Cultural Mindlessness

In the mid-1980s a sociologist by the name of Neil Postman wrote a book that was destined to become a classic in cultural criticism. The book was titled Amusing Ourselves to Death the thesis of which was that television dumbed down everything and that our politics would eventually be transmogrified by the electronic medium from a serious exercise in selecting the people who would guide our national destiny into little more than a frivolous spectacle.

A couple of years ago journalist Paul Brian wrote a column at The Federalist which amplified Postman's prescient prognostication and in which he argued that television is corrupting not just our politics but our very ability to think. Here are some excerpts:

Postman saw today’s click-craving, faux-outrage 24/7 news cycle slouching over the field of satellite dishes to be born from decades away. Even though the Internet Age was not yet upon him, he saw where the path of everything-as-entertainment was leading: to people having shorter average attention spans than goldfish, to a continuous present where contradictions and context are just minor details of no great interest.

“With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present,” Postman writes. “In a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit.”

In foreseeing the climate that would pave the way for pure-celebrity candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Donald Trump, not to mention the elevation of politicians like President Barack Obama to celebrity status, Postman surely deserves his reputation as the Nostradamus of the digital age.

The game show sets upon which our candidates stage their debates, the sporting event atmosphere that the media creates, the melodramatic "countdowns" to the debates and elections, the fascination with sexual scandal, the focus on whether some trivial development will help or hurt a candidate rather than on whether it's really even relevant to the issues that should concern us, all conspire to stifle thought.

Campaigns are no longer vehicles for helping voters understand issues and discern truth so much as extravaganzas exploited by the media to attract viewers who wish merely to be entertained.

Serious discussion of issues requires thinking and the strenuous exercise of reason, but that's not a promising way to garner ratings among the unthinking masses of television viewers. Better to package campaigns and candidates in a political version of Survivor:

We now live in a political climate where politicians embrace fame. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes national news for being photographed shirtless. Trump hires a media provocateur as his campaign CEO, prompting speculation his plan is to form a media empire if his presidential run doesn’t pan out. Hillary Clinton’s supporters fret that her appearance on Kimmel received lower ratings than reruns of Teen Moms and Friends (but she’s trying to increase star power by hanging out with Justin Timberlake).

Amusing Ourselves to Death essentially champions Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World over George Orwell’s vision in 1984.

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” Postman writes.

To extend the Big Brother metaphor: Is he so funny/annoying/brilliant/stupid/crazy/ridiculous that you can’t look away? Good news: because of the high ratings he’ll be back with all-new episodes next season.

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman prophesies with dark humor. Orwell saw a future where books were banned, Huxley one in which there was no need to ban books because nobody wanted to read them in the first place.

The media beguiles us into focusing on which candidate has made the most serious gaffe or committed the greatest outrage against social orthodoxy or articulated the cleverest put-down. We receive constant reminders as to who looks old, who looks tired, who looks frumpy. What the candidate would actually do if elected is barely given a thought by a media determined to seduce us with breathless reports of a candidate's eloquence, style, charm, and afflatus, but rarely analyzing in any serious way the quality of a candidate's ideas. They seem determined to amuse us to death.

Postman endeavors to prove that in the Age of Typography (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Exposition), when books and print newspapers were the sole source of information, discourse was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” But in the Age of Television (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Show Business), political discourse in particular has become “shriveled and absurd,” reliant on context-free snippets of information and entertaining spectacles and gaffes.

And it's not just our politics which suffers from this infatuation with the trivial and mindless. Sporting events are turned into multimedia assaults on the senses and intellect with halftime rock bands and fireworks and meaningless sideline interviews involving vacuous questions posed by witless "reporters."

Nor is religion immune. Too many church services feature epilepsy-inducing strobe lights, artificial stage fog, deafeningly high decibel "worship" music, and flamboyant preachers whose message, even if it's occasionally worth hearing, is often obscured by the medium in which it's presented.

One example of mind-dulling news reportage, albeit one of minor importance, is the radio news report that features a snippet of often unintelligible background noise from some foreign trouble site. Sometimes it's screaming sirens, or machinery noise, or people yelling in a foreign tongue. Listeners aren't supposed to ask what the actual purpose of playing that particular sound bite could possibly be, they're just supposed to allow it to anesthetize them into an acquiescence to the pointlessness of it.

Postman and Brian, I think, are right. We are not a people who want to think. We're a people who want to be able to avoid thinking, especially about politics. We really want only to be distracted and entertained. Brian quotes Postman:

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice,” he writes. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

There's more good stuff from Brian's article at the link.

Making Themselves Look Foolish

In the wake of the tragedy in Pittsburgh on Saturday in which a lunatic hater broke into a synagogue and murdered eleven Jewish congregants and wounded a number of others, some in the liberal media saw in this horrific slaughter an opportunity to score political points against President Trump.

Were the context surrounding their effort to smear the president not so tragic the effort itself would be amusing for its sheer absurdity.

Numerous attempts were made by commentators in liberal media outlets to accuse Mr. Trump of being an anti-semite whose rhetoric has nurtured a climate of hate so virulent that the more looney among his supporters feel justified in taking up weapons to kill Jews.

One wonders how intelligent people can sincerely make such an allegation given several widely known facts: First, the man who committed this crime was known to despise Donald Trump. He regarded the president as being too sympathetic to Jewish interests.

Second, the president's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are both followers of the Jewish faith.

Third, the president is a hero among Israeli Jews who have even named streets and plazas after him in Israel.

Fourth, President Trump has repeatedly condemned anti-semitism (see here and here) and all forms of bigotry.

Nevertheless, the progressive left is unfazed by any of this. They see a chance to discredit the president and they're not going to pass it up, even if it means making themselves look foolish and desperate.

If rhetoric has a causal effect on actions then we might ask when the left is going to start holding Louis Farrakhan, Linda Sarsour, et al. accountable for their hateful rhetoric toward Jews.

When are they going to hold people like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton accountable for legitimizing people like this by being seen in their company? And when are liberals going to demand that universities clean up the left-wing anti-semitic garbage dumps that exist on some of our campuses?

Julia Ioffe in the Washington Post cites some ambiguous quotes and ads for which alleges Mr. Trump bears ultimate responsibility as proof that he has stoked ethnic resentments among the morally sick far right groups. She writes:

Trump has had enough to say about the Jews that his supporters may easily make certain pernicious inferences. During the campaign, he joked at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that it wouldn’t support him “because I don’t want your money.” A campaign-era tweet about Hillary Clinton superimposed a Star of David over dollar bills. He said the white-supremacist marchers at Charlottesville last year were “fine people.”

