Only Two Options

Physicist Leonard Susskind has written a book titled, Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design in which he seeks to explain away the fine-tuning of the universe by offering the hope that there are something like ten to the 500th power universes out there, all with different laws and constants, so that one of them just has to be like ours.

He suggests that there really are only two options: The existence of zillions of universes, so many that we cannot comprehend the number (To get an idea of the size of the number there are only 10^80 atoms in the whole of our universe), or there is only one universe and it was intentionally designed by a cosmic intelligence.

Some time ago New Scientist ran an interview with Susskind by Amanda Gefter. Here's an excerpt:

Gefter:So even if you accept the multiverse and the idea that certain local physical laws are anthropically determined, you still need a unique mega-theory to describe the whole multiverse? Surely it just pushes the question [of the source of fine-tuning] back?

Susskind: Yes, absolutely. The bottom line is that we need to describe the whole thing, the whole universe, or multiverse. It's a scientific question: is the universe on the largest scales big and diverse or is it homogeneous [i.e. Is it many universes or just one]? We can hope to get an answer from string theory and we can hope to get some information from cosmology.

There is a philosophical objection called Popperism that people raise against the landscape [multiverse] idea. Popperism [named for philosopher Karl Popper] is the assertion that a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it's just metaphysics.

Other worlds, alternative universes, things we can't see because they are beyond horizons, are in principle unfalsifiable and therefore metaphysical - that's the objection. But the belief that the universe beyond our causal horizon is homogeneous is just as speculative....

Gefter: If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design [ID]?

Susskind: I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world.

But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now, we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.

Nuclear physicist David Heddle responds:

Susskind's answer shows that his book should be subtitled String Theory and the Possible Illusion of Intelligent Design. He has done nothing whatsoever to disprove fine-tuning. Nothing. He has only countered it with a religious speculation in scientific language, a God of the Landscape.

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, he tells us that we should embrace the String Theory landscape, not in spite of its ugliness, but rather because of it. Physics should change its paradigm and sing praises to inelegance.

Out with Occam's razor, in with Rube Goldberg. Out with reductionism, in with lots of free parameters. Why? Because if we don't (according to Susskind) there really is no way to explain the fine-tuning, except by Intelligent Design.

I think Heddle is correct. A fundamental theory that predicted all the physical constants would be a "win" for ID. It would nullify the only real threat to cosmological intelligent design, the hypothesis that there are an infinitude of universes all with different laws of physics.

The subtext (at times explicit) in Susskind's book is that fine-tuning is real, in the sense that our universe really does exist on a knife's edge, so much so that it demands attention. The only possible way that it is an illusion is if our universe is but one of an unimaginable number of universes.

To save materialism from the spectre of theism, Susskind argues that we must explain this fine-tuning, and his landscape [i.e. that there are zillions of universes] has the best chance of playing the role of a white knight.

Susskind's argument demonstrates the desperation of materialists who wish to escape the conclusion that there is an intelligence behind the cosmos. He's willing to jettison the traditional scientific criteria of testability, falsifiability and Occam's razor and blindly accept on faith, without any empirical evidence, that there exists a nearly infinite number of other worlds.

With so much cosmological variety, he believes, one of those other worlds just has to possess the extraordinary complex of features required to support life, and our universe happens to be that world. Thus, our universe is not so extraordinary after all.

Susskind's interview makes it plain that the battle over intelligent design is not one between science and religion but rather between two different philosophical views of the world: Naturalism and Supernaturalism.

Susskind says that our universe certainly appears to be intricately well-ordered and intelligently planned for living things, but that the appearance of purpose and design are, in fact, simply illusions.

The intelligent design theorist counters that the only evidence to which we have access, or even could have access, tells us that this universe is the only one there is, and that the supposition that our world is the only world is in any event the most parsimonious hypothesis.

Thus, we think we see purpose and intentional engineering in the fabric of the cosmos because these things are really there, and the only reason one would have for failing to accept that conclusion is an a priori metaphysical commitment to atheism. Unfortunately, a priori commitments are not conducive to a scientific approach to the search for truth.

Should anyone question why all parties seem to agree that the universe at the very least appears to be deliberately fine-tuned, I commend either or both of the following: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by physicist Stephen Barr and Nature's Destiny by biologist Michael Denton.

Naturalism and Objective Moral Values

Here's a five minute clip from a discussion twenty some years ago involving two philosophers, one a theist (Dr. William Lane Craig) and one a naturalist (Dr. Bernard Leikind), discussing whether naturalism can provide a ground for objective moral values.

Dr. Leikind is a relativist who apparently believes that some things, like slavery, are indeed objectively bad, but he struggles to give a reason why slavery is bad other than his own subjective aversion to it.

If naturalism is true then all moral values are subjective personal preferences, and if moral values are simply subjective preferences, like a preferred flavor of ice cream, then there is no genuine right and wrong, just as there's no right or wrong preference in ice cream flavors.

Nevertheless, the naturalist can choose to live by certain values, and most do, but the logic of his or her basic worldview should actually lead the naturalist to moral nihilism.

Fortunately, most naturalists are not logically consistent and don't follow their naturalism all the way to its logical endpoint.

If they were consistent not only would they be nihilists (see here), but they would never make moral judgments about any other person's behavior, for no matter how cruel or harmful that behavior might be, it wouldn't be morally wrong.

Is Time Static or Fluid?

Bernardo Kastrup, challenges readers in an article in Scientific American to consider that our apparent experience of the flow of time is really an illusion. He writes,

There can only be experiential flow if there is experience in the past, present and future. But where is the past? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it? Clearly not.

