Some of This Year's Books

2020 was not "a very good year" what with the social unrest in our cities, the increasing political and social distrust and polarization among Americans, and, of course, the pandemic and all the suffering it has wrought.

Nevertheless, the year did allow time for the reading of good books. The Roman orator and politician Cicero once said that "if you have a garden and a library you have everything you need." Well, maybe you wouldn't have quite everything, but you'd certainly have two essentials.

The 16th century reformer Erasmus acknowledged his addiction to reading by confessing that, "When I get a little money I buy books. If I have any left over I buy food and clothes."

The contemporary social critic P.J. O'Rourke advised that you should "always read stuff that would make you look good if you died in the middle of it."

My own reading this year past included some excellent books as well as some clunkers. Following the suggestion of C.S. Lewis that before you read a new book you should reread an old one, many of the good works to which I treated myself were rereads of books I'd read years ago.

I've been remiss the last couple of years in posting my annual reading list and didn't want to miss again so here are my favorite reads this year with a sentence or two of comment. Links are to other VP posts about the book:

Novels:
American Dirt (Jeanne Cummings) - Cummings received a lot of criticism for being a white North American woman writing a book about the experience of Hispanic migrants. The criticism is absurd, motivated perhaps by jealousy on the part of critics envious of the book's success, a success which is quite deserved.

Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) - A story about a feral girl growing up in a marsh. Having spent time myself in that habitat I couldn't understand how Owens could tell this story without once mentioning how intolerable the mosquitoes, ticks and biting flies would have made life for anyone trying to live the life Owens describes.

The Plague (Albert Camus, Reread) - I was motivated by the current pandemic to reread this classic story of a doctor who labors heroically but vainly against a deadly plague. There are some similarities to our present circumstance.

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) - A prize-winning but salacious tale that has almost nothing at all to do with cholera but is instead about a man's life-long unrequited love for a woman. R-rated.

The Sun Also Rises (Ernst Hemingway) - A somewhat autobiographical story set in Spain describing the meaninglessness of lives filled with ennui and alcohol of the "lost" post-WWI generation. Mutatis mutandis it could've been written today.

The Eustace Diamonds (Anthony Trollope) - An elegantly written Victorian novel about a very difficult woman and her struggle to keep diamonds she claims to have been bequeathed her by her deceased husband.

The Old Curiosity Shop (Charles Dickens) - Not one of Dickens' best, but still pretty good. The curiosity shop has almost nothing to do with the story which is actually about the perils of a precocious young girl named Nell.

Hard Times (Charles Dickens) - Both an expose of the misery of life in industrial England and a parody of the extreme rationality and scientism of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham.

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy, Reread) - A rambling account of the descent into despair and mental illness of a faithless wife. Some regard it as the greatest novel ever written.

Animal Farm (George Orwell, Reread) - Orwell's famous allegory of a leftist revolution and its brutal consequences. Thus it ever is with such revolutions.

The Possessed (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Reread) - A novel based on the idea, made more explicit in his Brothers Karamazov, that for men without God there are no moral rules. One criticism of the novel is that Dostoyevsky takes a seeming eternity to finish introducing his characters and get on with the story.

The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor (Reread) - O'Connor's stories are satirical tragicomedies whose theme is often the fall of the proud and haughty. Her use of the language of the South is masterful. My favorite of these stories is The Displaced Person.

Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, Reread) - A book whose fame is surely based not at all on the quality of the actual story but rather entirely upon Huxley's prevision of modern man as compliant putty in the hands of a dictatorial state which employs technology and pleasure to manipulate its citizens.

History:
Dominion (Tom Holland) - An account of the development of the Western world and its dependence, whether acknowledged or not, upon Christian moral assumptions with which, even in a secular age, it continues to be saturated.

The French Revolution and Napoleon (Charles Downer Hazen, Reread) - A readable account of the events surrounding 1789 and the subsequent rise and fall of one of the most execrable men in European history, at least prior to the 20th century.

Sam Houston and the Alamo Avengers (Brian Kilmeade) - In this book and the next Kilmeade sketches out the details of famous events which most of us never learned in school but maybe should have. Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans (Brian Kilmeade)

The Last Assassin (Peter Stothard) - A sometimes confusing but otherwise interesting account of the pursuit and execution of the assassins of Julius Caesar.

The Captive Mind (Czeslaw Milosz) - Milosz describes the psychology and coping strategies of people living behind the Iron Curtain of communism in Eastern Europe in the post-WWII era.

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Pt.III (Hannah Arendt) - An exhaustive description of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism written in 1951. The breadth of Arendt's scholarship is remarkable.

Biography:
Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love (Tom Tarrants) - Tarrants was a genuine white supremacist (not the ersatz variety sometimes presented to us by our media) who, as a young man in the 1960s, attempted murder, saw his friends killed by police and was himself severely wounded in a gun battle with the police. His whole life was changed through a Christian conversion that he underwent while in prison. It's an amazing story of redemption.

A Severe Mercy (Sheldon Vanauken) - Vanauken recounts his and his wife's conversion to Christian faith, their relationship with Oxford don C.S. Lewis and her subsequent death.

God's Funeral (A.N. Wilson, Reread) - An interesting recounting of biographical vignette's from the lives of a variety of 19th century British atheists and agnostics. Wilson wrote the book while he was himself an agnostic, but he later became a Christian.

Science:
The Miracle of the Cell (Michael Denton) - Readers without a background in biology will find some of this book difficult, but even so, Denton does a marvelous job of illustrating how living cells, all the way down to their constituent atoms, show astonishing evidence of having been intricately designed for the purpose of making life possible.

Signature in the Cell (Stephen Meyer, Reread) - This book deserves to become a classic on the problems inherent in any naturalistic account of the origin of life. It requires some knowledge of cell biology, but given that knowledge, Meyer's book is a powerful critique of naturalistic materialism.

The 5th Miracle (Paul Davies, Reread) - In this book and the next agnostic Paul Davies discusses the origin of life, seeking to avoid the hypothesis of intentional design. Other than to note that science can't permit such an explanation, he fails.

The Demon in the Machine (Paul Davies and also here) God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse (Hutchings and Wilkinson) - An interesting look at the multiverse and its inadequacies as a scientific hypothesis.

