Head Transplant Update

A few years ago we commented here at Viewpoint on news from Italy wherein a surgeon by the name of Sergio Canavero was striving to develop a technique that would allow him to transplant a human head onto another human being's body.

Part of the process would involve severing and restoring spinal cord function. If this could be done it would offer hope to accident victims whose spinal cords had been severed.

An article in USA Today suggests that progress is being made. Here's the lede:

Surgeons from China and Italy claimed that two studies published Wednesday add evidence to their ability to treat "irreversible" spinal-cord injuries and a related controversial aspiration to perform the world’s first human head transplant.

Xiaoping Ren and Sergio Canavero said the new work they published in a scientific journal showed that monkeys and dogs were able to walk again after their spinal cords were "fully transected" during surgery and then put back together again. The neurosurgeons described the results as medically "unprecedented."

The article goes on to say that,

While the researchers have tested head transplants, with some success, on small animals including mice and dogs, it's a concept that raises profound ethical, psychological and surgical questions.

It's interesting to speculate as to how a brain that has developed for decades in tandem with a particular body would accommodate itself to another body that has entirely different capacities and abilities. How much would have to be relearned? How psychologically jarring would the change be to the patient?

Would the resulting individual be a new person or would he/she be the same person that provided the head?

Canavero intends to eventually perform the extraordinarily expensive operation in China since America and Europe won't permit it: "The Americans did not understand," Canavero told USA TODAY two years ago as he announced that he would soon perform the world’s first human head transplant in China because medical communities in the United States and Europe would not permit him to do it there. From space exploration to climate-change science, China has indicated it intends to lead, not follow, the U.S. in all the major scientific and technological frontiers over the coming decades.

Canavero estimated the procedure would cost up to $100 million and involve several dozen surgeons and specialists. He said the donor would be the healthy body of a brain-dead patient matched for build with a recipient's disease-free head.

The procedure itself is described in the USA Today piece:

The researcher said he would simultaneously sever the spinal cords of the donor and recipient with a diamond blade. To protect the recipient's brain from immediate death before it is attached to the body, it would be cooled to a state of deep hypothermia.

Michael Sarr, a former surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and editor of the journal Surgery, told USA TODAY in 2017 that....Doctors "have always been taught that when you cut a nerve, the 'downstream side,' the part that takes a signal and conducts it to somewhere else, dies," he said.

"The 'upstream side,' the part that generates the signal, dies back a little – a millimeter or two – and eventually regrows. As long as that 'downstream' channel is still there, it can regrow through that channel, but only for a length of about a foot."

This is why, he said, if you amputate your wrist and then re-implant it and line the nerves up well, you can recover function in your hand. But if your arm gets amputated at the shoulder, it won't be re-implanted because it will never lead to a functional hand.

"What Canavero (would) do differently is bathe the ends of the nerves in a solution that stabilizes the membranes and put them back together," Sarr said. "The nerves will be fused, but won't regrow. And he will do this not in the peripheral nerves such as you find in the arm, but in the spinal cord, where there's multiple types of nerve channels."

Are Canavero and Xiaoping Ren quacks or are they medical pioneers? A hundred years ago no one thought that hearts, livers, kidneys, hands or faces could ever be transplanted, but today they are being transplanted frequently. Perhaps it's just a matter of time before someone whose body is dying but whose brain is healthy can be given a new body.

If they have $100 million to spend on it.

Materialism and Panpsychism

Materialism is the view that matter (and energy) are the fundamental realities in the universe. Everything that exists is reducible to, and explicable in terms of, matter. Materialism has always been a popular metaphysical assumption those holding a naturalistic worldview, but in the 20th century materialism found itself challenged by two developments, one was the discoveries being made in quantum physics and the other was its inability to account for human consciousness.

If we think of consciousness, at least in part, as possessing awareness it appears that subatomic particles like electrons exhibit a very rudimentary consciousness. Thus, some thinkers have revived a theory called panpsychism to account for this.

If we can't conceive of how material objects can generate consciousness perhaps it helps to assume that all material objects, down to the tiniest subatomic pieces, are to some degree conscious and that in aggregate are able to comprise conscious beings like ourselves.

I posted several pieces on the topic of panpsychism in the past (2/15/18, 2/16/18/, 2/19/18) and invite the interested reader to check them out.

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who has written a lot about mind and consciousness, has a column at Mind Matters in which he argues that consciousness requires senses and that inanimate objects, lacking senses, must a forteriori lack consciousness.

Perhaps, but as much as I'd like to agree with Egnor I think there's a problem with his argument. Egnor is a theist and if theism is correct then there are pure minds - e.g. God, angels and perhaps the souls of deceased human beings - that are surely conscious but which possess no physical senses. Thus, consciousness would not seem to require, necessarily, a physical sensory apparatus.

This is not to say that I accept the panpsychist's argument, as a perusal of the posts from February of last year will make plain, but I do think there's a problem with our understanding of material substance. The problem can be found lurking in the materialist's assumption that matter is fundamental and that consciousness is the product of material brains. Maybe things are really the other way around. Perhaps it is mind that is the fundamental substance and that matter is somehow a product of minds. Perhaps matter is to mind as wetness is to water. It's not that every bit of matter possesses mind, as the panpsychist would have it, but rather that matter is an expression of mind. Imagine, for instance, that, like the images on a computer screen, the fine structure of the physical world is comprised of pixels of exceedingly high resolution. These are not pixels made of chemicals like those on your monitor, rather they're pixels made of information or mind. What appears to us to be material stuff could in fact be a three dimensional manifestation of information flowing from a universal mind somewhat like the pixels on a screen are a two dimensional manifestation of the information flowing from the programmer's mind. Whatever the case, the days when it seemed obvious that matter is the fundamental reality appear to be waning. As the physicist Sir James Jeans presciently noted back in the middle of the last century, "The world is beginning to look more like a grand idea than a grand machine."

Not Enough Evidence

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably plead a special exemption for this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity.

This evidentialism or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 19th century and into the 20th among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink.

The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. They're based rather on an intuition of probability. The more intuitively probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it.

Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world.

When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult, if not impossible, standard for an inconclusive argument to live up to.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise.

Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in what was later collated into his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

Abstract Thought and Materialism

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that among the things that a material brain cannot accomplish just by itself is abstract thought. Egnor concludes that this is evidence for mind/brain dualism because certainly human beings are capable of abstract thinking.

Why does he say that the material brain is incapable of generating abstract thoughts? He makes his case in a short essay at Evolution News, excerpts from which follow:

Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy.

He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.

His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.

Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.

During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:

There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mindaction"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind....If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact.

The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way.

But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[emphasis mine]

Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer, apparently, is that the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.

Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.

There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this: If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience, and since stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.

This is not proof that there's a mind, of course, but it is certainly consistent with the dualist hypothesis that we are a composite of mind and brain and certainly puzzling on the materialist hypothesis that the material brain is solely responsible for all of our mental experience.

