On the Meaning of Life

One of the themes in my book In the Absence of God (See the link at the top of this page) is that if naturalism is true, i.e. if there's no super-nature, nothing beyond this space-time universe, then life is ultimately meaningless. As Shakespeare put it, "Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

To admit this is to poise oneself on "the knife edge of despair" in Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg's words, so it's not unusual for naturalists or atheists (the two words are close enough in meaning as to be considered synonyms) to push back.

One typical rejoinder to the claim that life in the absence of God is meaningless was stated by an atheist named Luke who wrote the following to Christian philosopher William Lane Craig:

I believe that purpose to life is not, nor should be cosmologically significant nor intrinsic but something we create and choose for ourselves. Hence, meaning comes from endeavors which could involve pursuing passions, raising a family, or helping others – pursuits which give your life purpose and make it feel as if it is worth living but have a finite and limited impact in any ultimate sense.

You may argue that if we are going to perish, why does it matter, it will not make any difference if I choose a or b. To illustrate why I disagree with this attitude, let’s consider two scenarios:

1. I have just finished my meal at a buffet restaurant and see a chocolate cake on a stand. Me choosing to eat the cake would be inconsequential in any ultimate sense. But the cake is sweet and delicious, eating it makes the moment temporarily more enjoyable, which is good enough. Eating the cake is a worthwhile experience despite the fact that it will run out and will not have any further impact on my life.

2. I am attending a classical concert and know that the music will end, and the event will become a vague memory. But while I am seated in the audience, I enjoy the music which is so powerful, elegant, and enlightening. In this sense, attending the concert was worth it – it was good while it lasted.

So, on naturalism, we will die and perish, the sun will swallow the earth, the universe will cease to exist. But I think it does matter that we were alive.

During the flicker of time while we were here, life was gratifying, engaging, and beautiful. So, under my conception of meaning, life is meaningful under naturalism, the fact that things to come to an end is not and should not be a cause for fear and despair, but rather something I have blissfully accepted. Instead, we should have gratitude that it happened.

Luke's letter reminded me of biologist Theodosious Dobzhansky's bleak asseveration that "The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life."

At the conclusion of his substantive response to Luke's argument Craig writes, "Let me close with a question for you to think about, Luke: you say that we should be grateful that the universe happened. Grateful to whom?"

Good question.

But Craig's response aside, my own answer to Luke would be this:

For something's existence to be meaningful it must have a purpose, that is, an end or telos or reasons for its existence. Reasons, however, presuppose a mind in which those reasons reside.

If there is no mind behind the reality in which we live, if the universe is a result of a mindless series of purposeless events, and if humanity is likewise the result of a mindless series of accidental evolutionary coincidences, then there's no reason for humanity's existence and thus no meaning to it. And, if the universe's existence has no meaning, and if life in general has no meaning, and if mankind's existence in particular has no meaning it's very hard to see how an individual life could somehow, in the midst of all that meaninglessness, nevertheless have a meaning, no matter how much chocolate cake we eat.

Certainly, while we exist some of us can enjoy life's pleasures, but is pleasure the purpose or reason for our existence? Is enjoyment the whole point of our lives? If so, then the lives of most people who've ever lived have had a very attenuated meaning at best because for most people throughout human history to live is to suffer.

And if pleasure is not the reason for our existence, then pleasure can't be what gives life meaning. It only helps to make life endurable.

So, if we are the accidental product of mindless processes that blindly and purposelessly brought us into being then there's no reason for our existing, no end or purpose for which we are made. We're just dust in the wind and all that we do and enjoy ultimately comes to nothing.

As filmmaker Woody Allen once said, "You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing, but it doesn't [amount] to anything."

If naturalism is true then the claim of another filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, is as apt as it is succinct: “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”

On the other hand, if naturalism is false and we're actually the product of an act of intentional creation - if a Mind brought us into being - then we can assume that this Mind had a reason for doing so. We can assume that we have a purpose, an end toward which we are to strive, and that our lives are therefore meaningful.

Even if we don't know the reason for which we were created we can at least assume there is one, and if we were purposely created then our existence is not just a meaningless random accident.

It's a wonderful prospect, but for some perplexing reason naturalists prefer to believe the melancholy view that they're headed for oblivion, that nothing really matters and that all we do is ultimately for naught, rather than embrace the possibility that they were created by a God who loves them and that their lives really do matter. Forever.

Basing Morality on Human Flourishing

Philosopher Sam Harris is often identified as a "New Atheist," one of a number of prominent thinkers who have undertaken to discredit religion in all its manifestations.

Harris gave a TED Talk in 2010 which he based on his book The Moral Landscape and in which he sought to rebut the common view that science, being the study of that which can be observed and measured, really has nothing to say about the aesthetic life - the realm of values, including moral values. In his TED Talk Harris says this:

So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history.

Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue.

Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

In other words, Harris claims that right and wrong are about what promotes the flourishing of human beings and that science can speak to this question. There are, however, at least three things wrong with using human flourishing as a criterion for ethics:

1. On what grounds do we privilege conscious creatures over other animals, human beings over chickens? What works against human flourishing (e.g. mass slaughters) might be a boon to the flourishing of animals, particularly carrion-eaters. On atheism, then, what grounds are there for the specieist promotion of human flourishing over that of the flourishing of other animals in general and other mammals in particular?

2. Whose idea of flourishing should we promote? A member of ISIS who thinks the human race would be better off if everyone were either forcibly converted to Islam or killed has a distinctly different idea of fluorishing than, say, Sam Harris. Whose conception of human flourishing should we privilege, and how do we decide that?

3. On what grounds does an atheist conclude that I should be concerned with the flourishing of others as opposed to simply being concerned with my own flourishing? If I can prosper at the expense of others why would that be wrong? Why is it wrong for me to live large by exploiting the earth's resources and leaving future generations yet unborn to fend for themselves?

Perhaps Harris can answer these questions, but I have serious doubts. Atheism simply does not supply the philosophical resources necessary to support a belief in objective moral obligation.

If atheism is true morality devolves to subjectivism, i.e. the view that what's right is whatever I feel is right or whatever I feel I should do, and subjectivism offers no rational justification for stopping short of a "might-makes-right" view of ethics.

On atheism, whoever has the power to make the rules gets to make them, whatever they are, and there's nothing wrong with that.

My Woke Friends Are Right

Like you, probably, I have some woke acquaintances who like to remind me that the United States is racist both personally and structurally and who are incredulous that I'm skeptical of their claim.

After all, "everybody knows" that there are lots of racists out there, that, indeed, just being white makes one a racist and that, in any case, our institutions work to the disadvantage of minority groups, especially blacks, even if the people who work in those institutions don't intend to disadvantage anyone.

Unfortunately, though, the only evidence adduced to support these claims is some disparity or other which could as well be explained by a dozen other factors, but for my woke friends racism is the only factor they'll consider.

Anyway, I think I'm coming around to their point of view.

