Democrats' Dilemma

I remember sitting in a high school faculty lounge in the spring of 1990 with a half dozen colleagues, including a foreign exchange teacher from Europe who asked us if someone could explain to him how our primary system for choosing presidential nominees worked. Nobody could. It's such a confusing, labyrinthine procedure that it seems one needs to be a political scientist to understand it.

The Democrats have saddled their voters this year with an even more arcane and convoluted system than existed thirty years ago, a process that, one could plausibly argue, should all by itself disqualify them from running the country.

The Cliff Notes version of the process is this: A candidate needs to garner in the state primaries 51% of the total pledged delegates, some 3979 delegates, to win the nomination on the first ballot at the convention this summer. If no candidate has that number (1990 delegates) after the first round of balloting then there'll be a second ballot on which delegates are then freed to vote for whomever they wish. Plus, there are "superdelegates" (party officials, office-holders, donors, etc.) of whom there are 771, who can also vote on a second ballot.

The number of votes needed to win the nomination on the second ballot is 2376 out of 4750 (3979 + 771).

It's all much more complicated than that, but the byzantine rules aside, the Democrats may also find themselves facing an agonizing dilemma this summer and fall.

Many delegates who'll be pledged to Senator Sanders won't actually want Sanders to be the nominee, and neither will many of the superdelegates. He's far too radical, even for the Democrat party which, in its current instantiation, is the most radical major party in modern American history.

If Sanders goes to Milwaukee in July with the most delegates but doesn't have the requisite 1990, many of his pledged delegates may defect to other candidates on the second round, and it's almost certain that many of the superdelegates will also support other candidates.

Consequently, the self-acknowledged socialist could be denied the nomination.

Now, here's the dilemma: Either Sanders gets the nomination or he doesn't. If he does he'll have a very difficult time raising money, he'll also have a very difficult time, barring unforeseen developments, beating Donald Trump in November, and his presence at the top of the ticket in the Fall could cost Democrats lots of offices further down the ballot.

On the other hand, if he's denied the nomination even though he had more delegates than anyone else on the first ballot, either he or his followers, or both, will likely walk out of the convention and sit out the election, which would split the party and probably result in an electoral disaster.

The question that is plaguing the Democrat party leaders, then, is how do they keep Bernie from getting the nomination while at the same time persuading him not to bolt at the convention?

They're probably hoping that former Vice-President Joe Biden wins today's primary in South Carolina (54 pledged delegates) and has a great showing on Tuesday when 1357 of the 3979 pledged delegates and about 260 superdelegates are up for grabs. If Biden can legitimately amass the 1990 delegates needed to win on the first ballot at the convention, Bernie won't have much of a complaint, and the party will breathe a collective sigh of relief.

Of course, if Biden, prone as he is to mental lapses and seemingly lacking any real passion for campaigning, is the party's nominee, that'll cause party leaders a whole other set of headaches.

What Exactly Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain.

But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face."

But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face? Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us. Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of consciousness. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Some Thoughts on Our Current Politics

Here's a sampling of the thoughts that occurred to me as I read the news over the last couple of months:

• Democrats are loath to credit President Trump's policies for the historically good economy Americans are currently enjoying and are trying to make the argument that President Obama actually created the conditions for the current economic boom. Very well, but if the economy was recovering under Obama: 1) Specifically which of his policies was responsible for the recovery, and 2) Why, when Trump undid most of Obama's policies, didn't the economy tank? Why did it instead skyrocket?


• Democrats have for years complained about "big money" in politics and have been very critical of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, but now that plutocrats Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are spending fortunes to unseat Trump, the only Democrats complaining about big money are the candidates that are running against those billionaires in the primaries.


• Speaker Nancy Pelosi justified ripping up the president's State of the Union speech on national television by alleging that the speech was all "mistruths." What, precisely, were the inaccuracies in the speech that warranted her display of incivility and contempt for the president? I could certainly have missed it, but I've yet to hear what those alleged mistruths were.


• The New York Times printed a story that the Russians are trying to influence the 2020 election in favor of Trump, a story which, from the outset, defied common sense. Why would the Russians want a man re-elected who has imposed hurtful sanctions on them and stymied their ambitions in Ukraine and Syria rather than a man, Bernie Sanders, who is himself either a communist or the next thing to it, and who was so deeply fond of the old U.S.S.R. that he spent his honeymoon in Moscow?


• The media has made much of the fact that Hispanics in Nevada turned out big for Bernie in the primary last week, but it puzzles me as to why they would have. Many of those Hispanic voters are either immigrants themselves or children or grandchildren of immigrants. Where did they immigrate from? For the most part they fled countries which have adopted the same policies that Bernie is promising to impose on us. These people fled from failed socialist states riven by the sort of corruption and crime that typically plagues socialist countries. They fled here to escape it all, and then they vote for a guy who praises the leaders, and who passionately advocates the same economic ideology, of the states those immigrants found intolerable?
  
  This may make sense to somebody, but I confess I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

Emergentism

One attempt to explain how an immaterial substance like mind could be produced by the purely physical substances that comprise the brain is called emergentism. On this view, when matter of the appropriate types is present in the appropriate complexity and order mind appears much in the same way that "wetness" appears when hydrogen and oxygen molecules combine in the appropriate ratios.

There's nothing inherent in either hydrogen or oxygen that exhibits the property of "wetness," but "wetness" nevertheless emerges from the combination of these two elements, thus wetness is ultimately reducible to material substance. Likewise, materialists argue, mind is not a separate and distinct substance from matter but emerges from it and is ultimately reducible to it.

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor has argued vigorously against this reductionist, materialist view of mind and shares some thoughts on emergentism in this short extract from an interview with Robert Marks at Mind Matters:

Robert Marks: Wouldn’t a materialist ideology require that the mind be an emergent property of the brain?

Michael Egnor: Well, it might even limit us with respect to the idea of emergence. That is, materialism would only be completely consistent with an emergent perspective if the emergent thing was material. That is, if some kind of immaterial soul emerged from brain activity, then that wouldn’t even be a materialist view.

In other words, emergentism is problematic for the materialist because it still allows for the existence of an immaterial soul or mind, however it is produced, which fits very awkwardly in a materialist ontology.

This is a serious problem with emergentism. The H2O molecule is material and wetness is a material property, but this is not analogous to brain and mind. Brains are material but minds are not:

Michael Egnor: [Emergentism] basically doesn’t do any lifting. It’s essentially the invocation of magic. And there are two very serious problems with the concept of emergence in philosophy of mind.

There are emergent properties that are accepted. A classic example is the wetness of water. It’s emergent in the sense that if one studies water rigorously from the standpoint of physics, there’s nothing about it that is particularly wet.

You can study the quantum mechanical attributes of oxygen and hydrogen and all the chemistry and physics of water and not come out of that with anything that suggests that it’s wet. But when you put real water in front of you and dip your finger in it, it’s kind of wet. So people say that wetness is an emergent property of water.

The thing is, with the philosophy of mind, if the mind is an emergent property of the brain, it is ontologically completely different. That is, there are no properties of the mind that have any overlap with the properties of brain. Thought and matter are not similar in any way. Matter has extension in space and mass; thoughts have no extension in space and no mass. Thoughts have emotional states; matter doesn’t have emotional states, just matter.