After I published a profile of Trump’s third wife, Melania, that displeased her — and his supporters — the alt-right deluged me with anti-Semitic insults and imagery, culminating in clear death threats — such as an image of a Jew being shot execution-style or people ordering coffins in my name. When Trump was asked to condemn these attacks by his supporters, he said, “I don’t have a message” for them.

Aside from the fact that Ioffe's claim that Trump averred that the white-supremacists at Charlottesville were fine people is dubious (A more charitable rendering is that he was referring to the fact that there were many people present at the Charlottesville protest who were not affiliated with the extremists of either left or right) her examples prove exactly what?

Surely, the fact that people can read into such things whatever they wish to support their own prejudices is no warrant for the conclusion that Mr. Trump is himself a Jew-hater or sympathetic to those who hate Jews. Mr. Trump is no more responsible for what this man did in Pittsburgh, and indeed arguably much less responsible, than Bernie Sanders is responsible for the actions of one of his campaign workers who shot up a GOP baseball practice and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise.

But none of this matters to our friends on the left. They seem determined to blame President Trump for anything and everything that goes wrong. If a meteorite strikes the earth causing widespread devastation the progressive media will somehow manage to convince themselves that Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the catastrophe.

Perhaps the electorate will be swayed in November by the left's metronomic imputation of blame and their incessant moral outrage, or perhaps people will just tune it all out as so much sound and fury, signifying nothing. We'll see.

Meanwhile, here's something to consider. November 5th will be the one year anniversary of the deadliest attack on a house of worship in American history. On that date last year Devin Patrick Kelley walked into First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas and killed 26 worshippers, including the pastor's daughter, and wounded dozens more. Kelley was an atheist who held Christianity and Christians in contempt.

Does the media hold prominent atheists who have written of their contempt for Christianity - people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris - responsible for this atrocity? Of course not, nor should they, but doing so would be far more justifiable than holding Donald Trump somehow responsible for the murders of eleven Jews in Pittsburgh on Saturday.

Fatherhood Matters

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family. Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Katie's Soul

My classes have begun discussing what philosophers call the mind/body problem, that is, the question whether the brain alone can provide an adequate explanation for our cognitive experience or whether there's justification for believing that something else, an immaterial mind or soul, is also involved.

I did a post last summer on an article that sheds some very interesting light on this question, and I thought it might be worthwhile to post it again since it ties in with our class discussion. Here it is:

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 to explain 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.

So You'd Like to be a Time-Traveler?

Astrophysicist Caleb Scharf wrote a short piece for Scientific American last summer in which he explained why he believes time travel into the past, even if technologically possible, would be impossible to manage in any practical way.

The difficulty arises because of the fact that any travel in time also requires travel in space. He calls this the spatial problem. Here's his explanation:

Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Imagine you have a nifty time machine and decide to pop one month into the past .... In a typical story you’ll appear at precisely the same location, just a month earlier. But how on earth does your time machine ... get you to that unique physical place?

On Earth’s surface we’re in constant motion. The planet’s spin has us racing around at about 1,600 kilometers an hour at the equator. The Earth is orbiting the Sun at an average of 110,000 kilometers an hour. The Sun is currently moving relative to the center of the Milky Way galaxy at about 828,000 kilometers an hour, and our Local Group of galaxies is plunging through the cosmos at a velocity of about 2.4 million kilometers an hour relative to the cosmic microwave background.

That radiation field offers a way to establish a universally agreed-upon measure of rest or motion.

But space is of course expanding, so on very large scales no physical object can be said to be truly at rest with respect to others – it may just be equally not at rest in all directions.

That’s gets us back to our time travel experiment. To go back 1 month, and to appear at the same place ... you must also move a significant amount of physical distance. And you must do this extremely accurately. This is the spatial problem.

Let’s take the Earth’s motion around the Sun. A month of orbit corresponds to moving in an arc of approximately 78 million kilometers. During that same period the entire solar system will have also moved approximately 600 million kilometers around our galaxy, and our entire Local Group of galaxies will have swept through about 1.7 billion kilometers of space relative to the cosmic microwave background. Not only do you need to traverse those kinds of distances, you need to get it correct to within a part in a trillion.

In other words: your time travel device has to be exceedingly good at figuring out where in the universe to place you, not just when....

On the one hand it’s scientifically interesting to think about how to actually deal with coordinates in a real, and very dynamic universe. Where you are at this instant is not a fixed point in any cosmic sense. Indeed, you follow a quite complex trajectory through the universe, and thanks to complicated gravitational and mechanical interactions and behaviors this trajectory is probably not fully predictable.

Earth’s spin varies, its orbit varies subtly over very long timescales, and even our intergalactic motion will evolve as other galaxies and mass concentrations get closer or further away over time.

Scharf's point is that because every spatial location is moving relative to other spatial locations in the universe, if you were to travel back in time, say, one week you would not arrive at the same room you're sitting in now. You'd probably find yourself floating in space somewhere far removed from the earth which has hurtled on through space in the intervening week.

True time travel, to be practical, must also somehow factor in the motion of all the spatial locations in the universe so that the time traveler doesn't wind up marooned in space.

Scharf concludes with a mention of one implication of this problem:

It’s also fun to consider that this could provide an answer to the question of why, if time travel is ever invented, we haven’t been visited by beings from the future.... Perhaps the reason is that no one has (ever) solved the spatial problem, and the cosmos is littered with time travelers adrift between the stars and galaxies.

Richards' Short Argument Against Materialism

Students are sometimes confused by the fact that in describing the worldview called naturalism three different terms are often used interchangeably.

Naturalism (the view that nature is all there is, there's no supernatural, at least insofar as it impinges upon the physical universe) is often used synonymously with materialism (the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy) and physicalism (the view that everything can be explained, at least in principle, by the laws and processes of physics and chemistry).

The term materialism is often used when writing for a popular audience and physicalism is usually employed when writing for a more philosophically sophisticated readership.

At any rate, on materialism there's only one substance, matter/energy. There's no immaterial mind or soul, or if there is it is somehow generated by the material brain. Materialism is not exactly the same as naturalism, but most naturalists are materialists.

There are a number of arguments against the materialist view that all of our mental experience is reducible to the workings of the brain and that there is no such thing as an immaterial mind. One such argument is based on what philosophers refer to as intentionality. Intentionality is the phenomenon that various conscious states are about or of or for something.

For example, a belief is about something (e.g. an approaching storm), a desire is for something (e.g. pizza) and a sensation is of something (e.g. redness). These are called intentional states.