The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook (Barnes and Lewis) - The authors lay out the obstacles that must be overcome by anyone wishing to promote an alternative to Big Bang cosmology and other ancillary consensus theories held by contemporary cosmologists.

Theology/Philosophy:
The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis, Reread) - Lewis' imaginative tale of what heaven and hell are like. According to the story they're not what many people think.

Abolition of Man (C.S. Lewis, Reread) - Lewis describes how modernity has dehumanized man, creating "men without chests."

Are We Bodies or Souls (Richard Swinburne) - Oxford philosopher Swinburne offers an improved version of Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul.

Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (Tim Keller) - An excellent resource to help sustain those in the midst of grief and suffering.

The Prodigal God (Tim Keller) - Keller offers an interesting look at the parable of the prodigal son and focusses our attention not only on the grace and love of the father but also on the bitter reaction of the older brother.

The War that Never Was (Kenneth Kemp) - The alleged war between science and religion is an ahistorical myth. Actual conflict between scientific theories and religious belief has been rare throughout Western history.

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Habermas and Licona) - There are four or five historical facts about the resurrection of Jesus upon which all or most scholars agree, even those who reject the historicity of the resurrection. The best explanation of those facts, however, is that Jesus actually did die and return to life.

Cultural Commentary:
Live Not by Lies (Rod Dreher) - Dreher's thesis is that America is entering an era of "soft totalitarianism" in which instances of people being "cancelled" for holding politically or socially unacceptable views will continue to increase to the point where anyone publicly expressing such opinions will suffer severe social and economic penalties. These penalties will be imposed not so much by the state but by private sector employers and social media with state sanction. As Dreher notes, this slide into tyranny is already well underway.

What if Life Exists on Other Planets?

Suppose scientists discovered intelligent life on a planet in a distant solar system, or perhaps on several such planets. What would be the implications of such a discovery for the validity of one's belief either that God, or a being very much like God, exists or one's belief that no such being exists?

For a long time metaphysical naturalists - those who believe that nature is all there is, there's no supernature - believed that the discovery of intelligent life on other planets would suggest that such life could and would arise anywhere the conditions for it are right and that the existence of living things on earth is thus not extraordinary. It would, in other words, seriously weaken the argument that the origin of life, especially intelligent life, is so improbable that it must be the product of a divine intelligence.

Physicist Paul Davies, an agnostic, believed this himself until he set out to write a book on the origin of life (The 5th Miracle). In the book Davies lists three possible explanations for life's origin, what biologists call abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-living matter).

The biggest problem for which any explanation has to account is the origin of complex, specified information such as we find in the DNA/RNA molecular architecture that forms the genetic code. According to Davies there are three possibilities: Either physical laws generate this specified complexity, or there are unknown biological laws that make it inevitable, or it was a genuine miracle.

Davies invokes science as justification for not considering the miraculous, but he also rejects the first possibility. He writes:

The heart of my objection is this: The laws of physics that operate between atoms and molecules are, almost by definition, simple and general. We would not expect them alone to lead inexorably to something both highly complex and highly specific....A law of nature...will not create biological information, or, indeed, any information at all. Ordinary laws....can shuffle information, but they can't create it.

This leaves him with the possibility of a kind of biological determinism which results from a heretofore undiscovered complexity law or information law that drives matter toward the goal of producing life:

Whereas the laws of physics merely shuffle information around, a complexity law might actually create information....I believe it is only under the action of an informational law that the information channel, or software control, associated with the genetic code could have come into existence.

From the standpoint of naturalism, however, such a law has at least two unacceptable implications. The first is that it flies in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy which claims that naturalistic processes are meaningless, purposeless and directionless. A law of information that exhibits foresight, purpose, meaning and direction and that pushes atoms and molecules toward the goal of increasing complexity would be the undoing of this claim.

The second is that if there is such a law and if the universe is actually suffused with purpose, meaning and foresight that would be compelling evidence for the existence of a super-natural mind, an intelligent architect of the cosmos.

If, though, scientists one day discover that life really is abundant in the universe then that would mean that the existence of such an information law and thus the existence of an intelligent supernatural agent are very likely. In fact, there's no significant difference between life resulting from a kind of biological determinism established by God and a supernatural miracle of instantaneous creation. They're both miraculous. The only real difference is the matter of how long the process took.

In the beginning of the last chapter Davies quotes one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, Freeman Dyson, who wrote in 1979 that, "The more I study the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." The evidence to which Dyson refers has multiplied in the four decades since 1979 many times over.

Davies concludes his last chapter with this:

The search for life elsewhere [in the universe] is thus the testing ground for two diametrically opposed worldviews. On one side is orthodox science, with its nihilistic philosophy of the pointless universe, of impersonal laws oblivious of ends, a cosmos in which life and mind, science and art, hope and fear are but fluky incidental embellishments on a tapestry of irreversible cosmic corruption....

There is an alternative view, undeniably romantic but perhaps true nonetheless, the vision of a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe, governed by ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve toward life and consciousness. A universe in which the emergence of thinking beings is a fundamental and integral part of the overall scheme of things. A universe in which we are not alone.

What Davies leaves to the reader to ask is where would such laws, laws that direct mindless matter to create consciousness, come from? Of the three possible explanations for the origin of life - physical law, biological determinism and miracle - the first is a non-starter and the other two both lead to the conclusion that there's an intelligence at work behind the universe.

Naturalists can't be happy with this state of affairs.

Newt's Refusal

An op-ed by Newt Gingrich in The Washington Times last Monday titled "Why I Will Not Accept Joe Biden As President," has elicited a lot of reaction from conservatives. Many responses were sympathetic and some were not. I find myself largely in agreement with what Mr. Gingrich writes and share much the same feelings about the last four years that he describes.

Where I demur is in the headline's refusal (Gingrich probably didn't select the headline) to accept Mr. Biden as president. It was after all the liberal leftists who four years ago loudly declared that Donald Trump was "not their president." That struck me then as both fatuous and small-minded. Trump was in fact the president of all Americans and unless they were prepared to renounce their citizenship, which they evidently were not, their cavils sounded absurd and insincere.

I like to think that conservatives are better, wiser and more serious than that. I like to think that despite how those on the other side behave, and despite what they say about those of us who disagree with them, we won't succumb to the temptation, strong though it may be, to act like them and to hate like they do.