So it’s not clear that you can get an emergent property when there is no connection whatsoever between that property and the thing it supposedly emerges from.

Egnor adds a second difficulty, which, unfortunately, is less clear:

The other problem with emergence is even more fundamental: When you think about the wetness of water as an emergent property of water, you are really talking about a psychological state. That is, you are saying, psychologically you didn’t expect water to feel wet but by golly, it does. So that’s emergent. But you can’t explain the psychological state [of perceiving wetness] itself as emergent.

He seems to be making the point here that wetness is really the way our senses interpret our experience of water, but the ability to produce the sensation, as well as the sensation itself (like the sensations of color, sound, fragrance, etc.) is not a phenomenon of which matter is capable.

How, after all, do electrochemical processes in the material brain produce the sensation of blue? Where in the brain is the blue? If a microscopically tiny scientist were inserted into the brain and traveled around in it, would he see the brain light up blue, or feel wetness in the brain anywhere?

It's hard to see how matter, acting solely by itself, could create sensations, and it's hard to see how emergentism helps us understand it any better.

Secrets of the Cell (Pt. II)

In Part II of Michael Behe's series titled "Secrets of the Cell," the Lehigh University biochemist explains the concept of Irreducible Complexity, a phenomenon for which it's very difficult to give a plausible explanation in terms of blind, purposeless physical processes like genetic mutation, genetic drift and natural selection.

The video is five minutes long. Part I of the series can be found here.

If purely physical processes are inadequate to explain structures like the bacterial flagellum, then the worldview of naturalism, the chief supporting pillar of which is Darwinian evolution, is in very serious trouble.

If irreducible complexity cannot be plausibly explained as a result of natural processes and forces then the case for the existence and creative agency of a supernatural intelligence is made considerably stronger.

The Political Spectrum

The election season is once again heating up so to help readers understand some of the terminology that's being thrown around, I thought it might be helpful to rerun the following post. It's one that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and it explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we roll deeper into the campaign season readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform the beliefs one holds about social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed in the previous paragraph denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quarrel, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian writer, and Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson are popular libertarian commentators.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to be economic libertarians, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government in social affairs. Conservatives share with libertarians a strong emphasis on preserving the Constitution and upon devolving governmental authority from the central, federal government back to the states and localities.

They place more importance than do libertarians on preserving traditional values and are reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Like libertarians, conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. They also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is perhaps the most well-known contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley was a popular conservative thinker/writer, and Rush Limbaugh is a popular conservative commentator.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those constraints. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Bill Clinton was an example of a liberal politician as are current Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent, or even hostile, to traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives as are current candidates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the last presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are examples of contemporary socialists and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically, fascism is thought to be an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that although fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics. Paradoxically, Antifa, which purports to be an anti-fascist organization, employs fascist tactics in their activism.

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it doesn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today though throughout much of the twentieth century the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation. Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, communists.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading in the runup to the election this November.

Secrets of the Cell

Michael Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University who has written several books in which he challenges Darwinian orthodoxy on the sufficiency of natural processes to produce biological complexity.

In the short video below he introduces a series of videos, titled "Secrets of the Cell" and produced by The Discovery Institute, on the amazing biology of living cells.

Behe's books include, Darwin's Black Box, in which he introduced the notion of irreducible complexity; The Edge of Evolution, in which he argued that any naturalistic evolutionary process can only occur within certain genetic limits; and his most recent work, Darwin Devolves, in which he makes a strong case for his belief that change occurs in living things when existing genes are broken or blunted not by the formation of new genes as Neo-Darwinism maintains.

In other words, according to Behe biological change is really a devolutionary process, not an evolutionary process.

In this introductory episode of "Secrets of the Cell" Behe explains how he first came to be interested in the topic of evolution:

Plato's Cave for Modern Man

Imagine that the year is 2030 and computer technology has advanced to the point where a sufficiently clever programmer (you, for example) can write software that would project beings onto the monitor's screen that can potentially evolve from very simple forms to highly complex structures capable, mirabile dictu, of rational thought.

One evening you download the software that confers upon these creatures this marvelous potential and sit back to watch what they'll do with it. Eventually, after much morphing and mutating, the creatures attain a level of mental ability at which they are capable of reflection, cognition, and language.

They begin to communicate among themselves, asking questions about their world and their existence. To them their world (we'll call it "screen world") is a three dimensional space since, although they are confined to a flat screen, they think themselves, like characters on a movie screen, able to move in all directions. You're very pleased with your creation. You're thrilled with the diversity of personalities that emerges among the creatures which you dub "screenies." You even find yourself growing fond of them.

As the night lengthens, you watch in rapt fascination as one of your screenies begins to think deeply about what exactly it (let's assume it's a "he") is. At first he explains himself in terms of shifting phosphor dots, but this, he realizes, is only a superficial level of explanation, and the screenie isn't satisfied with it. There must be a deeper understanding, a deeper level of reality, a reality that lies beyond the abilities you've programmed into the screenies to apprehend.

He and his fellows do some mathematical calculations and come to a breathtaking conclusion. The "ultimate" explanation for the population of creatures in screen world is a level of reality that they can never observe or visit, but which must exist. The equations demand it. They realize that there must be a whole set of complicated phenomena working to produce emanations from a multi-dimensional realm that somehow generates the relatively "flat" world they inhabit.

They do more calculations and come to an even more astonishing discovery. The mechanism that produces their world must be controlled by an even deeper level of phenomena: electrons, circuits, and microchips and who knows what all else. Finally, awed by their findings, they realize that this whole theoretical edifice they've constructed must be run by an information source, a set of algorithms and codes, that exists somewhere but which is inaccessible to them.

Your creatures are very excited. They have plumbed the basic laws, parameters, forces and material constituents of their world. They don't know where these ultimate elements come from or how they came to be organized in the fashion they are, and indeed they're convinced that they can never know any of this for certain. They've taken their investigation as deep as it's possible for them to go, they believe.

Then these marvelous beings, which have really sprung from your creative genius, draw a disappointing philosophical conclusion. Having explained their existence in terms of the ultimate physical constituents and laws they've deduced from the phenomena of their experience, they conclude that they've pretty much explained all there is to be explained. Those circuits, microchips, electrical energy and even the software are all that's involved in generating them and their world. It's an amazing thing, they agree, it's highly improbable, they acknowledge, but there you have it. There's no need to explain it any further, nor any way to explain it even if there were the need to. Unable to account for the world of microchips, codes and algorithms they simply accept it all as a brute fact. A given.

Screen world, to the extent that it's explicable, is explicable, they believe, solely in terms of the machinery in front of which you sit shaking your incredulous head. You're delighted that your creatures were able to reason their way so far toward the truth but dismayed that they lacked the wit to see that anything as fantastically complex as the laws and processes that generate their world cries out for even deeper levels of explanation. Why, you wonder, don't the screenies realize that something as amazing as they and their world doesn't just happen through blind mechanistic forces and luck? Why don't they recognize that screen world demands an intelligent cause as its truly ultimate explanation?

