Christmas Gift Idea

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Black Friday Suggestion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Forward to the book I write this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Thanksgiving Came to be a National Holiday

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. On September 28th, 1863, a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, however, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, this proclamation was actually written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads as if it could have been written today.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving day.

The Sweetest Virtue

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans will observe tomorrow is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

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

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

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the importance of gratitude:

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

I hope that for all our readers (including those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) tomorrow will be a day filled with gratitude, love, and joy.

Near-Death Experience

A discussion at Mind Matters between Robert Marks and Walter Bradley, both of whom are scientists, focuses on the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and contains some interesting insights into these events.

The term "Near Death" seems to be misleading. Scientists have documented over 3500 cases over the past several decades in which people have been not just near to death but completely, clinically dead - no heartbeat or brain waves - but from which they returned to life.

More astonishing, upon regaining their life they were able to relate to their medical staff what had happened while they were dead.

In the past, these sorts of accounts were dismissed as hallucinations, wishful thinking or even fabrications, but so much evidence in support of their veridicality has accumulated over the last thirty years that they're being taken much more seriously today. The question contemporary researchers are trying to answer is not whether the experience is genuine but rather what exactly is going on when someone has one of these.

So far any natural, physical explanation has proven elusive. NDEs remain a mystery.

To the extent that NDEs are indeed genuine, they constitute a powerful argument for two claims that are incompatible with materialism. First, if someone is having an experience which includes thoughts, sensations and recall while his or her brain is completely shut down - dead - it strongly suggests that more than the brain is involved in thinking, sensing and remembering. NDEs are an emphatic pointer to the existence of an immaterial mind or soul.

Second, NDEs offer a compelling reason to believe that physical death is not the end of our existence, that there's more beyond this life and that death is a bridge to that further existence, much, perhaps, like childbirth is a bridge between two separate existences.

This short video offers a fascinating example of an NDE. A woman born blind lost her life, temporarily, in an accident and recounts what happened in the hospital. If she's telling the truth then it certainly detracts from the credibility of materialism's claim to be an adequate account of what it is to be a human being:

A Short Argument for the Existence of Mind

The following argument comes to us courtesy of philosopher Jay Richards at Mind Matters. It's an argument for the proposition that in addition to our material brain we also have an immaterial mind involved in our cognitive experience.

Here goes:

Imagine a scenario where I ask you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae, while a doctor does an MRI and takes a real-time scan of your brain state. We assume that the following statements are true:

(1) You’re a person. You have a “first person perspective.”
(2) You have thoughts.
(3) I asked you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae.
(4) You freely chose to do so, based on my request.
(5) Those thoughts caused something to happen in your brain and perhaps elsewhere in your body.

Thinking about the sundae causes patterns of brain waves, but brain waves are simply electrochemical goings-on in the brain. They're not the same thing as your thoughts. They're not about anything, but your thoughts are. They're about the sundae.

Richards goes on:

We have thoughts and ideas — what philosophers call “intentional” states — that are about things other than themselves. We don’t really know how this works, how it relates to the brain or chemistry or the laws of physics .... But whenever we speak to another person, we assume it must be true. And in our own case, we know it’s true. Even to deny it is to affirm it.

Richards next observes that there's no dispute about points (1) through (5). They're common sense.

In other words, everyone who hasn’t been persuaded by skeptical philosophy assumes them to be true. But it’s not merely that everyone assumes them. They are basic to pretty much any other intellectual exercise, including arguing.

That’s because you have direct access to your thoughts and, by definition, to your first-person perspective. You know these things more directly than you could conclude, let alone know, any truth of history or science. You certainly know them more directly than you could possibly know the premises of an argument for materialism.

That matters because (1) through (5) defy materialist explanation.

So how might a materialist respond?

The materialist will want to say one of three things to avoid the implication of a free agent whose thoughts cause things to happen in the material world:

A) Your “thoughts” are identical to a physical brain state.
B) Your “thoughts” are determined by a physical brain state.
or
C) You don’t really have thoughts.

And if any one of (A), (B), or (C) is true, then most or all of (1) through (5) are false.

Richards concludes with this:

So here’s the conclusion: What possible reason could we have for believing (A), (B), or (C) and doubting (1) through (5)? Remember that if you opt for (A), (B), or (C), you can’t logically presuppose (1) through (5).

Surely this alone is enough to conclude that we can have no good reason for believing the materialist account of the mind.

Educated

I recently finished Tara Westover's autobiography titled Educated and thought that her story should serve as an inspiration to every young person who has been cheated out of an education by having attended a failing public school.

Westover was raised in a rural "survivalist" family in Idaho by a father who thought Armageddon was just around the corner and who was preparing for the day when the government would control every detail of every person's life. Neither she nor her six siblings, at least most of them, ever went to a hospital, ever saw a doctor, ever got vaccinated, ever attended school and ever received a birth certificate. Whatever education she had - which consisted largely in midwifery and the manufacture and use of various home remedies - she picked up at home from her mother.

Despite these disadvantages, despite her father's recklessness, paranoia and general whackiness, despite being terrorized by a psychopathic older brother, despite her mother's extraordinary submission to her husband's will, even to the point of allowing her children to suffer both physical and psychological harm at the hands of the older brother, Tara managed to get accepted at Brigham Young University, and within about a decade she had earned a PhD at Cambridge University.

Notwithstanding her lack of even the most rudimentary background knowledge - she had never heard of the holocaust and had no idea what it was when she entered BYU - she was like a dry sponge soaking up knowledge, teaching herself math, writing and history, eventually achieving her doctorate in history and writing a best-selling book of her own.

It's an incredible story and one from which young people can take the lesson that a weak educational background doesn't have to condemn one to a life of ignorance. It's possible through hard work to compensate for the learning and social skills one never received growing up.

Nor does a dysfunctional home environment have to determine our destiny as adults. Tara and her six siblings were raised in poverty in an auto salvage yard run by her apparently bi-polar father and a timid, acquiescent mother. The Westover siblings all had fairly similar backgrounds. Yet three of them eventually earned PhDs and managed to transcend their intellectually and socially disadvantaged childhoods.

It seems nearly miraculous, but it's apparently true, and what she and her siblings accomplished can also be accomplished by others who have the will and determination to surmount the environment into which they were born and reach their fullest potential as human beings.

Tara Westover's story is an inspiration, but one hopes that the scars of her childhood and the trauma of being estranged from her family, as she subsequently has been, don't prevent her from enjoying healthy relationships with others in the years ahead.

Weird Physics

Why do some physicists think that the material universe is dependent upon mind? Why do they think that an observation somehow creates a reality which didn't exist prior to the observation?

The following video illustrates a classic experiment that some say proves that materialism, the belief that matter is the fundamental reality, is false. The experiment is compatible with the view that mind is the most fundamental substance and that matter is a product of an observing mind.

One commenter at the Youtube site for this video asserts that all the theories seeking to explain the existence of the universe distill to three possibilities:

1. Either the universe(s) has always existed in one form or another and thus never needed creating because it always existed.