Philosopher Jay Richards explains how intentional states are an argument against materialism in a short piece at MindMatters. He writes:

Imagine a scenario where I ask you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae, while a doctor does an MRI and takes a real-time scan of your brain state. We assume that the following statements are true:

1. You’re a person. You have a “first person perspective.”
2. You have thoughts.
3. I asked you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae.
4. You freely chose to do so, based on my request.
5. Those thoughts caused something to happen in your brain and perhaps elsewhere in your body.

Notice that the thought in question—your first person, subjective experience of thinking about the chocolate sundae—would not be the same as the pattern in your brain. Nor would it be the same as an MRI picture of the pattern. One glaring difference between them: Your brain pattern isn’t about anything. Your thought is. It’s about a chocolate sundae.

We have thoughts and ideas—what philosophers call “intentional” states—that are about things other than themselves. We don’t really know how this works, how it relates to the brain or chemistry or the laws of physics or the price of tea in China. But whenever we speak to another person, we assume it must be true. And in our own case, we know it’s true. Even to deny it is to affirm it.

Points (1) through (5) above are common sense. In other words, everyone who hasn’t been persuaded by skeptical philosophy assumes them to be true. But it’s not merely that everyone assumes them. They are basic to pretty much any other intellectual exercise, including arguing.

That’s because you have direct access to your thoughts and, by definition, to your first-person perspective. You know these things more directly than you could conclude, let alone know, any truth of history or science. You certainly know them more directly than you could possibly know the premises of an argument for materialism.

That matters because (1) through (5) defy materialist explanation.

The materialist will want to say one of three things to avoid the implication of a free agent whose thoughts cause things to happen in the material world:

A) Your “thoughts” are identical to a physical brain state.
B) Your “thoughts” are determined by a physical brain state.
or C) You don’t really have thoughts.

And if any one of (A), (B), or (C) is true, then most or all of (1) through (5) are false.

So here’s the conclusion: What possible reason could we have for believing (A), (B), or (C) and doubting (1) through (5)? Remember that if you opt for (A), (B), or (C), you can’t logically presuppose (1) through (5). Surely this alone is enough to conclude that we can have no good reason for believing the materialist account of the mind.

To summarize, electrochemical reactions in the brain are not about anything, they just are. So how do we get from an electrochemical reaction to an intentional state? How does brute matter by itself produce an intentional state - aboutness, or forness or ofness?

No one knows. The materialist must simply respond that even though we don't know how it does it, it must do it because materialism is true.

This response, however, is an example of the fallacy of begging the question. In order to defend the truth of materialism the materialist assumes the very thing, the truth of materialism, that the non-materialist is calling into question.

The Biggest Threat

Over the years I've done several posts on the threat posed to our very survival by the deployment of Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons. These pose the most frightening dangers to our nation first, because we seem totally unprepared to counter them and second, because almost any nation with a modest nuclear capability can use them to essentially cripple our ability to defend ourselves and throw us economically back to the 19th century.

The collateral effect of this would be catastrophic, unleashing total social chaos.

The nature of these weapons is explained in this post from 2016, but the gist of it is that a single nuclear warhead launched from space, or even from a ship at sea, and detonated high in the atmosphere over the center of the country, would unleash a pulse of electromagnetic energy that could completely fry all electrical grids and electronic devices within a vast area of the U.S.

All banks, hospitals, financial institutions, vehicles and most industries would be knocked out of commission for an indefinite period of time. There'd be no way to access financial resources, no jobs, no medical care, no food, no water, no sanitation.

Millions would perish, not from the blast itself, but from its aftereffects. The same effects could result from a solar superstorm such as occurred in 1859 before there was an electrical infrastructure to be damaged by it.

Readers are urged to go to the above link to learn more about EMP. Awareness of this threat is especially important in light of a recent report issued by the congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. An article on this report by Bill Gertz in the Washington Free Beacon reveals that:

China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are preparing nuclear electronic pulse attacks from space in a future conflict to cripple the U.S. military and plunge the United States into darkness, according to a declassified study.

"The United States critical national infrastructure faces a present and continuing existential threat from combined-arms warfare, including cyber and manmade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, and natural EMP from a solar superstorm."

"Within the last decade, newly nuclear-armed adversaries, including North Korea, have been developing the ability and threatening to carry out an EMP attack against the U.S.," the report said.

"Such an attack would give countries that have only a small number of nuclear weapons the ability to cause widespread, long-lasting damage to U.S. critical national infrastructures, to the United States itself as a viable country, and to the survival of a majority of its population."

I don't like sounding like the guy wearing the sandwich board shouting that "The End Is Near", but on the other hand, there's a distressing lack of awareness in the West about the nature of this threat and how vulnerable we are to it. Near the end of his essay Gertz writes that:

The report also criticizes the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and the electric power industry for failing to address the EMP danger from either attack or solar storm. Private industry also has failed to understand the threat posed by EMP to high-voltage transformers.

An informed citizenry is essential to confounding this threat. We can do our part by voting in November for the candidates most likely to push for and fund the necessary counter-measures if they're elected to the House of Representatives or the Senate.

I'll let you decide under which party's auspices such candidates are most likely to be running.

A Roll of the Dice

From time to time we've talked about the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time").

Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of faith, doubt and skepticism.

The discussions are almost always pleasant and informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually exemplars of what such conversations should be, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here. For those readers who might prefer a slightly more elaborate explication of the fine-tuning argument try this post and the debate it links to.

Scientism and Self-Refutation

Philosopher J.P.Moreland has written a fine book titled Scientism and Secularism (2018) from which some of what follows has been borrowed. Scientism is not to be confused with science, but scientists, particularly naturalist or materialist scientists, are often proponents of scientism. Scientism is actually a philosophical view which holds, paradoxically, that science is the only reliable means of apprehending truth.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously declared in a book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design (2010) that "philosophy is dead" and that all the answers to life's important questions, at least those that can be known, are to be answered henceforth by science.

Hawking is here giving expression to his scientism, the view that all the important questions can either be answered by science or not answered at all, and that the methodologies of science are the only valid path to truth and knowledge. All other ways of knowing must give way to the supreme authority of science, especially the natural, or "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry.

Scientism is a common view, but not only does it have some serious liabilities, the notion that science supersedes philosophy is surely false.

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

1. It's self-refuting.
2. It's false that science is the only sure way of knowing truth.
3. It's false that philosophy is dead. If it were then science would be impossible.

