Searle's Chinese Room

Are computers conscious? Could a computer ever become conscious? Philosopher John Searle has his doubts. He offers a thought experiment he calls the Chinese Room which illustrates the difference between what a computer does and what a human mind does.

In short, a human mind has understanding and meaning (intentionality) but a computer has neither. Computers simply manipulate symbols, following certain rules established by the programmer. The computer neither understands what it does nor attaches any meaning to what it does.

Here's a short video that explainins the problem:

If Searle is right, then there's a qualitative difference between human beings and machines, and it's hard to see how that difference could be overcome by simply designing more powerful computers.

Indeed, the fact that it may prove impossible to replicate human consciousness in machines leads one to wonder how it ever emerged in humans in the first place - especially if one's worldview requires that any such explanation be naturalistic and materialistic.

Amazing Data Storage Device

The journal Science reports some fascinating facts about information storage:

Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it. Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks.

DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it. “DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University. And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.

It is astonishing that chance and natural selection could have produced a data storage apparatus with this degree of capacity. If brilliant engineers bringing to bear all the genius of the human species can't develop storage media that can even come close to what nature has produced pretty much by lucky accident, shouldn't we ask the question, was it really an accident?

Anyway, here's a video which gives a brief explanation of the sort of research being done on using DNA as a data storage medium:

Attacking the First Premise

In an article at Mind Matters neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses the debate between determinists (those who believe that there's no free will) and libertarians (those who believe we have free will). Egnor writes:

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

What do I mean by determinism? Determinism, in the scientific sense intended here, is the view that for every moment in time, the state of the universe is completely determined by the state that immediately precedes it.

If you knew all of the details of the universe — the location and state of every particle — at any given moment, you could know with certainty what comes next. Determinism is more or less the view that nature is a machine. If we know the position of the gears, we can know the future with certainty.

The basic argument for the belief that our choices are not free goes something like this:

1. Every event in the physical universe is the inevitable consequence of prior causes (i.e. every event is physically determined).
2. Our choices are events in the physical universe (i.e. they occur in the material brain).
3. Therefore, our choices are the inevitable consequence of prior causes (i.e. they're determined by our strongest motives)

This is obviously a valid argument. If each of the premises is true then the conclusion follows, but it's not clear that either of the two premises is true, and the first premise seems, in fact, to be false. Here's Egnor:

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

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

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

Determinism in nature has been shown, scientifically, to be false. There is no real debate about this among physicists. So the question as to whether determinism, if it really existed, would be compatible with free will is merely an academic question, an interesting bit of metaphysical speculation.

If all this is true, then the first premise in the above syllogism is false and the entire argument collapses.

It may still be that our choices are not free, of course, but, if so, some other argument is going to have to be employed to demonstrate that.

Trans-Cyclist

I argued recently that allowing men who identify as women to compete in women's athletics will ultimately make it impossible for biological women to succeed at the highest levels. A few examples are cited in this article at The Daily Caller:

The Big Sky Conference named University of Montana runner June Eastwood, a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, the cross-country female athlete of the week.

“June Eastwood finished second in a field of 204 runners at the Santa Clara Bronco Invitational,” helping “Montana place seventh as a team,” the conference noted in its announcement Tuesday. Eastwood previously competed on the University of Montana’s men’s team.

Biological male runner CeCe Telfer, who identifies as a transgender woman, won an NCAA DII national championship for Franklin Pierce University in May. Like Eastwood, Telfer competed on the university’s men’s team before later switching to the women’s team.

Biologically male cyclist Rachel McKinnon won a women’s world championship Oct. 19. McKinnon won the sprint event in the women’s 35-39 age category at the 2019 Masters Track Cycling World Championships, taking home the gold medal for the second straight year.

Two male runners have dominated girls’ high school track in the state of Connecticut.

As the article notes, The House of Representatives voted in May to pass the Equality Act, which would require schools to allow male athletes who identify as transgender girls to compete on female sports teams. The bill had unanimous support among House Democrats and is supported by every Democratic presidential frontrunner.

Allowing biological males to compete against women may seem like madness to sober-minded folk but sobriety is an uncommon condition in our postmodern culture.

Perhaps the most amusing report of someone dominating a sport by identifying as something different comes courtesy of the satirical site The Babylon Bee.

NEW YORK, NY—In an inspiring story from the world of professional cycling, a motorcyclist who identifies as a bicyclist has crushed all the regular bicyclists, setting an unbelievable world record.

In a local qualifying race for the World Road Cycling League, the motorcyclist crushed the previous 100-mile record of 3 hours, 13 minutes with his amazing new score of well under an hour.

Professional motorcycle racer Judd E. Banner, the brave trans-vehicle rider, was allowed to race after he told league organizers he's always felt like a bicyclist in a motorcyclist's body.

You can read about Mr. Banner's rationale and accomplishment as a bicyclist at the link.

Confirmed Predictions

Long time readers of VP will know that I'm agnostic about much that has to do with the so-called Creation-Evolution debate.

I do stake my flag, however, on two simple propositions: 1) however life arose on the planet it is exceedingly unlikely that it arose through a blind, unguided process, and 2) both the universe and living things show manifold evidence of having been intelligently designed. Having said this, a story about a year ago at Phys.org discussed a paper which, I should've thought, would've created shock waves among naturalistic scientists and philosophers, but which so far has generated very little comment.

I thought it would've created a considerable stir because it confirms two predictions made by creationists (those who believe that the earth is relatively young and that all life forms were created at essentially the same time) and which are wholly unexpected on the assumption of Darwinian evolution.

A little background: Darwinian evolutionists argue that life on earth has been around for billions of years and that the various forms, were we able to see all that have ever appeared, would be observed to grade into each other almost seamlessly. In a gradual process that takes millions of years, one species slowly transitions to a similar but slightly different form, until the original form and its descendents become reproductively isolated into two separate species.

On the Darwinian view different taxa would appear at different times in the history of the earth, and thus the age of one species might be substantially different from the age of another, perhaps by millions of years.

On the other hand, many creationists, at least those who reject the idea of universal descent from a common ancestor, assert that both of these claims are incorrect. They predict that all species on earth are approximately the same age and that since the major taxa were created independently there will not be significant evidence of transitions between them.

