How the Media Swayed the Election

Joe Biden's ostensible victory on November 3rd has been attributed by many of Donald Trump's supporters to electoral hanky-panky of one sort or another, some of it illegal, some of it legal but unethical.

An example of the latter is presented in a story by Jordan Davidson at The Federalist in which he cites a study that finds media suppression of certain news stories kept many Biden voters in the dark, voters who claim that had they known of these stories they would've voted for Trump.

Since the number of Biden voters who claim they would've voted for Trump if they'd known information that the media was suppressing totaled some 17% of those who supported the Democrat candidate, it's clear that, in a counterfactual world, one where the media, were honest and objective, Trump would've won.

Here are some of the key points in Davidson's column:

The survey results report that 17 percent of Biden voters would not have voted for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket if they had known about at least one of the eight news stories that were suppressed by big tech and mainstream media outlets.

The survey, conducted online by The Polling Company, ... asked 1,750 Biden voters living in seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) if they were aware of certain issues surrounding Biden, his family, and some of the Trump administration’s successes.

Some of these topics include former Biden staffer Tara Reade and her sexual assault allegations against Biden, the Hunter Biden scandal, VP Nominee Kamala Harris’s extreme liberal voting record in the Senate, the U.S.’s economic jump in the third quarter, millions of jobs added, America’s energy independence, Operation Warp Speed successes, and Trump’s facilitation of multiple peace deals in the Middle East.

Over a quarter of Biden voters said they didn’t know Sen. Harris had the most liberal voting record in the Senate in 2019, and nearly half of all Biden voters polled, 49 percent, said they were unaware of the U.S.’s remarkable economic recovery in the third quarter, doubling the previous record.

One in six Biden voters polled, 17 percent, said they would have changed their vote had they been aware of these stories. The report also found that without even voting for Trump and simply refusing to vote for Biden, “these voters would have handed all six of these states, and a second term, to the president if the news media had properly informed them about the two candidates.”

In Pennsylvania and Georgia, 15 percent of Biden’s voters would have refrained from casting a vote for him. In Michigan, it was 14 percent. In Arizona, it was 21 percent. In Wisconsin, it was 13 percent. And in Nevada, it was 18 percent.

The significant numbers, the report states, “would have moved every one of the swing states into Trump’s column, some by a huge margin.”

This would've given Trump an electoral college win of 311 to 227.

This is a condign indictment of the mainstream and social media, but although it is true that the media have behaved reprehensibly throughout Trump's four years in office, and although it may also be true that had these voters known about these stories the outcome of the election would've been different, I nevertheless have one reservation about this report.

I think it may be a bit of an overreach to conclude that had the media been more honest and professional in their reporting these voters would've known about these stories. The fact is that no matter how much the media discussed these facts it's possible that many voters would still have been oblivious to them because many people simply aren't interested in political news and don't tune in to it.

So, yes, voter ignorance very likely played a role in the outcome of the election and the media certainly played a role in keeping the voters ignorant, but whether an honest media would've been able to educate enough of those who don't take the trouble to be educated to have changed the election results is hard to ascertain.

Even so, when Donald Trump declares that large segments of the liberal media are "the enemy of the people" he has a point. Any organization entrusted by the people to disseminate information but which fails to uphold that trust is doing the country a grave disservice, even if what they do is technically legal.

Davidson has more details at the link.

Liberals and Leftists

Now that it appears likely that Joe Biden and the Democrats will inherit the White House it might be useful to keep in mind the distinctions between "liberals" and "leftists" or, as the latter are often called, "progressives."

President-elect Biden, who was once fairly moderate, has in recent years moved leftward and gained a reputation for being rather liberal/left. His party, however, is dominated by radical leftists who also exert an outsized influence in academia as well as news, entertainment and social media.

Given the dominance of leftist progressivism in the Democratic party and, indeed, in the culture as a whole, it'll be interesting to see how far Mr. Biden allows himself to be pulled toward their positions.

This five minute Prager U. video gives a succinct explanation of what those positions are and highlights the main differences between leftists and liberals:

One thing about these distinctions that should be kept in mind: Many people are liberal on some issues and leftist on others, so there's lots of ideological gray among folks on the left side of the ideological spectrum, just as there is among those on the right.

He's a Magic Man

J.B. Shurk at The Federalist notes that it's most peculiar that the media is not talking more about Joe Biden's absolutely astonishing political accomplishment in winning the recent election.

The word "incredible" seems an inadequate description of Biden's victory. Despite never having accomplished much during his 47 year career in politics, despite scarcely campaigning for the presidency, despite showing signs of cognitive impairment, despite generating scarcely any excitement, Mr. Biden nevertheless received the most votes in American history, 15 million more than Barack Obama.

But there's much more to Mr. Biden's astounding feat. As Shurk points out, the Democrats were clobbered in the down-ballot races, but still gave Mr. Biden a victory at the top of the ticket, defeating an incumbent who actually gained 10 million more votes than he won in 2016 - the first time in history an incumbent actually gained votes and still lost.

He goes on to observe that,

Amazingly, Biden beat the guy who lifted all other Republicans to victory. Now that’s historic! In 2020, The Cook Political Report and The New York Times rated 27 House seats as toss-ups going into Election Day. Right now, Republicans appear to have won all 27.

Democrats failed to flip a single state house chamber, while Republicans flipped both the House and Senate in New Hampshire and expanded their dominance of state legislatures across the country.

Now that's a breathtaking display of political prowess from a man who sometimes forgot where he was and which office he was running for. But that's not all. For the first time in history a candidate for president won despite losing both Florida and Ohio. He also won despite losing big in almost all of the "bellwether" counties in the country. Shurk writes:

Of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years, President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington.