What makes you conceive of the idea of the past is the fact that you have memories. But these memories can only be referenced insofar as they are experienced now, as memories. There has never been a single point in your entire life in which the past has been anything other than memories experienced in the present.

The same applies to the future: where is it? Can you point at it and say “there is the future”? Clearly not. Our conception of the future arises from expectations or imaginings experienced now, always now, as expectations or imaginings.

There has never been a single point in your life in which the future has been anything other than expectations or imaginings experienced in the present.

But if the past and the future are not actually experienced in the, well, past and future, how can there be an experiential flow of time? Where is experiential time flowing from and into?

He goes on to draw an analogy from space: Let’s make an analogy with space. Suppose that you suddenly find yourself sitting on the side of a long, straight desert road. Looking ahead, you see mountains in the distance. Looking behind, you see a dry valley.

The mountains and the valley provide references that allow you to locate yourself in space. But the mountains, the valley, your sitting on the roadside, all exist simultaneously in the present snapshot of your conscious life.

Kastrup argues that just as you wouldn't construe from seeing the mountains ahead and the valley behind while you sit by the roadside, that you are moving on the road. You aren't; you are simply taking account of your relative position on it. You have no more experiential reason to believe that time flows than that space flows while you sit admiring the landscape.

He concludes with this:

The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion. All we ever actually experience is the present snapshot, which entails a timescape of memories and imaginings analogous to the landscape of valley and mountains. Everything else is a story.

The implications of this realization for physics and philosophy are profound. Indeed, the relationship between time, experience and the nature of reality is liable to be very different from what we currently assume....

The article is fairly brief, but Kastrup manages to fit several other interesting insights into it. If the ontology of time interests you, you should check it out.

¡Si, Se Puede!

Here's a small irony. Yesterday Honduran migrants in Mexico tried with scant success to storm the U.S. border at San Ysidro shouting "¡Si, Se Puede!" ("Yes, we can!"). The irony is that this was the slogan which enjoyed wide popularity among Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers back in the 60s and 70s.

Chavez was an icon among liberal progressives. According to Tucker Carlson in his book Ship of Fools there are six libraries, eleven parks, half a dozen major roads and at least twenty five public schools in California all named for him.

Chavez's UFW union was comprised of Latino farm laborers, in this country legally, who saw illegal immigrants as a threat to their economic livelihood, which of course they were. Carlson writes:

Chavez understood that new arrivals from poor countries will always work for less than Americans. Immigration hurt the members of his union, undercutting their wages and weakening their leverage in negotiations with management...When government refused to protect them (from illegal aliens) Chavez did it himself....In 1969 Chavez led a march down the agricultural spine of California to protest the hiring of illegal workers by growers.

Marching alongside him were future presidential candidate Walter Mondale and Rev. Ralph Abernathy...

When the U.S. government failed to secure the border...in 1979, UFW members, almost all of them Hispanic, began intercepting Mexican nationals as they crossed the border and assaulted them in the desert. Their tactics were brutal: Chavez's men beat immigrants with chains, clubs, and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses bombed and cars burned...

The union set up a "wet line" along the border, a picket line of tents, each tent manned by five or six men whose task it was to catch illegals and beat them to a pulp.

During these years the Democrat party was firmly anti-illegal immigration. In 1975 California governor Jerry Brown (the same Jerry Brown who is again California's governor today, remarkably) opposed the admission of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Vietnam. His reason was that California already had too many unemployed people.

Senator Joe Biden introduced legislation to curb the arrival of the Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, accusing the Gerald Ford administration of not being honest about how many refugees would be coming to our shores.

Senator George McGovern, the leftmost progressive in the Democratic Party, opposed letting them in, saying, "I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam."

In 1994 Barbara Jordan, an African American congresswoman from Texas, demanded that immigrants assimilate into American society, learn English and become "Americanized." Those immigrants who refused she insisted be deported.

In 1995 Democrat President Bill Clinton intoned in his State of the Union address that, "All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by U.S. citizens or immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers."

He went on: "It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that we've seen in recent years. We must do more to stop it." He was given a standing ovation by Democrats and Republicans alike.

As recently as 2006, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and twenty three other senate Democrats voted to build a fence on the Mexican border.

And then suddenly they had an epiphany. They began to ask themselves, "What are we doing? These immigrants will almost certainly vote for us Democrats if we get them citizenship," and overnight their attitude toward illegal immigration flipped.

Once the Democrats realized that a huge influx of Hispanic migrants could turn Texas blue, thereby guaranteeing that Democrats would achieve political hegemony in this country for the next three generations, they quite abruptly forgot all the speeches they had made in the 90s and 2000s, they kicked American workers to the curb and stumbled all over themselves to do everything they could to get as many aliens into the country as possible.

Barack Obama even adopted Cesar Chavez's slogan, "Yes, we can" for his 2008 presidential campaign, oblivious, perhaps, of Chavez's actual attitude toward illegals.

Democrats today are willing to open our borders to almost anyone who wants to come in, they want to abolish ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, and declare every large city in America a sanctuary where illegal immigrants will be safe from enforcement of the laws they themselves fought to enact scarcely more than a decade ago.

This all suggests a thought experiment. Let's imagine that the tens of thousands of migrants wending their way across Mexico and arriving now at American points of entry were all sporting MAGA hats and were reliably expected to vote Republican when perchance they eventually were granted citizenship. Given those circumstances how many of those who are today championing open borders and sanctuary cities would continue to support those policies?

Not very many, I'd bet.

The left's concern for these migrants is largely specious and based almost completely on a political calculation. After all, what has changed for Democrats to cause them to abandon their hostility to mass immigration of a decade or two ago?