Unhealthy Obsession

President Donald Trump has been cleared of the charge of colluding with Russia to fix the 2016 election. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team have, after two years of searching and spending $25 million of taxpayers' money, found no evidence to support the charge that had seemed to many in the media as a matter of course: That Mr. Trump was guilty.

So certain were they of the president's culpability that they were willing to forfeit their professional credibility by uttering numerous very intemperate asseverations as a video at Grabien.com documents.

One wonders what evidence that the special prosecutor did not have that these people did have which convinced them that Mr. Trump would surely be found guilty of crimes, some of which (treason) carry the death penalty.

And if they had no evidence but were simply engaging in wishful thinking their irresponsibility in perpetuating what amounts to a slander on the president and further divides an already divided country.

Not only have they been complicit in setting Americans more sharply against each other, but they've made it very difficult for Mr. Trump to succeed on the foreign policy stage since most of our adversaries, like China and North Korea, have probably assumed that the president would soon be politically crippled and that there was no point in truckling to him in whatever negotiations were taking place.

So far from rejoicing that the president is not a traitor many of his domestic enemies are, like those ISIS holdouts in Syria, refusing to give up and admit their error and are instead pinning their desperate hopes on Mueller's claim that although there was insufficient evidence to support the allegation that the president also obstructed justice, there was also insufficient reason to conclude that he did not.

This rather ambiguous loose end has been seized upon by the Democrats in Congress and the media as justification for pressing on in their pursuit of Mr. Trump. Like Captain Ahab obsessed with wreaking vengeance on Moby Dick they're determined to politically and legally harpoon the president, even if their monomania destroys their party's electoral chances in 2020.

Their hatred for Donald Trump is beginning to appear even to some of their allies as all-consuming, and their failure to defeat him in 2016 and their subsequent failures to rid the White House of him seems, like Chief Inspector Dreyfus' failure to rid himself of the inept Inspector Clouseau in the old Pink Panther movies, to be driving them toward madness.

The progressive media has destroyed whatever credibility they may have had in their reporting and commentary of the "Russian Collusion" story, as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi observes, so maybe it's time for all these folks to take a deep breath or two and just let it go before they wind up like Chief Inspector Dreyfus.

Thoughts on Friendship

Last month I posted some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on the topic of friendship. Lewis spoke of how friendship was rooted in shared loves and interests. Lewis writes, for instance, that,

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).

He also says this:

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.

St. Augustine also wrote on the same subject. Augustine reflects on the desire to share a common love, particularly a love for the life of the mind (although that's not what he calls it) has on him. He writes wistfully about it:

...I do love wisdom alone and for its own sake, and it is on account of wisdom that I want to have, or fear to be without, other things such as life, tranquility and my friends. What limit can their be to my love of that Beauty, in which I do not only not begrudge it to others, but I even look for many who will long for it with me, sigh for it with me, possess it with me, enjoy it with me. They will be all the dearer to me the more we share that love in common.

Lewis and Augustine have something important to teach us about friendship. Two people can be companions for awhile even if they don't share much in common, but they'll only develop a true friendship if they both love some of the same things. For Augustine the chief of these loves is the love of wisdom, and surely the love of wisdom encompasses the love of truth.

That love has been largely lost in our post-modern age during which a lot of people seem to believe whatever suits their political or religious preferences. So far from loving truth (and wisdom) many seem almost to despise it as irrelevant if it gets in the way of their appetites and prejudices.

I wonder how many modern friendships are grounded in the same love that Augustine muses upon, or even could be.

The Case for Dualism

My classes will be discussing this week the philosophical debate between dualists - those who believe that human beings are comprised of both a material body and an immaterial mind or soul - and materialists who maintain that we are purely material beings. I thought it'd be helpful to rerun this post that I first put up a couple of months ago to help clarify some of the issues.

The debate is especially acute with regard to our cognitive activity with dualists arguing that thinking involves the integration of our material brains with an immaterial mind and materialists maintaining that the brain is all that's involved in our cognitive experience.

The materialist insists that the brain can account for all of our mental phenomena and that there's no need to posit the existence of an immaterial mind or soul. Moreover, given that brain function is the product of the laws of physics and chemistry, materialists argue that there's no reason to believe that we have free will.

For materialists mind is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain, much like we use the word digestion to refer to the function of the stomach. Just as digestion is a function and not an organ or distinct entity in itself, likewise the mind is an activity of the brain and not a separate entity in itself.

As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses in this fifteen minute video, however, the materialist view is not shared by all neuroscientists and some of the foremost practitioners in the field have profound difficulties with it.

Egnor explains how the findings of three prominent twentieth century brain scientists point to the existence of something beyond the material brain that's involved in human thought and which also point to the reality of free will.

His lecture is an excellent summary of the case for philosophical dualism and is well worth the fifteen minutes it takes to watch it:

There's a lot at stake in this debate. If materialism is true it not only becomes harder to believe in free will, it's also harder to believe that human beings have dignity, that objective moral obligations exist, that we have a self or identity which perdures through time and that there's a meaningful individual existence beyond the death of the body.

Most materialists accept that none of these beliefs are true, Most dualists believe, or at least hope, that they are. Whether you agree with the materialist or you hope the materialist is wrong you'll want to watch Egnor's video.

A Genuine Miracle?

The last few posts have touched on the topic of the inevitability of genuine miracles occurring if there truly exists a multiverse and the difficulty of ruling them out if our world is just one of a vast ensemble of worlds.

I thought it'd be fitting to add an actual contemporary example of what certainly seems to be a miraculous event that's so amazing a major motion picture has been made about it.

The account of the event appeared in a piece by Josh Shepherd at The Federalist, part of which reads as follows:

On January 19, 2015, 14-year-old John Smith was trapped underwater for 15 minutes. First responders pulled him from the icy waters of Lake Sainte Louise in St. Charles, a northwestern suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a month later: “He wasn’t breathing, and paramedics and doctors performed CPR on him for 43 minutes without regaining a pulse.” Yet, after his mother prayed for him, doctors at St. Joseph Hospital West say Smith inexplicably regained consciousness.

“They never expected the heart monitor to respond,” says Joyce Smith [John's mother] in an interview. “The first doctor who treated John wrote in his medical records: Patient dead. Mother prayed. Patient came back to life.”

Even when John reacquired a pulse, doctors anticipated that since his brain had been deprived of oxygen for so long he'd remain in a vegetative state, but the boy has fully recovered and returned to his basketball team. It's truly a remarkable story, and Shepherd provides much more detail in his article than I've given here.

The movie, due to be released on April 17th, and the team behind the film maintains that all the facts have been medically verified, and the story on-screen reflects accounts from multiple sources.

People today are often skeptical of reports of miracles, as they should be, given the number of fraudulent stories that have circulated over the years, but no one should be so skeptical as to rule out the possibility that something for which there's no room in a naturalistic worldview has in fact happened in this instance, and if one believes there's a multiverse, it would seem, one simply can't rule out that such events can and do occur.

