What ARE We?

A BBC article from a year ago raises the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix and in the course of discussing the pros and cons of the hypothesis gives an interesting insight into why philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals, like Elon Musk, are entertaining this speculation:

The idea that we live in a simulation has some high-profile advocates.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

However, there is a second, more popular, scenario that seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely so how can the existence of such a finely-tuned universe as ours be explained? There are two (naturalistic) options. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago. I'm reminded of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

The Born Alive Act

Whatever one's views on a right to abortion may be, surely the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to killing babies after they're born. Yet, a bill voted on by the Senate Monday night which would've made it illegal to allow newborns to die despite having survived attempts to abort them could only garner three Democrat votes and fell short of the 60 votes needed to pass.

It's stunning that in the entire Democratic Senate caucus of 47 members only three were willing to say that it should be illegal to allow children born alive, wanted or unwanted, to die from inanition.

The argument used to be that as long as the child was inside the mother's body she should have the right to determine whether it lives or dies, but that once the child is outside the body, its right to live supersedes her wishes.

Evidently, we have passed that point on the slippery slope, we've passed the point where the New York state delegation lights the city in pink and stands and cheers when a bill passes that allows the mother to decide to kill the baby as it's being born. We're now at the point where Democrat politicians cannot even say they oppose killing the baby even after it has left the mother's womb.

The Washington Free Beacon gives us the discouraging details:

Democrats blocked the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act in a Monday roll call vote, which would have made it mandatory for doctors to provide medical care to babies who are born alive during an abortion. The bill needed 60 votes to pass, but fell on a 53-44 vote.

The legislation sponsored by Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) had nothing to do with Roe v. Wade and the ability to obtain an abortion, but only babies outside of the womb....

The bill is overwhelmingly popular with voters, including a vast majority of those who identify as pro-choice; 70 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and 86 percent of Republicans support providing care to abortion survivors, according to the McLaughlin & Associates poll commissioned by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List.

Sasse took to the Senate floor emphasizing that the bill would not apply to Roe v. Wade just prior to the vote. He said Democratic rhetoric about the Born-Alive act had "nothing to do what's in this bill."

"As you get ready to cast this vote, picture a baby that's already been born, that is outside the womb, gasping for air. That's the only thing that today's vote is actually about," he said. "We're talking about babies who've already been born, nothing in this bill touches abortion access."

Nevertheless, some senators actually tried to argue that a mother should have the right to decide whether her child, though outside of her body, lives or dies:

Democrat Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) called the bill a "solution in search of a problem" and a "threat to women's reproductive health." She said physicians and mothers should be left to decide whether a live infant should receive care or be allowed to die on the table, rather than the law.

"Conservative politicians should not be telling doctors how they should care for their patients. Instead women, in consultation with their families and doctors, are in the best position to determine their best course of care," she said.

Senator Hirono's assertions are extraordinary. It's regrettable that no one asked her to declare what age a child must attain before its mother no longer has the right to decide whether it lives or dies.

If a newborn child hasn't the right to life, at what age does it acquire it? What are the criteria Senator Hirono believes we should base the child's right to life upon? Being successfully potty trained? Demonstrating rudimentary language skills? Graduating from high school?

Other questions arise:

If an unwanted child can be left to die should an abortion fail to kill it, what logical grounds remain for not removing protections from any baby that the mother decides she doesn't want, even if she never attempted to abort it?

How many of the senators who voted against protecting baby human beings would vigorously support a law preventing the harvesting of baby seals or whales? How many of them would support conferring rights on animals and rivers, even as they deny the most basic right to the most vulnerable human beings?

The Trump administration endorsed the bill ahead of the vote, saying that it was necessary to "prevent infanticide" and "ensure that the life of one baby is not treated as being more or less valuable than another."

"The bill draws a sorely needed bright line of protection around abortion survivors by requiring that they be given the same level of care as any other premature infant," the administration said. "A baby that survives an abortion, and is born alive into this world should be treated just like any other baby."

It should be, certainly. A society that has nevertheless lost the ability to value a child's life, which regards a baby's life as expendable, is a society in the process of moral disintegration and slow-motion collapse.

Every Republican in the chamber voted to approve the act, along with Democrats Bob Casey (PA), Doug Jones (AL), and Joe Manchin (WV).

The rest of them - following in the footsteps of their political ancestors who from the inception of the Democratic party in 1792 until the 1970s refused to consider blacks to be deserving of basic rights - refused Monday to consider human babies to be deserving of human rights.

What a sad indictment of their moral impoverishment.

Pro-Life Nation?

An article at Axios discusses the findings of a new Marist poll which reveal a profound shift in Americans' attitudes toward abortion, especially among young Democrats.

The poll found that for the first time in ten years as many Americans identified as pro-life as identified as pro-choice.

In the recent poll 47% of Americans identified as pro-life with an equal number identifying as pro-choice. In a similar poll last month pro-choicers enjoyed a 17 point edge.

Nevertheless, two things about this poll should temper the excitement of pro-lifers:

1. If the numbers can swing that much in one month they can certainly swing back again in an equally brief period of time.

2. The increased popularity of the pro-life position is alleged to be a consequence of the recent controversy over legalizing infanticide, which is, in the minds of many pro-choice advocates, a logical extension of pro-choice thinking. If, though, this controversy manages to get swept under the rug, by a complicit media the revulsion that fed it may also subside and the numbers fall back to earlier levels.

On the other hand, pro-choicers should be deeply concerned that:

1. Overall 80% of Americans want abortion limited to the first trimester. This is not the pro-choice position which is that abortion should be available to a woman who chooses it at any time in her pregnancy, and, among many Democrats in New York, Virginia and Vermont, even after the baby has been born.

2. The shift is largely due to a change in attitudes among Democrats: Democrats, specifically those under the the age of 45, seem to be leading the shift: This month's poll found 34% of Democrats identify as pro-life vs. 61% pro-choice. Last month, those numbers were 20% and 75%, respectively.

3. Younger Americans overall are moving toward the pro-life view. Among Americans under 45, 47% identify as pro-life vs. 48% pro-choice. In January, those numbers were 28% and 65%, respectively.

More details can be found at the link. I wonder whether the infanticide controversy is the only factor at play in the remarkable turnabout in the polls' findings. Perhaps there's also been a slow, cumulative germination of pro-life sympathies sown by the several undercover exposés of Planned Parenthood's grisly practices that have swept across YouTube and social media in the last few years.

In any case, if 80% of Americans want abortion restricted to the first trimester, then I think it fair to say that the United States, apart from the coastal elites and despite the laws as they currently stand, is largely a pro-life nation.

