Math Is Hard

An article by Nancy Pearcey at the American Thinker illuminates how the corrosive acid of wokeness eats through everything and finds racism everywhere, even in something as unpolitical, universal, unbiased and successful as mathematics.

Pearcey begins her column with some mind-boggling illustrations:

A young woman describing herself as a teacher, Ph.D. student, and "social justice change agent," recently gained notoriety for tweeting, "The idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural," a product of "western imperialism/colonialism."

Yes, even mathematics, held up as the most objective and neutral of disciplines, is being reshaped by critical theory, which claims that all ideas are social constructions by groups using their power to advance their own interests.

This is not just the inflammatory language of young social justice warriors. Alan Bishop, who teaches at Cambridge University, wrote an article titled "Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism," in which he deplores "the process of cultural invasion in colonised countries by western mathematics."

In Educational Studies in Mathematics, two math educators at Georgia State University write, "Dominant mathematics is a system established as right and True by the White men who have historically controlled and constructed the game." The authors call for "critical mathematics" to expose "the power dynamic between the oppressor — White, male mathematicians — and the oppressed — the marginalized Other."

Gutiérrez charges that algebra and geometry perpetuate white privilege because the textbook version of math history is Eurocentric: "[c]urricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans."

I'm not sure which history textbooks she's talking about. We all use Arabic numerals, and in my college math class, we learned that the concept of zero as a place holder came from India; that the Babylonians gave us the 360-degree circle and the 60-minute hour; that the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Chinese all had a rough idea of the value of pi.

A website for teachers, "K–12 Academics," calls for the development of "anti-racist" mathematics: 

I have no idea what an "anti-racist" mathematics would look like. Would we have to pretend that Europeans had no role in the development of mathematics? Would we have to conjure imaginary discoveries of mathematical principles by races and tribes in a kind of historical affirmative action?

As Pearcey notes, mathematics was developed by scholars all across the ancient world, not just Europe. Geometry, in particular, was a product of scholars throughout the Middle East and Egypt as well as Greece. It was pursued and advanced in the West because it was enormously successful in explaining how the universe works and because it allowed for giant strides in technology.

Pearcey argues that the above examples are the bizarre offshoots of what academics refer to as Critical Theory which maintains that all human activity can be explained in terms of power plays to advance the interests of oneself or one's group:

Critical theorists argue that mathematics is just another arbitrary human creation that has been used to privilege certain groups while excluding others. Since all worldviews are regarded as equally valid, the selection of any one worldview to teach in the classroom can only be a matter of privileging the interests of one social group over others.

I wonder how many folks who believe that math is arbitrary would board an airplane developed by aeronautical engineers who believed that any equations used in designing the plane were just as valid as any other.

Pearcy adds:

But critical theory contains a fatal self-contradiction. While proponents of the theory treat everyone else's beliefs as relative to social conditions, they treat their own beliefs as objective and universally true. And they are just as exclusive as anyone else in insisting that their view captures the way things really are. 

Critical theory is also inherently coercive, which makes it dangerous. Because it reduces truth claims to power plays, it has no problem with using power to advance its own views. Gutiérrez warns, "Any resistance to the sociopolitical turn is a form of hegemony." In other words, no resistance, no disagreement allowed.

Many educators are buying into critical theory because it promises them a more culturally sensitive approach for helping non-white students become more confident in their mathematical abilities — certainly a worthy goal. But ultimately, critical theory will harm more than help. Because it denies the very possibility of knowledge, ironically, it undercuts the deepest motivation for education: the unrelenting search for truth.

Or maybe they're buying into critical theory because math is hard, both to teach and to learn, so their solution is to simply do away with math. Next they'll be saying the same thing about reading and writing. 

What a great way to insure that inequalities between socio-economic strata grow even wider and that the more disadvantaged are plunged back to a state of primitive barbarism. No hate-filled Klansman could've devised a more insidious plot to oppress blacks than promoting the idea that they alone, among all the nation's minorities, can't learn the white man's math and shouldn't be expected to.

Why Think People Are Equal?

Yuval Harari is the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and a secular materialist who nevertheless recognizes the distressing shortcomings of his materialism. In Sapiens he notes that, 

[T]he American Founding Fathers . . . imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of [human beings], and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.

In other words, when a secular modern speaks of ideals like justice and human rights, he or she is simply reciting contemporary fairy-tales. The ideals of which these folks speak are socially fabricated illusions employed to oil the gears of society to make it function better. 

Indeed, the claim to be "fighting against injustice" is a foolish absurdity unless one is operating out of a Christian (or theistic) worldview. Every time our secular social justice warriors speak of "justice" and "equality" they're actually parasitizing the Christianity many of them reject.

Harari continues,

It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal?

. . . According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal.’ The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God.   

Apart from Christianity there's no foundation for the principle of human equality and therefore no foundation for the idea of justice. Those who march down our cities' streets shouting "No Justice, No Peace" are yelling an empty, meaningless slogan, unless they're standing in a Christian worldview.

Those who complain of the injustice of income inequality, discrimination and racism are doing nothing more than emoting. They're expressing their displeasure with things as they are, but there's no more heft to their complaint than if they simply said "Ugh! I really don't like that."

The question they should be asked is why are these things wrong? Why are they "unjust," and why is injustice wrong? Unless they stand on a Christian understanding of the world, or at least a theistic understanding, they can have no coherent answer. One can be a secularist or atheist or one can believe that injustice and inequality are objectively wrong, but one can't do both.

Harari clearly recognizes the problem for secularists such as himself:

However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.

Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently.’

Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.

It's intriguing that people can accept all that and still think it's somehow more sophisticated, virtuous or rational to live their actual lives as though it's all false. When a secular (or atheistic) materialist's life day after day repudiates the secular materialism he claims to believe, the one thing he can't claim is that his secular materialism makes sense.

Comparing Stories

A worldview is a set of assumptions we hold that act as a lens through which we look at life and the world. Our worldview is our story, our way of thinking about life. 

There are basically two stories that are competing today for our hearts and minds. There are, of course, many other options but for most of us in the Western world they distill to two: Naturalism and theism.

Naturalism is the belief that nature is all there is. There are no non-natural or immaterial entities like souls, minds or God. There are no miracles. Everything is the inevitable consequence of the laws of physics. 

Theism, on the other hand, is the belief that there is a personal supernatural Being who created the world and is, to some extent, involved in it. This Being - God - is the source of meaning, morality, beauty, love and human dignity and much else.

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live consistently within its parameters. On this test naturalism falls short since many, if not most, naturalists find that they have to give up some beliefs and assumptions that are very difficult, or even impossible, for them to let go. 

Among the things for which there is no room in a naturalist ontology (set of things which exist) are the following: 

1. ultimate meaning in life 

2. free will 

3. objective moral right or wrong/justice 

4. intrinsic value of human beings/human rights and dignity 

5. mind/consciousness 

6. an adequate ground for beauty, love and objective truth 

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in the classical Christian theistic story, it could be argued that at least some of them (1,3,4,6) are actually entailed by that story. 