This is the multiverse conundrum. If there is no multiverse then the fine-tuning of our universe for life points inexorably to the existence of a supernatural mind, and if one reverts to the multiverse to explain away cosmic fine-tuning she abandons any grounds for skepticism that miracles happen. And if miracles happen the case for that supernatural mind gets much stronger.

Whether you're skeptical or not read the article at the link and see what you think.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. III)

As a followup to our previous two posts here's another example of how embracing the multiverse leads to several unintended and uncomfortable consequences for the naturalist.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll, an atheist, has been quoted as arguing that the multiverse hypothesis, though it does not meet the standard criteria of a good scientific theory (i.e. it's not falsifiable or testable), nevertheless should be accepted as legitimate science.

He writes:

Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth.

The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they’re not falsifiable.

The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.

This reminds me of a passage from William James who asserted that, "any rule of thought which would prevent me from discovering a truth, were that truth really there, is an irrational rule."

Carroll wants to apply James' maxim to science in the belief that it's not reasonable to restrict science only to conjectures about entities whose existence can be tested.

Thus, the multiverse hypothesis should be considered legitimate science even if it's not testable because it's an entity that's either real or it's not, and "refusing to contemplate [it's] possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though [it] might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."

Very well, but then why wouldn't this same standard also apply to the hypothesis that the world is the creation of God? Wouldn't the same standard also apply to Intelligent Design which is banned from public school science classrooms because it allegedly can't be tested and is therefore not regarded as a genuine scientific theory?

Carroll wants to make the multiverse a viable scientific option because it gives him a means to evade the compelling theistic implications of cosmic fine-tuning, but in order to include the multiverse hypothesis in the field of legitimate scientific inquiry he has to open up the domain of science to include conjectures about the existence and activity of a God, which is the very thing he's eager to avoid.

Tomorrow I'll return to the topic of miracles with a description of a contemporary episode that, assuming it's not a hoax, surely counts as a genuine miracle. Indeed, it would require an even greater miracle for it to be a hoax.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took a look at Vincent Torley's analysis of the multiverse in which Torley argued that if there is a multiverse then miracles must not only be possible but certain to occur in some world in the infinite ensemble of worlds.

The naturalist who embraces the multiverse has a another problem in addition to the problem with miracles. Darwinian evolution is predicated on uniformitarianism, the belief that the laws of physics never change, but if there's a multiverse, of which we are a part, then uniformitarianism becomes highly improbable.

Torley writes:

[S]ince the argument for Darwinian evolution is based on the assumption that the laws and parameters of Nature do not vary, it follows that if we live in a multiverse, then our own universe is infinitely more likely to be one in which the miracles of the Bible occurred than a uniformitarian one in which life evolved in a Darwinian fashion.

... there will still be a number of possible universes in the multiverse, in which life pops into existence in the manner described in Genesis 1, and where living things just happen to exhibit the striking traits predicted by Darwinism, whereas there is (by definition) only ONE way for a given set of laws and parameters NOT to vary: namely, by remaining the same at every point in space and time.

The problem [for the naturalist] is that the uniformitarian requirement that the laws and parameters of Nature are the same at every point in space and time – which is rather like hitting bull’s eyes again and again and again, for billions of years – is inherently so very unlikely, when compared to “singularism” (the hypothesis that the laws of Nature undergo slight, short-lived or local fluctuations)...

Thus in a multiverse scenario, uniformitarianism becomes the albatross around the neck of Darwinism: no matter how many of Darwin’s predictions scientists manage to confirm, the sheer unlikelihood of the hypothesis that we live in a universe whose laws never vary renders Darwinism too unlikely a theory to warrant scientific consideration.

What a pickle. The naturalist rejects miracles and accepts Darwinian evolution (i.e. that evolution is a completely natural process with no intelligent input from a non-natural mind) largely because he rejects the existence of God.

He buttresses that rejection by also accepting the idea of the multiverse as an answer to the argument for God's existence based on cosmic fine-tuning, but by accepting the multiverse he pretty much has to give up the underlying assumption of Darwinism (uniformitarianism) and also his opposition to miracles.

He seems to be mired in an intellectual quagmire, and it's not at all clear how he can extricate himself from it.

More on the naturalist's difficulties tomorrow.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. I)

Naturalism is the view that physical nature is all there is. It holds that there's no non-physical reality, no supernatural entities. Naturalists usually embrace the idea of the existence of a multiverse in which infinite universes, all with different laws and parameters, exist something like bubbles in a bubble bath. Our universe is just one such bubble.

There's scarcely any empirical evidence for the multiverse, however, and it's popularity seems to stem largely from its utility as a response to the powerful argument for a cosmic Designer based on the incredible improbability that a universe like ours, with astonishingly precise values of the parameters that form the fabric of the universe and make life possible, would exist at all.

If, however, there's an infinite array of different universes with different laws and parameters, then even astronomically improbable universes are certain to be among that infinite manifold. Thus, as amazingly improbable as a life-sustaining world is, one pretty much had to exist, given the existence of the multiverse and we just happen to be in it.

Nevertheless, as philosopher Vincent Torley points out in a lengthy treatment of the multiverse at Uncommon Descent there's a perplexing difficulty for the naturalist who clings to the multiverse in order to avoid falling into theism. If the multiverse exists then not only does the improbable become certain, but so, too, does anything that is possible to occur under some set of physical laws. This would, of course, include miracles.

Miracles, after all, are exceedingly improbable events given the laws which appear to govern our world, but they're not logically impossible. The laws of our universe could be structured in such a way that allows for miracles on rare occasions. Such a world must, after all, exist somewhere in the multiverse and perhaps we just happen to be in it.

The irony is that the naturalist rejects the miraculous because he rejects belief in the existence of God, but in order to sustain his non-belief in God he relies on a hypothesis that makes miracles virtually certain to occur somewhere in the vast ensemble of worlds that comprises the multiverse.

Naturalism sees the universe as invariant. That is, the laws of physics hold everywhere and always. They're inviolable. Thus, miracles, for the naturalist, are physically impossible, but as Torley points out, in a multiverse there should be universes in which the laws of physics fluctuate episodically, thereby permitting anomalous events like miracles, and that these universes should be far more common than uniformitarian worlds in which the laws are invariant.

Here's Torley:

[B]ecause multiverses allow laws to vary bizarrely on rare and singular occasions, and because not all such variations are fatal to life, we can conclude that a life-permitting universe is far more likely than not to experience anomalous events (which some might call miracles), and that a life-permitting universe in which Biblical miracles occur is still more likely than one in which the laws and physical parameters of Nature are always uniform.

Thus [the] belief that we live in in a universe where Biblical miracles occurred will still be more rational than the modern scientific belief that we live in a universe whose laws are space and time-invariant, because [these] universes are more common in the multiverse than law-invariant universes.

We'll have more to say about the difficulty embracing the multiverse hypothesis poses for the naturalist tomorrow.