Anyway, after some introductory thoughts Gingrich explains his reaction to the election results:

As I thought about it, I realized my anger and fear were not narrowly focused on votes. My unwillingness to relax and accept the election grew out of a level of outrage and alienation unlike anything I had experienced in more than 60 years of involvement in public affairs.

The challenge is that I — and other conservatives — are not disagreeing with the left within a commonly understood world. We live in alternative worlds.

The left’s world is mostly the established world of the forces who have been dominant for most of my life.

My world is the populist rebellion which believes we are being destroyed, our liberties are being cancelled and our religions are under assault. (Note the new Human Rights Campaign to decertify any religious school which does not accept secular sexual values — and that many Democrat governors have kept casinos open while closing churches though the COVID-19 pandemic.) We also believe other Democrat-led COVID-19 policies have enriched the wealthy while crushing middle class small business owners (some 160,000 restaurants may close).

The former Speaker of the House then recounts some of the past bad behavior exhibited by many of the President's foes:

In 2016, I supported an outsider candidate, who was rough around the edges and in the Andrew Jackson school of controversial assaults on the old order. When my candidate won, it was blamed on the Russians. We now know (four years later) Hillary Clinton’s own team financed the total lie that fueled this attack.

Members of the FBI twice engaged in criminal acts to help it along — once in avoiding prosecution of someone who had deleted 33,000 emails and had a subordinate use a hammer to physically destroy hard drives, and a second time by lying to FISA judges to destroy Gen. Michael Flynn and spy on then-candidate Donald Trump and his team. The national liberal media aided and abetted every step of the way. All this was purely an attempt to cripple the new president and lead to the appointment of a special counsel — who ultimately produced nothing.

Now, people in my world are told it is time to stop resisting and cooperate with the new president. But we remember that the Democrats wanted to cooperate with Mr. Trump so much that they began talking about his impeachment before he even took office. The Washington Post ran a story on Democrat impeachment plots the day of the inauguration.

In fact, nearly 70 Democratic lawmakers boycotted his inauguration. A massive left-wing demonstration was staged in Washington the day after, where Madonna announced she dreamed of blowing up the White House to widespread applause. These same forces want me to cooperate with their new president. I find myself adopting the Nancy Pelosi model of constant resistance. Nothing I have seen from Mr. Biden since the election offers me any hope that he will reach out to the more than 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump.

But Gingrich is just getting started. When the conversation is about the bad behavior of many of the President's opponents there's much more than can be fit into a single op-ed. Nevertheless, Newt makes a stab at it:

When Twitter and Facebook censored the oldest and fourth largest newspaper (founded by Alexander Hamilton) because it accurately reported news that could hurt Mr. Biden’s chances — where were The New York Times and The Washington Post?

The truth of the Hunter Biden story is now becoming impossible to avoid or conceal. The family of the Democrat nominee for president received at least $5 million from an entity controlled by our greatest adversary. It was a blatant payoff, and most Americans who voted for Mr. Biden never heard of it — or were told before the election it was Russian disinformation. Once they did hear of it, 17% said they would have switched their votes, according to a poll by the Media Research Center. That’s the entire election. The censorship worked exactly as intended.

Typically, newspapers and media outlets band together when press freedom is threatened by censorship. Where was the sanctimonious “democracy dies in darkness?” Tragically, The Washington Post is now part of the darkness.

When Twitter censors four of five Rush Limbaugh tweets in one day, I fear for the country.

When these monolithic Internet giants censor the president of the United States, I fear for the country.

When I see that elite billionaires like Mark Zuckerburg are able to spend $400 million to hire city governments to maximize turnout in specifically Democratic districts — without any regard to election spending laws or good governance standards — I fear for the country.

When I read that Apple has a firm rule of never irritating China — and I watch the NBA kowtow to Beijing, I fear for our country.

When I watch story after story about election fraud being spiked — without even the appearance of journalistic due diligence or curiosity — I know something is sick.

So for Gingrich the problem isn't just the election. That's simply the last brick in the wall of alienation between Americans who believe that everyone should play by the rules and those who believe that whatever it takes to win is fair play as long as it works:

The election process itself was the final straw in creating the crisis of confidence which is accelerating and deepening for many millions of Americans.

Aside from a constant stream of allegations of outright fraud, there are some specific outrages — any one of which was likely enough to swing the entire election.

Officials in virtually every swing state broke their states’ own laws to send out millions of ballots or ballot applications to every registered voter. It was all clearly documented in the Texas lawsuit, which was declined by the U.S. Supreme Court based on Texas’ procedural standing — not the merits of the case. That’s the election.

In addition, it’s clear that virtually every swing state essentially suspended normal requirements for verifying absentee ballots. Rejection rates were an order of magnitude lower than in a normal year. In Georgia, rejection rates dropped from 6.5% in 2016 to 0.2% in 2020. In Pennsylvania, it went from 1% in 2016 to .003% in 2020. Nevada fell from 1.6% to .75%. There is no plausible explanation other than that they were counting a huge number of ballots — disproportionately for Mr. Biden — that normally would not have passed muster. That’s the election.

The entire elite liberal media lied about the timeline of the COVID-19 vaccine. They blamed President Trump for the global pandemic even as he did literally everything top scientists instructed. In multiple debates, the moderators outright stated that he was lying about the U.S. having a vaccine before the end of the year (note Vice President Mike Pence received it this week). If Americans had known the pandemic was almost over, that too was likely the difference in the election.

The unanimously never-Trump debate commission spiked the second debate at a critical time in order to hurt President Trump. If there had been one more debate like the final one, it likely would have been pivotal.

Any one of those things alone is enough for Trump supporters to think we have been robbed by a ruthless establishment — which is likely to only get more corrupt and aggressive if it gets away with these blatant acts.

Gingrich then brings his indictment of Trump's opponents to a close with this:

For more than four years, the entire establishment mobilized against the elected president of the United States as though they were an immune system trying to kill a virus. Now, they are telling us we are undermining democracy.

Given this environment, I have no interest in legitimizing the father of a son who Chinese Communist Party members boast about buying. Nor do I have any interest in pretending that the current result is legitimate or honorable. It is simply the final stroke of a four-year establishment-media power grab. It has been perpetrated by people who have broken the law, cheated the country of information, and smeared those of us who believe in America over China, history over revisionism, and the liberal ideal of free expression over cancel culture.

