What Is Social Justice?

As anyone who has spent much time on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of many young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain. In that respect it's much like "systemic racism" or just plain "racism." The terms are easy to wield as rhetorical weapons, but they're not so easy to define.

So what exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers a succinct explanation in a brief video at Prager U.

Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name. Indeed, at least one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, has acknowledged that she and her fellow organizers are communists steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology.

What's sought by these people is not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard his entire life to attain and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.

One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if points were subtracted from their GPAs and awarded to students who didn't do as well so that everyone gets a C. 

I'll bet not many. Anyway, check out the Goldberg video. It's illuminating.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning Points to a Cosmic Designer

This eight minute video succinctly explains how cosmic fine-tuning is strong evidence for an intelligently designed universe. Don't be put off by the Guy Fawkes masks. The theme of the video series of which this episode is a part is that a new generation of thoughtful young people is refusing to accept the materialist explanations for the universe and life that have prevailed among our cultural elites for a hundred and fifty years or more. 

The metaphysical assumptions of naturalistic materialism are increasingly difficult to sustain given the scientific advances of the last century, especially the last twenty five years, and the masks symbolize this generation's rebellion against the mindless acceptance of a naturalistic worldview to which previous generations of students have been pressured to conform.

A Refreshing Voice

Coleman Hughes is a refreshing black voice in the conversation about race in this country and to see why watch this 7:45 interview with David Rubin, a former leftist:

There are thousands of men and women just like Coleman Hughes in the black community, but progressive media outlets ignore them because if people, especially black people, were exposed to them it would undo everything the left has been trying to accomplish in this country for the last four generations.

The left thrives on racial division and the myth that the only thing holding the black man back is systemic white racism. It thrives on fostering white guilt in liberal whites and the myth of white privilege among young people both black and white.

There is indeed a pathway for poor people, both white and black, into the American middle class but progressives don't want to talk about it because it doesn't depend at all on liberal white paternalism, and in fact in at least one of its elements it refutes one of the major shibboleths of progressive politics over the last fifty years - the myth that women don't need husbands and children don't need fathers.

Professor Bill Galston, President Clinton’s domestic policy advisor and now a senior fellow at Brookings, stated back in the early 1990s that an American need only do three things to avoid living in poverty: graduate from high school, marry before having a child, and have that child after age twenty. Only 8 percent of people who do so, he reported, will be poor, while 79 percent who fail to do all three will.

It sounds so simple, so why is it so hard? One doesn't need to be "privileged" to do any of these things. Nor is "systemic racism" forcing anyone to do otherwise.

Anyway, check out Coleman Hughes' interview

The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies, resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without the tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved very early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did, even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known 1996 paper:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as those comprising the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves, perhaps unintentionally, the purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this cascade of chemical reactions and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (although, of course, nature has no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind at all. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow retained and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it should take a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input to guide its development than to believe that it arose through the intentional agency of a biochemical genius.

Miscellaneous Thoughts on the Current Crisis

It wasn't too long ago that bumper stickers and t-shirts proclaimed the message that we should "fear no art." Portraits of the Virgin Mary could be covered in elephant dung, crucifixes could be immersed in jars of urine. 

All art was good especially art which offended, but that was until Black Lives Matter and the current wokeness. Now statues and portraits that bruise the delicate sensibilities of the wide awoke are to be torn down. Fear no art only applies, it seems, to art that offends those "deplorables" that the left despises.

By the way, will we soon be demanding that pictures of all the people whose statues are being torn down be expunged from our history textbooks as well? And is it not ironic that most of the statues and portraits that have been thrown down the memory hole are of Democrats? At least they were until the art-haters turned their attention, inexplicably, on Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

Where will it end?

Toward the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency the press was pleased to present to us, whenever the opportunity presented itself, the evidence of his failing mental capacity. Joe Biden is showing worse symptoms than Reagan did and Biden's presidency hasn't even started yet. Nevertheless, the same liberal media that chortled over Reagan's apparent dementia has had almost nothing to say about Biden's.

Does anyone think that if Biden wins the election in November that he'll actually be the president?

It's peculiar that when there are failures in our schools the progressives always say that we need to pump more money into them, but when failures occur in law enforcement the progressives say we have to take more money from them. I wonder what Congressional Democrats would do if someone advanced a proposal to defund the Capitol police force. 

Meanwhile:

Fourteen people, including five children, were killed as more than 100 people were shot in a wave of gunfire in Chicago over the Father’s Day weekend that produced the city’s highest number of shooting victims in a single weekend this year.

Among the victims was 3-year-old Mekhi James, who police said was fatally shot Saturday as the boy was in a car with his father in the south Austin neighborhood. Police said the child's 27-year-old father was the intended target when someone fired shots at the vehicle, but he is not cooperating with detectives.

The weekend's other young shooting victims included a 13-year-old girl who died after being shot in the neck while watching TV in her home, and two boys, ages 17 and 16, killed in a separate shooting on Saturday. Police Superintendent David Brown said police were working hard to track down those responsible for the violence in several Chicago communities. He said “gangs, guns and drugs” are the common thread in those shootings.

In all, 102 people were shot across Chicago from Friday evening to Monday morning — the highest number of shooting victims in a single weekend this year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.The violence comes nearly a month after Chicago had its deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015 as nine people were killed and another 27 wounded in shootings.

So where's the outrage, the protests? Where's Black Lives Matter, or do they only care about black lives when those lives are taken by white cops? According to the left what we need are fewer, more poorly funded police officers on the streets. That'd be sure to reduce the violence. 

Even so, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is in favor of the idea so it's got that going for it.