Basic Epistemology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problems with Determinism

It's a common assumption among naturalistic materialists that, despite the inescapable sense that we're often able to make genuine choices, this sense is an illusion. In a completely material world governed by physical laws, there's no room for the sort of freedom we normally, and naively, think we have.

Given this view, our every choice is the product of all of the influences that have acted upon us from the time of our conception and at any given moment there's really only one possible future. Let's call this view volitional determinism. According to volitional determinism free will is an illusion, as is your conviction that you freely chose to read this post.

Volitional determinism is a derivative of what might be called broad or universal determinism. This is the idea that everything that happens in nature, in the physical universe, is the inevitable consequence of prior causes such that, given the cause, or series of causes, the consequence must necessarily obtain.

Since our choices are events that occur in the universe our choices are necessarily determined.

The argument can be summarized like this:

1. Every event in the physical universe is determined by antecedent physical causes.
2. Our choices are events in the physical universe.
3. Therefore, our choices are determined by antecedent causes.

The argument is valid, to be sure, but both of its premises are open to challenge. In fact, the first premise is almost certainly false, and the second one might well be false. But, if either premise is false then the argument falls apart.

As neuroscientist Michael Egnor explains in a brief article at Mind Matters the first premise is indeed false since physicists have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that the universe is not entirely deterministic.

Egnor writes:

In a previous post, I argued that if determinism is true, we cannot have free will. That is, if everything we do is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, there is no room for genuine freedom. In that respect, I am an “incompatibilist”—I don’t believe that free will is compatible with determinism.

What do I mean by determinism? Determinism, in the scientific sense intended here, is the view that for every moment in time, the state of the universe is completely determined by the state that immediately precedes it. If you knew all of the details of the universe — the location and state of every particle — at any given moment, you could know with certainty what comes next.

Determinism is more or less the view that nature is a machine. If we know the position of the gears, we can know the future with certainty.

The question that naturally follows is this: Is determinism true? If so, free will is impossible in principle. If not, free will is possible.

In 1964, Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990) published a paper titled “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox”. In it, he observed that there is a way to test determinism at the quantum level by measuring the ratio of quantum states of particles emitted by radioactive decay.

Bell’s experiment has now been done many times, and the answer is unequivocal: determinism at the quantum level is not true. Nature is not deterministic.

The experiments showed that every quantum process entails some degree of “indeterminism”; that is, there are predictable probabilities but there is never certainty. If we knew the exact state of the universe at any given moment, we could still never know with certainty what would happen next.

Determinism in nature has been shown, scientifically, to be false. There is no real debate about this among physicists.

The second premise is also questionable because unless one has ruled out apriori the possibility that human beings possess an immaterial mind there's no reason to think that our choices must be physical events occurring in the physical universe.

If immaterial minds do exist then it's quite possible that our choices occur in that faculty, at least in part, and are therefore not subject to the physical laws and forces that govern the material world.

If naturalistic materialism is true then determinism is probably true, but if naturalism is false determinism could well be false.

What one thinks about determinism and free will all depends upon whether one has embraced a naturalistic worldview or not.

The President's Legal Authority

Sean Davis has an excellent essay on the subject of President Trump's legal authority to declare the border situation a national emergency and use funds originally allocated by congress for other purposes to construct a wall along our southern border.

Davis breaks the issue into several questions which I list below with a summary of Davis' response to them:

Does President Trump have the legal authority to declare a national emergency along the border?
National Emergencies Act of 1976, explicitly authorizes the president to declare a national emergency. Congress put no constraints on whether a president may declare an emergency, or what conditions must be met in order for a particular event or crisis to be considered an “emergency.” Instead, the law leaves that decision solely up to the president.

Does the president have the legal authority to use funds allocated for other purposes for wall construction under the national emergency?
Within the context of the emergency border wall debate, that law is 10 U.S.C. 2808, which delegates to the president, in the event of a national emergency that requires the U.S. military, the authority to reprogram existing appropriations for military construction projects in order to address the ongoing emergency.

Who determines whether the use of the armed forces is required during a particular national emergency? The simple answer is that such discretion belongs to the president of the United States in the discharge of his duties as commander-in-chief.

Is a border wall a military construction project?
Some legal commentators assert that the answer is “no,” since immigration enforcement and border security generally fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.

As a broad matter, that seems to be a difficult position to hold, given that it requires one to argue that the military has no role in protecting the United States. If border security is solely the matter of non-military agencies, then it must follow that the U.S. military would have no role, authority, or jurisdiction in repelling an invasion of the United States, a position that is clearly nonsensical.

Similarly, it makes little sense to argue that two presidents were justified in using emergency authority to reprogram funds to build and maintain U.S. facilities in foreign nations in order to protect their security, as they did 18 separate times between 2001 and 2014, but that the current president has no authority to use the same funds to secure actual American soil from foreign invasion.

But should he do it?
As a legal matter, Trump’s authority to declare a national emergency on the border then reprogram a limited amount of existing military construction or civil defense project appropriations to address the emergency is well-established. Whether it is wise to do so as a political matter is an entirely different question. The question of “should” is entirely different than the question of “can.” And there many valid political arguments on both sides of the debate.

Davis presents much more detail in his column, and it's worth reading regardless of whether one is in favor of or opposed to a border barrier.

Unfortunately, proper legal authority is not likely to be a primary consideration for activist judges who've demonstrated a willingness in the past to ignore the law in order to impose their own personal will on the elected president of the United States.

That's why most observers, including Mr. Trump, believe this controversy will only be resolved when it reaches the Supreme Court.

Voter Suppression

Here's some interesting news.

Whenever attempts have been made to ensure the integrity of our electoral process by making it harder for those not eligible to vote to cast a ballot at the polls cries of racism and voter suppression have erupted across the social landscape.

This always perplexed a lot of ordinary citizens who wondered, perhaps naively, why anyone would object to making it more difficult for non-citizens to vote in our elections.

One such attempt to tighten up election security is legislation to require voters to produce an identification at the polls to show that they are in fact citizens. This seemed to many to be a common sense measure since ID is required at so many other venues in our everyday life. Indeed, it's hard to imagine getting through a week without having to produce an ID somewhere for something.

The ostensible objection to requiring ID to vote, however, is that it would place an undue burden on the poor who could not be expected to do whatever was necessary to procure an ID card. This objection seems insulting to the poor, assuming as it does that being poor makes one a helpless invalid, and it struck many Americans as such a feeble rationale for opposing voter ID that suspicions were raised that it was disingenuous.

Nevertheless, that argument has largely prevailed in many precincts despite its lack of cogency.

Now, however, comes word that a recent study has shown that, to the extent that these concerns are sincere, they're misplaced. The study concludes that voter ID laws are not unfairly onerous for any segment of our population.

