Intellectual Virtues

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, abortion, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that's reasonable to hold?

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions. It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, so, too, in ours. Open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among many of those who take sides on the issues of our day.

Whale Evolution

Over the last thirty years or so Darwinians have frequently cited a series of fossils that they maintain illustrate the evolutionary development of modern whales. This series of alleged transitional forms is offered as compelling evidence that whales have evolved through a sequence of ancestral forms leading to the modern behemoths of the sea.

Well, perhaps they have, but there are problems with the particular series of transitions that are commonly believed to be ancestral to whales. The fossils proponents have adduced to buttress their claims of whale evolution simply don't support their conclusion, as this light-hearted ten minute video makes clear:

Escaping the Implications of the Big Bang

Ross Pomeroy has a brief column at Real Clear Science in which he argues that the Big Bang theory of cosmogenesis (the origin of the universe) was resisted by many scientists because they harbored an anti-religious bias that rendered any theory of a beginning of the universe apriori repugnant.

A beginning to the universe implies a transcendent act of creation, which sounds too much like Genesis 1:1, and that sort of thing has no place in science, or so we've been told ad infinitum.

There were problems with the Big Bang to be sure, but as time wore on evidence accumulated that the universe was expanding which meant that if scientists extrapolated back in time they would come to a state of affairs in which all the universe was compressed into an infinitely small, infinitely dense point.

In other words, the universe seems to have come into being out of nothing which is what theologians had been saying for thousands of years. Atheistic scientists were chagrined by this notion. After all, science was supposed to debunk religious beliefs, not confirm them.

Then, in the 1960s, two scientists working for Bell laboratories, looking for something else entirely, accidentally confirmed a prediction of the Big Bang theory. They discovered the remnant energy from the initial "Bang." This discovery of what's called the cosmic background radiation rocked the scientific world.

Pomeroy writes:

Today, the Big Bang model of cosmology is pretty much taken for Gospel, and for good reason. For more than fifty years, evidence gathered from all manner of sources has supported the notion that the Universe as we know it expanded from an infinitely dense singularity.

But things didn't always look so certain for the Big Bang. In its most nascent form, the idea was known as the hypothesis of the primeval atom, and it originated from an engineer turned soldier turned mathematician turned Catholic priest turned physicist by the name of Georges Lemaître. When Lemaître published his idea in the eminent journal Nature in 1931, a response to observational data suggesting that space was expanding, he ruffled a lot of feathers.

As UC-San Diego professor of physics Brian Keating wrote in his recent book Losing the Nobel Prize, "Lemaître's model... upset the millennia-old orthodoxy of an eternal, unchanging cosmos. It clearly implied that everything had been smaller and denser in the past, and that the universe must itself have had a birth at a finite time in the past."

Besides questioning the status quo, Lemaître's primeval atom also had some glaring problems. For starters, there were hardly any means of testing it, a must for any would-be scientific theory. Moreover, it essentially suggested that all the matter in the Universe came from nothing, a flabbergasting claim. It also violated an accepted notion known as the perfect cosmological principle, which suggested that the Universe looks the same from any given point in space and time.

For these reasons, English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle gathered with a few colleagues to formulate the Steady State theory of the cosmos. The idea kept the observable universe essentially the same in space and time, and it accounted for evidence suggesting that the universe is expanding by hypothesizing that matter is instead being created out of the fabric of space in between distant galaxies.

Steady State didn't have the problems inherent to the notion of a primeval atom, and, as Keating wrote "it sure didn't look like the creation narrative in Genesis 1:1."

As Keating observed, anti-religious sentiments provided underlying motivation to debunk Lemaître's theory:

Many atheist scientists were repulsed by the Big Bang's creationist overtones. According to Hoyle, it was cosmic chutzpah of the worst kind: "The reason why scientists like the 'big bang' is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis."

When a man is dead set against the evidence that God exists there's not much that can persuade him to believe otherwise. Hoyle remained adamantly opposed to the Big Bang until his death in 2001. Many modern cosmologists are searching for a theory of cosmogenesis today that will allow them to avoid a cosmic beginning.

Stephen Hawking even claimed to have come up with one, but his theory, depending as it does on an imaginary time, has been roundly criticized by his peers as much too fanciful.

Nevertheless, maybe someone else will find a theory that doesn't lead to a beginning of everything, but there seems to be something peculiar about people who insist that religious belief has no place in science being animated by their own religious belief to spend their lives in search of a way to escape a theory for no other reason than that the theory has religious implications.

Beauty, Morality and Reason

Biologist Ann Gauger, in an article at Evolution News, discusses three aspects of the world that C.S. Lewis thought eluded any naturalistic explanation or account.

The first of these is beauty. She writes:

Why should there be beauty? What is it for? We find joy in beholding something truly beautiful, a sense of awe even. And we never grow tired of that beauty, unless some spiritual sickness has entered and sapped us of all capacity for joy. Even more strange, it is a great pleasure to participate in the creation of something beautiful, something that moves other people, that brings joy to them.

Why should this be, that there is joy for the creator in the creative act and joy for the audience also?

Scientifically speaking, does beauty indicate design or un-design? The answer is this: there is no reason to expect random mutation and selection to produce beauty, and no particular reason for us to find certain things beautiful. Functional, yes. But the beauty we see does not necessarily correlate with safety or suitability for eating or mating. It has no particular survival value. Instead, beauty is a lovely surprise that points toward the transcendent Something that is the source of beauty.

The second aspect of the world that Lewis believed could not be adequately explained within a naturalistic framework is morality. Here's Gauger:

As [Lewis] observed, when people quarrel, they often appeal to moral standards: “You promised,” or “You shouldn’t treat people that way.” They appeal to these standards expecting to be understood.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Or even our belief that there is such a thing as right or wrong?

There are certain acts that are universally acknowledged to be morally wrong, such as the killing of innocent human beings. Where does such objective certainty come from? If someone says, “Well, we evolved that view,” then there is no reason to suppose it has any basis in objective truth. Any moral view selected for its survival value loses any claim to objective truth. Should it not be just as moral, if not more so, to kill innocent humans if it benefits you, under that scenario?