The article in Phys.org reveals that both of these creationist predictions, neither of which is entailed by Darwinian evolution, seem to have been confirmed. Here are a few excerpts:

The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. "This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," [said David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who co-authored the findings last week.]

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age? Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

In analysing the [genetic] barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

This doesn't mean that life is only 200,000 years old. It only means that 90% of the species on earth today have been in existence for about the same length of time. In other words, this is consistent with the creationist hypothesis that there was a major environmental event early on in the history of the human race that produced a biological bottleneck of sorts, out of which emerged most of the forms that we find inhabiting the planet today.

This does not, of course, refute Darwinism and establish creationism, but it is a finding that requires a secondary explanation on Darwinism but which is directly predicted by creationists.

Here's another:

And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between. "If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."

The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

In other words, the lack of transitions between species is perplexing on the Darwinian view of a gradual evolution of life. Creationists have long pointed to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, but this study shows that even in extant forms of life species seem to be genetically isolated from each other.

Again, there could be a satisfactory Darwinian account of why this is, but the point is that it confirms a direct prediction of the creationist hypothesis.

None of this means that creationists are correct and that Darwinians are wrong. The article offers some possible explanations for why, on Darwinian terms, the aforementioned findings may obtain. What it does seem to suggest, though, is that the Darwinian criticism of creationism, that it's a metaphysical, not a scientific, construct, is becoming harder to defend.

The distinguishing characteristic of science is what philosopher Karl Popper called conjectures and refutations. That is, scientific researchers make predictions (conjectures) based on theory and then test those predictions to see if they're confirmed or refuted by the evidence.

To the extent that the creationist hypothesis generates predictions that are confirmed by the empirical evidence, to that extent it confounds those who wish to exclude it from the realm of science and consign it to the sphere of religious faith.

The Greater Abuse

Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion made a claim that many on the left cheered. He wrote that it's a form of child abuse to raise a child to believe religious doctrine. In this extraordinary claim he was eventually joined by philosopher Daniel Dennett and writer Christopher Hitchens.

Children are too intellectually undeveloped, these men argue, to be inculcated with religious beliefs and should not have beliefs foisted on them which are, in Dawkins' view, false.

On several occasions Dawkins even made the claim that sexually abusing a child is "arguably less" damaging than "the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing up a child Catholic in the first place".

These claims are widely accepted on the secular left and considered obviously true by many, yet a child given religious instruction is always free in later years to renounce his or her childhood training. Children are not condemned for the rest of their lives to live with beliefs that have been instilled in them in their early years if their inner convictions change as they mature.

How much different, though, is the case of parents who put their children through sexual transition, who change their children's bodies in ways that last a lifetime even though the gender dysphoria experienced by the child is a state of affairs that may well resolve itself as the child matures, if the child is left alone.

Which is the worse form of child abuse? Is it a greater crime to instill in children religious beliefs which may be wrong or to rob them of the ability to determine their own personal or sexual identity as an adult?

Oddly, the former is condemned by significant portions of the left while the latter is widely applauded.

Chad Felix Greene describes his own experience as a gender-confused child in an article at The Federalist.

Here's an excerpt:

Transition for children follows a predictable model. A young child is first socially transitioned through clothing, socialization, and identity. They adopt an opposite-sex name, opposite-sex pronouns, and attend school and social events dressed as the opposite sex.

With children, the transgender movement is extremely strict on imposing traditional gender stereotypes.

As the children approach puberty, they are given puberty blockers to “pause” physical development until they are old enough to “decide” which sex to live as. Yet these blockers have lifelong negative health effects, and while most children who do not take them grow out of gender dysphoria, most children who do take them will not.

If teaching religious ideas that may or may not be false to children is a form of child abuse then surely doing to them what Greene describes is moreso. If an adult wishes to transition to another gender that should be his or her prerogative (although I don't know why the rest of society should be required to subsidize the procedure), but it should be illegal to do this to children who are not mature enough to be able to decide for themselves whether they want to be permanently consigned to the opposite sex.

As Greene concludes, "Every gender-dysphoric child deserves the right to grow up free to decide who he wants to be when he is ready to do so."

Meanwhile, read about the tragic case of 7 year-old James Younger whose mother is determined to convert him to a girl.

Where are the voices of those who are outraged that parents would teach their child about God? Is not what James Younger's mother, and others like her, are doing to their children a far worse thing to do to a child than teaching them that God loves them?

Questioning the Unquestionable

For most of my adult life, any skepticism toward the reigning dogma in biology, Darwinian evolution, was considered a form of heresy or idiocy. Darwinism was beyond doubt and for a biologist to question it was to imperil his or her career. That state of affairs, however, seems to be changing.

Challenges to the Darwinian orthodoxy are arising almost daily in labs across the country as an increasing number of biologists are growing increasingly skeptical that the standard neo-Darwinian model of unguided, naturalistic evolution can explain either the origin or the complexity of living things.

Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science who has written several books that raise perplexing questions for the standard model. His first book, Signature in the Cell (2010), dealt with the difficulties posed to Darwinian evolution by our current understanding of the structure and function of DNA.

The second, Darwin's Doubt (2014), explained how the fossil record, specifically the fossils found in the Canadian Burgess shale deposits, points to an extremely sudden (in evolutionary time) appearance of almost all the major animal body plans with no evolutionary precursors, a finding that confutes all Darwinian expectations.

Meyer summarizes the arguments presented by these two books in this six minute video for Prager U.:

It's important to note that none of the science that Meyer adduces in this video is, as far as I know, in dispute. Indeed, it's arguments like these that are generating a great deal of the current rethinking among evolutionary biologists and workers in related fields.

A Fortunate Universe

A couple of years ago I did a post on a book by two cosmologists named Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos.

The book details a number of the parameters, forces, constants and ratios that have to be just what they are to a breathtakingly fine precision or else the universe either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be the sort of place that could sustain life.

I thought the book to be so important, and the style in which Barnes and Lewis wrote it to be so accessible to laymen, that when I came across this short video publicizing it I thought it'd be good to post it on VP in hopes that some readers may want to read the book.