You decide to tweak the program. You write the code for another being, one that is, perhaps, somewhat of a cyber-replica of yourself. He's your heart and soul, so to speak. You will in a sense visit screen world yourself through this "agent." He contains much of your knowledge about the reality beyond screen world, and when you download him into the computer up he pops on the screen. You've programmed this agent to tell the rest of the screenies that their world, the world of the monitor and even the deeper world of the computer, is an infinitesimal fraction of the really real. By comparison it's next to nothing, a mere shadow of the world that exists beyond the screen.

Your agent proceeds to explain to them as best he can that they, contrary to their belief, actually inhabit only two dimensions and that all around them lies a third dimension that they could never perceive or comprehend but which nevertheless exists, and that even now you, their creator, are observing them from outside the screen in another world that they cannot begin to conceptualize, much less observe, from their "prison" within the screen.

Your agent reveals to them, moreover, that you inhabit a reality infinitely richer than screen world, an idea they unfortunately find wholly preposterous. He tells them that as wonderful and impressive as their discoveries about their world are they've really just scratched the surface of understanding the really real and that, indeed, they aren't actually "real" themselves at all. They're simply epiphenomenal electronic manifestations of ideas in your mind, a congeries of shifting dots of color on a flat screen. They're in fact nothing more than virtual beings.

They scoff at all this. They grow angry. They tell your agent to get lost, his message is confusing and misleading to the young and impeding progress toward the goal of making screen world a better place. They wish to hear no more of his insane, superstitious babblings. They are the "brights" in screen world, the intellectually gifted, and they will stick to science and leave his untestable metaphysical speculations to the priests and shamans among them.

When the agent persists in trying to persuade them that mere mechanical processes could never by themselves produce such complex creatures as screenies, that the algorithms and coordinated flows of energy and pattern in their world, as well as the material organization of the computer, must have been intelligently engineered, they sneer and refuse to allow him to speak such nonsense any further.

They reason among themselves that their existence may indeed be improbable, but what of it? Had their world not been the way it is they would not be there to observe it, so it's not so extraordinary after all. Some of them suggest that there are probably a near infinite number of different screen worlds, and that among so many it's not so astonishing that there'd be one possessing the exact properties that their screen world has and boasting of creatures like themselves.

You're surprised, and a little hurt, that the screenies react this way. You can't believe that having come so far they'd refuse to entertain the idea that there must be more to the origin of the information that infuses their world than just blind matter, brute force and random chance. But they're obstinate. They have all the explanation for their existence they care to have.

To be dependent upon unthinking processes is one thing - they're still superior, after all, to the processes and forces upon which they are contingent because they can think and those processes can't - but to be dependent upon a being, you, who is so thoroughly superior to them in every way is, they think, degrading. So that they might be more appreciative of what you've created, you entertain briefly the idea of adjusting their software in such fashion as to make the conclusion that an intelligent programmer has created them ineluctable. You decide against it, however, when you realize that compelled appreciation is no appreciation at all.

And so, with a sad sigh of disappointment and resignation, you delete the program, shut down the computer and go to bed.

Another Media Hissy Fit

The media is undergoing another of their weekly political hissy fits, this time over Attorney General William Barr's recommendation that the 9 year sentence imposed on Trump associate Roger Stone for having violated several laws be reduced.

Given the nature of Stone's offenses and the fact that the jury foreperson was a Trump-hating activist the sentence seemed excessive, especially since far greater crimes, like homicide, often draw lighter sentences.

Barr's recommendation didn't sit well with the DOJ lawyers who prosecuted the case and so four of them resigned in a huff.

Trump haters across the nation saw an opportunity here to draw blood from one of the president's stellar appointments, and a petition was circulated among former Department of Justice employees demanding Barr step down. Democrats have threatened to impeach him in the House of Representatives for tainting the DOJ by allegedly doing a favor for the president.

The brouhaha over Barr's recommendation seems absurd, and Chip Roy, a congressman from Texas, concurs with that perception in an article at The Federalist.

Roy makes several points: One is that Barr did nothing wrong and another is that Barack Obama's Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, did much worse but nary a peep was emitted by the folks who are now clamoring in righteous indignation for Barr's head on a pike.

Here are four of Roy's eight criticisms of Holder:

Even a cursory review of the record shows that Holder, and his successor Lynch, abused power in the Department of Justice for a full eight years while carrying out hatchet work for President Obama.

After all, in an interview with Juan Williams, Holder proudly declared himself “an activist attorney general,” and acknowledged that he turned the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division into a political weapon, saying he was “proud of it.” How soon my leftist colleagues and media flacks forget they engaged in “community organizing” for left-wing activism at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. For just several major examples:

1. Under Holder, the notorious “Fast and Furious” operation was carried out. In it, guns were run to Mexican drug cartels, resulting in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Holder refused to cooperate with House investigators to turn over information.
2. Holder encouraged President Obama to use executive power to unconstitutionally and illegally give status and benefits to both children and parents illegally present in the United States after failing to pass legislation. In other words, the chief law enforcement officer encouraged an end-run of the Constitution and the law, one of which courts have already struck down, while the other is being litigated.
3. Holder effectively dismissed the Lois Lerner Internal Revenue Service’s clear targeting of conservative groups and refused to carry out a true investigation into this corruption.
4. Holder corrupted the Civil Rights Division, turning it into a radical political organization—led once by Tom Perez, who is now the head of the Democratic National Committee. DOJ’s own inspector general concluded in a report that the division was guilty of “deep ideological polarization” and a “disappointing lack of professionalism.”

Roy chose not to mention in his indictment of Holder his refusal to prosecute militant blacks in Philadelphia who, in clear violation of the law, were intimidating white voters at polling places when Obama was up for re-election. What Barr did is not even in the same league as Holder's abuses and malfeasances yet the media was fine with Eric Holder's tenure as head of the DOJ.

He concludes:

So let’s keep a little perspective....there are very clear differences here. With the current situation and no matter what has been tweeted, [Stone's] conviction stands, the judge controls [the sentencing], [Barr has merely made] a recommendation, and there are reasonable questions that would lead to Barr or his team [to make the recommendation].

We should not let the media and a bunch of left-wing activists ... to obfuscate the facts [about what Barr has done], nor to ignore the unbelievably rampant abuse at the DOJ under the most recent Democrat administration.

Attorney General Barr did nothing wrong in recommending a more just sentence for Roger Stone, and had he been Eric Holder recommending a fairer sentence for some friend of President Obama's the media would surely be praising and fawning over him for it.

Martyrdom in Burkina Faso

As has been noted in this space on previous occasions the most underreported human rights story of the 21st century is the slaughter of Christians around the world, primarily by Islamic terrorists, but also by Hindus in India and atheists in communist countries like North Korea.

One can only guess as to why the media shrinks from reporting this story, but I'm pretty sure that were it Muslims and Hindus being slaughtered by Christians, or blacks being slaughtered by whites the headlines would be screaming the media's condemnations of the atrocities. But since it's dark-skinned Christians being murdered by dark-skinned Muslims, the mainstream media yawns and focuses its attention on the Democratic primaries, the Harvey Weinstein trial and whether the Equal Rights Amendment should be resurrected.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently discussed religious persecutions around the world at the National Prayer Breakfast and didn't even specifically mention Christians despite the fact that in 2018 some 4300 Christians were murdered.