I did a post the other day in which I concluded that the minimum wage, which disproportionately harms minority workers, especially young black males, is ipso facto systemically racist, and today I read an article in the Wall Street Journal by William McGurn in which he offers a compelling argument that policies adopted by educational institutions dominated by progressives are clearly harming racial minorities.

McGurn writes,

The North Thurston Public Schools in Lacey, Wash., made headlines in November when their “equity report” classified Asian-Americans along with whites instead of as “students of color.” Apparently the Asian-Americans were doing too well academically to be students of color. After what the district said was “an overwhelming public response,” it admitted its “category choices” had “racist implications” and dropped the equity report from its website.

To normal Americans, it makes no sense. How are Asian-Americans not “people of color”? But give the North Thurston folks credit for following progressive logic to its conclusion. Modern progressive theory more or less divides the nation between the oppressors, defined as whites, and the oppressed, defined as everyone else. In this framework, achieving success puts you on the side of the oppressors and thus makes you white or “white-adjacent”—even if your family came from China or India.

Evidently the progressives who obsess over the fine points of racial distinctions fail to see that by defining achievement as white they provide a handy rationalization for the failures of those who don’t achieve. If I'm not white I can't succeed in this world so it's no wonder that I don't succeed. It's not my fault.

McGurn goes on to point out how this prejudice against Asians is a rerun of some of the most inglorious episodes in American history:

Bigoted laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or actions such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II were once thought among the worst stains on American history left by anti-Asian racism. But these days the characterization of Asian-Americans as the “model minority” triggers the woke.

“Asian-Americans are caught in a bind—condemn the system of white supremacy and privilege along with other people of color or be ‘banished’ from the victim group as white-adjacent,” says Wenyuan Wu, executive director of Californians for Equal Rights. “The end goal here is to pit people against each other as if our hyphenated identities are bigger than our common destiny as Americans.”

The director is correct, of course. It has always been the goal of the left to divide this nation into factions in perpetual tension with each other. An America at peace and harmony is not the sort of soil in which one can easily grow a socialist revolution.

Asian-American achievement, McGurn asserts, is "an embarrassment to progressives because it undermines the claim that structural racism dooms nonwhite citizens to the margins of the American dream. So Asian-American achievement must either be dismissed as somehow white, or sacrificed at the altar of equity."

A good example of how progressives address their dilemma is found in the reaction to a report which found that public schools in America’s most progressive cities have been failing their black and Latino children for decades.

The solution in New York City under the aegis of progressive Mayor Bill deBlasio is to punish those who are succeeding:

In January America’s self-styled progressive in chief announced that New York will abolish the entrance exam for the city’s gifted-and-talented programs for young students. If you can’t fix the schools that are broken, you cut down to size the schools that are working.

In 2019 Mr. de Blasio’s School Diversity Advisory Group reported that though Asians are only 17% of New York’s kindergarten population, they account for 42% of the gifted-and-talented seats.

Plainly the mayor’s “success” requires reducing the number of Asian-Americans no matter how qualified they are. The mayor has also tried to abolish the entrance exam for the city’s high-performing high schools, where Asian-American students again are “overrepresented.”

This not only manifests systemic racism on the part of the educational institutions which are failing blacks and Hispanics, but it also demonstrates personal racism on the part of the mayor. After all, would he take such measures if the numbers for Asian students and black students were reversed?

McGurn goes on to give other examples of how progressive policies and institutions are punishing Asians, ostensibly for being successful, and it's worth taking the time to read his entire piece.

As he says, Asian-Americans are an embarrassment to progressives because their success gives the lie to the trope that America is inveterately racist against people of color. The irony is that in their embarrassment Progressives actually adopt the racist policies against Asians that they imagine are being employed by others against blacks. Their policies are also terribly harmful to blacks because they inculcate the ridiculous idea that academic success is a sign of white supremacy which puts it out of reach for all but the most exceptional black students who, it’s alleged, betray their race by “acting white.”

McGurn closes with this:

In the past, anti-Asian bigotry took the form of direct assaults. These reflected claims that Asian-Americans were inferior, incapable of assimilating or stealing jobs. But today many Asian-Americans are learning that the progressive form of discrimination may be the most insidious of all.

“What do progressives say to a Chinese-American or Indian-American when she realizes their ideology means her children will be held to higher standards to get into college simply because of their race?” asks Wai Wah Chin, charter president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of Greater New York.

“Should she really have to tell her children they must just accept that because of their race they will have to work harder to get the same opportunities as others—and accept this new racism as the price of a woke America?”

So yes, I’m coming to see that my woke friends are right, after all. There is indeed a lot of systemic racism in our progressive institutions and among our progressive friends. Unfortunately, they’re too blinded by their own self-righteousness to see it.

Climate Predictions

Good scientific theories are subject to the outcome of predictions which means that good theories are risky because if the predictions turn out to be false the theory and its proponents are likely to be relegated to professional oblivion. If a theory is not discarded even though it repeatedly fails to pass the prediction test then practically speaking it's unfalsifiable. If no observation is allowed to count against the theory then its validity as a piece of science is suspect.

This all came to mind reading an article on President Biden's special climate envoy John Kerry's recent prediction that we have nine years left to avert climate catastrophe. From the article:

Earth will be plagued by consistently catastrophic climate patterns starting in 2030 unless human inhabitants of the planet begin making drastic changes — and right away.

"The scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left," Kerry told CBS "This Morning" in an exclusive interview aired on Friday.

The former secretary of state was brought on to discuss the historic winter freeze blasting southern states like Texas as well as the Biden administration's official reentrance into the Paris climate accord, an international agreement aimed at lowering global carbon emissions. President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris accord in 2017, citing the fact that it was disproportionately harmful to American business.

During the interview, Kerry argued the situation is so dire that the initial pledges agreed to when the deal was signed in 2015 won't cut it anymore.

"Even if we did everything that we said we were going to do when we signed up in Paris we would see a rise in the Earth's temperature to somewhere around 3.7 degrees or more, which is catastrophic," he explained, imploring that new, more ambitious pledges needed to be made.

"There is no room for B.S. anymore. There's no faking it on this one," he said.

Kerry argued that chaotic weather events such as the winter freeze that has resulted in dozens of deaths in Texas could become the new normal if aggressive steps aren't taken. The freezing temperatures are "directly related to the warming," he noted, "even though your instinct is to say, wait a minute, this is the new Ice Age .. it's not. It is coming from the global warming and it threatens all the normal weather patterns."

This is an odd statement for the climate envoy to make since cold spells in Texas are not unique. There have been several in the last century and the worst was 122 years ago in 1899. Was that one caused by global warming, too? The reason this current blast has been so destructive is that Texas is far more developed today than it was then and far more reliant on technology that's vulnerable to cold and ice to deliver their energy.

But never mind that. Mr. Kerry has given us a prediction that can be tested, and if 2030 rolls around and we haven't seen the calamitous weather he predicts, we may conclude that his failed prediction, though based upon a legitimate scientific hypothesis, is prima facie evidence that the hypothesis is either false or in some way in need of modification.