This cosmic fine-tuning as it's called constitutes a powerful cumulative argument for the existence of an intelligent mind responsible for it all. There seem to be no other very plausible explanations, but some who are queasy about the support fine-tuning gives to traditional theism have adduced other possibilities.

Some have posited that our universe is the product of a computer simulation somewhat like the Matrix.

Of course, this explanation still relies on an intelligent transcendent being. Others have sought to abandon the idea of an intelligent creator altogether and have embraced the idea of a multiverse which incorporates every possible universe in one unimaginably vast array of worlds.

If such a multiverse exists, the thinking goes, then since our universe is certainly possible it must exist somewhere in this enormous ensemble of worlds.

So, there are essentially three competing explanations for why our universe exists: It's a computer simulation designed by a mind in some other world; it's one of an infinity of universes (Geraint Lewis' position); or it's the product of a supernatural agent (Luke Barnes' position).

The problem is that both of the first two explanations themselves must be explained. If the creator of our world is an alien computer wizard, then how did the wizard come to be? Or, if the reason for our universe is some sort of multiverse generator, how did that come to be?

On the other hand, if the creator of the universe is the God of classical theism then the creator is a necessarily existent mind upon which all contingent existents depend. The creator's existence requires no further explanation because the creator is not a contingent being. The explanation of its existence is in itself.

Here's a short video which elaborates on this argument:

The Postmodern Challenge to Science

This is the question Denyse O'Leary addresses in a column at Evolution News. Here are a few excerpts from her answer:

The intellectual costs of metaphysical naturalism are rising rapidly.

Traditional “modern science” naturalists viewed supernaturalism as the chief danger to science. To permanently exclude the supernatural, post-modern naturalists have gone well beyond their forebears. They have thrown away reason, which is problematic because reason points to a truth outside nature. They have reinvented reason as an evolved illusion rather than a guide to truth. And, in a cruel but inevitable irony, they liberated superstition from modern science’s jail.

For those who believe in it, reason has always provided a check on superstition. But postmodernists, who dismiss reason as a form of oppression and evidence as unnecessary to high science, cannot simply dismiss such fields as astrology and witchcraft. If everyone’s truth is as true as everyone else’s truth, scientists must lobby for their truths as an interest group in a frenzied market.

The populations most affected by postmodernism tend to be more superstitious than those that resist postmodernism. They are also much more likely to dismiss academic freedom. Contemporary science conflicts are beginning to reflect these shifts....

We hear that objectivity is “cultural discrimination” (or sexist), Newtonian physics is exploitative, mathematics is a “dehumanizing tool” (if not white privilege), and algebra creates hurdles for disadvantaged groups. And mavericks in science are a problem because they tend to be wealthy, white, and male....

We might have guessed blindly that postmodernism (anything goes!) would lead to more academic freedom. So why is it not working out that way? The problem is that postmodernism is not about freedom as such. It is the assertion that there is no truth to be sought, no facts to be found, that are true for everyone. Everyone is entitled to feel as they wish.

There's more at the link, but here's her point: If there's no truth to be found through a reasoned exchange of ideas, if indeed the very idea of objective truth is an anachronism, if one's truth is merely what one feels strongly, if truth is defined as whatever works to help one group achieve its goals and purposes, then rational debate is just a waste of time.

So is any recourse to objective evidence and facts to support one's claims. One side must simply impose its ideas on all others by dint of intimidation and the exercise of raw political power. Might makes right.

In the late Medieval period whoever ruled the land determined the religion his subjects would follow. That principle, stated in Latin as cuius regio, eius religio (Whose region, his religion) in the post-modern era could be stated as cuius regio, eius scientia.

In such an intellectual climate science is no longer about discovering truth about the world, rather it's little more than a species of ideological politics.

In an environment hostile to open-minded inquiry, an environment deeply contrary to that which nurtured science from the 17th century through most of the 20th, science cannot thrive. And if science withers so, too, will technological advance.

Unless we get over our postmodern aversion to objective truth we may well find that the high water mark of scientific discovery and progress is in our rear-view mirror, and the marvelous tide that has made our lives so much healthier and more comfortable than those lived by our ancestors may already be receding away.

Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach described the ebb of religious faith, but what he says about religion in the modern age may be just as apt for "The sea of science" in the postmodern era:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Determinism and Free Will (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an argument by philosopher Stephen Cave that can essentially be stated thus:

1. Materialism entails determinism
2. Materialism is true
3. Therefore, determinism is true

The argument hinges, of course, on the second premise, but the truth of that premise is by no means obvious. It's an assumption based on a commitment to a naturalistic metaphysics. At any rate, ideas have consequences and Cave next addresses the human and social consequences of a widespread belief in the truth of determinism. They're not good:

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

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

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

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

This is a peculiar reaction, it seems, for if determinism is true, why should scholars be uncomfortable promoting a lie? What would make such a tactic morally wrong if they really had no choice in employing it? They're only doing what they've been determined by their genes and/or their social and professional environment to do.

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

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

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

Physicalism, the belief that everything is reducible to the laws of physics, does entail determinism, however, and as Cave points out in his essay, the consequences of determinism are bleak. In addition to those Cave mentions determinism also has the following consequences:

• Praise and blame, reward and punishment, are never deserved since these assume that the recipient could have acted otherwise than he or she did act.
• There are no moral obligations, no moral right and wrong, since morality is contingent upon uncompelled free choice.
• There's no human dignity since dignity is predicated on the ability to make significant choices.

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

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

Determinism and Free Will (Pt. I)

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

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

Cave observes that,

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will.

Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most, but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

It should be noted that the agreement to which he refers is a tacit consequence of a metaphysical assumption shared by many researchers - the assumption that there are no non-physical, non-material factors at play in the universe or in human beings. Of course, if physicalism or materialism are true then determinism follows, but there's no good reason to think that either are true and good reasons to think they're not.

He goes on to say that,

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

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

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move.

The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

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

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

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

If the system which produces our choices is indeed "a physical system like any other" then determinism is very probably true, but the assumption that our choices are solely the product of physical causes is an unprovable metaphysical faith-claim. If we are also possessed of an immaterial, non-physical mind or soul, as many philosophers believe, that faculty could possibly function as a locus of free choice.