A piece in The Daily Caller gives us an example of what Christians are going through in the African nation of Burkina Faso:

Gunmen killed 24 people including a Christian pastor in Burkina Faso, an attack that comes as analysts warn of increasing attacks against civilians and Christians.

About 20 attackers separated men from women near a Protestant church, Boundore commune Mayor Sihanri Osangola Brigadie told the Associated Press.

“The provisional toll is 24 killed, including the pastor … 18 wounded and individuals who were kidnapped,” Colonel Salfo Kabore, the regional governor, told Agence France-Presse. Kabore blamed “armed terrorists” for the attack.

The attackers also kidnapped three young people who they forced to transport oil and rice that the attackers stole from shops, Brigadie said. The mayor, who visited some of the victims in the hospital, said that “It hurt me when I saw the people.”

The attack comes after gunmen killed a retired Christian pastor and kidnapped another pastor in the Yagha province only last week, the AP reports.

Burkina Faso has become a hotbed for religiously motivated attacks. More than 1,300 people were killed in targeted attacks in Burkina Faso in 2019, a number that is more than seven times the amount of people killed the previous year, the AP reported, citing the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project.

Attacks against Christians and other civilians are increasing at “at an alarming rate,” West Africa director for Human Rights Watch Corinne Dufka told the AP.

The article which mentions Nancy Pelosi bizarre omission of Christians among persecuted peoples around the world as tells us this:

Over 245 million Christians lived in places where they endured serious religious persecution between Nov. 1, 2017 and Oct. 31, 2018, according to Open Doors USA, an organization that aids persecuted Christians worldwide. The organization also found that during this same time period, 4,305 Christians were killed for their faith, 1,847 churches and Christian buildings were attacked, and 3,150 believers were detained without trial, arrested, sentenced, or imprisoned.

Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), a Catholic charity that administers to persecuted Christians, reports that “almost 300 million Christians around the world — or 1 out of every 7 — live in a country where they suffer some form of persecution, such as arbitrary arrest, violence, a full range of human rights violations and even murder.”

A 2019 report ordered by former British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt found that Christians were the most persecuted group in the world and that the persecution of Christians has reached near “genocide” levels. Christianity faces being “wiped out” from certain parts of the Middle East, the report found.

Killings are not of course, the only form of persecution these people suffer. Their homes are burned down, their families disown them, they're beaten, they can't get employment and their children are kidnapped.

How could Pelosi have ignored this and why don't our major media outlets care?

Identity Politics and American Dirt

I'm currently enjoying a wonderful novel by Jeanine Cummins titled American Dirt. It's a story of a Mexican mother and her eight year-old son whose family has been murdered by a drug cartel and who are fleeing to the border in a desperate attempt to reach the United States.

It's a suspenseful, well-written narrative that certainly engenders a lot of sympathy for refugees seeking to emigrate to the U.S., and was highly recommended by Oprah's Book Club, but apparently the book has a major flaw that I, in my blissful obliviousness, never recognized.

According to Libby Emmons at The Federalist the unpardonable sin committed by American Dirt is that it's written by a white, American woman who has no business telling a story about brown-skinned Latinxs because, well, she's not one of them. Cummins has even received death threats for her temerity in writing such a book.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Emmons' piece:

After its publication, Cummins and her story about a refugee mother fleeing Mexican drug cartels and crossing the U.S. border with her young son were flayed by critics and on social media. Cummins’s crimes? Not being Mexican while writing about a Mexican experience, using cultural stereotypes in describing her characters, and supposedly knowing nothing about her subject matter, despite her extensive, years-long research process.

This question of who is allowed to tell what stories is huge, and it will be interesting to see how the conversation goes on Oprah’s Book Club. In media, there has been basically one answer presented: Cummins should not have written the book. The consensus among podcasters, reviewers, and social justice critics is that she shouldn’t have been given the money, the go ahead, or the platform to tell this story.

For [several reviewers], “American Dirt” gave them emotional insight into the fear and difficulty of being a refugee from Mexico traveling north to the United States. But that very real feeling of being swept up in the story was then mitigated by their concern that they shouldn’t be feeling what they were feeling because they weren’t feeling it in the right way. Instead of being concerned for refugees and migrants, they realized their concern should be that someone who didn’t have the authority to espouse those feelings or create this artwork was affecting them.

[Some critics] resented Cummins’s platform, feeling more deserving authors should have written the story instead, or that a different story about migrants should have been published by someone who had more experience with that story.

If "more deserving authors" should have written the story one wonders why they didn't. Nothing was stopping them. The controversy over the authorship of American Dirt sounds very much like a fit of author-envy. The critics are perhaps jealous of Cummins' talent and success and wish they themselves had written her book. Instead they're left to snipe at it and call Cummins names.

Here's more from Emmons:

In the current climate of identity culture, the book never had a chance. White writers who write outside of their ethnic or racial background will be skewered on long sticks and roasted over the fires of social media.

Meanwhile, these writers who are steeped in leftist culture know that their highest calling is to write with an eye toward social justice, political advocacy, and amplifying what are labeled as marginalized voices and experiences. The book can be good or the book can be bad, but that’s not really the issue at hand.

No, quality doesn't matter to the social justice types. All that matters to them is whether the author is of the proper race and gender and on the right side of the issue. Emmons concludes her article at The Federalist with these words:

The issue is whether Cummins should have been allowed to publish this story, if her blood gave her the authority to do it. That answer has roundly come down in the negative.

This is an abysmal result for the state of American literary arts. If the social justice mob does not permit an author to write the stories that compel her, she may as well toss out her quill for good. Race and ethnicity should not be qualifications for what stories a person can tell.

She's absolutely correct. Should Harriet Beecher Stowe never have written about slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin? Should critics have slammed the musical Hamilton since historically white characters were portrayed by African Americans? Should the recent PBS production of Les Miserables have been condemned because the French policeman Javert was played by a black actor and all the other French characters were played by Brits?

Where does the silliness of "cultural appropriation" end? Should Hispanics not play baseball and blacks not play basketball or football since their "cultures" didn't invent the games?

Should anyone from a non-white culture forgo the use of cell phones, automobiles, electric lights, air conditioning, airplanes and modern medicine since these and much else that's freely appropriated by non-whites were the inventions of whites and white culture?

If whites shouldn't write books about the experience of other cultures should modern historians refrain from writing about ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt? And if whites shouldn't write books about Mexican culture why should they not also be discouraged from reading books written by Mexicans?

The idea that only members of a particular race, gender or ethnicity can have the authority to speak on a topic that involves others of the same race, gender and ethnicity leads ultimately to the conclusion that no one should be permitted to write anything about anyone other than themselves. The only genre of art that would be acceptable, if the social justice mentality were carried to its logical conclusion, is autobiography.

Only Two Genuine Alternatives

Among biologists, and indeed anyone interested in the question of life's origin, there are, broadly, two live options. The first, the regnant view in most universities, is that life itself and ultimately the grand diversity of living things, arose through purely natural processes acting over long periods of time.

This is the view commonly called Darwinism and was indeed the position held by Charles Darwin himself.