2. Or the universe(s) created itself from nothing where nothing previously existed.

3. Or that a divine entity has always existed and created it through an act of will.

He goes on to say that:

Each of these alternatives is equally outrageous and impossible to believe but one MUST be true. I like to think the first one is true.

I don't think I agree that these are all equally hard to believe. I think the second is much harder to believe than the other two. Be that as it may, the commenter favors the first as a matter of metaphysical preference which is another way of saying that he doesn't really want the third option to be true.

Why he's averse to that alternative, he doesn't say, but I think a lot of people, whether theists or naturalists, share his basic outlook. What they believe about the universe, their fundamental worldview, is not a matter of logic or compelling reasons. It's more a matter of taste, or subjective preference, or aesthetics.

The atheist Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledges this in his Gay Science where he writes that, "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."

It's very difficult, especially in this pragmatic, postmodern age, to persuade someone whose belief is based on a matter of personal preference to abandon it for an alternative. People tend to believe what they most want to be true and are not easily persuaded by reason and logic to believe otherwise. Indeed, they're often not even open to reason and logic.

Common Good Capitalism

In the last few years GDP and financial sector profits have soared due to the salutary effects of free market capitalism. As President Trump has cut taxes and removed the burdensome regulations imposed on business by the Obama administration the economy has taken off and unemployment is at record lows, especially for minorities.

But, as Emile Doak observes in an article in First Things, there's a downside to our prosperity. As the economy has been thrumming along we're also experiencing a continuing plague of drug dependence, suicide and other deaths of despair. Here's Doak:

It’s against this backdrop that another ambitious GOP politician, Sen. Marco Rubio, is thinking beyond mere macroeconomic metrics to place human dignity at the core of America’s political economy. In a speech at the Catholic University of America yesterday, Rubio...outlined an economic philosophy that departs significantly from [the typical capitalist] laissez-faire approach.

“The primary purpose of capitalism is to provide for human dignity,” Rubio proclaimed.... “We don’t need socialism, [but we also] don’t need simply to say ‘the market will take care of it by itself.’ What we need is to restore common good capitalism.”

...Rubio seeks to reclaim a holistic disposition that recognizes the members of the U.S. economy as human persons, not simply scientific datum. Conservatives are turning against outsourcing—both of American jobs to China and of economic thought to libertarians.

Rubio said that economic growth is an inadequate indicator of economic health: “Economic growth and record profits alone will not lead to the creation of dignified work.” He argues for placing human dignity at the center of the economy. “Does our country exist to serve the interests of the market? Or does the market exist to serve the interests of our nation?”

Doak goes on to list some of Rubio's specific policy proposals and interested readers are urged to read the original article at the link.

Doak concludes with this:

At its core, Rubio’s common good capitalism represents a more authentically Christian approach to political economy than anything either major party has put forth in recent memory. It balances the legitimate interests of businesses and workers. It respects the rights of shareholders, CEOs, and employees alike, while emphasizing the corresponding obligations they have to one another and to the country that made their success possible....

The path forward requires recalibrating our nation’s economic priorities, reemphasizing the dignity of work and he who provides it, and reintroducing the language of national interest and the common good. The common good capitalism Rubio outlined at CUA is the place to start.

I am certainly all in favor of reemphasizing the dignity of work, but at the risk of sounding churlish I don't know how we can do that in a society that implicitly denies, in ways both great and small, the even more basic dignity of human beings.

It's interesting that Rubio is offering a proposal that grows out of a Christian worldview because on a secular worldview it's very hard to see how human beings, which are in that view nothing but machines made of meat, can have any intrinsic worth, and without intrinsic worth, human dignity, to the extent it exists at all, is simply an illusion we foist upon ourselves to stroke our egos.

If you doubt that secularists really think like this consider the words of the early twentieth century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.

Or consider the more recent claim by the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking:

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.

  And, of course, if we humans are just baboons and chemical scum then our work can hardly be imagined to rise to the level of "dignified activity."

I applaud Senator Rubio, but I think the cause of our distress, the cause of the mounting deaths of despair, lies at a much more fundamental level. We need to reemphasize not only the dignity of work but also the dignity of human beings and that will require simultaneously a persistent assault on the secular claim that we're no more than animals and a persistent reaffirmation that we are, in fact, created in the image of God and loved by Him.

Only if that is true can human beings lay any claim to dignity.

Who's Happier?

A column at The Federalist by Senior Editor Glenn Stanton takes to task Garrison Keillor, of all people, for what must be either his malevolence or gross ignorance.

Stanton quotes Keillor: “Liberalism is the politics of kindness.” Liberals “stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, [and] the defense of the weak against the powerful.” In...contrast, the “people who call themselves conservatives stand for tax cuts, and further tax cuts, annual tax cuts, the only policy they know. [They] use their refund to buy a gun and an attack dog” to keep everyone away who is not like them.

Well, that may be Keillor's point of view, but it turns out that serious scholarship has shown that none of this is true and is, in fact, the very opposite of the truth. According to the research,

Conservatives have happier families, find more meaning in life, are generally happier overall, and donate far more money and time to the needy than their liberal peers.

Also, it’s not just general conservatism per se that makes the difference. The more socially conservative people are, the happier and more content with life they are. And party affiliation matters significantly. Conservative Republicans outpace conservative, moderate, and liberal Democrats. When picking your neighbors, regardless of your politics or beliefs, conservative Republicans are who you want.

Stanton doesn't explain this, but it's probably the case that it's conservative values that foster contentment and Republican conservatives are generally more conservative than their Democratic counterparts. Stanton goes on:

Forty-one percent of both liberals and moderates report being “completely satisfied” with their family lives, while 52 percent of conservatives do.

Conservatives are also vastly more likely than liberals to believe marriage is essential in creating and maintaining strong families. They are also much more likely to actually be married, 62 versus 39 percent, thus benefiting from all the ways marriage improves overall well-being and contentment, personal happiness, economic security, long-term employment, longevity, better physical and mental health, and more.

Being a conservative increases the odds of being “completely satisfied with family life” by 23 percent. Married men and women who believe “marriage is needed to create strong families” have 67 percent greater odds of being completely content with their own family life than married couples who do not believe this.

Not only are they more satisfied with their family life but according to the research conservatives are just happier overall:

A much larger body of research has long demonstrated that, all things being equal, conservatives tend to be happier overall than their liberal neighbors are. This is truer for social conservatives than for fiscal conservatives, and the more conservative a conservative is, the happier he or she seems to be.

A massive study published earlier this year, involving five different data samples from 16 Western countries spanning more than four decades, adds more meat to this topic. These scholars from the University of Southern California found, as they put it, “In sum, conservatives reported greater meaning in life and greater life satisfaction than liberals.”

Conservatives experience greater meaning in life across their lives generally, but also daily and at most given moments throughout the day. The researchers conclude these findings are “robust” and that “there is some unique aspect of political conservatism that provides people with meaning and purpose in life.”

Multiple studies consistently show this difference in overall happiness and contentment is not affected by whose party or ideological partisans are in the seats of power in the White House or Congress. It seems as if the beliefs themselves matter most.

Since conservatives tend to be more religious than liberals the following is not surprising:

Likewise, regular church attenders are nearly twice as likely to say they are “very happy” than those who seldom or never attend, and this is consistently well-founded in a vast body of literature. So church-going, Republican conservatives are just some of the happiest, most contented folks around.