Here's Angela Morabito at The Federalist:

Voter ID requirements do not affect voter turnout, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers looked at 1.3 billion data points on U.S. voters from 2008 to 2013, and they found that “the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”

For years, opponents of voter ID laws have equated them with disenfranchisement. The American Civil Liberties Union says “voter ID laws deprive many voters of their right to vote” and that they “reduce participation.” Writing for CNN Politics, reporter Eric Bradner addressed voter ID requirements as “discriminatory voting laws.” The Democratic Party’s official website addresses voter ID laws as if they are anathema to democracy.

As it turns out, none of their fears about voter ID were backed up by this large study. This is great news: The country can now take obvious steps to protect the integrity of our elections, knowing that enacting voter ID laws will not disenfranchise anyone.

There's much more on this in Morabito's article and those interested in this issue are encouraged to read it. She goes on to point out, for example, that:

Of the eight states that require photo identification at the polls, all of them issue voter ID cards to their citizens free of charge. Of the 10 states that request photo identification, four issue ID cards at no cost. The other six allow voters without photo ID to cast their ballots so long as they verify their identity another way, like with a signature that matches the one on their registration.

One would think that with these examples in view, and the results of this study in hand, a lot of other states would be eager to pass their own voter ID laws, but, since this would depend upon the common sense and honesty of those who populate our political establishments, we probably shouldn't be optimistic.

Coherence and the Rush to Judgment

There is among some philosophers who work in the field of epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge, belief and truth) a theory that a statement or proposition is true if it coheres or harmonizes or fits with other beliefs we hold to be true. On this view, a claim that doesn't fit with our other beliefs is at best dubious.

An example would be a Darwinian confronted with the claim that the earth is only a hundred thousand years old. This assertion is so wildly out of synch with everything else the Darwinian believes that it would be rejected out of hand.

Coherence works the other way, too. A claim that a fossil had been discovered that shows an evolutionary link between, say, whales and land mammals would, at a minimum, have Darwinians hoping that the claim was true because it fits exactly with everything else they believe and lends support to their other beliefs.

I use evolution as an example but the post is not about that. It's about something quite different. It's about why the media and others, especially on the left, but not exclusively so, were so quick to believe Jussie Smollett.

It seems that every time a story that involves racist violence hits the news, social media explodes with condemnation and outrage, especially when the victims are alleged to be minorities, before any of the facts float to the surface.

Then, almost invariably, when the facts come out the story turns out to be a concoction or a fraud and those who rushed to judgment sheepishly slink back into egg-faced silence. Until, that is, the next such shocking account is announced, and then they're right back at it, heaping outrage and imprecations on the alleged perpetrators until the evidence shows once again that the charges are fraudulent.

They never seem to learn. Either that or they operate on the principle that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and assume that, like someone playing the roulette wheel, one of these times the ball just has to land on the right number.

Judgmental people simply can't help themselves. Like secular Puritans they feel a duty to display their own moral righteousness by furiously lashing out against any and all transgressors, real or imagined, but this only partially explains their lack of caution. The deeper question is why they're so prone to believe these fabrications in the first place, and this is where the coherence theory comes in.

From the Duke Lacrosse assault case to the University of Virginia rape case through a dozen or so other examples all the way up to the recent Covington Catholic boys and now the Jussie Smollett imbroglio, the attestations of racism, sexual assault, bigotry and violence have been shown so frequently to be empty and libelous that one wonders why the media talking heads and opinionators continue to fall for them.

Why don't they learn from their previous mistakes? Why don't they exercise prudence and wait for the evidence to come in? I think it's largely because these allegations cohere so well with their assumption of what America is like that their confirmation bias simply overrides their prudential judgment.

In the Smollett case I suspect that some people so despise Donald Trump and those who support him that not only were they prepared to believe the worst about those they hate, they actually hoped that the worst was true. Smollett's account of racist white men putting a noose around his neck, shouting anti-gay and racist slurs, dousing him with bleach and declaring him to be unwelcome in MAGA country comported so closely with the stereotype of Trump and his voters to which some in the media and on social media cling that Smollett's claims just had to be true.

For many, the actual facts don't matter. We live in any case in a post-fact culture where all that matters is one's personal feelings, and any testimony, no matter how bizarre, is credible if it coheres with and confirms our worst prejudices.

We need to be better than this.

What Is Your Self?

One of philosophy's most fascinating puzzles is the question of personal identity. What is it about me that makes me me? Is it my body? Is it my brain? Is it the information in my brain?

If the body is constantly changing then in what sense does my self perdure through time? If my identity is just the contents of my brain how do I remain the same self over time as those contents change? What significant thing about me remains the same over time that keeps me the same person?

My fingerprints and my DNA stay relatively constant over time, but are these what I'm referring to when I say "I"? Am I referring to my DNA or my fingerprints everytime I use the word "me" or "myself"?

The questions just keep coming. Suppose we say that it's our brains and their contents that make us who we are. Imagine that your body is dying but your mind is working well. Imagine further that doctors have, through amazing leaps in technology, developed the ability to transplant brains into different bodies. Suppose your brain is transplanted, at your request, into the body of a person named John who suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When you awaken from the surgery, who would you be, you or John?

Brain scientists know that if they cut the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, two different centers of consciousness can be created. If either hemisphere is destroyed it's possible that a person could live on as a conscious being. Suppose your brain is transplanted in such a way that one hemisphere is placed in the body of John and the other hemisphere is placed in the body of Mary.

Have you survived the operation? If so, are you now two people? If you're only one person, which person are you, John or Mary? Is it possible to be more than one person simultaneously? If so, if you committed a crime before the operation, should both John and Mary go to jail for it?

If we adopt a skeptical view and say that there is no personal identity but rather that the self evolves over time and we're not the same person today that we were ten years ago, then how can anyone be held responsible for promises they made or crimes they committed ten years ago? If we are not the same person who committed the crime then to punish us would be to punish an innocent person, would it not?

A theist might partially resolve this perplexing problem by claiming that our identity resides in our soul, not in our body or our brain, at least not completely, and that our soul is independent of whatever body or bodies it "inhabits." But how would a materialist or naturalist who has no belief in any non-material constituents to the self, who has no belief in souls, resolve it?

Perhaps their only recourse is to deny the existence of any significant self altogether, as did the philosopher David Hume, and declare that your self is just a bundle of perceptions that you experience from moment to moment. Or they could maintain with biologist Francis Crick that you are nothing but a pack of neurons.

Unfortunately, neither of these options seems very satisfying.

Nothing but Eggshells

An argument made frequently on Viewpoint is that metaphysical naturalism has no resources to undergird any objective moral obligation. Naturalism leads logically to nihilism and from thence to cruelty.

