What We Stand to Lose

Secularists of various stripes applaud the decline of Christianity in the modern era, but should they? Set aside the question whether Christianity is true and ask instead the question what will be lost when Christian influence is all but gone?

Put the question this way: What are the values that Western democracies cherish? At a minimum they would include:

1. Human equality (including that of women and minorities) under the law
2. Tolerance of dissent
3. Separation of church and state
4. Social Justice (charity, concern for the poor)
5. Freedom of speech
6. Freedom of religion

There are others, but just limiting ourselves to these, what other comprehensive belief system or worldview offers a ground for these values? Certainly not Islam which rejects all of them with the possible exception of #4 (but even here concern for the poor often extends only to other Muslims of one's own sect).

Nor does naturalism (the worldview held by many secularists that says that the natural world is all there is) offer any support for any of these. On naturalism we are the product of blind, impersonal forces that have shaped us to survive competition with our competitors. There is nothing in this process which in any sense mandates any of the values listed above. There's no reason, on evolutionary grounds, why any society should value any of them over their contraries.

But, it might be argued, evolution has equipped us with reason, and reason dictates that these values afford the best way to order a society. We don't need Christianity to instill or ground these values, according to this argument, reason can do the job.

This, however, is simply not true. Reason can perhaps help us find the best way to exemplify these values, but it cannot decide whether or not a society should incorporate them. To prefer a society which upholds them over and against one which does not is simply an arbitrary preference. It is to say that a society which exhibits these values is better than alternative polities because, well, most of us just happen to have a fondness for these values.

Moreover, aside from providing a solid grounding for those political values, Christianity bestowed additional blessings on the West. There's a consensus among scholars that the vast majority of the world's best art and music has been inspired by Christian assumptions. These also furnished the motivation for the development of schools, orphanages, hospitals and charitable organizations throughout Europe and North America and provided the fertile philosophical soil in which modern science could germinate and thrive.

To the extent that other worldviews have inspired their followers to notable cultural achievements, generally speaking they have neither amounted to much nor been sustained for long without somehow piggy-backing on Christianity.

Naturalism and Islam may some day succeed in extirpating Christian influence, but the world they would create will look very much like either the Stalinist dystopia of Orwell's 1984 or the Islamic dystopia of ISIS. It might not happen abruptly - an airliner can glide a long way after having exhausted its fuel, and the higher its altitude the longer it can remain aloft before crashing to earth - but it won't remain airborne indefinitely.

Similarly, one or the other of these two bleak dystopias represents the future that awaits us a generation or two after the fuel of Christian assumptions has finally been drained from the West.

Our Postmodern Moral Crisis

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?” The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here.

Toner writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.” The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution.

We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

We have always flouted moral standards but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, yet that's where large segments of our culture are headed in these postmodern times.

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime.

The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter. The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.” We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

• If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.
• If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.
• A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.
• Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever we wish.

Unless there is a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there is no such thing as a moral obligation.

As the great Russian novelist Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

The price we pay in a secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas meant when he said that,

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner continues:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power.”

Indeed. You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality is not good.

Critical Thinking

Mary Tillotson at The Federalist presents a good lesson in critical thinking. Her immediate context is the application of a critical eye toward news reports and op-eds, but what she says is sound advice for any aspect of life.

In fact, she says so many good things about each of the eight points she makes that I've only space enough to consider a couple of them.

Tillotson begins with an anecdote about a grad class she was taking that was engaged in a discussion of thinking critically about issues like "diversity, racism, and fear-mongering." She writes:

I had a hard time believing lack of critical thinking was a big problem until another student said we live in a time when race relations are worse than they ever have been, and everyone just nodded. Having grown up seeing old photographs of drinking fountains labeled “white” and “colored” and learning about the horrors of the antebellum South, I was stunned. There is a huge difference between “needs improvement” and “never been worse.”

When someone says something like what that student said they're probably not really thinking at all, much less thinking critically. In this case the students are likely just agreeing with the rest of the class in order to be congenial, polite or to be recognized by others as holding the right opinions.

Anyway, here's Tillotson's first point:

1. Know Your Narrative

Everyone has a worldview. Objectivity is a real thing and truth does in fact exist, but the existence of truth doesn’t mean we’re all good at seeing it. If you want to think critically, the first step is to know where you’re coming from.

Indeed, it's also good to know where the other person is coming from. Knowing a writer or speaker's own worldview helps immensely in "reading between the lines" of what they're saying.

Think of something evil that happened recently and consider these questions in that context. How do you explain good and evil behavior in people? Did the perpetrator act because he was a bad person or was he just a person who made a bad choice? Are there “good people” and “bad people,” or are we all prone to evil?

She elaborates on these questions, but one she doesn't mention that I think is helpful is to ask whether one even believes that "evil" exists. If so, what makes an act evil and what are some examples of it in our day?

Our answers to these questions will go far in helping us to understand both ourselves and others.

2. Predict, But Don’t Trust, Your Emotional Response

My high school psychology teacher passed out slips of paper to our class one day and asked us to raise our hands if we thought the sentence on our slip was true. We read, shrugged, agreed, and all raised our hands. It turned out we didn’t all have the same sentence: half of us had “People who are more cautious than average make better firefighters” and the other half had “People who are less cautious than average make better firefighters.” So we discussed various cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases also exist outside psychology classrooms. When you hear something bad about someone you already don’t like, you’re much more inclined to believe it. Likewise, when you hear something bad about someone you like, you’re more inclined to disbelieve, dismiss, or downplay it. This is called confirmation bias....You can’t eradicate it, but you can be aware of it.

Confirmation bias occurs everywhere and we all fall victim to it, unfortunately. Not only are we more likely to believe something bad about someone we don't like and something good about people we do like, but we're also more likely to believe a claim is true if it supports a political, scientific, philosophical or religious position we already hold than if it doesn't.

Tillotson makes an excellent suggestion about this:

When you hear a fact (or a “fact”) about someone, consider how you would react if that exact same thing were said about someone else. Put the opponent’s name in the sentence and observe your emotions.

At this point, you may become aware that your emotions are holding different people to different standards. This is an important step toward thinking with your brain and not with your emotions.

We certainly saw this happen a lot in the last election cycle, and it's still happening three years later. Critics of the president, for example, are engaging in discourse that, had similar discourse occurred during Barack Obama's presidency, would have elicited howls of indignation from the same people.