The logic of naturalism, however, compels one to regard them all as illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that. They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives do have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if they do have free will. 

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but in the way they live their everyday lives they affirm their reality over and over again. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage, because their own worldview simply cannot provide them. 

But when one has to poach from competing stories in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to holding a rational, coherent worldview. 

To be consistent a naturalist should be a nihilist and accept the emptiness and despair entailed by nihilism, yet even though some naturalists see that, few can bring themselves to accept it. For those who do, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that naturalism requires. 

For many others, though, who long for that same liberation, the nihilistic consequences either don't occur to them, or if they do, they're often simply ignored as though they don't matter. 

Naturalists are free to embrace this schizoid view of life, of course, but they're not free to live as if they can hold onto those existential needs while denying the only adequate ground for them and at the same time declare their worldview to be more rational than the Christian alternative.

It's not.

The Warfare Myth

Ever since the 19th century there's been a myth circulating that there's an inherent conflict between science and religion, specifically Christianity. The belief, often held by contemporary atheists but rejected by virtually every historian of science, is that there's a logical incompatibility between the two spheres that has led to intellectual warfare between them. 

According to this myth, to be either a person of science or a religious person is to automatically exclude being the other.

In his book The War That Never Was philosopher of science Kenneth Kemp explains why the Warfare Myth is false and why there's in fact no incompatibility between science and the Christian belief that God both created the world and has acted in it.

He gives four possible views of the relationship between nature and non-nature (or the supernatural). In the list below V stands for "View." Kemp uses a slightly different notation that would require a bit of explanation so I've taken the liberty of using a simpler notation:

V1- Only natural beings exist.
V2- Non-natural beings (if they exist at all) have no causal influence on the natural world.
V3- Non-natural beings exist, but they only occasionally act as direct causes of events in the natural world.
V4- Non-natural beings exist and frequently act as direct causes of what happens in the natural world.

V1 is incompatible with Christianity but is not at all necessary for the conduct of science. Indeed 50 of the 52 greatest progenitors of the scientific revolution were theists who rejected V1.

V2 is sometimes said to be necessary for science because if a non-natural being (God) exerted causal influence on the world then it would be impossible to formulate laws of nature since there'd be no regularities to provide the basis for such laws. This, however, is not true. A law of nature is simply a description of the way nature operates as long as there's no outside interference.

If an outside force interferes with a falling object by catching it that doesn't violate the law of gravitational attraction nor does it render the law invalid. As Kemp says, "Science does not presuppose, entail, or have any other logical connection to V2."

V4 would indeed make science difficult, but the belief that non-natural interventions are frequent is not essential to Christianity. That leaves V3 which is the position, probably, of most philosophically informed Christians.

Some naturalists have argued against V3, however. Biologist Richard Lewontin, for example, famously wrote that,

Either the world of phenomena is a consequence of the regular operation of repeatable causes and their repeatable effects... or else at every instant all physical regularities may be ruptured and a totally unforeseeable set of events may occur. One must take sides on the issue of whether the sun is sure to rise tomorrow. We cannot live simultaneously in a world of natural causation and of miracles, for if one miracle can occur, then there is no limit.

At first reading this sounds like a compelling refutation of V3, but Kemp offers a trenchant criticism of it. He begins with this sentence:

Science no more requires that all of what we observe be caused by natural interaction than it requires perfect observation on the part of scientists or the absolute impossibility of scientific fraud.

He then asks us to imagine Lewontin's quote modified by replacing parts of it with the words underlined as follows:

Either the world of phenomena is exactly as it is reported in laboratory notebooks ... or else all the data in all our laboratory notebooks could be completely wrong...We cannot simultaneously rely on science and admit that scientists can make mistakes, for if one mistake can occur, then there is no limit.

Kemp observes that phenomena are not exactly as reported in lab notebooks, scientists sometimes make imperfect measurements, sometimes they cheat, but these things are not common and despite them science is a very reliable guide to the way the world usually works. 

Just as science is fruitful despite these irregularities, it would still be reliable and fruitful, he argues, if there are occasional instances of supernatural intervention.

There's much more to Kemp's argument, but the point here is that there's no necessary or inevitable conflict, then, between the practice of science and the beliefs articulated in the Christian creeds. The claim that there is may perhaps be an expression of wish fulfillment on the part of naturalists who are a priori hostile to those creeds.

The Sudden Death of Freedom of Speech

Graham Piro at The Washington Free Beacon cites a new survey from the Cato Institute which found that a majority of Americans say they are worried about facing social or professional consequences for their political views. The details are not surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to our culture's drift toward totalitarian group think, but they are certainly dismaying.

Here's Piro:

The survey, conducted by Cato in collaboration with YouGov, found 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression out of fear of offending others. Majorities across the political spectrum said they are worried about sharing their political opinions, including 52 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents, and 77 percent of Republicans.

Thirty-one percent of liberals, 30 percent of moderates, and 34 percent of conservatives said they are specifically worried about professional retribution for political speech. The only respondent group with a majority confident in sharing political opinions was the "strong liberal" group, 58 percent of whom said they were confident. 

Fifty-two percent of respondents who identified as "liberal" said the political climate prevents them from sharing some of their beliefs, while 64 percent of "moderate" respondents and 77 percent of "conservative" and "strongly conservative" respondents said the same.

Respondents with stronger ideological leanings expressed support for punishing business executives who engage in political speech, although the sentiment was higher for strong liberals than strong conservatives. Half of "strong liberals" and 36 percent of "strong conservatives" said they support punishing business executives who donate to the opposing party's presidential candidate.

A Politico survey found that more Americans are becoming aware of so-called cancel culture, a social trend in which views are regulated through public shaming and self-censorship. Almost half of respondents told the outlet cancel culture had "gone too far," and only a quarter of respondents said they were not familiar with or had no opinion on the matter.

Cancel culture has gained prominence as more private citizens have faced real-world consequences for controversies that grew online. Recent examples include a high school teacher and coach who said he was fired for writing that "Trump is our president" on social media, a power company worker falsely accused of flashing a "white-power" sign, and an immigrant owner of a catering company whose daughter had written offensive social media posts as a teenager.

New York Times opinion editor James Bennet resigned from the paper after the opinion section ran an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that a group of staffers claimed put black Times employees "in danger." Opinion editor Bari Weiss also resigned from the paper, citing harassment she experienced from her colleagues, and Andrew Sullivan said he left New York magazine because he has "no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated" in the future.

At the beginning of the month, an open letter in Harper's Magazine defending the free exchange of ideas roiled progressives online and caused three of the letter's signers to withdraw their signatures. A response letter argued that the Harper's letter was a "caustic reaction to a diversifying industry" and accused free speech advocates of using "nebulous concepts and coded language" to uphold institutional norms that protect bigotry.

Anecdotally, I personally have heard people say that they support Trump but would never put a bumper sticker on their car, a Trump sign in their yard or wear a MAGA hat for fear that their property would be damaged or that they themselves would be physically assaulted.