It seems reasonable to believe that happiness is correlated with generosity and this, too, is borne out by the research:

Finally, if you had to guess who are more generous with their money and volunteering their time to help those in need, would you guess Democrats or Republicans? ... Conservative Republicans are consistently more generous than their Democratic neighbors. This is true among all income levels, including the wealthiest. Republican millionaires give more of their money away to the needy than Democratic millionaires.

The data is so strong that even New York Times columnist Paul Sullivan admitted the “more Republican a county is, the more its residents report charitable contributions.” His colleague at the Times, Nicholas Kristof ... laments that his clan doesn’t fare so well on kindness in the form of real dollars:

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

In his excellent book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, Arthur C. Brooks presents what he describes as “a large amount of data all pointing in the same direction.” ... He says, “People who favor government income redistribution are significantly less likely to donate to charity than those who do not.”

He perceptively notes that for a certain type of ideological American, “political opinions are a substitute for personal checks, but people who value economic freedom, and thus bridle against forced income distribution, are far more charitable” to those in need.

Stanton elaborates on all this in the article and offers links to the studies.

One thing I wondered as I read his piece is whether people were happier because they were religious and conservative or whether happier people just tend to gravitate toward those particular beliefs.

In any case, there's doubtless a moral in all this. In the universal human search for happiness in life, we'd do well to seek it where it's most likely to be found and not waste time looking for it where it's less likely to be found.

Relying on AI

There's lots of talk nowadays about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how computerized robots will eventually reach a stage of development in which they are essentially human, but much smarter.

Whether that future will ever be realized or not I doubt that anyone knows, though I confess to being skeptical that the characteristics of consciousness will ever be replicated in a machine. Nevertheless, I admit I could be wrong.

One thing that seems certain, however, is that AI has not yet arrived at that future. Robert Marks, Director and Senior Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence in a piece at Mind Matters, lists several events that illustrate that the abilities of AI are still dependent upon the abilities of human programmers.

Marks discusses a half dozen or so examples, but here are two of the more interesting - and tragic, even near catastrophic - failures of AI that he mentions:

An Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian in 2018: “According to data obtained from the self-driving system, the system first registered radar and LIDAR observations of the pedestrian about six seconds before impact, when the vehicle was traveling at 43 mph… As the vehicle and pedestrian paths converged, the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path.

At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision.” By then, it was too late.

This next one occurred when AI could be said to have been in its infancy, but it's nonetheless frightening to think how close we came to a world-wide holocaust due to our reliance on machines:

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union constructed Oko, a system tasked with early detection of a missile attack from the United States. Oko detected such an attack on September 26, 1983. Sirens blared and the system declared that an immediate Soviet retaliatory strike was mandatory.

A Soviet officer in charge felt that something was not right and did not launch the retaliatory strike. His decision was the right one. Oko had mistakenly interpreted sun reflections off of clouds as inbound American missiles. By making this decision, the Soviet officer, Lt. Col. Stanislov Petrov, saved the world from thermonuclear war.

Of course, when mistakes and oversights are discovered programs can be rewritten so as to avoid them in the future, but, as Marks observes,

The cost of discovering an unexpected contingency can, however, be devastating. A human life or a thermonuclear war is too high a price to pay for such information. And even after a specific problem is fixed, additional unintended contingencies can continue to occur.

He notes that there are three ways to minimize unintended consequences:

(1) use systems with low complexity, (2) employ programmers with elevated domain expertise, and (3) testing. Real world testing can expose many unintended consequences but hopefully without harming anyone.

For AI systems, low complexity means narrow AI. AI thus far, when reduced to commercial practice, has been relatively narrow. As the conjunctive complexity of a system grows linearly, the number of contingencies grows exponentially. Domain expertise [on the part of the programmers] can anticipate many of these contingencies and minimize those which are unintended.

But, as the examples he gives in his column illustrate, even the best of programmers can't anticipate everything. The greatest threat, Marks concludes, "is the unintended contingency, the thing that never occurred to the programmer."

Rolling the Dice

From time to time we've talked about the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time"). Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of faith. The discussions are almost always pleasant, informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually what such conversations should be like, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here. For those readers who might prefer a slightly more elaborate explication try this post and the debate it links to.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. III)

In the previous two posts I argued that Philosopher Peter Atterton failed in his attempt to show that there's a contradiction between God's goodness and the evil in the world and that the theist's concept of God is therefore incoherent.

Atterton is not finished, however. He next turns his attention to one more alleged contradiction, the alleged incompatibility between God's omniscience and His moral perfection:

What about God’s infinite knowledge — His omniscience? Philosophically, this presents us with no less of a conundrum.

Leaving aside the highly implausible idea that God knows all the facts in the universe, no matter how trivial or useless (Saint Jerome thought it was beneath the dignity of God to concern Himself with such base questions as how many fleas are born or die every moment), if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.

But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?

There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy.

But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.

Atterton is here committing the fallacy of equivocation, slyly using the word "know" in two different senses.

He first uses "know" propositionally, e.g. as someone might "know" who won the 1980 World Series, but then he gives the word an experiential meaning, as in one may "know" the pleasure of a fine wine.

When philosophers talk of God's omniscience they're speaking of propositional knowledge. God knows all true propositions. Omniscience doesn't entail that God knows what something like guilt or lust feels like experientially.

Nevertheless, I'd argue that it certainly seems possible that God knows very well what lust feels like without himself ever having experienced it, just as he can know what sweetness is like without ever having tasted anything sweet or what red would look like before he ever created light or eyes to see it with.

After all, if God designed and created man's emotions and sensations it's reasonable to think that He has an exhaustive understanding of what he has created even if he himself never has the experiences that give rise to those sensations in humans.

If this is possible then Atterton has not demonstrated a contradiction between God's omniscience and moral perfection and has therefore failed to show that there's an incoherence in the theist's concept of God. His argument is very unpersuasive.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we discussed an attempt by philosopher Peter Atterton to show that God's goodness is incompatible with the evil we find in the world. He concludes that this incompatibility renders the concept of God held by most theists incoherent.

Atterton concedes that moral evil can be explained by God having granted human beings free will, but, he insists, human free will cannot account for natural evils such as result from tsunamis, disease, etc.

Here's his argument:

However, this [human free choice] does not explain so-called physical evil (suffering) caused by nonhuman causes (famines, earthquakes, etc.). Nor does it explain, as Charles Darwin noticed, why there should be so much pain and suffering among the animal kingdom.

Actually, however, the Judeo-Christian theological tradition does explain it. According to this tradition the world and all that is in it was created good and given to Man as a gift for him to superintend, much like a husband might out of love build a house as a gift to his new bride.

God was in some sense present in this "home," and His presence acted as a governor on the laws of nature, holding them in check, overriding them and restraining them from producing the cataclysmic events which cause the awful pain and suffering we see today.

Man, however, chose to rebel against God in an act of cosmic betrayal akin to a much-loved wife cheating on a good and faithful husband. That act of infidelity resulted not only in the estrangement of Man from God but also the estrangement of Man's world from God.