One of the best intellectual disciplines we can develop is the ability to give people and positions we don't favor the benefit of the doubt and to ask, as Tillotson suggests, whether we would be saying or thinking or doing what we are if the person or position at issue were the person or position we favored.

For example, would those who excused Donald Trump's dishonesty or name-calling during the 2016 presidential campaign have excused similar behavior had it been Hillary Clinton instead of Trump caught in the lie or name-calling? We know in fact that they did not. People on both sides of the electoral divide were far too willing to excuse in their candidate what they saw as reprehensible in the other candidate.

Tillotson has more good advice on how to be a critical thinker, and I urge you to read the rest of her essay at the link.

Two Amazing Animals

It's been said that the fact that someone cannot imagine how nature can accomplish some amazing feat or other is not a reason to think that nature cannot do it. Those who doubt the theory of Darwinian evolution, for example, on the grounds that the anatomy, physiology and behaviors of living things are so intricate and complex that its unimaginable that they evolved by unguided chance processes are often derided for employing what's called an argument from incredulity (See a brief discussion of the argument here).

Of course, it's not just Darwin skeptics who employ this line of thinking. Materialists do the same thing when they argue that because we can't imagine how minds and brains can interact with each other that therefore belief that we have an immaterial mind is unwarranted. Or when their inability to imagine why a good God would allow suffering is given as a justification for their belief that a good God doesn't exist. Or when they doubt that we have free will because they can't imagine how free choices could exist in a world governed down to the tiniest particle by the inexorable laws of physics. Or when they scoff at the possibility of miracles for the same reason.

In fact, materialistic naturalists (atheists) are probably the most frequent invokers of incredulity as a legitimate epistemic criterion among those who think about topics like those just mentioned, and indeed there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with doubting some claim because its implausibility intuitively renders it deeply suspect. We do it all the time.

For that reason, it seems to me completely appropriate when watching the following short video to be deeply skeptical that the Darwinian explanation of how these creatures came to possess the food gathering mechanisms they do is correct. One attempt at a Darwinian explanation, in which this video was featured, is analyzed here.

Despite attempts to wave the magic wand of natural selection and throw the pixie dust of Darwin in our eyes it seems completely appropriate and rational, unless presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, to believe that it's much less probable that a mindless, unguided process would have created and synchronized all the adaptations these animals exhibit, from the molecular level on up, than that they're the result of intelligent engineering and foresight.

But watch the video and come to your own conclusion:

How to Disagree

We are now deep into the next election cycle in the United States. Campaigns for the 2020 presidential election are underway, money is being raised, debates are being held and positions are being staked out. It seems like it never ends, but even so, here we are.

This means that, as disputatious and ornery as the last three years have been, the next ten months or so will likely be worse.

As we enter this period in our nation's political life it would be good for those of us who engage in the to and fro of political discussion with friends, family and acquaintances to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good in the months ahead to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree in any discussion is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are debating. A winsome approach, seasoned with humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with rhetorical body blows.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we love the person we're engaged in conversation with than that we win an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing it under those circumstances anyway?

If we can love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining them a hearing.

Political, as well as religious and philosophical, differences are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Our politicians probably won't treat each other that way, but we should.

Christmas Thoughts (Pt. II)

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding the Incarnation. God Himself becoming man.

The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and we could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, that hope, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the real source and traditional meaning of the night are irrelevant.

People feel they should be joyful, but they can't say why. They seem to be trying to manufacture some sort of artificial "Christmas spirit," just like they try to gin up a feeling of near-delirium on New Year's eve.

An analogy: Picture the celebrations of players and fans after winning the Super Bowl or the World Series, but imagine the revelry and rejoicing even though the game hadn't yet been played. It'd certainly seem nonsensical and strange, but this is pretty much what a secular Christmas is like. No "game" has been played, nothing has been won, there's really nothing to celebrate, but the merriment and partying goes on nonetheless. Why?

All the talk of reindeer, ads for cars, beer, and phones, all the insipid "holiday" songs and movies - none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. The "joy" seems ersatz, empty and forced.

Indeed, Christmas Eve is hollow without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

One of the things that makes Christmas "good news that will cause great joy for all the people," is that the One who came to dwell among us has made it so that we can break out of the prison-house of meaninglessness and hopelessness that enchains us if all there is to life is little more than being born, enjoying a few good meals, suffering and dying.

Christmas represents the possibility that we can throw off the chains of meaninglessness, hopelessness and despair that plague modern life. It reminds us that our lives can matter for eternity.

Lovely thought, that, and one of the good things about it is that it's never too late for the transformation to begin. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of What Child Is This on their album Lost Christmas Eve.

The line that I find most poignant and hopeful is when an older man, though dying, finds his life transformed by reflecting on the Christmas story and cries out, "To be this old and have your life just begin!"

Here's Rob Evan of TSO performing the song.

I'd like to close this post with perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. As sung by Dave Phelps it captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas Eve. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas and a very special 2020:

Christmas Thoughts (Pt. I)

Christmas is two days away. Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. Actually what it is is a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin, it has meant the opposite of any attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of it is.

A popular Christmas tradition that has grown up over the years is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young, and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis).

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Arias was himself at the council and the story goes that Nicholas and Arias got into such a heated dispute that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary accretion, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (Say Saint Nicholas quickly with a European accent and you'll understand how we got the name Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern mythology surrounding him.

Nietzsche vs. Aristotle

Most ethical systems in our contemporary world can probably be subsumed under the names of either Aristotle or Nietzsche. Aristotle thought that human beings had a telos, that there was something that man was for, a purpose or an end, for which he was on the earth. Virtuous acts for Aristotle were those which helped men achieve their telos. The good life was a life which conformed to the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice - which Aristotle argued were objectively right to live by.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, denied that there was any overarching purpose to being human and therefore there was no objective moral right or wrong. Morality was all a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how we see things, a matter of individual subjective preference. Thus the ubermensch or overman creates his own values. He rejects the "slave moralities" of theism and embraces the "master morality" of the Promethean man. This is what makes men great, and great men define their own good.

Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche believed in the existence of a personal moral law-giver, which fact makes for an odd state of affairs. To wit, Aristotle's telos makes no sense unless the purpose or end of mankind is somehow conferred upon man by a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, how does man come to be endowed with a purpose? Where does such a purpose come from? But if there's no personal law-giver or telos-giver then neither humanity nor individual men have any purpose, and the "virtues" that Aristotle touts are just arbitrary conventions.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, is correct that in the absence of a transcendent, personal law-giver what constitutes a virtue is just a subjective bias. On Nietzsche's subjectivism the virtues extolled by the Nazis are no more wrong nor right than those embraced by St. Francis of Assisi. They're just different.