I recently reread a book I had originally read in the 1970s. It was written by a Romanian Lutheran pastor named Richard Wurmbrand who was arrested in 1948 by the Romanian communist government and imprisoned for fourteen years in communist prisons.

His crime was that he sought to carry out his pastoral duties in a country which, like all communist countries in the Soviet bloc, had outlawed Christianity.

In the book he recounts the tortures he and thousands of others suffered simply because of their faith (The book is titled Tortured for Christ).

Beatings while hung upside down from the ceiling, being forced to stand for days in a shallow box with nails in the sides so that the slightest movement caused one's flesh to be torn making sleep impossible, starvation, being placed in refrigeration units until almost frozen to death then removed, revived and returned to the frigid cold, over and over again.

Pastors and priests who refused, even under torture, to reveal names of those who participated in outlawed worship services were forced to watch their children beaten to death in front of them.

The sheer barbarism of the communists is difficult to comprehend.

Wurmbrand relates in the book that he often asked the torturers:

"Don't you have pity in your hearts?" They usually answered with quotations from Lenin: "You cannot make omelets without breaking the shells of the eggs," and "You cannot cut wood without making chips fly."

I said again, "I know these quotations from Lenin, but there is a difference. When you cut a piece of wood it feels nothing. But you are dealing with human beings. Every beating produces pain and there are mothers who weep."

Wurmbrand goes on:

It was in vain. They are materialists. For them nothing besides matter exists and to them man is like wood, like an eggshell. With this belief they sink to unthinkable depths of cruelty.

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man.

And then he adds this:

The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish. I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I haved lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

Of course most people who agree with the communists' atheism would nevertheless find their behavior repugnant, but what they cannot say, at least not if they are going to be consistent, is that the communist torturers were wrong. If the ultimate reality, the universe, is indifferent to human suffering, if men have evolved to behave cruelly toward their fellow men, how can it be wrong to do so?

As the late Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty, himself an atheist, once admitted, "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?'"

The only people who have a moral basis for condemning cruelty, for condemning the torture of those poor prisoners, are those whose ultimate reality is a transcendent, personal being whose essence includes moral perfection and who has the power to hold accountable those who wantonly and with pleasure inflict pain on others.

Absent such a moral authority cruelty is no more wrong in humans than it is in any other animal.

Beto's Feeble Objection

From time to time, one reads of people who, in an attempt to illegally break into a home or building, get caught in a chimney and sometimes die there. Or they fall through sky lights, sometimes to their deaths, or touch an electrical cable and are electrocuted.

I thought of these unfortunate incidents when reading a piece by Madeline Osburn at The Federalist on Beto O'Rourke's opposition to a border wall.

Osburn quotes O'Rourke:

[The border wall] has cost us tens of billions of dollars to build and maintain, and it has pushed migrants and asylum seekers and refugees to the most inhospitable, the most hostile stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, ensuring their suffering and death.

More than 4,000 human beings — little kids, women and children — have died. They’re not in cages, they’re not locked up, they’re not separated — they’re dead.

There are two things to note in O'Rourke's comment. First, is the tacit admission that where walls exist along the border they apparently work since people are being diverted to much more hostile areas.

Second, is his argument that a wall is cruel because it forces people intent upon entering the country illegally into this more dangerous terrain.

This is a very thin argument. It's not unlike arguing that home and business owners should leave their doors unlocked during off hours so that anyone who wants to enter illegally is not forced to seek entry through the chimney or other dangerous portals.

It's tragic that people bring children with them into these inhospitable climes, but to argue that therefore we shouldn't build a wall is like insisting that because intruders into your house may have children with them you should therefore make access to your home easy and safe for them.

O'Rourke also claimed that the wall in El Paso has not made residents safer, but this is contradicted by the city's mayor:

El Paso Mayor Dee Margo told Fox News in December that they need the rule of law, negotiations with Mexico, and a solution to problems in Central America. “We have a fence already in El Paso that was done during the Bush administration, I think back in 2008, and it has stopped criminal activity and it works.”

There may be good arguments against building a border wall, I am open to being persuaded, but I have yet to hear one (see here for more examples), and O'Rourke's effort is certainly no exception.

There are really only two reasons, evidently, why Democrats oppose a wall: First, they want open borders so they can increase their voter base. If they thought for a minute that all or most immigrants would, once they gained citizenship, vote Republican they'd be scrambling all over each other to allocate the entire national budget for a wall.

Second, they can't stand the thought of allowing the President to make good on his signature campaign promise. If Barack Obama had declared a need for a wall there'd be no opposition to it whatsoever. Everyone in the media and in congress would be coming up with reasons why we do indeed need a barrier.

It's a shame that our leaders put political power and petty posturing over the needs of the people, but unless the Democrats can offer a better argument than they have so far it certainly seems that that's what they're doing.

Coming to the End of the Island

The word is that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report will end not with a bang but with a whimper. There'll be no evidence adduced, those in the know are whispering, that President Trump engaged in any collusion with Russia.

Adam Mill (a pseudonym), in a column at The Federalist, claims that everyone should have known this all along but that those on the left have convinced themselves that the only way Mr. Trump could have defeated Hillary Clinton was by receiving aid from those nefarious Russians. They've been as sure of this as any True Believer could be of anything.

But Mill thinks they're in for an enormous letdown. He compares the situation to an old Seinfeld episode. Here's his lede:

In episode 171 of “Seinfeld,” George Costanza makes up a story about having a house in the Hamptons in order to avoid attending an event with his dead fiancée’s parents, the Rosses. He soon learns they know of his deception but the Rosses nevertheless accept an invitation to the fictitious house.

George picks them up and begins driving towards a house that doesn’t exist. Both the Rosses and George maintain the pretense until George drives to the end of [Long Island] past the last house in the Hamptons. George silently pleads for the Rosses to put an end to the charade. The lie’s momentum took on a life of its own as the players all continued acting their parts long after the truth was known.

The episode comes to mind as the media has started backing away from the Russia collusion hoax. Like Costanza, many of the media perpetrators seem to know a reckoning is coming. Politico warned Trump haters, “Prepare for disappointment.”... Mueller’s longtime top deputy at the FBI recently warned, “A public narrative has built an expectation that the special counsel will explain his conclusions, but I think that expectation may be seriously misplaced.”

Mill goes on to give a half dozen signs that should've been obvious from the beginning that the entire "Russian Collusion" investigation was a charade. Anyone interested in why no one should've been duped should read the column.

But many people were duped, perhaps willingly, perhaps not. Consider the good folks at progressive cable outlets like CNN and MSNBC. I think many of them truly believed that Mr. Trump was guilty as sin, and they've invested their entire professional lives for the last two years in promoting the story that Mueller is just one discovery away from ridding us for good of the loathsome imposter in the White House.