Given the history, it seems quite reasonable to assume that very few of those who advocate for the migrants today care much about them as human beings. Rather, they care about them primarily as potential Democrat voters.

They also see themselves in a win/win situation. If the migrants get into the U.S. they'll be here to stay, and a path to citizenship and the right to vote is probably in their future. If, on the other hand, they get discouraged and go home, the Democrats can blame their plight on heartless Republicans in general and that evil President Trump in particular.

In either eventuality, the migrants are pawns, they're a means to an end for the Democrats and their political aspirations.

Where Do Our Notions of Good and Evil Come from?

Philosopher Peter Kreeft at Boston College presents a version of the moral argument for the existence of God in this short video titled "Where do Good and Evil Come from?" His arguments are brief but cogent. The overall argument involves a couple of steps:

First, good and evil are objective realities, they're not simply matters of an individual's subjective feelings.

Second, the source of good and evil is either natural or supernatural.

Third, if the source is natural then it's likely to come from either evolution, conscience, human reason, human nature, or a utilitarian ethic.

He argues that none of these can explain moral duties. It therefore follows that moral duties must derive from a non-natural, or supernatural, source, i.e. God. Watch the video to see how Kreeft develops this and see what you think:

I'd add to his argument that if we posit evolution as the source of moral values then we're saying that since we have evolved a sense that kindness is good it therefore is good, and we thus have a duty to be kind. The problem with this is that a sense that selfishness is good, conquest is good, and power is good have also evolved in the human species. Are we therefore to believe that these things are good and that we thus have a moral duty to be selfish, to conquer, and to seek power?

The only way we can deny that these things, being the product of evolution, are good is if we are holding them up to a higher standard of good in comparison with which they're seen to fall short. But on the assumption that our moral duties are solely the product of evolution there is no higher standard.

The claim that a behavior is good because we have evolved a propensity for it commits what's called the naturalistic fallacy. This fallacy occurs when one concludes from the fact that something is a certain way that therefore it ought to be that way, but philosophers ever since David Hume in the 18th century have pointed out that you simply cannot derive an ought from an is.

Children of Light

Australian geneticist Michael Denton is the author of several excellent books, two of which - Firemaker and The Wonder of Water - I discuss here and here.

In these works Denton explores the amazing properties of both fire and water that most of us take for granted or of which we are completely unaware, but which would, were they only a smidgeon different from what they are, make life, or at least advanced life, impossible.

Denton has now come out with another book titled Children of Light in which he applies the same sort of analysis to light, the atmosphere, the leaf and the eye, and the "coincidences" and design he highlights are breathtaking.

For instance, visible light is an electromagnetic radiation the spectrum of which is exceedingly vast. If a stack of playing cards were placed on the earth and extended all the way beyond the milky way to the next nearest galaxy to represent the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiations, the frequencies that are visible to the human eye would be just a couple of playing cards thick.

This extremely thin sliver of frequencies is not only visible to the human eye, but these are the only frequencies that can be used to drive chemical reactions, they're the only frequencies that can be utilized by plants for photosynthesis, they are the only frequencies that can penetrate the atmosphere and water, and they are the bulk of the frequencies produced by the sun.

If the sun didn't produce these frequencies, or if the atmosphere didn't allow them to reach the surface of the earth, or if they couldn't penetrate water to trigger photosynthesis in algae, or if that sliver of energy didn't have the precise physical properties it does, there'd probably be no life on earth except, perhaps, a few bacteria.

There's more. The sun radiates heat (infrared) which warms the earth, but if the dominant gases in the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, absorbed infrared then that heat would be trapped and the earth would be much too hot to sustain life. These gases make up about 95% of the atmosphere and they allow heat to reach the surface and to escape back into space.

On the other hand, carbon dioxide and water vapor both do absorb heat. They provide a blanket that keeps the earth's surface from getting too hot during the day and keep some heat from escaping the earth at night which prevents the temperature from dropping to intolerably cold levels after sundown.

For various reasons, if the amounts of these atmospheric gases were just slightly different, life on earth would be significantly more difficult and higher life would probably be impossible.

It's this array of "just right" physical and chemical factors which have led scientists like Denton, a former agnostic, to the conclusion that light and the atmosphere are the products of intentional design. His discussion of the astonishing structure of the leaf and the human eye leads one to the same conclusion.

Here's a short video in which Denton himself discusses some of this:

Denton has much, much more in Children of Light that will surely amaze you. Taken together his three books, Firemaker, Wonder of Water and Children of Light, offer a powerful, awe-inducing case for the conclusion that the best explanation for the dozens of properties of fire, water, and light being precisely what are needed for the emergence and sustenance of creatures like us is intelligent agency.

What a Naturalist Must Believe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, his belief is an act of blind faith in naturalism.

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

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

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

An Attitude of Gratitude

Thanksgiving is a beautiful celebration because it reinforces gratitude - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a certain sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise ungrateful for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Here are a few quotes for your Thanksgiving week contemplation that reinforce the point:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I wish all our readers (including those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) a Thanksgiving filled with gratitude, love, and joy.

Another Gift Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out three years ago.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Shopping on Black Friday?

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our fourteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. it's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

Where the Hatred Really Lies

In George Orwell's masterful novel 1984 the government enforces a daily session during which the citizens of the country scream and shout their loathing at a video screen on which the image of their alleged enemy is broadcast. The session lasts two minutes and is called the Two Minutes Hate:

The behavior of today's left, is an unwitting replica of Orwell's vision of how a lobotomized people can be conditioned to act. Consider some recent well-publicized examples:

The Brett Kavanaugh hearings were punctuated by disturbed souls screaming their disdain at Kavanaugh for reasons many of them, if asked, could scarcely articulate.