Of course, there may be reasons why a theory fails to fulfill the predictions based upon it that have nothing to do with the quality of the theory itself. There may be instrument or researcher error, or maybe the prediction was sloppily framed, etc., so one or two failures do not merit trashing the theory, but repeated failures should certainly cast doubt on its reliability.

How many predictions does a theory have to fail, how many unfulfilled promissory notes does the public have to accept, before concluding that either the theory is false or its proponents won't let it be falsified because they keep finding reasons to excuse its failures?

After all, this is not the first time environmental alarmists have issued such dire prognostications. In his 1968 book Population Bomb Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich prophesied that there'd be a world-wide population catastrophe by the 1990s resulting in global famine, war and disease. It never happened.

Likewise, we were told in the 1970s that we were soon reaching "peak energy" and would quickly run out of fossil fuels like oil and coal. It never happened.

More relevant to the matter of climate change, in 2006 former Vice President Al Gore declared that unless "drastic measures" were taken to reduce greenhouse gasses, in just 10 years the world would reach a "point of no return." Yet in 2016 no one believed that we had passed the point of no return. If we did pass the "point of no return" in 2016 there'd certainly be no point in insisting today that we re-enter the Paris Climate Accords or in Mr. Kerry insisting that we have to do something by 2030.

Speaking of doing something, Mr. Kerry would have more credibility if he didn't give the appearance of thinking that he need not actually do anything himself, just that other people must. He's still flying around the globe in a private jet that emits up to 40 times as much carbon per passenger mile as a commercial flight, and although private jet emissions are a tiny fraction of total emissions, the people who make these flights have personal carbon footprints that are hundreds, or even thousands, of times the average as a consequence.

One might think that if Mr. Kerry was sincere in stating that we're on the brink of doomsday unless we all pull together to reverse the trend that he'd set a better example for the rest of us by putting his private jet in mothballs and flying commercial.

But of course flying commercial means he'd have to rub elbows with commoners and what elitist would deign to do that?

Journalistic Credibility

Why do contemporary journalists have so little credibility with so much of the public? Barton Swaim at the Wall Street Journal gives us a clue. He writes:

That Mr. Trump should've won the presidency [in 2016] largely by denouncing the media should have suggested to leading journalists and media executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong. Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their worst instincts.

Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump's unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true.

The repeal of "net neutrality," an Obama-era regulation on internet service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it didn't). The administration built "cages" in which to cram children of illegal border crossers (it didn't). The president praised neo-Nazis as "very fine people" (he didn't). His postmaster general was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie).

In retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans believed Mr. Trump's fictitious claims about the election.

Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.

Swaim could've included all of the untruths that filled our newspapers and airwaves surrounding, inter alia, the Russian collusion hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, Trump's alleged "authoritarianism," and his pandemic response. Little wonder allegations of "Fake News" emanating from the White House had such resonance with folks who believed, perhaps naively, that the media have an ethical obligation to present the truth and let the people decide for themselves how they should respond to it.

On the contrary, much of our media and its fellow-travelers on the left saw it as their duty to employ whatever means were necessary, no matter how dishonest, to damage and destroy a Republican president and his administration.

Rather than charitably giving the president the benefit of the doubt they put the worst possible construction on whatever he said or did to make him look as malign and as incompetent as possible. Rather than hold him to the same standard to which they held Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, they condemned in Trump what they ignored in his Democratic predecessors. Rather than tout his many successes along with criticisms of his failures, we heard from many precincts of the media only about his shortcomings and faults.

Any other president, for instance, who brokered the Abraham Accords, the first public normalization of relations between an Arab country and Israel since that of Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, would surely be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama was given the prize simply for talking about peace, but Trump's actual achievement, an amazing historical feat that eluded every president for the past 30 years, hardly rates a mention in our press.

Folks who got their news solely from CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times could be forgiven for thinking that the four years of Trump were an unmitigated disaster for the country. The truth is the Trump administration actually accomplished much more good than did any president in recent memory, but we rarely heard about it because it didn't fit the media narrative.

Mr. Biden talks about "bringing us back together," but it's an absurd aspiration as long as over half the country doesn't, and can't, trust the media to fairly and honestly report the truth.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

• The Covid vaccine was developed in almost miraculous time by the private pharmaceutical sector, but the government at the federal, state and local level is struggling to get the vaccine distributed. Millions of Americans over 70 are still waiting for their first shot.
  
  Why is it so hard? Doubtless it's because government does very little very well. Maybe the feds and states should've contracted with Amazon to deliver the vaccine.


• Can we please declare an informal moratorium on the phrase "getting shots into arms"? The phrase is beginning to suffer from extreme overuse by commentators who either wish to sound hip or lack sufficient imagination to come up with alternatives.


• This is the passage that gave rise to the expression that there's a God-shaped hole in every human heart that only God can fill. It's from Blaise Pascal's (1623-1662) Pensées:

  What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

  Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, theologian and philosopher. He discovered what became known as Pascal's Principle in physics, did important work on conic sections, laid the ground work for the mathematics of probability, invented a digital calculator, the syringe and the hydraulic press, wrote one of the most famous works in Christian theology (Pensées) and developed an argument justifying belief in God that came to be called Pascal's Wager.
  
  Quite a life packed into only 39 years.


• As I get older this story becomes a lot more like my everyday experience:
  
  An elderly couple had dinner at another couple's house, and after eating, the wives left the table and went into the kitchen.
  
  The two gentlemen were talking, and one said, 'Last night we went out to a new restaurant and it was really great I would recommend it very highly.'
  
  The other man said, 'What's the name of the restaurant?'
  
  The first man thought and thought and finally said, 'What’s the name of that flower you give to someone you love? You know, the one that's red and has thorns.'
  
  'Do you mean a rose?'
  
  'Yes, that's the one,' replied the man. He then turned towards the kitchen and yelled, 'Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?'

Karl Popper and the Falsification Criterion

Charlotte Sleigh at Aeon has an interesting piece on philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994), at least it's interesting until it becomes clear that Ms. Sleigh has no time for Popper's greatest contribution to his discipline.

Popper, in his book The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935), offered a solution to what's called the demarcation problem. This is the problem of distinguishing between what constitutes valid science and what Popper calls pseudo-science. His solution is called the falsification criterion.

What he means by this is that to be considered a legitimate scientific theory there must be some conceivable set of observations which, if they were made, would show the theory to be false. In other words, a theory to be scientific must be subject to testing and disproof.

Of course, this doesn't mean that to be considered scientific a theory must be shown to be false. That would be an absurdity. Rather it means that in principle there has to be some way to test it, some test which it could conceivably fail. Scientific tests usually consist of predictions based on the theory. To the extent that a theory succeeds in satisfying the predictions, the theory is confirmed and strengthened although it never reaches the status of final truth or proof since it's always possible that some future observation will not conform to a prediction.

For example, suppose it's your hypothesis that all objects will fall to earth at the same rate regardless of their mass as long as air resistance is discounted. You test your hypothesis by simultaneously dropping two balls of different masses from a height, as Galileo is said to have done, and you discover that no matter how many times you do this the two balls hit the ground at the same time.