I write this in genuine sorrow, because I think we are headed toward a serious, bitter struggle in America. This extraordinary, coordinated four-year power grab threatens the fabric of our country and the freedom of every American.

Everything he says in this seems true, but how should those who agree with him channel their anger and resentment? Speaking for myself, I want to resist the answer some have proffered that the best, most needed response is to act like them.

I hope that's not true.

How DNA Is Read

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

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

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

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

Gauger goes on to explain:

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

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

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

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

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

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information. It's an incredibly ingenious solution to the problem of packing maximum information into the shortest possible code, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence, and the only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be.

But why decide that? What reason can be adduced to rationally justify such a decision? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is, it seems, that they have a strong psychological or emotional preference that no such being exist and they allow that preference to shape everything else they believe.

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

Wouldn't these questions be important to think about?

The 2020 Election Mess

National Review's National Affairs editor John Fund has written a helpful explanation of why so many people believe the 2020 election was riven with fraud and why the courts failed to support efforts to gain redress.

Part of the article that stands out is Fund's summary of the irregularities that were alleged in Georgia. He writes this:

The Trump lawsuits may have had merit. In Georgia alone, Trump lawyers alleged, in addition to mail-in signature problems, there were:

• 92 mail-in ballots cast before voters requested them
• 217 voters whose mail-in ballots were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day”
• 395 out-of-state voters
• 1,043 people who claimed to live at post-office boxes
• 2,560 ineligible felons
• 10,315 dead people
• 66,247 voters under the age of 18
• 305,701 voters who requested absentee ballots after the deadline

In Georgia, Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Assuming these figures are correct, the frustration and anger many Trump supporters feel is understandable. Fund goes on to state that,

In the future, reforms must be made to ensure that the public believes in the integrity of the election. Many don’t believe that the 2020 election was fair. A Quinnipiac poll released on December 9 found that 38 percent of Americans believe that the election was marred by widespread fraud. That included 35 percent of independents and 77 percent of Republicans.

Needed reforms include requirements for a government photo ID to vote by mail (people could send a photocopy or smartphone image), as in Kansas and Alabama currently.

States should use Department of Homeland Security records to check the citizenship of registered voters.

Absentee ballots should go only to voters who request them — there should be no automatic mailing of such ballots to all registered voters, because those lists are filled with people who have moved or died or are ineligible.

The computer software used in voting machines must be shared with election officials and available to the public in court cases.

It should be added that making mail-in voting available also made it inevitable that perhaps millions of people would cast a ballot who would never have bothered to show up at a poll on November 3rd. It also made it extremely easy for party activists to "assist" tens of thousands of people to fill out their ballots.

That Republicans allowed this to happen without much objection prior to the election is incomprehensible. In Pennsylvania, for example, it was the Republican legislature, which, in 2019, joined 33 other states and the District of Columbia in actually passing legislation that enabled "no-excuse mail-in voting." Subsequently, roughly 2.2 million of Pennsylvania's seven million voters chose to submit a ballot that way.

Since Democrats formed the majority of that number and since Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes - stunningly scoring about 7800 votes more in the city of Philadelphia than Barack Obama did in 2008 - it's very likely that mail-in voting was directly responsible for Mr. Biden's victory in Pennsylvania.

Fund concludes his column with this paragraph:

Abuses, incompetence, and, yes, alleged fraud made the 2020 election suspect. Too bad Trump exaggerated his claims, failed to address some of the election’s ticking time bombs in court before the election, and took on lawyers unsuited to the task. Those errors, plus the fact that the media and courts often didn’t do their jobs, doomed his effort.

If these abuses aren't corrected by 2024, if opportunities for fraud continue to be permitted to infect the system, the American people will lose all confidence in our electoral process, and loss of confidence, the belief that the election isn't fairly conducted, will almost certainly lead to increased polarization, civil disobedience and turmoil.

A Christmas Eve Noel

I thought it fitting on Christmas eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

Three Christmas Symbols

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, the X 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 signified 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 the word is.

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A popular Christmas tradition 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.

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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 and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and 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 and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

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 by Constantine 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.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, 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 the words "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.

Christmas Magic

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 an incomprehensible idea, the idea of the Incarnation.

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 mystery and 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 or that they're something other than what they really are.

People feel they should be joyful at Christmas, 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 phony, 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 being born, enjoying a few good meals, suffering and dying.

Christmas represents the possibility that we can throw off the crushing weight of purposelessness, emptiness 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.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities with the movie are purely coincidental, although the similarities with my novel Bridging the Abyss, are not.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him.

Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

The Georgia Runoff

There's a lot at stake in the runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats being held January 5th in Georgia. Both of Georgia's Senate seats are being contested, and if the Democrats win both they'll have control of the Senate. The Republicans need to win one of the races in order to keep their majority.

If the Democrats control the Senate they'll have mastery of both Houses of Congress as well as the White House and there'll be very little standing in their way of implementing the most radical political and economic agenda in the history of the country.

So what do we know about the Democrat candidates running for those two seats? Jim Geraghty at National Review offers us a partial glimpse of what candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock stand for.

He first presents some personal info on Ossof and then lists some of his policy positions. He opines that "Ossoff is not a sensible centrist Democrat aiming to win a state that, up until very recently, had been a Republican lock. As the Democratic Party veered to the left in the Trump years, Ossoff followed."

Geraghty then goes on to support that claim by listing the following examples of Ossof's positions on current issues. He provides links for these, but you'll have to go to his column to get them:

• When asked about defunding the police, Ossoff offered a qualified endorsement, “You have to have national standards for the use of force, and yeah, you’ve got to be able to hold individual officers and entire departments accountable, and there also has to be funding for those departments on the line.”
• He supports statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
• He says he “maybe” supports eliminating the filibuster in the Senate.
• He wants to ban “semiautomatic rifles” — including the AR-15, the best-selling rifle in the country — and also insists he will “defend the Second Amendment.”
• He wants a “rapidly phased-in ban on single-use plastics,” which would include bottles, wrappers, straws, and bags.
• On judges, Ossoff says he will only vote to confirm federal judges who pledge to uphold Roe v. Wade.
• On the coronavirus pandemic, Ossoff wants to “implement widespread temperature checks.” (Temperature checks are not a terribly effective way to stop the spread of the virus, as roughly 40 percent of people who catch SARS-CoV-2 will be asymptomatic.)
• He supports “a generous forgiveness program for those struggling to pay off their student loans.”
• He wants the upcoming Congress to investigate the Trump administration’s immigration policy, comparing it to war crimes.
• He believes that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials should not deport illegal immigrants, but instead ensure they’re being paid the minimum wage.
• He supports sanctuary cities.