Why have people, predominately people on the left, abandoned the Enlightenment principle of free speech and dialogue in favor of an oppressive power play that destroys careers and property and stokes resentments? Perhaps one reason is that these folks are at some level aware that their ideas are not only wildly unpopular when properly vetted, but they're also intellectually untenable. 

They sense that if their ideas were subjected to free and open discussion they wouldn't survive scrutiny and they themselves would look foolish. All that's left to those who wish to see those ideas implemented is to monopolize discussion by shouting, by sloganeering and by shutting up the opposition by whatever means necessary.

It's childish and barbarous, but that's where our society suddenly seems to find itself.

A Few Reasons Why Humans Aren't Just Animals

It's been said that the 20th century abolished the difference between man and animal (via Darwinian materialism) and that the 21st century seeks to abolish the difference between man and machine (via AI, among other things).

Whether the latter effort will be successful remains to be seen, but the conflation of man with other mammals is hard to credit. The differences between human beings and animals are not simply quantitative - humans are not simply more intelligent - they're qualitative as well.

Humans, for example, have a sense of beauty and a desire to be surrounded by it. We possess a sense of humor, a sense of morality, a sense of the transcendent, an ability to create music and an ability to think abstractly, all of which are unique in the animal kingdom.

Paul Gosselin, in his book Flight from the Absolute, adds a few more unique human capacities. He writes that in addition to some of the aforementioned, mankind's abilities include:

...the awareness of his own existence, awareness of his future death (even when not imminent), his ability to develop and perceive his identity, his ability to develop a belief system and build a culture/civilization on this basis.

Perhaps, though, the most amazing ability possessed uniquely by humans is language. Gosselin quotes linguist Noam Chomsky who wrote:

When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the "human essence," the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man ....this creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.

Ideas have consequences. Gosselin observes that if the difference between humans and animals is only quantitative we're led to the conclusion that there's no reason to treat humans differently from animals. He quotes philosopher Mortimer Adler in this regard:

If a difference in degree justifies a difference in treatment, why would not superior men be justified in treating inferior men in whatever way men think they're justified in treating non-human animals....[Men] kill animals for for the enjoyment of the sport; or, ... for the purposes...of medical research.

Now, if these actions can be justified by nothing more than a difference in degree between human and non-human animals, why is not the same justification available for the actions of Nazis or other racists?

Indeed, the superior/inferior distinction has been used throughout human history to justify all manner of slaughter and slavery.

"But," someone might object, "humans have a responsibility to act differently because we're aware of what we're doing." Yes, but then we're not only conceding that humans are indeed unique, we're imputing to them a special responsibility that no other creature has. Where does this responsibility come from? If we're solely a product of blind, purposeless evolutionary forces how can we be burdened with any responsibility other than, perhaps, to insure our own survival?

We humans insist that we have a responsibility to treat others as equals, not as inferiors, and not only this but a responsibility, too, to preserve the earth's resources for future generations. But such responsibilities only exist if they're imposed on us from outside ourselves.

The naturalistic view that tells us that we're just an animal leaves no room for any such outside imposition of responsibility, nor can it it account for it by invoking the evolutionary process. It is, in other words, a totally baseless assumption, an article of blind faith, that the naturalist has no reason for holding other than that it makes him feel good.

A Few Desultory Thoughts

"If you’re voting for Biden over Trump because you’re tired of having a president who’s a septuagenarian with an outdated frame of reference just blurting out whatever pops into his head, regardless of whether it has any connection to reality . . . I have some bad news for you." Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt
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The Supreme Court has ruled that half of Oklahoma belongs to Native Americans. I read that the word Oklahoma actually means "Red People." Uh, oh.

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Will Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor be next on the PC chopping block? All three authors used the forbidden N-word in their novels, so we can soon expect calls from the progressive Committees for Public Decency to demand that their books be purged from all libraries, their statues taken down and their names forever shrouded in guilt and shame.

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Black lives Matter and the left in general are eager to defund the police, which is ironic since  Marxist nations, which is what both BLM and the left yearn to establish, often wind up as police states.

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The AP and other progressive media outlets have decided when writing on racial matters to capitalize Black but not white. How this will help to bring people together in unity and harmony is hard to figure, but maybe progressives don't much care about unity and harmony. The reasoning behind this decision is, to put it kindly, awful. 

David Marcus at The Federalist writes about why the AP thought this change was appropriate. He writes:

The AP says, “Most notably, people who are Black have strong historical and cultural commonalities, even if they are from different parts of the world.” This is absolutely bizarre. It suggests that people with black skin in Nigeria, the Caribbean, and the United States somehow have more in common culturally than people from Ireland, Poland, and the United States. Of course, this assertion is not backed up with any real evidence because there is none. 

Not only is this assertion laughable on its face, but it is also remarkably condescending to the many unique cultures of the world created by black people. For some reason, the AP thinks Irish and Italian culture stand alone, distinct enough to mean that the Irish and the Italians are not really part of a larger cultural group. But for some other reason, Jamaican and Ghanaian cultures are not distinct enough to warrant the same treatment, they just get lumped together as black. 

In fact, the AP kind of gives this game away later in the guidance when it writes, “capitalizing the term white, as is done by white supremacists, risks subtly conveying legitimacy to such beliefs.” Clearly, it is insane to give white supremacists a veto on how we use language, but it also basically negates the cultural argument made above, since if that argument were true, they would not need to resort to this one.

This distinction between how we're supposed to write racial descriptors is simply one more wedge progressives are using to drive us further apart rather than bringing us closer together. The more we stress our differences rather than our commonalities, the more we treat one race differently from how we treat another, the more we promote an us vs. them mentality and the more resentment and hostility we engender between the races.

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Meanwhile, over at Mind Matters there's an interesting piece which asks the question, "Do animals grieve?" The article is based on a piece at Sapiens by anthropologist Barbara J. King, author of How Animals Grieve (2014). She offers a compelling argument in support of the belief that animals do in fact grieve and love, and that these emotions are not unique to humans. 

The difference, though, is that human grief is based on an understanding of what death means. Death, the cessation of bodily existence, is an abstraction that animals don't grasp, or at least there's little evidence that they do.

Science and Atheism Don't Mix

It's commonly assumed that most scientists are atheists and that in order to be a scientist one must banish from one's thinking the idea that there may be supernatural influences that have acted in the universe. This assumption would sound very strange, however, to the men who actually began the modern scientific enterprise.

According to historian Rodney Stark in his book For the Glory of God, 50 of the 52 men who were most influential in the development of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries were Christians, and over 60 percent of these were devoutly so, including some of the greatest names in the scientific pantheon: Boyle, Brahe, Descartes, Gassendi, Hooke, Huygens, Kepler, Leibniz, Newton, Pascal, Vesalius, et al.

Nevertheless, the notion became widespread in the 19th century that science and theism are incompatible and the practice of science, particularly biology, became increasingly the domain of atheists throughout the twentieth century.

This is ironic because as that century moved toward its end philosophers become increasingly aware that the real incompatibility is between science and atheism (or naturalism), at least on the philosophical level.

An article at Evolution News by the brilliant Oxford mathematician John Lennox, excerpted from his new book 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, explains why.