The Fall of Man corrupted everything associated with Man and consequently the goodness of creation was distorted and altered. God withdrew from the home He had built for Himself and Man, the laws of nature were no longer restrained, and the world became a much less hospitable place.

Pain and suffering in both the moral sphere as well as in the natural world are, according to this view, a consequence, ultimately, of Man's free choice. The fault lies with Man, not God.

Now one may believe that this tradition is wrong. One may believe that nothing like it ever happened, but the starting point of Atterton's argument is the stipulation that God created the world. If that stipulation is accepted then something very much like this narrative is possible.

Moreover, if this account of the Fall of Man is approximately correct, then it's possible that the world as we find it today is not at all the world that God originally created. The present suffering of the world, given this scenario, is a result of Man's betrayal, not God's will, and there's therefore no contradiction between God's goodness and human suffering.

And if there's no demonstrable contradiction then, pace Atterton, there's no demonstrable incoherence.

More tomorrow.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. I)

Peter Atterton, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, had a column in the New York Times last spring in which he argued that the concept of God as held by most theists is incoherent and thus not credible.

Atterton is not the first to advance this argument, it's been around for a long time despite the fact that it fails to establish what it claims to establish.

In order to show that a concept is incoherent there has to be an explicit or implicit contradiction in the concept. For example, the concept of a square circle is incoherent since a figure cannot be both square and circular at the same time.

Here are some excerpts from Atterton's argument in the Times:

I’d like to focus on a specific question: Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?

You’ve probably heard the paradox of the stone before: Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? If God can create such a stone, then He is not all powerful, since He Himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if He cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then He is not all powerful, since He cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.

Surprisingly, Atterton admits that there's a possible solution to the paradox, but why mention the stone paradox as an objection to the coherence of theism if there's a plausible solution to it?

The way out of this dilemma is usually to argue, as Saint Thomas Aquinas did, that God cannot do self-contradictory things. Thus, God cannot lift what is by definition “unliftable,” just as He cannot “create a square circle” or get divorced (since He is not married). God can only do that which is logically possible.

Having answered his own argument Atterton then says that, well, there are other difficulties which make the concept of God incoherent:

[E]ven if we accept, for the sake of argument, Aquinas’ explanation, there are other problems to contend with. For example, can God create a world in which evil does not exist? This does appear to be logically possible.

Presumably God could have created such a world without contradiction. It evidently would be a world very different from the one we currently inhabit, but a possible world all the same. Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why he wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t He?

This is not much of an argument. It certainly doesn't show that there's a contradiction between God's attributes of omnipotence and goodness. Atterton is asking the question, if God could do something that He might've been expected to do, why didn't He do it? To which the answer is simply that He evidently had good reasons for not doing so.

As long as it's possible that God had sufficient reason not to create the world Atterton envisions then he has failed to show a contradiction in God's attributes. What Atterton needs to do to show a contradiction is to demonstrate that it's impossible or at least unlikely that God could've had good reasons for allowing evil to exist, and this would be a very difficult philosophical task. After all, how could anyone know such a thing?

The rest of his attempt to find a contradiction between the attributes of God fares little better. We'll look at another of them tomorrow.

The Moral Depravity of Honor Killing

My classes recently discussed ethical relativism and the practice of honor killing came up. To help explain what honor killing is and how it's viewed in some Islamic cultures I found this article, in a post from the archive. It discusses the practice of honor killings and the social pressures placed on families to carry them out. It sounds, quite frankly, pretty depraved. Here's part of it:

The murder of women to salvage their family's honor results in good part from the social and psychological pressure felt by the killers, as they explain in their confessions. Murderers repeatedly testify that their immediate social circle, family, clan, village, or others expected them and encouraged them to commit the murder. From society's perspective, refraining from killing the woman debases her relatives. Here are five examples:

A Jordanian murdered his sister who was raped by another brother. The family tried initially to save its honor by marrying the victim to an old man, but this new husband turned her into a prostitute and she escaped from him. The murderer confessed that if he had to go through it all again he would not kill her, but rather would kill his father, mother, uncles, and all the relatives that pressured him to murder and led him to jail. Instead of killing his sister and going to jail, he said he should have "tied her with a rope like a goat and let her spend her life like that until she dies."

An Egyptian who strangled his unmarried pregnant daughter to death and then cut her corpse in eight pieces and threw them in the toilet: "Shame kept following me wherever I went [before the murder]. The village's people had no mercy on me. They were making jokes and mocking me. I couldn't bear it and decided to put an end to this shame."

A 25-year-old Palestinian who hanged his sister with a rope: "I did not kill her, but rather helped her to commit suicide and to carry out the death penalty she sentenced herself to. I did it to wash with her blood the family honor that was violated because of her and in response to the will of society that would not have had any mercy on me if I didn't... Society taught us from childhood that blood is the only solution to wash the honor."

A young Palestinian who murdered his sister who had been sexually assaulted: "Before the incident, I drank tea and it tasted bitter because my honor was violated. After the killing I felt much better... I don't wish anybody the mental state I was in. I was under tremendous mental pressure."

Another Palestinian who murdered his sister: "I had to kill her because I was the oldest [male] member of the family. My only motive to kill her was [my desire] to get rid of what people were saying. They were blaming me that I was encouraging her to fornicate... I let her choose the way I would get rid of her: slitting her throat or poisoning her. She chose the poison."

These testimonies are in line with the analysis of 'Izzat Muhaysin, a psychiatrist at the Gaza Program for Mental Health, who says that the culture of the society perceives one who refrains from "washing shame with blood" as "a coward who is not worthy of living." Many times, he adds, such a person is described as less than a man.

In some cases, the decision to commit the murder has a quality of being deputized. In the case of Kifaya Husayn opening this article, the victim's uncles actually appointed her brother to commit the crime on behalf of the family. The murderer in the fifth case cited above felt obliged to commit the crime as the eldest male of the family.

Murder has its intended social effect, permitting the family to regain its original social status. The murderer in the fourth case cited above went on to tell how almost ten thousand people attended his sister's funeral; once she was dead, society again embraced the family.

There are those who say that what's wrong for us is not necessarily wrong for people living in other cultures and that we shouldn't judge other cultural practices. I wonder if they'd say that after reading the above. Some ways of life are better than others and some cultural and moral values are better than others.

Any culture which encourages, or even condones, the slaughter of young rape victims or, for that matter, the killing of any young girl for any imaginable reason, is sick. It's a culture of death.

Many Worlds

Yesterday's post discussed the multiverse and how contemporary scientists seem to be drawn toward theories for which there's very little evidence, which seems like a very unscientific thing to do.

Today I want to reflect a bit on a theory that's often confused with the multiverse and sometimes goes by the same name but is actually different. This is the Many Worlds hypothesis.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal science writer John Horgan reviews a book by physicist Sean Carroll titled Something Deeply Hidden in which Carroll argues that the simplest version of quantum mechanics entails the idea that every time a quantum particle such as an electron is jostled or observed the universe splits.

A consequence of this is that there exists an infinite number of worlds in which an infinity of different versions of you exist simultaneously with your existence in this world.