Warnock, an African-American pastor, may be even further to the left than Ossof. Writes Geraghty:

Warnock supports the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. The church where Warnock was a pastor “roared its approval” when Fidel Castro came to visit in 1995. He dismissed the New York City “workfare” program as a “hoax.”

Demonizing police officers in the name of criminal-justice reform is almost pro forma in Democratic circles in 2020, but Warnock was well ahead of the curve. In a 2015 sermon, Ossoff argued that the police represented a threat to children:

“Our children are in trouble, and it’s often those who are sworn to protect who cause more trouble . . . our children are in danger.” In another sermon that year, he declared, “we shouldn’t be surprised when we see police officers act like bullies on the street . . . You don’t get to be the incarceration capital of the world by playing nice on the streets. You have to work for that distinction.”

Warnock is a fan of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and is hostile to the state of Israel:

Warnock said the Nation of Islam’s “voice has been important for the development of Black theology.”

What’s more, the pastor really has an axe to grind against Israel. Warnock has compared Israeli control of West Bank to Apartheid South Africa, called Israeli government forces “birds of prey,” called Israel “a land of violence and bloodshed and occupation” run by “clever politicians” who are “racist and vicious,” and compared Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to segregationist George Wallace.

He's also sympathetic to Marxism. Geraghty quotes him:

To be sure, the Marxist critique has much to teach the black church. Indeed, it has played an important role in the maturation of black theology as an intellectual discipline, deepened black theology’s apprehension of the interconnectivity of racial and class oppression and provided critical tools for a black church that has yet to awaken to a substantive third world consciousness.

Geraghty concludes with this note:

Finally, Warnock’s wife accused him of running over her foot with his car during a heated argument days before he filed paperwork to officially seek the office, according to a police report obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Warnock insists it did not happen, and police did not press charges. Warnock and his wife are divorcing.

The policy stances these candidates represent may sound extreme, but I think it's fair to say that they're mainstream in their party. If Ossof and Warnock are elected to the Senate by the citizens of Georgia the United States will look very much different in two years than it does today.

Micro-choreography

One aspect of the argument for the existence of an intelligent engineer who has designed living things is based on the amazing fact that each cell in living organisms is a factory consisting of thousands of biological machines directed and choreographed by information-rich instructions.

Since we have a uniform experience of information (specified complexity) being produced only by intelligent agents, and we have no experience of complex, meaningful information being generated by blind, impersonal forces, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the information in the biosphere is also the product of an intelligent agent.

The following excerpt from a longer video provides an example of the astonishing goings-on in the interiors of every cell in your body. The quality of the YouTube version of the video is not good, but it's good enough.

Some questions we might ask about this include these: How do these molecular structures "know" what operation to perform and where to go to perform it? Where do the instructions (information) come from that direct and coordinate these operations, and how does such a system arise from a blind, mindless process like evolution? Indeed, how did these processes ever arise in the first cells before cells "learned" to reproduce?

After all, natural selection, and thus evolution, doesn't kick in until cells can make copies of themselves. Yet many of these basic processes must already have been in place in the earliest cells or they wouldn't have survived to develop the ability to reproduce.

It's all very mysterious, agnostic physicist Paul Davies even calls it "near miraculous" in his book The 5th Miracle (He can't very well call it an actual miracle because then he couldn't call himself an agnostic), but it certainly seems plausible to believe that this whole system was somehow designed.

In fact, the only way to side-step that conclusion is to rule out design a priori, but why do that unless one's metaphysical commitment to naturalism is so strong that no rival hypothesis can be allowed to creep into one's thinking? If that's the case, though, one should give up any pretense of being an open-minded follower of the evidence wherever it leads.

The Majority Minority Miscalculation

It's often been claimed that whites will find themselves in the minority in the U.S. by sometime around 2045 having been demographically eclipsed by members of black, brown and yellow races. A corollary to the claim is that being thrust into the minority will spell political doom for a GOP dominated by whites.

An essay at The Federalist, however, written by Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution challenges this conventional wisdom.

The belief that the "browning of America" entails permanent political exile for white Republican voters and office-holders is based on two questionable assumptions: First, that rising minorities would continue to favor the Democrats in their voting, and, second, that increased Democratic support from rising minorities would not be offset by falling support among the declining white population.

The 2020 election should give pause to those who hold the first assumption. Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump in record numbers and, although it's true that a more traditional Republican may not have generated as much enthusiasm among this demographic as did the president, the fact remains that many more members of these groups are willing to abandon their traditional fealty to the Democratic party to vote for Republican candidates than ever before. This is especially true among Hispanics.

The second assumption is rendered dubious by the gains Republicans have made in recent years among traditional Democrat loyalists like blue-collar union workers.

But Fiorina's main point is that the projections of a majority of minorities by mid-century are themselves questionable. They're predicated on misleading data culled from the 2010 census.

Question 8 on that census form (and on the 2020 census) asks about Hispanic ancestry. Those who report any Hispanic ancestry on this question are placed into the minority category, regardless of their responses to question 9 which asks the respondent to state their own race.

Fiorina explains:

Non-Hispanics who check the “white” box on question 9 go into the white category, of course — unless they write in anything else. Should they wish to claim, say, an American Indian ancestor (a fairly common impulse), they again fall into the minority category despite their white self-categorization. In both cases, descendants stay in the same category — minority — as the parent, if they acknowledge the parent’s ancestry.

So, someone as white as Senator Elizabeth Warren, and all of her subsequent descendents, would be considered minorities as long as they continue to maintain that they have a single Native American ancestor three or four generations ago. As Fiorina puts it:

The census projections reflect a “one-drop” rule akin to that used in the Jim Crow South. The white category consists only of people who are 100 percent “non-Hispanic white.” If one adopts a more expansive definition of "white," the projection of a majority-minority nation disappears.