Lennox quotes several philosophers and scientists and then writes:

[N]aturalism, and therefore atheism, undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever, let alone a scientific one. In short, it leads to the abolition of reason — a kind of “abolition of man,” since reason is an essential part of what it means to be human. 

Why does naturalism lead to the abolition of reason? If naturalism is true then what we call rational thinking is simply a series of mindless chemical reactions in the brain, they bear no necessary connection to reality or to truth. Chemical reactions have no truth value, they are neither right nor wrong. 

Lennox quotes philosopher Thomas Nagel from his book Mind and Cosmos who writes that,

Evolutionary naturalism implies that we should not take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which evolutionary naturalism depends.

He also cites Charles Darwin's fear that the conclusions of his reason are unreliable:

Charles Darwin saw the problem. He wrote: “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”

Lennox doesn't quote the following but he could have. They certainly support his argument:

• "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Naturalist neuroscientist Steven Pinker
• Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Naturalist philosopher Patricia Churchland
• "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." Atheist philosopher John Gray
• "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." Atheist biologist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis.

On the other hand science, which is based upon rationality, is very compatible with the notion that an intelligent rational Mind created the universe and imbued it with a logical structure, and that this Mind also created our minds to be able to apprehend that structure.

Lennox again:

Not surprisingly, I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But that is not my only reason. I also reject it because I am a mathematician interested in science and rational thought. How could I espouse a worldview that arguably abolishes the very rationality I need to do mathematics? By contrast, the biblical worldview that traces the origin of human rationality to the fact that we are created in the image of a rational God makes real sense as an explanation of why we can do science.

C,S. Lewis puts it like this in his book On Miracles:

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.

As Lennox says in conclusion, Science and God mix very well. It's science and atheism that don't mix.

The Purge

Once upon a time the left fancied themselves the champions of liberty of thought and expression, but it'd be a mistake to think that "liberals" still hold to that position today. Liberals were commonly heard to quote (or misquote) Voltaire who was said to have declared that "I may despise your opinions, but I'll fight to the death for your right to express them." No liberal says that today.

Today's left seems instead to have modeled itself after Orwell's barnyard menagerie in Animal Farm. Everyone on the left, or employed by institutions that are run by leftists, is goosestepping in unison to the shibboleths of race and gender dictated by the modern thought police.

Those who think for themselves are fated to be purged. Just as under the French Directorate during the Great Reign of Terror in 1793-94, dissenters from the dogmas of the left are at serious risk of being metaphorically guillotined, even if they consider themselves to be leftists themselves.

The quaint notion of thinkers like John Stuart Mill that a healthy society is one that carries on free and open discussions of differences has been relegated to the dustbin of history. Today anyone who even remotely offends against the dogmas and orthodoxies of the left is dragged off to the Revolutionary Tribunal where guilt is a foregone conclusion to be figuratively (at least for now) dispatched.

All that needs happen to guarantee one's "cancellation" is that an emotionally fragile co-worker complains of feeling physically or psychologically "unsafe" in the presence of the hapless miscreant.

Bari Weiss at the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine are two recent journalists whose names have been added to the long list of those who've been martyred for their adherence to the Enlightenment values of freedom of thought and expression.

Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media tells us about Andrew Sullivan's dismissal:

On Friday, Andrew Sullivan wrote his last column at New York magazine. Apparently, his brand of heterodox conservatism was too much for fellow staffers at NY Mag and Vox to take. Even though Sullivan supported John Kerry in 2004, Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden this year, his criticisms of the radical left were allegedly “physically harming” his Cancel Culture zealot co-workers. 

The woke inquisition has come for Sullivan, just as it came for Bari Weiss at The New York Times.

Sullivan wrote in his final column that,

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. 

They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space.

Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

Sullivan focussed on the increasingly stifling woke orthodoxy that prevails in academia and other areas of American culture.

Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged. The latest study of Harvard University faculty, for example, finds that only 1.46 percent call themselves conservative.  

But that’s probably higher than the proportion of journalists who call themselves conservative at the New York Times or CNN or New York Magazine.

Sullivan is no stranger to this cancel culture, O'Neil writes. In 2017, The Verge’s Sarah Jeong — now at The New York Times — demanded NY Mag fire Sullivan for an ostensibly “racist” column.

Sullivan’s crime? In addressing reasons why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, he had taken a detour into racial issues, suggesting that the relative success of Asian-Americans proves that the U.S. does not have overwhelming structural racism.

Bari Weiss, a staff editor at the New York Times, finally got tired of the vicious group-think atmosphere in the Times' newsroom and submitted her resignation.

Weiss, who is Jewish, faced harassment and accusations that she was a “Nazi” and a “racist” for daring to question the dogma of the radical left. She recently resigned following years of harassment.

Here's an excerpt from her resignation letter:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’  

Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name.  

Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. 

Weiss follows Times' opinion editor James Bennet out the door after Bennet had been subjected to accusations that he had put black staffers “in danger” by running Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) op-ed calling for federal troops to put down the violent George Floyd riots. Bennet resigned amid mounting pressure.

Another target of the leftist inquisitors is Harvard scholar Steven Pinker:

Recently, some linguistics professors penned an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America with the goal of removing Pinker as one of the society’s “distinguished fellows.” 

It claimed, “Dr. Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes.” 

The seemingly damning charges fall apart under scrutiny. As an example of Pinker’s misogyny, the letter described how he had responded to an incident wherein a student murdered “six women.” In fact, Pinker had merely pointed out that two of these women were actually men.

For that appalling breach of leftist orthodoxy Pinker's colleagues sought to excommunicate him from the Church of Proper Opinion.

Reached at his home on Cape Cod, Pinker, 65, noted that as a tenured faculty member and established author, he could weather the campaign against him. But he said it could chill junior faculty who hold views counter to prevailing intellectual currents.

The Cancel Culture is a form of mob rule, and it's tragic that those who run our media outlets and universities have sold out to the mob. Some of them simply lack the courage to stand up to the angry ideologues who scream for someone's head to roll, but many others are themselves sympathetic with leftist dogma and happy to purge non-conformists from their institutions.

It's how left-wing totalitarians, whether fascists or communists, have always sought to acquire and consolidate power.

Wokesters and Racists

In an amusing way this short video makes a good point: Progressive wokesters and white racists really hold the same set of beliefs.

That would be disturbing news to both groups, but what other conclusion can one draw when we read, for instance, that the Smithsonian has declared on their "whiteness" page that “Whiteness and the normalization of white racial identity throughout America’s history have created a culture where nonwhite persons are seen as inferior or abnormal.”

The “teaching tool” suggests that “whiteness” needs to be overthrown in order for non-white people to become liberated from an oppressive “white culture.”

How can one recognise this nefarious "whiteness" in the culture? An infographic - subsequently taken down by the Smithsonian, but which can still be seen at the above link - lists the characteristics of  white culture that make it so difficult for minority groups to get ahead.

Many of the traits are ridiculous, but for what it's worth they include placing a high value on the following: the nuclear family, capitalism, Christianity, science, objective and rational thinking, delayed gratification, standard English, punctuality, hard work, being future-oriented, self-reliance, politeness, respect for authority, and more.