If theism is true, however, if there actually is a God who creates man and endows him with a telos, then the moral law and the classical virtues really are objective and obligatory.

So, the way the theist sees it, Aristotle, by denying a transcendent, personal God, was inconsistent but nevertheless right about there being objective moral duties, and the atheist Nietzsche was consistent but wrong in his denial of objective moral right and wrong.

Only if theism is true can one to be both consistent and right about the existence of objective moral virtues and duties.

Mind, Math and the Universe

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. It would indeed be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathphobic students may wince at a statement like this, but it gets worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises. In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

Poor but Equal

Supporters of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, indeed, Democrats in general would do well to read a three year old article in the UK Telegraph about what's been happening in Venezuela.

Venezuela is a once-prosperous country which, having been run by socialists since 1998, stands today on the brink of utter ruin. The calamity is the consequence of a conflation of socialist economic policies and the collapse of oil revenues, each exacerbating the other.

Here are some excerpts from the Telegraph's report:

Led by Hugo Chávez, the country’s firebrand former president, the country embarked on a wave of expropriation and redistribution with the charismatic leader offering cut-price fridges, appliances and even new homes to poor Venezuelans.

Chávez wanted to create a socialist paradise, an ideology that has been reinforced by his successor [Nicolas] Maduro following his death in 2013.

But the oil price collapse a year later served as a wake-up call for a country that chose profligacy over prudence in the hope that a rainy day would never come.

Oil accounts for 98% of total exports and 59% of fiscal revenues, but Moya-Ocampos says the price slide isn’t the country’s only problem.

“Even under Chavez and $100 a barrel oil, debt was rapidly rising and there were already food shortages,” he says, “This is ultimately to do with an interventionist model that is not sustainable and has reached a tipping point.”

Maduro’s declaration of a fresh three month state of emergency has sparked fears that the government will try to seize control of more private companies.

Many Venezuelans have already left the country, including Francisco Flores. “Venezuela has taken good working companies, given them to the poor but not equipped them with the skills to run them so they go bankrupt,” he says. “That’s just a recipe for destroying a country.”

The NHS therapist, who now lives in London, says the regime is based on a principle of keeping everyone “equal but poor”.

“This way, the state becomes a nanny and everyone loses the power to do anything because they are so dependent on it.”

Venezuela is now suffering from the effects of a deep recession and hyperinflation as the government prints money to try to plug a gap between revenues and spending that is on course to hit 25% of gross domestic product (GDP) next year.

The principle of keeping everyone "equal but poor" could be said to be what animates much of our own Democratic party which has drifted far to the ideological left since the days of John F. Kennedy. It certainly seems to be the consequence of, if not the motivation behind, many of the policies of the previous administration as well as the economic philosophy of Warren, Sanders and those who promote the "Green New Deal."

I wonder how many Venezuelans thought, when they voted for Chavez, that they were voting for "A Future to Believe In." It would be good to take the time to read the rest of the article. It's as timely now as when it was written and it could be a portent of our own future if we continue rambling down the path of big government socialism.

The Demise of the New Atheism

Ben Sixsmith at ARC declares the decease of what for the last couple of decades has been called the "New Atheism" and undertakes a postmortem which he concludes with a few especially interesting remarks. He opines, for example that:

I think the New Atheists receive both too much and too little credit. Consider a recent tweet sent out by Bret Weinstein, a biologist associated with the Intellectual Dark Web:

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God.” Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?

He was missing an awful lot, actually. He was missing the fact that, by this logic, atheists should “quit broadcasting” the “exclusionary claim” that there is no God, given the “brutal coercion of people” in the Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror in Spain, the Cultural Revolution, and so on.

But he was also missing the fact that if Christians stopped maintaining that Jesus is the son of God, they would not be Christians.

He also adds this perspicuous observation:

The greatest enemies of religious believers are not, then, atheists who reject the idea of God’s existence, but apatheists who don’t consider the subject relevant.

He's surely right about that, especially since those among the New Atheists who have assayed to offer arguments against the reasonableness of belief in God in general and Christian belief in particular have never failed to fail miserably. Sixsmith makes the same point:

To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to the latter. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous “Five Ways” of Aquinas without even attempting to understand their terms. (“Whereof one cannot speak,” groaned Wittgenstein, “Thereof one must remain silent.”)

There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying that the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.

Why is it unanswerable? People have certainly tried to answer it. Answers readily came centuries prior to Hitchens himself, actually. Hitchens is free to take issue with Aquinas’ distinction between contingent and necessary existence if he wants, but he’s not free to suggest no answers have been offered.

How does the concept of the “necessary being,” for example, fail? Hitchens offers no sign of knowing what it is, because that “unanswerable” is not a logic conclusion but a rhetorical sledgehammer swung at the reader’s skull.

He adds that the New Atheists can make better arguments and he's correct, although it's hard to find among philosophical anti-theistic arguments one that hasn't been met with a convincing counterargument.

I know atheists can make better arguments. But the New Atheists never felt obliged to, because they were so confident in their own rationality that they never learned about the ideas they were mocking. If challenged on their philosophical ignorance — as the philosopher Alvin Plantinga brilliantly skewered Dawkins...on this very point — they were liable to observe that the average Christian does not have the theological sophistication of [a theistic philosopher].

True enough, he grants, but that's like declaring Darwinism defeated because the average man on the street who accepts it can't give a coherent explanation of it.

Sixsmith concludes with this:

Still, for all their errors, the New Atheists were right that certain matters raise questions that demand a serious attempt to resolve. Does God exist? Does life have objective significance or does it not? Is there an objective moral code or is there not? Is there an afterlife?

These are not questions we as individuals or societies can sidestep. A principled inquiry into these kinds of things may catch fewer eyes than a tribally-sorted debate about, say, gender differences or free speech on Youtube. But this is no failing for the people who insist on having the argument anyway. Richard Dawkins may be wrong about many things, but he was right about that.

Primal Screams and Identity Politics

R.R.Reno at First Things (subscription required) writes a brief review of Mary Eberstadt's new book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. She makes a very interesting point about today's "identity politics."

Here are some excerpts from Reno's review:

Many diagnose identity politics as a consequence of “cultural Marxism,” an invasion of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Mary Eberstadt takes a more sympathetic and persuasive view. In her latest book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, she interprets today’s feverish insistence on race, sex, and sexual orientation as so many desperate attempts by atomized, disoriented people to figure out their places in the world.