If anyone who checks the white box on question 9 were actually to be classified as white the nation would still be three-quarters white in 2060, according to Fiorina. He goes on to say that,

On first hearing about the projected nonwhite majority, many people probably form a mental image that looks roughly like this: 4 whites, 2 Hispanics, 2 blacks, 1 Asian, and perhaps one “other.”

As the preceding discussion explains, however, the picture is much more complex. The majority of minorities will not consist of people who are 100 percent Latino, 100 percent Asian, 100 percent black, 100 percent Native American, or 100 percent Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (the official census categories).

Rather, the majority of minorities will include people of numerous shadings of color.

The United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, not only because of the changing relative sizes of the five large groups but also because of the growing internal diversity within each group as the sizes of their [racially] mixed portions swell. Diversity is increasing within individuals as well as among groups.

In other words, what will happen as we approach mid-century is that categories like white, Hispanic, African-American and Asian will be increasingly blurred as inter-racial marriages continue to increase and more citizens are able to claim mixed-race status.

One of the positive benefits of all this is that identity-based politics, at least as it's practiced by the left today, will become increasingly irrelevant as a greater percentage of future generations' racial identity is "all of the above."

One Solitary Life

Most readers of Viewpoint have probably heard the vignette about the enormous historical impact made by the life of Jesus titled "One Solitary Life." It originated in a sermon delivered on July 11, 1926 by pastor and author James Allan Francis who was speaking to the Baptist Young People's Union in Los Angeles.

His message finished with a description of Jesus' impact on the subsequent history of the world, and the concluding excerpt went viral. It received global circulation and is still a powerful yet concise statement of the world-changing effect Jesus' short life has had over the last two millenia.

As we approach the Christmas season it's fitting that we share this three minute film adaptation of Francis' words produced by Illustra Media:

Agreeing with Trump, Voting for Biden

Over the course of the Trump administration there emerged on our political landscape a group of folks who identified as conservatives who were also what came to be called "Never-Trumpers." These were people who metaphorically, and sometimes literally, swore that under no circumstances would they ever cast their vote for Mr. Trump, either in 2016 or 2020.

I suppose these Never-Trumpers are quite satisfied now that President Trump seems to be at the end of his tether, that there seems to be no judicial recourse left to rescue his presidency, but frankly, I don't understand their thinking.

These are people, after all, who claim to be conservative which means that they affirm most or all of the following positions: They are pro-life and opposed to abortion on demand, they believe that the best way to get people out of poverty is to get them jobs and help them build strong families, they believe in free enterprise and free markets, they see the value of lower taxes and shudder at the high tax proposals of their liberal opponents, they ardently desire peace in the Middle East, they cherish religious liberty and freedom of speech, they're (generally) appalled at measures which would create functionally open borders, they loathe radical proposals to expand the number of Supreme Court justices and the number of states in the union and to do away with the filibuster in the Senate.

These are folks, too, who are fully aware that except for the desire for peace in the Middle East, the contemporary Democrat party opposes almost every one of the philosophical principles they embrace.

Nonetheless, the Never-Trumpers refused to vote for the one man who has done more on behalf of implementing those conservative policies and ideas than any president in the last century and a half, and some of them even voted for the Biden/Harris ticket, the most radical major party ticket in our history, because they find Trump's personality so contemptible.

Yet these Never-Trumpers must know that by refusing to help Trump hold on to the White House, by actively voting for his Democrat opponent, they've tacitly abjured all of the policies they claim to hold simply because they consider the man who has been finally accomplishing what conservatives have yearned for ever since the 1930s to be a coarse buffoon.

I don't understand their thinking. We weren't voting on November 3rd for high school Homecoming King. Never-Trump conservatives need to ask themselves, it seems to me, what's more important to them, principle or personality? If it's the latter then it's going to be very hard to ever take these people seriously again.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. II)

The previous Viewpoint post argued that sensations like color, sound, taste, fragrance, pain, etc. are not objectively real but are rather the products of the interaction of electrochemical stimuli with the brain/mind complex.

In other words, were there were no perceivers with sensory organs, a brain and a mind there'd be no color, just as there'd be no color if there were no light. We create the sensation of red out of the electromagnetic energy that impinges on our retinas. Red doesn't exist independently of someone seeing it.

But why posit a mind as part of the apparatus responsible for these phenomena of our daily experience? Why not just attribute them to our physical senses working together with our brains?

After all, we know that if a brain ceases to function, as in death, we cease to have sensory experience. Moreover, we know we have brains, we can see them, measure them, observe various parts of them activate on brain scans. But why think we also have a mind that can't be observed, can't be described and can't even be located?

The answer is that the material, physical brain, taken alone, seems to be an inadequate explanation for certain facts about consciousness, among which are the sensory experiences we talked about in the first paragraph above and in the previous post.

The problem is that the brain is material, the processes that occur in the brain are chemical or physical, but the sensations we experience are immaterial. There's no known bridge between an electrical impulse generated between neurons and, say, the taste of sweet. How does an electrochemical reaction among molecules produce the experience of sweetness or the sensation of sound or color or pain?

It's not just that no one knows how these amazing events happen, it's that no one knows how it could happen. A miniature scientist traveling throughout someone's brain while the person was looking at a red car would not see red anywhere in the brain, or the image of a car, for that matter. Where does the red come from? What exactly is it? How does a chemical reaction produce red in a person's brain?

The apparent inadequacy of matter to explain the immaterial phenomena of our experience is one piece of evidence - there are others - that something immaterial is involved in the creation of these phenomena. This immaterial entity is what philosophers call the mind or soul.

Of course, many philosophers, those called materialists, resist the idea that we have an immaterial mind separate from, and in some ways independent of, the brain. They resist the idea because they're wedded to the conviction that all that exists is matter and energy. Their ontology doesn't allow for mysterious immaterial entities that play a role in thinking and experiencing.

Once such entities are admitted, then, the materialist fears, the door will be open to other such mental entities like souls and ultimately, God.

In order to keep the Divine Mind from intruding Itself into the world, the materialist believes, all independent immaterial entities, especially those such as minds which are conscious and intelligent, must be excluded, but then we're left with what seems to be an insoluble mystery. How does a material brain generate the immaterial sensations we experience every moment of our waking lives and what exactly are those sensations?