Blacks and other minorities can't be expected to advance themselves in a white-dominated culture, the implication is, because members of those other races don't value these traits nor can they be expected to. 

Apparently the wokesters at the Smithsonian believe that blacks and Asians are not logical thinkers, don't value two parent families, economic success, being able to speak good English when the circumstances require it, respecting those in authority, working hard, being on time, being polite nor do they see any point to delaying gratification to achieve future success.

I can't think of anything more stereotypical and more racist than tacitly imputing those characteristics to blacks and others, but that's what the Smithsonian progressives evidently have done. They believe about minority groups the same things that many white racists believe about them which is exactly the point in the above-mentioned video. 

You should watch it. It'll make you laugh.

Progressivism's Book of Genesis

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English thinker who wrote during the turbulent period of civil strife and the struggle for power between King Charles I and Parliament. His thoughts on the best political system for avoiding the calamitous consequences of war were put down in a book titled Leviathan (1651).

Leviathan is one of the first books of modern political philosophy. Hobbes' central concern was peace, more specifically how to avoid the calamities of civil war. He began with two principles or axioms from which all else follows:

1. Men are all engaged in a constant struggle for power over others.
2. Men try to avoid death with all their might.

The word "leviathan" means great beast and is used to describe the state or commonwealth as Hobbes saw it. Hobbes' book, historian Peter Ackroyd observes, has been called "the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language."

Be that as it may, Hobbes wrote that the worst calamity to befall men is war. In one famous passage he wrote these lapidary words:

In such condition [i.e. civil war], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In a primitive state of nature, He argues, in which there is no government, the condition of man ...

...is a condition of war of everyone against everyone, in which case everyone is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.

And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.

Men in a state of nature are in a constant struggle each with every other for power and each lives in constant fear of violent death. Hobbes' solution is for all men to yield their own individual sovereignty and rights to that of one sovereign (or a committee) of rulers, whose will would govern all.

Once yielded, that sovereignty can never be rescinded. There would be in Hobbes' state no such thing as liberty of conscience, which only leads to conflict and violence. The state will determine what religion people will follow. Justice and truth are whatever the sovereign determines them to be, and nothing the sovereign does can be deemed to be unjust.

Leviathan is an outline for big government on steroids. It's the blueprint for the totalitarianisms of the Nazis and communists of the 20th century, and it's the logical endpoint of liberal progressivism, even if many progressives would deny wanting to go so far.

Progressivism is a faith that a government run by highly educated elites will naturally be the best way to prevent conflicts and protect individual rights. The bigger, more massive the bureaucratic state, the more power it has over individual lives, the less liberty the individual retains, the more able the state will be to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens.

Government is the progressive's religion, and its book of Genesis is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

Is Some Racism Okay?

Elizabeth Vaughn at The Federalist calls for a national conversation on racism, but it's not what you might think. Vaughn wants a national conversation about the racism that's being directed at whites.

She discusses primarily the June 30th remarks by Nick Cannon in which he claimed that white people fear black people because of their lack of melanin, that melanin gives blacks their soul and compassion. He said this:

The people that don’t have it – and I’m going to say this carefully – are a little less…and, and, and…cause I’m bringing it all the way around to Minister Farrakhan, to where they may not have the compassion or the, when they were sent to the mountains of Caucasus, when they didn’t have the power of the sun, the sun then started to deteriorate them, so then they’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low self-esteem, they’re acting out of a deficiency. 

So, therefore, the only way they can act is evil…They have to rob, steal, rape, kill, fight in order to survive.

So, then these people who didn’t have what we had – when I say we, I am speaking of the melanated people – they had to be savages. They had to be barbaric. They’re in these Nordic mountains, they’re in this rough terrential [sic] environment.

And so, they’re acting as animals. So, they’re the ones that are actually closer to animals. They’re the ones that are actually the true savages. And then they built up such this, this – I want to say warrior – but they built up such this, this conquering barbaric mentality.

Cannon was fired from one position he had with Viacom because other remarks he had made in this same incident were anti-semitic, but despite both his anti-semitism and racism he remains as host of Fox News' "The Masked Singer." It's hard to imagine a white celebrity saying something like this about any minority group and not having his career ended on the spot.

Part of the reason for the relatively mild treatment Cannon has received is, perhaps, that the definition of racism has undergone an evolution in this country. A generation or two ago one was racist if he or she hated members of another race simply because they were members of another race or if he or she merely believed those others were somehow less than fully human. 

Today that definition is obsolete. Today, at least among progressives of every race, racism is defined as a disease that uniquely afflicts white people and which taints everything white people do.

The contemporary definition is self-serving and tendentious. Once it's accepted then no matter what a black person says or does, whatever it is it can't be racist. Moreover, whatever a white person says or does is often racist solely by virtue of the fact that it's a white person who says or does it.

Thus the conversation on race in America is not a genuine conversation but a lecture in which blacks speak and whites are to shut up and listen. If a white person ventures to dissent from what she's being told in this "conversation," whatever dissenting view she expresses is ipso facto racist and thus disallowed. 

This is not a "conversation," of course, it's indoctrination. It's a demand for total conformity to the views of those who wield the power in the relevant social setting.

Moreover, whatever problems beset the black community are often blamed on white racism, either current or historical. According to leftist progressives blacks have no responsibility either for causing the problems or for solving them. Whites are responsible so whites must solve them, not by telling blacks how the problems could actually be solved, that would itself be racist, but simply by handing over money to the community in question.

As long as these attitudes and conditions exist the racial divide in this country will only grow wider. The contemporary understanding of racism is guaranteed to breed further resentments and hostility between the races. 

An equitable society is one in which everyone is treated fairly, and the rightness or wrongness of one's words or actions do not depend on the color of the person's skin. If an act would be wrong if a white person did it it's just as wrong if a black person does it. Race should be irrelevant.

Progressives once praised the words of Martin Luther King who longed for the day when his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. To quote those words today, however, is at best an act of racial naiveté. 

Today among progressives the color of one's skin is often all that matters. To say, as King did, that skin color should not matter in assessing how one is judged by others is to adopt an anachronistic view of race and racism that's largely rejected not only by the Nick Cannons of the world, but also by progressive government bureaucrats, academics and media opinion-makers.

The Universe Has to Be Just As Big As It Is

There's an article at Salvo by astronomer Hugh Ross that should fascinate anyone interested in chemistry, biology or the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe that makes life on earth possible.

It begins with a challenge frequently leveled at those who believe the universe is intentionally engineered by an intelligent agent to permit life to exist. If so, some who dissent from this view ask, why is the universe so vast? Why are there so many galaxies? Isn't such a huge universe wasteful when a much smaller universe would suffice?

Ross explains that a smaller universe would not have sufficed, and that the universe has to be as large as it is and as massive as it is in order for carbon-based life to exist anywhere in it. Ross' article can be summarized as follows:

In order for life to exist, at least life as we know it, there has to be carbon and oxygen, and in order for these elements to exist there had to be a very precise amount of mass to the universe in its early stages of development. Here's why:

At the beginning of the universe, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was rapidly expanding. Since mass exerts gravitational pull, the rate at which the universe expanded was determined by how much gravity there was acting as a drag on the expansion and this was determined by the amount of mass.