“The Great Scattering,” the weakening and fracturing of family life by the sexual revolution, brings disorientation. It has deprived two generations of the “natural habitat of the human animal,” the stable context in which we see ourselves as sons and daughters carrying forward an intact family legacy. As a consequence, the profound question Who am I? becomes more and more difficult to answer.

We’re left with the “clamor over identity.” Our current fixation on issues of race and sex is ­incoherent, but it is an authentic primal scream born of the need to belong.

Primal Screams continues Eberstadt’s analysis of the cultural revolutions that came to a head during the 1960s, especially the sexual revolution and its disintegration of the family. Her 2014 book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, demonstrated the connection between the decline in family stability and decreased religiosity.

Taken together, these trends strip away the strong, identity-defining institutions that formerly provided people with a stable, multifaceted sense of self. Today, with neither a Father in heaven nor a father at home, young people cast about for sources of belonging, turning to the ersatz paternity of identity politics, a view that unites people around DNA, sexual practices, and shared grievances.

For thousands of years people in the West felt themselves anchored by family, faith and place. Few worried about such arcane abstractions as identity. They didn't launch themselves on psychological journeys to "find themselves." They didn't ask, "Who am I?"

Then faith began its collapse in the West in the mid-19th century and family collapse followed a century later. Modern mobility has exacerbated the sense of unmooring by enabling many to leave the place of their birth and childhood. Thus, many today are uprooted from place, from faith and from family and consequently feel alienated, lost and identityless.

Reno continues:

And it’s not just children without fathers. We are witnessing a sharp increase in the percentage of adults who have no children, or only one. The bonds linking generations and siblings have weakened. Cast into the world alone—often as a consequence of contraceptive technologies and our own choices—we nevertheless seek a collective identity. Feminism is one coping strategy, Eberstadt argues; androgyny and the blurring of male-female differences is another.

“Whom do I love? is another way of answering Who am I?” writes Eberstadt....The Great Scattering has loosened the bonds of love. This was not the intention of the ­sexual revolution, perhaps, but it has been its effect. We now live in a love-impoverished culture, which means we have a difficult time knowing who we are.

As Eberstadt observes,

Anyone who has ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from its pack, knows the sound. The otherwise unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is nothing more, or less, than just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures trying desperately to identify their own.

Chirality and the Interaction Problem

Ever since René Descartes argued that the mind and the body were two completely different substances materialist philosophers have resorted to what's called the interaction problem as a rebuttal. According to the interaction problem the connection and interaction between two completely disparate substances is inconceivable and therefore extremely implausible.

More sympathetic philosophers have responded by noting that our inability to imagine how two substances such as an immaterial mind and a material brain can interact is not necessarily a reason for thinking that they don't. After all, it's very difficult to imagine how matter can bend empty space or gravity can pull objects or electromagnetism can attract and repel material substances, yet even before any possible explanations for these phenomena were advanced everyone believed they happened.

Apart from such examples, everyone knows that banging one's thumb with a hammer causes the sensation of pain but the sensation of pain is immaterial while the cause, hitting one's thumb, is physical. We haven't the slightest idea how stimulating certain nerve fibers produces the sensation of pain, but anyone who doubts that it does is welcome to try the experiment for himself.

Despite such counterarguments, however, the interaction problem persists. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor at Mind Matters offers another interesting counterargument based on the distinction between a material object and its form (the properties of a thing which make it what it is).

He cites a property chemists call chirality. Chirality is the property of some molecules to exist in two different forms which are mirror images of each other, much like a man's right hand is a mirror image of his left.

Egnor writes that,

The interaction between an immaterial entity and matter is not as problematic as materialists would have us believe.

It is the property of certain things to exist as mirror images of each other; my right and left hand are an obvious example. From the standpoint of matter, my hands are identical. They have the same bones, muscles and nerves. What makes them different is their form. My right hand is a mirror image of my left hand. That is, it is the form alone — the organization of my hand — that makes the difference, rather than the matter of which my hand (right or left) is composed.

Chirality is a property of asymmetry. The same chirality exists in many molecules and chirality plays an essential role in biochemistry. Most biomolecules are chiral, and the function of biomolecules is tightly linked to their chirality. “Right-handed” glucose is metabolized by the body. “Left handed” glucose is not.

The difference between the smell of oranges and of lemons is due to chirality. The molecule — limonene — smells like lemon or orange according to its chirality alone — to its form, not to its matter.

There are more troubling examples. One chiral form of thalidomide is harmless to humans. The other chiral form of thalidomide is highly toxic to developing embryos (thalidomide babies). All amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) in living things are L-amino acids (‘left-handed’). D-amino acids (right-handed) are not found naturally in proteins, but are found in some bacterial cell walls.

The relevance of chirality to substance dualism and the interaction problem — how can something immaterial interact with something material — is that chirality is a beautiful example of how form alone—immateriality — can determine the properties of matter. Chiral substances are materially identical but formally different — different only in their organization, not in the matter of which they are composed.

Immaterial properties can completely determine the functional powers of matter.

If the matter of two molecules is identical but the properties are different then something other than the matter is responsible for the properties. In the case of chiral molecules, Egnor argues, the immaterial form that the molecule takes determines what the physical properties of the molecule will be even though both forms of the molecule are materially identical.

Perhaps the interaction between mind and brain is something like that.

Confusing Moderates and Conservatives

New York Times columnist David Brooks once undertook to describe the distinctive characteristics of political moderates, but managed instead to give a pretty good description, inadvertently, of political conservatives.

He listed eight ideas that, he says, moderates tend to embrace. In fact, for the most part he's describing political conservatives. Of the eight traits Brooks discusses three are ideologically neutral but five are actually characteristics which define conservatives. Wherever he uses the term "moderate" the reader can more accurately, I think, substitute "conservative". Here are the five in boldface with my comments:

1. Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

This is why conservatives argue incessantly for limited, decentralized government and for more autonomy for communities and families, what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" of society.

2. In politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The harm government does when it screws up — wars, depressions — is larger than the benefits government produces when it does well. Therefore the moderate operates from a politics of skepticism, not a politics of faith. He understands that most of the choices are among bad options (North Korea), so he prefers steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change.

Conservatives are not opposed to change, but they are opposed to change for the sake of change. All change should be tempered by experience and traditions which have proven themselves reliable guides over long periods of time. Conservatives are very suspicious of revolutions, whether political, cultural or social. Sudden, rapid change rarely makes things better and usually makes them worse.