Your hypothesis has been confirmed, but had one of them, perhaps the more massive one, hit the ground first it would've indicated that the more massive ball fell faster and your hypothesis would've been falsified. Since we can imagine a result that would've falsified our hypothesis if that result had occurred our hypothesis is a legitimate scientific hypothesis.

Popper pointed out that it's the essence of science that it deals in theories (i.e. well-confirmed hypotheses) that are subject to being falsified. If a theory is impervious to falsification, if no realistic result could ever serve to show it to be wrong, if it's compatible with every possible observation, then it's not testable and therefore not a scientific theory. That doesn't mean that the theory is wrong, it just means that it's not a scientific theory. It could be a metaphysical hypothesis or pseudo-science, but it's not a theory that scientists should entertain in their capacity as scientists.

Popper's falsification criterion was widely believed to have been a great insight into the nature of scientific practice, but in recent decades, as Ms. Sleigh tells us, there's been grumbling. We might wonder, for instance, why a theory cannot be considered scientific if it can be verified but not falsified.

Suppose your theory is that there's life elsewhere in the universe. Your theory could be shown to be true if extra-terrestrial life were discovered, but it's hard to imagine any observation that could falsify the theory. After all, in order for the theory to be shown to be wrong every cubic centimeter of the universe would need to be inspected be sure that there's no life anywhere, yet despite the fact that the theory can't be falsified it seems as if it should be scientific because it can be verified if living things were to turn up somehow.

The difficulty can be resolved by simply recasting the theory. Rather than posit that there is life elsewhere in the universe we could posit that there's no life elsewhere in the universe. Now, the discovery of life on some distant planet, if such a discovery were made, would falsify the theory so the reformulated version passes Popper's test for a legitimate scientific theory.

Popper, in other words, argues that what scientists do, or should do, is seek to show their theories to be wrong, not to show them to be right.

One reason why Popper is falling into disfavor among some scientists, though, is that his falsification criterion would eliminate from the realm of science certain theories that some scientists have spent their entire careers investigating and writing about. String theory, the multiverse hypothesis, some aspects of Darwinian evolution and the origin of life, anthropogenic climate change and many hypotheses in psychology and social science such as critical race theory, have all been criticized as unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

Yet the people who work in these fields argue that the inability to test their theories shouldn't diminish their status as scientific projects. For them science is whatever it is that scientists are doing.

Popper has also been waved aside by those who wish to blur the boundaries between science and economics, politics and even philosophy and theology. Scientists who wish to use their prestige to speak authoritatively on matters outside their field don't like being reminded that they're outside their field.

One interesting consequence of the rejection of Popper's solution to the demarcation problem is that if falsification is not essential to the practice of science then hypotheses like intelligent design and special creationism cannot be dismissed as unscientific. Even the theological claim that God exists be placed outside the purview of science.

Indeed, if testability/falsifiability are no longer essential to the scientific enterprise it's hard to see how anything could be excluded from the scientific purview.

Here's a 9 minute video that explains Popper's falsification criterion:

Free to Choose

One of the perennial questions of philosophy is the question of free will. Are we in some sense really free to make genuine choices - the choice whether to tell the truth or lie, the choice whether to go to class or sleep in, the choice whether to have eggs or pancakes, or both, for breakfast, etc.? Or are all these apparent decisions actually illusory consequences of influences exerted upon us throughout our lifetime by our genes or by our environment?

The answer we give to this question is crucially important. It matters for reasons mentioned in this six minute video on the topic as well as for others that the video doesn't mention.

One thing you should bear in mind as you watch. If you believe that you're free to choose, if you believe that there are at least some junctures in your life at which there are more than one possible futures, then you're at least tacitly committed to some version of theism. Between theism and naturalism (the belief that physical nature is all there is) only theism has room for a belief in free will.

On naturalism there's simply no way to justify that belief. The video explains why:

The Minimum Wage and Systemic Racism

Systemic racism exists, we're told, wherever the structures of society work to the disadvantage of black people regardless of the intent of those who work within those structures.

I was for a long time skeptical that in 2021 such structures actually existed outside the imaginations of Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, but thanks to Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, I've found one - the minimum wage.

Despite the good intentions of those who want to raise the minimum wage, doing so, Riley argues, would have a disproportionate and negative impact on black workers and is therefore a good example of systemic or structural racism.

Riley points out the following facts:

• The Biden administration wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, but according to a new Congressional Budget Office report doing so would cause approximately 1.4 million jobs to vanish, and no one knows how many people would never be hired in the first place because they’ve been priced out of the labor force.
• A 2014 analysis by economists Joseph Sabia and Richard Burkhauser found that the vast majority of workers who would benefit from a minimum-wage increase live in nonpoor households. According to Mr. Sabia, “only 13 percent of workers who would be affected live in poor households, while nearly two-thirds live in households with incomes over twice the poverty line, and over 40 percent live in households with incomes over three times the poverty line.”
  
  In other words, those who would be helped by a higher minimum wage are not those who most need it, poor minorities.
• Most workers who earn minimum wages are not a family’s sole breadwinner. They tend to be teenagers living at home or senior citizens working part-time to stay busy in retirement.
  
  According to Mr. Sabia, single mothers made up less than 5% of those who potentially would benefit from a minimum-wage hike.
• Low-income minorities stand to lose the most from lifting the wage floor because they are overrepresented among less-skilled and less-experienced workers, i.e. the workers most likely to get laid off or not hired at all if businesses have to pay their employees twice what they have to pay them now. Labor economists William Even and David Macpherson’s study of the impact of state minimum-wage mandates in 2007-09 found that they cost younger blacks more jobs than the Great Recession did.

In fact, the minimum wage was instituted in order to prevent black workers from competing with white workers during the Great Depression, Riley tells us. By requiring employers to pay their workings a minimum starting wage employers lost the incentive to hire cheaper labor, usually blacks. This served to protect whites from being undercut by black workers who were willing to work for lower wages.

The federal government got involved in setting wage levels in the 1930s and did so at the urging of unions that excluded blacks as members. During debates in Congress, lawmakers complained openly about the “superabundance” and “large aggregation of Negro labor” and cited complaints by whites of black Southerners moving north to take jobs.

Riley writes that,

As Congress increased the minimum wage periodically over the decades, these same arguments were put forward as a justification.

When he was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy backed minimum-wage hikes as a way of protecting New England industry. “Having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too—the wages of the white worker who has to compete,” he lectured an NAACP official at a hearing in 1957. “And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage—and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work—it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?”

He concludes that the minimum wage hurt blacks at its inception and hurts them still today by making it harder for employers operating on slim margins to keep them on the payroll: "It’s no accident that these wage mandates disproportionately harm black job prospects. That was the intent all along. Even if it’s no longer the intent, it’s still happening" (the very definition of systemic racism).

Here's just one example, among hundreds, of the baleful effects that mandating an increase in employee wages has. The grocery chain Krogers has closed two stores in Seattle and two in Long Beach, California after these municipalities passed an ordinance requiring that employees be given a $4.00 per hour raise as "hazard pay."