On the other hand, if we concede that we didn’t evolve morality, a lot of people then default to the position that there is no objective basis for morality. We must define it for ourselves. Why, then, do most people still choose to adopt the moral precept that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings?

All this argues for the objective reality of moral values, and for our innate sense of them, sometimes called the natural law. And the existence of objective moral law points toward a designer who set this law into our hearts.

Lewis' third point is the existence of human reason. Gauger explains:

The fact that we reason at all, and that our reason corresponds with reality, is a remarkable thing. Have you never thought that it should be surprising that our minds are capable of probing the deep things of the universe, and that the universe is constructed in such a way as to be discoverable? That it should be founded on laws that we can grasp and that surprisingly find a match with our abstract mathematics?

Ape brains that evolved to hunt prey and run from lions should not be expected to do higher-order mathematics or particle physics. Yet our brains are fitted for the task, as deep as we need to go. Our brains and our abilities go so far beyond what survival requires that no evolutionary explanation could possibly account for the things we can do.

If evolution is all there is, then rationality hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Natural selection may favor the fastest or strongest or most fertile, but it doesn’t care about syllogisms or propositions or inferences. And if all we have is an evolved feeling that our minds are trustworthy, then our minds aren’t trustworthy.

She quotes Lewis:

All possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really “must” be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them — if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work — then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

Her argument is that "naturalism has cut itself off at the knees." She adds that,

Naturalism depends on the idea that science has discovered the truth about the world — what the world really is — namely, that it is nothing but matter and energy, particles in motion, and neurons firing, with consciousness an epiphenomenon and free will an illusion. But see — on what basis do they claim to know? Science is supposed to be a logical enterprise that interrogates the natural world and discovers its hidden reality using reason and logic, which naturalism cannot justify as being reliable.

Just so. We can add to what Gauger wrote the words of atheist philosopher John Gray who stated that,

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.

And in his book On Miracles Lewis wrote this:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

It's a marvel that a worldview, naturalism, that's so intellectually thin would nevertheless be so attractive to so many intelligent people.

Some Interesting Facts

One of the concerns with the current Covid-19 pandemic is that the virus seems so deadly and the morbidity rate for the virus seems so high that federal and state authorities have decided that it's better to shut the country down than to expose people to such a deadly contagion.

As new data keeps coming out, though, the morbidity rate (the deaths/ the number of cases) appears to be much less than had been feared.

In a column at TownHall.com Kevin McCullough points out that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stated on Thursday that antibody testing in his state has shown that at least 13.9% of New Yorkers have had Covid-19. This is very significant because it means the denominator in the morbidity ratio has been pegged way too low.

Here's McCullough:

The implication of this is a shockwave to the system. With a population of 19,540,500 the findings point out that over 2,500,000 New Yorkers had the virus and have recovered. Keep in mind that as of this writing that only 263,000 New Yorkers have currently confirmed cases. Also as of this writing New York has reported 19,543 fatalities.

We’ve been told that the true death rate is 7.4% in New York. We were told there would be hundreds of thousands dead. We were told that this was worse than the flu, which has still recorded more deaths to date in this past flu season—even though the CDC instructed medical personnel to start counting influenza, heart disease, pulmonary, respiratory, drug overdose, and possibly even car crash deaths as COVID-19 deaths.

We were told that we had to upend an economy, go into solitary confinement, and divorce ourselves from normal life because this [disease] would rage beyond any previous pandemic. We were told that this virus with 846,000 current confirmed cases was worse than the H1N1 that broke out on Obama’s watch that infected 60,000,000 people.

More precisely, using McCullough's numbers, the number of New Yorkers who have had the virus would be 2,716,129. This means that the actual morbidity rate is about .72% which makes it just slightly more virulent than the seasonal flu:

The death rate in New York State isn’t 7.4%, it is actually [about] .75%. The recently ended influenza season numbers from the CDC indicate possibly 56,000,000 cases of flu, 740,000 hospitalizations, and 62,000 deaths.

Thus, the morbidity rate for the seasonal flu is about .11%. I have no doubt that Covid's toll would've been higher had New York and a few other locales not taken the measures they did to slow it, but I'm not sure that the risk the disease poses warrants the continued destruction of our economic infrastructure.

At some point soon we have to find the point at which the risk to health is outweighed by the need to get people back to work and save us from a federal debt burden that will almost certainly crush our children and grandchildren.

Why Would Beauty Evolve?

A couple of days ago I did a post on beauty and meaning. Today I'd like to do one that addresses a different question raised by beauty: How can we account for it in an evolutionary framework?

Glenn Stanton has a column at The Federalist in which he poses a question that we've occasionally discussed on VP: Why would beauty evolve in living creatures? How does it enhance survival?

Stanton thinks that beauty is counterproductive from an evolutionary point of view, and he cites both Charles Darwin and Alfred North Wallace, the co-founders of the theory of natural selection, as having said essentially the same thing.

Here are some excerpts from Stanton's essay:

The genius of evolution is its brutal pragmatism; do whatever is needed to pass your genes onto the next generation in the fastest, most efficient, enduring way possible. It knows nothing else. As such, it should be inherently prejudiced against not only complex beauty, but any conspicuous beauty at all.

Mr. Guppy is a child’s starter fish for a reason. He lives years in a tiny, dirty fishbowl needing minimal attention. Algae thrives there. The same is true of the common finch over the peacock, or the dandelion and the orchid. One is common, while the other is rare for a reason.

If natural selection reined [beautiful fish like the above Moorish Idols] would see the runaway genetic success and durability of the common guppy and ask, “Why am I knocking myself out trying to maintain this extravagantly conspicuous design when I could be that guy?”

In survival of the fittest, the fittest is the least complex and needy — Occam’s razor applied to living things. Extravagant, superfluous beauty is not evolution’s friend.

Thus, beauty is one of evolution’s most serious and persistent problems. Its adherents have no good answer for it, and not for want of trying.