Scientism is self-refuting because the claim that only what is testable by the methods of science can be trusted to be true is itself a philosophical claim. The claim itself is not subject to being tested through the methods of science. Thus, the basic claim of scientism itself must be false.

Nor can science be the only way of knowing since there are many other things we can know with at least the same level of certainty as we know any of the deliverances of science.

For example, which do you know with stronger certitude, that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter or that torturing children for fun is evil? The latter is not a scientific claim at all, it's a metaphysical claim, yet most of us are far more sure of its truth than we are of the truth of the claim about atoms.

There are other examples of things we know that do not lend themselves at all to scientific demonstration. For example, I can know: that I took a walk on my last birthday, that I hold certain beliefs about science and philosophy, that I have an itch in my foot, that sunsets are beautiful, that justice is good; and I can know the basic laws of math and logic, e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I know that if a proposition (P) entails another proposition (Q) then if P is true so must Q be true.

Not only do we all know such things, we know them with far more certainty than we know the truth of the claims of scientists about, say, global warming, atomic theory or Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, science depends for its very existence upon a series of assumptions, none of which are themselves scientific. All of them are philosophical, so if philosophy is dead where does that leave science?

Here are some examples: The law of cause and effect, the law of sufficient reason, the principle of uniformity, the belief that explanations which exhibit elegance and simplicity are superior to those which don't, the belief that the world is objectively real and intelligible, the belief that our senses are reliable, and the belief that our reason is trustworthy. All of these are philosophical assumptions that cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true.

Scientism is a bid by some materialists to assert epistemological hegemony over our intellectual lives and especially over the disciplines of philosophy and theology. However, just as similar attempts in the 20th century such as positivism and verificationism fell victim to self-referential incoherence, so, too, does scientism.

The claim that science is uniquely authoritative and that we should all recognize and bow to its supremacy is quite simply false.

Endorsing Philosophy

Shannon Rupp is a journalist who, in a piece at Salon.com, claims that the most valuable courses she took as an undergrad were philosophy courses.

This may seem literally incredible to some readers, so I encourage you to follow the link to the original article and read her endorsement for yourselves.

Meanwhile, here are a few salient excerpts:

I tell people the most useful classes I took were all in philosophy.

Yes, the course of study that has long been denigrated as frivolous and useless in the job market has been the part of my education that I lean on again and again. For work and everything else.

[A] smattering of undergrad philosophy classes taught me something applicable to any and every job: clarity of thought. Name me one aspect of your life that doesn't benefit from being able to think something through clearly.

Because it delivers real skills, philosophy doesn't go out of fashion the way the vague, trendy subjects do. The University of Windsor just announced it's closing its Centre for Studies in Social Justice, after 11 years. I suspect some of the problem there may be that no one can actually define "social justice." And the importance of defining terms to ensure we all mean the same thing when we're talking is one of those skills I picked up in philosophy.

Epistemology -- the study of what we can know -- turned out to be particularly useful, since people love to tell reporters what they believe as if it's a fact. Well, to be fair, they often don't know the difference between their beliefs and facts. They think the mere fact that they believe something is true -- for example, that angels watch over us -- makes it true.

Logic had obvious benefits, as did ethics. And I've found that genuine disciplines that train us to think more clearly in any field never lose their value.

It seems that the postmodernist theory that began infecting the academy some 40 years ago has sent sensible students running, screaming. English was hit particularly hard by this nonsense. Where they once emphasized writing, they now turn students into PoMo phrase generators who are of no use to anyone.

I've long thought that the debate about whether universities should be offering trades training or educating citizens is something of a red herring -- the discussion should be about whether to study knowledge or nonsense. Post-secondary schools are as subject to fashions and fads as any business trying to edge out competitors; they have to fight for public funding and private donors as well as students. All too often that has them promoting programs that are little more than trendy course titles with flimsy credentials. Or selling seats in cash cow courses like journalism.

Rupp closes with this:

... I also recall a philosophy teaching assistant, who took a sabbatical from his fat-salaried job in the computer industry to do a company-funded PhD. He had benefited from that wave of computer development that hired logical thinkers to be trained in the new-fangled gizmos. For a brief, shining moment, BAs in philosophy had been hot commodities at places like IBM. One of his pals even wrote patents for companies that developed innovative tools and techniques.

He thought some philosophy courses ought to be mandatory for every undergrad, partly because of the economic and technological upheaval of the time. The prognosticators warned that we would change careers an average of six times and work in jobs heretofore unimagined in this brave new world.

"Jobs change. But if you teach students to think clearly first, they can do whatever else they want to do," was the argument he made.

Of course, I'm biased, but I think everything Rupp says here is on the mark.

This is not to argue that all students should major in philosophy (although a minor in philosophy can be very useful), but it is to affirm that taking some traditional philosophy classes (I'd recommend staying away from the "boutique" courses) would not only open up whole new ways of seeing the world, but also train students to think more clearly and more deeply about a much wider range of ideas than they may have ever realized existed.

Thoughts on the Khashoggi Affair

Like a cat chasing a laser dot around the carpet the media is currently fixated on the apparent murder of a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi government agents in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. If the details that have emerged about this crime are true then it is indeed a particularly grisly piece of butchery, but I have a couple of questions about the reaction to it in the American media.

First, murders committed by governments in this part of the world, and other parts as well, are not unheard of. Why is the media so interested in this particular homicide? Surely our media elites know that the Russians, Chinese, and dozens of lesser nations imprison, torture and/or murder dissidents and other problematic citizens with regularity, and yet our journalists show little serious interest in these stories unless the crime is committed on foreign soil such as were the poisonings of Russian citizens in England. The Saudi embassy is not foreign soil, however. It's Saudi territory.

Is the outcry over this crime especially acute because Saudi Arabia is an American "ally"? But so are Egypt and Pakistan our allies, after a fashion, and neither of these countries are particularly squeamish about dealing brutally with their internal dissenters.

In Islamic and communist countries Christians are often horribly persecuted, both by the government or with government connivance and acquiescence, but the Western media merely yawns even though the facts are easily available to them. Why does the Khashoggi affair suddenly arouse their indignation? Is it because he's a fellow "journalist"? Is it because they hope, perhaps, to be able to use his murder to somehow discredit President Trump? Is it because Khashoggi was a Muslim Brotherhood activist?

I really have no idea, but the media's high level of concern for Khashoggi does seem odd considering their general indifference to the murders of other dissidents, especially Christians.

But more than the media's selective outrage, I'm piqued by the moral contradictions in the secularist worldview that this episode spotlights.