Answer those questions and you'll win a Nobel Prize.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. I)

In my classes we discuss the question of what we mean when we say that something is real. One aspect of the question we specifically address are sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, sound, and so on.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and a tree falling in the forest makes a sound whether or not there's anyone around to hear it.

But is it true that the phenomena of our senses are objectively real? Consider this description of how music is downloaded to a computer and then transferred to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made in us by our brains/minds. If there's no ear to hear it, no brain/mind complex to interpret what the ear hears, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves were picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses were converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals were compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code was written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructed the bits in their proper sequence and transmitted them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relayed the file to a router, where the file was packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembled the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embedded the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, accessed by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converted the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy travelling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all, just electrochemical energy. The music is created by our brain/mind and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation that we experience and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

One last question: Why do I refer to the brain/mind? Why not just assume that the brain is solely responsible for the sensations we experience? I'll consider that question on Monday.

The Root Causes of Poverty

In his book titled The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth America’s Poor Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute argues that the primary reasons for poverty in this country are the laws and policies enacted by the government which make it harder for the poor to escape to the middle class.

He talked about this in a 2018 article at National Review Online. He opens with this:

Why are people poor? Conservatives and liberals offer very different explanations.

Conservatives point to a “culture of poverty” and suggest that much deprivation is the result of flawed choices and behavior by the poor themselves. They point to a strong correlation between poverty and a failure to follow the so-called “success sequence”: finish school, get a job, get married, and only then have children. Relatively few people who do those things end up in poverty.

Liberals, on the other hand, say that that is all very well, but choices are always constrained by the circumstances in which people live. Therefore, conservatives are wrong to discount structural factors, such as racism, gender-based discrimination, and economic dislocation, that can help shape people’s choices.

There is truth to both explanations. One can’t strip the poor of agency by treating them as if they were little more than chaff blown by the wind, with no responsibility for their choices. But neither should we ignore the context in which those decisions are made. For all the progress we have made, not everyone starts with an equal opportunity.

Tanner argues that five areas of government policy impede economic and social progress among the poor.

Criminal Justice: Studies show that a criminal record dooms an inmate's children to poverty, and having a criminal record makes it harder to get a job and get married once released, both of which increase out-of-wedlock births.

Tanner cites a 2016 statement from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers:

Having a criminal record or history of incarceration is a barrier to success in the labor market, and limited employment or depressed wages can stifle an individual’s ability to become self-sufficient. . . . Further, criminal sanctions create financial and emotional stresses that destabilize marriages and have adverse consequences for children.

This is one reason why President Trump's criminal justice reform was extremely beneficial to poor communities and why he received a larger share of the black and Hispanic vote than any Republican candidate in the last sixty years.

Education: Poor children generally find themselves stuck in failing schools. These schools are not failing because they don't receive enough money, rather they fail for a host of socio-economic reasons that indeed may be intractable. The problem is that there are lots of motivated kids languishing in these schools who are essentially being taught nothing. The answer is to give parents a choice as to where their children will go to school.

Tanner writes:

An effective anti-poverty program would break up the government education monopoly and limit the power of the teachers’ unions. One can debate the precise merits of charter schools vs. vouchers vs. tuition tax credits, but, in the end, we must give parents more choice and control over their children’s education.

You'd think that people who talk about social justice would be on board with this, but it's the left which has over the years consistently thwarted attempts to give parents more options in their children's schooling and conservatives who have championed school choice for poor families.

Housing Policy: According to Tanner, government zoning and land-use policies can add as much as 40 percent to the cost of housing in some cities. In places such as New York City and San Francisco, the zoning cost is even higher, at 50 percent or more, and these regulations don’t merely increase the cost of rent which already consumes a big chunk of a poor family's resources; they effectively lock the poor out of areas with more jobs or better schools.

Savings: Tanner asserts that, "Asset tests for public programs punish the poor for saving. And Social Security squeezes out opportunities for the poor to save for themselves. We need to reconfigure a wide variety of current policies to encourage thrift, saving, and investment."

Inclusive Economic Growth: Tanner urges our leaders "to pursue policies such as low taxes, reduced government debt, and deregulation, policies that spur investment, entrepreneurship, and the economic growth that will increase the wealth of our society."

Tanner goes on to add that,

[I]t’s not enough to encourage economic growth if the poor remain locked out of participation in that growing economy. That means we need to eliminate barriers such as occupational-licensing rules, occupational zoning, and the minimum wage.

For example, it's estimated that more than 1,100 different professions (25 to 30 percent of all job categories) require a license in at least one state, from florists to funeral attendants, from tree trimmers to make-up artists. The removal of licensure barriers not only unlocks employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for the poor in low-skill occupations but also lowers prices.

Similarly, occupational zoning can prevent a poor person from starting a small business in his or her home. And minimum-wage laws can block low-skilled workers from getting that first job, and therefore a start on the economic ladder.

Liberals will cheer Tanner's advocacy of criminal justice reform, although it took Donald Trump to actually accomplish it, while conservatives will applaud his remaining four policy recommendations. Unfortunately, nothing in the history of Democrat administrations suggests that any of those will happen in a Biden administration, and, indeed, it was Senator Joe Biden whose crime bill in the 1990s made reform necessary.

The larger point, though, is that government bureaucracy, mandates and general officiousness does more to hurt the poor than to help the poor, which is another assertion that conservatives will register strong agreement with.

Tragically, the poor often keep voting for people who think that the way to eliminate poverty is to enact policies that make it harder for people to overcome it.

Tanner concludes with this:

An anti-poverty agenda built on empowering poor people and allowing them to take greater control of their own lives offers the chance for a new bipartisan consensus that rejects the current paternalism of both Left and Right.

More important, it is an agenda that will do far more than our current failed welfare state to actually lift millions of Americans out of poverty.

It all makes sense to me.

What Do We Mean By Information

One of the most compelling arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer, a God, is based on the fact that there's an enormous amount of information packed into every cell in every living thing in the world. Since information, wherever we encounter it, is the product of a mind and never the product of chance or physical processes, it's reasonable to assume that the information in the cell is probably also the product of a mind.

The argument is especially compelling when we consider the information content of the very first cell, a structure which must've been at least as complex as a computer, which must've been able to metabolize nutrients and replicate itself and which must've emerged before the standard Darwinian processes of mutation and natural selection were operative.