The two men who simultaneously developed the theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, were profoundly burdened by the problem of beauty. Darwin confessed to a friend, “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”

Wallace held that a peacock’s raiment was more than unnecessary under natural selection; it was a detriment. He confessed the “excessive length or abundance of plumes begins to be injurious to the bearer of them.” Darwin and Wallace both worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to come up with a sufficient explanation for beauty. Both disagreed passionately with the other’s answer.

Darwin proposed that natural selection was not the only phenomenon at work here and developed the theory of sexual selection. The more "handsome" an organism is, the more likely it is to attract a mate.

The theory of sexual selection has lots of problems, but one big one is that it raises an even greater difficulty. Why would organisms evolve sexual reproduction in the first place, with all of the necessary adaptations - behavioral, genetic, biochemical, anatomical and physiological - when asexual reproduction is far simpler, more efficient and involves far less expenditure of energy?

The asexuality of the mudworm or hydra is simple and highly efficient. Why remove that ability from the individual and require complex coupling? Natural selection is not inclined to say, “Let’s make this exponentially more difficult,” which finding, competing for, wooing, and impregnating a mate certainly is.

Moreover, spectacular beauty not only requires more more energy to develop and maintain, Stanton writes, but it also makes one highly conspicuous and attractive to predators.

In short, there's no good evolutionary account for why our world should be filled with beauty, but it is. Perhaps that's because naturalistic evolution isn't the answer, or at least not the entire answer, for why and how beauty came to be.

Read Stanton's article at the link. It's very interesting, particularly his remarks on Mr. and Mrs. Blobfish.

Does Suffering Disprove God's Existence?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a professing Catholic, said recently that it wasn't God who has flattened the curve of covid cases in his state, it was New Yorkers. "Our behavior has stopped the spread of the virus," he claimed, "God did not stop the spread of the virus."

A couple of days later he added, "The number is down because we brought the number down. God did not do that. Fate did not do that. Destiny did not do that. A lot of pain and suffering did that."

To which Michael Stone at Patheos replied: "Cuomo is right. Prayers do not effect [sic] the virus. Some imaginary God does not effect [sic] the virus. But people, human behavior, can and do effect [sic] the virus."

Now I don't profess to know what role God has played in this disease, if any, but I do know that, despite their arrogant asseverations to the contrary, neither Cuomo nor Stone knows either. Indeed, both of these men might profit from a little more intellectual humility.

Another thing I know is that one of the most potent defeaters skeptics have employed over the ages against theistic belief is what's often called the problem of evil.

Those who believe in the existence of a wholly good, all-powerful deity are often challenged to come up with an answer to the question why such a being would not prevent completely gratuitous suffering, or why, in a time of plague, God wouldn't act sooner to mitigate the effects of the disease? Why, in the present case, has an allegedly loving Father allowed so many good people to have their lives cut short by this corona virus?

Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College, presents an interesting introduction to this vexing problem which has perplexed believers ever since the time of Job and surely before. Kreeft's treatment gives us a good idea of the direction in which possible solutions might lie.

The video is only about five minutes long, but it covers a lot of ground and is well worth watching:

Beauty Without Meaning?

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

This admission, though it caught the notice of the media, was not really anything new for Dawkins, who has made similar concessions in the past. Dawkins’ approach to all knowledge is strictly scientific. And since scientific knowledge is always technically tentative, so too must his ostensibly scientific opinion of the non-existence of God. Dawkins dismisses God because he finds no scientific evidence for God, but he must make allowances for the fact that scientific knowledge is always expanding.

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

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

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

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

Baruzzini puts the point somewhat differently:

The archbishop, rather than disputing, agreed with Dawkins about the beauty of the scientific description of the development of life. But he then explained that God was not an extra that was “shoehorned” onto the scientific explanation. Dawkins’ mistake, the archbishop attempted to show, was to suppose that the scientific explanation suffices, and the religious one is an unnecessary complication. The beauty that Dawkins finds in science is not challenged by belief in God; it presupposes it.

Beauty is something reasonable. The beauty of scientific explanation comes from seeing that the arrangement of things is so ordered to produce the phenomena we observe. The scientist begins with a mess of clues and an unfinished puzzle. He begins with a mystery. He seeks that moment when the pieces fall into place. Dawkins’ picture of scientific beauty comes from seeing just this arrangement in evolution, in the material development of the universe. But where creation presents a unified theme returning, finally, to reason, atheistic scientism must insist that at bottom [there] is only unreason.

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

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

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

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

There's more at the link, but I want to return for a moment to the matter of beauty: Philosophers going back to Plato have affirmed that the highest ideals are the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, but if the world is nothing more than atoms spinning in the void then there really is no Good, no Truth that matters, and no Beauty. The awe we feel when we look at mountains or a sunset or a galaxy is just the perturbations of chemicals in our brains triggered by a particular visual pattern.

It's only when we somehow see meaning in what we observe that we experience its beauty, but there can only be meaning if behind the experience there is a mind that has intentionally created it. Take away the author, the painter, the composer, the architect and there is no meaning and thus no beauty for us to enjoy. A novel filled with eloquently turned phrases and well-crafted sentences nevertheless lacks beauty if the story makes no sense.

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

Two Thoughts on the Current Shutdown

As protests mount for governors across the country to reopen their states for business recent polls show that almost six out of ten people are worried about loosening restrictions too soon. I wonder how many of that sixty percent are people working from home without having suffered any lost income. Indeed, I wonder how many of those who have lost no income in the midst of the current restrictions will also receive a check from the government.

I suspect that if everyone among that sixty percent was out of work that percentage wouldn't be nearly so high.

Another thought: here in Pennsylvania, and I expect elsewhere as well, over half the fatalities due to covid have occurred among nursing home patients. It would seem that these people would be the easiest to protect from the virus via constant monitoring, quarantine and minimal contact with outsiders.

If we took measures to enhance the safety of these most vulnerable could we not reopen the state and get back to work? There'd still be some risk of contracting the disease, but for most of the workforce, except those with co-morbidity factors like obesity and diabetes, the risk of very severe infection would be minimal.