As the universe expanded it cooled. At one point the cooling reached the temperature range in which hydrogen atoms, the only atoms that existed in the early universe, began to fuse together to form other elements. This temperature range is between 15 million and 150 million degrees Celsius.

How long the expanding universe remained in this temperature range depended on how much matter there was to slow down the expansion. Too little matter and the universe would have passed through this range too quickly to form much else besides helium. Too slowly, and all the hydrogen would have fused into elements heavier than iron. Carbon and oxygen would have been very scarce.

In other words, to get the elements necessary for life, specifically carbon and oxygen, the expansion rate had to be just right, which means that the gravitational pull slowing the expansion had to be just right, which means that the amount of matter in the universe had to be just right. That amount of matter happens to be precisely the amount of matter bound up in the stars and galaxies we see in our telescopes.

In order to allow time for the production of carbon and oxygen, but not too much time, the expansion rate had to be calibrated to the astonishing value of one part in 10^55.

To get an idea of how precise this is imagine a dial face with 10^55 calibrations (one with 55 zeros). Now imagine that the dial has to point to exactly one of those calibrations for the universe to have carbon and oxygen. If the dial deviated by just one increment no carbon and oxygen would form. That's breathtaking, but in order to achieve that degree of precision of the expansion rate the universe had to have just the amount of matter that is today bound up in stars and galaxies that it in fact does have.

Indeed, the total amount of matter in the universe had to itself be fine-tuned to an astonishing precision of one part in 10^59.

So, the universe has to be as big as it is and as massive as it is in order for us to be here in this little corner of a galaxy located in an even smaller corner of the universe. Little wonder that many people conclude that it can't all just be a cosmic accident, that there must be an intelligent mind behind it all.

Ross goes on to explain how the amount of carbon we find on earth is also fine-tuned. Just a bit more or a bit less carbon and life on earth would not exist, at least not life forms higher than bacteria. The article is not long and it's very much worth reading in its entirety.

Meanwhile, check out this video to get an idea of how big the universe actually is and how small we are. Each circle represents 10x the diameter of the previous circle:

Belief That Evil Exists Requires That God Exists

On July 22nd, 2007 two thugs broke into the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Petit and their two daughters in Cheshire, Connecticut. They held the Petits hostage for seven terrifying hours. The doctor was beaten, his wife was raped, his youngest daughter was sexually assaulted and their house set afire. The mother and daughters, having been tied up and doused with gasoline, burned to death. Only the father managed to escape. The crime was unimaginably evil.

It's not uncommon after some terrible event like this has occured to hear someone claim that they can't believe in God because no God who was good would've allowed such senseless evil to happen. A good being of any sort would have a moral obligation to prevent this kind of evil if he could, and the failure to prevent such an evil is a strong argument for the conclusion that God, if He exists at all, is either not able to prevent evil or not willing to do so and thus not good.

In the aftermath of the horror that the Petit's suffered it's easy to feel the emotional power of this argument, and people who are grieving and in shock don't want or need to have their reasoning analyzed. They need to be loved.

Nevertheless, for those not immediately in the throes of emotional devastation it might be noted that this is actually a very odd argument. As has been argued here at VP on many occasions, in order to speak of moral obligations one has to assume that God exists. In a Godless universe there are no moral rights and wrongs and thus no moral duties.

So the skeptic who pleads the existence of horrible moral wrongs as a basis for denying that God exists can use that argument only if God does, in fact, exist.

As I say, this is a very odd argument.

The conviction that the world contains terrible moral evils which God would have a moral obligation to prevent actually makes it more likely, not less likely, that God does exist. Only if there's an objective moral right and wrong can anything be morally evil, and only if there really is a God can there be objective moral right and wrong.

Thus, the belief that what happened to the Petits, or to untold millions of others, is morally evil must presuppose the existence of God.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes that a secular view of the world "has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort...and thus no way to say there's such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there is such a thing as horrifying wickedness, then you have a powerful argument" for the existence of God.

To talk about evil one has to talk about objective moral right and wrong, and to talk about objective moral right and wrong one has to assume that God exists.

If God does not exist then what those two men did to the Petits is neither wrong nor right, it's just a fact about what happened. It may outrage us, but that doesn't make it wrong. It can only be wrong if it 1) violates some objective standard of behavior and 2) if the men who perpetrated the deed will ultimately be held accountable for it.

And neither of those conditions exists unless God does.

What Caused the Universe?

A BBC article from a couple of years ago raises the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix, and, in the course of discussing the pros and cons of the hypothesis, gives an interesting insight into why philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals, like Elon Musk, are entertaining this speculation:

The idea that we live in a simulation has some high-profile advocates.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

However, there is a second, more popular, scenario that seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely so how can the existence of such a finely-tuned universe as ours be explained? There are two (naturalistic) options. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago.

I'm reminded of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Not All the Polls are Grim for Trump

Recent polls have not been kind to President Trump, showing him trailing Joe Biden by at least 8 points. Yet not all the polls are so gloomy for the president. Elizabeth Vaughn at The Federalist points out that the results of a poll conducted by the Democracy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, suggest that other canvasses are missing something.

Here's part of her column:

Contrary to what the media would have us believe, 77 percent of the 1,500 likely voters surveyed do not view Mount Rushmore as a racist monument. When asked which of two phrases better fits their own thinking about race in America, 29 percent of participants indicated “Black Lives Matter,” and 71 percent marked “All Lives Matter.”

Most notably, rather than showing Biden with a sharp advantage, the survey forecasts a much tighter race, with each candidate receiving 47 percent of the national popular vote. Moreover, the Democracy Institute predicts that if the election were held today, Trump would win 309 electoral votes and Biden 229.

State-by-state data isn’t conclusive, considering the limited sample size, but the data indicates Trump is ahead in the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by a margin of 48 percent to 44 percent, with 8 percent undecided. The poll puts Wisconsin in the Biden column, while giving Trump Minnesota and New Hampshire.

Trump is considered less likable than Biden. When asked which candidate respondents would be more inclined to invite for a barbecue, 33 percent chose Trump, while 51 percent chose Biden. Sixteen percent said neither. When asked if they believe Biden is in the early stages of dementia, however, 55 percent answered yes, and 40 percent no.

As virtually all recent polls have found, the Democracy Institute identified the massive enthusiasm gap between the two candidates. Seventy-seven percent of Trump voters are very enthusiastic about their candidate, compared to only 43 percent of Biden supporters. That explains why 81 percent of Trump voters say their choice was “a positive vote for [their] candidate” rather than a “negative vote against his opponent.” For Biden, only 29 percent said it was a positive vote, while a whopping 71 percent said it was negative.

Notably, participants were asked if they were “comfortable with your relatives, friends, and coworkers knowing how you vote.” Only 29 percent of Trump voters said yes, versus 82 percent of Biden voters. This “shy” vote phenomenon was one of the reasons polls were so wrong in 2016. Many pro-Trumpers, wanting to avoid stigma, simply won’t tell a colleague or even a pollster whom they plan to vote for.