Whereas the former VP picked up Clallam by about three points, President Trump’s margin of victory in the other 18 counties averaged over 16 points. In a larger list of 58 bellwether counties that have correctly picked the president since 2000, Trump won 51 of them by an average of 15 points, while the other seven went to Biden by around four points.

Here's another staggering aspect to Mr. Biden's masterful performance:

Polling guru Richard Baris of Big Data Poll...noted a statistical oddity from 2020’s election returns: “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Washington Post election analyst Robert Barnes...added that in those “big cities in swing states run by Democrats...the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.” In the states that mattered most, so many mail-in ballots poured in for Biden from the cities that he put up record-breaking numbers and overturned state totals that looked like comfortable leads for President Trump.

Who says miracles don't happen? Biden's wonder-working power rivals even that of Jesus who famously raised the dead and fed 5,000 people with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

As Mr. Shurk concludes, "Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out."

It is indeed interesting, but perhaps the lack of curiosity on the part of the anti-Trump media can be attributed to their unspoken incredulity that Biden is really the political magician he'd have to have been to honestly pull this off. Prudence dictates that an attainment so implausible, so apparently miraculous, when accomplished by the man one desperately hopes will win, is best left unquestioned.

It's bad form, after all, to ask the magician how he managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

How Thanksgiving Became Official

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. However, on September 28th, 1863 a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861 he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, though, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation only to become permanently an American custom and institution."

Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, the actual proclamation was written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to raise money to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads quite as if it could have been written today, particularly the penultimate paragraph.

I hope we all give thanks tomorrow for our many blessings, remembering especially as we express our gratitude to God and to each other those who suffer and grieve and that our thanksgivings make tomorrow a wonderful and meaningful day.

Gratefulness

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans will observe on Thursday is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) Thursday will be a day filled with gratitude, love, joy and, I must add, proper caution in these plague-ridden times.

If Naturalism Is True and Evolution Is True Then We Have No Reason to Trust Our Reason

In Part III of our series last week titled Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation, I wrote that,

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist has no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

For these thoughts I'm indebted to philosopher Alvin Plantinga who, in his book Where the Conflict really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Atheist 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 Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them 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.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E. This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out.

The naturalist has a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false. On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

To loosely cite Craig again:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. V)

Today's post concludes our series on theism as an inference to the best explanation for numerous facts about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.

I'd like to finish up with these four existential traits of human beings:

15. Our desire for justice
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self
18. Our desire to survive our own death

Human persons long for justice, but it's a longing for which there's no fulfillment if death is the end of our existence. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives filled with terrible fear, pain and grief and then they die.

Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering come to the end of their lives peacefully and content after many years of pleasure. In a world without God everybody comes to the same end, everyone vanishes, and there's no reward or punishment, just nothingness. In the world of the atheist, it doesn't matter ultimately whether you're Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, and there's no hope that justice will ever be done.

Only if there's a transcendent moral authority, like God, who has the power to hold us accountable for how we treat others is justice in any ultimate sense possible.

Humans also crave meaning to our existence. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but in the absence of God death nullifies everything and renders it all nugatory. There's no fixed purpose or value to anything we do. Everything we strive for is destined to perish either after we die or eventually in a solar explosion that will incinerate the earth, after which there'll be not a trace that humans ever existed. What will all of our efforts and achievements matter then?

All our struggles are like the furious running of a gerbil in his treadmill. Our lives are just a footprint in the sand at the edge of a space-time surf. When all is washed away and the cosmos is left as though we were never here, the greatest acts of heroism, charity, and scientific discovery will mean absolutely nothing.

If the atheist is correct, if our existence is simply a temporary fluke of nature, a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to think that anything we do actually matters at all in any permanent sense. If, on the other hand, we have been created by God we may assume that He had some purpose for making us. We may not know what that purpose is, but we have a basis for hoping that there is one. Indeed, if there is a God then we have reason to hope that what we do is not ephemeral, it's eternal, and that each life has an everlasting meaning.

Another point: In a Godless world the concept of soul becomes problematic and with it the notion of a self other than the physical body. Since our body is constantly changing, however, we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I," only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who I really am.

As T.S. Eliot put it in The Cocktail Party, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger." Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests, however, that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet, unless there is a God physical flux is all there is.

If there is a God, then it's possible that our self, our identity, persists through time because He constantly holds us, our individual essence, in being in His mind. So, while in one sense we're constantly morphing into someone different, in another sense we remain the same person we've always been.

Finally, human beings want desperately to live and yet we know we're going to die. In a Godless universe, the fate of each of us is annihilation. There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever "see" them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, they must acknowledge that their bravery serves to mask an inner despair. Many still harbor a profound wish that their loved ones still exist and that they'll someday be reunited with them.

But if death is the end of our existence our life truly is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," a Shakespeare put it in MacBeth. If death is the end then human existence is completely absurd. But, of course, death is the end if the materialist is right.

Only if God exists is there a realistic basis for hope of something beyond this life. Only if God exists can we have a reasonable hope that our longing for life will be fulfilled.

So, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we possess those yearnings because they point us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God.

In other words, the existence of God is, I believe, the best explanation for the human condition. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair toward which her worldview pushes her. She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists actually repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.

I've sought in this series of posts to briefly suggest why the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of their satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God.

If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice.

We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the nature of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled.

How, then, do we come to have these yearnings? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the skeptic should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence.

Nevertheless, I've never known or read one who held such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to wishing, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke. Nagel writes in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me at least, to understand.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. IV)

The theme of the last three posts has been that if we employ the principle of inference to the best explanation to the question of the existence of God it's reasonable to conclude that the best explanation for a host of facts about the world and human existence is that there is an intelligent mind, a God, that accounts for them.

