Privileging Psychology Over Biology

Travis Barham at The Federalist recounts the stories of two prominent scholars:

In 2017, Dr. Allan Josephson spoke at the Heritage Foundation on how medical professionals should treat children with gender dysphoria. His talk was based on decades of research and clinical experience. For 15 years, Josephson led the University of Louisville’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, turning the program around. In the three years before his speech, he had earned perfect marks on his annual reviews.

At Heritage, he argued doctors should understand and treat the psychological issues that often cause this confusion before pursuing more radical, aggressive treatments. This sort of reasoned, methodical approach mirrors how medical professionals handle other conditions, let alone those where the treatments might have permanent, negative side-effects.

Yet these few short moments derailed his career. Within weeks of speaking, he was demoted because his remarks angered a few of his colleagues. For the next year, he endured a demeaning, hostile work environment, before the university announced it would not renew his contract, effectively firing him.

Similarly, Dr. Nicholas Meriwether had taught philosophy at Shawnee State University for more than two decades when, in 2018, he answered a male student’s question with a simple, “Yes, sir.” After class, the student demanded to be referred to as a woman. When Meriwether respectfully declined, the student became belligerent, called him an expletive, and promised to get him fired.

Meriwether offered to refer to the student by whatever name he wanted but declined to refer to him as a woman (e.g., “she” or “Ms.”) because that would force him to verbally affirm something he does not believe is true. This did not satisfy the student or the university.

Instead, Shawnee State punished Meriwether and warned that he risks “further corrective actions” if he continues to use sex-based terms. Numerous officials have told him this could include immediate firing or suspension without pay.

Set aside whatever opinions of transgenderism you might have for a moment and ponder a few questions:

1. Why does the transgender individual have a right to demand that everyone else conform to his or her belief about his/her gender? We wouldn't insist that others agree to our beliefs about any other aspect of our physical or psychological selves so why this? And why does the transgendered individual's desire to be called by the pronoun of his/her choice trump the right of others to act according to their sincere beliefs about the individual's gender?

It might be a courtesy to accede to the transgender's wishes, but it's hard to see why the transgendered individual should be entitled to be acceded to.

2. The conviction of a biological male that he's in fact a female is a psychological state of affairs. In other words, the person's psychology is discordant with the person's biology. So, on what grounds does society, or some segment of it, justify subordinating the facts concerning an individual's biology to the facts concerning the individual's psychology? Why does psychology enjoy this privileged status over biology? And why does the transgendered individual enjoy a privilege that's denied to those who choose not to acquiesce to the transgender's view of him or herself?

Even if some wish to extend the transgendered individual the courtesy of honoring his/her convictions, from whence does the transgendered person derive the right to demand that everyone do so, even to the point of ruining someone's career if they decline?

That behavior goes beyond merely asking others to respect one's subjective psychological conclusions about one's own gender and crosses the line into abject narcissism and cruelty.

This post is not taking a position for or against transgenderism. It should not be construed as a criticism of anyone sincerely wrestling with the issues raised by gender confusion.

Rather, it's a plea for kindness, grace and common sense. It's an argument on behalf of people like the scholars mentioned above who should have the freedom to act according to their beliefs, and for the proposition that their duty to respect their students does not entail that they have a duty to acquiesce to every demand that a student might make upon them.

Some, transgendered and otherwise, might disagree, but disagreement is the heart of the intellectual enterprise, it's what produces intellectual progress. As long as it's respectful and courteous it should be nurtured and promoted, not stifled.

Sibling Rivals

There's a misconception perpetrated by many progressives that the group Antifa is comprised of people who are not only hostile to fascism but are the antithesis of fascists.

In fact, Antifa, being putatively an organization of far-left socialists, has more in common with fascism than most of its progressive supporters are willing to admit. Indeed, far-left socialism, or communism, has always had something of an ideological kinship with fascism even though there's a great deal of sibling rivalry and even hostility between the two.

Both are totalitarian and oppressive, both are based on socialist economies, both use anarchy and chaos to acquire power, and both promote, and are typified by, hatred.

The differences between them are fairly insignificant. Fascists generally tend to be more nationalistic and focus their hatreds on those of different ethnicities from themselves. Communists tend to be more internationalist and direct their hatreds toward those in the upper socio-economic classes and adherents to theistic religions. In other words, they both practice identity politics.

Because both are forms of socialism it's misleading to call the fascists "far-right." They are, in fact, leftists, and their antipathy toward communist socialists is the hatred spawned between ideological brothers who disagree on relatively minor matters regarding their inheritance.

I discuss all this in more detail here, but the important point to be made in the present post is that the distinctions between Antifa and the Nazi-style white supremacists they despise are minor. They're two faces of the same evil, and no decent person should associate with, or defend, either of them.

An interesting piece by Tyler Stone at The Federalist explains some of the history between the Nazi fascists and the Soviet communists. Were it not for Hitler's betrayal of Stalin, Germany and the Soviet Union might well today share global hegemony.

After recounting the sordid history of cooperation between the communists and the fascists in the late 30s and early 40s Stone concludes with this:

The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany desired the same goals: to defeat democracies, independent Republics, and individual freedom throughout Europe (and the world). Communism and Nazism are just different sides to the same totalitarian coin....

Communism stood side by side with Nazism, and marched with it across Europe. As Friedrich Hayek in his book, “Road to Serfdom,” states: “[T]o both [Nazis and Communists], the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type [i.e. conservatives].”

If the left wants to remove offensive objects from history, then perhaps they should start by acknowledging that the hammer and sickle is just as hateful and oppressive as the swastika.

It's an interesting historical fact that progressives and communists in the United States, prior to Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, were very supportive of Hitler and his demands. As long as the fascists and communists were allies the left in the U.S. insisted that the United States remain neutral in the conflict unfolding in Europe, but once Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. American communists and their progressive acolytes did a complete turn-about and beat the drums for war against Germany.

One lesson in this, I suppose, is that we should be very careful about being seduced by what groups like Antifa proclaim as their goal. Their agenda is, in fact, the erection of a totalitarian state and the abolition of individual freedom, and they'll do and say whatever it takes to achieve that end. Indeed, one of their heroes, Vladimir Lenin, said this in a speech in 1920:

We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order...

Thus began a movement which, before the end of the twentieth century, had murdered approximately 100 million people. Antifa and groups like it are the ideological heirs of both Lenin and Hitler, and we should put as much distance between them and ourselves as we do between ourselves and the neo-Nazis.

Embryogenesis and Information

Do you have six minutes? Watch this time lapse video of a fertilized egg developing into a newt, and ask yourself as you're watching how each of the cells in this embryo "knows" where to go and how to get there.

That the migrating cells wind up in the right place is crucial lest the newt have a leg grow out of its head or an eye grow out of its tail. Obviously, there's an enormous amount of information directing this process, so it's worthwhile to ask where the information comes from that coordinates everything you see happening. Complex information that programs a specific process is uniquely the product of minds. It's never the product of blind, random forces like those posited in the Darwinian hypothesis.

But if purposeless biochemical processes are inadequate to explain the complex, specified information that guides embryogenesis, if only minds can provide an adequate explanation, where did the information responsible for the development of this newt and, indeed, of every living thing, come from and how did it arise in biological history?

This is a very difficult and perplexing problem for anyone holding a materialistic, naturalistic worldview, one that's causing a lot of folks who hold to that worldview to have second thoughts about Darwinian evolution.

The Politics of Hatred

How did it come about that popular opinion seems to hold that hatred exists predominantly on the ideological right, even though historically, and even contemporaneously, the left is as equally riven with hateful rhetoric and deeds as is the right, and quite arguably much more.

Historians can probably point to several events in which the "political right = haters" had its genesis, but one contender for the most salient example was the propaganda following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Kennedy was an icon on the left despite pushing economic and foreign policies that were anything but compatible with leftist ideology.