Here's Horgan:

The universe supposedly splits, or branches, whenever one quantum particle jostles against another, making their wave functions collapse. This process, called “decoherence,” happens all the time, everywhere. It is happening to you right now. And now. And now. Yes, zillions of your doppelgängers are out there at this very moment, most likely having more fun than you.

The number of universes created since the big bang, Mr. Carroll estimates, is 2 to the power of 10^112 . Like I said, an infinitude.

If Carroll weren't so smart and such a good writer a lot of people might think he has taken leave of his senses.

After all, if his interpretation of quantum mechanics leads to the conclusion that there are an infinity of worlds and an infinity of different iterations of you and me then the appropriate conclusion to draw, it would seem, is that there's probably something wrong with his interpretation of quantum mechanics, even if we can't put our finger on what it is.

Horgan goes on:

I am not a multiverse denier .... [b]ut I’m less entertained by multiverse theories than I once was, for a couple of reasons. First, science is in a slump, for reasons both internal and external. Science is ill-served when prominent thinkers tout ideas that can never be tested and hence are, sorry, unscientific.

Moreover, at a time when our world, the real world, faces serious problems, dwelling on multiverses strikes me as escapism—akin to billionaires fantasizing about colonizing Mars. Shouldn’t scientists do something more productive with their time?

Some questions suggest themselves here. Carroll may be right or wrong, but whichever he is, what difference does it make to how anyone lives their lives or to how we view the world? And if it makes no difference what is its value? What's the point?

Carroll might reply that knowledge is an end in itself, and perhaps he'd be right, but a theory is knowledge only if we can establish its truth, and that's something which is very difficult to imagine anyone doing.

Evidence? Who Needs it?

In order to escape the overwhelming evidence that cosmic fine-tuning offers to those who believe the universe to be intelligently designed, many skeptics have staked their money, or at least their professional reputations, on the concept of a multiverse, for which there's scarcely any evidence at all. The multiverse, however, seems to be suggested by string theory, for which there's also scarcely any evidence, but it remains a popular hypothesis in some circles nonetheless.

One might be forgiven for thinking that this popularity is due to the fact that without it the multiverse would be seen as sheer fantasy, and without the multiverse there's no escaping the conclusion that our universe appears to have been intentionally designed for life by a mathematical supergenius.

Cosmologist Bernard Carr once said that “If there is only one universe you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.” Of course, there could be both, but if there is a multiverse it obviates one of the best arguments for the existence of God, i.e. the argument based on cosmic fine-tuning.*

Denyse O'Leary brings us a nice summary of some of what's being said about string theory in an article at Evolution News and Views. She begins with the relationship of string theory to multiverse theory:

[S]tring theory... undergirds the concept of a multiverse: There are more universes than particles in our known universe.

How so? To work at all, string theory requires at least nine spatial dimensions (six of which are curled up out of our sight) plus time. But if our universe (three spatial dimensions plus time) arose randomly among the ten dimensions of possibilities (the “string landscape"), theorists reckon that there should be about 10^500 universes (or more). [If there are that many different worlds then] literally anything can happen, has happened, and will happen over and over again.

The sheer number suffocates the evidence for fine-tuning. Our universe happens to look fine-tuned? But the theoretical others don’t. New Scientist spells it out: “This concept of a ‘multiverse’ could explain a puzzling mystery — why dark energy, the furtive force that is accelerating the expansion of space, appears improbably fine-tuned for life. With a large number of universes, there is bound to be one that has a dark energy value like ours.”

O'Leary goes on to discuss the theory of Supersymmetry, for which there's scarcely any evidence either, and notes the opinion of Peter Higgs, the physicist who predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson:

Curiously, Peter Higgs...is not a believer in either supersymmetry or the multiverse: “It’s hard enough to have a theory for one universe,” he says. As the Economist pointed out in 2016, “Supersymmetry is a beautiful idea. But no evidence supports it.”

The lack of evidence and the inability to test these theories is starting to embarrass some science writers and critics:

Critics, perhaps less imaginative than the theorists, decry string theory’s lack of testability. Science writer Philip Ball complains, “Proposing something as dramatic as seven extra dimensions, without offering the slightest prospect of testing to see if they are there, is a step too far for some physicists.” ....Physicist Ethan Siegel tells us bluntly at Forbes that string theory is not science: It cannot be tested.

Physicist Frank Close is blunt: “[M]any physicists have developed theories of great mathematical elegance, but which are beyond the reach of empirical falsification, even in principle. The uncomfortable question that arises is whether they can still be regarded as science.”

Science writer John Horgan, even blunter, scoffs [at the proliferation of untestable hypotheses in physics] “At its best, physics is the most potent and precise of all scientific fields, and yet it surpasses even psychology in its capacity for bull****.”

Evidence or no, string theory remains popular. Skeptical Columbia mathematician Peter Woit wonders why: “The result of tens of thousands of papers and more than 30 years of work is that all the evidence is that if you can get something this way that looks at all like the Standard Model, you can get anything. Normally when that happens you simply acknowledge the problem and give up, but for some reason that hasn’t happened.”

If science-based reasoning doesn’t explain string theory, cultural history might: A culture might wish a multiverse into existence despite the facts, to satisfy emotional needs such as making naturalism appear to work. As Philip Ball says, “[N]ailing your flag to the mast of string theory has come to be seen as an expression of faith rather than reason, and physics has become polarised into believers and sceptics.”

The string theory/multiverse complex resists being thrown into the dustbin of discarded scientific ideas because for metaphysical naturalists it's really the only game in town. If there's only one universe then, as Bernard Carr said over a decade ago, you pretty much have to accept that it was intelligently designed. The improbability of so many conditions, force values, parameters, etc. being calibrated within tolerances so fine that deviations in some cases of just one part in 10^120 would have prevented the universe from existing at all is so astronomical as to make the notion that our universe is just an accident literally incredible.

* Here are just a few examples of cosmic traits which must be set to the precise values they have or life as we know it would be impossible:

• Stars like the sun produce energy by fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom. During that reaction, 0.007 percent of the mass of the hydrogen atoms is converted into energy, via Einstein’s famous e = mc2 equation. But if that percentage were, say, 0.006 or 0.008, the universe would be far more hostile to life. The lower number would result in a universe filled only with hydrogen; the higher number would leave a universe with no hydrogen (and therefore no water) and no stars like the sun.
• The early universe was delicately poised between runaway expansion and terminal collapse. Had the universe contained much more matter, additional gravity would have made it implode. If it contained less, the universe would have expanded too quickly for galaxies to form.
• Had matter in the universe been more evenly distributed, it would not have clumped together to form galaxies. Had matter been clumpier, it would have condensed into black holes.
• Atomic nuclei are bound together by the so-called strong force. If that force were slightly more powerful, all the protons in the early universe would have paired off and there would be no hydrogen, which fuels long-lived stars. Water would not exist, nor would any known form of life.

Teaching Ethics in Public School

High school teacher Paul Barnwell had an article in The Atlantic a couple of years ago in which he expressed deep concern for the lack of moral education in today's public schools.

He noted that, among other things, the emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests has squeezed out opportunities for the addition of ethical instruction to the curriculum, and that the results are reflected in dispiriting attitudes among students toward matters like cheating, bullying, stereotyping, etc.