In today's post I'd like to briefly examine six facts of human existence and explain why I think theism accounts for them more seamlessly than does naturalism. The six facts are these:

9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
10. Our sense of moral obligation
11. Our sense of guilt
12. Our belief in human dignity
13. Our belief in human worth
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights

Since these are facts about the human condition they comprise what might be called an existential case for the existence of God:

Consider the first of these. It's part of the human psyche to desire answers to life's most profound questions. As human beings we want answers to the deepest, most perplexing questions raised by our existence, but in the world as the atheist sees it there are no answers, there's no assurance about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die.

We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Why do we want from life what we cannot have? - but in a Godless universe there's no reply, only silence. The cosmos is indifferent to our desire for answers. We are alone, forlorn, as Sartre put it, and our quest for answers is absurd.

If there are no answers to these questions it's a puzzle as to why we would've evolved in such a way as to feel such an urgency for answers to them. If, on the other hand, God exists then it's possible that each of those questions has an answer, and if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire their answers makes sense. We may not know what the answer is, but we have a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there is a reason why they gnaw at us.

The atheist must counsel acquiescence to the disconnect between our deep need and the impossibility of fulfilling that need. The theist is in a position to counsel hope.

Another aspect of the human condition is that we are burdened with a deep sense that we are obligated to act morally. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base them. In a purely material world morality is nothing more than whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right in any objective sense. There simply is no objective moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what non-theists deny. Consider these two quotes from some well-known atheists:

"In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. The way our biology forces its codes is by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject." Philosopher Michael Ruse.

"Life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins.

For the atheist moral judgments can be little more than expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state.

Whatever those who possess power do is neither right or wrong, even if they commit torture or genocide, it just is.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is nothing whatsoever which obligates us to act in one way rather than another. What could possibly obligate me, in a moral sense, to act in the interest of others rather than in what I perceive to be my own interest? Given naturalism, there is nothing which obligates us to care for the poor, nothing which makes kindness better than cruelty, nothing to tell us why the holocaust was morally wrong.

Given atheism, morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, our conviction that it does exist is simply self-deception. If God exists, however, then, and only then, does our intuition that objective moral value and obligation also exist make sense.

Related to the preceding point, we experience feelings of guilt, and have a sense that guilt is not just an illusion, but without an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there can be no real guilt. Human beings are no more guilty in a moral sense than is a cat which has caught and tortured a bird. The feeling of guilt is merely an evolutionary epiphenomenon which arose to fit us for life in the stone age and which, like our tonsils, we no longer need. Indeed, it's a vestige of our past that we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

On the other hand, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good Creator of the universe, then our sense that we are actually guilty has an explanation. We feel guilt because we have transgressed the moral law instituted by the Creator before whom we stand and to whom we must give an account.

It is this Creator who imposes upon us moral obligation. Take away God and there's no moral law, there's no moral duty, there's no transgression, and no guilt. As the great 19th century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it, "If God is dead everything is permitted."

An additional fact about our existence is that we profess a belief in human dignity but modern atheism tells us that we are little more than machines made of flesh - sacks of blood, bone and excrement. There is no soul; there's nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We are more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout.

In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit the rest of us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he might profit from so doing. The universe reminds us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

If, however, we are made in the image of God and personally and specifically loved by Him then we have a basis for believing that we are more than a machine. We have a ground for human dignity that is simply unavailable on the assumption of naturalistic atheism.

Related to the previous point is the further truth that most of us have a belief in human worth, but if all we are is an ephemeral pattern of atoms, a flesh and bone mechanism, then in what does our worth as human beings consist? We have value only insofar as others, particularly those who wield power, arbitrarily choose to value us.

If atheism is true there is no inherent value in being human. Only if theism is true and we are valued by the Creator of the universe can human beings have any objective worth at all. There is no other non-arbitrary ground for it.

Similarly, we have a belief that human beings have certain fundamental rights. Unfortunately, if there is no God there's nothing at all upon which to base those rights save our own prejudices and predilections. As Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, we have the right to life and liberty only because we are children of the Creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us and in whose eyes we are precious.

If there is no Creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules, mere words on paper, which some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked.

When atheists talk about human rights someone might ask them where those rights come from. Who confers them? Who guarantees them? If it is not God then it must be the state, but if so, our rights are not inalienable. If the state decides what rights we shall have then the state can determine that we have no rights at all.

The fact is that if atheism is true human rights are no more substantial or real than the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

More tomorrow.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. III)

Continuing the case for theism as the best explanation for the evidence available to us, let's consider the next four examples of that evidence:

5. The fact of human consciousness
6. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
7. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
8. Our sense that we have free will

One quality of the world that sits better on the assumption of theism than atheism, particularly atheistic materialism, is the existence of human consciousness.

How does it happen, for instance, that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or pain or the taste of sweet)? How do electrochemical reactions in our neurons produce a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, expectation, or frustration, boredom, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book)? How does it want, worry, or have intentions?

How do the chemicals that make up the matter of the brain happen to make that matter aware of itself and its surroundings? How does matter come to hold beliefs or understand what it believes? How does pure matter impose a meaning on a text that one reads or a lecture to which one listens?

These are vexing questions for a materialist view of the world. It may be that if we put the proper chemicals in a flask under the appropriate conditions the flask would become conscious or feel pain, but we have no idea how it could do so, and the belief that it could is simply an article of materialist faith.

In other words, on the assumption that human beings are solely material beings consciousness is inexplicable. After all, a robot could function pretty well without experiencing any conscious phenomena at all, so why did consciousness evolve in humans?

The existence of consciousness suggests that material substance is not the only constituent of reality, which may be one reason why some materialists (called eliminative materialists) pretty much deny the existence of consciousness.

If there is, in addition to the material substance in our world, also mental substance, how could such a thing have arisen in a purely physical/material universe? The hypothesis that there is an intelligent Creator of the universe who is itself pure mind presents us with an explanation where naturalism must just shrug its shoulders.

