Worst President Ever?

Matt Margolis argues that, contrary to the consensus on the left that Barack Obama was a great president, he was actually among the worst we've ever had. He gives six reasons, and elaborates upon them, in a piece at PJMedia:

By now you’ve probably heard of polls that say Americans believe that “Donald Trump is the worst president in history” or that presidential scholars have ranked Trump “dead last.” .... While it may be too early to properly gauge presidential rankings for recent presidents, I am confident that history will ultimately judge Barack Obama as the worst president our nation has ever seen.

The mountain of evidence that condemns his presidency to the bottom of the barrel is overwhelming. In my just re-released book, The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, I document 200 reasons why history will prove my belief correct in the years to come.

Here are Margolis' six with excerpts from his commentary on each:

6. Weaponizing the government against his enemies
The political use of the IRS to punish administration opponents and spying on the Trump campaign are just two examples of this abuse of power.

5. Obama’s surveillance state
According to the ACLU there was a 64 percent growth in electronic spying by the United States government during Obama’s first term. The Obama administration argued in federal court in 2012 that the public has no “reasonable expectation of privacy” regarding their cell phone location data and that the government can obtain these records without a warrant. Further blemishing Obama’s record on civil liberties, his administration green-lighted a giant government database of information on millions of citizens who weren’t even suspected of terrorism or any crime at all.

In May 2017, we also found out that Obama’s National Security Agency had been conducting illegal searches on Americans for years and was rebuked by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). We didn’t hear about it sooner because the Obama administration covered it up.

4. Purging Gitmo
As a candidate in 2007, Obama promised he would close the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (Gitmo), as soon as he was elected. He signed an executive order on January 22, 2009, requiring Gitmo to close within one year. Congress refused to go along, so instead of closing it, he systematically purged the prison of its terrorist inmates, as a sort of end-run around congressional opposition to closure. ...

One retired CIA officer estimated that at least 50 percent of those released from Gitmo returned to battle against American troops, and Paul Lewis, Obama’s special envoy for Guantanamo closure, confirmed that Americans have been killed by released Gitmo detainees.

3. Obamacare
Despite his campaign promise to bring Democrats and Republicans together to reform healthcare, Obama signed a trillion-dollar government takeover of one-sixth of the United States economy with zero Republican votes in the Senate and only one Republican vote in the House. Despite a promise of transparency, Obama and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made sure that the final negotiations were held behind closed doors....

The most insulting part of it all was that despite the high costs of Obamacare, health premiums went up and coverage got worse. Remember “if you like your plan you can keep it”? That was a lie.

....in November 2015, the percentage of people who reported delaying medical care over costs was higher than it was before Obama even took office. So, people were forced to buy insurance even if they didn't want it, and they still couldn't afford to seek medical care because of the higher premiums.

2. The worst economic recovery
There have been eleven recessions since World War II, each of which was followed by a recovery. Even Obama experienced an economic recovery… it just happens to be the worst one. All jobs lost in post-World War II recessions were recovered after about twenty-five months on average. But, it took seventy-seven months for employment to return to pre-recession levels, making Obama’s recovery the slowest recovery of them all—and by a wide margin....

Obama is also the only president in U.S. history to have never had a single year of 3.0 percent or greater GDP growth.

1. The largest deficits in history

Go to the link to read the rest of Margolis' remarks about each of these six.

Off the top of our heads we could add to Margolis' list the Iran deal which may have been the worst deal ever made by an American president, the Fast and Furious scandal, the Veterans Administration scandal, the mediocre judicial and SCOTUS appointments, the abrogation of American leadership around the world, and the empowerment of ideological progressives to undermine the principles and traditions upon which this nation was built.

There are, in my opinion, only two facts that will distinguish the Obama presidency in the eyes of future generations: Mr. Obama was the first person of color to rise to the presidency and his presidency was among the most disappointing in the modern era.

Scruton on Conservatism

Sir Roger Scruton is a writer and philosopher who has published more than 40 books in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. He was interviewed recently by Madeleine Kearns for National Review about his latest book which is titled Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, and he has some pithy things to say.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation with a few thoughts of my own interspersed:

Madeleine Kearns: In your most recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, you provide a distilled synthesis of modern conservative thought. First, I’d like to begin with your book’s last chapter, “Conservatism Now,” in which you reference William F. Buckley Jr.’s first book, God and Man at Yale (1951).

In that book, which arguably launched the conservative movement in America, a 24-year-old Buckley wrote: “I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”

Do you think Buckley was correct? If so, what are these “other vital battles”?

Sir Roger Scruton: Yes, Buckley was right. There is the vital battle to defend fundamental institutions, such as marriage and the family, and to counter the censorship of all opinions that express an attachment to our cultural and political inheritance.

MK: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative?

SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

MK: Why do many on the left consider conservatism to be inherently evil (rather than cuddly)?

SRS: The principal reason is that people on the left have illusions about human nature and think they prove their virtue by broadcasting those illusions. Anyone who punctures those illusions is therefore not just a spoilsport but a threat. What the self-declared “virtue” of the left amounts to can be witnessed in what happens to ordinary humanity when the left takes power.

I think here I would add to what Scruton says. A big part of the left's hatred for conservatives, IMO, stems from the fact that The left bases their policy prescriptions on emotivism and conservatives base theirs on reason and experience. For example, the left believes in their heart that socialism should work, but reason and experience demonstrate that it doesn't.

Thus, when people are shown that the ideas that they've invested their lives in are utterly wrong, it generates resentment, bitterness and ultimately hatred for those who show them to be wrong.

MK: Can one be a hopeful conservative without God?

SRS: Yes, but it helps to believe in God, since then one’s hopes are fixed on a higher reality, and that stops one from imposing them on the world in which we live.

Actually, I don't know how anyone can be a hopeful anything without God.

If there is no God what is there to hope for? What difference does it make what the world will be like after our deaths? Hoping that our descendents have a pleasant world to live in is a nice sentiment, but a couple of generations down the line you and they are utter strangers to each other, and their lives are just as pointless as are ours today. What does it matter to anyone living today whether the world's a better or worse place in 2100? If there is no God, hopefulness seems quaint, meaningless, and out of place.

MK: You mention a reluctance on the part of some conservatives to self-identify as such. Surprisingly, perhaps, you include George Orwell and Simone Weil in this category. Can you explain why they, too, belong to the “great tradition”? How can you spot a conservative?

SRS: I try to explain this in my book. Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

MK: How is Islam to be best accommodated in Western democracies?

SRS: By engaging Muslims in discussion and explaining to them that we live under a rule of law which is man-made, not God-bestowed.

I'm not sure why Islam should be specially accommodated at all. Western democracies have freedom of religion; that's all the accommodation the state should make for any religion.

If there's to be accommodation it should run the other way. Muslims should accommodate themselves to living in a country that holds constitutional values that their religion may make no allowance for.

In other words, the Muslim should accommodate him or herself to the laws and values of the land in which he/she chooses to live, not vice-versa.

Spiders

Here's a short but interesting introduction to one of the most fascinating creatures on the planet - spiders. How and why did spiders evolve the ability to produce three different kinds of silk and the ability to not only extrude it, but also the "knowledge" required to construct sometimes elaborate webs? Moreover, how does it happen that every spider of the same species "knows" what specific pattern of web it is to build?

How is that information encoded in the individual spider and passed on from generation to generation? Is it in the spider's genes or somewhere else in the organism? And how does random mutation and natural selection produce new information in the first place?

These are all questions evolutionary biologists struggle to answer. Of course, information, as far as we have experience of it, is always the product of a mind, never of chance. Why, then, should we think that the information in living things is the product of a lucky concatenation of atoms repeated millions of times in the history of the species?

Anyway, think on these questions as you watch the video:

An Atheist's Dilemma

Alfredo Metere is a senior research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In an article at Cosmos he argues that the laws of physics leave no room for free will, that the universe is a deterministic system, and that all human choices were made inevitable by the initial conditions which prevailed at the Big Bang.

Here are some key excerpts from his argument:

One of the major fundamental questions in physics concerns the presence or absence of free will in the universe, or in any physical system, or subset, within it.

Physics is based on the idea that nature is mechanistic, which means that it works like a machine. A machine is just a system, and therefore, by definition, it is a collection of elements, each of them with a specific, possibly different function, all working together to achieve a specific purpose, general to the whole machine.