Whether Krogers could've afforded the increase is irrelevant, they decided it wasn't worth the cost of keeping the stores open.

Not only does this mean that hundreds of workers will be out of a job it also means that food markets in urban areas will become even more scarce than they already are.

When government decides to mandate what businesses will pay their employees the very people that were supposed to be helped are often harmed and usually those harmed are disproportionately minorities, so why are we not hearing cries of outrage from our progressive friends about the systemic racism inherent in the minimum wage?

Impeachment and Conviction

Should former President Trump have been impeached?

Perhaps, but the charge the Dems came up with, incitement to riot, seems very difficult to support on the basis of the evidence at hand. It's not clear that Mr. Trump was attempting to incite anything more than a lawful demonstration against Congress in his January 6th speech. To be sure, he was seeking to stoke his supporters' outrage, but generating political outrage isn't the same as trying to incite a deadly riot, particularly when part of his speech contained an injunction to "[march] over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

If, however, his opponents wish to consider his speech dispositive in demonstrating culpability, then a lot of Democrats, including our current Vice-President, are perhaps even more guilty of the same offense for the awful things they said during last summer's riots. Kamala Harris, for example, said this:

They’re [last summer's riots] not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

She also urged her followers to donate toward paying Minneapolis rioters’ bail which is certainly an incentive to continue to riot. Some of the money raised was used to pay the bail of a number of violent criminals including Lionel Timms who promptly returned to the streets and split someone's head open.

You can read more examples of the left's rhetoric during the riots here.

On the other hand, there appears to be little doubt that once the January 6th riot was underway Mr. Trump refused to take appropriate steps to stop it. Indeed, in https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2021/02/15/republicans-democrats-came-together-hang-jaime-herrera-beutler-dry/ his conversation with House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy he seems to have been pleased that his supporters were creating the tumult at the Capitol.

If the House's impeachment charge against him had been dereliction of duty it would've been a lot easier to demonstrate the president's responsibility and a lot more Republicans would've been willing to lend their support to the impeachment effort.

Nevertheless, given that the impeachment case handed over to the Senate by the House was doubtful (not to mention https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/16/devin-nunes-blasts-dems-for-presenting-false-evidence-to-senate-for-impeachment/ dishonestly conducted by the House managers), and given that Trump was no longer president by the time the Senate took up the trial, the Senate probably did the right thing in refusing to convict. Their job wasn't to convict or acquit on the basis of whether they thought Trump handled the events of that day well, their job was to convict if 1) they determined that he was guilty of incitement and 2) if they were convinced that the Constitution permitted the conviction of a president who had already left office.

Since 1) is inscrutable and since constitutional scholars are split on 2), the Senate acted prudently in choosing not to create a precedent of convicting presidents who are no longer in office. Had that precedent been established, it would be possible for a future Congress controlled by one party to vindictively impeach and convict every president of the opposite party years after they left office, a practice which would probably destroy our political system.

As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell notes in https://www.wsj.com/articles/acquittal-vindicated-the-constitution-not-trump-11613430190?mod=e2two a fine WSJ column, Mr. Trump's legal woes are still in front of him. He can yet be held accountable in courts of law for his behavior, which, since the election, has been largely indefensible. Aside from his legal jeopardy he, among other things, single-handedly effaced what could have been an historic presidential legacy, handed the Senate to the Democrats by attacking Georgia Republicans, and disgraced himself in his treatment of Vice-President Pence.

He may be able to overcome all this, he may even run for president again in 2024, but it's very doubtful that he'll ever again have the strength of support he enjoyed in 2016 and 2020. Of course, as in 2016, a lot depends on who the Democrats run against him if he does run and also upon how well Mr. Biden does over the next three and a half years.

We Don't Need No Education

No doubt that in some precincts of some universities the best that has been thought and written, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, is still being taught by scholars who love the life of the mind and love teaching the great ideas and works of western civilization. In some campus alcoves the free exchange of ideas is still encouraged and vigorous debate and disagreement is relished, but one wonders how long these archipelagos of learning can survive, especially in the humanities, given the current climate in many of our institutions of higher learning.

Traditionally courses in logic, mathematics and physics trained students to think clearly. History, literature and politics taught students that the world didn't come into being on their birthday and that there's much to be gained from studying the experience of those who went before.

Alas, Gone are the days when university students could expect as a matter of course to be immersed in Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant and other dead white males in order to imbibe their wisdom and learn from their errors.

Thinking clearly is unfortunately dismissed as an artifact of white supremacy, and the disparity in the racial composition of students in courses like logic, math and physics is proof that these courses are inherently racist. Moreover, the only history, literature and politics that matter today in some departments at some schools are those which highlight the history of racial and gender oppression.

Students nowadays can expect to be taught all about trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, transgender, cisgender, critical theory, their "right" not to be exposed to speech they find hurtful or insulting, their "right" not to be offended or made uncomfortable, their "right" not to be confronted with ideas that challenge their own fervently, if often inchoately, held orthodoxies, their "right" not to be disagreed with, the need to intimidate and suppress those who dissent, and the evils of privilege, patriarchy, and other horrors of our corrupt and evil society.

As a consequence it sometimes seems, as philosopher J. Budziszewski puts it in his book Written on the Heart, that the educated in some ways know less than the completely uneducated.

This video, via Hot Air, takes a satirical look at the sad state of affairs that prevails in at least some of our contemporary universities.

Trigger warning: Some progressives may be offended by having their postmodern pedagogical eccentricities skewered:

ACLU "Debunks" Trans Myths

Recently the ACLU spoke out against those who wish to prohibit transgender athletes from participating in female sports. The ACLU's argument is that opponents of such participation are basing their case on four beliefs which the ACLU deems to be "myths." The ACLU called bans on trans people's participation in athletics "discriminatory, harmful, and unscientific," before addressing the following four alleged "myths":

MYTH #1: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics.

The ACLU responds to this by claiming that,

There is no one way for our bodies to be. Women, including women who are transgender, intersex, or disabled, have a range of different physical characteristics. Biological sex and gender are not binaries. There are no set hormone ranges, body parts, or chromosomes that all people of a particular sex or gender have.

Well, that's not true. Of course it's the case that there's a range of physical characteristics like height, weight and hormones, but it doesn't follow that there are no "normal" values for sex specific characteristics. Males have an X and a Y chromosome, females have two X chromosomes.

Females have a uterus and ovaries, they menstruate and lactate. Males have a prostate and testes. They generally have stronger bones, more muscle mass and larger hearts and lungs. There may be a few exceptions to all this, but if so, they're so far out on the tail of the bell curve as to be negligible.

MYTH #2: Trans athletes' physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes.

The ACLU claims that,

Trans athletes vary in athletic ability just like cisgender athletes. In many states, the very same cis girls who have claimed that trans athletes have an "unfair" advantage have consistently performed as well as or better than transgender competitors.

This is disingenuous. Simply because an outstanding female athlete can beat many trans athletes, it doesn't follow that, on average, women will be able to successfully compete against biological men. As more male athletes declare themselves to be women, fewer female athletes will experience athletic success, and even the top female athletes will experience less success than they would have otherwise.