Related to the matter of consciousness is the question of beauty, or more precisely, why it is that gazing at, or listening to, something beautiful should fill us with delight, or even rapture. It's possible, I suppose, to formulate some convoluted ad hoc hypothesis in terms of purposeless physical forces acting over billions of years on dozens of fortuitous mutations to produce response mechanisms to certain stimuli in our neuronal architecture. But why?

Why should a sunset fill us with wonder and a mountain range fill us with awe? Why and how would blind, unintentional processes produce such responses? What urgency would such seemingly gratuitous responses have in the struggle for survival that the whole panoply of mutations and selective pressures would be brought to bear to cultivate them?

A simpler explanation for such phenomena, perhaps, is that our encounters with beauty, like our encounters with good, are intimations of God. Beauty is one means by which God reveals Himself to us in the world. Our encounters with beauty are glimpses He gives us of Himself, and the delight we feel in them is a prelude to heaven.

Another aspect of the world that is better explained in terms of a theistic rather than an atheistic or naturalistic worldview is our sense that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes is not likely itself to be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, can be trusted to be rational or true, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and the reliability of scientific investigation, like "truth," is chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist is in the awkward position of having no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it.

We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any such justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

The next characteristic of human beings that makes more sense given the existence of God than given the truth of atheism is our sense that we are free to make genuine choices and that the future is open. In the absence of God our sense that we are free to choose and are responsible for those choices is problematic.

In a Godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to physical laws. There is no free will, there is only an inexorable determinism. At any given moment there is only one possible future, and our belief that we can freely create a future is pure sophistry and illusion.

Thus an atheist who faults me for writing this post is acting inconsistently with his own assumptions. If there is no God I am compelled to write and express these ideas by causes beyond my control and for which I am not responsible. Indeed, if there is no God, it's hard to see how anyone could ultimately be responsible for anything they do.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post introduced the concept of inference to the best explanation and seventeen facts about the world and the existential human condition, the best explanation for which, I argue, is God, or something very much like God. Today we'll consider the first four of those facts:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact that life's origin is inexplicable on naturalism
   
4. The fact of biological information
   

The first of these facts is our conviction that the universe must have had a cause and didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that its existence depends upon something beyond itself. It's possible, perhaps, that it somehow created itself, but that seems counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator Itself requires an explanation. As philosopher Del Ratzsch points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider an analogy to the discovery on Mars of a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium .

Most people would think that the cube was produced by some kind of intelligent beings, aliens, and would regard the cube as virtual proof that such beings existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of alien beings, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation of the cube, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the mysterious structure.

Such a reply would certainly sound odd.

The inability to say anything much about who the aliens were or where they came from doesn't count at all against the theory that intelligent agents were responsible for the cube, nor does it mean that the alien theory is no better than the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube is surely an inference to the best explanation.

The second fact about the world that is easier to explain on the theistic rather than the atheistic hypothesis is that the parameters, forces and constants which govern the cosmos are exquisitely fine-tuned. Here is one example of the dozens which could serve:

If the initial density of matter in the universe had deviated by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th power (a value referred to by scientists as the "density parameter"), the universe would have either fallen back on itself or expanded too quickly for stars to form. This is an unimaginably fine tolerance.

Imagine a stack of dimes stretching across 10 to the 30th universes like our own. Let the dimes represent calibrations on a gauge displaying every possible value for the density parameter. Imagine, too, that a needle points to the dime representing the critical value. If the initial density of our cosmos deviated from that critical value by a single dime our universe, if it formed at all, would not be suitable for life.

Or imagine a console featuring dials and gauges for each of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of constants, parameters, and other cosmic contingencies which define the structure of our world. Imagine that each dial face shows trillions upon trillions of possible values. Each of those dials has to be calibrated to precisely the value to which it is actually set in our world in order for a universe to exist and/or for life to thrive.

Of course, it could be an astonishing coincidence that all the dials are set with such mind-boggling precision. Or it could be that there are a near infinite number of universes having all possible values and that ours just happens to be one that is perfectly calibrated for life. But not only is this an extraordinarily unparsimonious hypothesis, it also elicits the question of what it is that's generating these universes and what evidence we have that they even exist.

It's much simpler to bow to Ockham and assume that there is just one universe and that its structure manifests a level of engineering of breath-taking precision, a conclusion perfectly compatible with the idea that there's an intelligent agent behind it all. "It's crazy," as philosopher Richard Swinburne says, "to postulate a trillion universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job."

One further point: Scientists assume as they study the universe that it is rational, that it lends itself to rational inquiry, but if so, then an entirely non-rational explanation for it seems less likely than an explanation which incorporates rational causes.

The third fact is that it has proven exceedingly difficult to explain how the first living unit, a cell able to metabolize, reproduce, eliminate waste, manufacture proteins, etc., could have ever arisen solely by chance. The odds against a chance origin of life, with no input from an intelligent agent, are so improbable as to make belief that it happened a matter of extraordinary blind faith.

It's somewhat like insisting that a very complex, fully functional and self-replicating computer could have arisen by the action of sun, wind, rain and lightning swirling through a junkyard for a couple million years.

A fourth fact about the world from which we might infer that there is an intelligent agent involved somehow in its development is the existence of biological information. The biosphere is information-rich, a fact which raises the question where this information came from and how it ever came about.

The naturalist's answer is that the information, such as we find in DNA and cellular processes, resulted from blind mechanistic forces acting purposelessly and randomly over eons of time. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, of course, but if we're going to limit ourselves to the lessons of experience we must acknowledge that information whose provenience we can ascertain is always the product of an intelligent mind.

Random processes can produce highly improbable patterns (like the particular pattern of craters on the moon) and they can produce very specific recognizable patterns (like the repetition of a single letter typed by a monkey), but what we've never observed a random, non-teleological process do is generate both (such as we find in a computer program). Yet that is precisely what we have in the genetic code.