He wrote:

As my students seemed to crave more meaningful discussions and instruction relating to character, morality, and ethics, it struck me how invisible these issues have become in many schools. By omission, are U.S. schools teaching their students that character, morality, and ethics aren’t important in becoming productive, successful citizens?

Barnwell goes on to lament that schools are almost devoid of any formal moral instruction, a consequence, no doubt, of the fear of treading into the domain of religion.

Indeed, religion in public schools is taboo, as is any topic that even hints at having theistic implications. But how can one teach ethics unless one is free to answer the question that inevitably arises in the minds of at least some of the more perceptive students: Why?

For example, a teacher can present to her students the utilitarian concept of maximizing human flourishing, but what does she say when the student asks why he should care about the flourishing of anyone but himself, or in what sense would it be wrong for someone to impede the flourishing of another, or how does his cheating on a test impede another person's flourishing anyway, or what makes humans special that we should maximize human flourishing and not the flourishing of all living things?

As soon as those questions come up, the discussion is effectively at an end because the only answer that avoids an eventual appeal to one's emotions and feelings - which itself leads to the conclusion that everybody should just do whatever feels right to them - is that there must be a transcendent moral authority whose very nature serves as an objective moral standard for right and wrong and which has the power and authority to hold us accountable for breaching that standard.

But that answer, the only answer which could possibly have purchase in a teenager's mind, is the very answer that our courts have forbidden teachers to offer to their young people.

Yet, if there is no such authority then, as the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky asserts several times in his marvelous novel The Brothers Karamazov, everything is permitted. If there is no such authority then there's no ultimate accountability for our behavior, the word "wrong" has no objective meaning, and the only ethical principle is, practically speaking, do whatever you can get away with.

Even if the existence of such an authority is offered to students they still may not know what's right to do, they still might not do what is right, but at least they have an answer to the ultimate question of whether there actually is an objective right and a wrong.

By banishing not only explicitly religious ideas but also ideas with religious implications from our public schools we've essentially neutered those schools in terms of what they can do to formally instill in students a sense of virtue and moral character. Then we wring our hands when we read about cyber bullying, violence, cheating, drug use and sexual promiscuity among the young.

Why are we dismayed? What did we expect?

Understanding the Big Bang

A commenter at Uncommon Descent offered a link to a 1997 article in the WaPo that talks about the origin of the universe and the nature of the "Big Bang."

Among other things, the article, by Sten Odenwald, explains that the Big Bang should not be thought of as an explosion of matter into a pre-existing space, since there was no pre-existing space.

Here are some excerpts from Odenwald's column:

The Big Bang wasn't really big. Nor was it really a bang. In fact, the event that created the universe and everything in it was a very different kind of phenomenon than most people -- or, at least, most non-physicists -- imagine.

Even the name "Big Bang" originally was a put-down cooked up by a scientist who didn't like the concept when it was first put forth. He favored the idea that the universe had always existed in a much more dignified and fundamentally unchanging, steady state.

But the name stuck, and with it has come the completely wrong impression that the event was like an explosion.

That image leads many of us to imagine that the universe is expanding because the objects in it are being flung apart like fragments of a detonated bomb. That isn't true. The real reason that the universe is expanding is that the objects in it are staying in one place -- the same place they were when the Big Bang started -- and the space between them is growing.

In other words, space is not just void. It is a full-fledged player and is undergoing change. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true.

Odenwald writes that many people think of the Big Bang as a gigantic firework burst which radiates debris from a central point in a brilliant spray of light:

Our "fireworks" image of the phenomenon depends on five basic requirements: 1) A preexisting sky or space into which the fragments from the explosion are injected; 2) A preexisting time we can use to mark when the explosion happened; 3) Individual projectiles moving through space from a common center; 4) A definite moment when the explosion occurred; and 5) Something that started the Big Bang.

All of these requirements in our visualization of the Big Bang are false or unnecessary.

They're rendered false or unnecessary by a proper understanding of Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR), which Odenwald spends some time explaining. He then discusses why the "fireworks" image is misleading.

Preexisting Space? There was no preexisting space. The mathematics of GR state unambiguously that three-dimensional space was created at the Big Bang itself, at "Time Zero," along with everything else.

Preexisting Time? Nor was there preexisting time. Again, GR's mathematics treats space and time together as one object called "space-time," which is indivisible. At Time Zero plus a moment, there was a well-defined quantity called time.

Individual objects moving away from a common center? There is no common center. Moreover, it is equally true to say every place in the universe is at the center. In other words, no matter where in the universe you might stand to gaze at the heavens, you would see all other galaxies racing away from you.

Odenwald elaborates on each of these themes in more detail in the article. The next portion of his column assumes the truth of what philosophers call the B theory of space-time. This theory holds that all of space-time - past, present and future - exists now, somewhat like an entire movie exists simultaneously on a DVD.

Moreover, galaxies don't move through space. Rather space is stretching like the surface of an inflating balloon. If we imagine buttons (representing galaxies) glued onto the balloon, the buttons will move apart from each other as the balloon expands:

Projectiles moving through space? If space is stretching like this, where do the brand new millions of cubic light years [of space] come from? The answer in GR is that they have always been there. Space has always existed in the complete shape of the universe in four dimensions.

But it is only as all four dimensions, including time, play out that the full shape and size of the universe is revealed.

It is only because of the way the human mind traditionally works that our consciousness insists on experiencing the universe one moment at a time.

Was there a definite moment to the start of the Big Bang? GR is perfectly happy to forecast that our universe emerged from something called a singularity, a point of infinite density that had no physical size at Time Zero. Any more than this, we cannot say.

The Hubble Deep Field: The points of light are not stars, they're all individual galaxies like the Milky Way

Odenwald then approaches the most philosophically intriguing aspect of the Big Bang hypothesis:

Something started the Big Bang. At last we come to the most difficult issue in modern cosmology. In a real fireworks display, we can trace events leading to the explosion all the way back to chemists who created the gunpowder and wrapped the explosives. GR, however, can tell us nothing about the stages preceding the Big Bang.

In fact, among GR's strongest statements is one saying that, before the singularity, time itself may not have existed.

In other words, the universe appears to have arisen out of nothing (ex nihilo), at least nothing physical or material, pretty much as theologians have always insisted. There was nothing and abruptly there was an expanding space-time.

Very weird. It's impossible for us to conceptualize how "something" could come from nothing. It's also "weird" how much this sounds like Genesis 1:1.

All of the above receives further elaboration from Odenwald at the link. He does a good job of making a very esoteric topic reasonably comprehensible.

Another Reason for the Wall

This horrific story illustrates the urgency of completing a border wall with Mexico.

Harrowing new details have emerged in the slaughter of three Mormon mothers and six of their children after cartel gunmen opened fire in a grisly ambush in Mexico on Monday.

Nine members of the LeBaron family were attacked eight miles apart on Monday while traveling in a convoy of three SUVS on a dirt road.

One hero mother died shielding her seven-month-old daughter who survived, it has since emerged. And a 13-year-old boy hid his siblings from gunmen in bushes and walked 13 miles for help, loved ones say.