They've scarcely talked about anything else every hour of every day since November of 2016. Like lovesick teenagers it seems to be all they think about both waking and sleeping. Some of them have spent the two years past in gleeful expectation of seeing Mr. Trump frog-marched to the metaphorical scaffold.

The prospect of his humiliation has animated them, filled them with the thrilling anticipation of a child on Christmas eve, infused their lives with meaning and purpose.

If Mueller presents them instead with a resounding nullity I'm afraid that some of these poor media folks will have to be put on suicide watch. It'll be too much for them to bear.

Having suffered the incredible shock of election night's stunning upset of Hillary Clinton, whose electoral victory they all assumed was a mere formality, and now having to endure this second crushing disappointment of learning that what they just knew was beyond question - that Mueller would show that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians - is simply false, will be devastating.

If that's what unfolds in the near future the trauma will be like discovering that one's most profound convictions were all complete fabrications. If reporting the election results in front of the cameras was close to torture for them, a nothingburger from Mr. Mueller will be cruelty compounded.

Where is the soul so callous and cold-hearted that he could fail to feel sorry for them?

On Friendship

A number of years ago I wrote a post on C.S. Lewis' book titled Four Loves because I enjoyed especially his treatment of friendship. He said so many interesting things on the topic that I thought it might be appropriate to once again share some of them with Viewpoint readers on this Valentine's Day. Here are some of his thoughts:

• "Nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to each other about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best."
• "Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)."
• "The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends.
  
  In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer."
• "That is why those pathetic people who simply "want friends" can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be 'I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend,' no Friendship can arise - though Affection, of course, may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and friendship must be about something."
• "A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies, do what he can for our widows and orphans. But such good offices are not the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost interruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in another not. Relevant, because you would be a false friend if you would not do them when the need arose; irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always remains accidental, even a little alien to that of Friend.
  
  It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection's need to be needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have been necessary - and now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude is no enrichment to this love. The stereotyped 'Don't mention it' here expresses what we really feel.
  
  The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it had to be devoted to affairs!"
• "In most societies at most periods Friendships will be between men and men and women and women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where men are educated and women are not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about."
• "When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later."

This last is particularly interesting. If Lewis is correct then the common notion that men and women can be "just friends" is something of a delusion. If a man and a woman really are friends, in the sense of the word that Lewis explicates, then it's almost inevitable that they'll wind up being more than friends.

Lewis is famous for his trenchant insights into human nature. His insights into friendship do nothing to diminish that reputation.

Intellectual Virtues

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, abortion, gay marriage, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that it's reasonable to hold?

Mill continues:

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind.

He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred.

All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions. It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among those participating in debates on the issues of our day.

Mind/Brain Interaction

One of the major objections to the notion that we possess an immaterial mind that somehow works in concert with our material brain is that interaction between two radically different substances is incomprehensible. We can comprehend how one material thing can interact with another because we see it all the time, the materialist says, but how can an immaterial thing like mind cause an effect in a material thing like a brain?

Since the dualist cannot explain how this is possible her belief in mind/brain interactionism is thereby believed to be discredited.

As physicist Stephen Barr once pointed out in a book review in the January 2010 issue of First Things, however, few who pose this objection to dualism stop to ask how it is that anything interacts with anything else.

The materialist (one who believes that matter is all there is) assumes that matter can interact with matter, but if you ask a materialist to actually explain the interaction you draw a blank.

The same explanatory problem confronting the dualist confronts the materialist whenever he tries to understand how two material objects interact or how a force like magnetism interacts with steel, or how matter interacts with space. We simply don't know how these phenomena take place.

Barr writes:

Material bodies are made up of electrically charged particles that interact with each other through the mediation of electromagnetic fields: The charged particles affect the fields and the fields affect the particles. By what "means" or "mechanism" this happens physics does not say.

It simply says that when electromagnetic fields are present, the charges are, in fact, affected as described by a certain equation; and when the charges are present the fields are affected as described by another equation.

In other words, physics posits two types of entities and mathematically describes, but does not otherwise explain, their influence on each other.

Nor is neuroscience much help in resolving the mystery:

[Neuroscience] can tell us that a lower than normal concentration in the brain of a molecule called dopamine (a certain arrangement of eight carbons, eleven hydrogens, one nitrogen, and two oxygens) leads to the subjective experience of boredom or apathy.

It can find that the electrical stimulation of a certain tiny region of the brain produces mental states ranging from mild amusement to hilarity. It can report ... that “damage to a certain small area of the cortex serving vision (called ‘V4’) can strip color” from one’s visual experiences.

But in none of these cases can it explain the connection between motions of material particles and mental experiences...

Gravity poses the same problem. We have no idea how gravity "pulls" objects toward a massive body, or, for that matter, how a massive body produces gravity in the first place, or even what gravity is.

If we fall back on the Einsteinian explanation that gravity is simply the bending of space around a material object then we've simply pushed the problem back a step. How, it can be asked, do material bodies bend space? If space is essentially "nothing" how is it affected by a "something" in its midst?

The materialist has no answer, but that doesn't stop him from believing it nor from disparaging the dualist for thinking that mind and brains interact. Pretty ironic, don't you think?

Is Sweden a Socialist Nation?

When the Democrats' Green New Deal came out last week complaints of "socialism" were heard in the conservative media and among critics in congress.

There was much not to like in the GND (A guaranteed income for those who refuse to work being one), but although it would be crushingly expensive to implement and result in an enormous expansion of government, it actually wasn't a socialist plan in the technical sense.

The confusion was amplified by some defenders of the proposal who identify as socialists who pointed to Sweden's economy as providing a socialist model that we would do well to copy.

This was confusing because Sweden's economy is not really an example of genuine socialism. In socialism the state owns the means of production, but in Sweden these are largely in private hands. Sweden's economy might rather be called welfare capitalism. In fact, in some respects its economy is actually more capitalist than that of the U.S.

In any case, Sweden is not a good model for the U.S. since it's a relatively small country with the fiscal burden of neither a large underclass nor of a world class military.

This short video put out by Reason.org clarifies the nature of Sweden's economy:

When folks like Bernie Sanders and some of his fellow progressive/socialists in Congress declare that we should look to Sweden as an example to follow someone might ask them exactly which aspects of the Swedish economy should we emulate? Taxing the poor? School choice? Privatization of social security?

I doubt our progressives would be enthusiastic about any of these.

The Origin of Life Problem

I filched some of the following post from philosopher VJ Torley at Uncommon Descent. He has some interesting things to say about Dr. James Tour's work and views on the origin of life that I'd like to pass along.