If we believe in the Big Bang Theory – and the universe’s continuous expansion is a strong indication that such theory must be correct – the initial state of the universe was a single point (known as a singularity) that then expanded to the cosmos we know and perceive today, which, of course, includes us.

If so, there is a causal relationship between the Big Bang and us. In other words, free will is not allowed, and all of our actions are just a mere consequence of that first event. Such a view is known as “determinism”, or “super-determinism” (if one finds it productive to reinvent the wheel).

Set aside the objection to Metere that according to quantum physics the universe is fundamentally indeterminate (See the argument developed at Evolution News by Michael Egnor), and bear in mind that most metaphysical naturalists are inclined to agree with Metere's analysis. Naturalism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a materialist view of reality, and materialism entails, though perhaps not strictly, a determinist view of human volition.

Atheism, materialism and determinism all cluster together so that those who hold one view, generally hold the other two as well. If they don't, they have to somehow reconcile what appears prima facie to be an inconsistency.

Now consider the awkward dilemma this places an atheist (metaphysical naturalist) in.

If atheism is true then materialism follows. Everything is ultimately reducible to, and explicable in terms of, material particles and the forces between them. And if materialism is true then determinism is true. There's no locus for free will in a purely material substrate like the brain.

Our choices are chemical reactions in our brain, and those reactions are caused by other chemical reactions, and so on back to the Big Bang.

All of those reactions are determined, so as Metere says, there's a causal relation between us and the Big Bang, and there's no room for any "choice" occurring outside that causal chain. But, if determinism is true then our beliefs are the product of non-rational chemical reactions, a coupling and decoupling of particles.

If that's so, then the belief that atheism is true is alo non-rational, so why should anyone believe it? Some people have the appropriate chemical reactions that lead to atheistic belief and others don't, but in neither case does the objective truth of things factor into the picture.

It might be objected that our beliefs are formed by reasons which stimulate the appropriate chemical reactions, but this is also problematic.

Our reasons are themselves ultimately determined by chemical reactions, so if our reasons are determined then we don't necessarily hold them because of their truth value, but because of a host of other causes, most of which are unknown and unknowable, and perhaps all of which are non-rational.

Moreover, reasons are ideas, and ideas are immaterial. How does a materialist account for the efficacy of immaterial ideas acting on material atoms and molecules to produce an immaterial belief?

Metere closes with this:

[O]ne can be tempted to interject that if free will does not exist, why do we punish criminals? It is not their fault, after all. A counter-argument to that is that punishment is the natural response to crime, such that global equilibrium can be sustained, and therefore punishment is just as unavoidable as the commission of wrongdoing.

In other words, the criminal commits a crime because he was determined to do so by the initial conditions of the Big Bang, and society's authorities punish him because they were determined to do so also by the initial conditions of the Big Bang.

If this is true then there's no real culpability, no moral responsibility, no right or wrong, and, if there is no God, no ultimate accountability. On this view, whatever is, is right, or at least not really wrong. In fact, on this view right and wrong simply mean what people with power like and what people with power don't like. That road leads to slavery and Auschwitz.

I wonder, if someone were to rape his daughter or torture his son to death, if Metere would think that it wasn't really objectively wrong. Perhaps he would, I don't know.

Metere is a very bright guy, so I'm sure he has answers to these questions. I just wish he would have included them in his essay.

Three Questions for Moderate Muslims

A story in The Guardian from two years ago relates how the family of Adel Kermiche, the young man who slit the throat of a French priest who was saying mass, had struggled to keep him from jihad. Kermiche had twice been stopped trying to get to Syria to join ISIS and had been placed in prison, but he had persuaded a gullible French judge that he was a moderate Muslim and no threat.

The judge, against the recommendation of prosecutors who knew better, released him from jail. In consequence a priest was horribly murdered and others were seriously injured.

Moderate Muslims insist after incidents like this that we must not blame Islam, that Kermiche was psychologically troubled, and that, despite the testimony of his schoolmates and others who said he talked religion all the time, it wasn't his religion which drove him to commit his terrible crime.

David Wood is a man who seeks to engage Muslims to examine what the Qu'ran and Hadiths teach about violence. It may seem presumptuous for a non-Muslim to undertake such a mission, but apparently many Muslims, like many Christians, don't really know what their holy books actually say.

In any case, Wood poses three questions in this short video to those who consider themselves moderate Muslims. His questions are intended to highlight the overall question why it is deemed racist or bigoted to be concerned about the spread of a religion that seems to spawn such horrific acts of violence as has Islam.

So, is Wood missing something?

Liquid Modernity

Brian Murray at Law and Liberty reviews a posthumously published collection of essays by the Italian scholar and novelist Umberto Eco. The essays are given largely to Eco's ruminations on our postmodern condition which Eco, following the Polish social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, calls liquid modernity.

Murray writes:

The term, which has a certain currency among European intellectuals, aims to convey the sense of fluidity and flux that has characterized life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a period often described with the umbrella term “postmodern.”

Postmodernism, Eco notes, “signaled the crisis of ‘grand narratives,’ each of which had claimed that one model of order could be superimposed on the world; it devoted itself to a playful or ironic reconsideration of the past, and was woven in various ways with nihilistic tendencies.” But it “represented a sort of ferry from modernity to a present that still has no name.”

Bauman, though, thought the word “liquidity” captured the nature of our current state, one of lost moorings and lost meanings, where the only constant is change. In the liquid society people often find themselves afloat, aware of the collapse of once-powerful institutions and ideologies, and without the consolation of the beliefs or traditions that provided ballast for centuries.

What is notable, Eco observes, is an “unbridled individualism” prompting people in the liquid society to “move from one act of consumption to another in a sort of purposeless bulimia: the new cell phone is no better than the old one, but the old has to be discarded in order to indulge in this orgy of desire.”

Eco opines that Twitter is a symptom of this liquidity. Twitter is like a bar room where everyone is talking over everyone else and no one really pays much serious attention to anything anyone else is saying.

In the liquid society many millions bid for attention, apparently driven by the sheer pleasure and excitement of being noticed. In the past, says Eco, people assumed recognition or praise was somehow earned, attached to the display of some skill or virtue widely prized. Now, however, it generally doesn’t take much to merit a legion of “followers,” a profusion of “likes.”

It often just means laying claim to a parcel of media space.

In a 2002 piece Eco already spotted this trend, pointing to the endless procession of untalented people rushing to appear on television reality shows to air their scandals and sins; or who, when a camera appears in public, jostle to position themselves before its lens, eager to “wave ciao ciao” to those watching at home.

This exhibitionism, Eco suggests, stems from anomie and fear of anonymity. In a 2010 piece he cites his friend, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, who posited that such desperate public displays must owe, at least partly, to a widespread loss of religious faith.

“At one time,” Eco writes, people “were persuaded they did have at least one Spectator,” the “all-seeing eye, whose gaze” brought meaning to all human lives, however lowly or great. The disappointed mother, thus, could tell her ungrateful child: “God know what I’ve done for you.” The abandoned lover could proclaim: “God knows how much I love you.”

When this “all-seeing Witness” is gone, being seen on a video screen is for many “the only substitute for transcendence,” one’s best shot at pseudo-immortality.

With the ear of God no longer there, one “seeks the eye of society, the eye of the Other, before whom you must reveal yourself so as not to disappear into the black hole of anonymity, into the vortex of oblivion, even at the cost of choosing the role of village idiot who strips down to his underpants and dances on the pub table.”

Though he himself was not a believer he lamented the loss of religious belief in Europe. Murray writes:

Eco was a traditionalist, of a sort — a left-leaning, sometimes cranky agnostic who nonetheless understood Western culture and loved its marvelous and often religiously inspired accomplishments, its literature and art.

As an Italian he registers with displeasure a growing disrespect for Christian symbols like the Crucifix, which is now commonly used as a piece of jewelry, seen “nestling in the chest hairs of Italian Lotharios” or dangling from the necks of young women “who go about with their bare navels and skirts around their groins.”

He points to the religious illiteracy of many schoolchildren in his country who, faced with a painting by Fra Angelico or some other Renaissance master, can’t begin to understand why a young woman is depicted “in conversation with a winged youth,” or why an “unkempt old man” is pictured “leaping down a mountain carrying two heavy tablets of stone and emitting rays of light from two horns.”

“It’s virtually impossible,” Eco writes, “for people to understand, let us say, three quarters of Western art unless they are familiar with the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints.”