For example, we're frequently reminded by our elites, both in the media and in academia, that we in the West cannot judge other cultures, that we have no business imposing Western values on people elsewhere in the world, that what's wrong for us isn't necessarily wrong for others, that right and wrong are relative to the time and culture in which people live, and that it's crass cultural chauvinism for us to hold others to our Western moral standards.

In other words, our elites have for over half a century sought to inculcate in us a moral attitude that philosophers call moral relativism. This is the conviction that moral standards are established by the culture, that there is no universal, absolute morality, and that we should therefore be tolerant of how other people view right and wrong since we don't have a monopoly on moral truth.

Yet in the present case, when agents from a very different culture have done something that would be considered a horrific crime in the U.S., the relativists in our media immediately doff their relativism as easily as a child sheds a Halloween mask and they passionately commence condemning the foreign government for violating Western standards of behavior.

This is a strange reaction, to be sure, for folks who would otherwise declare their fealty to a relativistic view of morality.

Yes, we should condemn the murders of citizens wherever they live. Of course we should insist that it's wrong everywhere for a government to harm anyone without due process of law and certainly to do their citizens harm simply for being a political or religious dissenter.

But if relativism is true we're not justified in doing any of this. We can only make a moral judgment on the Saudis if we reject relativism and maintain that there is, in fact, an absolute standard of right and wrong which enjoins us to treat others justly.

But the existence of such a standard is precisely what relativists deny.

Perhaps one reason for this denial is that one can only hold the belief that there is an absolute moral standard if one also holds that there is an absolute moral authority which transcends human culture and consensus.

This, though, leads uncomfortably close to the conclusion that there's a Divine moral law-giver which establishes that standard, and this alarming implication many of our elites are simply loath to accept.

They'd prefer to continue with an unlivable relativism that makes them look foolish and confused in situations like the Jamal Khashoggi affair than admit that their very condemnation of the murder of this Saudi citizen by Saudi agents is a tacit acknowledgement that their naturalistic, materialistic worldview is philosophically untenable.

Of Blind Faith and Metaphors

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without this tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved very early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this complex sequence of chemical reactions occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It's at least logically possible that it did, and lots of very intelligent people assure us that it did even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known paper from 1996:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists, perhaps unintentionally, serves the purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this pathway and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature had no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version of it, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow retained and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it takes a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input than to believe that it arose through the agency of a biochemical genius.

Is Belief in Free Will Obsolete? (Pt. III)

In yesterday's post we looked at an argument made by philosopher Stephen Cave in an article in The Atlantic wherein he assumes that libertarian free will is an illusion.

Picking up where yesterday's post left off, Cave next addresses the human and social consequences of a widespread belief in the truth of determinism. They're not good:

Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency....This development raises uncomfortable — and increasingly non-theoretical — questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Some philosophers have suggested that given the consequences of living consistently with an awareness of the truth of determinism that the philosophical elites ought (strange word in this context) to deceive the masses and just not tell them about it. The elites should foist upon the public a kind of Platonic Noble Lie.

Cave, however, demurs:

[F]ew scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand.

This is a strange reaction, it seems, for if determinism is true, why should scholars be uncomfortable promoting a lie? What would make such a tactic morally wrong if their decision to employ it was actually compelled by their environment or their genes?

Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower.

There's something very odd about a metaphysical view - physicalism - the implications of which are so destructive that they can't be shared even among many of those who accept the view. If a belief is such that one cannot live with it consistently there's probably something deeply wrong with the belief.

Physicalism, however, does entail determinism and as Cave points out in his essay, the consequences of determinism are bleak. Here are a few other consequences of determinism:

• Praise and blame, reward and punishment, are never deserved since these assume that the recipient could have acted otherwise than he or she did act.
• There are no moral obligations, no moral right and wrong, since morality is contingent upon uncompelled free choice.
• There's no human dignity since dignity is predicated on the ability to make significant choices.
• If it's true one's belief that it's true is determined by many factors which have nothing to do with its truth value.

It's hard to see how people could live with a belief which has these consequences without falling into nihilism and despair. Yet that's where physicalism - and the closely related views called naturalism and materialism - lead.

Philosopher John Searle offers an antidote to the determinism described by Cave in this Closer to the Truth interview:

Is Belief in Free Will Obsolete? (Pt. II)

Philosopher Stephen Cave writes recently in The Atlantic that the idea that human beings have free will is dying out among scientists. The results of the experiments of neuroscientists, he argues, all seem to support the notion that at any given moment there's only one possible future. Our "choices" are determined by causes of which we may be completely unaware but which make our decisions ineluctable.

I've excerpted parts of Cave's essay below and follow the excerpts with critical comments.

Cave observes that,

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment.

But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

It should be noted that the agreement to which he refers is a tacit consequence of a metaphysical assumption shared by many researchers - the assumption that there are no non-physical, non-material factors at play in the universe or in human beings. This view is variously called materialism or, more properly, physicalism. If physicalism is true then determinism follows, but there's no good reason to think that it's true and several good reasons to think, or at least hope, that it's not.

Cave goes on to write that,

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior — otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Quite so, but it doesn't follow from the fact that changes in the physical brain cause changes in behavior that therefore the physical brain is all that's involved in behavior. A viewer can change the physical settings on his television and thereby change the image on the screen, but it would be foolish to conclude that therefore the image can be exhaustively explained in terms of the workings of the television set.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

This is a misreading of Libet's work, a clarification of which can be read here. Libet himself believed that human beings had free will. It would've been peculiar of him to hold this view after he had proven that the view was wrong.

The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond.

In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

If the system which produces our choices is indeed "a physical system like any other" then determinism is very probably true, but the assumption that our choices are solely the product of physical causes is an unprovable metaphysical statement of faith. If we are also possessed of an immaterial, non-physical mind or soul, as many philosophers believe, that faculty could possibly function as a locus of free choice. The only reason for thinking that such minds don't exist is an a priori commitment to physicalism, but such a commitment is no more rational than is an a priori commitment to a belief in an immaterial mind.

We'll finish up our consideration of Cave's article tomorrow.

Is Belief in Free Will Obsolete? (Pt. I)

Yuval Noah Harari has an essay in The Guardian in which he argues that liberal democracy will not survive the technological age as long as we continue to believe that we have free will, or something like that. His argument is dubious for a couple of reasons.

1. It's not clear how accepting volitional determinism will enhance liberal democracy and save us from corporate and governmental powers which would seek to use technology to control us.