According to Jonah Goldberg writing in his excellent book Liberal Fascism, Kennedy campaigned on a the need for stronger military defense. He tried to depose Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba, and presided over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He brought the world to the threshold of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis, and got us deep into a pointless war in Vietnam before he was assassinated.

He also cut taxes, and although he championed civil rights legislation for blacks, he was simply building on what Republicans had started in the 1950s under Dwight Eisenhower.

Nevertheless, he became posthumously a mythical character among liberals. When he was shot, the media, particularly people like CBS reporter Dan Rather, were quick to blame the political right for the crime and brand Dallas, Texas, the city and state in which the assassination occurred, the loci of hate in America.

When it turned out that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was in fact a Marxist, a man of the left, liberals were stunned. They proceeded, however, to nourish the Kennedy mystique, ascribing heroic traits to the man that he never possessed in real life and claiming that anyone (i.e. Republicans) who opposed him politically must've been motivated by hatred.

The irony is that Kennedy was much closer ideologically to contemporary Republicans than he would've been to contemporary Democrats, or even to Democrats of the 1960s.

The point, though, is that Kennedy hagiography became a big business. He was turned into a martyr by his party and a media which, always eager to be seduced by superficiality, adored him for his charmingly suave persona.

In order to achieve his canonization, however, his opponents had to be vilified and it was convenient to accomplish this by convincing people that his opponents were "haters."

The ruse worked, and continued to work for several decades thereafter, largely because people got their political opinions from relatively few sources, almost all of which were committed to propagating the myth of Kennedy sainthood and right-wing hatred.

Even today, the left continues to push the meme, labelling much that Republicans, especially the president, say as hateful, racist, bigoted, etc., and people who lack the time or the inclination to ask what, exactly, is hateful about whatever it is that has been called such by the media or one's Facebook friends, simply accept that it must be.

It would be good for all of us to think more critically when these terms are tossed about, to ask, when someone calls someone else a racist, what their definition of a racist is and how and why it applies to the individual in question.

Many times we'll find that those using these labels have no good answer to these questions. They simply use them as rhetorical vehicles for expressing their dislike for the other and because it saves them the hard work of having to develop arguments and to actually think.

Intellectual Integrity

Anyone who engages in public commentary and debate is often tempted to color facts to better fit his position, to overstate his case, or to do something which might be intellectually not-quite-honest. 

Some ten years ago a blogger who called himself Mike Gene did a post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty in which he listed ten good rules to follow when participating with others in dialogue.

Since the link to his post no longer works I'll take the liberty to list his ten rules along with his explanations (slightly edited). They're very much worth heeding for anyone who wishes to participate in the debates occurring in our contemporary public square.

Here they are:

1. Do not overstate the power of your argument. One's sense of conviction should be in proportion to the level of clear evidence assessable by most. If someone portrays his opponents as being stupid or dishonest for disagreeing, intellectual dishonesty is probably in play. Intellectual honesty is most often associated with humility, not arrogance.

2. Show a willingness to publicly acknowledge that reasonable alternative viewpoints exist. The alternative views do not have to be treated as equally valid or powerful, but rarely is it the case that one and only one viewpoint has a complete monopoly on reason and evidence.

3. Be willing to publicly acknowledge and question one's own assumptions and biases. All of us rely on assumptions when applying our worldview to make sense of the data about the world, and all of us bring various biases to the table.

4. Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points.

5.Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Those selling an ideology often have great difficulty admitting to being wrong as this undercuts the rhetoric and image that is being sold. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

6. Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

7. Address the argument instead of the person making the argument. Ad hominem arguments are a clear sign of intellectual dishonesty. When resorts to insulting their opponent, often by relying on stereotypes, guilt-by-association, and superficially innocent-sounding "gotcha" questions they're revealing the inadequacy of their own arguments and trying to deflect attention away from that inadequacy.

8. When addressing your opponent's argument, do not misrepresent it. Misrepresenting an argument in order to make it look weaker and easier to defeat is called the "straw man" fallacy. Straw man often occurs when people are quoted out-of-context or are paraphrased incorrectly. When critiquing an argument one should show that one has made a good faith effort to both understand it and to represent it in its strongest form.

9. Demonstrate a commitment to critical thinking. This seems self-explanatory.

10. Be willing to publicly acknowledge when one's opponent has made a good point or criticism. If someone is unwilling to admit that his opponent has made a telling point or an incisive criticism it demonstrates an unwillingness to honestly engage in the give-and-take of dialogue.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules Mike describes I sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary nonetheless. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed. 

Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. I've printed out Mike's Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty and have them posted over my computer.

Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

Why Darwinism Is in Trouble

I prefer to avoid posting long videos because life is short and people don't have the time to commit to a lengthy conversation between two interlocutors even if both are uncommonly sharp.

I'm going to make an exception, though, for a video of an interview by Ben Shapiro of philosopher of science Stephen Meyer about the challenge posed to Darwinism by the theory of intelligent design.

You wouldn't know it from reading most media outlets, but the theory of Darwinian evolution is currently in profound turmoil and Meyer does a masterful job of explaining why as he addresses Shapiro's very incisive questions.

Sometimes conversations like this tend to ramble and get lost in the weeds, but this one is extremely focussed and informative.

The video is just short of an hour long, but it's like taking an entire course in one class period. Shapiro asks all the right questions. He's perhaps the most well-informed lay interviewer on this topic that I've seen, and Meyer is simply brilliant.

Give it ten minutes and see if you don't want to keep watching. If the topic is one that interests you, and it should interest everyone who thinks deeply about life because it has enormous worldview ramifications, I bet you'll want to stay with it longer:

Butterfly Metamorphosis

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies highlight the incredible difficulties faced by any purely unguided and natural account of the origin of metamorphosis.

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no plausible answer.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

Condemning Nationalism

The journal Commonweal has published an open letter ostensibly in response to a similar manifesto which appeared in the March issue of First Things. Commonweal so strongly agreed with the letter that they chose to run it even though their staff was not involved in its composition.

At any rate, the signatories are concerned by a "disturbing rise of nationalism, especially among some Christians, in the United States" which they espy in the First Things missive.

It's hard to say what in the First Things piece was so objectionable, but apparently there was enough there to animate the letter published by Commonweal and from which the following excerpts are lifted. I'd like to offer some critical reflections on the excerpts and will begin in the middle of the letter where the authors contrast nationalism with patriotism:

To be clear, nationalism is not the same as patriotism. Nationalism forges political belonging out of religious, ethnic, and racial identities, loyalties intended to precede and supersede law. Patriotism, by contrast, is love of the laws and loyalty to them over leader or party. Such nationalism is not only politically dangerous but reflects profound theological errors that threaten the integrity of Christian faith. It damages the love of neighbor and betrays Christ.

This seems a tendentious definition of nationalism. I would suggest instead that nationalism "forges political belonging" out of a shared national identity. As such it seems to me to be both salutary and innocuous, but having said that, what seems to be happening in this country is more in line with the authors' definition of patriotism. That is, what we're seeing unfold is a frustration with the failure of our political leaders to uphold the laws of the land, especially with respect to immigration, despite a patriotic desire on the part of many Americans to remain faithful to those laws, a desire that transcends party affiliation.

American Christians now face a moment whose deadly violence has brought such analogies to mind. Again we watch as demagogues demonize vulnerable minorities as infesting vermin or invading forces who weaken the nation and must be removed.

Who demonized vulnerable minorities as "infesting vermin?" It would be very helpful if the authors would quote the relevant claims rather than tacitly expecting us to simply trust them to have quoted the "demagogues" correctly. And why is it inaccurate to characterize tens of thousands of people storming across our borders illegally as an "invasion?"

Without answers to these questions the above paragraph is meaningless.

Again we watch as fellow Christians weigh whether to fuse their faith with nationalist and ethno-nationalist politics in order to strengthen their cultural footing. Again ethnic majorities confuse their political bloc with Christianity itself.