Television host Tucker Carlson's wife, home alone at night, was verbally assaulted by a group of leftists who surrounded the house, shouted threats, spray painted graffiti on the driveway and banged loudly on the door while screaming their standard epithets at whomever was inside. It was understandably frightening for Mrs. Carlson who was thankful her children weren't home.

This same sort of behavior is occurring regularly now on campuses, in restaurants, on the streets, anywhere leftists can find someone affiliated with politics or politicians they despise. People are being beaten for wearing MAGA hats, speakers on university campuses are shouted down, ordinary citizens are being terrified, and that's exactly what the left-wing thugs hope to accomplish.

The irony is that among the mindless accusations that are hurled at the victims of these deplorable encounters is that they're haters and bigots, when in fact all that these virulent, snarling zombies are doing is attempting to camouflage their own bottomless hatreds by directing the accusation at their target.

The tactic is designed to wrap the shouter in the mantle of righteousness while vilifying the victim. There's never any attempt at dialogue because the screamers know that they could never prevail in a calm, rational airing of ideas. Indeed, they have no ideas. None of this is about ideas. It's about exercising power and intimidating and silencing those with more brains than themselves who, because of their superior intelligence and education, are seen as threats.

Anyone who disagrees with the left is labelled an "extremist" or a "fascist," though few of those who invoke the term could explain what a fascist actually is. If they could define it they might recognize that it's they who are employing the methods of classical European fascism. They call themselves "anti-fascist," but the only substantive difference between them and neo-nazis is that the "antifa" don't sport swastikas.

By branding the opposition as extremists the left seeks to marginalize and discredit them, to exclude them from the public square, notwithstanding that their opponents' ideological, political or philosophical positions might be profoundly compelling. Actually, it's because their opponents' ideas would be seen by fair-minded people as rational and persuasive that those opponents must be shut up.

Another tactic the left likes to employ is to accuse those who disagree with them as being "phobes" of one sort or another. This has the effect of making their opponents seem subject to irrational prejudices and hatreds, to be unbalanced and neurotic, in any case not anyone worth listening to and perhaps not even to be permitted shelter under the umbrella of free speech.

These people would only be irritating naifs, immature emotional adolescents to be dismissed with the advice to come back after they've read some history of the horrors of the leftist revolutions of 1789 or 1917, say, or accounts of the hideous cruelties of the left found in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or Valladare's Against All Hope, or novels like Koestler's Darkness at Noon, or Orwell's Animal Farm or 1984, were it not for the fact that historically the left has always opted for violence, repression and tyranny as their power and influence waxed stronger.

Violent, unhinged rhetoric leads ineluctably to violent, unhinged behavior. So far, we've witnessed only isolated cases of extreme, violent derangement, like the shooting of Steve Scalise and others at the GOP baseball practice in June of last year, but as the suppurating infection of left-wing psychosis continues to fester, the violence is likely to become more frequent and more widespread.

We can expect recurrent assaults, insults and attempts at intimidation by the left in the months and years ahead, but hopefully the thugs won't be successful at cowing the rest of society into submission or bending our institutions to their will. If they are successful, though, well, go back and watch that video again.

The Moral Crisis of Our Time

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?” The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here.

Toner writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.”

The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution. We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

People have always flouted moral standards, but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, yet that's where large segments of our culture seem headed in these postmodern times.

Toner continues:

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime. The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter.

The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.”

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.” The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.

If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.

A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.

Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever it suits us. In other words, unless there's a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there's no such thing as a moral obligation.

As Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

Part of the price of living in the present secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas meant when he wrote the following:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner concludes with this:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power."

You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality of the PDF isn't good.

Are We All Egoists?

Here's a question for your Thursday rumination: Does genuine altruism exist in human beings? By this I mean, do human beings, or better, can human beings, act for the benefit of others if there's no benefit in the act for the doer? Do we do what we do for others only because we believe, if even subconsciously, that there's some benefit in the act for us?

Before you answer you should read a brief essay written some years ago by Georgetown philosophy professor Judith Lichtenberg on just this question.

Lichtenberg notes that psychological egoism (PE), the view that all our actions - including those ostensibly done for others - are really done for self-benefit, is impossible to falsify. This means that one cannot imagine a circumstance which, if it obtained, would show PE to be wrong. The inability to think of such a circumstance means that the theory can't be tested, and this is, in fact, a detriment. Immunity to testing is a weakness in a theory, not a strength.

Lichtenberg might have also mentioned that PE is ultimately based upon circular reasoning. To see this consider the case of Wesley Autrey which she discusses in the beginning of her piece. Autrey risked his life in 2007 to rescue a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks in New York City as a train bore down upon him.

To the question, what was in it for Autrey? the PE might reply that Autrey hoped for a reward, either monetary, psychological or perhaps even eternal, for his act of heroism. Suppose, though, that upon being interviewed Autrey denied that any of those considerations ever entered his mind. He didn't have time to think, he attests. He saw the man fall, he saw the train approach, and he reacted.

The PE might then resort to this fallback position: "There must have been some self-benefit in saving the man that Autrey felt, if only subliminally." If asked why there must be such a motive, the PE can only answer, "because saving the man is what he did, and everything people do they do in their own self-interest."

In other words,

1. We always act for our own benefit
2. Cases where people seem to act genuinely for others only seem to be altruistic. There's always a self-beneficial purpose buried somewhere in the person's motivations.
3. We know there must be a self-beneficial motive driving the person's act because we always act for our own self-benefit.