An Endless Argument

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson constructs an imaginary but not uncommon exchange between a Darwinian (Evolver) and an Intelligent Design advocate (Designer):

Designer: The formation of proteins from amino acids cannot occur in an aqueous prebiotic setting. Hydrolysis will attack the peptide bonds —
Evolver: Excuse me for interrupting, but that is not how proteins formed.
Designer: In the Oparin-Haldane model —
Evolver: You mean the Oparin-Haldane strawman?
Designer: But their “thin organic broth in a reducing atmosphere” was the leading prebiotic scenario for much of the 20th century.
Evolver: Hello, it’s 2020. The field has moved on. Proteins exist, so using a prebiotic soup model for their origin, when we already know that doesn’t work, cannot be right. You need to address the actual prebiotic pathway that occurred, not some old and erroneous hypothesis.
Designer: All right, what is the actual prebiotic pathway to proteins?
Evolver: We’re working on that. The tour bus is leaving, try to keep up.

Nelson states that "We could continue this dialogue indefinitely, with Designer critiquing as unworkable, or false, every prebiotic protein origins hypothesis put forward by Evolver — and yet Evolver stands there, untroubled, yawning and checking the messages on his iPhone."

The reason that no progress can be made in such an encounter is because of an unstated assumption in Evolver's argument. Evolver tacitly assumes that naturalism, the belief that there are no non-natural forces at work in the universe, i.e. that there's no supernatural agency, is true. Here's the argument as it might appear to an onlooker (I've altered Nelson's version a bit):

1. Proteins exist.
2. Naturalism is true (tacit assumption)
3. Therefore, any non-naturalistic explanation for the existence of proteins must be false.

Obviously, this argument hinges on the truth of premise 2, but that premise is not a scientific assertion, it's metaphysical. It's a philosophical assumption for which there's scant, if any, evidence.

Designer's argument might go something like this:

1. The genesis of proteins is exceedingly improbable on any naturalistic hypothesis.
2. Proteins exist
3. Therefore, it's exceedingly improbable that naturalism is true.

The debate then is not really over the science. Evolver's commitment to a naturalistic explanation for all biological phenomena is not scientific, it's psychological. It's not based on any empirical evidence but rather on a psycho-emotional preference. It's the same sort of commitment that many people make to their religious beliefs.

Thus, Designer's task is a difficult one. His argument is scientific. It's based on biochemistry, probability and information theory, all of which militate against Evolver's naturalism. Nevertheless, no matter how much evidence he adduces to show that the biochemical hurdles to a naturalistic origin of the first proteins are astronomically high, Evolver will simply take refuge in his faith that naturalism is true and that there must therefore be some naturalistic explanation for how proteins evolved.

The irony is that Designer's case is scientific but points to a supernatural agent as the architect of the first life whereas Evolver's argument dresses itself up as science in appealing to natural forces as the cause of living things, but it has, in fact, much more in common with religion than does Designer's argument.

Pandemic Hypocrisy

John Daniel Davidson, political editor at The Federalist, argues that, should a second wave of coronavirus infections strike us this Fall, Americans should ignore lockdown orders from governors and mayors who sacrificed all their credibility and moral authority during the recent protests.

He writes:

Simply put, the people in charge have shown themselves to be rank hypocrites who care more about politics than science. For months, we were told that large gatherings were deadly because of the coronavirus, but when protests broke out in late May, large gatherings were suddenly okay. 

The exact day the experts lost their credibility was June 4, when more than 1,000 public health workers signed a letter claiming the protests were “vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of black people in the United States.” 

The woke corporate press scrambled to assure us this wasn’t hypocritical at all, and that “health is about more than simply remaining free of coronavirus infection,” as a pair of epidemiologists put it in The Atlantic.  

That’s a curious argument to make after forced business closures and lockdown orders destroyed tens of millions of American jobs, ruined countless businesses and livelihoods, and caused a sharp uptick in suicides, drug overdoses, and domestic abuse. 

Never mind the compelling research that lockdowns are overall much worse for public health than the coronavirus.

Davidson provides links for the claims he makes throughout the article. It is ironic that our public health experts told us that no cost was too high to save lives, as New York Governor Cuomo put it, but as soon as the protests and rioting started the rationalizations for permitting them came thick and fast.

Here's Davidson again:

Witness the appalling double standard of men like New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio.  

On Monday, city workers welded shut the gates of a Brooklyn playground frequented by members of the Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg. They claimed it was necessary to stop the spread of the coronavirus. 

But this happened one day after the city allowed a massive “Black Trans Lives Matter” rally in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza that attracted thousands of protesters packed together in close quarters.

Davidson gives a number of other examples of this hypocrisy in his article. Here are a few:

In Washington, D.C., which has seen days on end of massive BLM protests, some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Mayor Muriel Bowser on Wednesday announced the city would begin “phase 2” of its reopening next week.

For restaurants, that means no more than 50 percent capacity, tables six feet apart, and all diners must be seated at the tables.

Same thing in Los Angeles, where thousands converged on Hollywood Boulevard Sunday for a Black Trans Lives Matter rally. Video footage of the event showed attendees packed tightly together on the street, with no possibility of social distancing.

According to news reports, there were no police present at the rally, and the city made no effort to stop it or limit attendance.

But like D.C. and other cities, Los Angeles still has strict pandemic policies for businesses, churches, and just about everything else.

For houses of worship, the city has issued elaborate guidelines for reopening, including a limit to the total number of people, clergy, and parishioners combined, who can attend a service: 25 percent of building capacity or 100 people, whichever is lower.

Government officials have indeed lost their credibility as well as their moral authority. Should there be a "second wave," and these officials order people to once again shut down their shops, churches, and restaurants it's not likely that many of them will be taken seriously.

Naturalism's Daunting Difficulty

Within the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty, the belief that nature is all there is (i.e. naturalism) and that everything in the universe can be explained by natural processes, has run up against a serious, and perhaps fatal, difficulty. 

The problem is that biologists have come to realize that the fundamental substrate of living things is not matter, as naturalism has always held, but information. Information is contained in codes like the amino acid sequence in proteins or the nucleic acid sequence in DNA and RNA, and the origin of information, especially in the first living cell, is inexplicable in terms of random, unguided, unintelligent natural processes.