The only reason for thinking that such minds don't exist is an apriori commitment to physicalism.

More on Cave's essay tomorrow.

The End of Girls' Sports?

Yesterday's post criticized the media for fabricating embellishments to their news stories which falsify the news and deceive their consumers. Today's post discusses, in part, how the media distorts the public's understanding by maintaining silence on issues that would embarrass their political allies were those issues publicized.

A case in point is the Gender Equality act which every Democrat candidate has promised to pass if he or she is elected president. The part the media doesn't explain is that the provisions of this act would apparently place women's athletics in serious jeopardy.

The Daily Caller explains:

Democrats have made girls’ sports a 2020 campaign issue, but establishment media outlets are keeping their viewers and readers in the dark.

Every Democratic frontrunner has pledged their support of the Equality Act, which would make “gender identity” a protected characteristic under federal anti-discrimination law. Among other things, the bill would force public schools to expand female athletic teams to include biological males who identify as transgender girls. (italics mine)

If girls are forced to compete against biological males it could very likely be the prelude to the demise of girls' athletics, at least at the elite level. Women's high school state championships, major college competitions and National and Olympic level teams will very likely come to be dominated by males who claim to be females.

This has already happened in Connecticut this year where two boys who identify as female competed and won their events in the women's high school state track and field championships.

The Daily Caller article goes on to highlight the media blackout of the consequences for women's athletics if the Gender Equality act passes in its current form:

Every Democratic frontrunner for president has pledged their support for the bill, which passed the House in May with unanimous Democratic support. But when establishment media outlets have covered the Equality Act in relation to the 2020 election, the girls’ sports issue has gone missing.

An Oct. 10 CNN article noted that passing the Equality Act is a “top priority” for the 2020 campaigns of California Sen. Kamala Harris, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, but made no mention of the bill’s impact on female sports. CNN’s LGBT town hall the same day included zero questions about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

Only one CNN article, when the Equality Act passed the House in May, has mentioned the girls’ sports issue in relation to the bill. The rest of CNN’s coverage of the bill—including Democrats’ support for it on the 2020 campaign trail—has ignored the athlete issue altogether.

An Oct. 8 analysis piece by CNN writer Brandon Tensley, for example, noted that the Senate would likely pass the Equality Act if Democrats retake control in 2020—but included nothing about what the bill means for female athletics.

There are more examples at the link. Anyone who thinks that boys, no matter whether they've received hormone treatments or not, will not, on average, be bigger, stronger and faster than most girls, are denying both the science and common sense.

If any boy who claims to identify as transgender is permitted to compete against girls fewer girls will be participating in high school sports, since they'll be beaten out by boys, and those who do participate will be at an unnatural and unfair competitive disadvantage.

Moreover, girls will be increasingly likely to be intimidated and injured in sports like soccer and basketball where bodily contact frequently occurs.

In order to accommodate a perverse sense of "justice" for transgenders a gross injustice will be done to girls. This is ironic in that Title IX was passed in 1972 partly to guarantee that girls would have the same athletic opportunities as boys. Now, in the service of advancing the left's ideological agenda, we're contemplating diminishing those opportunities by welcoming biological boys into girls sports.

If this makes sense, the sense is eluding me.

"Slaughter" at a Kentucky Gun Range

When our mainstream news media tell you what's happening in the nation and around the world the prudent response is skepticism. Donald Trump's "Fake News" slogan has become famous (or infamous), but he certainly has good reason for distrusting what he sees on tv.

A recent example of the willingness of the media to manipulate both the news and their viewers is the decision by ABC to show a video, purporting to have been taken on site in Syria, and alleging to be evidence of the Turks slaughtering Kurds.

The ploy was quickly exposed as an absurd sham, however, when the video was revealed by viewers to actually have been taken at a Kentucky gun range. In fact, anyone watching it can see that it's not what the producers and news reporters told us it was.

There are trees in the scene, recorded at night, which would be anomalous in the deserts of northern Syria, but even worse, there is an audience of people clearly visible in the foreground, starting at the 28 second mark, casually recording the "carnage" on their cell phones.

Either ABC simply titled this video "Slaughter in Syria," and threw it onto their broadcast without even looking at it, in which case they're extremely irresponsible, or they knew what it was and thought their audience wouldn't notice, in which case they're contemptuous both of their viewers and the truth.

Here's the vid:

Whatever their motivation, the mainstream media continue to demonstrate that they simply can't be trusted to give us the truth.

This article at The Federalist gives a couple of other recent examples of media mendacity.

The African Slave Trade Is Flourishing

Charles Jacobs is the president of the American Anti-Slavery Group. He's written a very important and interesting piece for The Federalist in which he informs us that black Africans are still being bought and sold by slavers in Africa, but there's very little interest in doing anything about it in Western nations or the press.

Perhaps that's because the perpetrators are mostly Arab Muslims, a favored class among Western media liberals due to their status as an historically "oppressed" group, and the victims of this odious trafficking are largely Christian, and thus not deemed worthy of media attention.

If Israelis were selling Palestinians into bondage, or white South Africans were once again imposing apartheid on blacks it'd be all we'd be hearing from our media megaphones, but Arab Muslims enslaving black Christians elicits little more than a yawn from our "compassionate" elites. They're too preoccupied with climate change and impeaching the president to concern themselves with genuine human rights atrocities.

Here are a few excerpts from Jacobs' article:

Every day across the African continent, black men, women, and children are captured, bought, and sold into slavery with the Western world paying scant attention. Human rights groups have marched and battled against abuses noticeably less cruel and evil than human bondage, yet no major organization has attempted to free today’s black slaves, much less taken meaningful steps to raise awareness about their plight.

For instance, in Mauritania, although slavery has been legally banned five times since 1961, it nevertheless persists with tens of thousands of blacks continuing to be held in bondage. While it is forbidden in the Qur’an for Muslims to enslave fellow Muslims, in Mauritania, racism trumps religious doctrine — as it did in the West — as Arab and Berber Muslims enslave African Muslims.

Americans first heard about Islamist slave raids in Nigeria when Michelle Obama made it a cause célèbre with her “#BringBackOurGirls” hashtag, but interest quickly faded, and Boko Haram continued to kidnap hundreds of Christian girls into jihad slavery. So cruel are the events of their captivity that some girls prefer death as suicide bombers to the life of a slave.