Lunar Origin

Astronomer Hugh Ross, in a 2014 article at Salvo, discussed some of the current theories on the formation of our moon. Those theories posit a collision between an object about the size of Mars with the early earth and require such an astonishing precision in the masses, momentum and timing of the colliding objects that it's almost literally incredible that it happened at all.

Our astonishment is magnified by the fact that our moon, which is virtually unique in our solar system in terms of the ratio of its size to that of the earth and its proximity to the earth, has to have almost exactly the properties it has in order for life to be sustained on earth.

Robin Canup, the author of one of the more popular theories on the moon's origin, wrote that, "Current theories on the formation of the Moon owe too much to cosmic coincidences."

And earth scientist Tim Elliott observed that the degree and kinds of complexity and fine-tuning required by lunar origin models appear to be increasing at an exponential rate. Among those who study lunar origin, he notes, "the sequence of conditions that currently seems necessary in these...versions of lunar formation have led to philosophical disquiet."

Ross adds that,

Thanks to the exquisitely fine-tuned nature of this impact event, the collision:

1. Replaced the earth's thick, suffocating atmosphere with one containing the perfect air pressure for efficient lung performance, the ideal heat-trapping capability, and the just-right transparency for efficient photosynthesis.
2. Gave the new atmosphere the optimal chemical composition to foster advanced life.
3. Augmented the earth's mass and density enough to allow it to gravitationally retain a large, but not too large, quantity of water vapor for billions of years.
4. Raised the amount of iron in the earth's core close to the level needed to provide the earth with a strong, enduring magnetic field (the remainder came from a later collision event). This magnetic field shields life from deadly cosmic rays and solar x-rays.
5. Delivered to the earth's core and mantle quantities of iron and other critical elements in just-right amounts to produce sufficiently long-lasting, continent-building plate tectonics at just-right levels. Fine-tuned plate tectonics also performs a crucial role in compensating for the sun's increasing brightness.
6. Increased the iron content of the earth's crust, permitting a huge abundance of ocean life that, in turn, can support advanced life.
7. Salted the earth's interior with an abundance of long-lasting radioisotopes, the heat from which drives most of the earth's tectonic activity and volcanism.
8. Produced the moon, which gradually slowed the earth's rotation rate so that eventually advanced life could thrive on earth.
9. Left the moon with a just-right mass and distance relative to the earth to stabilize the tilt of the earth's rotation axis, protecting the planet from rapid and extreme climatic variations.
10. Created the moon with the just-right diameter and the just-right distance relative to the earth so that, at the narrow epoch in solar-system history when human life would be possible, humans on earth would witness perfect solar eclipses, which would help them make important discoveries about the solar system and universe.

If we didn't have a moon like the one we have we wouldn't be here, and yet the existence of our moon is such a highly improbable occurrence that anyone who studies it is almost overwhelmed by how fortuitous it is.

No wonder, then, that so many of the people who study it, astronomers like Ross, believe that the earth/moon system, just like virtually every other aspect of cosmic architecture, is not an accident, but is rather the intentional product of an unimaginably intelligent and powerful engineer.

There's much more in Ross' article. It was written five years ago which leads one to wonder how much more we know about the moon today that adds to the breathtaking scope of coincidences that were known in 2014.

Why St. Patrick Is Celebrated

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day tomorrow. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

No, the Economy Is NOT Terrible

Despite what some presidential candidates are saying the American economy is in the best shape it's been in many Americans' lifetime. Andrew Kugle at The Washington Free Beacon cites a number of statements made recently by Democrats vying for their party's nomination which suggest that they believe, or want voters to believe, that the economy is in tatters.

For example,

• "The economy in America today is not working for working people," Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.).
• "When they declare victory at 4 percent unemployment, it is not good enough," Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.).
• "We have enormous crises in this country … in terms of millions of people living in poverty, in terms of a shrinking middle class," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).
• "The middle-class squeeze is real and millions of families can barely breathe." Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.).
• "Clearly something is broken. Something is broken in our economy," former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg (D.).

Statistics, however, don't seem to bear out these melancholy claims. According to Kugle:

The unemployment rate is at 3.8 percent, a 50-year low. Unemployment rates for African Americans and Hispanics have reached record lows in the last two years. The labor force participation rate is at 63.2 percent. Consumer confidence reached an 18-year high in September and rebounded in February after a three-month decline.

A 3.8% unemployment rate is considered at, or close to, full employment, so it's not clear what Senator Gillibrand means when she says that 4% is not good enough nor what the others mean when they assert that the economy isn't working. here are a couple more stats from Kugle's piece:

In January, manufacturing jobs were growing at a rate 714 percent faster under Trump than under his predecessor President Barack Obama.

The latest job numbers show wages growing at a rate not seen in a decade, with most of the wage growth occurring in the lower half of wage earners.

Kugle might've also pointed out that food stamp recipients have declined by almost four million people in the last two years, and that compared to the economies of every other first world nation, ours is very healthy.

Of course not everyone in the country is a millionaire, but of all the problems with which we are faced today, the economy seems to be among the least urgent. If politicians are going to tell us that that's not true, they should explain why it's not.

Otherwise, they're being less than honest with the American people, and they're certainly forfeiting their credibility.

What Does Life Mean?

Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl once wrote a book titled Man's Search for Meaning in which he asserted that man can't live without believing that there is some purpose or meaning to his life. To waken in the morning and realize that there's no real point to anything one does in the hours that lie ahead beyond just keeping oneself alive is psychologically deadening.

It can easily lead to existential despair.

Each of us, of course, has projects which inject temporary meaning into our lives and help us to avoid a numbed listlessness, but when we ask what, in the overall scheme of things, those projects amount to, the answer seems to depend on how enduring they are.

Long term projects like raising a family or building a business seem more meaningful than short term projects like mowing the grass or watching a television program. Yet the problem is that if death ends our existence it also erases the meaning or significance of what we do, no matter how important it may seem to us while we're engaged in it.

For some, a relative few, their projects live on after them for a time, but even of many of these it might be asked, what's the point? Napoleon conquered much of Europe, was responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, but he was overthrown, died in exile, and the monarchy of France was restored.

His deeds and fame live on after his death, but what was the sense of all that death and carnage.

Meaning is a slippery notion, it's hard to define precisely what it is, but if our lives, like the light of a firefly, are here one instant and gone the next, if the earth is doomed to die, a casualty of a solar supernova, then nothing lasts and nothing really means anything. Unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all.

These gloomy thoughts occurred to me as I read about a lecture given by biologist Jerry Coyne. Coyne told his audience that:

The universe and life are pointless....Pointless in the sense that there is no externally imposed purpose or point in the universe. As atheists this is something that is manifestly true to us. We make our own meaning and purpose.

This is perhaps the consensus view among those holding to a naturalistic worldview. It was eloquently articulated by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his book A Free Man's Worship in which he wrote the following words:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief.

Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

It's a bleak view of life, to be sure, but if we're convinced that extinction awaits us, both individually and corporately, it's hard to dispute it. As the writer Somerset Maugham put it:

If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said essentially the same thing though with a bit more angst at the prospect of the emptiness and futility of existence:

What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed — Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?