Moreover, if trans athletes have no physical advantage over cis athletes why do we not see biological females competing against men in most sports beyond elementary school? How many WNBA players could play in the NBA? How many female tennis players could win championships if they had to compete against males?

It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If anyone thinks male bodies have no physical advantage over female bodies they might consider transgender Australian rugby player Hannah Mouncey:

MYTH #3: The participation of trans athletes hurts cis women.

The ACLU responds that,

Excluding women who are trans hurts all women. It invites gender policing that could subject any woman to invasive tests or accusations of being "too masculine" or "too good" at their sport to be a "real" woman.

So what? Why should the feelings of trans athletes be allowed to trump the feelings of their female competitors? We test athletes for PEDs and Covid. Why can't women be required to submit to a test that would ascertain their sex if there's reason to question it? I'm quite sure that most female competitors would happily submit to a DNA test if it meant filtering out biological males.

MYTH #4: Trans students need separate teams.

The ACLU responds that,

Trans people, like all people, may experience detrimental effects to their physical and emotional well-being when they are pushed out of affirming spaces and communities. Efforts to exclude subsets of girls from sports can undermine team unity. And youth derive the most benefits from athletics when they are exposed to caring environments where teammates are supported by each other and by coaches.

This is a completely irrelevant response. All the goods that the ACLU mentions here can be obtained by having leagues consisting of biological males who believe that they're actually females or by requiring biological males to compete with other males.

Of course, the numbers of trans athletes in high schools are doubtless insufficient to support a league, but that's not a justification for prioritizing the benefits to a very small number of athletes over the rest of the female athletes who compete against them. On what grounds is such a privilege warranted? The ACLU doesn't tell us.

The ACLU's attempt to justify allowing biological males to compete against females in scholastic supports needs to be made considerably stronger than this if it's going to be even slightly persuasive, and the Biden administration's decision to buy into reasons like these in order to appease progressives looks increasingly more foolish the more people try to defend it.

Repressive Tolerance

There's lots of talk nowadays about "tolerance," although the conversation has morphed quite a bit from what it was just a couple of years ago. It used to be that we were enjoined by progressives to be tolerant of those who disagreed with us, who held political or religious opinions at variance with our own or who adopted a lifestyle that others may have thought immoral.

Now the talk in progressive circles is all about what Herbert Marcuse back in the 60s was promoting as "repressive tolerance." Marcuse argued that tolerance and freedom of speech should not extend to those who hold retrograde political views, views that other groups find offensive or harmful. He insisted that freedom of speech was a subterfuge that elites employed to enable them to maintain power and as such should not be accorded the cherished status that has traditionally been conferred upon it.

In the educational sphere, in particular, Marcuse wrote that measures of repressive tolerance,

...would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, if you believe in maintaining a strong military defense, if you believe that America is the greatest country ever to grace the planet, or if you disagree that social security should be increased or perpetuated, you should be denied the ability to voice your views.

This, in good Orwellian fashion, Marcuse labels genuine freedom of thought. He goes on to write that,

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual...the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin...with stopping the words and images which feed his consciousness.

To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

So, if tolerance means that people should be allowed to argue against what Marcuse thought to be a better form of life, in his case Marxism coupled with sexual freedom, then those arguments should be repressed. People must not be exposed to well-reasoned arguments if those arguments may be so cogent as to persuade the hearer to reject the ideology of the left.

Marcuse made this case in 1965 in an essay titled Repressive Tolerance, but it's bearing fruit today in social media, the academy, and news organizations like the New York Times where any opinion that wanders beyond the bounds of acceptable progressive orthodoxy is quashed.

One of the arguments that the progressive left makes in support of "repressive tolerance" - which is, ironically, a fascist notion - is based on a misuse of a footnote in philosopher Karl Popper's famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. John Sexton at HotAir.com cites a footnote in the book that some leftists have seized upon to promote repression of deviant ideas and street violence. Sexton explains:

[Popper's] idea was pretty simple: If society is completely tolerant, then the intolerant will rule society because there will be no one willing to stand up to their intolerance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a tolerant society to be intolerant toward those who are themselves intolerant.... You can probably see how this plays into certain Antifa arguments about “punching Nazis” and using street violence against the intolerant.

Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Popper added, however, that,

In this formulation, I do not imply...that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

In other words, as long as people are willing to debate and discuss and have conversations about their disagreements, as long as they don't seek to impose their views by violent means, we must insist on tolerance and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. It's only when people opt for violent coercion that tolerance comes to an end.

Here's Popper:

But we should claim the right to suppress them [those who eschew dialogue and resort instead to force] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

The fascist left, including Antifa, seizes on this as a justification not only for suppressing contrary ideas but also for violence, yet it's pretty clear that Popper was claiming that resort to violence is justified only when the other side refuses to engage in fair debate and chooses instead to substitute "fists and pistols" for reason and logic. It's also pretty clear that it's the extremists on both left and right in our current social landscape who fit the profile of those of whom Popper was speaking.

The extremist rejects argument because at some level he knows that neither facts nor reason are on his side. He senses the rational inadequacy of his position so he rejects reason and rationality rather than give up his position or subject it to rational scrutiny.

The only truth he recognizes is whatever he feels most strongly to be true, and since his feelings are self-authenticating and self-validating there's no point in debating them. He needs only to force you to accept his "truth," and if you refuse then you must be compelled, with violence, if necessary, to submit.

After all, if you disagree with the progressive left then you must be a racist bigot, and you should be silenced or have your face smashed. If you disagree with the extremist right then you must be part of the conspiracy to undermine America and you deserve to get stomped on.

That's unfortunately where we are today in America.

An Amendment to Limit Despotic Governance

This post may seem a little more parochial than most of what appears on VP, but since many of our readers are residents of the state of Pennsylvania in the U.S., I thought it was worth bringing this content to our readers' attention.

Pennsylvanians, like many Americans and, indeed, people worldwide, have been deeply affected during the current pandemic, not only by the corona virus itself, but by the actions of government in dealing with it. In Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, the government response has been crushingly heavy-handed.

The governor of our state, Democrat Tom Wolf, has managed to devastate hundreds of thousands of lives, jobs and small businesses by forcing thousands of establishments to close their doors during the recent spike in covid cases.

Many of his edicts would be risible were they not so harmful. Like his counterpart in neighboring New York, Governor Wolf required that elderly covid patients who had been sent to hospitals from their long term care facilities be returned to their nursing and rest homes allowing the virus to spread through those facilities like flames through dry straw, resulting in over half of all the covid deaths in the state.

His Secretary of Health, anticipating this calamity, took her mother out of a nursing home and put her up in a hotel. Thousands of others didn't have this option and as of this writing almost 12,000 elderly patients have died in long term care facilities in Pennsylvania. The secretary is now in the Biden administration.