I'm certainly not a medical expert, and perhaps there's more to this that I'm not aware of, but by staying shut down we may be trading safety from covid in exchange for greater risk of personal economic devastation with accompanying suicide, domestic abuse and opioid addiction. For many, that probably doesn't seem like a wise trade.

I imagine that for a lot of folks the risk of a covid infection is one worth taking if the alternative is the loss of their business and livelihood.

More Perspective on the Pandemic

After a month or so of the media seemingly trying to convince us that we are on the cusp of a pestilential apocalypse a lot of Americans are beginning to wonder exactly how bad the nationwide coronavirus situation really is.

Matt Margolis, from whom we borrowed in an earlier post to give us some perspective on where the U.S. stands relative to other nations in per capita cases and per capita deaths from covid-19 has another interesting post at PJ Media on what our numbers would look like if we bracketed out downstate New York where the bulk of the cases have occurred.

In other words, what is the situation in the huge expanse of territory that comprises the United States if we treated downstate New York as a separate country? Margolis shows that the numbers from downstate New York are heavily skewing the statistics for both New York state and the country as a whole.

For perspective I borrowed this graphic from his post:

Downstate New York is in blue

Using the latest data, Margolis finds that the U.S. as a whole ranks 7th in the world in covid cases per million people, but if you exclude the 12 million or so residents of eight downstate counties that encompass New York City and surrounding areas, that ranking drops to 13th in the world. In fact, if we treat those counties as a separate country they would rank #1 in the world in covid cases per million people.

Of course, actual cases are hard to determine because there simply isn't enough testing being done to measure how many people have or have had the virus. A more accurate indicator is fatalities, so when Margolis looks at fatalities per million he finds that the United States as a whole would rank 8th in the world.

Removing the fatalities in downstate New York, however, drops the U.S. to 11th and makes those eight New York counties #1.

None of these comparisons, by the way, includes Iran, Russia or China whose cases and fatalities reports are deemed untrustworthy.

Margolis concludes with this:

What we can see from the data is just how much downstate New York is skewing the data for the United States. What this tells us is that there shouldn't be a one-size-fits-all approach to social distancing or reopening the country. I feel pretty safe where I live, but because I'm in New York State, and Governor Cuomo is treating the whole state like it is downstate, I have to abide by the same statewide restrictions.

Further, if the media ever chose to look at the country's numbers the way I have, they'd see that the overwhelming majority of the country is doing much, much better than it appears to be when you include downstate New York in our numbers. The media wants you to believe that President Trump botched the federal government's response to the coronavirus. This is clearly not true. Even with downstate's tallies we don't lead the world in cases or deaths per capita.

Treating downstate as its own country shows just how much local leadership impacts containment and mitigation.

Check out his post at PJMedia for details. What Margolis says about having to abide by statewide restrictions is true not only of residents of New York but of many other states which have counties of denser populations where restrictions make more sense than they do in the rest of the state. Yet the state governments don't make distinctions when they impose their restrictions.

Nor, in some cases, do they make any attempt at consistency or rationality. Michigan's governor, Gretchen Whitmer, has decreed that you can shop in a Home Depot, but you're prohibited from buying certain items in the store, like garden plants, that are deemed "inessential."

If you're allowed into the store what's the point of telling you you can't buy garden plants? Do garden plants make people more vulnerable to covid?

Her policy also allows one to canoe on Michigan waterways but ban the use of motorized craft. What's the rationale for that? Are outboard motors known to harbor the virus? Do they somehow fling the virus across the water to other boaters?

Examples of arbitrary and poorly conceived restrictions are not hard to find. They do nothing to minimize risk but do a lot to diminish even further the trust and confidence people have in their government.

Staggering Improbabilities

I've several times in recent posts made the claim that scientists have no idea how life could have arisen through blind, undirected processes like chance and the laws of chemistry.

The folks at Lad Allen have put together an eleven minute video which starkly illustrates the difficulties any such theory of the origin of life (abiogenesis) must surmount in order to be plausible.

They discuss the probability of getting just a single useful medium-sized protein purely by the action of mindless chance, and it turns out that you can't. It would quite literally take a miracle, and, as is mentioned at the end of the video there's a huge gap between having a single, medium-sized protein and having a living cell that has the ability to metabolize nutrients and reproduce itself. The simplest living cell requires hundreds of different proteins whose functions all must be coordinated by some sort of information software, and no one has any idea at all where that comes from.

The task of discovering how nature, unaided by intelligence, could have accomplished this astronomically improbable feat seems hopeless, and one feels for those researchers who have spent their lives trying to come up with the means by which nature could've accomplished it, laboring all the while under the conviction that it surely must've happened somehow.

Perhaps it did, but no one who has ever placed a bet on anything would ever wager on something so staggeringly improbable as what's depicted in this video:

Comatose But Conscious

Anyone who has had a family member in a coma from a brain injury has probably wondered whether their loved one could hear them and wondered what it must be like for someone to be conscious but completely unable to express themselves. We've discussed this on VP on several occasions in the past but whenever I come across an article on the topic, I feel like I should mention it again.

In a partial transcript of a podcast interview with neuroscientist Michael Egnor, Egnor elaborates on the work of Adrian Owen who discovered about fifteen years ago that many comatose patients were capable of thinking and could hear what was being said to them.

Subsequent research has determined that in a significant number of cases, as high as 40%, comatose patients are indeed able to hear what is being said to them and, with modern MRI techniques, even able to respond.

Here's part of Egnor's discussion of Owen's work:

Owen took a woman who was in a persistent vegetative state—she’d been in a car accident and had severe brain damage, and she’d been in this state for several years—and he put her in an MRI machine and did what’s called a functional MRI test. A functional MRI test looks at changes in blood flow in the brain that we believe correspond to activation of parts of the brain. So you can kind of tell what’s going on inside the brain during the time they’re in the machine.

So he put her in the machine and he put headphones on her and he asked her to think about things. Now remember, she’s a woman who, supposedly, is the deepest level of coma, just a hair above brain dead. And he said, “Imagine you’re walking across the room.” “Imagine you’re playing tennis.” “Think of things.” And he found activation in her brain. Even though she had massive brain damage, there were patterns of activation.