Fifty-two percent of those surveyed believe Trump will be reelected. While 4 percent of Trump supporters indicated their vote could change by Election Day, 12 percent of Biden backers said they could change their minds.

Ms. Vaughn cites other data from the poll that should be encouraging for those who wish to see the president re-elected. 

Polls this far out are notoriously unreliable, of course. In 2016 polls taken four or five months before the election showed that Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide. Even so, the Democracy Institute poll must be encouraging for the White House.

The Democrats right now seem to be employing a three-pronged campaign strategy: 1) Criticize Trump relentlessly no matter what he says or does, even if they know they would often do the same thing were they in his place, 2) keep Biden out of the public eye as much as possible and 3) hope that the economy doesn't recover the vigor it had before Covid-19 struck, since the more people suffer the better it is for Biden's chances.

That really is quite a strategy. No wonder there's no real enthusiasm for Mr. Biden's candidacy.

One Statue That Should Be Taken Down

I wrote recently that I think there's a reasonable case to be made for removing some statues, especially those of Confederate soldiers, from our public spaces. One statue in particular that really needs to be removed is that of South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman who served as a Democrat in the U.S. Senate from 1895 to 1918. Why his statue is still allowed to disgrace that state's capitol is a mystery.

The Discovery Institute's John West explains:

Tillman was a monster. He publicly defended lynchings. He drew on evolutionary racism to preach black inferiority. And he worked to subvert representative democracy. 

During a U.S. Senate debate on January 21, 1907, Tillman boasted about how he and others successfully disenfranchised blacks after the Civil War through intimidation, killings, and fraud. 

He revealed that depriving blacks of their newly accorded political rights was in fact his motivation for becoming involved in politics: “We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank, and only one plank, namely, that ‘This is a white man’s country and white men must govern it.’ Under that banner we went to battle.” 

He meant “battle” literally, recounting how he and others killed blacks in a series of armed conflicts: “A month later we had the Ellenton riot, in which no one ever knew how many negroes were killed, but there were forty or fifty or a hundred. It was a fight between barbarism and civilization, between the African and the Caucasian, for mastery. It was then that ‘we shot them’; it was then that ‘we killed them’; it was then that ‘we stuffed ballot boxes.’” 

Tillman justified his actions by drawing on the standard tropes of evolutionary racism. As he explained, “We had decided to take the government away from men so debased as were the negroes — I will not say baboons; I never have called them baboons; I believe they are men, but some of them are so near akin to the monkey that scientists are yet looking for the missing link.” 

According to Tillman, it was the supposed biological inferiority of blacks that justified him in stealing elections: “We saw the evil of giving the ballot to creatures of this kind, and saying that one vote shall count regardless of the man… Then it was that we stuffed ballot boxes, because desperate diseases require desperate remedies.”

Frankly, I am appalled that South Carolina would continue to honor such a man. I definitely don’t favor illegally removing his statue (let alone blowing it up), but I do favor legally removing it.

Here’s an idea: Replace Tillman’s statue with a statue honoring the nine black Republican congressmen from South Carolina during the 1870s-1890s. Then move Tillman’s statue to a museum, and surround it with an exhibit exposing his racist record, including his promotion of scientific racism.

West is obviously correct. There should be no place in our society where men such as Tillman are honored. Take his statue down.

Do Facts Matter?

John Sexton at Hot Air asks this question: "When did it first become clear to you that verifiable facts didn’t matter to the opinions being spouted by every media outlet and progressive?" Sexton, borrowing from author Jesse Singal, calls this the "epistemic breach," the disconnect between what one chooses to believe and the established facts of the matter.

Singal says the moment he noticed it was the Covington student encounter in Washington, D.C. For Sexton it was the Trayvon Martin case in 2012. He also cites the Michael Brown shooting and a few other examples (There are plenty to choose from, he notes).

He writes:

For me this kind of breach with reality really became clear much earlier, during the Trayvon Martin case in 2012. In that case it was clear who had done the shooting from the start but almost every other detail seemed to exist apart from the facts. 

Remember when NBC News edited the 911 call to make it sound as if Zimmerman had been racially profiling Martin? Two NBC producers were eventually fired over that error. Remember when ABC News claimed there were no injuries to the back of Zimmerman’s head and then retracted that after an enhanced video showed they’d been wrong?  

Remember when Rachel Jeantel told a reporter she believed Martin threw the first punch in the confrontation that led to his death? (Most people never heard about that.) 

Remember when Ta-Nehisi Coates claimed he could hear a racial slur in the audio of the same call? Coates later wrote a major story for the Atlantic claiming that all of the pushback (to correct reported errors) was because President Obama was black. 

The point is there were a lot of things the media got badly wrong about that story, some of which were corrected, but a lot of people still insist on believing the first version. 

The same was true of the shooting of Michael Brown. Once again, you had a lot of instant myths crop up, some of which (“hands up, don’t shoot”) are still with us. 

I still remember the piece in which Vox’s Ezra Klein explained the moment in Officer Darren Wilson’s story when “every BS detector in me went off .” He was referring to Wilson’s claim that Mike Brown paused during his assault on Wilson to hand the bag of stolen cigarillos to his friend Dorian Johnson. 

Just one problem with his BS detectors. The story matched what Dorian Johnson said happened. Rather than admit he was wrong and issue a correction to the story, Klein published a second story the same day in which (many paragraphs later) he admits “Johnson does semi-corroborate a key moment in Wilson’s account.” 

Again, as with the Covington kids, most news outlets did eventually admit error in the initial coverage but it was too late. A lot of people preferred the initial stories about Mike Brown’s death and didn’t want to hear the revised (factual) versions.

Sexton goes on to give a few more examples, but an important consequence of all this is that when people refuse to allow themselves to be swayed by facts, progress, in this case social progress, grinds to a halt and shifts into reverse. 

We become balkanized into a hodge-podge of warring groups that no longer have any common ground upon which to stand to talk with each other. Instead it's women vs. men, blacks vs. whites, liberals vs. conservatives, atheists vs. Christians, and who prevails is not whoever has the best ideas and can marshall the most evidence but who can shout the loudest and who can intimidate their foes most effectively.

Rather than forming conclusions based on objective facts, many people form their conclusions based on their subjective emotions. For many in our postmodern age beliefs are justified by desires, not by reason. If they want something to be true it is true regardless what the objective evidence may indicate. If a biological male wants to be a female then he is a female notwithstanding his genetics and physiology. If progressives want it to be true that blacks are being "hunted" by white police officers then it is true regardless of what the statistics show. 

If the facts support their beliefs, fine, but if they don't support them, so much the worse for the facts. Indeed, to cite objective facts, to rely on reason, is scorned as patriarchal or an expression of "white privilege," as if non-whites can't be expected to be rational. 

This is not only irrational, it's atavistic. It's a throwback to a more primitive and tribal stage in our civilization's development. When facts no longer matter then all that matters is forcing others, by whatever means necessary, to conform to one's vision and desires, and that mindset has led always to the guillotine, the firing squad, the gulag and mass graves.