This may in fact be happening although to what extent it's happening is certainly unclear. Even so, the authors are correct to deplore anyone confusing Christianity with a particular political party. The disconcerting thing about this concern, though, is that liberal Christians, like those in the black church, and those on staff at journals like Sojourners and Commonweal have been acting like the religious arm of the Democrat party for decades and liberal thinkers have been indifferent or even supportive.

It seems that it's only when conservative Christians start to confuse politics and the gospel that folks like the letter-signers become alarmed.

Then follow five aspects of what the signatories perceive to characterize our present moment and to which they express their disapprobation:

1. We reject the pretensions of nationalism to usurp our highest loyalties. National identity has no bearing on the debts of love we owe other sons and daughters of God. Created in the image and likeness of God, all human beings are our neighbors regardless of citizenship status.

True enough, but how is insistence upon border security and an orderly process of immigration unloving? The signatories don't say. One wonders whether they themselves lock the doors to their homes and cars when they leave them or whether they lovingly welcome anyone who wishes to avail themselves of their houses and vehicles to do so whenever they please.

2. We reject nationalism’s tendency to homogenize and narrow the church to a single ethnos. The church cannot be itself unless filled with disciples “from all nations” (panta ta ethné, Matthew 28:19). Cities, states, and nations have borders; the church never does. If the church is not ethnically plural, it is not the church, which requires a diversity of tongues out of obedience to the Lord.

Why this appears in this manifesto is a head-scratcher. To the extent that there's anything non-trivial here who disagrees with it?

3. We reject the xenophobia and racism of many forms of ethno-nationalism, explicit and implicit, as grave sins against God the Creator. Violence done against the bodies of marginalized people is violence done against the body of Christ. Indifference to the suffering of orphans, refugees, and prisoners is indifference to Jesus Christ and his cross. White supremacist ideology is the work of the anti-Christ.

Yes, but if the authors are going to suggest that white supremacy is infecting the Church they need to do more than simply assert it. They need to offer some supporting evidence.

Of course, there are white supremacists outside the Church, just as there are black supremacists, and like the black variety some of the whites are horribly virulent, but do the authors mean to imply that President Trump is among them? On what basis do they make this implication? Is it based on the fact that he wants our laws to be enforced and our borders secured? Does that make him a white supremacist? If so, he's got quite a lot of company, including many blacks and Hispanics as well as former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

4. We reject nationalism’s claim that the stranger, refugee, and migrant are enemies of the people. Where nationalism fears the stranger as a threat to political community, the church welcomes the stranger as necessary for full communion with God. Jesus Christ identifies himself with the poor, imprisoned foreigner in need of hospitality. “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me” (Matthew 25:41-43).

So what's to be concluded from this? That we're not feeding, clothing, and providing drink for those who are here illegally? That's simply false. Or is it that we should open our doors to everyone in the world to come here and be fed, clothed and sheltered? If that's how we're to understand it, it's nonsense.

Again, it should be asked whether everyone who agrees with this letter has removed the locks from their homes, cars and businesses so that anyone in need can partake of whatever amenities they might find therein. If they really believed what they've signed on to in this letter then it seems hypocritical not to exemplify these ideals in their personal lives. To fail to do so is to suggest that their public approval of the contents of the letter is mere virtue preening.

5. We reject the nationalist’s inclination to despair when unable to monopolize power and dominate opponents. When Christians change from majority to minority status in a given country, they should not contort their witness in order to stay in power. The church remains the church even as a political minority, even when unable to influence the government or when facing persecution.

Yes, so what's the point? What does this statement have to do with our present circumstance? How is the church contorting its witness? The authors simply proclaim that it should not do it. Very well, but without some sort of explanation they may as well have proclaimed that neither should the church violate the ten commandments.

The letter suffers from such vagueness and nebulosity that it's really hard to tell exactly what the authors and signatories were trying to say. Without more specific explanation the letter is little more than an exercise in trumpeting the authors' moral superiority and is otherwise frivolous.

Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism

The recent controversy surrounding the proposed trip to Israel by Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib raised once again the question of the distinctions between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

One often hears that one can be a critic of Israel without being anti-Semitic. That's true. One also hears that one can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. That's not true.

Dennis Prager gives us a very helpful explanation of the nature of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at PJ Media and why the latter really amounts to the former.

His essay opens with a thought experiment:

Imagine a group of people who work to destroy Italy because, they claim, Italy's origins are illegitimate. Imagine further that these people maintain that of all the countries in the world, only Italy is illegitimate. And then imagine that these people vigorously deny they are in any way anti-Italian. Would you believe them? Or would you dismiss their argument as not only dishonest but absurd?

Substitute "Israel" for "Italy" and "Jew" for "Italian" and you'll understand the dishonesty and absurdity of the argument that one can be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.

But that is precisely what anti-Zionists say. They argue that the very existence of a Jewish state in the geographic area known as Palestine -- there was never an independent country known as Palestine -- is illegitimate. They do not believe any other country in the world is illegitimate, no matter how bloody its origins. And then they get offended when they're accused of being anti-Semitic.

Prager then goes on to discuss five arguments commonly employed by anti-Semites, like Omar and Tlaib, who wish to mask their anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. Here's the first:

They say it is unfair to charge those who merely "criticize" Israel with being anti-Semitic. But I don't know anyone who does that. It's a phony argument. Criticism of Israel is fine. Denying Israel's right to exist is not. Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israel. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Israel's existence.

Zionism is the movement for the return of Jews to their ancient homeland, Israel. Over the past 3,000 years, there were two independent Jewish states located in what is called Israel. Both were destroyed by invaders, and no Arab or Muslim or any other independent country ever existed in that land, which was only named Palestine by the Romans in an attempt to remove all memory of the Jewish state they destroyed in the year A.D. 70.

Read the rest at the link. The fourth and fifth are especially informative.

Omar and Tlaib, it should be noted, both support the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) directed against Israel. The tacit purpose of the BDS effort is to so weaken Israel economically that it can no longer resist those who would destroy it. That goal is both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.

The kind of hatred that drives the BDS movement should have no home in either political party and certainly not in the Congress of the United States.

The Eric Garner Decision

The police officer who killed Eric Garner five years ago has been dismissed from the force, and from everything I've seen about this tragic story he should've been. The officer's name was Daniel Pantaleo and the death occurred as he was trying to arrest Garner, a black man who was illegally selling cigarettes and refusing to cooperate.

Officer Pantaleo and Garner grappled during the confrontation and Pantaleo applied a choke hold the use of which, according to the police training manual, should have been terminated as soon as Garner was subdued. It was not. Garner protested that he couldn't breath, suffered a heart attack and died.

Garner should not have resisted, but Pantaleo had subdued him, had backup to assist him and was in violation of official procedures by unnecessarily continuing the deadly chokehold. Although I generally support the police as far as possible, and although I recognize that they have a very difficult job dealing with recalcitrants like Garner, I have to ask how I'd feel about what happened if Garner had been my own father or my son.

Applying that test, I have no doubt that I would think that but for the officer's lack of disciplined response my loved one would still be alive.

Having said all that, I also have to wonder what the motive of the national media has been in giving this case and others like it such prominence. Is the media trying deliberately to provoke racial antagonism and bitterness in this country?

The reason I ask is because there was another case of an officer killing an already subdued miscreant four years ago that no media people outside the local area showed any interest in at all, and in that case the officer wasn't even fired.

In the incident to which I refer the officer actually shot and killed the man being arrested as he lay on the ground, immobilized by the officer's taser (there's body cam video at the link for those who can bear to watch), so why have you probably never heard about this tragedy? Why didn't Al Sharpton rush to get himself in front of all the cameras on behalf of this victim?

Here's a possible answer: The officer was a white female, the man she killed was a white male fleeing from a traffic stop. No racial angle there. Nothing to inflame passions and stir up civil unrest. Nothing to stoke peoples' hatred for each other. Nothing to fit the narrative of "racist" cops. Ergo, this is a non-story as far as our national media are concerned.