But, if death is not the end of our existence as a person then there's a chance that maybe there's meaning in the chaotic horror that is human history. If death is simply the transition between two stages of life, like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly, then maybe there's meaning, not only to history, but to each and every individual life.

If death is not the end of our existence then what we do in this life really may matter and may matter forever.

On the other hand, if death is the end, if we are annihilated when our body dies, then all we are is dust in the wind, and philosophers and writers from Schopenhauer to Shakespeare are correct: Life is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

We're born, we suffer, we die, and that's all there is to it.

Pass the Prozac.

Are We Real? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an article by computer expert Peter Kassan in which he critiques the notion that we're actually virtual beings in a grand cosmic simulation. Kassan is very skeptical that such a simulation could ever be accomplished, and I'd like to finish the discussion of his argument today.

One of his objections is that a material device like a computer cannot produce immaterial effects like consciousness. He has more to say on this in the part of his article we'll look at here. How, for instance, can a computer generate what philosophers call intentionality? He writes:

The argument that a sufficiently complex computer program would be conscious in the same way you and I are goes something like this:

• The brain is an information processor.
• A computer is an information processor.
• A computer can be programmed to process the same sort of information the brain processes in the same way that the brain processes information.
• The conscious mind arises from information processing in the brain.
• Therefore, a conscious mind will arise from equivalent information processing on a computer.

The argument depends crucially on the concept of information. A computer contains, processes, and displays data like a highway road sign consisting of a rectangular array of light bulbs. As we drive by, we can interpret the pattern of light as letters and words, but the message we read is actually nowhere contained in the display.

Imagine a space alien interpreting the display as a binary code, with each column of eight light bulbs conveying one byte. How would they interpret a sign that to us read DANGER—CONSTRUCTION AHEAD? A computer is processing data (information) only because we interpret it as doing so; a brain behaves as it does without interpretation.

In other words, the arrangement of the bulbs in the sign has a meaning to us, it is about something, but how do the reactions in our brains when we see the sign generate that meaning? The brain is just an enormously complex system of neurons. Where does the meaning come from? There's no meaning in the chemical reactions that fill the brain when we observe the sign. Nor does a computer generate meaning. It simply produces data. Meaning is the product of conscious observers.

Kassan finishes with a couple more thoughts about all this:

There’s another irony concerning the notion that we’re all just computer simulations. If you believe you’re living in a computer simulation, then everything you think you know about the world — including its vastness, the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and even the very existence of computers — is part of that simulation, and so is completely worthless. The evidence on which the entire chain of reasoning depends, in short, is illusory — and so nothing at all can be argued from it.

This is an interesting point. On the simulation hypothesis none of our beliefs are reliable since they're all just beliefs we hold because we've been programmed to do so. Among those simulated beliefs are our moral beliefs:

If we believe we’re just simulations, how should we behave? Should we treat everyone around us as if they’re just a figment of someone else’s imagination, shamelessly manipulating them for our own pleasure or gain? Should we take careless risks, knowing we’ll live again in another simulation or after a reboot? Should we even bother to get out of bed, knowing that it is all unreal? I think not.

If the universe is a simulation then we're all programmed to live the way we do. No behavior is wrong in any meaningful sense. There's no free will, no morality, no meaning to our existence, no justice or injustice.

We're all just actors on a stage manipulated by an intelligent programmer for his own purposes. Thus, there is nor can there be, any value to our lives.

This, by the way, would be true as well if the programmer were a God who preordains every aspect of our lives.

Belief in a real world and other minds besides our own is properly basic. We are within our epistemic rights to believe that the world exists objectively unless and until we are confronted with a compelling defeater for that belief, but the simulation hypothesis falls short of being a compelling defeater.

Are We Real? (Pt. I)

I have occasionally written (see most recently here and here) on the fascinating notion that the universe we live in is actually not "real" but is rather a computer simulation designed by some intelligent creatures living in a different world altogether. This theory has been popularized, perhaps most notably, by philosopher Nick Bostrom.

I find the theory fascinating not because I think it's plausible but because those who do are actually trying to account for the enormous amount of apparently intelligent engineering and design manifested by the fine-tuning of our universe without having to concede that theism is true. They are right, I think, to see an intelligence behind the universe, but wrong if they conclude that the intelligence is anything less than the Maximally Great Being posited by theism.

There's a good article by computer expert Peter Kassan at Skeptic.com in which he explains the simulation hypothesis and offers several criticisms of it.

Here's his summary of the argument for thinking we actually live in a computer simulation:

• The universe contains a vast number of stars.
• Some of these stars have planets.
• Some of these planets must be like Earth.
• Since intelligent life arose and eventually invented computers on Earth, intelligent life must have arisen and invented computers on some of these planets.
• It is (or inevitably will be) possible to simulate intelligent life inhabiting a simulated reality on a computer.
• Since it’s possible, it must have been done.
• There must be a vast number of such simulations on a vast number of computers on a vast number of planets.
• Since there’s only one real universe but there’s a vast number of simulations, the probability that you’re living in a simulation approaches one, while the probability that you’re living in the real universe approaches zero.

As Kassan observes there is no empirical evidence for, or testable implications of, this argument. It's therefore not a scientific hypothesis. It's more akin to science fiction or theology. Kassan calls it "cybernetic solipsism". There’s little reason, he says, to argue that anyone else in your simulated universe is conscious — to achieve verisimilitude, there’d be no need to actually program anyone else’s consciousness but yours.

More than that, though, even an immensely powerful computer would not be able to program human consciousness:

But even a superdupercomputer wouldn’t produce even a single conscious being. The crucial move in the argument is that the simulation of a human mind would actually be conscious in the same sense that you and I are.

Your computer simulation wouldn’t simply behave exactly like a real person, it would actually feel pain, pleasure, lust, fear, anger, love, nausea, angst, ennui, and everything else you can feel.

It would actually experience the same optical (and other sensory) illusions you do. It would feel what you feel when you get sick, or when you drink or take drugs. It would fall asleep and dream, and then wake up to realize that it was only dreaming. Presumably, it would even die.

In other words, the qualia or phenomena of sensory experience would have to somehow emerge from the whirrings of the computer's hard drive, but a physical computer can only produce physical outputs, and our sensations - pain, color, sound, etc. - are not physical or material.

They're produced by physical stimuli, they're generated by electrochemical reactions in our nervous system, but the sensation of blueness when we look at the sky, to take one example, is not itself physical.

In other words, our conscious experience is not simulatable and therefore we cannot be a simulation.

I'll have more on Kassan's argument tomorrow.

Human Language and Abstract Thinking

An interesting short article by Michael Egnor at Mind Matters explores the difference between human language and the vocalizations of other animals. Despite having much of the hearing and vocal apparatus necessary for speech, animals are not capable of language.