2. He doesn't make much of a case for believing that determinism is true. He simply asserts it.

The closest he comes to arguing for it is this passage:

Unfortunately, “free will” isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of “free will” to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices. If our choices aren’t made freely, why should God punish or reward us for them?

According to the theologians, it is reasonable for God to do so, because our choices reflect the free will of our eternal souls, which are independent of all physical and biological constraints.

This myth has little to do with what science now teaches us about Homo sapiens and other animals. Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.

I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.

It's true that there's much about us that we don't choose, but as neuroscientist Michael Egnor points out, these things are not will:

Humans have emotions which are indeed not free, in the sense that we cannot freely choose our passions. Appetites—lust, greed, hunger, fear, etc—are common to all animals, rational and irrational. While humans can tame our appetites to a considerable extent, we are indeed subject to them and do not have libertarian control over them.

Will is a different matter entirely. Will is an immaterial power of the human mind, and it follows on intellect, which is also immaterial. The immateriality of intellect and will is obvious from the objects of intellection and will—universal and abstract concepts, which are immaterial themselves.

The contemplation of these concepts is necessarily immaterial in turn. The immateriality of human intellect and will has been demonstrated logically and philosophically for several millennia by philosophers of all (and no) religious stripes, and the immateriality of intellect and will is strongly supported by modern neuroscience, despite Harari’s uninformed claim.

Harari's belief that free will is a myth is an unstated entailment of his belief in materialism. If all there is to us is our material body, if there is no such thing as an immaterial mind, then determinism may well be true, since matter is indeed deterministic (except at the quantum level). If, however, we do have immaterial minds then our intuition that we really are somehow free to choose may well be true.

Belief in libertarian free will is a properly basic belief. That is, it's a belief that has had a powerful hold on us most of our lives, and since free will is necessary if we're to make sense out of our moral experience, there's no good reason to give it up unless Harari can give us a powerful argument, a defeater, for that belief. This, however, he doesn't do. He simply assumes materialism is true and tacitly concludes that therefore determinism is true also.

But like most determinists Harari can't live consistently with his determinism. In the conclusion of his essay he employs language that only makes sense if in fact we're free. In answer to the question of what we should do in the face of threats to liberal democracy from those who would use technology to control us, he answers:

We need to fight on two fronts simultaneously. We should defend liberal democracy, not only because it has proved to be a more benign form of government than any of its alternatives, but also because it places the fewest limitations on debating the future of humanity.

At the same time, we need to question the traditional assumptions of liberalism (i.e. that we have free will), and develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.

Perhaps he's right about what we should do, but whenever one uses the word "should" in this context one is implying that one's interlocutors possess the ability to choose between alternatives. In other words, Harari is assuming we have the freedom to deny that we are free even as he implies that we are indeed free to pursue the alternatives he urges us to pursue. This borders on being incoherent, if indeed it doesn't cross the line altogether.

More on this important topic tomorrow.

18 Facts about Us and the World

One form of argument employed by investigators - whether police, scientists or philosophers - is called abduction or inference to the best explanation. When confronted by certain facts or evidence, the investigator asks which explanation, among the possible options, fits or explains these facts best with the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

That explanation is then considered the most probable, or best, of the alternatives, and it becomes a working hypothesis until further evidence arises which makes it less tenable.

Below are eighteen facts about the world, some of which are scientific and others of which might be called existential. There are basically two competing metaphysical explanations for these facts in Western culture - naturalism and theism. We must approach the evidence objectively, that is with no a priori assumptions about the truth or falsity of either explanation, and then ask which of the two explanations do these seventeen facts mesh with most comfortably.

Do they conform best with the view that everything is a product of blind forces and serendipity, or are they best explained by assuming the existence of a transcendent, intelligent agent?

Remember, no a priori assumptions about which of the two alternatives is correct are permitted.

Here are the eighteen with a brief elaboration on each:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning: What caused the universe to come into being when it did? Could it have "just happened"?
2. The fact of cosmic fine-tuning: Is it just a lucky accident that there are dozens of forces, constants and other parameters that are calibrated to within astonishingly precise limits such that were it otherwise either life or the universe itself could not exist?
3. The fact of the ubiquity of biological information: It's the uniform experience of human beings that information is the product of a mind. How, then, did the information in DNA and other macromolecules arise?
4. The fact of human consciousness: How does brain matter by itself generate meaning, sensation and awareness?
5. The fact that mathematics can explain much of the world and that we can comprehend math:
Is it just a coincidence that the world is explicable in the language of math? How did we evolve the ability to do higher math when such an ability had no survival value?
6. The joy we experience when we encounter beauty: Why does beauty, whether visual or auditory, affect us?
7. The fact that we believe human reason to be generally reliable: If reason evolved to aid in survival then it doesn't necessarily produce true beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, so why should we trust it?
8. Our sense that we have free will: If we're just a collocation of atoms governed by the principles of chemistry where does the powerful intuition that we're in some sense free to choose and responsible for our choices come from?
9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions: Why would the evolutionary process produce in us a desire for answers which are completely unnecessary for survival?
10. Our sense of moral obligation: Where does our sense that we have a duty to do some things and to avoid others come from? Why do we think this sense of duty is somehow binding upon us?
11. Our sense of guilt/regret: If nothing is really right or wrong why do we have a sense of guilt when we engage in certain behaviors? Why do we feel guilt if we're not guilty and what does it mean to be guilty?
12. Our belief in human dignity: If we're just an animal, an ephemeral product of chance and physical law, from whence comes the notion that we have dignity?
13. Our belief in human worth: Ibid.
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights: Ibid.
15. Our desire for justice: Why have we evolved a desire for justice if there is no such thing, at least not in an ultimate sense?
16. Our need for meaning and purpose: Why, if we're the product of natural selection and genetic mutation, do we yearn for a deeper meaning to life beyond mere reproduction?
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self: If all we are is a "pack of neurons" (Francis Crick) what is it about us that makes us think we're something more, something that perdures through time?
18. Our desire to survive our own death: If death is just a natural part of life, why do we seek to do what we can to avoid it? Why do we have a desire for something more?

So, which worldview, in your opinion, is the best explanation of these eighteen facts?

Fundamentally Transforming the Country

Just a few years ago, students and young people in general faced a dismal job market upon graduation. Burdened with onerous student loan debt some despaired of ever finding a job that would allow them to pay it off, much less support a family, buy a home and embark upon a meaningful career.

If they were poor their outlook was especially bleak. There just were no jobs for the unskilled, our president was admonishing us that many good paying jobs had fled overseas and weren't coming back and that we all needed to get used to this "new normal."