The genetic code and the complex of proteins and transcription molecules necessary to decipher that code, must've arisen prior to the ability to replicate and thus prior to the action of any selection mechanism, in other words, by sheer chance. Believing it happened is somewhat analogous to believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could leave in its wake a fully assembled and functional jet airplane.

There may someday be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information, but until that day arrives the obvious existence of that information suggests an intelligent agent lurks somewhere in its history.

More tomorrow.

Theism as an Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. I)

Among the indictments of religious believers registered by skeptics such as the coterie of anti-theists lead by Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. is that belief in God is at best irrational and at worst pernicious. Theism, the believer is condescendingly assured, is all blind faith and no evidence, but should a theist try to pin down his antagonist and ask him exactly what he means by "evidence," it often turns out that the word is employed as a synonym for "proof."

Well, perhaps there's no proof that there is a personal God, but that's hardly a reason not to believe that one exists. After all, we can prove very little of what we believe about the world, yet we don't hold our beliefs less firmly for that.

The skeptic's claim that there's no evidence for God and that theistic belief is thus irrational is, ironically, the reverse of the truth. It is actually, in my view, more rational to believe that a personal transcendent creator of the universe exists than to disbelieve it. Moreover, if what I argue below is correct, the logical consequences of atheism turn out to be psychically and politically toxic.

Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests more comfortably on the side of the believer. This is because almost every relevant fact about the world, and every existential characteristic of the human condition, makes more sense when viewed in the light of the hypothesis of theism than it does on the assumption of atheism.

Put differently, the conclusion of theism is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation.

I don't mean to suggest that there are no facts about the world that militate against the existence of God - there are, of course. The existence of suffering is the most troubling example. Nor do I mean to suggest that atheism can offer no account at all of the facts of human existence that I discuss in what follows. Perhaps it can. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism the facts are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism.

If that is the case, it follows that it's more reasonable to believe that the best explanation for them is the existence of a personal God.

Here are eighteen facts about the world and human experience that I will argue, over the course of the next several days, are easier to explain on the assumption that traditional Judeo-Christian theism is true than on the assumption that metaphysical naturalism (atheism) is true:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact that life's origin is inexplicable on naturalism
   
4. The fact of biological information
   
5. The fact of human consciousness
   
6. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
   
7. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
   
8. Our sense that we have free will
   
9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
   
10. Our sense of moral obligation
    
11. Our sense of guilt
    
12. Our belief in human dignity
    
13. Our belief in human worth
    
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights
    
15. Our desire for justice
    
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
    
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self
    
18. Our desire to survive our own death
    

Nine Questions about Black Holes

Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes answers nine questions submitted to him by a young student about black holes. If you've ever wondered about any of these questions, or even if you haven't, you'll want to watch the video Barnes has put together on this. Here are the questions:

1. How do scientists know there is a supermassive black hole in the centre of every galaxy?
2. Many sites say scientists don’t know how supermassive black holes are formed. Are there any theories?
3. Why does a star explode into a supernova when it runs out of energy?
4. If it has run out of energy, where does the energy for the explosion come from?
5. Why do extremely dense objects have so much gravity?
6. Does a black hole really ‘blow out’ matter sometimes and why?
7. When a black hole consumes more matter does its gravity increase?
8. Can black holes die?
9. Is it possible for a black hole to have an ‘other side’ and if so what could it be?

And here are Barnes' answers to these questions:

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

In her magisterial 1951 work titled The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian tyrannies grow out of the fragments of a highly atomized society comprised of lonely, alienated and isolated individuals who have lost faith in the institutions of their culture and who lack both a knowledge of, and appreciation for, their history.

Rod Dreher picks up on this theme in his recent book Live Not by Lies. He writes that our contemporary young, despite the superficial connectedness they may feel as avid consumers of social media, are largely unhappy and isolated to a historically unprecedented degree.

Their loneliness and ennui manifest themselves in epidemic rates of teenage depression and suicide which psychologist Jean Twenge says have placed us "on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades." Much of the deterioration in the mental well-being of those born since 2000, she claims, "can be traced to their phones."

Walk into a restaurant or any gathering place where you might find groups of young (and maybe not-so-young) people sitting together and it's not unusual to see each of them alone in their own world, staring at their phones, or wearing ear buds or head sets that exclude any meaningful interaction with others.

I've visited people in their homes who keep the television on so loud conversation is all but impossible, and, of course, lonely people congregate in night clubs where the music creates a din over which it's impossible to talk. Even in a crowd we're often functionally alone.

Dreher says that modern technology and social media are just two of the forces creating the conditions for what he calls a decadent, pre-totalitarian culture. Along with social atomization, widespread loneliness, the embrace of radical ideologies, the erosion of religious belief, and the loss of faith in our institutions leave society "vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation."

Totalitarian tyrants will do all they can to destroy a sense of community in the people they oppress because community is a support system that encourages resistance. It's much easier to control people when they lack the sense of identity that comes from belonging to something bigger than themselves.

Where in our modern society do we find community? The family is disintegrating, churches are empty, neighborhoods are populated by people who frequently move on after a few years, and now with the Covid pandemic schools are closing, sports teams are disbanded and gatherings are restricted by the state to a couple dozen people. It's harder than ever to feel a sense of belonging to something.

When people lack community, a sense of belonging, they'll crave the fellowship and identity that an ideological commitment provides. They'll sign on to any movement that gives them a sense of importance and fills their otherwise empty lives with meaning, even if that meaning is at bottom an illusion.

It is precisely this promise of a meaningful life that propelled the Bolshevik communists to power in an effete Russia after 1917 and enabled the rise of Hitler in a worn out Germany in the 1930s.