He mentions Benedetto Croce’s well-known remark that “we cannot not call ourselves Christians” - referencing all Europeans, practicing or not, whose civilization retains such deep Judeo-Christian roots.

At the very least, for children, a more rigorous schooling in the history of religion would seem to be in order, particularly since the media environment that envelopes them “is now transmitting less and less useful information, and more and more that is entirely useless.”

It is indeed grievous to see the cultural roots of our civilization withering away. How long one wonders, can the tree of culture continue to be fruitful and verdant after the roots have died?

Murray concludes his review with this:

It’s not hard to detect the melancholia in this final Eco collection—a kind of nostalgia for the past mixed with worry about what’s ahead for a world “with no points of reference, where everything dissolves into a sort of liquidity.” .... where, as Eco himself puts it, too many people “are inclined to talk without pausing to think.”

Amazing Data Storage Device

The journal Science reports some fascinating facts about information storage:

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented.

Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks.

DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it.

“DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University. And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.

It is astonishing that blind, purposeless processes like random chance and natural selection could have produced a data storage apparatus with this degree of capacity. If brilliant engineers bringing to bear all the genius of the human species can't develop storage media that can even come close to what nature has produced by lucky accident, shouldn't we be asking the question, was it really an accident?

Anyway, here's a video which gives a brief explanation of the sort of research being done on using DNA as a data storage medium:

Actions Speak Louder

Mikheil Saakashvili knows whereof he speaks when he talks about Russia. Saakashvili was the president of Georgia when the Russians invaded and annexed twenty percent of his country in 2008. He declares that far more important than Mr. Trump's words at the recent Helsinki Summit is what he has actually done, and far more significant than what Mr. Trump said is what his predecessor failed to do.

Here's part of Saakashvili's column:

I consider it unfair that Trump’s performance in Helsinki has garnered harsher criticism than other incidents in recent memory. In 2012, for example, a hot microphone at a global nuclear security summit picked up then-President Barack Obama assuring Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” to negotiate with Putin after the presidential election.

During a debate with GOP opponent Mitt Romney the same year, Obama casually dismissed the Russian threat, quipping: “The 1980s called; they want their foreign policy back.” Although Trump could certainly have been more forceful by condemning Putin’s crimes, his statements at the Helsinki press conference were nowhere near as concerning as his predecessor’s remarks about Russia.

This brings me to my second point: Trump’s actions toward Russia speak louder than words—and so did his predecessor’s. Indeed, the Obama administration’s foreign policy undermined America’s credibility in my region, which Putin considers Russia’s “backyard.” There are many opinions about Trump’s rhetoric on Crimea, but it is a fact that the Russian land grab in Ukraine happened on Obama’s watch.

How, exactly, did this happen? During and after Ukraine’s revolution of 2014, which ousted a Kremlin-backed dictator, on a daily basis the United States cautioned Ukraine not to escalate in response to Russian aggression. Thus, Putin saw an opportunity to annex Crimea without risking a direct confrontation with the West—and he seized it. Putin is a bully, but not a fool.

Rather than changing his course after Moscow redrew the borders of Europe by force, Obama doubled down. Despite bipartisan consensus in favor of selling lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine, and vocal support from his own administration officials (including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton), Obama repeatedly refused to authorize the sales.

Instead of anti-tank weapons, the Ukrainians defending their territory from Russian invasion received hot blankets and canned goods from the Obama administration. At the same time, Obama asserted that the Ukraine conflict had “no military solution.” With these words—and more importantly, these actions—he was perceived by some on the Russian side as accepting the Kremlin’s sphere of influence in Ukraine.

Despite my warnings, the Obama administration also essentially turned a blind eye to Russian meddling in Georgia’s 2012 elections. The result was devastating not only for Georgia, but for American interests: A Kremlin-backed oligarch (who has substantial interests in Russian energy firm Gazprom) ascended to power in a strategic U.S. ally (i.e. Georgia). Moreover, Russia’s meddling in Georgia’s elections functioned as a proving ground for information operations later used in the United States.

By contrast, Trump authorized the sale of lethal defensive weapons to both Ukraine and Georgia in 2017. The Trump administration went beyond the congressional mandate in sanctioning Russian authorities involved in the annexation of Crimea. Earlier this year, the United States imposed the harshest sanctions yet, targeting Russian oligarchs as well as government officials.

Trump’s rhetoric on energy at the Helsinki summit, which has been largely overlooked, is also a reason for optimism. The backbone of the Russian economy is energy, and Russia’s dependence on fossil fuels is Putin’s Achilles heel. At Monday’s press conference, Trump stated that U.S. liquefied natural gas exports would “compete” with Russian gas in Europe.

This reflects Trump’s comments at the NATO summit, where he criticized Germany for supporting the Nord Stream II pipeline. Trump was correct to call attention to this project, which will enrich the Kremlin at the expense of struggling pro-Western allies like Ukraine.

Saakashvili goes on to outline other interesting options the United States has at hand to punish further Russian misbehavior, but the important aspect of this essay to me was the utter silence on the part of some of the same Democrats when Putin steamrolled Obama contrasted with their cries of treason now when Trump doesn't take as firm a public stand against Putin as he could have.

Whether one thinks Obama's policy was right or Trump's policy is right is not the point. The point is the hypocrisy of the criticism of Trump's words by those who supinely accepted Obama's actions. If one believes President Obama's lassitude in the face of Russian aggression was the correct course of action, how can one now criticize President Trump for conciliatory words?

I wonder how much the progressives in the media and the Democratic Party really care about Russia anyway. Given their silence during the Obama years it's not unreasonable to assume that they probably don't care much.

Concern over Russia, it seems, is simply a convenient cudgel with which they can clobber Mr. Trump in order to distract the American people from the ongoing revelations of Democrat malfeasance during the 2016 campaign and the booming economy that has resulted from the Trump tax cuts and deregulations.

No one who was silent when Obama allowed Putin to seize chunks of Crimea and Ukraine has any credibility now when they condemn Trump for not being sufficiently bellicose.

Computers Don't Think

There's lots of talk about computers soon being able to "think" like human beings and maybe even bringing about an AI apocalypse. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor strongly dissents from this view, however.

He grants that humans can use computers to do despicable things but that computers themselves will never be able to think.

Egnor writes:

A cornerstone of the development of artificial intelligence is the pervasive assumption that machines can, or will, think. Watson, a question-answering computer, beats the best Jeopardy players, and anyone who plays chess has had the humiliation of being beaten by a chess engine....Does this mean that computers can think as well as (or better than) humans think? No, it does not.

Computers are not “smart” in any way. Machines are utterly incapable of thought.

The assertion that computation is thought, hence thought is computation, is called computer functionalism. It is the theory that the human mind is to the brain as software is to hardware. The mind is what the brain does; the brain “runs” the mind, as a computer runs a program.

However, careful examination of natural intelligence (the human mind) and artificial intelligence (computation) shows that this is a profound misunderstanding.

Citing the 19th century German philosopher Franz Brentano Egnor observes that computers lack a fundamental and critical characteristic of all thoughts. They lack "aboutness", or what philosophers call intentionality. Here's what he means:

All thoughts are about something, whereas no material object is inherently “about” anything. This property of aboutness is called intentionality, and intentionality is the hallmark of the mind.

Every thought that I have shares the property of aboutness—I think about my vacation, or about politics, or about my family. But no material object is, in itself, “about” anything. A mountain or a rock or a pen lacks aboutness—they are just objects. Only a mind has intentionality, and intentionality is the hallmark of the mind.

Another word for intentionality is meaning. All thoughts inherently mean something. A truly meaningless thought is an oxymoron. The meaning may be trivial or confusing, but every thought entails meaning of some sort. Every thought is about something, and that something is the meaning of the thought.

Computation, however, is an algorithmic process. It's the matching of an input to an output. There's no meaning to what the computer does. Whatever meaning we ascribe to the process is, in fact, imposed by our minds, it doesn't arise from within the machine.

What computers do, then, is represent the thoughts of the person designing, programming, and/or using it:

Computation represents thought in the same way that a pen and paper can be used to represent thought, but computation does not generate thought and cannot produce thought.

Only minds can think. Machines cannot.