Today, Fulani Muslim herdsmen raid Christian villages, massacring their inhabitants. President Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim, has done relatively little to stop the assaults, even in the face of demands for action from the White House.

In Algeria, sub-Saharan Africans fleeing violence and poverty are enslaved by Algerian Arabs as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI), 106,000 black Africans are estimated to be enslaved in Algeria. Migrant women and children of both sexes risk being forced into sexual slavery, while men perform unskilled labor.

The GSI estimates as many as 48,000 migrants are enslaved in Libya, with survivors reporting torture and sexual slavery.

Jacobs goes on to discuss two factors impeding any effective action that might eliminate this horrific practice, or at least diminish it. You can read about these and more of what Jacobs has to say about this modern plague at the link.

Indigenous Peoples Day?

Today is Columbus Day here in the U.S. and past observances of the day have elicited protests and disdain for the savage legacy of early European conquerors. The topic, in fact, brings to mind a stomach-churning book I read several years ago titled The Destruction of the Indies by a Spanish priest named Bartholomo de Las Casas. The book is an eyewitness account of the horrors inflicted upon the native American people in the West Indies by the Spaniards in the 16th century.

I thought of that book when I read of people who see Columbus as the initiator of the terrible oppression inflicted upon native Americans. I think the record regarding Columbus himself is a bit ambiguous, and I don't have too much sympathy for those who wish to efface his memory. Indeed, it's easy to suspect some of them of ulterior motives, but, be that as it may, neither have I much sympathy for those who wish to replace Columbus Day with what they're calling "Indigenous Peoples Day."

In the first place, there are no indigenous people, or if there were, they're lost to history. The Indians the Spaniard explorers encountered and often massacred had themselves driven out, slaughtered or assimilated other groups who preceded them hundreds, or even thousands, of years before.

But more importantly, if the Spanish Conquistadors were unimaginably savage and cruel, and they certainly were, many of the Indians they conquered (though not all) were their equals in barbarity. Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto illustrates this disturbingly well. So does an essay by Michael Graham at The Federalist.

About the Indians the Spanish encountered in the New World Graham writes:

[I]f we really want to commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect holiday: “Indigenous People’s Day.”

“Long before the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman in the book Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten. “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned.”

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865, by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas, for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of The Last Days of the Incas.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Nor was the bloodlust and oppression limited to Central and South America:

According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s The Jesuit Relations—captives had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skin stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed their prisoners as “marching meat.”

The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.

The lesson in all this is that there is no race of people who is exempt from the human inclination toward savage depravity. White, black, brown and yellow, no race is free from the stain of a deeply corrupted human nature. As Graham points out, racism, violence and conquest are part of the human condition, not just the European one.

If Europeans have managed to dominate and oppress others at some points in their history it's not because they're more evil but because for the last thousand years or more they've been more technologically advanced. Every other group has behaved in exactly the same cruel fashion whenever they've been more powerful than their neighbors.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously observed that,

[T]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

He could have added "races and ethnicities" to that first clause.

The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

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

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

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

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

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

Consider this excerpt from a well-known 1996 paper:

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

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

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

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

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

Here's another metaphor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberals and Leftists (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post featured an assertion by Dennis Prager that leftists (as opposed to liberals) corrupt everything they touch. In the following video Prager elaborates on how, exactly, he believes various aspects of our personal and social lives are corrupted by left-wing policies and also why leftism, or progressivism, is not synonymous with liberalism.

Prager opens the column upon which this video is based with this:

What is the difference between a leftist and a liberal?

Answering this question is vital to understanding the crisis facing America and the West today. Yet few seem able to do it. I offer the following as a guide.

Here’s the first thing to know: The two have almost nothing in common.

On the contrary, liberalism has far more in common with conservatism than it does with leftism. The left has appropriated the word “liberal” so effectively that almost everyone — liberals, leftists and conservatives — thinks they are synonymous.

But they aren’t.

You may disagree with Prager, but as you watch the video you might ask yourself how, and in what way, is he mistaken:

Liberals and Leftists (Pt. I)

In a column at PJ Media Dennis Prager makes the following claim:

A rule of life is that everything the left touches it ruins: art, music, Christianity, Judaism, race relations, male-female relations, universities, high schools, elementary schools, late-night comedy, sports, liberty, journalism, the Boy Scouts, national economies, language and everything else it influences.

The left, not liberalism. (I have written a column and done a PragerU video on the differences between liberalism and leftism.)

To this list, we can now add childhood and children.

To see why Prager claims that the left is ruining childhood and children read his column at the link. To see how he differentiates between liberalism and the modern left (or progressivism) watch the following video:

One reason that people (sometimes including myself) conflate liberalism and leftism is that they both favor greater government control over the economy and individual lives, they both favor a welfare state, and they generally agree on most social issues.

Nevertheless, Prager's six differences are helpful. Unfortunately, there seem to be far fewer liberals today than there were a generation ago and a lot more leftists. The Democratic party was once the political home of liberalism in America, but today it has been largely taken over by leftists.

Almost all of the Democratic candidates running for their party's nomination for the presidential campaign of 2020 are leftists, and so are many of the party's leaders in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The same is true of much of the media, especially CNN and MSNBC.

Whether the progressives will be successful in pulling enough voters to the left thirteen months from now is uncertain, but if you agree with Prager's first paragraph above, it certainly matters.

Our Amazing Brain

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

The Dependence of Beauty Upon Meaning

Michael Baruzzini writing at First Things recalls an exchange between Richard Dawkins and Archbishop Rowan Williams in which Dawkins admitted that he was an agnostic about God, and was not, strictly speaking, an atheist. Much was made of the admission in the media despite the fact that it was a trivial distinction as Baruzzini explains:

This admission, though it caught the notice of the media, was not really anything new for Dawkins, who has made similar concessions in the past. Dawkins’ approach to all knowledge is strictly scientific.

And since scientific knowledge is always technically tentative, so too must his ostensibly scientific opinion of the non-existence of God. Dawkins dismisses God because he finds no scientific evidence for God, but he must make allowances for the fact that scientific knowledge is always expanding.