Could we, too, be slouching toward totalitarianism? If we think it couldn't happen here then perhaps we understand neither history nor human nature nor the parlous condition of our contemporary culture.

Evolution and Parsimony

There's a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts. The principle is sometimes called the Principle of Parsimony, because it stresses that our hypotheses should always be as simple (parsimonious) as the evidence allows.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views wrote a piece some years ago inviting us to imagine a scenario illustrating this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards! The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier (simpler) to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the most parsimonious explanation of the phenomena depicted in the video, certainly more so than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell relates this to the problem of undirected Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a college professor assigning the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class.

“Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms was formed by pure chance with the ability to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were also able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors that crept in.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded in a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have reversed the pictures! You did it backwards” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

The fictitious student has put his finger on the problem with any theory of biological origins that excludes intelligent agency. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as butterfly metamorphosis, or create a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these marvels were the intended product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable, on naturalism, as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

It's much simpler to assume that an intelligent mind must've somehow been directing the whole process toward a preconceived end.

Ethics and Evolution

In an essay titled Evolution and Ethics written in 1893 Thomas Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for morality. One popular candidate for such a basis is the evolution of the moral sense in human beings, but Huxley, despite his total fealty to Darwinian evolution, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,”... adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution.

I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Huxley's right, of course. If the inclination to be kind and tolerant has evolved in the human species then so has the inclination to be selfish, violent, and cruel. So if evolution is to serve as our "moral dictionary" what grounds do we have for privileging kindness over cruelty? Both are equally sanctioned by our evolutionary history, and thus we can't say that either is better or more right than the other.

Huxley goes on to dispense with the notion that the evolutionary development of our ethical sensibility can provide us with some sort of guide to our behavior:

There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called “ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittest’; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.

The problem is that, for naturalists, the processes of nature are the only thing they can look to for moral guidance.

Having rejected the notion that there exists a transcendent, personal, moral authority, the naturalist, if he's to avoid nihilism, is left trying to derive ethics from what he sees in nature, which leads to what I regard as the most serious problem with any naturalistic ethics: There's simply no warrant for thinking that a blind, impersonal process like evolution or a blind, impersonal substance like matter, can impose a moral duty on conscious beings.

Moral obligations, if they exist, can only be imposed by conscious, intelligent, moral authorities. Evolution can no more impose such an obligation than can gravity. Thus, naturalists (atheists) are confronted with a stark choice: Either give up their atheism or embrace moral nihilism. Unwilling to do what is for them unthinkable and accept the first alternative, many of them are reluctantly embracing the second.

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

I had been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality….

I experienced a shocking epiphany that religious believers are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality….

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Joel Marks, An Amoral Manifesto

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The world, according to this new picture [i.e. the picture produced by a scientific outlook], is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….

Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative. W.T. Stace, The Atlantic Monthly, 1948

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We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality. Kai Nielson (1984)

What these thinkers and dozens like them are saying is that the project of trying to find some solid, naturalistic foundation upon which to build an ethics is like trying to find a mermaid. The object of the search simply doesn't exist, nor could it.

How Is it That We Understand?

One major controversy in the philosophy of mind is driven by the claim that computers can think, or will soon be able to. If that claim is true then it makes it a lot easier to assume that the brain is a kind of computer and that what we call mind is simply a word we use to describe the way the brain functions.

Or put another way, mind is to brain what computer software is to the computer's hardware. This view is called "functionalism."

In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to our cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and neuroscientist Michael Egnor has a helpful discussion of it at Evolution News and Views. Egnor describes the argument as follows:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You've moved to China and you get a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth with you is a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to the algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to and from the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing. As Egnor says: "Thought is about understanding the process, not merely about mechanically carrying out the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm."

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and do understand, either our brains are not computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

This leads to the question of how a material chunk of meat, the brain, can generate something as mysterious as understanding. If all the material that makes up a brain were placed in a laboratory flask would the flask understand? Would it be conscious?

That human beings are capable of such marvels is evidence that there's more to our cognitive abilities than our material brain. Perhaps that something more is an immaterial mind or soul that's cognitively integrated with the material brain and which the brain cannot function without.

Short Memories

A lot of folks on the left are criticizing Donald Trump for claiming that the vote last Tuesday was fraudulent. I don't know if it was or not, but gee whiz, does anyone seriously think listless Joe Biden really won something like six million more votes than Barack Obama received in 2008 and 15 million more than Hillary Clinton got in 2016?!

We should remember this the next time we hear someone say miracles don't happen.

Anyway, Trump is being told by our media overseers that he should stop making such an unseemly fuss and just go away quietly. What short memories we have.

1. The Democrats fought tooth and nail for Al Gore in Florida after the 2000 election. They didn't concede until every last scintilla of hope was extinguished, and after Gore finally did concede a month or so after the election the Democrats continued to insist that he was the real president and that George W. Bush had stolen the office.

2. After the 2016 election millions of people signed petitions urging the electors who were to cast their ballot in the electoral college for Trump to "do the right thing" and vote for Clinton even though they were pledged to vote for Trump.

3. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have been claiming for four years that Trump is an illegitimate president. They offer not a shred of evidence, but they refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of his tenure nonetheless.

4. When Stacey Abrams challenged the results of her governor's race in Georgia in 2018 the media cheered for her and urged her not to give up. She still claims that the election was rigged, that she actually won, and she's still being feted by progressives and the media.

5. Hillary Clinton adjured Joe Biden that if he was behind when the networks called the election he "should not concede under any circumstances."

By claiming that the results reported from several swing states are fraudulent, and refusing to concede until every legal recourse is explored, Trump is only following the precedent the Democrats themselves have created. Now they're criticizing him for doing what they themselves have done and, were circumstances reversed, would be doing again today.

Live Not by Lies

In his new book, Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher draws a comparison between the conditions which prevailed in Europe and Russia before the communist revolution in 1917 and the conditions which prevail in the contemporary West.