So he then took fifteen normal volunteers, put them in the machine, and asked them the same questions. And her patterns of activation were identical to theirs. So he said, well, to a first approximation, it looks like she can think just like they can think.

But, he said, you know, maybe the activation that we are seeing in the brain isn’t because she understands. Maybe it’s just the brain’s reaction to sound. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand, maybe just the noise from the headphones is causing this activation. So he scrambled the words so, instead of saying, “Imagine walking across a room” he would say “across walking imagine room your”. So it made no sense. And the activation went away in her brain and in the volunteers’.

So he showed that the only time she had activation in her brain was when what was asked of her made sense. And her activation was completely indistinguishable from the activation of completely conscious people. So he concluded that she was able to understand and think about things that he was asking her to understand and think about, even though she was in the deepest level of coma.

This alone is astonishing, but there's more:

His research has been repeated by a number of other laboratories on many, many patients with persistent vegetative state. And about forty percent of people in persistent vegetative state show high levels of intellectual functioning even in deep coma.

There are ways of conversing with people in deep coma where you can, for example, look at the activation state representing "Yes" and the activation state representing "No" and you can ask them questions. You know, “Are you lonely?” “Do you wish your mother were here?” “Would you like something to eat?”, stuff like that, and they can answer you, with these brain states.

In addition, some people can do mathematics in a coma. You can ask them “Is the square root of 25, 6?” and they do a "No." And “Is it 5?” and they do a "Yes." So there can be very high levels—not in all patients that we have found—but in many patients, forty percent, at least—of mental function in profoundly damaged brains. To the point where the medical profession has actually added a category to this list of ways you can be in a coma, and this is called minimally conscious state.

So patients who have evidence of intellectual functioning in deep coma are called “minimally conscious,” although, frankly, they’re not really minimally conscious, they’re quite conscious.

I've always wondered whether the comatose patient was in pain but unable to communicate their suffering to anyone. If so, it would be hellish. These sorts of developments give hope that medical professionals will be better able to care for and comfort those who appear to be unconscious but aren't.

Materialism, Theism and Abstract Ideas

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? Is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It is clear, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be. For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed?

In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God. If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems obvious that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would, or could, exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me. If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing. Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left. Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

Metamorphosis

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies show the incredible difficulties metamorphosis poses to any account which insists that the genesis of the process be completely unguided and naturalistic.

There are a number of biological phenomena for which a plausible explanation in standard Darwinian terms is difficult to imagine. Metamorphosis is one, but others include the origin of life, the development of eukaryotic life, the origin of the DNA code, the evolution of irreducibly complex molecular machines and systems, sexual reproduction, the origin of multicellular life, the sudden appearance of the various body plans of living things in the cambrian era, and, perhaps most enigmatic, the emergence of human consciousness.

Why such phenomena would have ever evolved in the first place and how they could have done so are questions for which naturalistic Darwinism, or Neo-Darwinism, has no convincing answer.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process, as well as the others mentioned above, evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

It's All in How You Look at It

The media as is their habit is being a bit disingenuous in their claims that the U.S. is leading the world in covid-19 deaths. As a piece at PJ Media by Matt Margolis points out, it all depends on which statistics you use.

Here's Margolis:

Last month, when President Trump said the United States had done more coronavirus tests than South Korea, the media pounced on the claim and pointed out that the United States’ population is more than six times that of South Korea, and when you looked at testing per capita, the United States was still behind South Korea.

Fair enough, but now it's being widely trumpeted in the media that the United States has the unenviable distinction of leading the world in coronavirus deaths. Political attack ads are using this statistic to discredit Trump's response to the plague, but, as Margolis points out, this is bogus for two reasons.

The first is, of course, that anyone who trusts the numbers produced by the Chinese authorities is being extraordinarily naive, and the second is that the media, which insisted that we use per capita statistics when the talk was about testing, has now abandoned that measure since it evidently no longer suits their purpose.

Margolis again:

The United States does not lead the world in coronavirus cases per capita — which is the best way to compare how the pandemic is being contained in each country. For much of the pandemic, Italy has been overwhelmed by the coronavirus, but Italy has fewer cases and deaths than the United States.

The United States has nearly six times the population of Italy, and when you measure cases and deaths per capita it’s easy to see why Italy was overwhelmed and the United States is not.

Margolis features some dramatic graphs in his column, and the interested reader should check them out. What they show is that if cases and deaths are ranked per capita, the standard the media derided Trump for not using when he talked about testing, the United States is actually fourth in the world in terms of cases of infection, trailing Spain, Italy and France, and fifth in the world in terms of deaths. Spain, Italy, France and the U.K. all have more deaths per capita than does the U.S.

And these numbers don't include China which is doubtless lying about both their cases and deaths, just as they've lied about this virus from the beginning.

Moreover, Margolis' graphs show that in per capita terms we are not just behind, but we're far behind those nations with the highest morbidities. This is glum news in any case, but it would be a little more helpful if the media would be a little more honest in how they report these statistics. Of course, when the summum bonum is discrediting Trump what does a bit of dissimulation matter?

One caveat: If you check the graphs the plot line for France in the graph that shows cases per million doesn't correspond to the numbers given in the table, but the table is more likely than the graph to be accurate.

True for Me But Not for You

Perhaps the most calamitous of the casualties of our postmodern age is the loss of belief in objective truth.

The notion that all truth, except, perhaps, for mathematical truths, is conditioned by race, gender and economic class has become axiomatic in contemporary discourse. What's true for you, we often hear, isn't true for me. The underlying assumption is that truth is socially constructed and subjective, and that each of us possesses our own personal truth.

I ask students in my classes for a show of hands of those who believe that something can be true for them but not for me, and it frequently happens that over half the class raises a hand.

These students, I believe, are a victim of muddled thinking. When I then ask them to give me an example of something that's true for them but not true for me they'll often say something like, "I'm 19 and you're not," or "I was born in Europe, but you were born in the U.S."