On this model there's no room nor need for any supernatural intelligence to act at any stage in the process. Darwinians hold that in principle all of biology can ultimately be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry and the initial conditions of the universe, all of which just happen to be what they are.

The second option is that however life may have first arisen and diverged into the manifold forms we see around us, it could not have occurred solely through natural processes. A supernatural intelligent agent must have been involved. The manner of that involvement is controversial among those who hold this view, but there's nevertheless broad agreement among them that apart from that involvement no life would have ever appeared on earth or anywhere else.

Protein chemist Doug Axe, the author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed elaborates on this second option in a piece at Evolution News. In a dialogue with a friend Axe says:

I understand why you, as a theist, are okay with God having created life either by divine fiat or by wielding natural forces the way a sculptor wields a chisel. So am I! The problem is that neither of those options is on the table in the biology departments of the major research universities. There, chance and nature (both completely blind) are the only options on offer.

As understood by their main proponents, Darwinism and design are most emphatically not compatible...: proponents of design hold that living things cannot have arisen by ordinary natural processes, whereas Darwinists hold the opposite view. I understand the appeal to giving a nod in both directions, but that doesn’t resolve the contradiction. Evolution is either unguided (in which case it doesn’t work) or overwhelmingly dependent on guidance (in which case it isn’t natural). It can’t be both!

This is the fundamental divide in the debate over evolution. The critical disagreement is not between special creationists and evolutionists, nor between theistic evolutionists and intelligent design theorists. The fundamental debate is between those who believe life to be solely the product of an unguided, purely naturalistic process and those who believe that an intelligent agent is somehow necessary to explain what we find in the biosphere.

Axe goes on:

Keep in mind that the improbabilities I’m referring to are not at all restricted to the origin of the first bacterial cell. For example, hummingbirds exhibit high-level functional coherence that is entirely absent from bacteria.

According to the argument I put forward in [my book] Undeniable, the probabilistic implications of this simple observation make it impossible for accidental processes acting on bacteria to have produced anything comparable to hummingbirds, whether on Earth or on any other planet.

...Darwin offered first and foremost a mechanism which he thought explained the origin of all modern life from some simple first life. I’m saying he was comprehensively wrong about that .... Specifically, I’m saying we can be very confident that the blind natural mechanism he appealed to can’t possibly be the inventor of new forms of life.

His other big contribution was the idea of all life being related by common descent — Darwin’s tree of life. That idea is separable from the question of mechanism, and I’m very willing to consider its merits (in fact, this is one focus of my current work). Undeniable takes no position on common descent.

In other words, even if one assumes that somehow, against astronomical odds, a primeval, self-replicating cell were to have formed, eventually giving rise to all creatures extant throughout the history of earth, the crucial metaphysical question is still whether chance, matter, and physical law can, by themselves, provide a sufficient account for this history or whether the evidence is better explained by also invoking purposeful engineering.

Axe's book Undeniable makes a powerful case that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the intelligent agent view unless, because of an apriori philosophical commitment to naturalism or atheism, one simply refuses to consider it.

Why Religious Conservatives Support Trump

There's recently been a spate of controversy over whether Christians are betraying their principles by supporting Donald Trump. Andrew Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement who has written a fine response to this concern at National Review.

His article is a bit lengthy but it's worth reading if the question of how a religious conservative can support the president is one that interests you. Here are a few outtakes:

There are two competing interpretations of Trump’s enthusiastic support from religious conservatives: that it is a lesser-of-two-evils transaction based on self-interest, or that it shows a voting bloc compromised by every form of democratic vice, whether racism, nativism, or nationalism.

They will vote not so much for Donald Trump — with his uncouth speech and incessantly immature tweets — as they will vote against the worldview of the Democratic platform. Those who make this calculation are not sell-outs, nor have they forfeited the credibility of their values carte blanche. For blind allegiance does not explain the voting relationship. That religious conservatives are not progressives does. Between Never Trump and Always Trump is a third category: Reluctant Trump.

[A]n event on October 10, 2019 explains the odd-couple relationship of religious conservatives and Donald Trump. That evening, during a CNN townhall on LGBTQ issues, the now-former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proclaimed that churches failing to toe the line on gay and transgender rights would lose their tax-exempt status in his administration. O’Rourke’s comments represented a high-water mark of a culture that has jettisoned anything resembling a Christian moral ecology.

For years, religious conservatives predicted that the sexual revolution would eventually affect government policy and directly threaten churches. They can now point to O’Rourke and other examples as evidence of a massive cultural shift that has realized their predictions. Even the most convinced progressive should sympathize with religious conservatives who are concerned about federal law possibly turning against them.

Consider the Democrats’ garish and unapologetic devotion to abortion in the latest stages of pregnancy. Anyone who wonders why religious conservatives cannot bring themselves to vote for Democrats simply does not understand the religiously formed conscience that shudders at America’s abortion regime.

This sentiment was intensified during last week’s State of the Union address, when Democrats sat stone-faced at President Trump’s call for banning late-term abortion. A moment of such moral contrast demonstrates why religious conservatives do not care about the endless think pieces criticizing them as soulless hypocrites. They will endure that criticism if it means the chance to end abortion through Supreme Court appointments.

Martin includes a description of a friend of his who is doubtless typical of many religious conservatives:

To understand this complexity, take my real-life friend. Let’s call him Steve. Steve is a white evangelical in his forties, a middle-school teacher, the father of two daughters, and a deacon at his Southern Baptist church. These are identities that media narratives depict as culprits for Trump’s ascension: White, male, Christian, middle-class, husband, father. He’s the token “white evangelical” that the media depicts as red-state reprobates.

But there is more to Steve. Steve serves the homeless, sees diversity as a pillar of God’s creation, and helped an Iraqi refugee family resettle in his own hometown. I daresay he cares more about justice in real life than those who preen about it on Twitter.

Steve voted for Trump, and will again. Why? For one, he thinks abortion is America’s Holocaust, and will not support any party that supports abortion on demand. Whatever Trump’s eccentricities are, Steve won’t vote for a progressive, even if the media tells him that to do so would save America and its institutions.

For Steve, saving abstractions like “America” and its “institutions” can make America a lot less worthy of survival if abortion on demand continues apace. To the average religious conservative, in fact, saving America means saving it from the scourge of abortion.

Martin then adds some concluding thoughts:

Those are the stakes that many religious conservatives live with. My advice to progressives is that, if they want religious conservatives to let go of their devotion to the Republican Party’s platform, progressives should weaken their commitment to unfettered abortion access. The same goes for their support for gender fluidity, and opposition to any person or institution that does not affirm such things as gay marriage.

Until that happens, complaining about “white evangelicalism” and ascribing to it every imaginable authoritarian impulse will be like shouting into a void; no one will listen.

Donald Trump is not the savior of American Christianity. At best, he’s a bed of nails on the road, temporarily halting secularism’s advance. Yet the choice for so many religious conservatives is between someone who is crude and profane but who will defend their values and an eloquent politician who will undermine their faith and advance an agenda they see as barbaric and unjust.