This 21 minute video does an excellent job of explaining the problem in terms that are easy to understand and follow. It features a protein chemist (Doug Axe) and a philosopher of science (Stephen Meyer), both of whom have played prominent roles in bringing the significance of biological information in the origin of life to public attention.

Any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life has to show how the enormous improbabilities of evolving just a single protein can be overcome by mindless chance. It's a daunting task. Watch the video to see why:

For Father's Day

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Tomorrow is Father's Day in the U.S. so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

What the Third World Owes to Missionaries

I find myself often referring in conversation with friends to Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won. Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had it's genesis in the West.

His theory, to my mind convincingly defended, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were.

He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. 

Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anti-colonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics, who never made life better for anyone, sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant, or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

The Gorsuch Opinion

Set aside for a moment your views on homosexuality, gay marriage and transgenderism, whatever those views may be, and consider the argument made by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch in his majority opinion in the Bostock case. In fact, let's let Rusty Reno, the editor at First Things, dissect the logic.

Reno writes:

The Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County offers a striking display of sophistry in service of the spirit of the age. The Court had to rule on whether Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The 6-3 decision held that the Act does indeed forbid such discrimination.  

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, which is said to be a straightforward textualist interpretation. Title VII stipulates that it is unlawful “for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

There is no mention of sexual orientation or transgenderism. But Gorsuch has a clever argument. He notes that if a man identifies as a woman and is fired for doing so, then he is being fired for something that would be entirely OK if he were a woman. 

The same holds for homosexuality. A man who has sex with men would not trouble someone who objects to homosexuality if he were a woman. Therefore, employment decisions based on rejections of homosexuality or transgenderism are, in truth, forms of discrimination on the basis of sex, which is prohibited by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Gorsuch is being too clever by half. As Reno points out, his reasoning fails the test of argument by analogy:

The logic of Gorsuch’s reasoning is elegant but unworkable. New York law prohibits discrimination on the basis of marital status, as do many other states. By Gorsuch’s reasoning, it would therefore be illegal to discipline or dismiss an employee for committing adultery. 

Such an act would be acceptable if the person were not married, and thus to consider it cause for action amounts to discrimination on the basis of marital status. 

Or consider a McKinsey consultant who presents as white but identifies as black. He insists upon his right to join the black consultants group at the firm. Any measure that McKinsey might take against him would count as racial discrimination for precisely the reason adduced in Gorsuch’s opinion. 

Were the consultant black, his identifying as black would be acceptable. It is the fact that he is white that makes the situation difficult for the employer, who wishes to encourage support groups and mentoring for black employees. 

Therefore, if disciplined, the white who identifies as black is being discriminated against on the basis of his race.

Critics of the Bostock decision argue that it's another step in the abolition of free speech and freedom of religion. Those who would sue churches and religious schools for refusing to hire gay and lesbian employees whose sexual identity violates the tenets of the church's doctrine will now have even more powerful weapons at their disposal.

Reno asserts that,

Gorsuch piously denies that the decision has implications for bathrooms, women’s sports, and other aspects of civil life recently contested by LGBT activists. But it obviously does. The civil rights doctrine of “hostile environment” will be used to compel employers to enforce “preferred pronouns” and censure any statements of traditional sexual morality. 

The Supreme Court has determined that stamping out discrimination is a “compelling state interest,” which can override many of our constitutional rights, including religious liberty (as the Bob Jones case indicates).

There's more to Reno's column at the link. The court had to twist the Constitution to find in it a right to abortion in Roe in 1973. It had to twist it again to find in it a right to penalize under Obamacare those who didn't buy insurance and then again a right to gay marriage in Obergefell in 2015. 

Now the court is again indulging in sophistry to justify the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the 1964 Civil Rights Act which makes no mention of these contemporary concepts.

One may reply that these things should be included in the law, that it's the right thing to do, but that's not the point. If the Civil Rights Act should be revised that's the role of the legislature, not the courts. The role of the courts is to decide what the law says and whether a certain behavior conforms to the law or not. Their role is not to find creative ways to twist the law to make the behavior fit what the justices think the law should say.

It's as surprising as it is disappointing that Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts have strayed so far from what we had been given to understand their judicial philosophy would be.

Do Minds Exist and Does it Matter?

Physicalism is the view that everything in the universe, including us, can be explained in terms of physical laws such as the laws of physics and chemistry. This view is similar to what's called materialism which holds that there are no non-material substances or entities in the universe. Everything that exists is made of material stuff, atoms, or is derived from matter.

These two ways of seeing the world dominated science and philosophy throughout the twentieth century but have become increasingly untenable as evidence continues to pile up that there's more to reality than just matter.

A recent post on VP borrowed from a discussion on the evidence that convinced pioneering neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield that something besides just our material brains was involved in our cognitive experience and that materialism and physicalism could not explain conscious experience..

The following video is put out by Inspiring Philosophy and takes the discussion a few steps further. It assesses a number of additional lines of evidence that point to the existence of an immaterial mind that works with the brain but is independent of it. 

The video is a bit long, but if you're interested in the reasons why substance dualism (the view that there are two disparate substances responsible for our mental phenomena - matter and mind) is gaining renewed acceptance among philosophers and neuroscientists then you'll want to watch as much of it as you have time for.

The question of whether materialism is correct or not has important consequences for one's religious beliefs. The beliefs that we have a soul, that we have free will, that we have a self which perdures through time, that there's life after death, that there's moral accountability after death, and that God exists are all much more compatible with dualism than they are with materialism/physicalism..In fact, most materialists deny all of these beliefs.

Here's the video:

Why All This Has Happened

A friend remarked recently that it seems as if we're reliving the conditions that prevailed in 1917 in Russia and 1789 in France and which led to horribly bloody revolutions and crushing oppression..

Our country is being torn apart by thugs and mobs who feel they've nothing to lose, and who are unwittingly aided by police who're too quick to use unnecessary force, politicians who're too reluctant to use necessary force, a media that seems intent on fanning the flames, and a generation of "snowflakes" eager to destroy careers and lives of anyone who transgresses their delicate sensibilities.