3. Truth before justice. All political movements must face inconvenient facts — thoughts and data that seem to aid their foes. If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism,....

For precisely these reasons conservatives are the strongest advocates of free speech and the free flow of ideas in our culture. Those who prohibit or restrict this freedom are taking us down the road to Big Brother totalitarianism.

4. Partisanship is necessary but blinding.....Moderates are problematic members of their party. They tend to be hard on their peers and sympathetic to their foes.

This helps explain why conservatives have been such a thorn in the side of their congressional leaders for the last decade or so, and why some conservatives were until recently among President Trump's strongest critics. The Democratic party is disciplined and unified largely because it has no conservatives in it.

5. Humility is the fundamental virtue.....The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.

Precisely because of the humility Brooks describes, conservatives tend to be skeptical when authorities in various fields speak apodictically about phenomena like climate change, biogenesis, morality, religion, and what's best for our children. Conservatives often suspect that neither we nor they know enough to warrant their certainty.

Brooks finishes with this:

Moderation requires courage. Moderates don’t operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know.

In fact, the people who must have courage today are those who stand against the Zeitgeist, who are legally hounded for their religious beliefs, who are shouted down in the university, who are threatened with violence and who lose their jobs, businesses and friends because of their beliefs. Most of these folks today aren't moderates, they're conservatives.

Articles of Impeachment

After weeks of blathering about "quid pro quo" and "bribery" and "high crimes and misdemeanors" that imperil our national security the Democrats have settled on two very tepid articles of impeachment.

Mr. Trump has been indicted for abusing his power as president and for obstructing a congressional investigation by refusing to cooperate with it.

As Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, explains in an excellent piece at NRO, neither of these articles has much merit and neither of them warrants an impeachment.

The obstruction of congress allegation is risible since it arises from the president's exercise of his constitutionally permitted right to invoke executive privilege and attorney-client privilege to keep his subordinates from testifying before Congress. If Congress feels an urgent need to obtain that testimony they are free to take the matter to the courts for adjudication, but this they chose not to do.

The abuse of power allegation is more serious but still woefully weak. Here's McCarthy:

Trump’s abuse of power is said to have three components: The president (a) exploited his foreign-relations power to pressure a foreign nation [Ukraine] to meddle in American domestic politics; (b) undermined our democratic elections; and (c) endangered national security. Each is problematic.

McCarthy argues that there were legitimate grounds for Trump to encourage the Ukrainians to undertake the investigations he requested, and not only were the Ukrainians unaware that there was any "pressure" being applied to them nothing whatsoever came of it.

Moreover, the claim that Trump endangered national security is frivolous. McCarthy observes that the Democrats are trying to persuade the American people that,

Our noble (if pervasively corrupt) ally Ukraine is in a border war with Russia, a hostile foreign power, so we supply defense aid to Kyiv so they can fight Moscow’s mercenaries over there, lest we have to fight the Russian army over here. Yes, Jerry Nadler would have us believe that Ukraine — its armed forces threaded with neo-Nazis and jihadists — is the only thing preventing Putin from laying waste to everything from the Upper West Side down to Greenwich Village.

This, from the same Democrats who yawned when Russia annexed Crimea, and when Obama denied Kyiv the lethal defense aid Trump has provided.

This, from the same Democrats who swooned when Obama mocked Mitt Romney for observing that Russia remains our most worrisome geopolitical foe. This, from the same Democrats who cheered when Obama struck a deal, including cash ransom payments, to give Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism, an industrial-strength nuclear program that, in the absence of meaningful monitoring, could be converted to a nuclear-arms program in nothing flat.

It is perfectly reasonable to contend that arming Ukraine against Russian aggression is in American interests — especially after prior U.S. administrations of both parties encouraged Ukraine to disarm on the loopy theory that post-Soviet Russia posed no threat. But the claim that Trump’s dealings with Ukraine have put our national security at risk is fatuous.

McCarthy lays out his case in much more detail at the link. If you read his article it will become clear to you why so many Americans, and even some congressional Democrats, oppose this whole charade. It seems to many that the only reason for the Democrats to be putting the nation through this ugly ordeal is to weaken Trump for the 2020 election. Polls suggest, however, that it might well have the opposite effect.

One effect it will almost surely have that should deeply concern every American is that by lowering the threshold for impeachment to almost a whim, the Democrats are setting a very dangerous precedent. If a president can be impeached and removed from office simply for partisan political reasons or because the opposing party just don't like him then in the future any occupant of the White House is in real danger of removal from office merely because the opposite party controls the House and the Senate.

This would be very destabilizing to our polity, and the people who are responsible for setting this precedent are acting with enormous recklessness and short-sightedness. Hopefully, they'll be told that unequivocally at the polls next November.

Poverty and Bad Decisions

An interesting piece by Emily Badger at CityLab cites research that suggests that, contrary to common opinion, poor people are not poor because they make bad decisions but rather they make bad decisions because they're poor. The exigencies of poverty, some research shows, exert such a powerful pull on people that unwise choices are practically inevitable.

Here's part of her essay:

Researchers publishing some ground-breaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little [cognitive] bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort. This research suggests that the reality of poverty actually makes it harder to execute fundamental life skills. Being poor means, as the authors write, “coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.”

I don't know how reliable this study is, but I hope it's conclusions are not true. If they are true then the plight of the poor is almost hopeless. According to the study the poor make unwise decisions because they're poor, but they can't get out of poverty until they stop making unwise decisions. They're caught in a vicious cycle.

Indeed, this study provides those living below the poverty line with a good reason to just give up.

Badger thinks, though, that taxpayers should give the poor financial independence so they can be freed from the stressors that drive them to make bad choices:

Conversely, going forward, this also means that anti-poverty programs could have a huge benefit that we've never recognized before: Help people become more financially stable and you also free up their cognitive resources to succeed in all kinds of other ways as well.

Unfortunately, we've already conducted that experiment. Since the 1960s we've spent $22 trillion on the War on Poverty and there are still millions of our fellow citizens living in relative poverty (I say "relative" because poor people in America are only poor relative to their contemporaries in the U.S. Relative to the vast numbers of people who've inhabited the planet throughout history our poor are fabulously wealthy).

How much more can, and should, we give, and what reason do we have for thinking that we're not now at the point of diminishing returns? When the government subsidizes something we get more of it. That goes as much for poverty as it does for anything else.