But what is information?

Eric Holloway at Mind Matters helps us get a handle on it. He writes:

We know information when we see it. An article contains information. A photograph contains information. The thoughts in our mind contain information. So does a computer program and so do our genomes.

Yet other things we see around us clearly do not contain information. A handful of toothpicks dropped on the ground does not. Nor do the swirling tea leaves in a cup. Neither does a pair of tossed dice nor a sequence of 100 coin flips. But mere disorder is not the clue. An intricate snowflake does not contain information either.

Can we state the difference between the article and the scattered toothpicks precisely? That’s tricky.

Clearly, complexity is a necessary feature of an entity that contains information—but it is not sufficient.

A monkey pounding on a computer keyboard would produce a complex pattern of symbols, but it's not information, at least not in the relevant sense we find in living cells, such as the genetic code inscribed on DNA.

So, what's needed to qualify as information in this relevant sense? What's the difference between the sequence of letters produced by the monkey and the sequence of letters found in a Dickens novel?

The raw matter of an article is letters and punctuation. If we distribute letters and punctuation randomly on a page, without applying an external pattern, then we get something that is without pattern and uninformative. On the other hand, if we take our letters and punctuation, and arrange them so as to express our thoughts (an external, specified pattern), suddenly the arrangement becomes informative to a reader.

In other words, the sequence of letters produced by the monkey, though complex, doesn't inform. It has no meaning. It doesn't specify a recognizable pattern.

A landscaper who plants flowers in a pattern that spells out "Welcome to Our Town" has created a complex arrangement that specifies a meaningful pattern. It's information. The same flowers strewn randomly around a field may form a complex distribution, but they wouldn't specify a meaningful pattern and therefore do not constitute information.

The DNA/RNA arrangement is extremely complex and specifies a meaningful code responsible for synthesizing proteins. Moreover, it requires the assistance of proteins to aid it in synthesizing the very proteins it requires.

How this amazing ensemble arose apart from the input of a mind is orders of magnitude more mysterious than how the flowers would've spelled out "Welcome to Our Town" without the input of an intelligent landscaper.

Indeed, the only reason for doubting the existence of an intelligent "landscaper" is a metaphysical prejudice in favor of naturalism that leads one to conclude that despite the difficulties of explaining how an information-rich cell could have arisen by chance, we're mistaken to conclude that God did it.

And why are we mistaken? Because we know a priori that there is no God.

This is what's called circular reasoning, and it's not very convincing.

The Fury of the Fatherless

The riots of last spring and summer were unlike anything in the history of our nation. There have been violent riots before, of course, but the organized and sustained vandalism and violence we witnessed last summer is unprecedented.

Mary Eberstadt, in an article at First Things titled The Fury of the Fatherless, claims that the apparently unlimited supply of mayhem-makers requires an explanation, and she offers one, but first she discounts the explanation that's most frequently invoked, that the riots were a reaction against racism.

The fact that rioters who were often white screamed at and spat at black police officers and, in at least one case, even killed a black security guard suggests that the rioters weren't motivated by any sense of sympathy for blacks. Nor, she asserts, do the actual statistics of police violence against blacks support the conclusion that police brutality is the cause.

For Eberstadt the critical factor responsible for the hatred and rage exhibited on our cities' streets this year is due to something more subtle but more insoluble. She writes:

So, here’s a new theory: The explosive events of 2020 are but the latest eruption along a fault line running through our already unstable lives. That eruption exposes the threefold crisis of filial attachment that has beset the Western world for more than half a century. Deprived of father, Father, and patria, a critical mass of humanity has become socially dysfunctional on a scale not seen before.

The riots are, at least in part, a visible consequence of the largely invisible crisis of Western paternity. We know this to be true, in more ways than one.

Six decades of social science have established that the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. And this the United States has done, for two generations now. Almost one in four children today grows up without a father in the home. For African Americans, it is some 65 percent of children.

Some people, mainly on the left, think there’s nothing to see here. They’re wrong. The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in fatherless homes. Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes.

Eberstadt goes on to argue that fatherlessness leads to a search for father substitutes which is one reason why the homicide rates among blacks are so high. Black homicide is largely a gang problem and gangs are largely a missing father problem. The gang and the gang leader are often father substitutes.

She has more to say about this that's interesting, but her point is that many of those attracted to BLM and Antifa are young people who grew up fatherless and the resentments and bitterness this causes is manifested in the violence we watched on our television screens last summer and probably would have watched again had Biden lost the election.

Moreover, the loss of an earthly father plays a role in the rejection of a heavenly Father. Each generation for the last sixty years has been less inclined to believe that there exists a transcendent, ideal Father. Their experience with earthly fathers has soured them on the notion of a heavenly Father. They can't trust the disappointing earthly version to be there for them, and are thus similarly distrustful of, and disinterested in, the heavenly version.

A further consequence of the lack of a decent father in so many lives is that many of those who've been abandoned by their fathers feel no allegiance or loyalty to their country. Loyalty starts in the family and children of dysfunctional families, or families that have been rent asunder by divorce or other forms of fatherlessness (except when the father was killed or died of natural causes in which case he's often memorialized and revered) have a much harder time developing a sense of loyalty to an abstraction like a nation.

Eberstadt's essay is rather long, but it can be summed up in this sentence: The anger and fury vented by our young in our cities last summer, as well as the increasing secularization among the young that we see reflected in survey after survey, is largely the culmination of our culture's six decades-long minimization of the importance of fathers in the lives of their children.

I think she's right.

The Scientistic Worldview

In Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality the author unabashedly promotes a scientistic view of knowledge. "Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it describes a view based on "scientism" which is the view that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not something we should even believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism."

Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, truths about justice, rights, beauty, and morality, for example, but Rosenberg thinks it's neither good science nor good epistemology to hold beliefs about these things.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor morally "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unrelentingly dark world and even this little glimmer is beset with problems.

Here's one: If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved behaviors that are not "nice." If we're the product of evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and nothing which is wrong to do.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to bravely and honestly face up to these consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in both of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of the page) that the consequences outlined in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism. The atheist who lives as if none of these consequences exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief or a worldview that entails conclusions one cannot live with, however, stands in serious need of reexamination.