What other reason could there be for the constant publicity for the Eric Garner death and the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, both of which involved the deaths of black men at the hands of white officers, and the total media indifference toward the case in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania?

Little wonder the national media is held in such contempt by so many Americans.

An Extraordinary Man

August 14th marked the anniversary of the death of an extraordinary man. He was born Raymond Kolbe in Poland in 1894. In 1910 he became a Franciscan and took the name Maximilian, eventually managing a friary outside of Warsaw which housed 762 Franciscans.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he committed his friary to sheltering thousands of Polish and Jewish refugees. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them.

In May 1941 the friary was closed down and Maximilian and four companions were taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, where they worked with the other prisoners.

On June 15, 1941, he managed to write a letter to his mother:

Dear Mama, At the end of the month of May I was transferred to the camp of Auschwitz. Everything is well in my regard. Be tranquil about me and about my health, because the good God is everywhere and provides for everything with love. It would be well that you do not write to me until you will have received other news from me, because I do not know how long I will stay here. Cordial greetings and kisses, affectionately. Raymond.

One day an SS officer found some of the heaviest planks he could lay hold of and personally loaded them on the Franciscan's back, ordering him to run. When he collapsed, the SS officer kicked him in the stomach and face and had his men give him fifty lashes.

When the priest lost consciousness the Nazis threw him in the mud and left him for dead. But his companions managed to smuggle him to the camp infirmary - and he recovered.

Prisoners at Auschwitz were slowly and systematically starved, and their pitiful rations were barely enough to sustain a child: one cup of imitation coffee in the morning, and weak soup and half a loaf of bread after work. When food was brought, everyone struggled to get his place and be sure of a portion.

Father Maximilian Kolbe however, stood aside in spite of the ravages of starvation, and frequently there would be none left for him. At other times he shared his meager ration of soup or bread with others. At night he moved from bunk to bunk, saying: "I am a Catholic priest. Can I do anything for you?"

A prisoner later recalled how he and several others often crawled across the floor at night to be near the bed of Father Kolbe, to make their confessions and ask for consolation. Father Kolbe pleaded with his fellow prisoners to forgive their persecutors and to overcome evil with good. When he was beaten by the guards, he never cried out. Instead, he prayed for his tormentors.

A Protestant doctor who treated the patients in Kolbe's block later recalled how Father Kolbe waited until all the others had been treated before asking for help. He constantly sacrificed himself for the others.

One doctor, Rudolph Diem, later recalled: "I can say with certainty that during my four years in Auschwitz, I never saw such a sublime example of the love of God and one's neighbor."

All this was extraordinary but what happened next was astonishing:

In order to discourage escapes, Auschwitz had a rule that if a man escaped, ten men would be killed in retaliation. In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped.

The other men of the bunker were lined up.

"The fugitive has not been found!" the commandant Karl Fritsch screamed. "You will all pay for this. Ten of you will be locked in the starvation bunker without food or water until they die." The prisoners trembled in terror. A few days in this bunker without food and water, and a man's intestines dried up and his brain turned to fire.

The ten were selected, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He couldn't help a cry of anguish. "My poor wife!" he sobbed. "My poor children! What will they do?"

When he uttered this cry of dismay, Maximilian stepped silently forward, took off his cap, and stood before the commandant and said, "I am a Catholic priest. Let me take his place. I am old. He has a wife and children."

Astounded, the icy-faced Nazi commandant asked, "What does this Polish pig want?"

Father Kolbe pointed with his hand to the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek and repeated "I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children."

Observers believed in horror that the commandant would be angered and would refuse the request, or would order the death of both men. The commandant remained silent for a moment. Amazingly, he acceded to the request. Franciszek Gajowniczek was returned to the ranks, and the priest took his place.

Gajowniczek later recalled:

I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.

Father Kolbe was thrown down the stairs into a bunker along with the other victims and simply left there to starve. Hunger and thirst soon gnawed at the men. Some drank their own urine, others licked moisture on the dank walls. Maximilian Kolbe encouraged the others with prayers, psalms, and meditations on the Passion of Christ.

After two weeks, only four were alive. The cell was needed for more victims, and the camp executioner, a common criminal called Bock, came in and injected a lethal dose of carbolic acid into the left arm of each of the four dying men.

Kolbe was the only one still fully conscious and with a prayer on his lips, the last prisoner raised his arm for the executioner. His wait was over. A personal testimony about the way Maximilian Kolbe met death is given by Bruno Borgowiec, one of the few Poles who were assigned to render service to the starvation bunker. He told it to his parish priest before he died in 1947:

The ten condemned to death went through terrible days. From the underground cell in which they were shut up there continually arose the echo of prayers and canticles. The man in-charge of emptying the buckets of urine found them always empty. Thirst drove the prisoners to drink the contents.

Since they had grown very weak, prayers were now only whispered. At every inspection, when almost all the others were now lying on the floor, Father Kolbe was seen kneeling or standing in the centre as he looked cheerfully in the face of the SS men.

Father Kolbe never asked for anything and did not complain, rather he encouraged the others, saying that the fugitive might be found and then they would all be freed. One of the SS guards remarked: this priest is really a great man. We have never seen anyone like him.

Two weeks passed in this way. Meanwhile one after another they died, until only Father Kolbe was left. This the authorities felt was too long. The cell was needed for new victims. So one day they brought in the head of the sick-quarters, a German named Bock, who gave Father Kolbe an injection of carbolic acid in the vein of his left arm.

Father Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this I left under the pretext of work to be done. Immediately after the SS men had left I returned to the cell, where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.

The date of his execution was 14 August, 1941 at the age of forty-seven years.

Ironically, the escaped prisoner was later found drowned in a camp latrine, so the terrible reprisals had been exercised without cause.

Father Kolbe's body was removed to the crematorium, and without dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow.

The cell where Father Kolbe died is now a shrine. Maximilian Kolbe was beatified as Confessor by Paul VI in 1970, and canonized as Martyr by Pope John Paul II in 1981.

Franciszek Gajowniczek died on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in Poland, 95 years old - and 53 years after Kolbe had saved him. But he was never to forget the ragged monk.

After his release from Auschwitz, Gajowniczek made his way back to his hometown, with the dream of seeing his family again. He found his wife but his two sons had been killed during the war.

Every year on August 14 he went back to Auschwitz. He spent the next five decades paying homage to Father Kolbe, honoring the man who died on his behalf.

It's an amazing story about an exceptional man. To give one's life for a loved one is poignant. To give one's life for a stranger is more than human, it's divine.

Atheism and Moral Duties

Lincoln Mullen wrote a review, a couple of years back, of Peter Watson's The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.

In the course of his review, Mullen makes a point which I think needs to be clarified. He writes that:

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals.

He might be correct that this is a common charge, but even so, the moral problem that Christians (and theists in general) have with atheism is not that atheists don't have moral values but rather that they have no ground for making moral judgments beyond their own subjective preferences.

Take a concrete example: A tobacco company lies about the danger its product poses to the consumer. A theist would say that such deception is objectively wrong because it violates the will of the Creator who commands that people be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness - a command that imposes a clear moral duty not to harm people.

The atheist may also be outraged that the tobacco company has lied to people about the hazards of using its product, but the only reason they could have, if atheism is true, for condemning the company's behavior is that they simply don't like it. If an atheist were to respond to this by insisting that it's just wrong to hurt people, the question then needs to be asked, "Why is it wrong?"

If atheism is true then we are here as a result of a blind, impersonal, evolutionary process, and blind, impersonal processes cannot impose a moral duty on anyone to do anything. Nor can such processes prescribe or proscribe behavior, nor pronounce a behavior wrong in any meaningful moral sense.