This is a circular argument and circular arguments are logically invalid. Thus, although PE may seem formidable, it's ultimately based on fallacious reasoning, and if PE is fallacious then perhaps altruism is not the illusion that some philosophers have claimed it is.

Anyway, read Lichtenberg's column and see what you think.

Recognizing Incoherence

Consider this sentence: Zebras are heavier spellers than giraffes.

The sentence is easily seen to be incoherent. Even though the words all have meaning, and the structure or syntax of the sentence is correct, the words don't fit together in a meaningful way. The proposition is literally nonsense.

Now consider this state of affairs: a colleague walks into the office and reports that it has begun to snow. You look out the window and confirm that it is indeed snowing. Your observation corresponds to your colleague's report.

In both cases something very interesting is going on, usually without us being aware of it. Somehow, we're able to recognize phenomena like incoherence and correspondence, but how? What is actually occurring in our cognitive apparatus when we recognize that words don't cohere or that other words accurately describe what's happening outside?

On the materialist view all that's involved here are electrochemical processes occuring in a lump of living matter in our heads, but how do events like electrons whizzing along neurons and molecules jumping across synapses cause us to recognize incoherence and correspondence?

What's the connection between the physical processes taking place in the brain when we read the sentence or look out the window and the conscious awareness that a particular pattern of words is either absurd or does in fact correspond to an actual state of affairs? Where in the brain does the awareness of incoherence and correspondence reside and what does this awareness "look" like?

Moreover, what would a tiny, miniaturized scientist, navigating her way through a brain which at that moment is recognizing incoherence, observe? She might witness a great deal of electrical activity and notice a lot of atoms jostling about, but how do these physical phenomena translate into an immaterial awareness that a combination of words is nonsensical?

Materialists will often reply that it's true that at this point we have no idea, but that we know too little at present about how the brain works to say how it does what it does. Someday, though, we'll able to explain it, and when we do the explanation will be in completely material terms.

Well, maybe, but there's a pretty serious problem here.

Physical things have weight, occupy space, and are made of atomic particles that possess electric charges. Mental events, on the other hand, share none of these properties. They have no weight or mass, they're non-spatial, they're made of no substance recognizable to science and they don't possess electric charge.

All that being so, it's clear that mental events such as recognizing incoherence and correspondence are not themselves material or physical. They're qualitatively different, so, in the absence of any plausible materialistic explanation, it makes sense to suspect that perhaps these mental events are somehow the product of an immaterial, non-physical element in our cognitive apparatus.

In other words, perhaps the physical brain is not the sole agent in our cognitive life. Perhaps the conscious experience of human beings, and maybe even other animals as well, is also the product of a spaceless, massless, immaterial mind.

Utilitarianism and Egoism

Peter Singer is a philosopher at Princeton who has gained substantial notoriety for invoking his utilitarian ethical principles to justify infanticide and animal rights. In a piece at The Journal of Practical Ethics the editors interview Singer and question whether utilitarians can, or do, live consistently with their own ethical philosophy.

Here's part of the interview:

Editors: Frances Kamm once said...that utilitarians believe in very demanding duties to aid and that not aiding is the same as harming, but they nevertheless don’t live up to these demands, don’t really believe their own arguments....She concludes that ‘either something is wrong with that theory, or there is something wrong with its proponents’.

What do you think about this argument? Why haven’t you given a kidney to someone who needs it now? You have two and you only need one. They have none that are working – it would make a huge difference to their life at very little cost to you.

Singer is a utilitarian. He believes that he has a moral obligation to do the act that would produce the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people. Yet Singer also is a metaphysical naturalist who believes there are no transcendent moral authorities to impose moral duties upon us.

These two beliefs are in tension with each other. To understand why, let's first see how he answers the interviewer's question about donating a kidney:

Peter Singer: I’m not sure that the cost to me of donating a kidney would be “very little” but I agree that it would harm me much less than it would benefit someone who is on dialysis. I also agree that for that reason my failure to donate a kidney is not ethically defensible.... Donating a kidney does involve a small risk of serious complications. Zell Kravinsky suggests that the risk is 1 in 4000.

I don’t think I’m weak-willed, but I do give greater weight to my own interests, and to those of my family and others close to me, than I should. Most people do that, in fact they do it to a greater extent than I do (because they do not give as much money to good causes as I do). That fact makes me feel less bad about my failure to give a kidney than I otherwise would. But I know that I am not doing what I ought to do.

This response raises several questions, but I'll focus on just one. Singer believes it's wrong not to give the kidney, and he feels bad, he feels guilty, about not doing so, yet why should he? In what sense is his violation of utilitarian principles morally wrong? Indeed, why is utilitarianism morally superior to the egoism to which he admits to succumbing?

To put it differently, if Singer chooses to be a utilitarian and donate the kidney while someone else chooses to be an egoist and keep his kidneys, why is either one right or wrong? Given Singer's naturalism, what does it even mean to say that someone is morally wrong anyway? Who or what is to hold him or us accountable for not giving the kidney? On naturalism there's no moral authority except one's own convictions and neither is there any ultimate accountability, so in what way is keeping one's kidneys an offense to morality?

Elsewhere in the interview, Singer notes that his ethical thinking is based on the work of the great 19th century ethicist and utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and mentions that,

Sidgwick himself remained deeply troubled by his inability to demonstrate that egoism is irrational. That led him to speak of a “dualism of practical reason” — two opposing viewpoints, utilitarianism and egoism, seemed both to be rational.