Reading Badger's column raises a further question: If it's true that poverty makes people choose actions that perpetuate their poverty how do we account for the fact that so many poor people have surmounted their circumstances, especially before there were any social welfare programs in place to help them?

Irish and Asian immigrants had nothing but the shirts on their backs when they landed on these shores, and the latter didn't even speak English. Yet many of them, despite suffering brutal discrimination, made the choice to work hard, and they overcame tremendous odds to succeed. Moreover, much of the American population was impoverished during the Great Depression, yet they rose out of it, and still today many of our fellow citizens are lifting themselves out of poverty and achieving middle class status or higher.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but all of this taken together causes me to wonder if maybe it's not Ms. Badger and the study she cites that are missing something.

Who Designed the Designer?

Philosopher of science Jay Richards is a proponent of intelligent design, i.e. the view that the universe and life show evidence (lots of it) of having been intelligently engineered. Richards asserts that one of the most frequent objections he encounters, one raised in fact by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion is, "If the universe and life are designed then who designed the designer?"

Laypeople can be forgiven for asking the question because it seems commonsensical, but someone of Dawkins' stature should know better, and he took a lot of heat from philosophers, even philosophers sympathetic to his metaphysical naturalism, for his evident lack of philosophical sophistication.

Here's a short video in which Richards addresses the question:

It's worth noting, I think, that the attempt to use this question as an indictment of the intelligent design hypothesis is misguided for other reasons besides those Richards gives.

Let's look at the first part of the question: "If the universe and life are designed...." implies a willingness to accept for the sake of argument that the universe is designed, but as the naturalist grants, even if only hypothetically, that the universe is designed he gets himself into trouble.

Whether there's just a single designer or an indefinitely long chain of designers doesn't much matter. Naturalism would stand refuted since naturalism holds that the universe is self-existent.

Moreover, to posit more causes/designers than what's necessary to explain the universe is a violation of the principle that our explanations should contain the minimum number of entities necessary to explain what we're trying to explain - in this case, the universe.

The simplest, and therefore the best, explanation is that there's only a single designer of the universe. There's no reason to think that the belief that the universe is designed entails an absurdity like an infinite regress of designers.

We might also point out that the universe is a contingent entity. It could possibly not exist. Now contingent entities require a necessary entity as their ultimate cause, and a necessary entity is, by definition, not itself dependent upon anything else.

Thus, if the universe is ultimately the product of a necessary or non-contingent being then it makes no sense to ask what designed the non-contingent being. Nothing designed it. If it were designed it wouldn't be a necessary being, it'd be contingent.

Finally, it should be noted that if there is an intelligent designer it must not only be a necessary being, but it must also transcend the universe. This means it must transcend space, time and matter because these are aspects of the universe. Therefore, the designer must be non-spatial, non-temporal and immaterial. It must also be very intelligent and very powerful to design and bring into being a universe.

In other words, it must be something very much like God.

Given all this, the naturalist would do better to resist the temptation to ask "who designed the designer." It's a question which carries far less polemical punch than they think it does.

Downloading Consciousness

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about the possibility of gaining immortality by downloading one's consciousness into some information-storing medium like a computer chip which could then be implanted into another body of some sort.

It sounds interesting given the technological advances in computer power that've been made in recent years, but as the following 11 minute video points out the obstacles to downloading the contents of one's brain in such a way that the self remains intact are more than daunting.

The narrator of the video, which was recommended to me by one of my students, seems to have a tongue-in-cheek optimism about the prospects of digitizing the brain. There's no reason to think it can't be done, he seems to imply, but as the video proceeds the viewer realizes that the whole point of the video is to show that, in fact, it could never be done.

In addition to all the fascinating technical difficulties that preserving one's consciousness involves there's another major problem that the video doesn't address. The video assumes that the brain is all that's involved in human consciousness, but it's by no means clear that that is so.

Many philosophers are coming to the conclusion that, in addition to the brain, human beings also possess a mind that somehow works in tandem with the brain to produce the phenomena of conscious experience. If this is correct then the problems entailed by downloading the data that comprise the physical brain are child's play compared to the difficulties of downloading an immaterial mind.

Maybe the only way to gain immortality is the old-fashioned way, the way that involves the God that your grandparents told you about.

Where Does the Information Come From?

Ever since I was an undergraduate biology major I have been intrigued by the mystery of how a zygote (a fertilized egg) develops from a single cell into a multi-cellular embryo and from there to a complete organism.

The reason this is such a profound mystery is that the initial cell somehow "knows" to divide and the daughter cells somehow "know" to form different types of cells which somehow "know" to migrate around the embryo and form different kinds of tissue which somehow "know" to integrate with other kinds of tissues to form organs, and so on.

So, how do cells with no brains "know" how to do all this? Where are the instructions located which choreograph this astonishing process and tell all the parts what to do and how to do it, and how are those instructions communicated?

The information is not to be found in the genome or the epigenome, apparently, so where is it, what is its storage medium, and how is it stored and accessed? What mechanisms control it so that the entire assembly unfolds in a flawless sequence with each step occurring precisely when it must in order to successfully construct an adult organism? And how, exactly, does the zygote "know" to produce, say, a flower rather than a fish, or a bird, or a human?

These questions are fascinating and they emerge again in an article at Uncommon Descent that quotes geneticist Michael Denton:

The earliest events leading from the first division of the egg cell to the blastula stage in amphibians, reptiles and mammals are illustrated in figure 5.4 (in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis). Even to the untrained zoologist it is obvious that neither the blastula itself, nor the sequence of events that lead to its formation, is identical in any of the vertebrate classes shown.

The blastula stage is an early step in embryogenesis when the zygote divides several times to produce a ball of cells. When those cells then evaginate and begin to take on the form of the early embryo biologists call that the gastrula stage.

Denton continues:

The differences become even more striking in the next major phase of embryo formation – gastrulation. This involves a complex sequence of cell movements whereby the cells of the blastula rearrange themselves, eventually resulting in the transformation of the blastula into the intricate folded form of the early embryo, or gastrula, which consists of three basic germ cell layers: the ectoderm, which gives rise to the skin and the nervous system; the mesoderm, which gives rise to muscle and skeletal tissues; and the endoderm, which gives rise to the lining of the alimentary tract as well as to the liver and pancreas....

In some ways the egg cell, blastula, and gastrula stages in the different vertebrate classes are so dissimilar that, were it not for the close resemblance in the basic body plan of all adult vertebrates, it seems unlikely that they would have been classed as belonging to the same phylum.