Police confirmed they have arrested a suspected drug lord after the killings which left one vehicle torched and riddled with bullets.

The state prosecutor's office said one person was detained on Tuesday in the Mexican border state of Sonora and they were investigating whether they were involved in the massacre.

The mothers were driving in separate vehicles with their children from the La Mora religious community where they live, which is a decades-old settlement in Sonora state founded as part of an offshoot of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Rhonita Maria LeBaron and four of her children - her six-month-old twins, Titus and Tiana, her 10-year-old daughter Krystal and 12-year-old son Howard - were all killed.

Another two mothers, Dawna Langford and Christina Langford Johnson, as well as Dawna's sons, aged 11 and three, were also all killed.

Christina’s son Devin walked 13 miles to get help from relatives. He covered his injured siblings with branches before trying to make out where the shots were coming from to avoid the gunmen as he walked away.

Relatives say he reached the community six hours later. Family members alerted authorities before arming themselves with guns to go out searching for the injured children.

His mother Christina saved her seven-month-old baby Faith's life by throwing the infant to the floor of their SUV as bullets tore through the vehicle.

There's much more on this awful atrocity at the link. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador refuses to use violence against the cartels, which are almost indistinguishable from terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL, but his approach is enabling them to murder with impunity police, politicians, judges, journalists and other citizens by the tens of thousands each year.

Giving an ironic twist to the claim that immigrants are doing jobs that Americans won't do, President Trump has offered to send U.S. troops to Mexico to deal with the cartels, essentially doing the jobs that Mexicans won't do.

Mexico is in a slow motion collapse into chaos. If the government there won't clean up the mess, or allow us to do it for them, then it's all the more imperative that we build a border wall before these cartels gain a substantial foothold in the U.S., and horrors like the one perpetrated by this gang of drug dealers and human traffickers on these innocent American families begin to occur in Texas, Arizona and California.

Struggling to Say Why It's Wrong

There's been a lot of talk in the news about sexual assault and other forms of abuse by men in positions of power who prey upon women in their orbit. The tacit assumption, pretty much universal in all the discussion, is that this is morally despicable behavior, and it is, but there's an irony buried in this assumption.

In a secular society comprised of people who have largely declared God to be irrelevant what does it mean to say that the behavior of these men is morally wrong? Having abandoned any transcendent moral authority to whom we are all accountable, must we not also give up the traditional notion that there are any objective moral norms and obligations?

It's certainly difficult, as even most secular thinkers have acknowledged, to see how there can be a standard of moral good without an adequate objective authority whose nature serves as that standard, and if there is no objective standard there really is no objective good, at least in the moral sense, and therefore no objective moral wrong.

Thus, good and bad, right and wrong if they exist at all, must be subjective which means that they're dependent on one's inner feelings or preferences. If one person's feelings differ from another's, though, neither person is right nor wrong, they're just different.

This subjectivity expresses itself differently among the three main groups of people involved in these sex scandals.

First, there are the victims who, lacking any objective standard by which to assess what was done to them, simply allege their aversion and revulsion. For them what was done to them is wrong for no reason other than they were made uncomfortable, repulsed, or frightened by it or the like.

Then there are the perpetrators. Lacking any objective reference point for their behavior, they intuit that there's nothing wrong with forcing themselves on a weaker individual as long as they can get away with it.

In other words, for these men, might makes right. Others may deplore what they do, society may choose to punish what they do, but if they can get away with it they're not doing anything wrong in any meaningful sense, and, if they're powerful enough to be immune from social sanctions why should they care what society thinks? The sad truth is that powerful men often do get away with it, with the help of the next group, as the case of Bill Clinton illustrates.

The third group are the commentariat in the media and elsewhere who condemn what these men do, who suspect, perhaps, that there's something deeply wrong with sexual assault, but who can give no real reason for their suspicions. They may insist that people have a right not to be violated in such intimate ways, but upon reflection they may realize that such rights are simply conventions fabricated by society.

Having abandoned God they've also abandoned the ability to cite any truly objective rights. After all, what could it actually mean to say that it's morally wrong to violate a "right" if there's no ultimate accountability for what anyone does?

These are some of the same folks who pooh-poohed the allegations of women back in the 90s of Bill Clinton's escapades and predations and who insisted that "character doesn't matter in a president", only competence matters.

So, for this group, right and wrong are pragmatic. Nothing's really wrong except insofar as it harms the prospects of one's political party or, more cynically, if it can be used to harm the prospects of one's political opponents. Put differently, these people believe that whatever hinders their own political aspirations is wrong and whatever promotes them is right.

So, they'll ignore the odious behavior of the Clintons and Weinsteins of the world as long as it does no harm to their party, and they'll express moral outrage at the similarly odious behavior of their opponents if they can gain political advantage by so doing.

Thus, what Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, Matt Lauer or the growing host of others in Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and corporate penthouses are alleged to have done, is only wrong for the pragmatist because the members of the victim group are exposing the perpetrators in such a way as to harm their respective party's prospects among the vast numbers of unenlightened voters who still believe in God, who still believe in objective moral values, and who still believe that preying on women is objectively evil.

Assuming There's a Can Opener

Author Eric Metaxis recounts the old story of a chemist, a physicist, and an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of soup:

Puzzling over how to open the can, the chemist says, “Let’s heat the can until it swells and bursts from the buildup of gases.” “No, no,” says the physicist, “let’s throw it off that cliff with just enough kinetic energy to split it open on the rocks below.” The economist, after thinking a moment says, “Assume [you have] a can opener.”

The humor of the story lies in the absurdity of the assumption. Of course, if there's a can opener then there's no problem getting the can opened, but what justifies the assumption that a can opener exists?

Metaxis compares this story with its convenient assumption of the existence of a can opener to the controversy surrounding the origin of life. He writes:

The way Darwinists approach the origin of life is a lot like that economist’s idea for opening the can. The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection explains everything about life, we’re told—except how it began. “Assume a self-replicating cell containing information in the form of genetic code,” Darwinists are forced to say. Well, fine. But where did that little miracle come from?

Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in his book “Signature in the Cell” why this may be Darwinism’s Achilles heel. In order to begin evolution by natural selection, you need a self-replicating unit. But the cell and its DNA blueprint are too complicated by far to have arisen through chance chemical reactions. The odds of even a single protein forming by accident are astronomical.

So Meyer and other Intelligent Design theorists conclude that Someone must have designed and created the structures necessary for life.

Darwinian naturalists, however, simply assume the existence of a can opener. They assume, despite the complete and utter lack of empirical evidence, that something existed somewhere that somehow organized the first replicating cell.

When someone believes something despite the lack of supporting evidence we sometimes derisively call that blind faith. It's ironic that those who believe that the extraordinary complexity and functionality of life are evidence of an intelligent agent are accused of having "blind faith" by the same people who believe that nature waved a magic wand and fortuitously brought living things into being by accident from a chemical soup even though no evidence has ever been adduced that would support the claim that this is even possible.

Those who direct the blind faith pejorative at those who posit an intelligent agent behind the origin of living things would do well to first examine a few of their own beliefs before they find themselves embarrassingly hoist with their own petard.