Why has this all come upon us? The great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed that question during his Templeton address in London in 1983. Why, he asked, were the Russian people visited by the human pestilence that followed in the wake of the Russian revolution, the rise of Joseph Stalin, one of the most horrific butchers ever to disgrace the planet, and the unimaginable terrors the Stalinist communists perpetrated upon the people, first in Russia, then in the broader Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and large swaths of the third world?

Solzhenitsyn said this:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened."

Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

A society which has forgotten God no longer has any basis for objective moral behavior. To paraphrase John Adams, the second president of the U.S., "Our system of government was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

When God goes, so, too, go all moral constraints on the consciences of the people. Sometimes the people don't immediately realize that they're no longer tethered to a moral law, but once they do, murder, destruction, theft and tyranny often follow, at least they did in France and Russia. The masses become ungovernable, tyrants seize power, freedom is quashed, and the people are crushed under the tank treads of their "liberators."

It's a recurrent theme. Plato described it in his Republic 2300 years ago. It happened not only in 18th century France and 20th century Russia, it happened in dozens of other countries, great (China) and small (Cuba), throughout the twentieth century.

The French and Russian revolutions, like most left-wing revolutions, were self-consciously atheistic. Enormous efforts were made to wipe out Christianity, which was seen as the real enemy because the church was the only institution which had, among other things, the standing to compete with the state for peoples' allegiance and the moral authority to condemn the atrocities perpetrated by the French Jacobins and the Russian Stalinists.

In our own time the Christian church is still considered to be the enemy by the left, and for much the same reason. The secular power-brokers in our society have decided that God has no place in our public life and should have scarcely any place in our private life.

Our elites in the media, Hollywood, the courts and the academy have labored assiduously to make Him irrelevant, but what the apostle Paul said of men in his letter to the Galatians applies as well to whole societies: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."

We are today reaping the fruits of a century or more of attempts to reduce God to a non-entity. Our contemporary urban Jacobins are not interested in dialogue. Some of them would be quite happy to burn our cities to the ground and cart all dissenters off to the guillotine, gulag or firing squad.

The only thing stopping them is their lack of power and that may be a merely temporary limitation.

That may seem too strong, too alarmist, to some readers, but I'm reminded of Elie Wiesel's great book Night in which he recounts the sad tale of many Jewish families who refused to believe that they were in any serious danger from the Nazis. They couldn't imagine the horrors to which they would be subjected in a few short months, they passed on the opportunity to flee and were totally unprepared for the holocaust when it broke upon them.

When people - like the Nazis, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Antifa, etc. - no longer believe that they're accountable to God, when they no longer believe that they have a divinely-imposed duty to love their neighbor and their ideological enemies, then many of them will believe with Lenin that what's moral is whatever promotes the revolution and what's immoral is whatever hinders it.

Once that's granted it follows that anything at all, no matter how ghastly or bestial, is justified if it promotes the goals of those who are willing to burn everything down to create their idea of a new social order.

Luckily, we today have some advantages that the French and Russian people did not. We live in a democratic republic, not an aristocracy, we have an armed citizenry, we have a tradition of freedom, we have a president unlikely to try to appease the anarchists, we have social media that can get truth out to the masses in a timely manner, but we could conceivably lose all of those advantages almost overnight.

Those who consider themselves liberated from the religious superstitions of their grandparents, who are unconstrained by a belief that they're accountable to God for what they do, are waiting for that to happen and actively working to make it happen.

One irony of this, if the experience of the French and Russian radicals should repeat itself, is that those who make it happen will be among the first to find themselves sacrificed to the exigencies of the revolution they created. Leftist revolutions always wind up eating their own.

Shelby Steele

An article at The Federalist discusses an interview that appeared on Fox News with Shelby Steele, an author of several books on race in America and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Steele, who is himself African American, noted that the contemporary civil rights movement under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” was deeply unserious, catering to an old form of victimization that has accomplished nothing to lift up black people.

Here are some of Steele's remarks:

There’s a pathos here. It’s like we’ve done this too many times. We’ve been here too many times, we’ve seen this kind of thing and there’s a big hullabaloo and then it sort of fades away and this is already beginning I think to fade. What was it all about? What was the point? What did these various groups, what did they want?

Striking to me about this particular one is that there was not even a list of demands. Usually there’s always a long, elaborate list of demands. That wasn’t the case here. There’s nothing that you could come away from, this entire episode, the last two weeks or so, that’s meaningful.

Steele denies that our recent social convulsions were really about police reform. He asserted instead that the current generation of young people is a "lost generation." Why they're lost he explains a bit later on in the interview.

In response to Al Sharpton's remarks delivered at George Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapolis, Steele said this:

Al Sharpton is the master of this old form of politics that comes out of the ’60s where we as blacks cry victimization and demand the larger society give us things of some kind or another.

I will take Al Sharpton seriously - I know him, he’s a nice person - I will take his message here seriously when he stands before a congregation like that, of black people in America over a tragic event, and says what black Americans can do to get out of the situation that we’re in.

No one from the president on down anywhere says what role, what’s going wrong with black America?

Why are they so dependent on white America, on the government, that all they can think of is themselves as victims, which of course deflates themselves as human beings, undermines their best energies, their best intentions, and so after 50, 60 years now, past the civil rights bill, we’re worse off in many socioeconomic categories than we were sixty years ago.

Steele went on to explain that this African-American dependency emerged out of white Americans desperately seeking to prove themselves as non-racist.

White Americans live under this accusation that they’re racist. They need to prove that they’re not racist. In order to prove that you’re not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we’ll engineer you into the future. We’ll engineer you into equality,” Steele said. “Life doesn’t work like that. We have to engineer ourselves. Period. There is no other way.

This is a trenchant observation. White liberals infantilize blacks while at the same time they exploit them. They infantilize them by encouraging the perception that their problems are beyond their ability to solve, due as they are to an inveterate white racism, and they exploit them by promising to help them in exchange for their vote.

The votes are given, but the help never seems to materialize.