In other words, the choice between utilitarianism and egoism is an arbitrary exercise of personal preference, although Singer doesn't agree with this because he believes evolution affords grounds for rejecting egoism. It's hard to see how this could be the case, however, since blind impersonal processes cannot impose moral duties. Nor is it easy to see how acting against the trajectory of those processes can be morally wrong.

How is one doing anything wrong if he chooses to act contrary to the way mutation and natural selection have shaped the human species? Why should he accept the ethical results of evolutionary history any more than we accept the physical limitations imposed on us by gravity when we go aloft in an airplane or hot air balloon?

The only reason we have for not putting our own interests ahead of the interests of others - as in the example of the kidney - and the only rational reason we would have for feeling guilt over our failure to consider the needs of others is if we believe that such failures are a transgression of an obligation imposed upon us by a transcendent, personal, moral authority.

Singer lacks such a belief and can thus give no compelling explanation for his feelings of guilt nor any compelling reason why one should be a utilitarian rather than an egoist.

One (Partial) Explanation for Why Trump Won

In his recently released book titled Last Call for Liberty, cultural critic and public intellectual Os Guinness observes that the times in which we're living call for statesmen to emerge at the highest levels of government, but that no equivalent of Abraham Lincoln has stepped forward to speak on behalf of the better angels of the American republic. He writes:

If anyone did, their task would be gargantuan, for the present generation has rejected both the vision and the manner of the sixteenth president as decisively as many have rejected that of the founders.There is too little statesmanship to match the gravity of the hour, and too little analysis that goes beyond supporting one side of the other....

Guinness does not explicitly talk about our current leaders by name nor does he engage in political partisanship, but his words about the lack of statesmen aroused in me the thought that, in fact, the American people really don't want to be led by statesmen, and our politics of the last three decades are pretty good evidence of that.

For example, in the 1990s the Republicans nominated George H.W. Bush (1992) and Bob Dole (1996), two fine political eminences, to run for the office of the presidency. The Democrats nominated a scandal-plagued philanderer named Bill Clinton. The American people voted for Mr. Clinton - twice.

In the 2000s, the Republicans nominated John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012), two very experienced and ideologically moderate political leaders very much in the mold of Bush and Dole. The Democrats nominated Barack Obama, a far-left Alinskyite community organizer with almost no political experience to speak of. The American people elected Mr. Obama - twice.

Finally, in frustration, rank and file Republicans decided that they'd had enough with nominating moderate statesmen. They concluded that the American electorate doesn't want statesmen, rather they desire in their leaders the same thing they demand in their entertainment: conflict, charisma, afflatus, glamour, scandal, drama, celebrity. The GOP rank and file realized that their party would never win another presidential election if they kept running responsible, straight-arrow grown-ups who didn't embody at least most of the traits of a rock or movie star.

After twenty years of losing (George W. Bush was an anomaly whose elections were abetted by the Democrats, who, forgetting what the Republicans hadn't yet learned, nominated two vanilla politicos, Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004) who, in terms of personality, if not political temperament, could've been Republicans) the GOP base decided that they'd had enough.

They acknowledged that the people who'll get elected to top positions of leadership in twenty-first century United States are people who could have either stepped off the front page of a tabloid or who promise to hand out goodies like Santa Claus.

They recognized that neither experience, statesmanship nor character is important to the majority of American voters, certainly not those who vote Democratic. This sad conclusion was confirmed in the minds of many conservatives when the Democrats proceeded in 2016 to nominate for the presidency a thoroughly corrupt Hillary Clinton, of all people.

Having given up trying to get the voters' attention with fine men like the elder Bush, Dole, McCain and Romney, they finally said "Enough. Let's nominate the sort of man the American people apparently want."

So they nominated Donald Trump, and it proved to be an inspired choice. The Democrats hate him, of course, but only because he's a winner who's reversing the long march toward big brother socialism begun under Franklin Roosevelt and continued under presidents of both parties, but especially under President Obama.

If Trump were still the Democrat he once was, advancing the same policies that Mrs. Clinton would have advanced, the media would be slobbering with adoration and stumbling all over themselves to find excuses for his abrasive, combative style. He'd be the perfect Democrat candidate. They'd love his demeanor were he one of them, and no one would ever hear a peep about his sexual coarseness and legal indiscretions on the evening news.

I have a friend who laments that millions of women are "aching" that we've elected such a boorish individual to be our president, but I wonder whether they ache because of his vulgar talk or because he's a Republican rather than a Democrat. After all, millions of women just like the ones who ostensibly lament Mr. Trump's ascendency, voted for John Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and now Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey who has been credibly accused of sexual congress with underage girls in the Dominican Republic.

So why would women vote for these men but express revulsion and loathing for Donald Trump? Perhaps it's because they all had D's after their names, a circumstance which often wins absolution from female admirers for behavior that'd earn a Republican a trip to the political guillotine.

The point is that the majority of the American electorate really doesn't want moderate statesmen. They want bread and circuses, signs and wonders. If they wanted statesmen some of those four Republican candidates mentioned above would've been elected president.

But, because those men all pretty much got trounced, the frustrated Republican base threw up its collective hands and gave us Donald Trump, and many of the people who excused the behavior of the philanderer ("character doesn't matter" we were told) and swooned at the speeches and the crease in the pants of the community organizer, now profess to be outraged that the American people have ensconced Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.

They have no one to blame but themselves.

Seeing Racists Behind Every Tuba

So, it's happened again.

This time it was four members of a Georgia high school marching band during their halftime show spelling out a racially insulting bit of slang which provoked instant outrage among the unthinking and uncritical. They blamed racism. They blamed Trump. They blamed white people in general.