Dawkins is still an atheist, after all, because agnosticism is simply a species of the genus atheism. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God and agnostics lack a belief in God. They are what might be called soft atheists because, unlike the hard atheist, they don't make the very strong and undemonstrable claim that God doesn't exist. They simply hold that the evidence is insufficient to justify believing that He does.

It was another comment that Dawkins made in the same discussion that I found much more interesting:

Speaking to his believing conversational companion, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Dawkins said, “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing—that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”

I don't think Dawkins is quite right about this. Beauty ultimately depends upon meaning. Meaningless form and color may please the senses, it may be pretty, but it doesn't rise to the level of beauty unless there's meaning to it. Just as a meaningless sexual experience, though it may afford some degree of pleasure, is hardly beautiful, a world full of things for which we've evolved an aesthetic appreciation may be intriguing, but it's ultimately beautiful because it exudes meaning from every nook, cranny, and pore.

Baruzzini puts the point somewhat differently:

The archbishop, rather than disputing, agreed with Dawkins about the beauty of the scientific description of the development of life. But he then explained that God was not an extra that was “shoehorned” onto the scientific explanation.

Dawkins’ mistake, the archbishop attempted to show, was to suppose that the scientific explanation suffices, and the religious one is an unnecessary complication. The beauty that Dawkins finds in science is not challenged by belief in God; it presupposes it.

The beauty of scientific explanation comes from seeing that the arrangement of things is so ordered to produce the phenomena we observe. The scientist begins with a mess of clues and an unfinished puzzle. He begins with a mystery. He seeks that moment when the pieces fall into place....

But where creation presents a unified theme returning, finally, to reason, atheistic scientism must insist that at bottom [there] is only unreason.

If it all has no meaning, no purpose, if it's all simply the effluent of a cosmic belch, the beauty drains out of it.

Baruzzini goes on to make a further point about Dawkins' views that should be emphasized. He asserts that:

Dawkins supposes that the doctrine of creation requires a Divine Tinkerer, interfering with or co-opting the natural beauty present in the workings of the natural world. Whether or not God tinkered with creation in the manner envisioned by creationism or some versions of intelligent design, such tinkering is neither necessary to the doctrine of creation nor is it the source of the beauty seen by the believer.

To use an analogy previously developed by Stephen Barr, to ask whether God or evolution created life is like asking whether Shakespeare or Hamlet killed Polonius. If there is no Shakespeare, Hamlet’s act is meaningless. It is merely the accidental arrangement of ink on a page. If there is a Shakespeare, however, his existence as the creator of the literary Denmark does not obviate the drama of the play. It is rather a necessary prerequisite for it.

Shakespeare, as a playwright, is not a competitor with the drama of the play.

There's more at the link, but I want to return for a moment to the matter of beauty: Philosophers going back to Plato have affirmed that the highest ideals are the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, but if the world is nothing more than atoms spinning in the void then there really is no Good, no Truth that matters, and no Beauty.

The awe we feel when we look at mountains or a sunset or a galaxy is just the perturbations of chemicals in our brains triggered by a particular visual pattern.

It's when we somehow see meaning in what we observe that we experience its beauty, but there can only be meaning if behind the experience there is a mind that has intentionally created it. Take away the author, the painter, the composer, the architect and there is no meaning and thus no beauty for us to enjoy.

A novel filled with eloquently turned phrases and well-crafted sentences nevertheless lacks beauty if the story makes no sense.

The world and life are beautiful because they're filled by it's composer/author with deep, profound meaning.

The Restoration of Man

A classic work by Michael Aeschliman on C.S. Lewis has been reissued under the title The Restoration of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism.

Scientism may be considered the dominant religious expression of modernity. It's the view that the scientific method is the only reliable means of attaining truth and that anything that can't be known through the methodology of scientific investigation is not knowable and not worth believing.

The definitive critique of scientism, in my opinion, is philosopher J.P.Moreland's 2018 book Scientism and Secularism, but Aeschliman's book is also worthwhile and geared more toward the literary reader rather than the philosopher.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says of Aeschliman's book that,

The long overdue reappraisal of C.S. Lewis as a serious social critic and public intellectual has been much helped by Michael Aeschliman’s incisive monograph; its appearance in a new edition is very welcome at a time when crude scientism and incoherent forms of reductionist ideology seem (bafflingly) more popular than ever — as if we really don’t want to be human if being human involves reasoning, irony, growth, wisdom and joy.

David Klinghoffer focuses on Williams' assertion that contemporary scientific and philosophical reductionism is stripping us of our humanity, "as if we really don’t want to be human."

Klinghoffer writes:

It’s no secret that our reigning culture is anti-human. As Wesley Smith has written, a major drift in modern thinking “seek[s] to push us off the pedestal of unique value,” with “many academics, biological scientists, and evolutionary philosophers hav[ing] joined the anti-human crusade.”

That many adults don’t wish to be adults, and fight determinedly against adulthood with what they consider its unwelcome trappings (responsibility for others, personal dignity, even adult clothing), is also well known. But that many of us “don’t want to be human” is an additional insight, and a profound one.

You could call this twist in our thinking species dysphoria.

Klinghoffer's analogy to gender dysphoria is interesting for the question it tacitly raises. If the belief of those who suffer from the conviction that though they possess all the biological appurtenances of maleness they are nevertheless female is to be respected and accommodated, by what logic can we deny someone the same consideration who, despite having all the biological characteristics of a human being, nevertheless believes he's a cow?

When common sense withers in a culture madness soon swoops in to take its place.

Our Existential Predicament

My classes recently spent some time talking about the view of life called existentialism, so I thought it might not be out of place to offer a little mood music here on VP to perhaps nudge us toward reflection upon what's sometimes referred to as our "existential predicament."

The question this song by the group Kansas raises is, if it's true that all we are is dust in the wind what meaning or point is there to our lives?

The great 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer perceived the problem more clearly than most when he noted that, "Unless the point of life is to suffer there is no point," and this depressingly droll observation: "Life is bad today, tomorrow will be worse, until we die," and, "Life is a task, the task of staying alive and staving off boredom." The world, for Schopenhauer, is a "penal colony" in which "happiness is measured by the absence of suffering." He titled the book from which these quotes are taken, Studies in Pessimism.