In response to the claim that the protestors do indeed have a list of demands, including defunding the police and reparations, Steele puts his finger directly on the biggest impediment to black achievement and the most salient cause of dysfunction in the black community:

I will take those things seriously when I also hear from Sharpton and others the argument that we need within the black community to work on the institution of marriage. Our families have fallen to pieces. Seventy five percent of all black children are born out of wedlock without a father.

I don’t care how many social programs you have. You’re not going to overcome that.

This is why so many African Americans are what Steele called a lost generation. Fatherlessness is for many young blacks, especially males, is a barrier to advancement almost impossible for all but the fortunate few to surmount, and the fact that so few people on the left are willing to talk about it is the most pernicious expression of racism among whites today.

Steele concludes with this:

We as black Americans need to begin to take our fate back into our own hands, and stop crying racism. There's a little racism out here. there always was and always will be. Why is that an argument to stop, to not move forward, to not be responsible for your own fate?

You can send the police to as many sensitivity training sessions as you want, it's not going to read a story to a child at night before he goes to sleep so he's developing his mind...so he can someday compete in the most advanced society in the modern world.

You can watch the whole interview here.

Meanwhile, at least these two of Steele's books - The Content of Our Character and White Guilt - should be on the summer's reading list of everyone concerned about race relations in America.

Penfield's Conversion to Dualism

Wilder Penfield was a pioneering neurosurgeon at the University of Montreal during the middle decades of the twentieth century who started out holding a materialist view of the brain and mind, but who found himself persuaded by his research to embrace dualism.

Materialists believe that our cognitive experience is solely the product of the material elements of the central nervous system, primarily the brain. Dualists argue that in addition to the material "stuff" of the brain we also have a mind that plays an important role in our thought life.

An article at MindMatters features a transcript of an interview with another neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor, who explains the three findings that caused Penfield to abandon materialism.

Egnor notes that during the course of his surgeries on epileptic patients Penfield could stimulate the brains of the patients, and since the brain doesn't experience pain, the patients were conscious and responsive during the operation.

                                                   Wilder Penfield c. 1958

When Penfield would stimulate different areas of the brain he could get patients to move a limb, or retrieve a memory, but he could never induce a patient to have a thought about an abstract concept like justice or mercy. He was never able to stimulate a patient's reason or intellect.

Here's Egnor:

All the stimulations were concrete things: Move your arm or feel a tingling or even a concrete memory, like you remember your grandmother’s face or something. But there was never any abstract thought stimulated.

And Penfield said hey, if the brain is the source of abstract thought, once in a while, putting an electrical current on some part of the cortex, I ought to get an abstract thought. He never, ever did. So he said that the obvious explanation for that is that abstract thought doesn’t come from the brain.

Penfield also found by studying hundreds of thousands of cases of epileptic seizures that the person never had a seizure that had intellectual content or involved abstract reasoning.

When people have seizures, sometimes they have a generalized seizure. Sometimes they just fall on the ground and go unconscious. Or sometimes they’ll have what’s called a focal seizure where they’ll have a twitching of a finger or a twitching of a limb or they’ll have tingling feeling, the same kind of things that he got when he stimulated the surface of the brain.

But nobody ever had a calculus seizure. Nobody ever had a seizure where they couldn’t stop doing arithmetic. Or couldn’t stop doing logic.

And he said, why is that? If arithmetic and logic and all that abstract thought come from the brain, every once in a while you ought to get a seizure that makes it happen. So he asked rhetorically, why are there no intellectual seizures? His answer was, because the intellect doesn’t come from the brain.

Penfield's third bit of evidence was this:

He would ask people to move their arm during the surgery. So he’d be playing around with their brain. And he’d say. “Whenever you want to, move your right arm.” The person would move their arm.

And, once in a while, he’d stimulate the part of the brain that made the arm move. 

And they moved their arm also when he did that. And then he would ask them, “I want you to tell me when I’m making your arm move and when you’re moving your arm without me making you do it. Tell me if you can tell the difference.” And the patients could always tell the difference.

The patients always knew that when he stimulated their arm, it was him doing it, not them. And when they stimulated their arm, they were doing it, not him. So Penfield said, he couldn’t stimulate the will. He could never trick the patients into thinking it was them doing it. He said, the patients always retained a correct sense of agency. They always knew if they did it or if he did it.

So he said the will was not something he could stimulate, meaning it was not material.

Egnor remarks that these three lines of evidence were dispositive for Penfield. He believed he could not sustain his belief that the brain was the only thing involved in mentation:

So he had three lines of evidence: His inability to stimulate intellectual thought, the inability of seizures to cause intellectual thought, and his inability to stimulate the will. … So he concluded that the intellect and the will are not from the brain.

This is not proof, of course, that materialism is wrong, but it's certainly interesting evidence against it.

The Eye

For about the last century or so Darwinian naturalists have cited the eye's design as evidence against the existence of an intelligent designer. This is surprising because the eye is an exquisitely engineered organ, but the argument of the Darwinians has been that there are several design flaws in the eye's structure that any competent engineer would have avoided. 

One of the alleged flaws is that the rod and cone cells in the retina face backward rather than forward which would seem to minimize the amount of light that reaches them. As such, the eye seems to reflect sub-optimal engineering, and, the argument goes, since sub-optimal structures are what we would expect given that naturalistic evolution is a blind, rather haphazard process, they're the very opposite of what we would expect were the structure intelligently constructed by a competent designer.

As the short video below illustrates, however, the backward facing cells are actually an ingenious way to optimize vision and not a defective design at all.

The video also makes short work of the claim that complex eyes evolved over very long periods of evolutionary time by numerous successive short steps. In fact, the very earliest eyes found in the fossil record are just as complex as are the eyes found in organisms today. If eyes did evolve the process must have been very rapid and thus, it's reasonable to suspect, somehow intelligently directed.

Indeed, the only basis there can be for ruling out an intelligent agent guiding the process is an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, but why privilege naturalism in such a way if there's evidence to suggest it may be wrong? Yet people do it all the time as this famous quote from geneticist Richard Lewontin reveals:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism [i.e. naturalism].