The technical name for the origin of life is abiogenesis, the emergence of living cells from non-living material precursors. Abiogenesis is a necessary first step for the evolution of higher life forms. Until there was life there was no evolution.

Interestingly, all theories of naturalistic abiogenesis entail mind-blowingly improbabilities, which means that it's highly probable that naturalism, the belief that everything is explicable in terms of natural processes and forces, is false.

Torley introduces us to Dr. Tour who is nothing if not an expert witness:

Professor James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology, who is also is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In addition to holding more than 120 United States patents, as well as many non-US patents, Professor Tour has authored more than 600 research publications.... Tour was ranked one of the top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade by Thomson Reuters in 2009.

So how does Dr. Tour say that unaided nature produced the first living cell? He states emphatically that we have no idea whatsoever:

We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins, were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex system, and eventually to that first cell.

Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those who say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis.

From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins.

Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system.

That’s how clueless we are. I’ve asked all of my colleagues: National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners. I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professor says, “It’s all worked out,” [or] your teachers say, “It’s all worked out,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. It is not worked out.

In other words, all those people who tell us that the naturalistic origin of life is a fact and that only nincompoops, Trump voters, and Westboro Baptists are skeptical of it, are in fact clueless as to how the first step in the process could ever have been taken.

Torley quotes Tour some more:

Let us assume that all the building blocks of life, not just their precursors, could be made in high degrees of purity, including homochirality where applicable, for all the carbohydrates, all the amino acids, all the nucleic acids and all the lipids. And let us further assume that they are comfortably stored in cool caves, away from sunlight, and away from oxygen, so as to be stable against environmental degradation.

And let us further assume that they all existed in one corner of the earth, and not separated by thousands of kilometers or on different planets. And that they all existed not just in the same square kilometer, but in neighboring pools where they can conveniently and selectively mix with each other as needed.

Now what? How do they assemble? Without enzymes, the mechanisms do not exist for their assembly. It will not happen and there is no synthetic chemist that would claim differently because to do so would take enormous stretches of conjecturing beyond any that is realized in the field of chemical sciences...

I just saw a presentation by a Nobel prize winner modeling the action of enzymes, and I walked up to him afterward, and I said to him, “I’m writing an article entitled: ‘Abiogenesis: Nightmare.’ Where do these enzymes come from? Since these things are synthesized,...starting from the beginning, where did these things come from?”

He says, “What did you write in your article?” I said, “‘It’s a mystery.’” He said, “That’s exactly what it is: it’s a mystery.”

It's a mystery. Well, if a theist were to give this answer in reply to some question about God the skeptic community would suffer collective side-stitches from laughing so hard, but the cornerstone of naturalism, the belief that life arose from non-life without any intelligent intervention or direction, is itself an inexplicable mystery.

Yet naturalists insist that it's rational to believe in an inexplicable mystery, no matter how improbable it may be, and that it's irrational to believe that somehow life arose as a consequence of intelligent agency.

Let's look at this a different way. Which would someone with no prior experience of computers think more likely, that a functioning computer could be produced by a series of highly improbable physical accidents or that a functioning computer could be produced somehow by an intelligent engineer? We have lots of experience of engineers producing amazingly complex structures which contain high information loads, but we have little or no experience of such things being produced by the random action of natural processes.

As with computers so, too, with the first cell.

Thus, the existence of a first cell is more probable given the existence of an intelligent agent than it would be if no such agent exists, and since it's more rational to believe what's more probable than to believe what's less probable, it's more rational to believe that life arose as a result of intelligent agency.

If you've a background in cellular chemistry or an interest in the topic and would like to watch Tour's entire lecture it's here:

Darwin Doubters

Charles Darwin's birthday will be celebrated on February 12th, but the last forty years or so have not been kind to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Despite the fact that it is the reigning orthodoxy in our academic institutions much of the homage paid to it, except by the true believers, is obligatory lip service.

Indeed, confidence that a naturalistic theory like Darwin's, or the neo-Darwinian synthesis, can explain the phenomena that scientists are discovering in their laboratories and field work is waning among front line researchers.

Despite the fact that the Darwinian priesthood still has the power to punish heretics in the academy, over a thousand scientists have grown so disenchanted with Darwinian versions of evolution that they've taken the bold step of going public with their doubts.

These dissenters have affixed their names to a document, which can be viewed here, and which makes clear that these men and women have serious reservations about the scientific credibility of Darwinism. They may not all believe that intelligent design is correct either, but they're quite convinced that Darwinian evolution is inadequate as an explanatory paradigm.

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News describes the document these worthies have signed:

It reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” The signers hold professorships or doctorates from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other prominent institutions.

They are also an increasingly international group. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences are represented. Discovery Institute began taking names of signatories in 2001 in response to frequently heard assertions that there is no dissent, or “virtually” none.

Actually, there are very serious problems with any naturalistic explanation of biological origins and development. Ten of the most serious are discussed here.

What makes this document even more impressive than the number and status of the signatories is the fact that they almost surely represent only the tip of the scientific iceberg. It can be reasonably assumed that thousands more harbor similar doubts but, out of concern for their professional well-being, are reluctant to publicly express them.

Klinghoffer elaborates:

What’s significant about the Dissent from Darwinism list is not so much the names and the institutions listed there but what they tell you about the many Darwin skeptics in the science world who wouldn’t dare sign.

Scientists know the career costs that would come from publicly challenging evolutionary theory. Discovery Institute and its sister research lab, Biologic Institute, have welcomed refugees who were chased out of top spots in the research world....

The signers of the Dissent list have all risked their careers or reputations in signing. Such is the power of groupthink. The scientific mainstream will punish you if they can, and the media is wedded to its narrative that “the scientists” are all in agreement and only “poets,” “lawyers,” and other “daft rubes” doubt Darwinian theory.

In fact, I’m currently seeking to place an awesome manuscript by a scientist at an Ivy League university with the guts to give his reasons for rejecting Darwinism. The problem is that, as yet, nobody has the guts to publish it.

Other scientists, like the Third Way group or the researchers who met at the Royal Society in 2016, reject standard evolutionary theory but would not sign the Dissent list because they (mistakenly) think it conveys an even worse source of ritual contamination — the taint of intelligent design. In fact, the Dissent text doesn’t in any way imply support for ID, as the website’s FAQ page emphasizes.

The simple observation that neo-Darwinism can’t explain the origin of complex life forms does not lead directly to a design inference. That is a separate argument with separate evidence. Every ID proponent is a Darwin doubter, but not every Darwin doubter is an ID proponent.