When a materialist thinks about her materialism she's essentially disproving her fundamental belief that the material brain is all that's necessary to account for her thoughts. How can electrochemical reactions along material neurons be about something? Electrons whizzing across a synapse are not about anything. They have no meaning in themselves. The meaning must come from something else.

Why They Hate Him

Alan Dershowitz is a liberal Democrat law professor who voted for Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless he repeatedly finds himself in the position of having to defend Donald Trump against absurd attacks against the president by Democrats and other progressives who seem to be willing to make any allegation if there's even a remote chance that it'll damage Mr. Trump.

Recently, his political opponents have ludicrously accused him of treason for his rather maladroit performance at the press conference in Helsinki. It seems that the charges against him become more and more strident and bizarre with every passing week.

Dershowitz says that the allegation of treason against Mr. Trump is "completely over the top". It has no constitutional merit whatsoever.

According to a NewsMax article Dershowitz appeared as a guest on Hugh Hewitt's talk radio show and said this:

You might not like what Trump did. I didn’t like what he did. But to call it treason is just wrong as a matter of constitutional law.

What President Trump is alleged to have done, you know, making the image of Putin stronger and helping him gain international credibility around the world doesn’t even come close to treason under the Constitution.

It's another example of shrill Democrats making Trump even stronger with his base.

It shows that the Democrats and the opponents of Trump are not making nuanced, carefully thought through, calibrated criticisms. They’re going completely, completely over the top.

So why are the Democrats throwing the word "treason" around? Here's Dershowitz:

Treason is one of the two crimes specified for impeachment, and that’s why I think so many of the Trump opponents are focusing on treason, because if he did commit treason … then he would be subject to impeachment. But the criteria for treason are laid out clearly in the Constitution, and people shouldn’t just be making up crimes.

Dershowitz concluded with this:

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton. I’m a liberal Democrat. But I don’t want to see the law stretched to target somebody whose politics we disapprove of.

Here's a question: What accounts for the incredibly vitriolic hatred the left has for Donald Trump? It's true he's undoing many of his predecessor's policies, but I don't think that by itself accounts for the extraordinary animus directed at him. I think there's something deeper.

People on the left, whether in the media or in politics fervently - indeed, religiously - believe two things:

1. They believe that they're more politically astute than the average Trump voter and more intelligent than Trump himself, and
2. They believe that liberal ideas are without question superior to those of conservatives.

In fact many on the left, especially those in the public eye, have invested their lives and their professional reputations in those ideas. They hold them with all the intensity of a true believer. Their hatred for Trump, then, is due not so much to his repudiation of their policies, though that's surely part of it, but far worse, by his success he's showing those ideas to be bankrupt, bankrupt intellectually and practically.

In other words, Trump's success with the economy and, perhaps, in foreign affairs is humiliating to those who have spent their lives promoting the very policies that the president has shown don't work, and they've invested their careers in opposing policies that Mr. Trump has shown do work (tax cuts, for instance).

The president is, in effect, discrediting the progressive's religion. He's demonstrating to the world that that religion is a fraud, and they hate him for it with all their heart. That hatred manifests itself in their frantic attempts to destroy him before it sinks any deeper into the public consciousness that the progressive faith is, at bottom, a hoax.

Philosophy's Interaction Problem

One of the enduring philosophical questions is whether our cognitive experience is the product solely of our material brain or whether there's another fundamentally different substance involved which works in tandem with the brain to produce that experience.

This other substance is usually called mind or soul. Materialists, i.e. those who believe that the only substance that exists is matter, argue that all of our cognitive experience can be explained ultimately in terms of electrochemical reactions in the material substrate of the brain.

They reject the notion that we're also possessed of an immaterial mind. For materialists the word "mind" is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain, just as we use the word "digestion" to describe the function of the stomach.

Perhaps the chief argument that materialists have employed over the years against the notion of an immaterial mind is what's called the "interaction problem". If mind and brain are completely disparate substances, the argument goes, how could they interact? We have no difficulty, for instance, imagining ourselves grasping and lifting a mug with our hand because both our hand and the mug are material objects and we can easily visualize similar substances interacting with each other (parenthetically, it's actually difficult to imagine how even material objects can interact, but more on that below).

However, if we try to imagine how a mind could raise a mug we find that it seems incomprehensible. How does an immaterial mind "grip" a material mug to raise it?

There are various ways to respond to the interaction problem, which philosopher J.P. Moreland calls the most overrated problem in all of philosophy, but physicist William Murray at Uncommon Descent replies by noting that the belief that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up our universe is itself a scientifically obsolete notion.

The problem isn't how mind and matter interact, the problem is why we should think that matter exists objectively at all:

Modern physics has long ago disproved the idea that “matter” exists at all. ...

Just because we perceive a world of what we call “matter” doesn’t change the fact that we know no such world actually exists regardless of what our perception tells us. What we call “matter” is a perceptual interpretation of something that is not, in any meaningful sense, “matter”. We know now (current science) that matter is, at its root, entirely “immaterial”, despite what our macro sensory perceptions have told us for millennia (like the sun moving through the sky).

Materialists are clinging to a pre-Victorian perspective of what it is we are perceiving, long since discarded after over a hundred years of experimental results.

Murray then responds specifically to the interaction problem:

Now we get to the so-called “material-immaterial interaction problem”. First, there is no “material world,” so it’s problematic to begin [the discussion] with a term that draws from an archaic, unscientific understanding of what it is we are perceiving.

Second, has the “material-material” interaction problem even been addressed, much less “solved”? We have absolutely no idea how “matter” interacts with other “matter”. We can describe the behavior of that interaction, then use a term to refer to that model as if that term was an actual “thing”, but describing the behavior is not explaining the how of the interaction.

When so-called dualism objectors [i.e. materialists] can first explain matter/matter interaction, and when they can tell us what they mean by “material” and “immaterial”, they will then have a meaningful foundation to form a cogent objection to the idea of material/immaterial interaction.

In other words, our inability to explain or imagine how mind and matter interact is no reason to forfeit a belief that they do.

Another way to look at the problem of how fundamentally disparate substances can interact, without denying that there is such a "thing" as matter, is to note that we witness the interaction between material and immaterial all the time. Electrical signals in the material brain produce immaterial sensations like color, sound, and pain. Two magnets will attract each other, but what that magnetic force is and how it pulls another magnet is a mystery. We know these phenomena happen even if we can't explain how they happen.

Likewise with the mind and the interaction problem. Just because we can't explain, or even imagine, how a mind/matter interface would work, we nevertheless have good reason, given our conscious experience, for thinking there is one.

Indeed, belief in the existence of an immaterial mind, long thought to have been buried in the philosophical graveyard, has been recently resurrected as both philosophy and physics breathe new life into it.

Maybe Trump's Partly Right

President Trump is being hammered with criticism from both left and right for his apparent acceptance of Vladimir Putin's assurance that the Russians didn't meddle in the 2016 election despite the assessment of our intelligence agencies that they did. He's also taking a lot of heat for his tweet that poor relations with Russia are the fault of past clumsiness in the crafting of United States foreign policy.

I would have preferred that he not have made either of these claims, or if he had, that he employ the qualifier "largely" in the second one, but even so, David Goldman at PJ Media makes a compelling case that Trump was "largely" correct in what he said about American policy toward Russia.

This is not to absolve Russia which is led by brutal, amoral men, Mr. Putin chief among them, but as Goldman argues, the United States has, going back to President Clinton, repeatedly interfered in Russian politics and repeatedly sought to undermine the Russian government.

I should mention that whether Goldman's argument is sound or not he's not a Putin fanboy. He writes that,

I'm no Russophile. I'm an old Cold Warrior. I don't like Putin. I don't even like Dostoevsky (he invents improbable characters to suit his theological agenda) or Tolstoy (Pierre Bezukhov and Anna Karenina bore me). I don't especially like Tchaikovsky or Mussorgsky. I don't like drinking Russian-style (get as drunk as you can as fast as you can). I like a lot of individual Russians -- they have guts, and tell you what they think. I'm so leery of Putin's machinations in Europe that I prefer Angela Merkel to the Putin-friendly German right wing.

Nonetheless, it was America that made a mess of relations with Russia, and President Trump’s tweet this morning was right on the mark. You can usually gauge the merits of this president's public statements by the decibel level of the protests.