Dreher believes that the U.S. is ripe for a totalitarian takeover of our culture, though perhaps not of the murderous sort witnessed in virtually every communist country during the 20th century.

In his book he quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a victim of the Soviet prison camps known as "the Gulag." Solzhenitsyn described the totalitarianism of 20th century Soviet state and the horrific suffering of political and religious prisoners at the hands of the Soviet secret police (KGB).

These wretches had their skulls squeezed with iron rings, they were lowered into acid baths, they were trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs, they had red hot iron rods shoved up their colon, they had their genitals crushed beneath the boot of their torturers, they were kept from sleeping for days, subjected to thirst, and beaten to a pulp.

Other prisoners have testified to being starved and kept outdoors in freezing cold for hours with nothing on but their underwear.

This was communist totalitarianism (the word refers to the complete and total control of every aspect of a person's life by the state), and it's the logical endpoint of leftist ideology. It was vividly portrayed in books like Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago, Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind and films like The Lives of Others.

But Dreher isn't warning that this sort of mass scale barbaric brutality is coming to the West. What he sees on our near horizon is what he calls a "soft totalitarianism." It's more like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than George Orwell's 1984. It's a totalitarianism in which coercion is exercised by the masters of the culture who compel conformity through speech codes, fear of ruined businesses and careers, tax penalties, loss of opportunities and massive surveillance.

Nevertheless, the prevailing social conditions are so similar to those prior to 1917 in Russia that he's convinced that we should prepare for it.

Some of the conditions that he says make us vulnerable to a very profound restriction of our freedom are a loss of confidence in institutions like the family and government; the loss of belief in objective truth; waning religious commitment; the rise of identity politics in which someone is considered evil simply because of their race, gender, social class or religion; an unwillingness to transmit our heritage to the next generation and a perversion of such history that is transmitted (e.g. the 1619 project); alienation and isolation, especially among the young; and a diminution of the value people place on freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion.

Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), Dreher alleges, are playing the same role today that the Bolsheviks played in early 20th century Russia. Cancel culture puts at risk entire careers and the livelihoods of those who hold opinions contrary to those approved by the SJWs.

Add to all this the enormous potential for surveillance afforded by modern technology (imagine how easy it would be for all those smart devices in the home, like Alexa, to be programmed to monitor every conversation) and the untoward influence six giant tech companies - Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft - exert over our culture, and it's easy to see that we are precariously close to a precipice.

Here's one example of what's in store if the left continues to gain control over both our culture and our government. It doesn't appear in Dreher's book because it just came to light in the last day or so.

Some on the left have acknowledged that they're keeping an enemies list of people who worked for or otherwise supported Trump. The purpose of the list is to insure that those people have their careers ruined. The following is excerpted from the link:

Jennifer Rubin, a columnist at the Washington Post tweets:

Any R[epublican] now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into "polite" society. We have a list.

And she’s not alone in keeping a list. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted her approval of a project started by someone named Michael Simon, who’s keeping track of people who were Trump supporters. They’re finished.

Simon is a former Obama administration analytics guy who has started the “Trump Accountability Project” to keep a list of, as Democratic congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez calls them, “Trump sycophants.”

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets [sic], writings, photos in the future,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

Simon responded, in a now-deleted tweet: "Yes, we are. The Trump Accountability Project (@trumpaccproject) Every Administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them – everyone."

One has to be alarmed by this sort of thing, even if one was originally skeptical of Dreher's thesis. It's all of a piece with the behavior of the left in the wake of every revolution in which they succeeded in toppling the established order going back to Paris in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959. The victors rounded up all those who opposed them, all those who refused to go along with the Marxist-Leninist program, and stripped them of their jobs, their careers, their homes, threw them into horrid prisons, tortured them and murdered them by the millions.

Our contemporary SJWs may not go so far as state sanctioned murder - Dreher doesn't think they will - but they have every intention of ending the careers and wrecking the lives of those who oppose them.

There's more about this group of political revenge-seekers ontheir website.

They make laughable President-elect Biden's promise to bring us all together in unity and harmony. Fat chance of that as long as his party harbors petty tyrants like these.

Some Thoughts on the Election

I write this on November 6th while the vote tallies in several major states are still incomplete. Nevertheless, assuming the trends which show Mr. Biden heading to the White House are correct the good news for conservatives is that the news isn't all bad.

I'm pretty sure that had voters judged Mr. Trump on the basis of what he has accomplished for the country and the world and not on the basis of his lamentable personal characteristics or the portrait the media has been at pains to paint of him - in other words, if Americans judged Trump like they judge their music and movie celebrities - the President would have won easily.

But be that as it may, the election results were in some respects encouraging for conservative Republicans and less so for Democrats. In fact, just about the only reason the Democrats have for rejoicing is that their candidate won the presidency. Everything else for them is rather bad news. Here's why:

1. The Democrats had high expectations for a "blue wave" which would sweep large numbers of Democrats into office at the national and state level and give them control of the nation's destiny for generations into the future, but the wave never materialized.

The Republicans appear to have retained control of the Senate despite having almost twice as many members up for reelection than did the Democrats (23/12). Republican control of the Senate will stifle any plans the Democrats may have had to "expand" the courts, add states to the union, abolish the electoral college and end the filibuster.

Moreover, any radical economic legislation, such as the Green New Deal, issuing from the House of Representatives will be Dead on Arrival in the Senate.

Any judges that Mr. Biden would have opportunity to appoint will have to be reasonably moderate since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can block or slow walk any radical progressives which might come up for confirmation.

2. Contrary to expectations, the Democrats picked up no seats in the House and stand to actually lose a dozen or more which may slow down the legislative ambitions of the leftmost members of the chamber. They anticipated gaining as many as fifteen seats, but they've lost, at this point in the counting, about ten and may ultimately lose even more.