But I understand why people fear to go public, even if they would seem to have nothing to lose. I recall a visit a colleague and I made to the office of a Nobel laureate in a relevant field who gruffly stated his own rejection of evolutionary theory but refused to say anything in public. He is not a young man. Given his senior status, you would think he’d have nothing to fear. Yet he was afraid.

Anyway, one wonders whether totally in-the-tank Darwinian naturalists aren't actually troubled about biological discoveries in the coming years. After all, the more we learn about the way life works the less tenable Darwinism seems. The more awesome and amazing the biological world appears the less confidence the average person has that it's all a result of blind, impersonal chance and forces.

Someday it may turn out that the ardent defenders of the old paradigm will be like those solitary WWII Japanese soldiers still holding out in the jungle, never having heard that the war was over.

Senators, Please Read Article VI

The Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee would've fit right in as inquisitors ferreting out heresy a couple of centuries ago, but what was condoned centuries ago in Europe, imposing a religious test on those seeking public office, has been unconstitutional in this country since 1789.

Unfortunately, Senator Cory Booker and several of his colleagues seem unaware of that fact.

The following is taken from a piece by Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media:

On Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a 2020 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, asked Trump judicial nominee Neomi Rao, an Indian-American former law professor, if she considered homosexual relationships to be sinful.

Booker seized on Rao's 2008 article opposing the Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized homosexual activity. He then directly asked her,

"Are gay relationships in your opinion immoral?"
"I am not sure the relevance of that," Rao responded.
"Do you think gay relationships are immoral?" he continued.
"I do not," Rao said.
"Do you believe they are a sin?" Booker pressed.
"My personal views on any of these subjects are things I would put to one side," the nominee said.
"So you're not willing to say whether you believe it is sinful for a man — for two men — to be married?" the senator pressed once again.
"No," Rao responded.
"Excuse me?" Booker said.
"My response is that these personal views are ones that I would put to one side. Whatever my personal views are on the subject, I would faithfully follow the precedent of the Supreme Court," the nominee said.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) slammed Booker for his line of questioning, arguing that questions about what is sinful should be utterly off-limits in confirmation hearings. He cited the Constitution's ban on a religious test for public office, and declared, "I don't believe this is a theological court of inquisition."

"The Senate Judiciary Committee should not be a theater for twisting nominees' records or views, nor should it be an avenue for persecution," Cruz declared. "We have seen a growing pattern among Senate Democrats of hostility to religious faith.

I was deeply troubled a few minutes ago to hear questioning of a nominee asking your personal views on what is sinful. In my view that has no business in this committee."

Booker is only the latest in a series of Democrats whose hostility to Christian nominees and Catholics in particular has emerged in confirmation hearings. Senator Dianne Feinstein made it known to all and sundry that the Catholic views of Amy Coney Barrett should disqualify her from the federal bench.

An article by Carrie Severino at National Review Online provides some examples:

During Barrett’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein pointedly told the then-nominee, “the dogma lives loudly with in you, and that’s a concern.” The “dogma” to which she referred was Barrett’s Catholic faith, and Feinstein’s not-so-subtle suggestion was that an observant Catholic could not also be a fair and impartial judge.

Severino continues:

Senate Democrats have continually engaged in questioning that test the limits of the Constitution’s Article VI prohibition on “religious tests” for holding government office.

Their latest target is Brian Buescher, a federal district court nominee from Nebraska. Following Mr. Buescher’s November 2018 nomination hearing, Senators Mazie Hirono and Kamala Harris submitted questions for the record interrogating Buescher about his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus—a fraternal service organization of the Catholic Church that claims two million members worldwide.

The Knights are an arm of the Church and one of the world’s great charities, having made billions of dollars in charitable contributions and given millions of hours of volunteer service. Their mission includes aid to the poor, support for people with physical and developmental disabilities, and assistance to victims of natural disasters.

There have been numerous others who have been subjected to this line of inquiry. Severino lists them for us:

• In November 2018, Senator Feinstein submitted written questions for the record to Paul Matey (Third Circuit) asking about his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus.
• In October 2018, Senators Feinstein, Leahy, Blumenthal, Whitehouse and Harris submitted written questions for the record to Allison Jones Rushing (Fourth Circuit) asking about her involvement with Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nonprofit organization “that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.”
• In May 2018, Senator Kamala Harris submitted written questions for the record to Peter Phipps (W.D.P.A.) asking about his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus.
• In March 2018, Senator Feinstein submitted written questions for the record to Michael Scudder (Seventh Circuit) noting his membership in the St. John the Cross Parish and asking about his involvement with the parish’s efforts to establish a residential crisis pregnancy center as cited in a parish bulletin.
• In June 2017, Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) submitted written questions for the record to Trevor McFadden (D.D.C.) about his personal views on issues of same-sex marriage and abortion in light of his church membership.
• And the church bashing has not been exclusive to the Senate Judiciary Committee: during a nomination hearing before the Senate Budget Committee in 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders accused Russell Vought—a Christian and President Trump’s nominee for Deputy Director of The White House Office of Management and Budget—of being an “Islamaphobic” on account of his religious views.

Not only is this line of interrogation in conflict with Article VI of the Constitution which explicitly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office under the United States,” it's also grossly hypocritical. None of these senators would ever dream of posing such questions to a Muslim nominee.

Catholic Christians, however, notwithstanding that their views on abortion and gay marriage are more moderate than those generally held by observant Muslims, are considered legitimate targets for the senators' bigotry.

Northam's Infanticide Views Are No Shocker

There's been a lot of shocked commentary on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's support for infanticide, but I'm not sure why people are surprised at his views.

Infanticide, causing the death of already born children or fetuses in the process of being born, has been supported by leading Democrats for at least twenty five years and supported by philosophers like Peter Singer for much longer than that.

For example, Republican-led Congresses first passed bills banning partial-birth abortion (PBA) in December 1995 and again October 1997, but both pieces of legislation were vetoed by President Bill Clinton.

PBA, also known as intact dilation and extraction, is a late-term abortion procedure. After inducing labor, the abortion provider typically turns the baby around (while still within the mother) and pulls the child’s leg(s) out, leaving the head in the uterus.

The baby’s head is then pierced with a sharp implement, creating a cavity through which the brains are sucked out, causing the skull to collapse and making it easier for the baby to be pulled out. In other words, the baby is killed while in the process of being born.

After Mr. Clinton was no longer in office the procedure was again banned by Congress, and the ban was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003. It was challenged in the courts by pro-choice groups and upheld by the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Carhart.

Contemporaneously, the Illinois state senate sought several times in the early 2000s to protect the lives of children born alive after a botched abortion. These children were often left to die of exposure and dehydration in various facilities around the state, and the state senate sought to end this inhumane neglect with the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA).