He begins by quoting science writer Tom Seigfried who states that: It’s true that humans, and humans alone, evolved the complex set of voice, hearing and brain-processing skills enabling full-scale sophisticated vocal communication. Yet animals can make complicated sounds; parrots can mimic human speech and cats can clearly convey that it’s time for a treat.

Many animals possess an acute sense of hearing and are able to distinguish random noises from intentional communication.

Much of the physiological apparatus for hearing and speaking is found in all land-dwelling vertebrates — the tetrapods — including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. “Humans share a significant proportion of our basic machinery of hearing and vocal production with other tetrapods,” Fitch writes in the Annual Review of Linguistics. Even so, only humans have language, Egnor argues. Here's part of his reasoning:

[Animals] can make and respond to signs—gestures, grunts and the like. A dog, for example, can respond appropriately to simple words directed at him (“Sit!” “Fetch!”). But all animal communication is symbols, that is, signals that point directly to an object. In this case, the object is a simple expected action the animal is to perform immediately.

What animals cannot do is communicate using abstractions. They cannot use designators, — words employed abstractly as language. For example, a dog can be trained, by reward and punishment, to stay when told, “Stay!”

He associates the sound “s-t-a-y” with a behavior and performs the behavior. But he doesn’t know what you mean when you say “Let’s stay a bit longer on the beach,” “He extended his stay in Peru,” or “The judge issued a stay of the eviction order.”

Animals can only think concretely. Their thought is of particulars—the particular bowl of food, thrown stick, or warm bed. They don’t contemplate nutrition, exercise, or rest. Humans can think abstractly, without any particular physical object in mind. For example, a vet might tell her client during an office visit, “Tuffy here needs to lose about 1.5 kg. I suggest a lower calorie kibble and more exercise—if possible, before bedtime.”

She can explain it to her client but not to the dog because it’s all abstractions about times, places, things, and concepts. Of course, he might recognize his name, “Tuffy,” and raise his ears slightly to see if he is being told to do something concrete.

Concrete thought needs no language because the concrete thinker focuses on a perceived object. Tuffy thinks of his bowl of food. If he were to think of nutrition, an abstract concept, he would need abstract designators as objects, not only to express his thought but even to think it.

In short, animals don’t have language because they don’t have abstract thought and thus have neither the capacity nor the need for abstract designators—words as language.

Language is a tool for abstract thinking and only human beings can do that. The gap between animals and human beings is not just a narrow evolutionary jump. It's a chasm.

Justifying Hate Speech

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D - MN) is a Muslim woman who has made repeated deprecatory comments toward Israel and Jews, comments that many Jews, including members of her own party, have taken to be anti-semitic. This has caused a lot of dissension in the party between those who still think that hate speech is wrong no matter who engages in it and those who think it wrong only if Republicans engage in it.

The former demanded a resolution that would've chastised Omar (and others) for their increasingly audacious anti-Jewish remarks, so, in an attempt to heal the rift, Speaker Pelosi advanced a weak-tea resolution that condemned just about every offensive form of speech anyone could imagine. the resolution was so childish and anodyne that even Ms. Omar voted for it, notwithstanding that it was originally instigated to serve as a condemnation of her conduct.

Some of her defenders in the Democratic caucus have subsequently embarrassed themselves by advancing the silliest arguments heard in the halls of congress since, well, since the debates over the border wall.

Speaker Pelosi, for example, insisted that the poor woman didn't understand the significance of her statements about Jews and Israel, but that seems to be a veiled allegation of the congresswoman's stupidity. If she doesn't understand why her comments have repeatedly offended Jews in the United States what's she doing in a position of national leadership?

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), herself a Jew, voiced this remarkable justification for overlooking her colleague's anti-semitism:

I want to tell you, part of being a Jew is to be welcoming to the stranger. And I want to tell you, Ilhan Omar is a refugee from Somalia. She comes from a different culture. She has things to learn.

So, being a refugee from a different culture makes hatred okay. That's a great argument for shutting down the immigration of Muslims altogether. Ms. Omar, who is Somali, has been living in the U.S. since 1995 and has been a citizen since 2000. One would think she'd understand by now that ethnic hatred is not acceptable here.

She also, it must be said, comes from a culture that practices genital mutilation of women, honor killing, and which holds it to be a religious duty to kill apostates. Does Ms. Schakowsky think we should give a pass to those behaviors among immigrants as well? If not, why not?

She added that,

I am not either trivializing anti-Semitism or the things that she said or saying that it's okay that she said them. But what I am saying is that I think this a learning moment for her and a learning moment for the caucus on how to get along.

But she is trivializing anti-semitism by excusing it on the basis of a misguided cultural relativism. Had a Republican been making comments like these Democrats would be outraged by the hatred it evinced and demanding that she be punished.

In fact, a few months ago Republican congressman Steve King was stripped of all committee assignments for a pattern of remarks which many on both sides of the aisle felt to be too sympathetic with the notion of white supremacy.

Even sillier than Rep. Schakowsky's moral relativism, however, were the comments from Democratic House Whip James Clyburn who complained that media outlets weren't reporting that Omar lived through the Somali Civil War. "I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain," Clyburn said.

Does Mr. Clyburn suggest that we are to accept that, having lived through pain caused, be it noted, by other Muslims, we are to exonerate Ms. Omar for her hostility to Jews? What's the connection between the hardships of her childhood and Jewish people?

If the hardships she endured as a consequence of the civil war excuse her repeated bigotry, I wonder if Mr. Clyburn, who is African American, would apply that same standard to the bigotry of white southerners toward blacks during Reconstruction.

Those whites lost everything in the American civil war, a war fought in large part for the benefit of blacks. If living through a civil war is justification for despising a group of people then why is the racist behavior of southern whites not at least understandable, if not justifiable?

The bald fact is Ms. Omar is an anti-semite and attempts by her colleagues to sugar-coat her hatred of Jews is as embarrassing as it is ineffective. She has no more business serving in the House of Representatives than does any member of the KKK.

Our Amazing Universe

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

Here's another example courtesy of biologist Ann Gauger. Gauger quotes philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon who writes that,

[I]f we measure the width of the observable universe in inches and regard this as representing the scale of the strengths of the physical forces, gravity is fine-tuned to such an extent that the possibility of intelligent life can only tolerate an increase or decrease in its strength of one one-hundred-millionth of an inch with respect to the diameter of the observable universe.

To which Gauger responds,

That is literally awesome. That 1/10^8 inch movement is the same as 0.00000001 of an inch, or about the width of a water molecule, in either direction compared to the width of the observable universe. That is an incredible amount of very fine-tuned order — the relationship between the strong nuclear force and the gravitational force has to be that precise for stars and planets to form, and the elements that are necessary to support life.

Just one water molecule’s width compared to the width of the whole universe — if the ratio were just a little too little, stars’s lives would be cut short and there would be no time for life to develop; too much and everything would expand too fast, thus preventing star and planet formation.

No wonder fine-tuning is called one of the best evidences for intelligent design. People have proposed ways around the challenge, mainly to do with the multiverse hypothesis. But there are so many other instances of fine-tuning and design perfect for creatures like us that it begins to look like a genuine plan.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Gauger refers to the assumption held by some that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must inevitably exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many moderns choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are quite remarkable.