Not So Dark Ages

A lot of high school and even college students are taught that the historical period roughly from the fall of Rome to the 15th century was a time of intellectual stagnation with little or no scientific or technological progress.

The ignorance that descended over Europe during this epoch has caused it to be called the "Dark Ages," a pejorative assigned to the Middle Ages by historians of the 18th century hostile to the Church and desirous of deprecating the period during which the Church wielded substantial political power.

Lately, however, historians have challenged the view that this epoch was an age of unenlightened ignorance. Rodney Stark has written in several of his books (particularly, his How the West Won) of the numerous discoveries and advancements made during the "dark ages" and concludes that they weren't "dark" at all.

The notion that they were, he argues, is an ahistorical myth. Indeed, it was during this allegedly benighted era that Europe made the great technological and philosophical leaps that put it well in advance of the rest of the world.

For example, agricultural technology soared during this period. Advances in the design of the plow, harnessing of horses and oxen, horseshoes, crop rotation, water and wind mills, all made it possible for the average person to be well-fed for the first time in history.

Transportation also improved which enabled people and goods to move more freely to markets and elsewhere. Carts, for example, were built with swivel axles, ships were more capacious and more stable, and horses were bred to serve as draught animals.

Military technology also made advances. The stirrup, pommel saddle, longbow, crossbow, armor, and chain mail eventually made medieval Europeans almost invincible against non-European foes.

Similar stories could be told concerning science, philosophy, music and art, and thus the view espoused by Stark that the medieval era was a time of cultural richness is gaining traction among contemporary historians who see the evidence for this interpretation of the time to be too compelling to be ignored.

This short video featuring Anthony Esolen provides a nice summary:

On Teaching Ethics

My students are beginning a study of ethics so I thought an older post on the topic of teaching ethics would be an appropriate read. Here it is:

Ray Penning at Cardus Blog asks the question, "Can ethics be taught?" The answer, of course, is yes and no. Ethics, as the study of the rules that philosophers have prescribed to govern our moral behavior, can certainly be taught, but, although thousands of books have been written about this, I doubt that any of them have changed anyone's actual behavior. Part of the reason is that, as Penning observes:

Ethics courses that leave students with a bunch of “you shoulds” or “you should nots” are not effective. There are deeper questions that proceed from our understanding of what human nature is about and what we see as the purpose of our life together.

This is true as far as it goes, but the reason teaching such rules is not effective is that focusing on the rules fails to address the metaethical question of why we should follow any of those rules in the first place. What answer can be given to the question why one should not just be selfish, or adopt a might-makes-right ethic? If there's no ultimate accountability and we all die in the end, what does it matter how we live in this life?

At the end of the day secular philosophy has no convincing answers. Philosophers simply utter platitudes like "we wouldn't want others to treat us selfishly, so we shouldn't treat them selfishly," which, of course, is completely unhelpful unless one is talking to children.

The reply is unhelpful when aimed at adult students because students will discern that it simply asserts that we shouldn't be selfish because it's selfish to be selfish. The question, though, is why, exactly, is it wrong to do to others something we wouldn't done to us? What is it about selfishness that makes selfishness wrong?

Moreover, this sort of answer simply glosses over the problem of what it means to say that something is in fact "wrong" in the first place. Does "wrong" merely mean something one shouldn't do? If so, we might ask why one shouldn't do it, which likely elicits the reply that one shouldn't do it because it's wrong. The circularity of this is obvious.

The only way to break out of the circle, the only way we can make sense of propositions like "X is wrong," is to posit the existence of a transcendent moral authority, a personal being, who serves as the objective foundation for all our moral judgments and who holds us accountable for how we live.

If there is no such being then neither are there any objective moral values or duties to which we must, or even should, adhere.

This lack of any real meaning to the word "wrong" is a major consequence of the secularization of our culture, it makes teaching ethics from a solely secular perspective an exercise in futility, and it's one of the major themes of my novel In the Absence of God (see link at the top of this page) which I heartily recommend to readers of Viewpoint.

Do We "Know" That People Have Rights?

Philosopher Patrick Grim offers a Lecture for the Great Courses series in which he asks by way of introduction what kind of knowledge ethical knowledge is.

In other words, is our knowledge that it's wrong to abuse children like our scientific knowledge - subject to empirical verification? Or is it more like the intuitive knowledge we have upon reflection, like the axioms of geometry? He begins his query with this:

We do know things about ethics. We know that human life is important and valuable. We know that people have rights; rights to take their own paths in life. We know it is ethically wrong to violate those rights. We know we have obligations to our family, to our friends, to humanity at large. I take that to be an important kind of knowledge, but a normal kind of knowledge.

The question, as I see it, is not whether we have that kind of knowledge. The question is a reflective question about what kind of knowledge that is.

Not having heard the lecture series, I don't know where Grim eventually comes down on this question, but I'd say two things about it here. First, I'm not sure we do know the things Grim says we know, although it's certainly true that many of us believe those things.

Secondly, in order for those beliefs we hold to be knowledge they have to have some warrant or justification, and that leads us to a crucial question: What warrant do we have for thinking that our beliefs - for example, that others have rights - are true beliefs, i.e. knowledge?

If someone claims that other people have rights then we might ask where those rights come from. If our rights are inherent in us because we're human then it'd be wrong for anyone to deprive us of them, but where do "inherent" rights come from, and what do we mean when we say that depriving someone of an inherent right is "wrong"?

If the human species is nothing other than the end-product of a blind, naturalistic process of development that occurred over eons of time then to say something is wrong is to say little more than "I don't like it," but if "wrong" is just what someone else doesn't like then why should anyone care about refraining from doing what others don't like if it doesn't suit them to do so?

Philosopher David Hume in his book The Treatise of Human Nature came to the conclusion that right and wrong are simply whatever wins the general approbation or disapprobation of one's fellows, but if that's all we mean by right and wrong then the terms are synonymous with "socially fashionable." To accuse someone of doing wrong is like accusing them of gaucherie because they slurp their soup. Such behavior may be unconventional and distasteful, but it's not morally wrong.

When we say that child abuse is wrong, however, we surely want to say more than that it's unconventional and distasteful behavior. We want to say that it's evil.

Ethics are indeed self-evident, and we do have intuitive knowledge of right and wrong, but only because, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, we've been endowed by our Creator with a law that, in the words of St. Paul, is "written on our hearts." That law, being the gift of a perfectly good and wise being who will ultimately hold us accountable to it, is the source of all our moral understanding.

It's binding upon us only because it's bestowed by a personal being. If it were merely the product of impersonal evolutionary forces we would be no more obligated to observe it than we are obligated to refrain from flying in an airplane because it flouts the law of gravity.

If, as Grim says, "We know that human life is important and valuable, that people have rights; rights to take their own paths in life, that it's ethically wrong to violate those rights, and that we have obligations to our family, to our friends, and to humanity at large," then we are tacitly acknowledging that there must be a Being who has bestowed those rights and obligations upon us.

Either that, or we're trying to hold on to the belief in right and wrong while discarding the only suitable foundation for that belief. It's like pulling the table out from under the dinner setting and expecting the dishware to all remain in place.