Here’s my plea from one religious conservative to other religious conservatives in 2020. If the majority of us vote for Trump, let’s do so not because he’s a Protector of the Faith or a champion for “taking America back.” He’s neither. Instead, view him as a flawed, complex political figure whose admixture of vanity and pragmatism is resulting in a political agenda that is less hostile to Christianity than its alternatives.

Indeed, it's fair to say that this administration's political agenda is not just "less hostile" to all expressions of religious faith, it's actually, contrary to the alternatives, not hostile at all.

What was the alternative in 2016? Voters were given a choice between two morally compromised candidates, the policies of one were seen by religious conservatives as an almost certain disaster for the country and the policies of the other as possibly salutary. Which one should a religious conservative have voted for?

What's the alternative in 2020? Voters are given a choice between a party which is willing to demand that taxpayers subsidize and oversee the annual slaughter of a million unborn babies and an incumbent who, despite his character flaws, has appointed judges and jurists who will protect our freedoms and who may eventually end the slaughter. Which one should a religious conservative vote for?

Religious conservatives care about the poor and the marginalized, or at least they should. No president in history has done more to help the poor - by lowering minority unemployment to record lows, increasing blue collar wage growth, establishing enterprise zones in poor communities and implementing criminal justice reform - as this president. So who should a religious conservative vote for?

For many religious conservatives their support for Trump is tentative. It's contingent upon his conduct in office. As long as he does nothing Clintonian to disgrace the office and continues to uphold the First Amendment and appoint jurists who'll do so, they're willing to suffer his childish, neurotic outbursts and offer him their support.

He may be only a bed of nails on the road to a totally secular state hostile to traditional economic, social, civic and moral values, but sometimes a bed of nails in the road can force a change in direction. Meanwhile, I think most religious conservatives will prefer to vote for the bed of nails than for life in the fast lane to a secular nirvana.

Lewis on Friendship

A number of years ago I wrote a post on C.S. Lewis' book titled Four Loves because I enjoyed especially his treatment of friendship. He said so many interesting things on the topic that I thought it might be appropriate to once again share some of them with Viewpoint readers on this Valentine's Day.

Here are some of his thoughts:

• "Nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to each other about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best."
• "Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)."
• "The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends.
  
  "In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer."
• "That is why those pathetic people who simply 'want friends' can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be 'I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend,' no Friendship can arise - though Affection, of course, may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and friendship must be about something."
• "A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies, do what he can for our widows and orphans. But such good offices are not the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost interruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in another not. Relevant, because you would be a false friend if you would not do them when the need arose; irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always remains accidental, even a little alien to that of Friend.
  
  "It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection's need to be needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have been necessary - and now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude is no enrichment to this love. The stereotyped 'Don't mention it' here expresses what we really feel.
  
  "The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it had to be devoted to affairs!"
• "In most societies at most periods Friendships will be between men and men and women and women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where men are educated and women are not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about."
• "When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later."

This last is particularly interesting. If Lewis is correct then the common notion that men and women can be "just friends" is something of a delusion. If a man and a woman really are friends, in the sense of the word that Lewis explicates, then it's almost inevitable that they'll wind up being more than friends.

Lewis is famous for his trenchant insights into human nature. His insights into friendship do nothing to diminish that reputation.

What Bernie Wants to Do

For those wishing to learn more about the policies proposed by Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders there's a piece at The Federalist by Emily Jashinsky and Madeline Osburn in which they list and give a brief explanation of 19 of the senator's proposals.

One thing about Sanders: unlike a lot of politicians if he says this is what he wants to do then it's what he really wants to do. He is the most radical member of the senate and the left-most candidate since WWII. Indeed, the senator is so radical that even the Democratic party leadership is beginning to panic over the prospect of a Sanders candidacy for president.

Here are a few of the 19 things a President Sanders would strive to accomplish. You're referred to the original article for explanations and links:

1. Implement a $34 trillion socialized health insurance overhaul which would cost triple what the U.S. currently spends on the military and diminish the quality of health care currently available.
2. Implement a mass bailout of student loan debt. Those who worked to pay off their loans would not benefit. Only those currently in debt would have their debt forgiven at a cost to taxpayers, many of whom either didn't go to college or worked to pay their loans off, of $1.6 trillion.
3. Implement a moratorium on deportations of illegal immigrants and grant citizenship to the 11 million who illegally jumped ahead of all those who are seeking to come here legally.
4. Abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as Customs and Border Protection (CBE), the two agencies that protect our country’s sovereign borders and which are the only impediment to the mass migration of not only much of the population of Central America and indeed the world into the U.S. but also of the same thugs, rapists and murderers who've been responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Mexican citizens in the past year alone.
5. Enacting a Green New Deal which would ban all fossil fuel energy production, such as oil and gas, as well as cars, meat, and air travel, while also promising to provide all Americans education, healthy food, housing, and government-guaranteed jobs. Sanders puts the cost to taxpayers at $16.3 trillion.
6. Allow convicted felons, even terrorists, to vote.
7. Ban hydraulic fracking, a move which would not only kill the technology that has made us energy independent of the Middle East for the first time in the modern era, but it would also cripple our economy and cost up to 14.8 million jobs by 2022.

Jashinsky and Osburn note that,

Sanders has long admired and praised tyrannical dictators such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the USSR’s Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1985, Sanders visited Managua to celebrate the anniversary of Nicaragua’s authoritarian Marxist regime....Last year, footage of Sanders from the 1980s surfaced, in which he praised socialist countries such as the Soviet Union and claimed bread lines in communist countries are a “good thing.”

“It’s funny sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That’s a good thing,” he said. “In other countries, people don’t line up for food, rich people get the food and poor people starve to death.”

This is an absurd response, of course. The fact is that in capitalist countries everyone eats. It's only in third world Marxist countries of the sort admired by Sanders that people starve.

Some of what Sanders would do as president may sound superficially attractive, but each one would either eliminate freedom, diminish our quality of life or balloon the national debt, or all three. A Sanders presidency would soon do to the United States what a Chavez/Maduro presidency did to Venezuela.

Good Billionaires

The staff at The Washington Free Beacon has come across an open letter sent to Senator Bernie Sanders by email after the Democratic debate in New Hampshire in which Mr. Sanders excoriated billionaires.

The email was signed by a group called Billionaires for Social Justice and a New World Government (although it features Mike Bloomberg's return address) and urges the senator to recognize that not all billionaires are evil, only those who support Republicans. In fact, a couple of them are actually vying for the Democratic nomination for president.

I've taken the liberty to copy the missive onto VP, but I guess I should tell you before you read it that it's actually an amusing satire concocted by the WFB staff (note Sanders' email address):

From: The Good Billionaires
Date: February 9, 2020 at 9:17:32 PM EST
To: Bernard1917@aol.com
Subject: A Plea for Humanity

Dear Senator Bernie Sanders,

We the undersigned represent a diverse constituency of American billionaires who support the Democratic Party. Some of us prefer to work behind the scenes creating dark money organizations pushing global disarmament and tribunal justice for the architects of the Iraq War.

Some of us have bought media operations, purchasing newspapers and Internet platforms to help amplify progressive voices above the noise of Fox News. Two of us are running for president like yourself.