Lots of thoughtful atheists have admitted this. Consider a few quotes from thinkers, all of whom are, or were, atheists:

• What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. ~ Richard Dawkins
• What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after. ~ Ernest Hemmingway
• This philosopher (Joel Marks is speaking of himself) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. ~ Joel Marks
• Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs....The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways. ~ Margaret Sanger
• For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel. ~ Richard Rorty.
• The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower. ~ Leo Tolstoy
• Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. ~ Karl Marx
• One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best. ~ Charles Darwin
• As evolutionists, we see that no justification (of morality) of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place. ~ E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... ~ Will Provine
• I would accept Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that if you do not believe in God, you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do. ~ Richard Rorty

So, the problem atheism has with morality, as the theist sees it, is not that atheists can't choose to adopt the sort of values of which society approves. Of course, they can. The problem is that they wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense had they chosen to adopt completely opposite values. Their choice is purely a matter of personal preference, like choosing to paint their house brown instead of green.

Thus, it's puzzling when atheists adopt the view that they hold to a superior morality than that of Christians as Mullen asserts in a later passage:

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

The most the atheist can claim, however, is that, on the Christian's own assumptions, the atheist's views on these issues might be closer to what God wills than are the Christian's views, but in order to make this claim the atheist has to piggyback on the theist's belief that both God and objective moral duties exist.

Moreover, the atheist cannot say that the theist is wrong in holding the views on these issues that perhaps he does. The most the atheist can say is that the theist's views are inconsistent with what he professes to believe about God's moral will.

Of course, it may be true that the theist is not acting consistently with his fundamental moral assumptions, but that doesn't make those fundamental assumptions wrong, and it certainly doesn't make them inferior to the atheist's values which are grounded in nothing more authoritative than his own tastes.

This is the point I seek to make in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss. An atheist, if he's to be consistent, can either give up the pretense of holding to some non-arbitrary moral standard and admit that he's just making his morality up as he goes along, or he can admit that he believes that right and wrong are not merely matters of subjective preference but are real, objective features of the world. If he admits that, however, then, to be consistent, he'd have to give up his atheism and become a theist.

He has to do one or the other, or he could simply do neither and admit that he prefers to live irrationally, which is the option many atheists apparently settle upon.

Alternative Reading Frames

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each. Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence.

The only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be. But why decide that? What reason can be adduced upon which such a decision might be based? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is that they have a strong preference that no such being exist and they allow their preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Gauger doesn't address that question, but her article is still very good.

Trump/Hitler

The progressive left often signals desperation when they stoop to comparing their political enemies to Adolf Hitler and throwing around labels such as "Nazi" and "fascist." PJ Media lists seven times (!) when talkers on just a single network, MSNBC, made the Hitlerian comparison in the solitary month of July, and the person being analogized to Hitler was, of course, the nefarious Donald Trump.

There may well be people in this country who deserve to be compared to Hitler. There may be people in this country who are genuine fascists, but almost certainly the majority, if not the totality, of such people in this country are on the ideological left. Nazism and fascism are ideologies of the left, not the right, although ever since Stalin the left has tried to convince the world that the truth is otherwise.

In his excellent 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg elucidates the nature of fascism and Nazism and shows beyond any reasonable doubt that these two statist, totalitarian ideologies both fall on the left end of the political spectrum and in fact have much more in common with American progressivism than they do with whatever political philosophy informs Mr. Trump's thinking.

And certainly, Mr. Goldberg argues, neither Nazism or fascism bears any similarity at all to conservatism.

To understand the absurdity of the Trump/Hitler nexus it's helpful to understand that, according to Goldberg, Hitler was driven by four main ideas: 1) power concentrated in himself, 2) hatred of the Jews, 3) faith in the racial superiority of the German people, and 4) the employment of war to secure the other three.

There's no evidence that Trump has any of these traits and much evidence that he has none of them. Taking them in turn, a man who wishes to concentrate power in himself would not undo Obama's executive orders, deregulate industry and appoint constitutionalist judges and justices. Indeed, it's because President Trump is dismantling the consolidation of power that has accrued to the executive and judicial branches of government over the last couple of decades that accounts for the left's virulent hatred of the man and their desperation to get him out of office.

Nor is there a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump is anti-semitic. An anti-semite would not have moved our embassy to Jerusalem, would not tolerate a Jewish son-in-law, nor would an anti-semite have such a close relationship with Israel and look with such favor on that nation. For genuine anti-semitism one has to look at certain congressional Democrats and the left's BDS movement which flourishes on American university campuses.

Some have accused the president of Hitlerian racism because he's been critical of political opponents who happen to be people of color. The charge is ludicrous inasmuch as in order for it to be at all credible one has to assume that it's an act of racism to criticize anyone who happens to be a member of a minority race. If this assumption is seen for the absurdity that it is then none of the allegations of racism made against Trump make any sense.

Finally, Mr. Trump has been the least hawkish president we've had since Jimmy Carter. He has repeatedly shied away from the use of military force even when he could've justified its use, such as when the Iranians shot down our drone in international waters. It's absurd to identify a man so averse to military adventures with the man who wallowed in them.

The left has always accused their opponents of the same sins of which they themselves are guilty, and in the attempt to identify Trump with the erstwhile leader of the Nazi party they present us with another instance of this tactic.

The Nazis under Hitler were, like the left, revolutionary, not conservative; they came to power exploiting a socialist, anti-capitalist platform; they emphasized environmentalism, health food and exercise; they sought to diminish or eradicate the influence of Christianity, transcend notions of class and were masters of the practice of identity politics.

They favored universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the elderly, expropriation of land and industry, and state health care.

Moreover, their ethics, such as they were, were entirely pragmatic. Whatever worked to achieve their goal was ipso facto the right thing to do. Like postmodern progressives they believed that truth and falsehood were arbitrary terms, that the "truth" of an idea lay in its power to inspire the people. It mattered very little whether the idea was actually true or false.

The only real differences between the Nazis and the communists of the 1930s and their progressive contemporaries and their descendents was that the Nazis were nationalists and the communists/progressives were internationalists. The Nazis divided people by race, the communists/progressives divide them by class. Hitler hated the communists of his day, not because he disagreed with them on economics, he didn't, but because in his paranoia he believed they were a Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe.

So, when progressives hurl the Hitlerian epithet at Donald Trump, they're showing not only an astounding ignorance of who Hitler was and what he believed, they're also revealing an astounding ignorance of their own history and current ideological kinship to the people they claim to deplore.

More on the Mind/Body Problem

Yesterday's post closed with the question of what's at stake in the debate between materialists and dualists. Materialism is the belief that human beings are comprised solely of material stuff and that everything about us can, in theory, be explained in terms of matter (and energy).

Dualists maintain that human beings display certain traits that cannot even in principle be explained in terms of material, physical causes, among which are the phenomena of consciousness. This fact leads them to conclude that there must be something else about us that's involved in our mental life. This something else must somehow be integrated with the material brain yet immaterial and non-spatial and not reducible to the brain.

This something else has traditionally been called the mind or soul.

So why does it matter? Well, if materialism is correct several consequences follow that many consider to be hard to reconcile with our human experience.

For example, if we're just material beings completely in thrall to the laws of physics it's hard to see how there could be anything like free will. All our choices must be the consequence of prior events occuring in our brains over which we have no real control.

But if that's so then we're not really responsible for our choices, in which case there's really no such thing as morality. For morality and moral responsibility to exist individuals must exert some control over the choices they make.

Also, if we have no free will it's hard to see how the notion of human dignity can be anything more than a pleasant illusion. We're just animals like any other. Yes, we have the ability to reason and speak, but some animals have the ability to fly or swim. Why is rationality and speech to be privileged over flight or grace under water?

And if we're just animals what exactly do we mean when we talk about human rights or human equality? Are animals all equal? Do animals have rights? If so, where do they come from?

Moreover, if we're merely a particular arrangement of carbon and assorted other atoms it's very hard to say what we mean when we talk about the self. Can there be a self, an I, if the atoms that comprise our bodies are constantly being replaced by other atoms and the contents of our brains are constantly changing?