Despite losing a ton of credibility with me for his opinion of Dostoevsky he nevertheless makes a convincing case about Trump's claim about American policy toward Russia. Here are a few excerpts:

President Trump offended the entire political spectrum with a tweet this morning blaming the U.S. for poor relations with Russia. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity,” the president said, and he is entirely correct. By this I do not mean to say that Russia is a beneficent actor in world affairs or that President Putin is an admirable world leader.

Nonetheless, the president displayed both perspicacity and political courage when he pointed the finger at the United States for mismanaging the relationship with Russia.

Full disclosure: I was a card-carrying member of the neoconservative cabal that planned to bring Western-style democracy and free markets to Russia after the fall of Communism.

...Unfortunately, the delusion that the United States would remake Russia in its own image persisted through the Bush and Obama administrations. I have no reason to doubt the allegations that a dozen Russian intelligence officers meddled in the U.S. elections of 2016, but this was the equivalent of a fraternity prank compared to America’s longstanding efforts to intervene in Russian politics.

The United States supported the 2014 Maidan uprising in Ukraine and the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in the hope of repeating the exercise in Moscow sometime later.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland pulled whatever strings America had to replace the feckless and corrupt Victor Yanukovych with a government hostile to the Kremlin. She didn’t say it in so many words, but she hoped the Ukraine coup would lead to the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.

Evidently Nuland and her boss, Hillary Clinton, thought that the Ukraine coup would deprive Russia of its Black Sea naval base in Crimea, and did not anticipate that Russia simply would annex an old Russian province that belonged to Ukraine by historical accident.

The Maidan coup was the second American attempt to install a Ukrainian government hostile to Moscow; the first occurred in 2004, when Condoleezza Rice was secretary of State rather than Hillary Clinton.

As I wrote in Asia Times a decade ago, “On the night of November 22, 2004, then-Russian president - now premier - Vladimir Putin watched the television news in his dacha near Moscow. People who were with Putin that night report his anger and disbelief at the unfolding 'Orange' revolution in Ukraine. ‘They lied to me,’ Putin said bitterly of the United States. ‘I'll never trust them again.’ The Russians still can't fathom why the West threw over a potential strategic alliance for Ukraine. They underestimate the stupidity of the West."

Russia is in crisis, but Russia always is in crisis. Russia has a brutal government, but Russia always has had a brutal government, and by every indication, the people of Russia nonetheless seem to like their government. If they want a different sort of government, let them establish one; what sort of government they prefer is not the business of the United States. America’s attempt to shape Russia’s destiny, starting with the Clinton administration’s sponsorship of the feckless, drunk and corrupt Boris Yeltsin, had baleful results.

So did the State Department’s attempt to manipulate events in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014.

There's more from Goldman at the link.

Mr. Trump's comments certainly seem to be unfortunate even were they technically correct, but before jumping on the outrage bandwagon, I'd like to know what was said in the private meeting between the two men. The tone could have been very much different, for all anyone knows. Perhaps both men agreed that henceforth they would refrain from surreptitious political interference in each other's countries and for the present they'd put the current unpleasantness behind them. If so, that would be a good thing.

Whether this is what happened or not, certainly the president, as The Federalist's Megan Oprea writes, has been tough on Russia policy-wise, and those actions are far more important than his words, which are not infrequently more misleading than edifying anyway.

In any case, one of the more amusing aspects of the hostility Mr. Trump has incurred for his statements implicitly disparaging our intelligence agencies and blaming America for our tattered relationship with the Russians is that so much of it comes from the progressive left which has historically been hostile to our intelligence agencies and arrantly prone to "blame America first" for whatever evils are afoot in the world.

You'd think that the left would be praising the president for his statements which diminish our own intelligence service and blame America for a truculent Russia rather than castigating him for it, but consistency is not a virtue held in high regard among leftists. It's rather jarring to see the left wrap themselves in the flag and make patriotic noises.

It seems that whatever this president says or does, a lot of people will happily abandon whatever principles and positions they formerly held in order to adopt a stance in direct opposition to him.

This being so, perhaps if President Trump wants to defeat the Democrats in November he might consider announcing that he's going to join the Democratic Party. Upon hearing that news the entire left in this country would promptly flee the party and rush to the polls to vote Republican.

Revolutions French and American

As America and France celebrated the anniversaries of their respective revolutions this month several commentators reflected on similarities between the two historic struggles.

Yet other than occuring within a decade or so of each other (1776 and 1789 are the years in which the American and French revolutions began) and aspiring to establish Constitutionally protected rights, the two revolutions and their aftermaths were really very different.

For instance:

• The French were seeking to topple their monarchy, Americans were seeking to withdraw from one.
• The French revolution led to instability and a series of tyrannies that lasted for decades. The American revolution led to a stable, ideologically moderate republic.
• The French revolution devolved into horrific bloodletting, The American revolution did not.
• The French revolution led to a regime that was exceedingly hostile to Christianity. The American revolution was led by men who were themselves Christians or sympathetic to Christianity.

Regarding this last point, Jeff Sanders at PJ Media writes:

Beginning in 1793, the French revolutionary government abolished the Catholic monarchy and confiscated all church property. Cities and streets that had been named after saints were given secular names. Some 30,000 French priests were exiled and hundreds were murdered by mobs. The Christian calendar was replaced by one that measured the years beginning not with the birth of Jesus, but with the first year of the revolution. The seven-day week was also banned and replaced with a ten-day week.

Churches and monasteries across France were closed. The amazing abbey at Cluny (with its enormous library and archives) was burned in 1793. The church had been the largest in the Christian world until St. Peter's was built in Rome, but it was plundered and its stone was later used for buildings in town. Most of it is still nothing but ruins today.

Statues of saints and crosses were destroyed. Churches were forbidden to ring their bells.

In the French Revolution, the government banned Christian holy days such as Feast Days of Saints, Christmas, and Easter. In the place of these days, government leaders established a "Festival of Liberty" or a "Festival of Reason." The beautiful, magnificent Cathedral of Notre Dame became known as the "Temple of Reason" for a time, and people had services dedicated to their "Goddess of Reason."

Every attempt was made to erase any vestige of Christianity.

The famous revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre actually established his own religion — it was called "The Cult of the Supreme Being" (he was a deist). He inaugurated this new religion on June 8, 1794 (Pentecost on the Christian calendar) with a procession and "divine service." Six weeks later the revolution turned on him, placed him in the same cell where Marie Antoinette had stayed before her execution, and he was sent to the guillotine on July 28, 1794.

The American Revolution, however, was not like that at all. In fact, in America the Christian faith has traditionally been nurtured and protected by society as a whole, and respected by government as part of every person's natural freedom of conscience (until recently). The First Great Awakening (a national revival led by such men as Jonathan Edwards) had a tremendous impact upon colonial America....

In America, Christians were part of the "revolution." Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, only two were confirmed deists (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin). Two were Roman Catholic, and the other 52 were all members in good standing in orthodox Protestant churches. They never saw themselves as anything else but Christians who were taking a stand for freedom against tyranny.

They saw their Christian faith as an ally, not as a hindrance. In fact, Sam Adams stated on July 4, 1776: "We have this day restored the Sovereign to whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and from the rising of the sun to the setting, let His kingdom come." (He certainly was no deist.) One of the signers of the Declaration was a clergyman himself, the Reverend John Witherspoon (ordained Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey at the time).

The Continental Army was so full of ordained clergy in its ranks that the British would refer to those men as "the Black-Robed Regiment."

As for the bloodshed in the wake of 1789 Sanders writes:

Between 1793 and 1794 some 16,594 death sentences were handed out ... most without a trial (certainly not any kind of trial we would call fair today). It was Robespierre himself who justified mass executions without trial. He believed that a government executing all suspected "enemies of the state" was actually being quite virtuous: "Terror is nothing more than speedy severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue."

Robespierre himself was taken to the guillotine in 1794.

France today is a wonderful country with wonderful people, but their revolution and the Terror which ensued was quite different from the American experience in the late 18th century.

Amazing Cephalopods

We've posted this wonderful video on Viewpoint in the past, but I thought newer readers might like to see it because it raises some fascinating questions:

How did the physiology necessary for cephalopods to camouflage themselves like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these animals display evolve by those same mechanisms?

If mutations affect DNA and DNA programs for proteins, and proteins create tissues and enzymes, etc. what is it that mutations act upon in the organism that gives rise to behavior? How does the octopus "know" to make itself look like the particular background it finds itself in, and how did, or could, such a phenomenon evolve through purely mechanistic processes?