Here's a sample of the Twitter comments:

• “If I ever seen one of those white band mates at Brookwood in Gwinnett County just know I’ll be [sic] the s**t out of them,” one user wrote. “Those kids need a** whoopings. I have that.”
• “At times I attempt to convince myself that racism isn’t A BIG THING … in youth/HS sports,” another user said. “But then things like THIS happen. Thank you Brookwood HS for showing your True School Spirit!”
• “Brookwood has been a racist ass school forever why is anyone shocked,” another remarked.
• “The hate is real,” one user commented.
• “Inspired no doubt by the words & vitriol spouted by the Great Leader in the WH — what an embarrassment 4 all the good people of Georgia, of Gwinnet [sic] County & of Brookwood High School,” another user said.
• “There should not remain one black student in the band, in the football team, or at Brookwood High School,” another user offered.

As many times as this sort of thing has happened (See here, here and here for other examples), you'd think people would learn to hold their righteous indignation in check until the facts come out, but some people just can't wait to display their virtue to the world by condemning the parties responsible for such unconscionable acts of racial bigotry.

Except, the band members who performed this "prank," it turns out, were two African-Americans, one Asian and one Hispanic, all of whom thought it would be "funny". In a way it was. It was funny to see the knee-jerk reaction of the folks quoted above who literally didn't know what they were talking about.

Perhaps the lesson here is that when political and/or social decorum appears to have been transgressed, and before we begin willy-nilly calling down fire and brimstone upon the offenders, we should at least wait until we know the facts. It would keep us from looking foolish and spare us a lot of embarrassment.

Minds, Computers and Chinese Rooms

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.

Nor do computers understand. In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to a human being's cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and goes like this:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You're living in China, however, and have a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth there's a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book, and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to an algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing.

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and we do understand, either our brains are not just computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

Postmodern Assumptions

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites. Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes, but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.

CIA Catastrophe

Michael Walsh has a piece at PJ Media that reveals the worst intelligence catastrophe to hit the U.S. (excluding the failure to detect the 9/11 plot) in decades.

According to Walsh the following story broke on November 2nd. The media, evidently fixated on the pending "Blue Wave" and loath to publicize anything that might tarnish the image of the Obama presidency, has paid it little heed, but if it's true it is a huge bombshell of a story:

In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage.

“When this was going on, it was all that mattered,” said one former intelligence community official. The situation was “catastrophic,” said another former senior intelligence official.

From around 2009 to 2013, the U.S. intelligence community experienced crippling intelligence failures related to the secret internet-based communications system, a key means for remote messaging between CIA officers and their sources on the ground worldwide.

The previously unreported global problem originated in Iran and spiderwebbed to other countries, and was left unrepaired — despite warnings about what was happening — until more than two dozen sources died in China in 2011 and 2012 as a result, according to 11 former intelligence and national security officials.

The disaster ensnared every corner of the national security bureaucracy — from multiple intelligence agencies, congressional intelligence committees and independent contractors to internal government watchdogs — forcing a slow-moving, complex government machine to grapple with the deadly dangers of emerging technologies.

During a two year period starting in 2010 the Chinese and the Iranians, were able to systematically roll up our intelligence assets in these countries and eventually execute more than 30 agents working for the CIA. They were able to do this because the CIA had been using lax, outdated internet communications security.

Much more detail on this fiasco is provided by Walsh at the link.

If the media wants a scandal, and, of course, they always do, they might try forgetting about "Russian collusion" and look more deeply into this failure. It might be helpful if they'd call for congressional investigations into how and why this happened, who was primarily responsible, what the extent of the damage has been and what role, if any, this played in the Obama administration's obsession with closing the Iranian nuclear deal.

What Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain.

But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face."

But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face? Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us. Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of consciousness. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Just Made it All Up

After all the media did to destroy Justice Kavanaugh you'd think they could find a few minutes to devote to this revelation, but, alas, evidently they're too preoccupied chasing down the next shiny object in their hyper-attenuated field of vision.

It turns out that one of the women who accused Judge Kavanaugh of having raped her is now admitting to having made the whole thing up. The following is from the link:

Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has referred another one of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers to the FBI for possible criminal prosecution after she admitted to Committee investigators that she made up allegations that Kavanaugh had raped her in a car.

This referral stems from an anonymous “Jane Doe” letter that the committee received in September that, in graphic detail, claimed that Justice Kavanaugh had raped the letter writer ...“several times...” in the back of a car.

The accuser, a woman whose name, it later turned out, is Judy Munro-Leighton, sent an anonymous letter detailing the accusation to Senator Kamala Harris, who forwarded it to Senate Judiciary Committee investigators.

The letter was signed "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, CA and contained highly graphic sexual-assault accusations against Judge Kavanaugh. Here's more from the link:

The anonymous accuser alleged that Justice Kavanaugh and a friend had raped her “several times each” in the backseat of a car. In addition to being from an anonymous accuser, the letter listed no return address, failed to provide any timeframe, and failed to provide any location — beyond an automobile — in which these alleged incidents took place.

But the Committee took the letter seriously and even questioned Justice Kavanaugh under oath about the allegation.

They read him the letter in full as part of the questioning. In response to the anonymous allegations, Judge Kavanaugh unequivocally stated: “[T]he whole thing is ridiculous. Nothing ever — anything like that, nothing . . . . [T]he whole thing is just a crock, farce, wrong, didn’t happen, not anything close.”

Later that day, September 26th, the Committee publicly released the transcript of that interview with Judge Kavanaugh, which included the full text of the Jane Doe letter.