We are no more the same self over time than the image of a kaleidoscope is the same image over time.

Finally, if materialism is true and there is no mind or soul it becomes much more difficult to believe that anything about us survives the death of our bodies. The notion of an afterlife becomes increasingly tenuous as does belief that there exists an immaterial being or mind called God.

Ideas have consequences. If we choose to believe the idea that we are purely physical matter then it's hard to see how we can avoid accepting all of implications listed above, and indeed most materialists do accept all of those implications.

If, on the other hand, we believe we're not just a material body but also an immaterial mind then those difficulties evaporate.

Which view, then, conforms most comfortably with our experience of life, a view which entails a denial of free will, moral responsibility, human dignity, human rights, human equality, the self and the hope of God and an afterlife, or a view which is compatible with all of these?

The Mind/Body Problem

Jonathan Westphal is an Oxford philosopher who has written a book on the mind/body problem in philosophy, and the MIT website The Reader has an interesting article by Westphal that's excerpted from his book.

The mind/body or mind/brain problem is essentially the problem of ascertaining whether we are simply a material, physical being, a body, or whether, in addition to our material selves we also have an immaterial mind that's non-physical and non-spatial.

The article begins by giving a description of the problem based on an everyday event such as seeing a cup of coffee:

[T]he physical story is that light enters my eyes from the cup of coffee, and this light impinges on the two retinas at the backs of the eyes. Then, as we have learned from physiological science, the two retinas send electrical signals past the optic chiasm down the optic nerve.

These signals are conveyed to the so-called visual cortex at the back of the brain. And then there is a sort of a miracle.

The visual cortex becomes active, and I see the coffee cup. I am conscious of the cup, we might even say, though it is not clear what this means and how it differs from saying that I see the cup.

It does indeed seem miraculous. No one knows how it happens that chemical reactions in the brain produce an image that seems to be in the brain but which is invisible to any outside observer examining the brain. Only the individual looking at the cup "sees" the image. No one looking at his brain can see what he's seeing. Westphal goes on:

One minute there are just neurons firing away, and no image of the cup of coffee. The next, there it is; I see the cup of coffee, a foot away. How did my neurons contact me or my mind or consciousness, and stamp there the image of the cup of coffee for me?

It’s a mystery. That mystery is the mind-body problem.

Part of the mystery consists in explaining what exactly the image of the coffee cup is and how electrochemical impulses flowing along a neuron could produce it. After all, brain matter is physical matter, it's spatial, but the image is immaterial and non-spatial. We say it's in our brains but if we could peer inside our brains we wouldn't see a picture of a coffee cup anywhere. So how does matter produce an immaterial image?

A number of philosophers have argued that it's inconceivable that two fundamentally disparate substances, such as matter and mind must be, can interact and that therefore we should only posit a single substance responsible for our "mental" phenomena, the physical brain. This view is called materialism.

Westphal quotes the 17th century French philosopher Descartes:

The whole problem contained in such questions arises simply from a supposition that is false and cannot in any way be proved, namely that, if the soul [mind] and the body are two substances whose nature is different, this prevents them from being able to act on each other.

Descartes seems correct about this. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, everything that happens subsequently is physical and material, except the pain. Pain is non-spatial. It's an immaterial sensation, so where does it come from? Indeed, what exactly, is it?

Westphal describes the problem using not pain but color:

We see that the experiences we have, such as experiences of color, are indeed very different from the electromagnetic radiation that ultimately produces them, or from the activity of the neurons in the brain. We are bound to wonder how the uncolored radiation can produce the color, even if its effects can be followed as far as the neurons in the visual cortex.

So how do physical causes produce non-physical effects? Westphal again:

What happens,...for example, when we decide to do even such a simple thing as to lift up a cup and take a sip of coffee? The arm moves, but it is difficult to see how the thought or desire could make that happen. It is as though a ghost were to try to lift up a coffee cup.

Yet, the fact that our immaterial thought, the thought of raising our arm, triggers a cascade of physical effects is astonishing. No one knows how it happens, but that it happens is one of the chief reasons many philosophers today have rejected materialism and embrace the belief that there's more to us than just our physical bodies.

We must, these philosophers are convinced, also possess a non-physical, immaterial mind or soul.

There's more from Westphal at the link, but you might wonder what's at stake in the controversy between those who believe that we're just material beings (materialists) and those who believe we're a composite of matter and mind (dualists).

That'll be the topic of tomorrow's post.

The Intellectual Life

In an interesting - and rather unusual - piece in First Things Paul Griffiths gives advice to young people aspiring to the intellectual life. He lists and discusses four requirements of such a life. The first three are these:

1. The aspiring intellectual must choose a topic to which he or she can devote his or her life. Just as one might fall in love with another, so, too, does one often fall in love with an idea or question.

2. An intellectual must have time to think. Three hours a day of uninterrupted time. No phone calls, no texts, no visits. Just thinking and whatever serves as a support for thinking (reading, writing, experimenting, etc).

3. Anyone taking on the life of an intellectual needs proper training. This may involve university study, but it may not.

What Griffiths has to say about each of these is interesting, but the most interesting part of his essay to me is what he says about the fourth requirement. One who aspires to the life of the mind must have interlocutors, i.e. people with whom one can share ideas. He writes:

You can’t develop the needed skills or appropriate the needed body of knowledge without them. You can’t do it by yourself. Solitude and loneliness, yes, very well; but that solitude must grow out of and continually be nourished by conversation with others who’ve thought and are thinking about what you’re thinking about. Those are your interlocutors.

They may be dead, in which case they’ll be available to you in their postmortem traces: written texts, recordings, reports by others, and so on. Or they may be living, in which case you may benefit from face-to-face interactions, whether public or private. But in either case, you need them.

You can neither decide what to think about nor learn to think about it well without getting the right training, and the best training is to be had by apprenticeship: Observe the work—or the traces of the work—of those who’ve done what you’d like to do; try to discriminate good instances of such work from less good; and then be formed by imitation.

Very well, but such people are not easy to find. Most people don't care at all about the things that fascinate and animate an intellectual. Most people are too preoccupied with the exigencies of making a living and raising a family to care overmuch about ideas or the life of the mind.

Where are such interlocutors to be found? The answer these days, as you must already know, is: mostly in the universities of the West and their imitators and progeny elsewhere. That, disproportionately, is where those with an intellectual life are provided the resources to live it, and that, notionally, is the institutional form we’ve developed for nurturing such lives.

I write “notionally” because in fact much about universities (I’ve been in and around them since 1975) is antipathetic to the intellectual life, and most people in universities, faculty and students included, have never had and never wanted an intellectual life. They’re there for other reasons. Nevertheless, on the faculty of every university I’ve worked at, there are real intellectuals: people whose lives are dedicated to thinking in the way I’ve described here....If you want living interlocutors, the university is where you’re most likely to find them.

Griffiths adds this:

You shouldn’t, however, assume that this means you must follow the usual routes into professional academia: undergraduate degree, graduate degrees, a faculty position, tenure. That’s a possibility, but if you follow it, you should take care to keep your eyes on the prize, which in this case is an intellectual life.

The university will, if you let it, distract you from that by professionalizing you, which is to say, by offering you a series of rewards not for being an intellectual, but for being an academic, which is not at all the same thing. What you want is time and space to think, the skills and knowledge to think well, and interlocutors to think with. If the university provides you with these, well and good; if it doesn’t, or doesn’t look as though it will, leave it alone.

The university’s importance as a place of face-to-face interlocution about intellectual matters is diminishing in any case. Universities are moving, increasingly, toward interlocution at a distance, via the Internet. This fact, coupled with the possibility of good conversation with the dead by way of their texts, suggests that for those whose intellectual vocation doesn’t require expensive ancillaries (laboratories, telescopes, hadron colliders, powerful computers, cadres of research subjects, and the like), they should be one place among many to look for interlocutors.