It's not hard to see why.

Alex Rosenberg, the philosophy department chair at Duke University, frames the problem of our predicament succinctly when he writes: "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."

Bertrand Russell put the same dispiriting thought this way:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

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

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

What these thinkers are urging us to recognize is that death annihilates all, it's the big eraser, obliterating everything we do and rendering our existence on the planet a pointless exercise in absurdity.

Those who insist on the one hand that death is the end of our existence and on the other that there can nevertheless be some purpose to our lives are a bit like a prisoner who insists on making his bed and brushing his teeth before accompanying the executioner to the scaffold.

At least that's how many who hold to a naturalistic worldview, as do all three of the philosophers quoted above, see life, and they're probably correct to do so if indeed death really is a personal annihilation. Unless what we do matters forever it's hard to see how it matters at all.

Maybe, though, naturalism is wrong and what we do in this life does matter forever. If so, that would change everything.

Guaranteed Health Care Is Not a Human Right

Some of the candidates seeking the presidency in 2020 are making the claim that health care (or health insurance) is a basic human right. I think this is not only demagogic but utterly wrong. Here's why:

If everyone has a right to have health care provided for them then why do we not also have a right to have a home, food, transportation, clothing, etc. provided for us? All of these are just as important as health care to our well-being, but if we maintain that people have a right to these things that implies that others have an obligation to provide them.

We may, as compassionate people, choose to provide such necessities for others, but if so, it's an act of personal or corporate charity, not an obligation imposed on us by others.

If we do think of it as an obligation then the recipient need feel no gratitude, nor is the donor being virtuous or compassionate if all he's doing is meeting a state-imposed requirement.

I have a friend who made a truly wonderful choice a few years ago to donate a kidney to enable someone to live, and what made that decision so marvelous is precisely that he didn't have a duty or an obligation to do it. It was completely gratuitous.

If, however, he had been coerced by the state to provide the organ then compassion would've been no part of his act. There would've been no more virtue in it than there is in paying one's taxes. Likewise, though I'm sure the recipient of the kidney was extremely grateful for my friend's sacrifice, if the recipient believed that the donor had a duty to make that sacrifice, gratitude would've been out of place.

Parenthetically, that's a major problem with our welfare system, it stifles both compassion and gratitude by making support of the needy something to which they feel entitled.

In any case, if people have a right to health care, do people who are in need of an organ have a right to be given that organ? If so, doesn't that mean that others have an obligation to provide their organs to them, at least if, like kidneys, they have more than they need? If others have a right to our money to subsidize their health care why would they not have a right to our organs, especially those organs of which we have a surplus?

Another difficulty is that a "right" to health care is not like other rights that are intrinsic to our being human - rights like the right to life, liberty, etc. Those rights impose no duties upon others beyond obligating them to refrain from impeding us in our exercise of the right (within reasonable limits, of course). A right to health care, however, imposes an obligation on other people to provide it.

Suppose I live an irresponsible lifestyle that causes me to develop diabetes with all its concomitant health complications. Then others, essentially, have a duty to subsidize my irresponsible lifestyle by providing insurance for me against those complications.

In my opinion, my fellow citizens should be no more required to pay for my irresponsible lifestyle choices than they should be required to pay my grocery bill or mortgage. They may choose to do so, of course, but it would be an act of grace, not of duty.

Suppose, too, that society can't afford to pay for health care for everyone and can no longer insure it without bankrupting itself. What then are the reasonable limits on one's right to health care? If no money was available to fund it we wouldn't claim that individuals' rights were being denied because their health care was no longer being subsidized, but then health care would be a basic human right only if our nation could afford it.

At what point, then, do we decide that providing health care for others is no longer affordable? Surely, at some point the right to keep one's property overrides another person's right to have health care. If we deny that then we're saying that we must provide health care coverage even if it means confiscating everyone else's property in order to pay for it, or if it means forcing medical professionals to provide care for free.

Health care or insurance is like owning a house. We all have the right to own a house - no one can legally prevent us from purchasing one - but we don't have the right to demand that others buy the house for us no matter how badly we might need it. If we can't afford housing then people may wish to provide shelter for us, but we don't have the right to demand it of them.

Understand, this is not an argument against single-payer or any of the health care plans that'll eventually be discussed if and when the Democrats ever get over their infatuation with impeachment. We may as a society comprised of good and generous people decide we want to provide health coverage for everyone, to the extent that a wise, affordable program can be crafted.

What I've written above is an argument, however, against the assertion that anyone has an inherent human right to such coverage and a right to demand that we pay for that coverage.

What Americans Believe about Evolution

A fairly recent Gallup poll reveals that the number of people who hold to the strict creationist view that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so has declined and the number of people who believe in some form of evolution, whether naturalistic or directed by God has increased:

The percentage of U.S. adults who believe that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so -- the strict creationist view -- has reached a new low. Thirty-eight percent of U.S. adults now accept creationism, while 57% believe in some form of evolution -- either God-guided or not -- saying man developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

Allahpundit, a commentator at HotAir.com, looked at the data and wrote:

The pure creationist position was trending downward, then made a big comeback in 2011 for no obvious reason. It’s tempting to call that result an outlier or statistical noise, but the hybrid position of guided evolution polled poorly in the low 30s in 2011 and remained flat in 2014, suggesting a real trend. Now suddenly it’s come surging back. Why? You tell me.

Here's the graph he refers to:

Maybe the answer to Allahpundit's question is that many people who formerly embraced a literal seven-day creation have been persuaded by intelligent design theorists that ID offers a more satisfactory explanation of origins.

Many people who may have formerly thought that there was a conflict between evolution and theism might now, after almost three decades of work by intelligent design theorists, believe that the two are compatible. In other words, the survey is stuck with a format of questions that are no longer very illuminating.