What they don't see in the examples they give is that if it's true for them that they are 19 years old then it's true for everyone that they are 19 years old. How could it be true for Joe that he's 19 but not true for Mary that Joe is 19? How could it be true for Mary that she was born in Europe but not true for Joe that Mary was born in Europe?

As I said, this is muddled. If it's true that Mary was born in Europe then it's an objective truth. It's not just true for Mary, it's true for everyone.

What I think the students really mean to say is that there are things that are true about them that are not true about others. This, of course, is quite right, but it's an entirely different proposition.

Here's another illustration of the same confusion. Sometimes we hear people say, in a rather inchoate way, that, "It's true for Joe that God exists, but it's not true for me." But, if it's true for Joe that God exists, then it's true for everyone that God exists. How could it not be? God doesn't just exist for some people and not for others.

What the speaker is actually trying to say is that, "It's true that Joe believes that God exists, but it's not true that I believe that God exists." This might well be so, but it's a different claim altogether. Moreover, if it's true that Joe believes that God exists then it's objectively true for everyone that Joe believes that God exists.

The notion that everyone has his or her own truth is really quite absurd. All of us may have our own opinions, our own beliefs, our own memories or our own eye color, etc. but no one has his own truth. Whatever is true for any of us is objectively true for all of us, even if it's not true about all of us.

The notion that truth is subjective, that it's whatever we feel strongly, and that my truth isn't necessarily your truth is a product of intellectual slovenliness. The sooner we all get over it the better off we'll be for it.

John Updike's Meditation on the Resurrection

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes for a meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

Father and Son

As Christians observe this the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday, it might be helpful for both Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on Golgotha.

It might be good today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and the people on the train.

The Easter Miracle

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false. Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from the circularity of basing the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible. But we can only know they're impossible if we know that all reports of miracles are unreliable.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules on one occasion to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident. They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that there could be an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. There's no evidence of other worlds, unfortunately, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist. The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it is not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well? If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead. After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

Kantian Man

Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970) describes in vivid accents the modern man who prides himself in his rational approach to life unencumbered by the silly superstitions believed in by gullible religious people. The modern rational man, typified in her telling by someone like the 18th century philosophical icon Immanuel Kant, is a man who ...

...confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgement of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason . . . . This man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d’être of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek . . . .

He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it.

In fact Kant’s man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.

Lucifer? Why such a harsh judgment? Perhaps because the modern, "rational" man believes only what science and his senses tell him. The rational man looks at himself and his fellows as little more than flesh and bone machines, animals, whose only real "purpose" is to reproduce, experience pleasure and avoid pain.

He regards morality as an illusion. His reason affords him no basis for caring about the weak or the poor, no basis for human compassion, no particular point to conserving the earth's resources for future generations.

Whereas Kant thought that reason dictated the categorical imperative, i.e. the duty to treat others as ends in themselves and not merely as a means to one's own happiness, the fact is that reason, unfettered from any divine sanction, dictates only that each should look to his own interests.

In practice modern man may care about the well-being of others, but he must abandon his fealty to science and reason to do so because these provide no justification for any moral obligations whatsoever.

Indeed, the purely rational man is led by the logic of his naturalism to the conclusion that might makes right. The pursuit of power frequently becomes the driving force of his life. It injects his life with meaning. It leads him to build abattoirs like Auschwitz and Dachau to eliminate the less powerful and less human.

Would Kant have agreed with this bleak assessment. No, but then Kant wasn't quite in tune with the modern, rational man. Kant believed that in order to make sense of our lives as moral agents we have to assume that three things are true: We have to assume that God exists, that we have free will, and that there is life beyond the grave.

The modern man, of course, rejects all three, and in so doing he rejects the notion of objective moral value or obligation. That's why reason has led men to embrace ideologies that have produced vast tracts of corpses, and that's why, perhaps, Murdoch uses the name Lucifer to describe them.

The Origin of Life

Yesterday we took a brief look at a new book by physicist Paul Davies titled, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life. I observed in that post that Davies, an agnostic, occasionally walks right up to the brink of acknowledging that life must be the product of an intelligent designer but at the last moment veers away from drawing that conclusion.

Toward the end of this fascinating read he not only walks up to the line, he actually sticks his toe over it. Here's how:

On page 172 Davies replies to the question posed in the title of this post by exclaiming that, "The short answer is, nobody knows how life began!" He goes on to explain that nobody even has a plausible theory for how the enormous difficulties involved in generating even the simplest living cell could have been surmounted by natural processes. 

 He writes that, "An explanation for the origin of life as we know it has to include an explanation for the origin of...digital information management and - especially - the origin of the [genetic] code," as well as the entire translation system necessary for converting the information inscribed in DNA into proteins. The translation system is comprised of numerous kinds of proteins, but where did they come from before there was a DNA to code for them and a translation system to produce them and the information to choreograph the whole process?

In other words, this complex system had to pretty much exist in order to bring itself into existence. Davies states that this is the most formidable and perplexing problem in all of evolutionary biology.

Moreover, each step in the evolution of a living cell must somehow be conserved in a kind of ratchet effect which allows for its preservation before the next step occurs. What constituted the ratchet and where did it come from?

So many are the conditions that need to be satisfied to produce life that Davies and many other scientists are beginning to think that it may have arisen only once in the entire history of the universe. Contrary to what we often read in the popular media, the discovery by astronomers of an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of some star is scarcely reason, by itself, to assume that life could exist there.

Davies voices his skepticism of the enthusiastic claims that often surround these discoveries:

Suppose the transition from non-life to life involved a sequence of a hundred chemical reactions, each requiring a particular temperature range (for example, 5-10°C, for the first, 20-30°C, for the second, and so on). Perhaps the transition also demanded tightly constrained pressure, salinity and acidity ranges, not to mention a host of catalysts....habitability does not imply inhabited.

And these conditions are just a few of the requirements that must be met for a planet, even one with water on its surface, to give rise to living things.