You should, in any case, not assume that what you need in order to have an intellectual life is a graduate degree. You might be better served by assuming that you don’t, and getting one only if it seems the sole route by which you can get the interlocution and other training you need. That is rarely the case....

Here's his conclusion:

And lastly: Don’t do any of the things I’ve recommended unless it seems to you that you must. The world doesn’t need many intellectuals. Most people have neither the talent nor the taste for intellectual work, and most that is admirable and good about human life (love, self-sacrifice, justice, passion, martyrdom, hope) has little or nothing to do with what intellectuals do.

Intellectual skill, and even intellectual greatness, is as likely to be accompanied by moral vice as moral virtue. And the world—certainly the American world—has little interest in and few rewards for intellectuals.

The life of an intellectual is lonely, hard, and usually penurious; don’t undertake it if you hope for better than that. Don’t undertake it if you think the intellectual vocation the most important there is: It isn’t. Don’t undertake it if you have the least tincture in you of contempt or pity for those without intellectual talents: You shouldn’t. Don’t undertake it if you think it will make you a better person: It won’t.

Undertake it if, and only if, nothing else seems possible.

There's a lot of wisdom in all of this.

Truth vs. Fact

KellyAnne Conway was roundly mocked in 2017 for having observed that there were "alternative facts" concerning the size of the crowd at President trump's inauguration, and former vice-president and current leader in the race for the Democratic nomination for president Joe Biden has been similarly mocked for asserting the other day that "We [presumably meaning Democrats] choose truth over facts."

Media guffaws notwithstanding, Conway was completely correct when she referred to the possibility of alternative facts. For any given claim facts can be adduced which count both for the claim and against the claim. These may reasonably be considered alternative facts, and anyone with common sense understands that.

Nor was Mr. Biden completely deserving of the derision that has come his way for his assertion that Democrats choose truth over facts, for as odd as his words sound they are completely in keeping with the current understanding of truth among our elite cognoscenti.

Most of us would say that a proposition - for instance the proposition that Mr. Biden is 76 years old - is either true or false. If it's true, it's a fact. If it's false, it's not a fact. That's the simple, common sense understanding of the relationship between truth and fact, but in our contemporary culture common sense no longer reigns and truth has been divorced from fact, as Mr. Biden suggests.

In our postmodern era truth is a matter of how one feels about things, and facts don't necessarily have much to do with it. As philosopher Richard Rorty once put it, "Truth is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying."

When someone with male anatomy, for example, insists that he feels female then, if others are willing to accept his claim, that becomes his truth. He's a female regardless of the objective anatomical facts of the matter. Gender becomes a matter of psychology, not physiology.

Parenthetically, it's an interesting question as to how psychology has come to be privileged over physiology, but it has.

Or, if someone feels strongly that President Trump committed treason with the Russians or that Justice Kavanaugh is a vicious sexual molester then the actual facts simply don't matter. Guilt is based on how others feel, not on what Trump or Kavanaugh actually did.

In her book Total Truth Nancy Pearcey notes that some middle school curricula teach that there are no wrong answers in mathematics, only different perspectives. She adds that truth is being presented to generations of college students as wholly relative to particular interpretive communities and that all knowledge claims are social constructions at best and power plays at worst.

It was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's view that everyone has a different perspective, sees things differently and no one can claim the privilege of having the "correct" perspective. Thus, different individuals and different groups - racial, sexual, religious, economic - all have different truths. Truth is no longer thought to be out there waiting to be discovered, rather it's an entirely subjective construct. We create it, we don't discover it.

All of this follows, according to Rorty, from the loss of belief in God. Rorty argues that the idea of an objective truth, "is a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation, the work of someone who had something in mind, who Himself spoke some language in which He described His own project."

In other words, if God exists then there's at least one objective truth, at least one ontological fact. And further, if God has spoken to man then what He spoke is also objectively true, and it is the belief that God has spoken to human beings that is the source of our intuitive belief that truth is objective and that what is true is factual.

Take away God, however, and it becomes much harder to hold on to the belief that truth and facts are anything more than subjective preferences which happen to be popular with one's peer group at the time. Truth is little more than a fashion.

Now Mr. Biden was probably not thinking at all along these lines when he made his odd-sounding statement, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was. If so, then we can take him to mean that Democrats do not believe in objective truth and don't accept the relationship of identity between truth and facts.

This may put him in good stead with progressive elites in academia, but I doubt that the average Democrat voter really agrees with this view of truth. At least I hope not.

If truth is severed from facts then there is no truth at all, and Biden's statement itself cannot claim to be true.

Second Thoughts

Yesterday, I expressed deep concern over an upcoming movie that depicts elitist liberals on holiday literally hunting down and killing Trump supporters. In hindsight and with the advantage of a bit more time to research the film, it seems that I might have been too hasty in portraying the movie's theme.

Evidently, The Hunt is a satire in which the good guys who prevail in the end are actually the hunted "deplorables" and the bad guys are the leftists who relish killing them.

Having said that, I stand by the general claim that violent films (and video games), no matter who is doing the killing, have no place in a sane, morally healthy society.

Human beings, particularly young people, have a way of becoming desensitized to violence, just as they become desensitized to pornography. The more graphic the violence they absorb, whether fictional or in real life, the less horrified they are by it.

We're often told that a person's behavior is not influenced by visual images. If that's true, why do people like Michael Moore make so many movies with political messages and why do corporations spend millions of dollars on visual advertising? The idea that what we consume from the screen does not affect our mental health is as absurd as claiming that what we consume at the dinner table doesn't affect our physical health.

This is not to say that watching violent films turns everyone into a psychopath, but what it does do is erode and diminish our natural revulsion toward violence.

Put differently, human beings reside along a kind of spectrum with complete abhorrence of violence at one end and the celebration of, and participation in, violence at the other end.

Violent entertainment nudges everyone who watches or listens to it or otherwise participates in it incrementally toward the violent end in a kind of psychological red shift. The people already close to the edge get pushed over it, and everyone else gets bumped a little bit closer, especially if they're given a steady exposure to the brutality and killing, and especially if that brutality and killing is glamorized.

I'm glad I might've wrong about the message the movie actually sends, but I'd still rather such movies not be made. The implicit message sent by explicit violence is not one that can conceivably benefit a nation plagued by real and frequent violence.

The Other Mass Shooting, Etc.

It appears that mass shootings are guaranteed to make the news as long as they're perpetrated by one or two white men, as long as the slaughter occurs in a short period of time and as long as the left can use it to their political advantage. If the mass shooting is spread out over several hours, perpetrated by non-whites, or reflects poorly on Democrats then the news media appears to be much less concerned about the horrible loss of life.

Last weekend twenty two people lost their lives in a matter of a few minutes to a single evil individual in El Paso, Texas while during the same time frame another such individual, in mere moments, stole the lives of eleven others in Dayton, Ohio. In both incidents many more were seriously injured.

In the days since, our media has been talking about little else as they look for ways to implicate Trump for the El Paso shooting and ways to avoid implicating Democrats in the Dayton shooting which seems to have been the work of someone who described himself as a leftist who disliked President Trump.

Yet, the media has all but ignored the carnage in Chicago last weekend. In that city eleven people were murdered and sixty three injured in a series of shootings, none of which were conducted by a lone white male. Since the shooters and the victims were black, and there was no way to tie the ghastly death toll to President Trump, the media was apparently disinterested.

Had the shooters been white and the victims black, well, that would certainly have made things different in the eyes of those who only seem concerned about homicidal slaughter when it has a racial or social policy dimension that can be politically exploited.

Progressives, of course, are very, very concerned about inflammatory rhetoric, or rhetoric they can at least portray as inflammatory, as long as it comes from the White House or from the mouth of some Republican, but genuinely inflammatory rhetoric which comes from the lips and fevered brains of their allies they tend to ignore.