Anyway, keep in mind as you watch the video that, on naturalism, these creatures evolved these marvelous capabilities purely by undirected random mutations in their genome.

If you don't keep that in mind, you might find yourself strongly tempted to think that maybe the cephalopod's amazing abilities are the result of intelligent engineering of some sort and that naturalism, despite its popularity among intellectuals, offers completely inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.

Fading Habit

A friend told me the other day of a dinner to which he and his wife had been invited along with several other couples, all of whom were very well-educated people and folks with whom he looked forward to interesting conversation.

After dinner, however, the guests were ushered to the host's home theater where they sat and watched a movie for a couple of hours. By the time the movie concluded it was time to leave for home.

My friend mentioned how disappointing it was to be in the company of well-informed, intelligent people and have so little time to talk with, and learn from, them.

Maybe I'm wrong about this, but it certainly seems that meaningful conversation is becoming a fading habit, an increasingly rare form of social interaction. It almost seems like a social impropriety to invite people to gather simply for the purpose of discussion. Instead, it seems that often when people come together they spend the time watching television or a movie, or playing a game, or, worst of all, staring at their phones, but they don't have much meaningful interaction. If they do talk it's often very light and "safe". It's rarely about anything that matters.

A hostess who invites people to her home for an evening of intelligent conversation nowadays might expect a lot of demurrals from prospective guests who prefer that any conversation incline toward superficial, frivolous, or gossipy fluff.

Why is that?

Perhaps one reason is because fewer people today read good books. I once had a teaching colleague who boasted that he hadn't read a book since he graduated from college over forty years earlier. I don't think he was atypical. People often neither have the inclination nor make the time to read and, when they do, what they read is often the equivalent of junk food.

If people don't read good books, books that invite the reader to think, they certainly limit the range of what they have to talk about, which suggests another reason why people might tend to avoid meaningful conversation.

The most important topics are sometimes those we feel least informed about. We may be conversant on pop culture, sports, or neighborhood goings on, but on issues of national moment - politics, social issues, religious matters - all we have, perhaps, are feelings, and exchanging feelings, as opposed to exchanging ideas, doesn't take us far or teach us much.

So maybe some people are as reluctant to be drawn into conversation on significant matters as non-swimmers are to be drawn out into deep water. They feel much more secure wading in the shallows and they resent someone coaxing them out of their comfort zone.

It's too bad. Meaningful conversation enriches our lives. It's a good way to learn, to expand our world, and to achieve a kind of intellectual cross-pollination. It'd be a tragedy if we lose altogether the ability to talk to each other about things that really matter.

The Teenage Princess

I ran across this old post in the archives and thought it'd be worth posting again:

One of the charming quirks in the behavior of young girls - my daughter's friends, for example - is that they instinctively defer all decisions involving the group to a particular individual as if she were somehow anointed by God for preeminence.

There need be no verbal communication in these interactions, they just happen as a matter of course, as if everyone tacitly understands that there's a hierarchy of status which no one in the group is to challenge.

If one of the lower ranking girls should have the temerity to dissent from the dictates of the alpha female - the teenage princess - the unfortunate young lady would suffer immediate social excommunication and be banished from the royal court.

I once asked my daughter why girls accept this state of affairs as normal, to which she replied with a shrug which suggested that she had no idea and that no one really wonders about it except me.

I thought of this, oddly enough, after reading writer Susan Ives' complaint that "Intelligent design disrespects faith, discounts faith, destroys faith."

Faith, Ives avers, is:

...belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. Faith falls into the realm of metaphysics - literally, "beyond physics," the branch of philosophy that seeks to explain the nature of reality and the origin and structure of the world.

When we try to prove and promote the metaphysical through the physical - when we muddle faith and science - we are, in effect, saying that faith is not enough, that faith, like science, requires proof. Faith that requires proof is no faith at all.

Ms. Ives constructs a strange argument. Suppose it were the case that science demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe and everything in it were indeed the product of purposeful, intelligent engineering. Would Ms. Ives then feel that her faith was devastated beyond repair? Would she greet the news with fascination or would it throw her into a religious crisis? Simply to pose the questions, I think, is to answer them.

Her confusion stems from a Kierkegaardian view of faith that makes it the more virtuous the less evidence there is to support it. Her view is that metaphysics and physics are sealed in airtight compartments without either ever leaking into the other. This is pretty naive. The idea that faith is somehow vitiated by empirical evidence is really quite peculiar.

Jesus, after all, offered his disciples plenty of empirical evidence that he was the Son of God and he expected those demonstrations to strengthen their faith, not destroy it.

All of that aside, though, Ms Ives completely misrepresents Intelligent Design. ID is not an attempt to "prove" that God exists. Nor is it an attempt to demonstrate some tenet of religious faith to be true. It is simply a conclusion inferred from observations of the physical world that powerfully suggest that the universe in general, and life in particular, appear strongly teleological.

If this teleology is not just an illusory appearance but a factual reality, it would certainly be of religious interest, just as Darwin's claims have been of religious interest to people, many of them atheists, but so what? Should we shrink from investigating the nature and structure of the cosmos just because it might bolster one's faith or encourage another one's skepticism?

Ms. Ives seems to be implicitly arguing that Christians and other theists should not be engaged in the scientific enterprise, nor should they be doing philosophy, because the more they understand about God's creation, and the more scientific and philosophical support they find for their religious beliefs in the creation they study, the more damage they'll do to their faith.

This is ludicrous, of course. Most of the great scientists of the past, Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, Galileo and so on were Christians who delighted in the attempt to understand more about God through their science. They were all "intelligent design" proponents though the term wasn't in use during their era, and they saw no problem in deriving nourishment for their faith from the fruits of their science.

What does all this have to do with teenage girls? Well, Ms Ives is either arguing that Christians should not undertake to study the world or she's advocating a teenage girl version of theory precedence, viz that Christians engaged in science and philosophy dare not presume to arrive at conclusions at odds with the reigning materialist paradigm.

Materialism is the tacitly acclaimed alpha theory that all must acknowledge, to which all must pay deference and which no one dare flout on pain of social ostracism and intellectual banishment. It's the metaphysical assumption whose rightful place, like that of the teenage princess, at the very top of the theoretical hierarchy is always assumed and never challenged.

Why Ms Ives thinks materialism should be granted this place of epistemological privilege, though, and what there is about materialism that has earned it such lofty status, she doesn't say. Perhaps the reason she doesn't is that, as with the teenage princess, there really is no good justification for the deference materialism expects to be shown.

It survives atop the heap only so long as people like Ms Ives unthinkingly assume it just belongs there.

Walk Away

The Democratic Party seems to be facing a significant defection among disillusioned, white millennials.

An online movement titled Walk Away, led by Brandon Straka, a young, gay, former liberal, is urging young voters who hold liberal values to wake up to the fact that the Democratic party is no longer a liberal party but is rather the antithesis of the values liberals hold.

He documents his indictment of the contemporary Democratic Party in this impressive video:

An article at PJMedia gives some background on the Walk Away movement:

Young people do not like President Donald Trump, but whites between the ages of 18 and 34 said they are equally likely to vote for a Republican as for a Democrat in the elections for Congress this November.

A full 39 percent said that "if the election for U.S. Congress were held today," they would vote for the Republican in the district where they live. Another 39 percent said they would vote for the Democrat.

This represented a nine-point shift away from Democrats since 2016. That year, only 33 percent of young white voters said they would elect a Republican to Congress, while 47 percent said they would choose a Democrat.

Young white men made the greatest shift toward the GOP. In 2016, nearly half of them (48 percent) said they would vote for a Democrat, while only 36 percent said they would vote Republican. This year, 46 percent said they would choose a Republican, while only 37 percent said they would vote Democrat — a 21 percent shift in favor of the GOP.

Brandon Straka, a gay man from Nebraska, identified himself as "The Unsilent Majority" and launched a campaign urging people to reject the Left — for the same reasons he became a liberal.

In the "Walk Away" viral video, Straka denounced racism, misogyny, "tyrannical group think," junk science, "hate," and "a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, and dogmatic mob to suppress free speech, create false narratives, and apathetically steamroll over the truth." He said he became a liberal for these reasons, and he "walked away" for the very same reasons.

"For years now, I have watched as the left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded, and at times blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric," Straka declared.