Then came 2016 and the election of a man whom Matthew Continetti describes in a column at the Washington Free Beacon this way:

He brags, he intimidates, he pouts, he jokes, he insults, he is purposefully ambiguous, and he leaves no criticism unanswered. He is unlike any postwar American president, though he shares some qualities with LBJ and Reagan. He is frenetic and polarizing, a showboat and a salesman. His methods are over-the-top, combative, and divisive.

In place of the politics of consensus he adopts the politics of confrontation. Where others mindlessly repeat politically correct clichés, Trump unequivocally challenges them. He has ushered in a new era of American politics by dissolving the varnish that for so long obscured fundamental cultural divisions between and within the parties. He is president of a country that is wilder, zanier, and more unpredictable than before.

Yet he has done more to make the country stronger, to help the poor, and to offer a hopeful future to young people than any president before him, including Ronald Reagan. Wherever one looks - trade, judges, foreign policy, the economy, he is succeeding in doing what his predecessor also promised to do, i.e. fundamentally transform the country, but not in the way that President Obama had in mind.

Whereas Mr. Obama saw socialism as the future of the United States and did what he could to move us in that direction, Mr Trump is freeing markets to do what socialism can never do, create jobs and create opportunities for everyone to have a better life, including the poor.

Unemployment, both overall and for minorities, is at record lows, average family income is at record highs, the welfare rolls are shrinking and most college students can expect to find ample career opportunities awaiting them once they secure their diploma.

Mr. Trump has accomplished all this while being relentlessly hounded by a special prosecutor and a media which despises him and despite being opposed at every step by a Democratic party which perhaps sees their hold on the lower economic classes slipping from their grasp and their dreams of a burgeoning centralized government that has its fingers in every pie fading into oblivion.

Here are some of the ways Continetti sees President Trump transforming the country:

TRADE: Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced it had reached an agreement with both Mexico and Canada to revise and rebrand the North America Free Trade Agreement as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. This announcement fulfills one of President Trump's key pledges on the campaign trail while benefiting constituencies in important states such as Michigan (autos) and Wisconsin and Minnesota (dairy). Trump also renegotiated the Korea Free Trade Agreement and has made progress with the Europeans as well as the Japanese.

ECONOMY: The Trump Bump continues, with overall unemployment at its lowest level since 1969. Consumer confidence is high, and data from the manufacturing and service sectors indicate continued growth. No president is responsible for the state of the American economy, but fiscal and regulatory policy help, and presidents take credit or receive blame in any event.

JUDGES: Judge Brett Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court will secure a five-vote majority of originalist and textualist judges on the high court for the first time in modern memory. Such a transformation of the federal judiciary has been a goal of Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. The fact that it will be Donald J. Trump who will cement this victory is no small feat. On the contrary, it may turn out to be his greatest and longest-lasting achievement.

FOREIGN POLICY: President Trump is slowly and steadily re-orienting U.S. foreign policy to face the central challenge of the twenty-first century: the rise of China to great power status. Beginning with the national security strategy released at the end of 2017...Trump has accomplished the "pivot to Asia" that the Obama administration so often talked about. What the pivot looks like is a policy of containment—one that should have been pursued decades ago. Trump has made this move while sanctioning Russia, getting tough on Iran, ending the farcical Middle East "peace process," and attempting to defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Mr. Trump is not without his faults, but what he has done for the workers of this country and for the future of our young people is unprecedented. Those who oppose him do so not because of his failures but because of his successes. They don't want to see capitalism succeed inasmuch as it'll make it that much harder for them to regain power and to implement the socialist policies they believe to be the only just economic system.

Nor do they want to see him succeed in appointing judges and Justices who will interpret the law rather than legislate from the bench because it's a lot easier for the left to get their way when they can do it through the courts rather than having to go through the people's representatives in the legislature.

No one has a crystal ball, of course, and the trajectory of the country could change overnight, especially if Mr. Trump's political opponents regain the House and Senate in November, but if you care about jobs, if you care about the poor, if you care about our young people's future, and if you care about the rule of law, you have to be gratified with the overall direction we're moving in today.

Time for Dems to Disavow Alinsky

I commented yesterday on the deplorable state of our political rhetoric, a state that fell to a new nadir with the Kavanaugh hearings. With the elections looming in November and so much riding on the outcome, it's unlikely that our discourse is going to become less toxic anytime soon.

Even so, one step that may go some distance toward a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people on the left to repudiate and renounce the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) has had on left-wing political activism. They don't have to renounce the whole book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salutary development if more of them would distance themselves from Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here are the rules I have in mind:

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the almost fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ Alinsky's methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity. Indeed, Alinsky promotes polarization in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies.

Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy. Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but the opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed just as this writer for the Colbert show tweeted the other day:

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malign effect upon our society. Division is what the book advocates and it's what its votaries want, but if they're serious about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously renounce Alinsky and his book.

Rock Bottom

If there's truth to the aphorism that people are known by the company they keep then rank and file Democrats must be feeling a bit uneasy and embarrassed by the sheer wickedness and lunacy of some of the people who vote the way they do.

There are, of course, awful people on both sides of the political spectrum, but no prominent Republican has said or done anything as remotely vile as have some prominent Democrats.

To be sure, Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who brought the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that when they were at a high school party he forced her into a bedroom and then jumped on top of her (she claims to have escaped from the room before anything else happened and none of the people she names as witnesses have corroborated her story), claims now to be receiving death threats. If this is true it's absolutely disgusting and contemptible, but as of yet there are no records of the threats and we have no idea who might be doing this.

Yet, in terms of sheer hatred, cruelty and verbal violence, from people who are in the public eye and can be counted among the elite in our society, it's hard to match what we're seeing from some on the left.

Consider just two recent examples. Georgetown University Professor C. Christine Fair, who, according to a piece in The Daily Caller, has a sordid record of vulgar and hateful rhetoric, tweeted recently:

“Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.”

“All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps,” Fair wrote. “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

A second example of the left's moral dwarfism comes to us from a writer for the Stephen Colbert show named Ariel Dumas who tweeted on Saturday before the Kavanaugh confirmation vote that, "Whatever happens, I'm just glad we ruined Brett Kavanaugh's life."

It evidently doesn't matter to these people that Kavanaugh might well be innocent. It doesn't matter that even if he did try to force himself on a woman while intoxicated 36 years ago that he may be a man of completely different character today.

It doesn't matter that both of these women doubtless voted for Bill Clinton, a man credibly alleged to have been a serial sexual assaulter and both presumably would have supported Ted Kennedy, who was not only renowned for his sexual improprieties but was actually responsible for the death of a young woman.