For example, Reza Aslan, a contributor to CNN, has ostensibly called for the extermination of Trump supporters. Since this amounts to over half the country, Aslan is essentially calling for mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Yet, as far as I can tell, the folks at CNN and other progressive precincts, are undisturbed by Aslan's genocidal degeneracy.

To see how horrifying and hypocritical is the liberal apathy at Aslan's call for a "final solution," imagine someone at FOX News had in 2011 called for the extermination of Obama supporters. What do you suppose the reaction would've been?

Another example: Universal Studios is coming out with a movie next month titled The Hunt. In this film, sure to win plaudits from the left, rich liberals actually hunt down and slaughter a dozen or so kidnapped Trump supporters for sport.

From the link:

"The violent, R-rated film from producer Jason Blum's Blumhouse follows a dozen MAGA types who wake up in a clearing and realize they are being stalked for sport by elite liberals,” THR’s [The Hollywood Reporter's] Kim Masters wrote. “It features guns blazing along with other ultra-violent killings as the elites pick off their prey.”

According to the Hollywood trade publication, characters in the film refer to the victims as “deplorables,” which is what Hillary Clinton famously dubbed Trump supporters during the 2016 election. The report noted that a character asks, "Did anyone see what our ratf--ker-in-chief just did?"

Lest the message be too subtle for the anticipated audience to grasp, the film was originally supposed to be titled Red State Versus Blue State.

It's an interesting question why liberals would be depicted committing recreational murder with "guns blazing," since liberals abhor firearms, but more seriously, whoever has been involved in any way in the making of this movie is just sick beyond words.

Again, ask yourself what the reaction would be if a film featured a bunch of MAGA hat-wearing good ol' boys hunting down and butchering a group of innocent Obama supporters. Any theater showing the film would be burned to the ground and every progressive (and conservative) news outlet in the country would be expressing their horror that anyone would be so depraved as to make such a film.

So where is the outcry from progressive pundits who otherwise profess deep concern for our toxic cultural climate? Do they see only the mote in the other side's eye and ignore the plank in their own?

It certainly seems so.

Let's Blame Trump

Democrats such as Beto O'Rourke, Joe Biden and others almost too numerous to mention are blaming President Trump for the mass murder in an El Paso WalMart last weekend.

The president's attempts to uphold the immigration laws of this country and to prevent our borders from being overrun by tens of thousands of illegal immigrants is said to be the reason why the young psychopath who gunned down twenty two innocent people did what he did.

He was animated by Trump's rhetoric, the left insists, with absolutely no compelling evidence to support their slander.

Before the bodies had even been removed from the site of the slaughter Democrat politicians were fund-raising off the horrible deaths of the victims and the grief of their families, while also exploiting the tragedy to advance a political vendetta against the president.

This is, of course, despicable, but to actually blame Mr. Trump for the massacre is not only despicable but incredibly stupid.

The Democrats seeking to use the atrocity for their own political advantage seem too dimwitted to understand that if blame is to be assigned it's just as easy to make the case that the young perpetrator was driven to madness by his seething frustration at the abject refusal of Democrats to enforce the laws of the land and secure our nation's borders. It could as plausibly be argued that Democrat contempt for the law stoked the young man's sense of his own helplessness and fueled his hatred and anger, driving him to an act of horrible cruelty and irrationality.

That narrative makes at least as much sense as the left's mindless refrain that "It's all Trump's fault."

It's worth noting in passing that progressives will twist themselves into all sorts of rhetorical contortions to avoid giving Trump credit for the booming economy, but they'll eagerly blame him on the thinnest of evidence or on no evidence at all for the insane iniquities of some evil lunatic.

Meanwhile, some in the media have been lucubrating, as they always do after these massacres, over what the killers all have in common in order that their motivations might be better understood and such terrors more effectively forestalled in the future.

All sorts of possibilities have been adduced: the shooters are invariably male, often white, loners, disaffected, traumatized, alienated, etc.

All of this may be true, but there are two possible commonalities I'd like to see researched but which I have little confidence the progressive media would be interested in pursuing.

I suspect, but don't claim to know, that almost all of the mass shooters, especially the younger ones, firstly, have either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship with him at all.

I also suspect, but don't claim to know, that they also have a terrible relationship, or no relationship at all, with God.

I'd love to read the statistics on this if anyone has done the digging, but I rather doubt that anyone has. It's not the sort of thing that most of our betters in elite progressive circles care to think about much less investigate.

In the Middle of the Night

A recent survey of British millennials found that a shocking 89% of them believe their lives are meaningless.

Reading that depressing statistic I was reminded of a piece writer James Wood did for the New Yorker a number of years ago which the magazine titled Is That All There Is? The book he reviewed attempted to counter the nagging angst among thoughtful atheists (Wood himself is one) occasioned by the realization that their lives are meaningless and that they're headed for eternal oblivion.

Wood opens with this:

I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life — beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward — is cosmically irrelevant?”

In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts.

....as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night.

The book is titled The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now edited by a scholar named George Levine. Wood explains that,

[T]he book’s aim is to “explore the idea that secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”

Wood focuses on the book's first essay, written by Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher, in which Kitcher argues that a theistic worldview founders on a couple of philosophical reefs. If I can summarize Wood's summary, Kitcher argues that two of theism's strongest claims are false.

First, Kitcher believes that the claim that God is necessary for there to be objective moral value and duties is refuted by Socrates' response to this claim from an interlocutor named Euthyphro. This has come to be known as the Euthyphro Dilemma and goes like this:

If an act is good because God commands it then cruelty would be good if God commanded it. If, on the other hand, God commands certain acts because they are good, then goodness is independent of God and we don't need God in order to do what's good.

It's surprising to me that this argument still finds employment in contemporary atheistic writings, having been long ago adequately answered by theistic philosophers.

Very quickly, the reason why any act is good and willed by God is because it conforms to God's essential nature. He is Himself perfect goodness. The more closely an act conforms to the ideal the better it is, just as the quality of a photocopy depends on how closely it reproduces the original.

An act, then, is morally better the more closely it conforms to the nature of God whose nature consists, inter alia, of compassion, mercy and justice.

Thus goodness is neither independent of God nor arbitrarily willed by God, but rather emerges from His being somewhat like light and heat flow from the sun. If God did not exist there would be no objective moral good.

The second claim that Kitcher believes to be in error is that theism (Wood uses the word religion, but I think theism is a better word choice for what he's trying to say) is no better at putting meaning into life than is secularism. In other words, it may be true that life is a pretty bleak business if atheism is true, but God's existence doesn't help matters.

I think this is patently false. Imagine a man imprisoned in a slave labor camp sent out every day to dig ditches. He's told by the authorities that his work is necessary, although any prisoner can do it, and that, not only will he never be released, but when he can no longer perform the work he will be executed.

Another prisoner is given the same tasks but told that if he performs them well he will be released and given all the amenities of a comfortable life. Do you suppose both lives will seem equally significant to the prisoners?

The first prisoner will constantly be wondering, "How does anything I do really matter? Isn't it all pointless and absurd?" But those questions might scarcely occur to the second prisoner who sees his labor as the means to something much greater.

The skeptic might reply that the promise to the second prisoner of eventual release is false. In real life everybody dies in the prison.

Perhaps, but the skeptic doesn't know that. We do know, though, that unless the promise is true there really is no hope and no meaning to either prisoners' toil.

In other words, our human existence can only have genuine meaning if we are created and loved by God and destined to an existence beyond this one. On that point, it seems, Wood might agree. He closes with this:

Thomas Nagel [once] wrote a shrewd essay entitled “The Absurd,” in which he argued that, just as we can “step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.”

Secularism can seem as meaningless as religion when such doubt strikes. Nagel went on to conclude, calmly, that we shouldn’t worry too much, because if, under the eye of eternity, nothing matters “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

This is impeccably logical, and impishly offers a kind of secular deconstruction of secularism, but it is fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

In thoroughly secular England it seems that young people are discovering the hard way that the materialism proffered by a secular society is indeed fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.