Aborting Gay Babies

Stephen Lavedas and his wife are distraught. They're convinced that no one can tell a woman what she can do with her body. They're convinced that a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason at any time. Yet when they sought to exercise their right to choose they ran into a stony wall of resistance and hate.

Why? Well, because they discovered that the child Mrs. Lavedas was carrying was gay, and, given the statistics and their own interests and opinions, they thought their child would have a very difficult life, and his sexual predilections would make their own life difficult as well.

So, having absorbed and assented to all the arguments proffered over the years in defense of a woman's right to choose, they opted to abort the child.

Lavedas tells their story here. His account is in fact a clever satire, but it's worth trying to imagine how those who defend a woman's right to choose would respond, as Lavedas tells it, to the mother's choice when her choice transgresses the boundaries of progressive orthodoxy.

Here's his lede:

My girlfriend and I recently found out she is pregnant. I told her I’d support her and the baby, and secretly started saving for an engagement ring. She said she thought I would have wanted her to get an abortion. I didn’t—at least at first.

She was excited and started planning the nursery. It took me two months to save up, but I finally got on one knee and popped the question. She cried and said yes. I’m still scared about being a dad, but I’ve got a good job and so does she. We’ll make a great family, just the three of us.

Last week, though, she went in for a checkup. We decided to get full fetal blood work done. Everyone’s doing it; the doctor said there is little risk to the fetus, and better safe than sorry, right? I’m sure everything will be fine, and we’ll learn the sex. I really hope it’s a boy.

Oh, and we decided to make everything official with a trip to the courthouse. We are married now!

Well, got the blood work results, and there’s good news and bad news. Good news: It’s a boy and he’s healthy. Bad news: He’s gay. I didn’t even know there was a blood test for that now, but I guess it’s new? They found the genes that cause homosexuality and they test for them now.

So here's a question for our left-leaning friends: Would it be okay for parents in Lavedas' position to abort their child because it's gay?

Read the whole essay at the link. It's not long, but it does put a lot of pro-choicers in a bit of a logical pickle and offers a serious and rather unique challenge to their rationalizations.

SJW Heretic

I suppose there are conversions from right to left, ideologically speaking, as well as from left to right, but it seems that the latter have been more frequent in recent years.

A fellow by the name of Barrett Wilson writes of his own experience in an interesting piece at The Federalist. Wilson, a liberal, hasn't abandoned his liberal ideas, but he does find that he has much more in common with conservatives than with his fellow progressives.

Here's his lede:

Recently, I went to have a beer with one of my friends from my former life as a social justice crusader. He’s one of the few left-leaning friends I have left since I was mobbed and shamed out of my lefty, social justice community for “toxic behavior” on Twitter (in a straight-up Justine Sacco-style event). He’s a great guy, and he’s still friends with my old friends, so when we meet, it’s a secretive thing.

As I was on my way, I started thinking about just how many people I had lost in my life over the last year or two. It’s got to be in the hundreds. People who have known me for 20 years or more, who said they loved me, who took care of me and let me take care of them, are all mostly gone now. For many, it’s a matter of their own social survival. Guilt by association is a h-ll of a thing.

As I was starting to tally the people I have lost touch with, another thought occurred to me: I probably have more conservative friends than liberal friends now. For a lifelong “bleeding heart” liberal, this is quite the unexpected life development. I decided to tweet something to that effect.

I tweeted: “Since I was mobbed out of my social justice community, I’ve found that conservatives are more kind, forgiving, and open-minded people than my old crew. I’ve found friendship and acceptance despite disagreement. I can’t get in trouble anymore for saying so—so I’m saying so.”

Wilson's doubts seemed to have been prompted by the demonization of people he knew personally who weren't anything like they were being portrayed by his leftist friends:

Even when I was at my most insufferable, social justice version of myself, I had a soft spot for conservatives. My family is deeply religious, and some supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election. I was appalled by this choice (I am still no fan of Trump), but I know the hearts of my family members, and I know that they are good people who simply have different beliefs than me.

When the media and my social group continually went on about how Trump supporters were fascists and white supremacists, it made me deeply uncomfortable. They were talking about my parents, my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I know these people to be tolerant, inclusive, and generous. They do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, or sex. They, like most conservatives these days, are LGBT-friendly.

I love them. And they are worthy of love and respect.

When I got unpersoned, in a social-media driven mobbing, I was self-injurious and my life was at risk. My family was there for me, and they helped me get healthy again. Then I met some friends. Some people had seen what I had gone through and wanted to offer support and discussion.

Wilson goes on to explain how, having been driven by his erstwhile friends on the left into outer darkness he found tolerance and acceptance among his new friends who were, perhaps ironically and unexpectedly, conservatives.

The interesting thing about Wilson's experience is how Stalinist so much of the left has become. There's no room for dissent, no allowance for ambiguity. Everything is absolute, black and white, us versus them, and if you vacillate in your enmity toward the other side you're condemned as a heretic and shunned.

Just as was the fate of ideological deviants in the old Soviet Union, one becomes a non-person, a traitor to the cause deserving the punishment of being "unfriended."

He goes on to describe the attendees at a social gathering held for the staff of a journal for which he now works:

Some were liberals like me, but all had been unpersoned in one way or another, whether it was a result of false allegations, “heretical” thinking, or some minor unwoke gaffe. Many were conservatives who were thrilled to be a part of this new cultural movement, where ideas could be freely exchanged. It was the most extraordinary thing.

The one thing they all had in common was that they cherished the principle of free speech. Modern conservatives and exiled liberals cherish free speech more than ever because they share the experience of being silenced in the name of social justice. (I’m not saying that social justice shaming is exclusively the purview of the left, but I think most reasonable people would agree it happens much more frequently on the left.)

Here's his conclusion:

And I suppose that’s why I have forged meaningful friendships with conservatives. The policing of language and shutting down of open inquiry has never been more popular among the modern left. Say the wrong thing or associate with the wrong person, and the left will lose you. It seems today’s conservatives are more moderate than today’s liberals. That’s quite the thought.

Even in our more intense disagreements (abortion, rights, trans rights, guns) my conservative friends have never aggressively lashed out at me, deplatformed me, unpersoned me, or tried to ruin my livelihood. They understand how important forgiveness and redemption will be if we are ever going to move on from these divisive times.

While I am not planning to abandon my liberal beliefs, I do feel that my fellow liberals could learn a lot from the way modern conservatives comport themselves.

For what it's worth, I think he's right. I'm sure there are conservatives who say and do things that would make other conservatives wince, but how often is the sort of treatment visited upon Wilson by his liberal friends meted out by conservatives to those who deviate from conservative orthodoxy?

Maybe it's happening more than I'm aware, but if so where are the testimonials like Wilson's?

It's About Time (Pt. III)

Let's today tie together some thoughts that've been explored in the previous two posts.