He's right, of course. Today's conservatives are in fact classical liberals, whereas today's leftist progressives have more in common with the totalitarians of the 20th century and the tyrants of Orwell's 1984, than they do with anything that can rightly be called "liberal".

Straka's video makes a compelling argument in support of the claim that no one who loves freedom and abhors hatred should feel comfortable in today's Democratic Party.

Our Students' Broken Moral Compass

High school teacher Paul Barnwell had an article in The Atlantic a couple of years ago in which he expressed deep concern for the lack of moral education in today's public schools.

He noted that, among other things, the emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests has squeezed out opportunities for the addition of ethical instruction to the curriculum, and that the results are reflected in dispiriting attitudes among students toward matters like cheating, bullying, stereotyping, etc.

He wrote:

As my students seemed to crave more meaningful discussions and instruction relating to character, morality, and ethics, it struck me how invisible these issues have become in many schools. By omission, are U.S. schools teaching their students that character, morality, and ethics aren’t important in becoming productive, successful citizens?

Barnwell goes on to lament that schools are almost devoid of any formal moral instruction, a consequence, no doubt, of the fear of treading into the domain of religion.

Indeed, religion in public schools is taboo, as is any topic that even hints at having theistic implications. But how can one teach ethics unless one is free to answer the question that inevitably arises in the minds of at least some of the more perceptive students: Why?

For example, a teacher can present to her students the utilitarian concept of maximizing human flourishing, but what does she say when the student asks why he should care about the flourishing of anyone but himself, or in what sense would it be wrong for someone to impede the flourishing of another, or how does his cheating on a test impede another person's flourishing anyway, or what makes humans special that we should maximize human flourishing and not the flourishing of all living things?

As soon as those questions come up, the discussion is effectively at an end because the only answer that avoids an eventual appeal to one's emotions and feelings - which itself leads to the conclusion that everybody should just do whatever feels right to them - is that there must be a transcendent moral authority whose very nature serves as an objective moral standard for right and wrong and which has the power and authority to hold us accountable for breaching that standard.

But that answer, the only answer which could possibly have purchase in a teenager's mind, is the very answer that our courts have forbidden be presented to our young people.

Yet, if there is no such authority then, as the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky asserts several times in his marvelous novel The Brothers Karamazov, everything is permitted. If there is no such authority then there's no ultimate accountability for our behavior, the word "wrong" has no objective meaning, and the only ethical principle is, practically speaking, do whatever you can get away with.

Even if the existence of such an authority is offered to students they still may not know what's right to do, they still might not do what is right, but at least they have an answer to the ultimate question of whether there actually is an objective right and a wrong.

By banishing not only explicitly religious ideas but also ideas with religious implications from our public schools we've essentially neutered those schools in terms of what they can do to formally instill in students a sense of virtue and moral character. Then we wring our hands when we read about cyber bullying, violence, cheating, drug use and sexual promiscuity among the young.

Why are we dismayed? What did we expect?

God Help Brett Kavanaugh

President Trump has nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a jurist who believes that decisions should be based on what the Constitution says and not on what a judge wishes that it said, to be the newest member of the United States Supreme Court.

Frankly, I don't understand why Judge Kavanaugh would accept the nomination given the way he is about to be savaged by a progressive left that believes that the end of defeating Trump justifies any means.

I hope I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that Kavanaugh, his family, and his entire personal history are about to be subjected to humiliating public scrutiny by people in the media and Congress who are willing to smear and even destroy a man's reputation and career if that man is ideologically unsatisfactory to the progressive left.

It's quite remarkable that anyone would be willing to put his family through what the Democrats did to Robert Bork and to Clarence Thomas, and what they're almost certain to do to anyone President Trump might have nominated, but evidently, Judge Kavanaugh is willing to brave the slime storm that's headed his way.

The assault on Kavanaugh - and perhaps, too, the pressure on liberal Republican senators and Democrat senators running for reelection in states where Trump won in 2016 to vote against him - will be brutal, relentless, and probably both coarse and cruel.

Even if Kavanaugh is a saint and nothing can be found in his personal life with which to malign him, it won't matter. His opponents will fabricate a scandal if they feel they must.

It's deeply ironic that the people on the left who've lectured us for decades that there should be no "litmus test" for Supreme Court Justices, particularly on the issue of abortion, are now wholly committed to making abortion a "litmus test".

Anyway, I wish Judge Kavanaugh well. He appears to be a highly qualified jurist and a man of high moral character, and that's all that should matter for confirmation. Unfortunately, in these debased times only two "qualifications" seem to matter: Who the president is and what the nominee's position is on Roe v. Wade.

Katie's Soul

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has a fine piece at Plough.com in which he argues against the materialist view that we are simply material beings with no spiritual or mental remainder. The materialist holds that everything about us that might be attributed to qualities like soul or mind are ultimately reducible to the physical structure of the material brain. Matter and the laws of physics can in principle explain everything.

The opening paragraphs of Egnor's essay call this view into serious question. He writes:

I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain – a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water.

Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little chance at a normal life.

She had a fraternal-twin sister in the incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had. I explained all of this to her family, trying to keep alive a flicker of hope for their daughter.

I cared for Katie as she grew up. At every stage of Katie’s life so far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister. She’s made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school.

I’ve had other patients whose brains fell far short of their minds. Maria had only two-thirds of a brain. She needed a couple of operations to drain fluid, but she thrives. She just finished her master’s degree in English literature, and is a published musician.

Jesse was born with a head shaped like a football and half-full of water – doctors told his mother to let him die at birth. She disobeyed. He is a normal happy middle-schooler, loves sports, and wears his hair long.

Some people with deficient brains are profoundly handicapped. But not all are. I’ve treated and cared for scores of kids who grow up with brains that are deficient but minds that thrive. How is this possible?

Well, if materialism is true it's hard to see how it could be possible, but if materialism is false then there might be an explanation that includes a soul or mind that's somehow integrated with the brain but which is nevertheless not ultimately explicable in terms of the material stuff that makes us up.

Egnor goes on in his essay to show that mental processes like thoughts and sensations cannot be reduced to physical structures and also why the materialist denial of human free will is almost certainly wrong.

He offers the sorts of arguments that are making it very difficult nowadays to be a consistent materialist. Indeed, some materialists are finding it so difficult to explain phenomena like human consciousness solely in terms of the material brain that they've even taken to denying that consciousness exists, but this seems like madness. After all, doesn't one have to be conscious in order to think about whether consciousness exists?

Evidently, some philosophers will go to any lengths, no matter how bizarre, to avoid having to accept any idea that may lead to the existence of anything that's consistent with a theistic worldview.

Egnor concludes his column with this:

There is a part of Katie’s mind that is not her brain. She is more than that. She can reason and she can choose. There is a part of her that is immaterial.... There is a part of Katie that didn’t show up on those CAT scans when she was born.

Katie, like you and me, has a soul.

On Beauty

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) often said that the two best arguments for the truth of the Christian faith are the lives of the saints and the beauty of its art. Like the other two ancient transcendentals, Goodness and Truth, Beauty is indeed a difficult thing to explain apart from the existence of a God who appreciates it.

Biologist Ann Gauger writes about this at ENST. Here are a couple of salient excerpts:

If the world is evolved by a process of random mutation and natural selection, by a universe that does not care, then why is there beauty? Why is it so beautiful? Beauty is always a surprise, a delight. Beauty does not come from randomness.

It is beauty, not ugliness that must be explained. If we are merely atoms in motion, the result of purely unguided processes, with no mind or thought behind us, then beauty is completely unexpected.

It’s not hard to make a muddy brown splotch when painting, but to paint a beautiful flower arrangement requires knowledge of where to place the brush, and the restraint to choose wisely among colors. Choosing what to do and what not to do is design. The highest forms of art, of music, and of physical performance require choice, discipline, knowledge, and restraint in what is done and not done, by design. Architecture and mathematics require the same.

In fact, for any human endeavor to be done beautifully, discipline, knowledge of what to do and what not to do, and how best to bring things together in service to the whole are essential. The result is beauty, which is by design, not by accident....

The argument has been made that we evolved to like what are presumed to be safe environments, like the savannahs of Africa from which we came. This I doubt.

Mountaintops with blue glaciers, wind-sculpted sand dunes, and steep cliffs overlooking a restless sea are not particularly safe places to live. Yet something in them captures our eye. Their proportion and balance and richness move us. It’s design. And it’s what holds the biosphere together.