There is no question that, because of the great dissimilarity of the early stages of embryogenesis in the different vertebrate classes, organs and structures considered homologous in adult vertebrates cannot be traced back to homologous cells or regions in the earliest stages of embryogenesis. In other words, homologous structures are arrived at by different routes.

In other words, different types of animals follow different pathways in building morphological structures such as the arm of a man, the foreleg of a horse, the wing of a bird, and the pectoral fin of a fish, that are otherwise believed to be evolutionarily "related."

If they follow different pathways then there must be a different set of assembly instructions for the development of these "homologs," and thus all of the above questions arise again.

There is in the organism from the time it's just a single cell until it's fully developed, a massive amount of information that programs its development. The locus, nature, and modus operandi of this information are unknown, but one thing I think can be inferred: If information of such astonishing sophistication controls the progression of the cell's development, it seems very unlikely that that information is the product of blind, impersonal, random processes.

Complex information such as we find in computer code or architectural blueprints are never the product of random processes like genetic mutation, but are always, insofar as we've ever experienced it, the product of a mind.

I leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Two Questions

The science writer at Forbes, Ethan Siegal, was asked which of these five physics-related mysteries would he most like to have the answer to:

• Did cosmic inflation happen or was there another process?
• Is earth the only place in the cosmos with life?
• How [can we] merge general relativity and quantum mechanics?
• What is dark energy and dark matter?
• How did life begin on Earth?

These are all fascinating questions, and I'd like to know the answers to all of them, especially the last. Siegal gives interesting explanations at the link as to why these questions are significant, and interested readers should check it out, but for me the two most fascinating science-related questions are not on this list.

The first question I'd like to read a convincing answer to is how did brute matter - atoms and sub-atomic particles - ever give rise in evolutionary history to human consciousness? Indeed, what exactly is consciousness? It would seem that the explanatory gap between material stuff and conscious experience is enormous so how was it bridged in human development or, for that matter, how is it bridged in each human brain?

The second question I'd like to see answered is what is matter in the first place? What is the fundamental constituent of matter? Is it something solid or is it a force of some kind? If it's the latter then how does solidity arise? Is solidity just an illusion? Is the material world objectively real and to what extent is it so?

Someone might dismiss such questions with the remark that the answers make no difference to how we live our everyday lives, and at one level they'd probably be correct. But, if, as a lot of very smart people think, the answers to these questions would point to an ontic reality beyond the universe itself, an intelligent mind, then the implications for everyday life could be considerable.

If, for example, it should turn out that consciousness cannot arise from matter but must be itself the product of consciousness then it would appear that conscious mind underlies the cosmos, and if it should turn out that matter (or mass/energy) reduces to information then, since information is the product of minds, it would appear, again, that a mind must underlie the cosmos.

Those are conclusions, one would think, of immense significance.

Perhaps we'll never know the answers. Perhaps we cannot know them. Perhaps solving these puzzles is as far beyond our intellectual capacities as solving quadratic equations is beyond the intellectual capacities of a rabbit. All the same, it'd be a stupendous achievement were the answers ever found.

Who's the Aggressor in the Culture War?

For the last fifty years or so the left has been employing an interesting strategy in what has come to be called the culture war. The left attacks and undermines some traditional institution of the culture - marriage, abortion, sexual practices, gender, free markets, religious freedom, Christmas etc. - and when people try to resist these encroachments upon these long-held ways of doing things the left complains, indignant that anyone could be so divisive and confrontational.

It's like a man about to be slapped in the face throwing up an arm to ward off the blow and then being criticized for unwarranted aggressiveness and violence because he resisted.

It's hard to believe that the tactic has worked so well for so long, but it has, largely because the general public seems indifferent to what's going on in the culture until it's too late to do anything about it.

Emily Jashinsky, the culture editor at The Federalist, has a column on this in which she writes that,

By the essence of their mission and the definition of their moniker, progressives are on offense. There would be no cultural battles were it not for changes demanded by the left. Those of us so-called “culture war-stoking” conservatives in media are on defense. Almost always.

We focus heavily on culture because it’s what our audience finds useful. It’s what our audience finds useful because they, too, are on defense—and that’s because the left is focused even more heavily on culture. This kind of coverage is entirely a response to the left’s broad and deliberate cultural offensive, which honest progressives should fully own. The left raises proposals (or demands, more often) for cultural change. In response, we stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” (Or we’re supposed to, at least.)

Of course, media conservatives are blamed for stoking the flames of a culture war because center-left elites wouldn’t dare admit their own hands have been dirtied by something so asinine and lowbrow. Yet, curiously, they own all of these politicized initiatives to alter the culture. But you can’t have it both ways.

She's right about this as well as the rest of what she says in the piece. The "culture war" is a war of aggression and attrition waged by the left on much that America has traditionally valued. To the extent that anyone, conservative or even liberal, seeks to offer resistance to the left's ideological scorched earth march through the institutions, they can hardly be called "culture war-stokers," at least not by any honest observer.

Extraordinary Evidence and Belief in the Multiverse

Physicist and writer Brian Greene does a fine job of explaining the concept of the multiverse in a column at The Daily Beast which appeared some years ago.

In the piece he quotes the late Carl Sagan reminding us that in science extraordinary claims must be supported by extraordinary evidence and then tacitly acknowledges that there's not much evidence for the multiverse theory, so we're left to wonder why it has enjoyed so much popularity among some cosmologists.

Perhaps one reason is that our universe is comprised of forces and constants whose values are calibrated with unimaginably exact mathematical precision.

If any of dozens of forces, like gravity, for instance, deviated in their strength from the tiniest amounts - one part in 10^60 in the case of gravity - the universe could not exist, or if it did it would not be the sort of place where living things could emerge.

It's mind-bendingly improbable that such precision would have emerged by sheer chance and there are thus only two viable explanations for it. Either the universe is the product of an intelligent engineering process or there are so many different universes, an infinite number, that one like ours would have to exist as a consequence of sheer probability.

Just as the probability of a blind-folded rifleman hitting a postage stamp half a mile away is increased as the number of bullets fired increases, so, too, the chance of a universe as improbable as ours increases as the number of different universes that exist increases toward infinity.

It seems odd that scientists would posit an explanation which requires the existence of so many entities for which there's so little evidence, but consider that the only viable alternative is that the universe is the creation of an intentional agent, a God, and it's easier to understand why they do so.