David Klinghoffer, commenting on Gallup's questions, correctly observes that,

Since 1982 [Gallup] has been asking:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings — 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

What I wish they would ask is:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of living creatures – 1) Animal and human life arose and developed over billions of years, guided by a designing intelligence, whether God or otherwise, 2) Animal and human life arose and developed over billions of years, by strictly blind, natural processes, unguided by any intelligent agent, 3) God created all animal and human life at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

Now that would tell you a lot about the state of the evolution debate. But the modern intelligent design movement didn’t exist 35 years ago, so Gallup is stuck in 1982.

The Gallup poll also shows that fewer than one in five Americans holds a secular view of evolution, but that proportion has almost doubled from about 10% in 2000 to about 19% today. Allahpundit makes a compelling argument that this number is a pretty good measure of the percentage of atheists in the U.S. Here's Allahpundit:

The 19 percent figure for evolution without God is interesting in light of [a] recent [study] suggesting there may be many more atheists in the U.S. than everyone believes. Ask people if they think of themselves as “atheist” and chances are no more than three percent will say yes. Ask them if they believe in God without using the A-word and maybe 10 percent will say no.

How many people secretly believe there is no God, though, and are simply reluctant to say so, even to a pollster? [The] study ... divided people into two groups and gave them identical questionnaires filled with innocuous statements (e.g., “I own a dog”) — with one exception. One group had the statement “I do not believe in God” added to their questionnaire.

People in each group were asked to identify how many of the statements were true of them without specifying which ones were true. Then the numbers from the control group were compared to the numbers from the “I do not believe in God” group. Result: As best as researchers can tell from the numerical disparity, 26 percent don’t believe in God, way, way more than most surveys show.

I’m skeptical that the number runs quite that high, but the fact that 19 percent told Gallup they believe in evolution without God may mean the number of atheists is higher than the 3-10 percent range usually cited.

After all, how many religious believers are likely to also believe that God played no role in man’s development? Per Gallup, just one percent of weekly churchgoers signed on to that proposition and just six percent of nearly weekly or monthly observers did. “Evolution without God” may be a reasonably good proxy for atheism.

If so, the ratio of theists to atheists in this country is about 4 to 1. Of course, a lot of people can believe or disbelieve in God without acting or thinking consistently with that belief, and many respondents to the study may not have answered the questionnaire in a manner consistent with their true convictions.

For instance, a similar poll several years ago found that 9% of those who claimed to be atheists prayed at least once a week. One wonders how carefully those folks thought about their responses. Or their beliefs.

Forcing Others to Be Like You

I noted this morning that Kamala Harris has urged Twitter to suspend Donald Trump's account, ostensibly because she doesn't like what he says on Twitter about the people who are trying to destroy him. It also came to my notice that New York City has made it "illegal" to use the term "illegal alien."

Attempts to control speech are essentially attempts to control thought and anyone who values the freedom of either speech or thought should be appalled by the measures Harris proposes and New York has adopted.

As it happens I've been re-reading Louis Menand's 2002 best-seller titled The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual history of 19th century America, and an excerpt from the chapter on Civil War veteran and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is fresh in my mind.

Menand wrote:

The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies - people who think their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf.

If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.

Those who seek to punish those with whom they disagree, either economically, or through social media or through the courts, are precisely the sort of people Menand has in view in this passage. Later in life Holmes wrote that he detests a man who "knows that he knows," and, Menand continues,

[Holmes] had a knee-jerk suspicion of causes. He regarded them as attempts to compel one group of human beings to conform to some other group's idea of the good, and he could see no authority for such attempts greater than the other group's certainty that it knew what was best. "Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of seeking for change," he wrote in a letter...

By this Holmes meant seeking to compel others to change, to compel others to accept one's own point of view and certainties. Menand quotes Holmes:

I don't care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different than what they do - even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.

There's much here for people like Kamala Harris and the bright lights who govern New York City, as well as others like the folks who run the social media giants Google, Facebook and Twitter - and who censor political figures they dislike and ban political or religious speech and ideas of which they disapprove - to take to heart.

Do the Dems Really Want Trump Thrown Out?

A lawyer named Kyle Sammin gives four reasons at The Federalist why he thinks Trump's phone call to Ukraine will probably not result in the president's impeachment.

I'm not as confident as Sammin that impeachment will fail, but I do think the Democrats are not really trying to remove the president from office. I think they have a different strategy. In any case, here are the four reasons Sammin gives:

1. Unlike Watergate and the Clinton impeachment there's no cover-up. The administration has released all the relevant documents for everyone to see.
2. Nor was there any conspiracy.
3. The public suffers from impeachment fatigue after two years of breathless assurances that the Mueller probe was certain to result in an impeachment.
4. The public is also weary of the Democrats' persistence in "crying wolf" every time the president sneezes.

You can read Sammin's explanations of each of these at the link. He concludes by saying this:

The radicalism of the House Democrats and their media allies has made it hard to take them seriously without more conclusive evidence of presidential wrongdoing. Resistance folk on the internet are energized by this latest incident, and Trump’s more fervent partisans are too, but most people are dead tired of all of the lawfare and 24-hour news cycle argle-bargle.

They’ll watch—we all should—but for now the Zelensky affair looks unlikely to be the knockout blow the left has been seeking.

As I said, I doubt that there'll be a serious effort to remove the president from the White House. I don't think any but the most rabid progressive Trump haters really want to give Mike Pence a year as an incumbent to win over the loyalty of Trump's base. An incumbent would be much more difficult for Democrats to unseat in 2020.

What the Democrats are apparently trying to do is not remove Trump from office, but rather through their relentless investigations and resistance, they're trying to erode his support among Independents and wear him down physically and mentally to the point that he loses the 2020 election to an Elizabeth Warren or someone of similar ideological pedigree. Impeachment, though it would not remove Mr. Trump from office, would aid them in their effort to discredit, demoralize and weaken him.

In fact, were I a paranoid conspiracy theorist (which I'm not) I might even go so far as to say that the constant attacks on Trump are being orchestrated by Clinton allies not only to cripple him, but, with this latest attack over the Ukraine business involving Joe Biden's abuse of power, also cripple Democratic front-runner Biden.

The hope among the Clinton operatives would be that with Biden out of the way and no satisfactory Democratic candidate emerging from the primaries, Hillary could be drafted at the convention to run against and beat a severely weakened Trump in a rematch of 2016.

You heard it here first.