Indeed, the beauty of the world is far more abundant than what any naturalistic account seems able to explain. It's gratuitously excessive. From the gorgeous architecture of microscopically small diatoms to the glorious splendor of the night sky, beauty pervades every nook and cranny of our world.

Consider these words from Mike Mitchell at his blog Thought Sifter:

A lot of people claim that the world as we know it came about randomly, meaning there was no one who intended the world to exist. They say all the universe just came about in the same way a certain pattern of dust collects on a bookshelf. They then try to use the same explanation for the stunningly sophisticated systems that fill our world: Our ecosystem, solar system, nervous system, digestive system, reproductive system, etc.

These are all supposed to be random systems, but a "random system" is the same kind of phrase as a square circle. It cannot be both. A system is an intentionally ordered grouping of multiple parts which works to carry out a particular purpose. There can be no such thing as a random system that is intended to work in a certain order for a particular purpose, because random means that which is without intent, order, and purpose.

The same is true of beauty. We cannot coherently talk about "random beauty." There is an inescapable chain of logic that can't be broken without falling into nonsense. When we say something is beautiful that means the thing is important. To say something is important is to say the thing is meaningful.

To say it is meaningful is to say that it exists for a purpose. But again, "random" necessarily means the absence of importance, meaning, and purpose.

These three are to beauty what squares are to a cube. We cannot talk intelligibly about cubes while denying the existence of squares.

The theological significance of beauty in the world cannot be overstated. To paraphrase the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, beauty is the battleground over which God and the devil contend for the heart of man.

We might wonder why it is that Goodness, Truth and Beauty seem always to walk hand-in-hand with each other just as evil, hatred and ugliness seem always to be found in each other's company. Is it just a coincidence?

The President's Next Pick

President Trump will announce his next pick for the Supreme Court on Monday, and there's swelling panic among those who fear that Mr. Trump will pick a judicial conservative as a replacement for retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. If he does it'll have a profound effect on the Court's future decisions.

Given all the talk about his nomination it's appropriate at this point to get some terminology straight. Specifically, what exactly do people mean when they talk about "judicial conservatives" and "judicial liberals"?

Briefly, a judicial conservative is a man or woman who believes that cases should be decided on the basis of how closely the issues raised by the case hew to the Constitution of the United States. If there's no reasonable warrant for thinking that the Constitution supports an argument brought before the Court, a conservative is not likely to find in favor of that argument.

For conservatives the Constitution is the touchstone, it's the interpretive key for deciding the merits of the case.

A judicial liberal, on the other hand, is much more prone to treating the Constitution as having only secondary importance. A liberal jurist will tend to find in favor of arguments that seem to be based on the current consensus among progressive elites, regardless of whether the arguments which are adduced before the Court are grounded in the Constitution.

Liberals see the Constitution as far more supple and far less authoritative than do conservatives.

Liberals, then, want federal judges and Supreme Court Justices who will not feel bound by either the laws or the Constitution because such jurists enable an end run around the legislature. If liberal policy cannot be enacted into law through Congress then by finding a sympathetic judge on the district or federal bench or five Justices on the Supreme Court, liberal policies can be enacted regardless of the will of the people.

The preceding summarizes the general differences between conservative and liberal attitudes toward jurisprudence, but there are, of course, many other ways to understand liberalism and conservatism.

One other way is to examine their respective views of what it is to be human - what it is, in the metaphysical sense, to be man. What follows is not true of all conservatives nor of all liberals, but I think it's fair to say that it is true of a great many, perhaps the majority, of both.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference in the anthropology of conservatives and liberals is that conservatives tend to see man as bearing the image of God, possessing immortal souls, and loved by God. This is significant because from this starting point conservatives,

• See human rights as divinely ordained and based in the will of God, and thus objective and inalienable.
• See man as fallen from his original estate and prone to sin. Thus follows the conservative skepticism of governmental power and the need for institutional checks and balances.
• See history as both meaningful, because it is the outworking of a Divine plan, and replete with lessons for the present because human nature doesn't change much.
• See science as a fruitful means of making sense of the world because the world was created by a rational being and yields its secrets to rational inquiry.
• See morality as rooted in a personal, transcendent moral authority who promulgates an unchanging moral law to which each of us is held accountable.

On the other hand, many liberals tend to see man as the product of the blind, impersonal, random process of evolution. For many liberals, particularly secular liberals, which perhaps comprise the majority, God plays little to no role in either the creation of the world or in human affairs. From this starting point, then, liberals often,

• See human rights as the product of a consensus of enlightened thinkers.
• See man as basically good and malleable, and evolving toward ever greater capacities and perfections.
• See history as an indecipherable, meaningless flux of events about which we can know little and learn less, since humanity is constantly evolving and changing.
• See science as the only trustworthy source of knowledge and the pronouncements of scientists as authoritative, if not infallible.
• See morality as an arbitrary, relativistic set of arbitrary norms which have evolved to help us get along with each other. There are no objective moral absolutes and probably no accountability for how we live in this life.

These disparate worldviews have profound consequences. One's starting point largely determines where one winds up.

If, for instance, human rights are simply a human invention then they're grounded in little more than the will and whims of those in power. They're just words on paper. They have no objective existence and can be discarded or changed whenever someone has the power and desire to do so. Indeed, to accuse a government of violating the human rights of its citizens makes no sense if those rights are simply whatever the government decides they are.

Likewise, if human nature can be altered and molded then the temptation to use government to compel people to conform to the image decided upon by the elites becomes irresistable. Since there is no objective right to liberty the government can and should do whatever's necessary to create the utopian society. That, of course, leads to Orwellian dystopias.

Ideas have consequences and the bigger the idea the more far-reaching the consequences. We're going to see this writ very large in the coming debate over President Trump's next nomination for the Supreme Court.

Conjectures and Refutations

A story at Phys.org discussed a recent paper which, I should've thought, would have created shock waves among scientists and philosophers, but which so far has generated very little comment.

A little background: Darwinian evolutionists argue that life on earth has been around for billions of years and that the various forms, were we able to see all that have ever appeared, would be observed to grade into each other almost seamlessly. In a gradual process that takes millions of years, one species slowly transitions to a similar but slightly different form, until the original form and its descendents become two separate species.

On the Darwinian view different taxa would appear at different times in the history of the earth, and thus the age of one species might be substantially different from the age of another, perhaps by millions of years.

On the other hand, many creationists, at least those who eschew the notion of universal descent from a common ancestor, assert that both of these claims are incorrect. They predict that on the creationist hypothesis, all species on earth are approximately the same age and that since the major taxa were created independently there will not be significant evidence of transitions between them.

The article in Phys.org reveals that both of these creationist predictions, neither of which is entailed by Darwinian evolution, seem to have been confirmed. Here are a few excerpts:

The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. "This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," [said David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who co-authored the findings last week.]

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age? Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

In analysing the [genetic] barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

This doesn't mean that life is only 200,000 years old. It only means that 90% of the species on earth today have been in existence for about the same length of time. In other words, this is consistent with the creationist hypothesis that there was a major environmental event early on in the history of the human race that produced a biological bottleneck of sorts, out of which emerged most of the forms that we find inhabiting the planet today.

This does not, of course, refute Darwinism and establish creationism, but it is a finding that requires a secondary explanation on Darwinism but which is directly predicted by creationists.

Here's another:

And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between. "If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."

The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

In other words, the lack of transitions between species is perplexing on the Darwinian view of a gradual evolution of life. Creationists have long pointed to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, but this study shows that even in extant forms of life species seem to be genetically isolated from each other. Again, there could be a satisfactory Darwinian account of why this is, but the point is that it confirms a direct prediction of the creationist hypothesis.

None of this means that creationists are correct and that Darwinians are wrong. The article offers some possible explanations for why, on Darwinian terms, the results I've alluded to may obtain. What it does seem to suggest, though, is that the Darwinian criticism of creationism, that it's a metaphysical, not a scientific, construct, is becoming harder to defend.

The distinguishing characteristic of science is what philosopher Karl Popper called conjectures and refutations. That is, scientific researchers make predictions based on theory and then test those predictions to see if they're confirmed or refuted by the evidence.

To the extent that the creationist hypothesis generates predictions that are confirmed by the empirical evidence, to that extent it confounds those who wish to exclude it from the realm of science and consign it to the sphere of religious faith.