It is, at least for some of them, an act of metaphysical desperation.

As physicist Bernard Carr once put it, "If you don't want God you better have a multiverse." They're the only two live options.

Anyway, it would be good to read Greene's article. It's written by a physicist who's sympathetic to the multiverse theory, and, like much of his work, it's very lucid and accessible to the layman.

No Longer Playing the Game

Many of his opponents are fond of trying to make everyone believe that Donald Trump is a raging anti-semite. Well, the raging anti-semite recently drove yet another nail deep into the coffin of that allegation.

A couple of weeks ago President Trump upended forty years of American policy vis a vis Israel by recognizing Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

People can debate the wisdom of this move, but coming on the heels of Trump's recognition two years ago of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and his more recent recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights last March, added to the fact that his daughter Ivanka married a Jewish man, Jared Kushner, one might think those who have accused him of anti-semitic bigotry would be a bit chagrined by all the counter evidence.

From the first link above:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. will no longer view Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as "inconsistent with international law." This effectively means the US will no longer adhere to a 1978 State Department legal opinion issued under the administration of former President Jimmy Carter, which determined the settlements violated international law.

"Calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law has not advanced the cause of peace," Pompeo said on Monday. "The hard truth is that there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace."

Pompeo is surely right about this. No matter how many concessions Israel makes to the Palestinians, no matter how far backwards the United States bends to get the Palestinians to simply admit Israel's right to exist, nothing ever comes of it except more Palestinian hostility toward Israel.

If the Palestinians aren't interested in peace with Israel then the United States may as well stop trying to be a neutral broker and start showing the Palestinians that their obduracy is not in their best interests and that we're no longer going to play their game.

Even so, whether recognizing the legality of the settlements is good or bad policy, calling Trump and anti-semitic bigot is surely one of the most ridiculous libels his opponents have tried to tarnish him with.

Meaning and Atheism

Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University who wrote a piece for the Federalist a year or so ago in which he discusses the question of whether there can be meaning in life in a world without God.

Many atheists themselves tacitly acknowledge that the answer to that question is no. Here's Weikert:

[P]rominent atheist thinkers, such as Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, have insisted that because there is no God, there is also no cosmic purpose, no objective morality, and no transcendent meaning to life. The atheistic Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg dismissed meaning and morality as an illusion in a 2003 article, “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life.”

Some atheistic thinkers insist that the question of meaning is itself meaningless:

The prominent atheistic evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has also expressed dismay that anyone would dare suggest that atheists don’t have any meaning in their lives. But if you dig deeper—for example, by actually reading the empirical study—you find that atheists who insist that non-religious people can find meaning in life have changed the meaning of the word “meaning.”

When theists talk of meaning and purpose they generally refer to an objective meaning and purpose, but atheists often take the question of meaning to refer to that which one arbitrarily invents for oneself. Weikert sees a problem with this:

If one can find meaning in life by creating one’s own meaning, then one is only “finding” the product of one’s own imagination. One has complete freedom to invent whatever meaning one wants.

This makes “meaning” on par with myths and fairy tales. It may make the non-religious person feel good, but it has no objective existence.

An invented meaning is like a child's imaginary friend. It's "real" to the child, but objectively speaking, it doesn't really exist. Nor, for that matter, do objective moral obligations:

In 2015 the online periodical BuzzFeed interviewed atheists about how they found meaning. While they uniformly denied that there was any overarching meaning to life or the universe, they insisted that they find meaning and significance in their own personal lives. Many also implied that certain moral positions are objectively better than others, even though they presumably do not believe in objective morality.

The denial of objective moral duties sometimes gets atheists mired in a bog of muddled thinking. Weikert quotes atheist scientist Nan Arney:

People tell religious fairy stories to create meaning, but I’d rather face up to what all the evidence suggests is the scientific truth – all we really have is our own humanity. So let’s be gentle to each other and share the joy of simply being alive, here and now. Let’s give it our best shot.

This is a non-sequitur. If all the evidence suggests that all there is is the natural world, how does it follow that we should be gentle with each other. It reminds me of the parody of humanist thinking by Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev: "Man has descended from apes, therefore we must love one another."

The unfortunate truth is that there's not much gentleness in nature, nor, if nature is all there is, is there much warrant for humans to repress their baser instinct for aggression and be gentle with each other.

The late atheist biologist Will Provine was much more consistent when he declared,

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will….

Or as British atheist philosopher John Gray once put it, “Human life has no more meaning than that of slime mold.”

If naturalism is true it's hard to see how either Provine or Gray is wrong, which is why naturalism leads anyone who wishes to be logically consistent ultimately to embrace nihilism. That being so, the naturalist has three choices, 1) embrace nihilism, 2) pooh pooh logical consistency and simply follow one's subjective feelings, or 3) reconsider his or her naturalism.

The first puts one on a dehumanizing "highway to hell," the second is irrational and the third is psychologically wrenching, but there don't seem to be any other alternatives.

Looking at the Bright Side

Michael Stanton Gives us a dose of optimism in an essay at NRO. He writes that despite the doom and gloom we're constantly exposed to in much of our news, life in America keeps getting better.

Here's a summary of his argument:

For those of us who spend far too much time following the news these days, it is easy to feel that everything is falling apart. Regardless of your political ideology, there is no doubt that this country is politically divided and facing serious challenges. To make matters worse, we are entering an election season. Politicians will be trying their best to convince us that we are one vote away from choosing between Nazi Germany and Venezuela.

Yet, as we gather with friends and family this Thanksgiving, it is worth remembering that, beyond the headlines, things are actually pretty darn good. As both individuals and a country, we really have more than enough to be thankful for.

Stanton then goes on to note that our economy is doing great. Unemployment is at record lows, including minority unemployment, and earnings are up.

Inequality still exists but poverty is down. Last year, Americans donated $427 billion to charity, and more than 63 million people gave their time and talent to help others — over 8 billion volunteer hours.

Also down is crime, both property crime and violent crime, and prisoner incarceration rates are down 100,000 persons over the last decade.

Americans are healthier than ever. Americans are exercising and eating better, and smoking is at the lowest level since 1965. Race relations are improving as well as reflected in the growing number of interracial marriages and multi-racial children.

Stanton has the details to all this in his article at the link. He finishes with this:

Politics are not our life. The people we love, our faith, our families, the things we do that bring our lives joy and meaning — these things are far more important than politics. As George Will has pointed out: There are 357 million Americans; 350 million of them did not watch cable news or listen to talk radio yesterday.