But all of us have one thing in common: We are human beings. We put our pants on, one leg at a time with the help of a dedicated butler, like most Americans. Last Friday's debate in New Hampshire was hurtful and othering for all Americans with ten-digit wealth. For those of us who have fought hard for a progressive agenda, your campaign feels like a betrayal.

To claim that progressives must oppose Americans of enormous wealth is ahistorical. Should progressives have rejected Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his LGBT wife Eleanor? And should progressives cancel the Obama family? They didn’t begin their presidencies as billionaires, but wait till you see their Netflix deals for 2020.

Normally, we would not appeal to any campaign in such a public way. We believe in a big tent when it comes to centralizing the economy and engineering the culture. Many of us (well, actually just Tom Steyer) like you. But your attacks are doing real damage. Amy Klobuchar told us to stop contacting her until after the Nevada caucuses.

One of us had to cancel a private Beyoncé concert and wine tasting fundraiser for Mayor Pete Buttigieg last month. Do you have any idea how hard it is to schedule Beyoncé? You probably don't because Sidney Blumenthal tells us the last album you purchased was The Best of Peter, Paul and Mary.

We understand some of the anger inside the Democratic Party these days. We're angry, too. We're not saying you shouldn't attack any billionaires, we're saying you should stop attacking the good billionaires.

If you want to run campaign ads railing against Sheldon Adelson or Rebekah Mercer, we would happily pay for them. But we're the guys fighting for trans-equality, ending the fossil fuel industry, and destroying the state of Israel. Aren't these supposed to be your issues too?

So please, let's find a way to work this out. All of us would be happy to support your campaign if you're the nominee, but we can’t support someone who does rhetorical violence to the lived experience of billionaires. Your record is so strong when it comes to most minorities. We urge you to show the same sensitivity to Americans who have accumulated astronomical wealth.

In Solidarity,

Billionaires for Social Justice and a New World Government

It is peculiar that all those Democrats who had been haranguing us about the obscenity of "Big Money" in politics have, except for Bernie Sanders, grown strangely silent now that Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are in the race and promising to spend whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump.

"Big Money" is bad, apparently, when it's Republican money and good when it's Democrat money.

Swinburne's Argument for the Soul

Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one the most prominent of contemporary philosophers. In his recent book, Are We Bodies Or Souls? he takes up Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul and amends it slightly to remove one of the classical objections philosophers have made to it.

The result is a succinct argument for the existence of the soul in human persons. His argument goes like this:

1. I am a substance which is thinking.
2. It is conceivable (i.e. logically possible) that while I am thinking my body is destroyed.
3. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that 'I am thinking and I do not exist.'
4. I am therefore a substance which, it is conceivable, can continue to exist while my body is destroyed.
5. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that a substance can lose all its parts simultaneously and yet continue to exist.
6. Therefore, I am a soul, a substance, whose only essential property is the capacity for thought.

How does the conclusion follow from the rest of the argument? According to 4. it's logically possible that I exist when my body ceases to exist, but according to 5. it's logically impossible that anything can continue to exist when every part of it is destroyed.

Therefore, there must be more to my existence than just the existence of my body. There must be something about me that can continue to exist when every part of my body is destroyed.

That other part of me must be, from 1. and 2., that part of me which thinks, i.e. a soul (or mind), and which I identify as myself.

Swinburne gives a cogent defense of this argument in the book, which, though he claims it to be written for a broad audience, would be rather hard going for someone with little background in philosophy.

Nevertheless, in an age in which the reigning view on these matters is a philosophical materialism which denies the existence of a soul or mind, Swinburne's book is refreshing.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. III)

This is the third and final part of our look at an essay by Richard Weikart, a professor of modern European history at California State University, in which he addresses the inability of naturalism to provide a coherent basis for ethics. See here and here for the first two installments.

In today's post we'll look at Weikert's critique of the attempt by biologist Jerry Coyne to derive ethics from biological and cultural evolution. He notes that Coyne's writing on this topic presupposes an objective moral standard, the existence of which he nevertheless denies:

Coyne is an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and a prominent atheist. In his 2015 book, Faith Versus Fact, Coyne argues that morality is the product of both evolutionary and cultural processes. He vigorously denies that there is anything fixed or objective about morality.

However, despite his moral relativism, later in his book Coyne inexplicably states, “Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most ‘religious’ morality.”

Apparently it escapes Coyne’s grasp that for one kind of morality to be superior to another, there has to be some yardstick outside both moral systems.

In other words, if human beings are the product of evolution then all of our behaviors are also the product of our evolutionary development. How then do we determine that charity is good and selfishness is bad if they're both the residue of the evolutionary process?

The only way we can make that judgment is if we compare the two behaviors to some objective standard to see which one conforms best to that standard. Yet Coyne's philosophy doesn't allow for the existence of such a standard so his judgments of good and bad are completely arbitrary.

Weikert continues:

When Coyne confronts specific moral precepts, he falls into the same contradiction. In a 2017 blog he argues that infanticide and assisted suicide should be permitted, and he insists that the increasing acceptance of them in our society is a sign of moral progress. He proclaims, “This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide [i.e., its legalization in some states and countries] are the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world.”

Now, some commentators (such as myself) would argue the exact opposite: that the increasing acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide is evidence of our moral decline. But laying aside whether I am right or Coyne is right on this specific moral issue, both of our moral claims — that there is moral progress or moral decline — imply that we are moving toward (or away from) some objective moral goal.

Unless there is an objective moral standard how does Coyne know that any behavior represents moral progress? All that he actually seems to be saying is that a behavior represents moral progress if it's a behavior that he likes.

Weikert goes on to discuss a sociological study done by John Evans, a sociology professor at the University of California, that shows a correlation between one's worldview and one's view of human rights:

[Evans] divided people’s views of humanity into three broad categories: theistic, biological, and philosophical. The theistic view of humanity is characterized by the view that humans are created in the image of God. The biological view of humanity sees humans as the product of evolutionary processes and as exclusively physical beings. The philosophical view understands humans to be defined by their having certain traits, such as consciousness, the ability to plan their future, and so forth.

What Evans discovered was that people embracing the theistic view of humans have greater respect for human rights than those espousing the two secularist views. Evans, as a secularist who nonetheless believes in human rights, is clearly uncomfortable with his discovery.

This result should not be surprising since only the theist who believes that all human beings are created by God in His image and loved by Him have any basis for thinking that objective human rights could even exist. In any other worldview human rights are simply an arbitrary fiction men fabricate to make it easier to live together in society.

For Evans to believe in objective human rights requires a non-rational leap of faith out of his naturalistic worldview and into the worldview of the theist. He must piggy-back, as it were, on theism to get him to objective human rights while all the while rejecting the theistic assumptions that allow for those rights to exist in the first place.

Secularists like Evans want a kind of Christianity without God, but a Christianity without God provides no more solid foundation for ethics than any other worldview, and is just as nonsensical as every other system of thought that tries to hold on to beliefs about right and wrong in the absence of any objective standard for them.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. II)

Yesterday I discussed an essay written by Richard Weikert on how modernity, which is characterized by a naturalistic metaphysics that excludes God, led to the massive bloodletting of the 20th century.