Then, on October 3, 2018, Committee staff received an email from a Ms. Judy Munro-Leighton with a subject line claiming: “I am Jane Doe from Oceanside CA — Kavanaugh raped me.” Ms. Munro-Leighton wrote that she was “sharing with you the story of the night that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend sexually assaulted and raped me in his car” and referred to “the letter that I sent to Sen. Kamala Harris on Sept. 19 with details of this vicious assault.”

She continued: “I know that Jane Doe will get no media attention, but I am deathly afraid of revealing any information about myself or my family.” She then included a typed version of the Jane Doe letter.

But, as it turns out, the woman who claimed she underwent such a horrific sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh never experienced any such thing. She simply made the whole thing up in order to try to destroy Kavanaugh. Committee investigators were able to track her down and discovered that she was a left-wing activist who is decades older than Judge Kavanaugh and lives neither in Washington, D.C. nor in California, but in Kentucky:

She further confessed to Committee investigators that (1) she “just wanted to get attention”; (2) “it was a tactic”; and (3) “that was just a ploy.” She told Committee investigators that she had called Congress multiple times during the Kavanaugh hearing process – including prior to the time Dr. Ford’s allegations surfaced – to oppose his nomination.

Regarding the false sexual-assault allegation she made via her email to the Committee, she said: “I was angry, and I sent it out.”

When asked by Committee investigators whether she had ever met Judge Kavanaugh, she said: “Oh Lord, no.”

So, where does Justice Kavanaugh go to get his reputation back? How do those who went along with the disgraceful charade at the confirmation hearings, who screamed like lunatics from the gallery, who gleefully dissected every salacious accusation on the media talk shows, who delighted in destroying this man's reputation and devastating his family - how do they look at themselves in the mirror without being overcome with nausea and self-loathing?

Maybe their consciences are so numbed by an "ends justifies the means" ethic that they simply shrug, laugh and blithely move on, indifferent to the wrecked lives they've left in their wake.

Fine people, these are.

The Metastasizing Cancer of Anti-Semitism

In the wake of the horrible slaughter of Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue last week in Pittsburgh there has been no shortage of condemnations of neo-nazi anti-semitism - which condemnations all decent people will endorse - but there has been almost total silence about the hateful rhetoric emanating from two of the most toxic sectors of anti-semitism in our country today: Muslim clerics and university leftists.

Why does our media only see hate on the far right? Why are they blind to the even more vicious and depraved rhetoric coming from other quarters? Perhaps one explanation is that progressives in the media see the far-right as the political enemy and see campus leftists and Muslim imams as political allies.

Like a cancer, anti-semitic hatred has metastasized to sectors of our culture far beyond its traditional locus in the far-right.

In July 26th of 2017 I ran a post on VP titled Hate Speech in which I wrote this:

Imagine that a prominent Christian pastor, speaking from the pulpit, called for the annihilation of gays. Imagine, too, that he referred to them as filth, and that his sermon was put up on YouTube for all the world to see. What do you suppose would be the reaction? Is it unreasonable to think there'd be nationwide 24/7 condemnation of that pastor's bigotry and his hateful speech?

The pastor would become a pariah, and Christianity would be discredited, don't you think? The left, especially, would be marching outside that pastor's church, demanding that he be removed from the pulpit.

Well, recently that very thing happened, sort of, and there's been almost no reaction to the preacher's hatred and bigotry whatsoever. Perhaps, you'll understand why when you read the details. You see, it wasn't a Christian pastor calling for the annihilation of gays in a sermon, it was a Muslim imam calling for the annihilation of Jews in a lecture:

In a July 21 lecture ... Muslim preacher Ammar Shahin spoke in English and Arabic about how all Muslims, not only Palestinians or Syrians, will be called upon to kill all the Jews on "the last day."

Shahin is an Egyptian who has been in the U.S. since 1999. His mosque isn't in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, it's in Davis, California.

In a video translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Shahin also stressed that the Hadith (oral tradition of sayings attributed to the prophet of Islam) does not say where the final battle will take place. "If it is in Palestine," for example, "or another place," hinting at the possibility that such a battle could happen in the United States or Europe as well.

He also prayed that the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem be liberated from "the filth of the Jews."

Here's the relevant clip:

This sort of rhetoric would not be tolerated were it to be delivered by a representative of any other religion or political party. Why is it tolerated when it's delivered by Muslims? Why are Muslims excused from standards of behavior we expect of everyone else in a tolerant, civilized society?

Shahin should be free to cite his beliefs, as repugnant as they are, but that doesn't mean that everyone else should just shrug and say, "Well, that's just what Islam teaches". Hatred of this sort, taking delight in the prospect of mass slaughter, should be exposed and roundly condemned, as it would be were it to come from any other source.

To the extent that Shahin accurately represents mainstream Islamic belief, and according to the article at the link he teaches Sunni Islam to Westerners, it sure makes it difficult to accept the notion that Islam is a religion of peace.

The situation among leftists on university campuses is in some ways worse because the virus of hate is reaching a much broader audience. The anti-semitism of students and faculty masquerades as a political critique of the state of Israel (anti-Zionism), but in fact, it results in a virulent hatred of Jews (anti-semitism) and anyone who supports them.

The following video explains what's going on. It's roughly 30 minutes long, but it offers a valuable perspective on how some university campuses in the New York area are cultivating the same sorts of poisonous hatreds that led a depraved individual to murder and maim last week in Pittsburgh.

Given what you'll see in this video you can be sure that similar crimes will happen again until we stop turning a blind eye to the cesspools of hate not only among neo-nazis but in our mosques and on our university campuses.