The governor also declared that gatherings of less than ten people would be permitted, but businesses like gyms and small shops and restaurants which rarely have more than ten occupants at any one time were nevertheless required to close, even as big box stores could remain open. He additionally ordained that anyone entering the state from other states, as well as Pennsylvanians who are returning home from other states, must have a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours prior to entering Pennsylvania or quarantine for 10 days upon entry into the state, but travel between home and work or home and medical appointments in other states was permitted.

This order was so fraught with problems (truckers traversing the state, people visiting family across the state line, etc.) that it had to be amended to the point where almost everyone is exempt except those who vacation outside the state or come to Pennsylvania to vacation. Even at that the order is ludicrous because it's unenforceable.

Any ordinance that is completely impractical and unenforceable only increases disrespect for the law and those who make it. Now, though, the Pennsylvania legislature is taking action to rein in our governor's recklessness.

According to Charles Mitchell, President and CEO of the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free-market think tank, the state legislature has set in motion a constitutional amendment that would limit a future governor's ability to wreak chaos on the state's businesses and the economic and psychological welfare of its citizens.

Mitchell explains,

Wolf’s restrictions, some of the most draconian in the country, have inflicted the Keystone State’s communities with mass unemployment, social disorder, widespread despair, and overall economic decline. Other states should view Pennsylvania’s course as an alarming model for how their own governors and local officials can seize unlimited “emergency” executive governance.

In response to Wolf, Pennsylvanians — beginning with their representatives in the state’s General Assembly — are pursuing a voter-driven remedy that could serve as a national model. A constitutional amendment, placed before voters this year, would check a governor’s unilateral, indefinite emergency powers. If approved, Pennsylvanians could prevent an encore of what unfolded this past year, and inspire other states to follow their lead.

In Pennsylvania, state law caps the duration of emergency declarations to 90 days but places no limit on the number of times a governor can unilaterally renew them. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is paying the price of this policy. Since last March, Wolf, wielding his unchecked power, has extended the disaster declaration by fiat three times.

During that period, Pennsylvanians suffered the social and economic costs of policies, including lockdowns, that enforced mass business closures. Although lawmakers in both parties have challenged Wolf’s arbitrary decision-making and lack of transparency, the governor still holds veto power.

It's not that the legislature hasn't tried other means of redress. Since last summer they passed ten bills that would've in one way or another limited the governor's unilateral authority, but Mr. Wolf vetoed nine of them and, whenever the legality of his measures was challenged in court, a Democrat-dominated Supreme Court supported him.

So, beginning last summer, the General Assembly commenced a process that would preserve checks and balances while also ending the state’s endless state of emergency. Through a constitutional amendment, this process would restore lawmakers’ oversight of a governor’s emergency decision-making. In short, the amendment would allow the General Assembly to prevent a governor from extending a disaster declaration beyond 21 days without lawmakers’ approval.

The state’s constitutional amendment process, which doesn’t require a governor’s signature, commenced when lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1166 in July 2020. But any proposed constitutional amendment requires passage in two consecutive legislative sessions.

That’s why the General Assembly approved Senate Bill 2 last week. The bill, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward, completes the legislature’s role in the constitutional amendment process. Voters will now have their say at the ballot box in May.

As a result, Pennsylvanians will soon vote on restoring their civil liberties by imposing checks on a governor’s emergency powers. If the constitution is amended, future governors can still respond in crises, but not indefinitely. Instead, after 21 days, a governor will require the approval of the people’s representatives in the legislature.

If you're a Pennsylvania resident, and you believe that the kind of absolute power Governor Wolf has arrogated to himself should not be invested in any one person then you should make it a point to vote for this amendment to the state constitution in May.

Did the Universe Come from Nothing?

The brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking stated in his book The Grand Design that he believed that the universe could've essentially created itself out of nothing and that there was no need to posit the existence of a Creator. He wrote that, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."

The universe could just come into being out of nothing, Mr. Hawking suggested, as long as there are physical laws to mediate the process. I'm reluctant to disagree with the late Mr. Hawking because he truly was a genius, but geniuses often become ordinary thinkers when they step outside their rightful domain, which Mr. Hawking did in The Grand Design.

Early in the book he famously declared that, "Philosophy is dead," and that science no longer has need of it. He received a lot of criticism for this claim, not least because it is itself a philosophical assertion, but also because The Grand Design is filled with philosophical conjectures. For example, he speculates in the book about the existence of God which is clearly not a scientific, but rather a philosophical, musing.

Had Hawking been a bit less cavalier about philosophy he might've avoided the sloppy thinking involved in the statement that "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," an asseveration that suffers from several philosophical shortcomings.

First, if gravity, or merely the law of gravity, exists then that's not nothing. Physical laws are existing somethings, but where, exactly, do such laws exist before* there's a universe?

They can't exist in matter because there is no matter until there's a universe. They can only exist either as abstract "objects" or they exist as ideas in a mind. If they're abstractions they cannot have produced the universe because abstractions - like, say, numbers - can't produce anything. Indeed, physical laws have no creative power, they're simply descriptions of how matter and energy behave.

If, though, these physical laws exist as ideas in a mind it must be a mind that precedes or transcends the universe which means it's not material, spatial, nor temporal because neither matter nor space nor time exist until there's a universe. In other words, it's a mind which possesses at least some of the attributes of the immaterial, spaceless, atemporal transcendent God.

Second, the idea that anything, universes included, can somehow create themselves is incoherent. In order for something to create itself it has to exist before it exists which is nonsense. Pace Hawking and physicist Lawrence Krauss in his book A Universe from Nothing, if there was a "time" when there was literally nothing then there never could be anything now. Ex nihilo nihil fit (Out of nothing nothing comes) is one of the oldest principles in philosophy.

Folks like Hawking and Krauss are essentially asking us to choose between belief that God created the universe or the belief that physics created the universe, but it's a silly choice. It's almost like asking us to choose between the belief that Thomas Edison created the light bulb or that the laws of physics created the light bulb.

Celebrated physicist and author of a number of popular books on science, Paul Davies, falls into the same error. Davies writes,

There's no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being.

This makes no sense. The laws of mathematics are not "clever," they're not intelligent minds, and moreover they don't bring anything into being. If you have an apple in each hand the laws of mathematics tell you that you'll have two apples, but those laws don't put the apples in your hands, and they certainly don't bring the apples into being.

Stephen Hawking was, and the others are, very smart men, but very smart men sometimes say very foolish things, especially when they're trying to do away with God.

* Technically, it's inappropriate to use temporal prepositions like before and until when talking about the origin of the universe because time came into being with the universe. Even so, it's awkward not to use them so in this post I do.

If There's a Multiverse, God Exists

Some time ago I visited a website on which there was a discussion of the multiverse. One of the claims made was that if the multiverse is real then everything that can happen, i.e. everything that's logically possible, will happen somewhere among the near-infinite worlds that populate the multiverse.

I replied to that claim with the observation that one consequence of this is that if there is in fact a near-infinite number of different universes in which all logical possibilities are somewhere actualized then it follows that there must be a God.

The justification for my claim is that if in the multiverse all possible states of affairs are realized then there must be a world somewhere in the multiverse in which it’s true to say that a maximally great being (MGB) exists.