Even if some day a researcher manages in a laboratory to synthesize a living organism from a residue of raw chemicals it would demonstrate only that life can be created by an intelligent researcher who can establish all the necessary, tightly controlled conditions in her laboratory. It would prove nothing about what could actually happen in nature in the absence of an intelligent scientist.

Davies again:

To attain even the modest successes [creating life in the lab] announced so far requires special equipment and technicians, purified and refined substances, high fidelity control over physical conditions - and a big budget. But above all it needs an intelligent designer (aka a clever scientist).

And that clever scientist must have a purpose or goal in mind toward which he is striving, but, he writes, "Astrobiologists want to know how life began without fancy equipment, purification procedures, environment-stabilizing systems and - most of all - without an intelligent designer." (p.179) (emphasis mine).  

As Davies goes on to say, just because an intelligent agent can easily manufacture an artifact doesn't mean that nature could do it even given a billion or more years: "...organic chemists can readily make plastics, but we don't find them occurring naturally. 

Even something as simple as a bow and arrow is straightforward for a child to make but would never be created by an inanimate process." Indeed, but nevertheless many scientists have faith, a blind faith, that the unimaginably complex and purposive processes in the cell, plus both the material hardware and the informational software, have been created by just such an inanimate process.

And why do they believe that with such conviction? Not because there's evidence for it, but because they're committed to a naturalistic worldview, or at least a naturalistic methodology, that excludes apriori the possibility of the existence of an intelligent designer. If the possibility of a designer is automatically ruled out then some naturalistic theory, no matter how implausible, must be true.

Davies' Demon

Physicist Paul Davies is a prolific popularizer of science, having written numerous books on scientific topics, most of which are accessible to the layman. His most recent offering is titled The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life and in it Davies makes a strong case for the emerging view among scientists and philosophers that the fundamental characteristic of life is not any of the biological processes that occur in living organisms, but rather information.

Davies discusses numerous cellular processes - the amazingly complex procedure by which the DNA code is translated into proteins, how signals are transmitted along neurons and many others - and argues that all of these marvels are choreographed, coordinated and controlled by information. If a cell is like a computer the molecular constituents are like the hardware and information is like the software.

In several places throughout the book the author pauses to remind us that all of these wonders as well as the information necessary for them to function are the product of eons of evolution, that mindless nature serves the same role in designing life as a computer engineer serves in designing a computer.

The analogy that Davies tacitly promotes, however, is of a computer that guides the development of its own hardware and software, from the fabrication of the substances used in the hardware components all the way to the construction of a functional PC and all without any input from an outside intelligence.

To continue the analogy, this computer starts out with minimal software capabilities but is able to develop more complexity with time, developing the ability to correct errors, repair itself, duplicate itself and program the increasingly complex computer to create more parts of itself as well as interface with peripherals. And all of that would be necessary just to produce the very first computer. There are no precursors.

That's somewhat analogous to what must have happened to get life started, but how does software, information, produce itself?

The primitive computer, would on Davies' telling, had to have had both foresight and knowledge (!) of its internal states, being able not only to sense when certain processes needed to be turned on and off, but also to both recognize damage to its organelles and sense threats to its well-being.

He acknowledges that this is not standard Darwinism, insisting that it's instead a "refinement" of standard evolutionary theory, but it seems that so far from being a refinement it's in fact a total falsification of the Darwinian hypothesis.

Regrettably, Davies never explains how evolution could have produced the wonders he describes. He never defends the theory. He simply waves a magic wand and declares it a fact.

He mentions that there are indeed mysteries along the evolutionary progression from prebiotic chemicals to human life. Scientists are at a loss, for example, to explain any of the following in standard Darwinian or naturalistic terms: The origin of life (abiogenesis), the origin of nucleated cells (eukaryogenesis), the origin of sexual reproduction, the origin of multicellularity and the origin of human consciousness.

We could add to this list the origin of metamorphosis, the link between genes and behavior and the origin of language, none of which has, as far as I'm aware, ever received a plausible Darwinian explanation.

It's also a mystery as to why humans haven't evolved longer life spans with longer periods of reproductive fertility. It would certainly would seem that both of these would be child's play for a process that has accomplished such astonishing wonders as metamorphosis and photosynthesis. The evolutionary selection pressure to extend human life spans and fecundity should've been immense, yet it's never happened to any significant extent. Why not?

Finally, he neglects to discuss the origin and source of biological information itself. Information is always generated by a mind. It doesn't arise by chance. Astrobiologists looking for extraterrestrial life have said that were they to find something as simple as a radio signal that repeated a sequence of prime numbers they would consider the information content of that signal to be dispositive evidence of an alien intelligence.

Yet whole libraries of information are found in even the simplest cells and are far more complex than a sequence of prime numbers, but that information is not considered to have an intelligent provenience. Why not?

Davies occasionally comes close to admitting that the wonders he describes must somehow have been the product of intelligent engineering. Several times he walks right up to that admission but at the last moment dances back away from it.

In fact, reading the book I had the feeling that Davies is either an undercover intelligent design provocateur seeking to undermine the Darwinian edifice from within or else he's a man who can look at the noonday sky on a clear summer's day and fail to see the sun.

Egoism at Shantung Compound

Langdon Gilkey was a theologian and philosopher who, as a young man with a degree from Harvard, went to China to teach English and philosophy. While he was there WWII broke out and the Japanese invaded China. Gilkey was detained and held in a facility with 2000 others under very trying conditions.

He writes about his experience in his 1966 memoir titled Shantung Compound. In the book he describes himself at the time as holding the belief that human reason would enable him and his fellow prisoners to transcend their conditions and build a community based on their common humanity and solidarity. He also believed that religion was a "frill" that wasn't necessary for people to seek to advance the common good, a goal that "any unbelieving naturalist (atheist) can easily avow."

For a while his optimistic humanism was affirmed, but as time wore on he began to experience disillusionment. His worldview, his view of his fellow man, suffered a series of blows, but one in particular was especially jarring.