Indeed, it wouldn't have mattered whatsoever if the allegations had never been brought against Judge Kavanaugh. No one in the Senate would have voted any differently than they did vote.

Fairness and logical consistency are irrelevant when one is consumed by hatred to the point that the most important thing is ruining someone's life or gloating over the prospect of their murder and mutilation.

Also embarrassing for Democrats must be the behavior of protestors in the Senate gallery as the vote was taken on Saturday. Women screamed, screeched and howled like inmates in an asylum. These are the people who want to determine who runs the country? These are the people who demand that we listen to them? Why on earth should we?

Perhaps those who belong to the same party as these women are outraged at the black eye their party's being given. Perhaps they're asking themselves what it is about their candidates that appeals to people like these, and perhaps they're asking themselves whether they really want to be associated with individuals who give so much evidence of being mentally and/or morally sick.

If they're not perhaps they should be.

The Demise of Science (Pt. II)

I suggested in the previous post that science would deeply harm itself if it abandoned the distinctive criteria that set it apart from other intellectual pursuits. Today I'd like to consider another reason science is jeopardizing its own fruitfulness, and it's a consequence of the naturalism (i.e. the view that the natural, physical world is all that exists) that led to the problems discussed yesterday.

This additional way in which naturalism and its adherents may be bringing about the demise of the scientific enterprise is highlighted in a piece at Stream.org. Here's an excerpt:

In his profound book The Death of Humanity, Richard Weikart documents how self-appointed spokesmen for “Science” such as “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins — and thousands who follow his lead — reject the idea of objective morality, free will, and the meaningfulness of life.

Instead they blithely insist that everything — every single thing — in human nature can be traced to natural selection and blind variation. Religious impulses, altruism, friendship, love, even scientific curiosity, must all be explained away as the purposeless side-effects of mutations.

Human consciousness itself is a purely chemical, deterministic process entirely driven by the firing of neurons in the brain — which means that it is impossible to describe knowledge as objective, or any statement as really “true.”

The perception each of us has that a proposition is provable, or an experiment is conclusive, is no guarantee of anything in external reality; instead it is the outcome of subatomic dominoes falling in random patterns. How can science continue if even scientists start to believe this about their minds?

The answer is that it cannot. The death of humanity which Weikart describes will also be the death of science. We are already seeing state attorneys general trying to prosecute scientists who question the political orthodoxy of climate activists, federal regulations overriding the medical judgments of doctors treating “transgender” patients, and a dogmatic refusal on the part of many well-educated people to admit that a human embryo is either living or human, or that physical sex (gender) exists.

In other words, science is naturalism's summum bonum, but naturalistic assumptions are corrosive, if not fatal, to science. Science arose and flourished in the Christian culture of the West, a culture that took it for granted that the world was the product of a rational, logical God who created man in the image of himself.

Being the creation of a rational being the world was thus assumed to be orderly and law-like and could be expected to yield its secrets to logical inquiry by men who were its divinely appointed stewards.

Early philosophers and scientists believed that because the Creator was rational there was a reason why everything happened and that those reasons could be uncovered by rational investigation.

Naturalism, though, rejects the notion of an intelligent, personal Creator without realizing that everything else that it wants to hold on to is contingent upon the conviction that the world is the product of such a being as they deny. In the absence of God, belief in an objective, law-governed universe discoverable by human reason crumbles like very old paper as soon as it's touched.

Naturalists, ironically, exalt science without realizing that science and naturalism are fundamentally incompatible and cannot indefinitely co-exist.

The Demise of Science (Pt. I)

Science has flourished for three hundred years in the West, and has been in many ways a marvelous blessing to the world, but it may nevertheless soon find itself on life support. Ironically, the agent of its potential senescence is the rejection of a couple or three metaphysical assumptions that many credit with having given it its robust vigor and success in the first place.

The assumptions I refer to are these: 1. The conviction that science should limit itself to the study of natural, physical causes, and 2. that the theories it propounds should be based on physical, empirical evidence. Those theories, moreover, should 3. have the quality of being in principle falsifiable - that is, there should be a way to test the theory and a conceivable result of that test which, if it obtained, would show the theory to be false. Whatever hypotheses cannot meet these criteria - e.g. religious, ethical, epistemological, or aesthetic theories - belong to philosophical inquiry and reside outside the boundaries of science.

That's been the prevailing view ever since the Enlightenment, but there's sympathy in some scientific and philosophical precincts today for quietly doing away with both the need for empirical evidence as well as the falsifiability criterion, and the reasons for this, or at least a couple of them, are interesting.

Some scientists, for instance, think these criteria are too confining and, worse, they lead to unhappy metaphysical conclusions about the existence of God.

Specifically, some (many?) philosophers and scientists want desperately to legitimize multiverse hypotheses as legitimate science because if our universe is the only one that exists the conclusion that it is intentionally designed becomes virtually inescapable.

As one might imagine, this ineluctability makes metaphysical naturalists (atheists) quite uncomfortable. As Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London puts it, it's either the multiverse or God. Those are the only two live options.

The reason the multiverse seems necessary to save naturalism is that cosmic fine-tuning is so compelling (see video below), and the probability of a universe as incredibly fine-tuned as ours existing is so infinitesimally tiny, that if one wishes to avoid the conclusion that a supernatural Designer exists, or even the weaker but still important conclusion that the universe affords much evidence that such an intelligence exists, one has to hold that there's an infinite array of worlds in which every possible universe is actual.

If so, then in an infinity of worlds every possible world has a probability of one, including our world. This would mean that the cosmic fine-tuning may be no big deal.

Thus, the multiverse is seen as the best way on offer to rescue naturalism from the theists. But the problem is there's no physical evidence that such a plethora of worlds really does exist, only that their existence is possible, nor is there any way to test or falsify the claim that this ensemble of worlds exists. Thus, many philosophers and scientists argue, the multiverse theory is not a scientific hypothesis at all. It's metaphysics, just like religion, ethics, aesthetics, etc.

This "reduction" of the stature of the theory won't do, however, because if it's not a "scientific" theory it won't have any particular authority or claim on people's minds, so what's the solution? If the hypothesis doesn't meet the criteria of science then one solution is to discard the inconvenient criteria altogether so that science becomes simply whatever it is that scientists do.

But this makes science something other than what it's been for three centuries. It robs it of its distinctive character and, let's repeat, transforms it into an exercise in metaphysics, just like religion.

There's another way science seems to be losing its distinctive character, and we'll look at that in the next post.