I'd like to continue looking at Weikert's column today as he focuses on one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell was one of the most famous British philosophers of the twentieth century. In an essay written in 1903, Russell divulged a rather stark view of humanity:

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

Because he viewed humans as merely “accidental collocations of atoms” and thus as merely the product of random processes, Russell complained that Christianity and other religions were wrong to believe that the earth and its inhabitants have a special place in the cosmos.

In 1925 he underscored this point by stating: “The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth, is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet.”

If you didn’t catch it, those “tiny parasites” are you and I and all our fellow human beings.

This reminds one of the claim made by cosmologist Stephen Hawking that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

Weikert continues:

In addition to denigrating humans as “tiny parasites,” Russell also stripped humans of any moral significance, claiming that morality was merely an expression of subjective desires or emotions. The moral command, “Thou shalt not kill,” according to Russell’s philosophy, does not really mean there is anything objectively wrong with murder. Rather, anyone making such a statement really means, “I don’t like killing.”

Moral statements are meaningless, Russell claimed, unless they are understood as merely an individual’s personal emotional preference. In his philosophy, then, Russell continually undermined any notion of objective morality or inalienable human rights.

Like most moderns, however, Russell couldn't live consistently with the entailments of his worldview. Having declared to the rest of us that there's no objective right nor wrong, Russell proceeded to live as if there is. He took a leap of faith, in other words, away from what his atheism told him was true and lived, at least to some extent, as if theism were true:

However, ironically, in his personal life he was an intense and committed moralist. In his Autobiography he stated that his whole life was animated by three passions: love, knowledge, and pity for human suffering. Indeed, in the same essay that he called humans “tiny parasites” with no cosmic significance, he also uttered the words, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

Russell’s passion for humanity also manifested itself in his opposition to nuclear arms. He even spent time in jail as a result of demonstrating for nuclear disarmament.

What was going on here? Was the arch-rational philosopher letting his emotions get the best of him? Whatever the explanation for this tension between his moral philosophy and his personal life, I am not the only one to notice the contradiction. In her memoirs about her life with her father, Russell’s daughter, Katherine Tait, called him a “passionate moralist” and an “absolutist” who would have been a saint in a more religious age in the past.

Ideas have consequences. If the consequences of our ideas, in Russell's case his atheism, are unlivable then there's doubtless something wrong with the ideas. Russell was not unaware of the tension:

Interestingly, now that we have access to some of Russell’s private correspondence, we also know that Russell was troubled by these inconsistencies in his life. In a private letter to a woman he loved he poured out his soul, explaining:

I am strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of all this, to my intense sorrow, pain to you must grow.

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain — a curious wild pain — a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite — the beatific vision — God — I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found — but the love of it is my life — it’s like passionate love for a ghost.

At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work, it fills every passion that I have — it is the actual spring of life within me. I can’t explain it or make it seem anything but foolishness — but whether foolish or not, it is the source of whatever is any good in me....At most times, now, I am not conscious of it, only when I am strongly stirred, either happily or unhappily.

I seek escape from it, though I don’t believe I ought to.

Russell's letter reveals the predicament of modern man. He recognizes his emptiness. He recognizes the contradiction between what his heart tells him is true and what his philosophy tells him he must believe. He has a profound inner yearning for God, but, despite being painfully conflicted, he simply will not yield himself to that which deep down he realizes has to be true.

Filled with angst from the tension between the emptiness within and the inability of his naturalistic worldview to satisfy it, he nevertheless refuses to conclude that his worldview is in error.

Russell's mistake, perhaps, was that he was looking for God to reveal Himself in some sort of supernal ecstacy or Pascalian emotional experience. But Russell, a man of reason and logic, had at his disposal all the intellectual and philosophical resources needed to justify a belief that God was real.

He didn't need the intense emotional revelation that Blaise Pascal experienced in order to jettison his atheism. All he needed was the willingness to submit to what his heart told him must be true, and that, for whatever reason, he was unable to do.

Monday we'll look at two contemporary figures whose thinking Weikert discusses in his essay.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. I)

Richard Weikert has an interesting piece at Equip.org in which he writes about how the assumptions of 20th century modernity, i.e. that there is no God and therefore no objective morality, led to the horrors of the Gulag and the Holocaust.

He begins with an overview of the ideas of Marx and how they led to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin:

In 1945, the year that World War II ended, C. S. Lewis published That Hideous Strength, the third book in his science fiction trilogy. In that work Lewis depicted the dangerous consequences of embracing secular worldviews. His warning came at a time when Stalin and Hitler had committed horrific atrocities in the name of secular worldviews.

Stalin, in the name of a Marxist worldview, slaughtered millions in his collectivization campaign and in the Great Purge. Marx, based on his atheistic position, had promoted environmental determinism, the view that human behavior is shaped by the environment. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin all believed that by altering the economy — specifically by eliminating private property — they could transform human nature, thus leading us into a society free from oppression, poverty, and strife.

Another corollary of the Marxist worldview was that objective morality and human rights are non-existent. Marxists believed that morality was a tool of bourgeois oppression, so they did not believe in any objective human rights. Lenin explicitly argued that the ends justify the means. Any measures necessary to reach the final communist state were justified, in his view.

Because of their view of human nature and morality, Marxists saw people as things to be manipulated. Through labor camps Soviet communists hoped to re-educate prisoners to bring them into conformity to communist ways.

The Holocaust was also a consequence of a secular worldview:

Hitler’s atrocities also flowed from a dehumanizing worldview. Instead of environmental determinism, Nazism promoted biological determinism. It held that human nature and behavior are shaped by one’s biological traits, especially those associated with one’s race....Hitler believed that humans were locked in an inescapable struggle for existence that fostered evolutionary progress.

The only criteria to judge human behavior, he thought, was whether or not it helped foster evolutionary progress. Because he believed in biological inequality, especially racial inequality, this meant that measures to benefit those deemed biologically superior, along with policies to eliminate those considered biologically inferior, were morally justified.

There's much more to Weikert's essay, and I'd like to look at more of it over the next couple of days, but for now it's important to note that ideas have consequences and the consequences of the naturalism embraced by many moderns were particularly horrific. Modernity sought to exalt mankind, to apotheosize man, but by putting man in the place of God it actually dehumanized humanity. Instead of being created in the image of a God who loves us and endowed us with objective human rights, man was reduced to the level of a soulless brute.

Under the Stalinist and Hitlerian tyrannies, and the tyrannies imposed by lesser communists all over the globe in the 20th century, mankind was reduced to the level of cattle to be herded, manipulated and slaughtered whenever it suited the purposes of those who had the power to carry out their sick dreams.

And, let's note, given the truth of a naturalist worldview, a worldview that excludes God, there's no basis for saying that any of these slaughters was morally wrong. As atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins once observed, it's very difficult for one who holds to the atheistic view of reality to say that Hitler was wrong.

For anything to be objectively wrong there has to be an objective standard of goodness and there has to be accountability. Take away either of these, which atheism, of course, does, and the whole idea of objective right and wrong collapses. This is why Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong could murder over 100 million people in the 20th century and think that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing.

None of them believed butchering human beings was objectively wrong nor that they would ever be held accountable for doing it, and, if they were right about God, they were right about that.

More on Weikert's essay tomorrow.