There are two theories as to the nature of time. The first, the A theory, is the common sense view that time is like a flowing river that carries the events of our lives past us like the stream carries water past a person standing in the stream. Future events lie upstream, heading toward us, and the past is downstream, flowing away from us. Events, on this view, are said to have tense - past, present and future.

Another theory, more counterintuitive but nevertheless popular with many, maybe most, philosophers and scientists, derives from Einstein's theory of the relativity of time. On this view, called the B theory, every event that has ever occured is happening somewhere now. Our consciousness somehow moves from event to event, but time itself is static and tenseless.

We employed the analogy in Saturday's post of a movie that's been burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie, every moment, is present simultaneously, but is only "read" off the DVD by the player in a "one moment at a time" sequence. On the B theory, then, our birth, high school graduation, marriage and death are all in some sense happening now.

One of the interesting consequences of this view, although I don't think I've ever seen it alluded to, is that if it accurately describes the way things are, if the flow of time is an illusion, then it would seem to make little sense to ask how old the universe is.

Claims that the universe is 13.7 billion years old should really be understood as claims about how old it appears to us to be. If every event exists simultaneously somewhere on the temporal DVD, then the apparent lapse of 13.7 billion years, or any "length" of time, is simply the illusory consequence of the way our minds process events, but the objective age of the universe, if there is one, is inscrutable.

The universe - its birth, life and death - potentially came into being simultaneously, or at least in no particular order, like the beginning and end of a movie could theoretically be impressed upon the DVD instantaneously.

This is not to say that this is how things actually are. It's only to say that it seems like a plausible consequence of the B theory of time.

Thus, if either time is a subjective phenomenon, a consequence of our mental architecture as we discussed on Friday, or if the B theory is true it would follow that the question of the age of the universe is moot.

If that's so, then one of the major points of contention between those who believe the universe is relatively young, on the order of ten thousand years old, and those who believe it is much older is also moot. The universe could be scarcely any age at all even though there's plenty of empirical evidence that gives it the appearance of being almost 14 billion years old.

It all depends on the actual nature of time.

It's About Time (Pt. II)

In Saturday's post (On Time Pt.I) I wrote that:

[Physicist Paul] Davies is saying here that the flow of time is an illusion like the apparent movement of the sun across the sky is an illusion. It's we who are moving, not the sun. Likewise, on Davies' view, sometimes called the static view of time, every moment of time, every event, past, present, and future exists now, and somehow our consciousness moves from one to the next.

On this view, the universe is like a movie that has been instantaneously burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie exists simultaneously with every other event, but the characters in the movie, and even the person viewing the movie, perceive those events as happening sequentially.

Suppose for a moment that this is true. It would seem then that time does not exist "out there" but is rather somehow an internal feature of our minds. Time is a word we use to describe the way our minds apprehend events. Our minds create the illusion of temporality.

Immanuel Kant declared that "time, apart from the subject [i.e. the perceiver], is nothing". In other words, Kant is saying that time is not an objective reality at all but rather a structure of the human mind that enables us to experience the world. If Kant is correct then it follows that if there were no minds there'd be no time. There might be events like the events in the movie that's been impressed onto the DVD, but they wouldn't occur in any time unless they were experienced by a mind.

If we take this a step further it makes moot the questions of the age of the universe or the age of the earth. Since there were no minds (if we bracket out the mind of God) to perceive the unfolding of the universe, then from the original "Big Bang" to the appearance of minds the events would have all occurred instantly or simultaneously, like "burning" an entire movie instantly onto a DVD.

Eventually, when observers with minds appeared they looked back at the evidence of cosmic history and concluded that, had a human observer been watching this "movie" it would have taken about 13.5 billion years, but since we're assuming there were no observers, no minds, it didn't take any time at all.

In other words, when human beings look back at the history of cosmic evolution - the expansion of the universe, the birth and death of stars, radioactive disintegrations, etc. - it's like popping the DVD into the player and watching the movie. Until the movie is played and observed it's just a bunch of pits in a disc. There's no time on the disc. Nothing on the disc has any meaning until it's put in the player and observed by a mind.

If Kant's view that time is part of the structure of our minds is correct then if the human race, or at least all creatures with minds structured to experience time, were to disappear, time itself would disappear. Just as there would be no pain or sound or color if there were no organisms with senses structured to experience these sensations, likewise there'd be no time if there were no minds to experience it.

This seems astonishingly counter-intuitive, but then Galileo's view that it was the earth, not the celestial bodies, that was moving was also counter-intuitive. The more we learn about the universe the stranger it seems. Indeed, it's quite possible that the world we experience is in reality not at all as it appears to us to be.

It's also quite possible that the only way to hold onto the belief that there is an objective time - that time would continue to exist even if human beings and other minds were extinguished from the earth - is to believe that an objective time exists because an omnipresent mind, the mind of God, observes every event in the universe.

We'll finish up this discussion tomorrow.

It's About Time (Pt. I)

St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) wondered in his Confessions about the nature of time. He wrote that "As long as nobody asks me I know perfectly well what time is, but as soon as I'm asked to explain it I haven't the faintest idea".

Philosophers and scientists ever since have sympathized with Augustine's perplexity. Time has been called one of the universe's greatest mysteries, and no one really knows what it is.

John Steele, the publisher and editorial director of Nautilus puts some questions about time to physicist Paul Davies. In an interview for Nautilus Steele asks Davies the following:

• Is the flow of time real or an illusion?
• Where does the impression of flow of time come from?
• Is time fundamental to the Universe?
• Could time be an emergent property of the universe?
• If multiple universes exist, do they have a common clock?
• What do you think are the most exciting recent advances in understanding time?

Davies' answers to most of these questions amounts to an admission of scientists' ignorance on the topic, but his answer to the first question is interesting. He replies:

The flow of time is an illusion, and I don’t know very many scientists and philosophers who would disagree with that, to be perfectly honest. The reason that it is an illusion is when you stop to think, what does it even mean that time is flowing?

When we say something flows like a river, what we mean is an element of the river at one moment is in a different place of an earlier moment. In other words, it moves with respect to time. But time can’t move with respect to time—time is time. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the claim that time does not flow means that there is no time, that time does not exist. That’s nonsense. Time of course exists. We measure it with clocks. Clocks don’t measure the flow of time, they measure intervals of time. Of course there are intervals of time between different events; that’s what clocks measure.

Davies is saying here that the flow of time is an illusion like the apparent movement of the sun across the sky is an illusion. It's we who are moving, not the sun. Likewise, on Davies' view, sometimes called the static view of time, every moment of time, every event, past, present, and future exists now, and somehow our consciousness moves from one to the next.

On this view, the universe is like a movie that has been instantaneously burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie exists simultaneously with every other event, but the characters in the movie, and even the person viewing the movie, perceive those events as happening sequentially.

If this is true then it would seem that time does not exist "out there" but is rather somehow a feature of our minds. It's the way our minds apprehend events.

I'll have more to say about this on Monday.