BAIPA was introduced to insure that babies who survive attempted abortions are provided the same medical care and sustenance as any other infant born alive. BAIPA was introduced after evidence was presented that babies born alive after unsuccessful abortions were simply discarded in utility closets without food, care, or medical treatment until they died.

As an Illinois state senator at the time, Barack Obama voted twice against the BAIPA.

Mr. Obama saw such protections for the child as an unconstitutional infringement on a woman's right to choose even though the nation's foremost abortion advocacy group, NARAL, had no problem with it. As President, Mr. Obama also expressed concern about the Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on PBA.

Whether the issue has been eugenics back in the 1920s, or abortion in the 1970s, or partial birth abortion in the 1990s, or infanticide in the 2000s progressives have often supported the most extreme position.

It's little wonder, then, that Governor Northam would be taken aback by the outcry over what he probably thought was a reasonable articulation of the mainstream liberal position.

Naturalism's Incoherence Problem

I was listening to a podcast discussion the other day between two philosophers, one an atheist and one a theist, on the topic of whether or not naturalism is incoherent. Disappointingly, the discussion quickly devolved into an exchange over whether or not God exists and never did get around to exploring the original topic.

Maybe it's just as well because I think the topic title is slightly misconceived.

A concept is incoherent when it contains mutually contradictory features. For example the concepts of a married bachelor, or a giant pygmy, or a round square are incoherent because the first term in each contradicts and precludes the second and vice-versa.

But naturalism itself is not incoherent in this way. There don't appear, to me at least, any internal contradictions in the view that nature, as can be described by science, is all there is.

However, this is not to say that there are not coherence problems in trying to live as a consistent naturalist. Many who adopt a naturalistic worldview find themselves unable to live with it and have to go about their daily lives acting as if naturalism were false.

For example, most of us deeply desire in our lives a number of what might be called existential qualities, none of which can be sustained under naturalism:

• We desire meaning. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, wrote in his book Man's Search for Meaning that men can't live without meaning. Yet on naturalism, there's no meaning to be found anywhere in the cosmos, just "blind, pitiless indifference" in the words of Richard Dawkins.
• We desire to ground our moral judgments in something solid, but on naturalism morality is "just an illusion, fobbed off on us by our genes, to get us to cooperate with each other" according to philosopher Michael Ruse. Nothing is really right or wrong in a moral sense. It's just useful or not in promoting the survival of the species.
• We desire justice, but on naturalism death is the end and selfish and cruel men experience the same fate as their victims - total extinction. Unless there's accountability for our actions justice is a fiction.
• We desire dignity, but on naturalism we're just animals, gobs of protoplasm in thrall to our genes, with no free will and no real specialness. In the words of Stephen Hawking "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it this way: "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." On naturalism no lives matter.
• We desire to live, but on naturalism we all die and when those we love are gone they're gone forever. The late Will Provine of Cornell University writes: "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death...no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will." (emphasis mine)
• We desire happiness, but on naturalism the fate of most humans who've ever walked the earth has been simply to be born, suffer and die. There are moments of pleasure, Woody Allen once said, "but they don't add up to anything."

Most people who believe that the natural world is all there is, however, can't live consistently with these implications of their fundamental assumption. They're like a person who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. They live their daily existence as though their lives were meaningful, as though there were such things as justice, dignity, and morality, but then they switch into their alter ego and insist that the only thing that could actually make any of these possible - i.e., God - doesn't exist.

There's an incoherence in naturalism, to be sure, but it's not found in the concept itself. Rather, it's found in the attempt to live as though the concept were true.

Ralph Northam's Very Bad Week

Be glad you're not Virginia's Democratic governor Ralph Northam.

Northam was roundly criticized last week for supporting the killing of babies after they'd been born. Legislation Northam supported was ultimately defeated in the Virginia state legislature, but, had it passed, it would've legalized infanticide.

Northam claims he was taken out of context, but it's hard to see how else he could have been understood. He clearly favored a law that would have facilitated the killing of children. Here's what he said:

If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

He added that he thought the furor over the bill “was really blown out of proportion.”

Then, as if that wasn't trouble enough, on Friday it emerged that the hapless governor was discovered to have posed in blackface for a picture in his medical school yearbook alongside another student dressed as a Klansman (It may have been the other way around, no one knows for sure, but it hardly makes any difference).

The picture was clearly intended to demean and make fun of African Americans, and an irony in this is that Mr. Northam's successful campaign for the governorship benefitted handsomely from having painted his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, as a racist.

Calls from both left and right for the governor to resign have been increasing in volume, although I'd wager that were he a Republican the amplitude of the demands coming from the left would be exponentially greater than what they've been.

After all, as J. Christian Adams at PJ Media reminds us that former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott discovered to his sorrow that the standard of acceptable behavior is set far higher for Republicans than for Democrats.

Back in 2003, for instance, the Senate threw a birthday party for a 100-year-old colleague from South Carolina named Strom Thurmond who in his youth had been a staunch segregationist. Senator Lott offered a toast to Senator Thurmond in which he committed the unpardonable sin of lightheartedly suggesting that, had the country voted for Strom Thurmond for president when he ran in 1948, the country would be better off today.

It was an old man’s birthday. Lott never mentioned race. He was just being kind and not even thinking of the racial implications of what he was saying. Nevertheless, Adams writes, in a flash, Lott was gone from the Senate.

Lott's absent-minded insensitivity meant that he had to go, yet contemporaneously a former Klansman, the late Senator Robert Byrd (also of Virginia), had been serving in the Democratic party's top Senate positions for over three decades, and no one on the left seemed to mind.

Northam's defenders say that the offensive photo was taken in 1984 and that he's not the same man today. I sympathize with that argument. I don't think we should judge people in their late fifties simply by what they did and thought in their youth. Young men often do or say dumb, even awful, things, but people mature and change.

I believe in redemption, but here's the thing: People who sought to destroy Brett Kavanaugh for what he might have done as a teenager decades ago are hardly in a position to say now that Northam's case is different (Northam was in his mid-twenties when the photo was taken) and that he should be given a pass.

Adams points out another irony:

Just last week, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing where a representative of the NAACP testified in favor of a new federal mandate that would let all felons vote. When pressed, advocates admitted that a full restoration of rights – including the right to run for office, such as Governor of Virginia – would apply to murderers and child rapists.

There you have it. Northam has to go because of the yearbook photo while the same gang wants to ensure that murderers and rapists can hold public office. These are things I suspect nobody in 1984 would have believed could ever come true.

We can pass laws to allow felons to vote and run for office, but posing in a racially insulting photo disqualifies somebody for life from holding public office? What a topsy-turvy world we live in today. Update: This post was amended from the original to show that Northam's yearbook photo was taken when he was in medical school, not high school.