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As Lewontin's declaration of fealty to naturalism illustrates, it's not science as such that conflicts with the notion of intelligent agency at work in biology. The conflict is one between two metaphysical worldviews, naturalism and theism. Lewontin is acknowledging that his choice to embrace naturalism is a subjective philosophical preference, a preference akin to a personal taste and not based on any empirical evidence at all. He embraces naturalism for no reason other than that he has a deep metaphysical, and perhaps psychological, aversion to theism. 

Anyway, give the video a look:

Post-Death Experiences

Near Death Experiences (NDEs), or what should probably be called "After Death Experiences," are becoming much better documented and much harder for those inclined to do so to ignore. Something is happening, but the question is, what?

NDEs are problematic for both Christians and materialists. They're a problem for some Christians because although they point to the existence of the self after physical death - a state of affairs that reinforces a belief Christians also hold - many of the details of what persons who've experienced these episodes relate do not conform to traditional Christian beliefs about that existence.

They're problematic for materialists because materialists believe that all we are is our physical, material selves and when we die our self is extinguished. If it is the case that our existence continues after the death of the body it would be a fact completely incompatible with materialism.

Thus, if these are genuine after death phenomena some Christians may have to adjust their thinking on the afterlife, but materialists would have to give up their belief in materialism altogether.

A recent article at Mind Matters discusses an article on NDEs which appeared in a recent issue of Scientific American. The author, a neuroscientist named Christof Koch, acknowledges that people who report these experiences are reporting something genuine. They're not fabricating the accounts, but Koch, being a materialist seeks a materialistic explanation for them.

The author of the Mind Matters article is Michael Egnor, also a neurosurgeon. Egnor writes that,

Koch points out that NDEs share common characteristics across individuals, cultures, and historical eras—freedom from pain, traveling down a tunnel to a light, an intense sense of peace, seeing loved ones, experiencing a life review, and having an unusual sense of time and space. These experiences are also remembered with unusual intensity. To the person who experiences them, they seem “realer than real”—and they often fundamentally change the person’s outlook on life.

It is when Koch addresses some of the neuroscience attempts to explain NDEs that his discussion goes off the rails. The number and variety of the materialist theories he describes counts against their veracity—it conveys more of a sense of groping for any plausible materialist explanation than of sober scientific investigation.

For example, he points out that NDEs are no more likely to occur in people with religious beliefs and beliefs in the afterlife than in people who lack those beliefs. But, far from undermining the significance of NDEs, that finding supports the view that they are not mere confirmation bias toward existing beliefs during a traumatic experience.

Egnor is right about this. If NDEs were, in fact, a real post-death experience of an afterlife we would expect that one's religious beliefs would have nothing to do with whether one experienced it or not.
Egnor then challenges Koch's explanation of what causes the NDE in the dying or dead person:

In an attempt to account for NDEs in a fully materialist way, Koch ascribes many of them to “power outages” in the cerebral cortex during the dying process. 

This is an implausible account for two reasons. First, a sizeable portion (around 20% in many studies) of NDEs are correlated with perceptions and knowledge that could not have been obtained via conventional means. A famous example in the neurosurgical community is that of Pamela Reynolds, who had an out-of-body NDE during cardiac arrest associated with aneurysm surgery. 

Afterwards, she remembered watching her own operation while her heart was stopped and she could recount precise details of events during her surgery that she could not possibly have known unless she had actually seen them.

Hers is not the only example of an out-of-body experience that is inexplicable in materialist terms. One of my colleagues encountered a young child who had complex skull surgery who described his own operation in meticulous visual detail, despite being under general anesthesia and having his eyes and face covered during the procedure.

The technical details of the surgical procedure were idiosyncratic to that neurosurgeon; information was not publicly available and was not described to the family or the child in the kind of detail that the child reported seeing. The family was so shocked by their child’s awareness of the details that they asked why my colleague hadn’t used anesthesia for the surgery! 

There are many such examples of NDEs where details of accounts could be correlated, which of course cannot be explained by the “power outage” theory.

One of the most remarkable accounts I ever came across was of a Seattle woman named Vicki Noratuk who was totally blind from birth. Noratuk was "killed" in an automobile accident and yet was able to accurately report what happened to her in the hospital and even to describe seeing color which she had never seen in her life. She was resuscitated but never regained her sight. She tells her story in this video.

Egnor continues his critique of Koch's explanation for NDEs:

The second reason that Koch’s “power outage” theory fails is more mundane. The usual consequences of brain hypoxia and hypoperfusion are very well understood and they invariably entail confusion, diminished sensations, loss of memory, etc..

All of these experiences are antithetical to NDEs, which are characterized by stunning clarity, inexplicable knowledge, and lifelong memory of the events. NDEs improve awareness and understanding, which is utterly unlike brain hypoxia and brain damage.

Other materialist explanations for NDEs fail in much the same way. While drug intoxication, seizures, uncontrolled release of neurotransmitters, and the like may have some superficial resemblances to NDEs, all of them utterly fail to capture the whole phenomenon. NDEs are radically different from any mental experience caused by brain impairment.

There's more in the Mind Matters article that anyone interested in NDEs should read. It's a fascinating subject.

A Contingent World

Several years ago cosmologists Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes wrote an excellent book titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Universe which describes the amazingly delicate settings of the constants, parameters and forces that comprise the structure of our cosmos. 

Having enjoyed the book I was pleased to come across an article by Lewis in Cosmos Magazine which serves as a pretty good summary of A Fortunate Universe. One statement in the article, however, was problematic, and I'd like to address it. 

Before I do, though, here's the lede from the article:

For more than 400 years, physicists treated the universe like a machine, taking it apart to see how it ticks. The surprise is it turns out to have remarkably few parts: just leptons and quarks and four fundamental forces to glue them together.