Gilkey was chosen by his fellows to head up the committee in charge of housing. Conditions were extremely cramped and the closeness led to a lot of friction. One particular housing unit had eleven inmates in a room that could comfortably accommodate only half that number, and Gilkey learned that an adjacent unit of exactly the same size had only nine inmates. The unit with nine was crowded but not as badly as the unit with eleven.

Gilkey thought that there was an obvious and rational solution: Send one of the inmates from the more crowded unit to the less crowded unit and both would have ten inmates and be on equal terms. This was a just and moral solution, he thought, that any reasonable person would accept.

But he was disappointed to find that the less crowded unit refused to accept a tenth inmate. They told Gilkey in so many words that it was not in their self-interest to make their quarters more crowded than they already were. Gilkey argued passionately that they were being irrational and unfair, but his appeals fell on deaf ears. They even threatened Gilkey with physical violence if he persisted.

He concluded from this that if rationality conflicts with self-interest men will often choose self-interest. Rationality and logic were insufficient to move men to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

In other words, although Gilkey doesn't put it in these terms, he was confronted with a conflict between utilitarianism and egoism, and he found to his dismay that egoism frequently prevailed, even among otherwise rational men.

I disagree, though, with his conclusion that these men were being irrational. I think they were acting perfectly rationally. Gilkey simply assumed that utilitarianism is the rational ethical stance, that we should always seek to promote the greatest good for all, but why should we? Why should anyone care about the well-being of others? Why is it not rational to promote the greatest good for oneself? This is indeed the default position in a secular society. In the absence of any transcendent source of moral imperatives the rational course is to look out for #1, to put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others.

This could only be wrong if there actually is a transcendent moral authority with the power to hold us accountable for our choices and who demands that we care about others at least as much as we care about ourselves. If no such authority exists then egoism makes perfect sense.

People who are repelled by this conclusion and who are convinced that we have a moral obligation to do what is fair for all are tacitly making a case, whether they realize it or not, for the existence of God because such an obligation can only exist if God imposes it upon us.

This is not to say that those who do not believe that God exists will necessarily be egoists. People can certainly choose arbitrarily to live any way they wish. What it means, though, is that there's nothing in atheism that requires one to care about the welfare of others. On atheism egoism is perfectly rational, and any other ethical outlook is purely a matter of subjective preference.

Atheists who think this repugnant should probably rethink their atheism.

Christianity and the Abolition of Slavery

One of the peculiarities of our current cultural moment is that many African Americans, associating Christianity with slavery, repudiate their "Christian" name and adopt an Arabic or Islamic identity. I say this is peculiar because according to Rodney Stark in his book For the Glory of God, Africans suffered as badly, if not worse, from Islamic slavery as they did from the European variety.

This is especially true if Islamic slavery is compared to slavery as it was practiced in North America.

Muslim slave-trading began many centuries before Europeans discovered the New World and carried at least as many Africans into bondage, and probably more, as were eventually shipped across the Atlantic. By 1600 more than 7 million Africans had been transported to Islamic countries, and another 1.2 million more were transported there between 1800-1900.

These numbers only reflect the number of Africans who arrived at the destination. The death toll while being transported (by African slavers, it should be noted) from the interior to the African coast was somewhere between 20%-40%. Another 3%-10% died while waiting to be shipped, and 12%-16% died in transit on hellish slave ships. Altogether, of those initially taken as slaves, 35%-66% died before reaching the Islamic slave markets.

This pic and the one below show the horrible conditions to which African slaves
were subjected on slave ships. The filth, heat, and stench would've been overpowering.

It's sometimes said that Africans were treated better by Muslims than they were in the West, but Stark argues that this is dubious. Although roughly equal numbers of Africans arrived in both the West and in the Islamic world there's no substantial black population today in the "land of Islam." This is attributed in large measure to very low fertility due to the practice of castrating black males and of killing any infants who show black ancestry. Castration not only meant that black males who survived it couldn't reproduce, it also created a very high mortality rate among males due to infection and blood loss.

Just as science arose only once, so too, did effective moral opposition to slavery, and, like science, it arose only in the West and by Christians. Slavery has existed in every society able to afford it, including Native American societies, but of all the world's religions only Christians developed the belief that slavery was a great sin and must be abolished.

Antislavery efforts began to appear in Christian theology soon after the decline of Rome and eventually led to its disappearance in all but the fringes of Christian Europe by the end of the 16th century. When Europeans subsequently instituted slavery in the New World they did so over strenuous papal opposition. Unfortunately, by this time in history Rome was too weak to exert its influence over slave-owners in the Western hemisphere.

It's an interesting detail that relatively few slaves were imported into North America. From 1626 to 1808 when it became illegal to import slaves in the U.S., the total number of imported African slaves was about 400,000. By contrast, 3.6 million went to Brazil, 1.6 million were imported by the Spanish colonies, and about 3.8 million wound up in the horrific Caribbean sugar plantations. Eventually, due to the efforts primarily of Quakers in North America, like William and Sarah Lay, and the Clapham Sect in England, most notably William Wilberforce, the slave trade was first abolished and then ultimately done away with in the West.

There was, however, no similar abolition movement in the Islamic world. Slavery was only ended in the Muslim world because of Western pressure to do so, but it persisted nevertheless well into the 20th century (Saudi Arabia banned it in 1962, Mauritania in 1981). The British navy embargoed Muslim slave ships and British and French colonial troops intercepted countless slave caravans, freeing the slaves and sometimes executing slave traders on the spot. In North America a catastrophic civil war was fought, primarily over the issue of slavery.

Stark notes how the people who finally ended the moral scourge were acting essentially altruistically. They themselves had nothing to gain from their efforts and some paid dearly for their commitment to the cause of blacks.

He concludes that although a Christian culture was certainly not a sufficient basis for ending slavery, it was nonetheless a necessary one since it was almost solely Christian thinkers and activists, working within the unique Judeo-Christian understanding of human rights and equality, who reached anti-slavery conclusions and influenced the larger culture to recognize that they were participating in a great evil.

Perhaps if this history were more widely known fewer African Americans would be inclined to reject their Christian heritage in favor of an Islamic one.