Since the minority party usually does well in mid-term elections when the other party holds the White House, the GOP may be poised to take back the House in 2022.

3. Also contrary to expectations, as of this writing, no state legislatures were flipped from Republican to Democrat, but one was flipped the other way.

Likewise with state governorships where the GOP picked up one.

4. The Democrats suffered a severe erosion in their base constituency, especially among Hispanics. Minorities voted for Republicans in numbers not seen since 1960. Barack Obama promised to bring the races together, but did little or nothing to accomplish it. Trump has made a surprising start, especially given the relentless media narrative that he's an inveterate racist.

There appears to be a tectonic shift taking place in American politics. Throughout much of the 20th century Democrats were seen as the party of the working class and minorities while Republicans were perceived to be the party of the wealthy corporate execs. Today that's reversing. Republicans are rapidly gaining traction with the working class and minorities and the Democratic party is populated with rich celebrities and fat cat CEOs from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and elsewhere.

One caveat about this, though. The shift may be more a function of President Trump's popularity with blue collar workers and minorities than a function of their fondness for the Republican party. Unless the party learns something about governance from Mr. Trump, its popularity with these groups may prove ephemeral.

In any case, perhaps the biggest advantage of a Biden presidency for Democrats will be that he'll be able to revoke all of Mr. Trump's executive orders, the same orders which were largely responsible for the pre-pandemic economic boom. Despite his campaign promises and the pressure he'll be under from the progressive wing of his party, I'm not sure Mr. Biden is going to be eager to do that.

5. The media, both the news media and social media, as well as most pollsters, have taken an enormous and well-earned hit to their credibility. Having forecast a Democratic blowout they're left having to explain how they could've gotten it so badly wrong. Again.

6. Even if he serves his entire four year term (and that's a huge "if") Mr. Biden will almost certainly be a one term president. Mr. Trump could run again in 2024 if he wishes. He'd be the same age then as Mr. Biden is now, so his age shouldn't prevent him from running and winning.

Of course, this assumes that when the final vote counts are in and the lawsuits are all adjudicated Mr. Biden will have prevailed and Mr. Trump will have come up short. As of right now, however, that's by no means a certainty.

Naturalism, Utilitarianism and Egoism

My students are in the midst of discussing Utilitarian ethics as well as the view called ethical egoism so I thought I'd rerun this older post on the topic:

Peter Singer is a philosopher at Princeton who has gained substantial notoriety for invoking his utilitarian ethical principles to justify infanticide and animal rights. In a piece at The Journal of Practical Ethics the editors interview Singer and question whether utilitarians can, or do, live consistently with their own ethical philosophy.

Here's part of the interview:

Editors: Frances Kamm once said...that utilitarians who believe in very demanding duties to aid and that not aiding is the same as harming, but nevertheless don’t live up to these demands, don’t really believe their own arguments....She concludes that ‘either something is wrong with that theory, or there is something wrong with its proponents’.

What do you think about this argument? Why haven’t you given a kidney to someone who needs it now? You have two and you only need one. They have none that are working – it would make a huge difference to their life at very little cost to you.

Peter Singer: I’m not sure that the cost to me of donating a kidney would be “very little” but I agree that it would harm me much less than it would benefit someone who is on dialysis. I also agree that for that reason my failure to donate a kidney is not ethically defensible.... Donating a kidney does involve a small risk of serious complications. Zell Kravinsky suggests that the risk is 1 in 4000.

I don’t think I’m weak-willed, but I do give greater weight to my own interests, and to those of my family and others close to me, than I should. Most people do that, in fact they do it to a greater extent than I do (because they do not give as much money to good causes as I do).

That fact makes me feel less bad about my failure to give a kidney than I otherwise would. But I know that I am not doing what I ought to do.

This response raises several questions, but I'll focus on just one. Singer believes it's wrong not to give the kidney and he feels guilty about not doing so, yet why should he? In what sense is his violation of utilitarian principles morally wrong? Indeed, why is utilitarianism morally superior to the egoism to which he admits to succumbing?

To put it differently, if Singer chooses to be a utilitarian and donate the kidney while someone else chooses to be an egoist and keep his kidneys, why is either person right or wrong? Given Singer's naturalism, what does it even mean to say that someone is morally wrong anyway?

On naturalism there's no moral authority, except one's own subjective convictions, and no accountability, so in what way is keeping one's kidneys an offense to morality?

Elsewhere in the interview, Singer notes that his ethical thinking is based on the work of the great 19th century ethicist and utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and mentions that,

Sidgwick himself remained deeply troubled by his inability to demonstrate that egoism is irrational. That led him to speak of a “dualism of practical reason” — two opposing viewpoints, utilitarianism and egoism, seemed both to be rational.

In other words, the choice between them is an arbitrary exercise of personal preference, although Singer doesn't agree with this because he believes evolution affords grounds for rejecting egoism. It's hard to see how this could be the case, however, since it's difficult to understand how blind impersonal processes like random genetic mutation and natural selection could impose moral duties.

Nor is it easy to see how acting against the trend of those evolutionary processes can be morally wrong. How is one doing anything wrong if he chooses to act contrary to the way mutation and natural selection have shaped the human species? Why should he accept the ethical results of evolutionary history any more than we accept the physical limitations imposed on us by gravity when we go aloft in an airplane or hot air balloon?

The only reason we have for not putting our own interests ahead of the interests of others - as in the example of the kidney - and the only rational reason we would have for feeling guilt over our failure to consider the needs of others is the belief that such failures are a transgression of an obligation imposed upon us by a transcendent personal moral authority.

Singer lacks such a belief and can thus give no compelling explanation for his feelings of guilt nor any compelling reason why one should be a utilitarian rather than an egoist.