But those few parts are exquisitely machined. If we tinker with their settings, even slightly, the universe as we know it would cease to exist. Science now faces the question of why the universe appears to have been “fine-tuned” to allow the appearance of complex life, a question that has some potentially uncomfortable answers.

Lewis then goes on to discuss several interesting ways in which this fine-tuning manifests itself and follows up with this:

Examining the huge number of potential universes, each with their own unique laws of physics, leads to a startling conclusion: most of the universes that result from fiddling with the fundamental constants would lack physical properties needed to support complex life.

While this is a scientific article, we cannot ignore the fact that to many, the fact that the universe is finely tuned for intelligent life shows the hand of the creator who set the dials. But this answer, of course, leads to another question: who created the creator? Let’s see what alternatives science can offer.

But then he dashes off to talk about multiverses and grand simulations without even trying to answer the query he has raised, as if the designer hypothesis has been disposed of simply by posing the question. In fact, there are a number of ways to answer it as well as answering Lewis' apparent assumption that the question "who created the creator?" is itself an adequate refutation of the design hypothesis.

One response is to note that the universe can be thought of as the sum of all contingent entities (a contingent entity is anything which could possibly not exist and whose existence depends upon something else. You and I are contingent, as is the earth and, indeed, the cosmos itself). 

That being so, there must be a cause of the universe that is non-contingent otherwise the cause would be dependent upon something else and would itself be contingent and thus part of the universe. This would mean that the universe would be the cause of itself which is metaphysically absurd. 

Now a cause that is non-contingent is necessary. It doesn't depend upon anything else for its existence. Thus Lewis' question, what caused the creator, is philosophically ill-conceived. The creator of all contingent things must itself be uncaused.

Moreover, the design hypothesis asserts that the universe has a sufficient cause. Once the skeptic grants that the universe has a cause, even if, in defiance of Occam's razor, he wants to suggest the possibility of an infinity of such causes, he has pretty much conceded that the design hypothesis is correct.

Anyway, here's a short video on the contingency argument as developed by 17th century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz:

 

P.S. There's a typo in Lewis' article that those who read it should be aware of. The article says that string theory allows for the existence of 10,500 different universes. The number should be 10^500 universes (i.e. a one with 500 zeros after it). It makes a big difference. Those interested in the fine-tuning of the universe should read the whole article as Lewis provides a good overview of the contemporary issues involved.

Drink the Kool-Aid

An essay by Chad Sanders could easily be ignored as the ranting of a narcissistic crank were it not published as an op-ed in the prestigious New York Times last Friday. John Sexton at Hot Air.com tells us that Mr. Sanders' column, titled “I Don’t Need ‘Love’ Texts From My White Friends.” opens with these words: “My book is coming out in a few months, and I don’t know if I’m going to be alive to see it, because I’m a black man.”

Mr. Sanders wishes us to know two things. One, he has a book coming out and two, his life is in serious danger because he's black. I don't know where he thinks the threat to his life comes from, but if he thinks it comes from racist whites he's delusional. Statistically speaking, he has a far greater chance of having his life ended by another black man than he does by a white person, police officer or otherwise.

Sexton continues:

That combination of humble-bragging and self-pity gets repeated for a dozen or more paragraphs with the author repeatedly saying he’s tired of white friends texting to express their support which he sees as just a way to express guilt. 

Actually, this is one point on which I find myself somewhat agreeing with Sanders. Liberal whites are often so eager to be granted absolution by a black person for the sin of being born white that they'll engage in the most obsequious groveling as penance. The behavior is demeaning to the white person and insulting to the black person who is, in fact, often treated as if he/she were a child.

Anyway, Sexton goes on:

[Sanders] doesn’t want them to say they care about him as a person, he wants them to do something practical for the cause. And one of the things he recommends is to text their relatives and let them know they are being cut off socially and emotionally unless and until those relatives show support for “black lives.” [emphasis added].

Here's Sanders' text:

So please, stop sending #love. Stop sending positive vibes. Stop sending your thoughts. Here are three suggestions on more immediately impactful things to offer instead:

Money: To funds that pay legal fees for black people who are unjustly arrested, imprisoned or killed or to black politicians running for office.
Texts: To your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.[emphasis added]
Protection: To fellow black protesters who are at greater risk of harm during demonstrations.

Yes, these actions may seem grave. But you insist that you love me, and love requires sacrifice. Text messages are unlimited on most data plans. Emojis are not sacrificial.

Sexton quotes Quillette editor Jonathan Kay as pointing out in a tweet that this is exactly the sort of demand that cult leaders impose upon their followers:

"only ppl I've seen who demand that you cut off relationships with family are either religious nuts seeking to punish family apostates, gender crazies on tumblr videos telling autistic girls to cut off body parts & run away from home, Scientologists... And this author [i.e. Sanders]. All cults."

Sexton adds these observations:

Kay's not wrong. This is exactly the kind of thing Scientology does, requiring those inside the cult to cut themselves off from those outside, even close family members. In fact, in Scientology those on the inside are denounced for failing to distance themselves from friends and family who aren’t supportive.

Even apart from the cultic nature of this, it should strike people as obviously wrong. The author isn’t recommending an appeal based on reason or empathy, he jumps directly to emotional blackmail. It would have been one thing if he’d merely said, ‘talk to your friends about why this matters.’ But he’s gone beyond that to saying anyone who really cares should demand compliance. 

The creepiest part is his justification of this demand, i.e. “love requires sacrifice.” If you love me, you’ll sacrifice your relationship with your friends and parents.

This is the point at which adults should suddenly realize they’ve been asked to join a cult and should tell author Chad Sanders they aren’t interested in his “friendship.” 

Seriously, have any of your friends ever told you to cut yourself off from your own parents? What would you say to them if they tried it?

This author is so self-involved he doesn’t seem to spare a thought for anyone else. Imagine being an elderly parent or grandparent whose child calls to say that they’ve decided they can’t speak to you again unless you send money to Black Lives Matter or go out in the midst of a pandemic to join a march. The author doesn’t even hesitate.

He’s far more concerned about the vanishingly small possibility that he’ll be murdered (before his book comes out).