Why So Many Hoaxes?

An Oregon man who claimed on Facebook that he had received a racist letter has recently admitted to police that he wrote the letter to himself in yet another of what has become an epidemic of race hoaxes. Before this most recent episode came to light Dennis Prager had raised an interesting question: Why are there so many hoaxes? He writes:

If America is so racist, why are there so many race hoaxes? Virtually every time we read about a swastika painted on a door, or a noose hanging from a tree to taunt blacks, it turns out to be either a false alarm or, more frequently, a hoax.....

If there were a lot of racism, there would be no need for hoaxes. No Jew in Germany in the 1930s made up an anti-Semitic hoax. No Jewish shop owner ever made up a charge that a Nazi hurled a rock through his store window. The reason? None was needed. Nazi hatred against Jews was real. It didn’t have to be faked. To convince people that America is racist, you have to fake it. 

To buttress his claim that race hoaxes are common he cites about fifteen examples of hoaxes (or mistakes) perpetrated by blacks over the last fifteen years, most of which have occurred within the last six years:

No. 1: The Duke lacrosse team (2006): Three white members of the Duke University lacrosse team were falsely accused by Crystal Mangum, a black student at North Carolina Central University, with having raped her. The charges were all fabricated, but the American media and Duke University faculty rushed to judgment and devoted months to smearing the three lacrosse players and Duke University itself as racist.
No. 2: UC San Diego library noose (2010): “Student apologizes for noose in UC San Diego library” (Los Angeles Times). A “minority student” was responsible for placing the noose in the university library. Previously, the Associated Press had reported, “Anger boiled over on the University of California San Diego campus today, where students took over the chancellor’s office to protest the hanging of a noose in a campus library.”
No. 3: Truck at Oakland’s Corporation Yard (2014): “A reported ‘noose’ tied to the back of a city truck in August, which stirred already simmering racial tensions at Oakland’s Corporation Yard, was not an intended act of racial harassment, a city-commissioned report has found” (Mercury News).
No. 4: University of Delaware (2015): “‘Nooses’ Found Hanging on University of Delaware Campus Were Lanterns” (NBC). University President Nancy Targett had earlier announced, “We are both saddened and disturbed that this deplorable act has taken place on our campus.”
No. 5: The LSU noose (2015): It was widely reported that a noose was sighted at Louisiana State University leading to protests against racism there. It was later reported, “LSU said a picture of what appeared to be a noose hanging from a campus tree Thursday was not what it appeared to be” (WBRZ).
No. 6: University at Albany (2016): “A state appeals court has upheld the University at Albany’s expulsion of a woman who along with two friends falsely claimed to be the victim of a racially motivated attack on a CDTA bus in January 2016” (Times-Union). The three black women had attacked a white woman and then claimed they had been racially attacked.
No. 7: Bowling Green State University (2016): “Bowling Green police say student lied about politically driven attack” (ABC). “The day after the 2016 election, Eleesha Long, a student at Bowling Green State University — about 90 miles west of Oberlin — said that she was attacked by white Trump supporters, who threw rocks at her. Police concluded that she had fabricated the story” (City Journal).
No. 8: Dreadlock cutting hoax (2019): “A black student at a Christian school in Virginia who accused three white sixth grade boys of cutting her dreadlocks and calling her ugly now says she was lying about the attack” (NBC).
No. 9: Jussie Smollett (2019): In one of the most notorious hoaxes, actor Jussie Smollett claimed he was attacked by white racists in Chicago on a freezing night. The story was a hoax. The “noose” was a rope his two co-conspirators had purchased for staging the “attack.”
No. 10: Oakland’s Lake Merritt (2020): After the city of Oakland launched a hate crime investigation regarding a noose hanging from park trees, Victor Anari Sengbe, a black man, tweeted: “It’s not a noose, this guy climbed the tree and put up the rope for a swing months ago, folks used it to exercise… ITS NOT A NOOSE.” Nevertheless, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf then tweeted, “Intentions do not matter. We will not tolerate symbols of hate in our city. The nooses found at Lake Merritt will be investigated as hate crimes.”
No. 11: NASCAR (2020): A “noose” was found in the Talladega, Alabama, racetrack garage assigned to black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace. FBI investigators determined it to be one of several such ropes placed sometime the year before in Talladega garages as door pulls, long before that garage was ever assigned to Wallace. But Wallace continued to maintain it was, in fact, a noose.
No. 12: University of La Verne (2020): “Racist Threats and Attacks that Rattled a California University Campus Were Faked, Police Say” (Newsweek).

Prager goes on to mention even more, but one additional takeaway from his article - besides Prager's point that the frequency of these frauds is strong evidence that racism is more a figment of the collective progressive imagination than it is a reality in our society - is this: Despite virtually every instance of an alleged racist threat turning out to be either a hoax or an innocent mistake, the media still runs with each one that's alleged as if they finally have the proof to justify their belief that the U.S. is filled with racists. 

Like Wile E. Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons or Elmer Fudd in the Bugs Bunny cartoons every time they think they have their proof it blows up in their faces. You'd think that they'd learn from experience to be leery of these allegations, but our media Fudds and Coyotes are evidently very slow learners.

Our American Totalitarians

An open letter to Harper's Magazine defending freedom of speech and thought and signed by 150 sundry journalists and academics has caused a stir among left-wing progressives. A defense of freedom is seen, apparently, as an attack on progressive values.

After the obligatory swipes at President Trump and the ideological right, the signatories offer the most anodyne condemnation of our current "cancel culture" they could possibly have crafted. Here's the heart of it:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.  

But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. 

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement. 

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. 

As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Many on the left are appalled that an endorsement of the Enlightenment values of free speech and thought would be endorsed by the signatories, some of whom are themselves leftists. The letter is seen as anti-progressive and anti-left because it endorses the freedom to express unfashionable opinions without the fear of losing one's livelihood. This is too much for progressives who believe that opinions with which they disagree must be silenced and people who transgress the leftist consensus must be fired or otherwise deplatformed.

This is, of course, the same pattern of thinking that prevailed in Hitler's Nazi Germany and during Stalin's reign of terror in the U.S.S.R., Mao and his successors' reign of terror in China, the Kim family's ongoing reign of terror in North Korea, and Castro's ongoing reign of terror in Cuba. It's how fascist and communist totalitarians always treat freedom - which they despise - and it has led invariably to mass slaughter and dehumanization ever since the French Revolution in 1789.

It's perhaps the paramount evil of our age, and it's rearing its grotesque head once again in the form of "cancel culture."

Perhaps the best response to those who are upset that freedom and liberty would actually be endorsed in America is Fredrik deBoer's who writes this pithy reaction:

Please, think for a minute and consider: what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left? There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy.  

So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t. And people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech. That is the most obvious political fact imaginable today. Of course Yelling Woke Twitter hates free speech! Of course social justice liberals would prevent expression they disagree with if they could! How could any honest person observe our political discourse for any length of time and come to any other conclusion? 

You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore? 

Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.

Amen.