As horrid as all this sounds it's not all that unusual on the left. In fact, it's the way leftists have always viewed allegiance to their cause - absolute conformity to the party line or total excommunication.

 
It's very much the way twentieth century communist totalitarians treated "deviationists." No one was allowed to dissent in even the smallest degree from the doctrines handed down by the party elites on pain of banishment to Siberia or the firing squad. Indeed, the only thing that prevents contemporary leftists from destroying anyone who disagrees with them, whether family or former friends, is their lack, for now, of the power to do so.

Nevertheless, attempts to achieve "ideological purity" are all over university campuses and social media. No matter who you are, if you refuse to toe the line laid down by the bullies, you'll be fired, cancelled, censored, censured and turned into a pariah or non-person.

 
Parents, siblings and friends must either drink the ideological Kool-aid themselves or they're dead to those they love.

What an awful testimony to what happens to people when they make their ideology their religion.

Some Thoughts on the Recent Troubles

There've been numerous demands for justice this past week, a circumstance which is not a little ironic. 

After all, we live in a society that has made it clear that there's to be no mixing of religious belief with public policy, but a society simply can't say, at least not rationally, that we don't want God but we do want justice.  

Calls for justice are empty in a secular society which sees human beings as little more than an evolutionary product of the struggle for survival. We're told that we're just animals, "naked apes," but where is there justice among animals? What makes our sense of justice an objective moral imperative rather than a mere illusion? 

Justice as we understand it, and as it's being demanded in the streets, is an artifact left over from our Judeo-Christian heritage. Secularism has no basis for it. Justice in the absence of God is simply whatever the strong can impose on the weak. For justice to exist, objective morality has to exist  (i.e. some things, like harming the innocent, have to be objectively wrong) and for objective morality to exist God has to exist. 

Calls for justice coming from those who stand in the Christian tradition, like Martin Luther King, have resonance. Those who demand justice based on a secular understanding of the world, however, are either hypocritically piggy-backing on the Christian tradition they reject or they're just shouting meaningless slogans as a form of public virtue-preening.

Clamorings to abolish or defund the police are also emanating from the protest marches.  Here's a suggestion: Why not establish police-free zones, like urban enterprise zones, in those neighborhoods where the police are most resented? Neighborhoods can democratically decide whether they want a police presence or not.  

This would be a disaster, of course, for the people in those neighborhoods; businesses would flee and gangs would take over, but at least there'd be no cops around risking their lives to protect people who don't want their protection. And it'd allow the corrupt city politicians to pocket more taxpayer money that would've otherwise gone to funding the police.

It sounds like a good idea, and I don't know why it hasn't actually been tried before.

Another thought: Maybe I'm too cynical, but watching the memorials honoring George Floyd, I have to wonder how many of the "mourners," aside from his family, really care about George Floyd the man. After all, we certainly don't see such an outpouring of grief over the deaths of any of the other thousands of black men murdered every year. Why not?

Most people probably care more about what Floyd's death symbolizes, so wouldn't it be more appropriate to honor instead all the innocent victims, living and dead, of police recklessness, brutality and malfeasance? This would be a much more meaningful observance as it would encompass all those who've had their lives unjustly devastated by law enforcement in this country, but that would, of course, include Michael Flynn so there probably won't be an upswell of support for this idea from the mainstream media.

The governors and mayors of the states and cities hardest hit by the violence and unrest are assuring us that the inequities and  racism that led to the death of George Floyd and the deaths of fifteen others during the riots, as well as the huge property losses, cannot be allowed to continue. They're going to "bring about change," they're going to "eliminate systemic racism," but what, exactly, does any of that actually mean? 

Does it mean "reparations"? Perhaps it means that where minorities are underrepresented more will be hired. Perhaps it means more affirmative action. 

Are there too few blacks in physics, astronomy, engineering and neurosurgery? No problem, just lower the standards and hire more. 

Are there too few whites in the NBA and NFL? No problem, just lower the standards and hire more. (Well, maybe we need to tap the brakes on that one. We don't want to overdo our attempt to achieve racial equity. After all, some racial inequities are more acceptable than others, just like some reasons for flouting social distancing are more acceptable than others.).

Are there too many members of one race committing a particular kind of crime, such as whites committing white-collar crimes and blacks committing street crimes?  No problem, just legalize the crime and, poof, the inequities are gone. What could be easier?

Here's another irony.  Most of  the states and cities that have suffered severely from the late unrest have been governed for decades by liberal Democrats, and, in the case of the mayors, many of them are African American. Why have these politicians just now awakened to the need to "do something" and why do the people so often victimized by the inequities they live with every day continue to vote for the same party every election that has done nothing to meliorate their suffering? 

What has electing Democrats done to change the prospects of those citizens living in our poorest neighborhoods? Every election season they talk about change, but for the poor in Democrat run cities and states nothing ever seems to change.

A final thought: Minnesota's Attorney General, Keith Ellison, a black liberal Democrat, as it happens, has decided to push all his chips onto the table by charging former officer Derek Chauvin with second degree homicide in the death of George Floyd and charge the other three former cops with aiding and abetting second degree homicide. 

I don't know who's advising Ellison, but in order to convict on a charge of second degree homicide in Minnesota you have to prove an intent to kill or prove that the death occurred during the commision of a felony. It's hard to see how it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt either that Chauvin actually intended to kill Floyd or that in subduing him he was committing a felony, but that's what Ellison has chosen to base his case on. 

Aiding and abetting is defined as occurring when a person is criminally liable for a crime committed by another if the person intentionally aids, advises, hires, counsels, or conspires with or otherwise procures the other to commit the crime. It's not clear that the other three officers did any of these things. The most they could be convicted of, it seems, would be negligent homicide because they stood by and did nothing to stop Chauvin.

But that's not the route Ellison has chosen to take. 

So imagine what'll happen now in cities across this country if the state of Minnesota fails, as seems quite possible, to make its case, and all four officers are acquitted. 

Heaven help us.