But if it's true that there is an MGB in one world it follows that this being must exist in every world (otherwise it wouldn't be maximally great), including our own. Since a "maximally great being" is what we mean by "God," it follows that if there's a multiverse then God must exist in our world.

A reader responded with two questions:

1. Since a maximally great individual would have to be the greatest in all possible fields, wouldn’t maximal “greatness” include maximal evil? Are we suggesting that Satan was the Creator?

2. The other problem is that if ... it’s not possible to get – or create – something from nothing then, since there is something, that something must always have existed. And if something has always existed, it was never created, so there is no need for a Creator. Is there?

These are interesting questions. One possible answer to the first is this:

An MGB is a being which possesses all compossible great-making properties (Compossible properties are properties it's possible to possess at the same time without contradiction.). Maximal evil and maximal goodness are not compossible properties. Thus the MGB would be either maximally good or maximally evil, but not both, and there are a number of reasons for thinking that the MGB is not maximally evil. Here's one:

If the MGB were maximally evil it's hard to account for why there would be so much good in the world. If maximal evil created the world it would seem that this world would be an unmitigated hell, and it's clearly not.

A reply to this might be that if the MGB is maximally good then we should expect this world to be heaven, but it's clearly not.

This is so, but the reason there is suffering and evil in the world is largely because of human free will which is bestowed on us because it's an eminently good property to have. A maximally evil being would have no reason to bestow upon us anything that was good. Thus, unlike the evil in this world which is at least partly explicable in terms of free will, goodness in a world created by a maximally evil being would be inexplicable.

We might also note that the problem posed by the first question still leaves the argument for an MGB intact. Even if an MGB could be maximally evil it's still the case that a multiverse entails the existence of a maximally great being, one which is the ultimate cause of all that is.

As for the second question there are also several possible answers. Here are a few: First, cosmologists have shown that the mathematics of eternity require a beginning to the universe. If this is so, then the universe hasn't always existed.

Second, it's true that something (i.e. material substance) doesn't pop into being out of nothing (i.e. the complete absence of anything), but by "nothing" is not meant the complete absence of anything but rather the absence of any pre-existing material substance. An MGB is not material substance but neither is it the complete absence of anything. Rather, it is pure being itself.

Moreover, even if matter were eternal or infinitely old that would not remove the need for a cause of its existence. Since it's possible for matter, as well as the universe that's made up of matter, to not exist, the universe is a contingent entity. However, contingent entities require a non-contingent (i.e. necessary) entity as their ultimate sustaining cause.

The ultimate sustaining cause of the universe must not only be a necessary being (i.e. it doesn't depend on anything else for it's existence), it must also be very powerful (since it has created a universe), very intelligent (since it has designed a universe), non-spatial (since it's outside the spatial universe), and non-temporal (since it's outside the temporal universe).

In other words, it has many of the same properties we attribute to a Maximally Great Being.

The Pioneers

I recently finished historian David McCullough's book The Pioneers in which he recounts the history of the settlement of Marietta, Ohio and surrounding territories in the late 1700s. It's very interesting, but one thing in particular that stood out to me was the importance the early founders of the region placed on the establishment of schools and colleges.

To the leaders of these frontier colonies, men like Rufus Putnam, Samuel Hildreth, Manasseh Cutler, and, most notably, Manasseh's eldest son, Ephraim, to name but a few, placed enormous value on the cultivation of the mind despite the exiguous circumstances in which they lived.

This was especially interesting given the attitude which prevails in many quarters of our society today where even the poorest among us have so much more of the amenities of life than did these early pioneers. We might describe this unfortunate state of mind as the Pink Floyd "We Don't Need No Education" attitude.

What's the difference between people scraping out a living on the frontier, possessing very little of the goods of life, beset by Indians and disease, their lives filled with grief, pain and worry, who nevertheless treasured their books and their schools, and those of us today who squander and disdain the amazing learning opportunities which surround us everywhere we turn?

No doubt there are several possible answers to this question, but one which I think should not be overlooked is that the early pioneers were steeped in a Christian worldview which saw learning as a form of obedience to the commandment to love God with all one's heart, soul and mind.

For these men and women, learning about the world God had made, reading literature which inculcated Biblical values, and nurturing a deep appreciation for both was a way of loving God with all their minds. Even studying the ancient pagans like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius yielded important insights into the truth of their own faith.

Things are otherwise today. Our secular culture has a much greater appetite for hedonism and entertainment, especially entertainment that stimulates the senses, than for intellectual growth. A lot of us are like the narrator in Paul Simon's "Kodachrome," almost addicted to the pleasure to be found through the lens of his camera and disdainful of "all the crap" he learned in high school.

Secularization has made us more materialistic and more effete that our pioneer ancestors. In many quarters of our culture we seem to have lost the love of learning that drove those hardy souls 240 years ago to build schools as soon as their own homes were under roof.

It's a loss that may well be crucial to our very survival as a nation for as Thomas Jefferson noted, "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."

Moral Emotivism

We often hear the argument, when legislators consider laws that would restrict things like pornography, that morality cannot be legislated. Laws, it is claimed, can only be designed to address non-moral matters. The claim is so obviously wrongheaded, however, that it's surprising that anyone seriously believes it.

In his book Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, J. Budzizewski says about this assertion that,

From the horrified way in which modern people usually pronounce the phrase ["We can't legislate morality"], one would think that all its vowels were gasps. But let us try to breathe normally.

First, we need to understand that it is impossible to legislate without legislating morality. Try to think of a law that is not based on a moral idea; you won't be able to do it....you may be able to think of some that are based on false moral ideas, but that is not the same thing.

The law requiring highway taxes is based on the idea that people should be made to pay for the benefits they receive.

The law requiring graduated income taxes is based on the idea that some people ought to be made to pay for the benefits that others receive.

The law punishing murder is based on the moral idea that innocent blood should not be shed, that private individuals should not take the law into their own hands, and that individuals should be responsible for their deeds.

The law permitting abortion is based on the moral idea that innocent blood may be shed if the victim is still in the womb.

Because laws are based on moral ideas what could be wrong with making sure they're based on true ones?

Budzizewski, of course, is well aware that in our postmodern society the ideas both of truth and morality are problematic. He wrote the book, partly, to show that those postmodern ideas are vacuous.

Nevertheless, it's true (irony intended) that we live in a moral climate in which right and wrong are simply expressions of one's own personal preferences, tastes, biases and prejudices - a climate Alisdair MacIntyre, in his much cited book After Virtue, calls emotivism. To say that something is wrong is simply to express one's negative feelings or emotions about it.

Our modern culture is saturated with emotivism which makes agreement on many moral matters extremely difficult, if not impossible. If two people have different feelings about, say, abortion or affirmative action how can one person argue that the other person's feelings are wrong? They quickly find themselves at an impasse, and the only recourse is to change the subject (if they're polite) or start screaming at each other (if they're not).

Because we've reduced morality to subjective feelings, MacIntyre writes, our moral discourse has been essentially emptied of meaning. "We possess the simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have - very largely, if not entirely - lost our comprehension" of what those words actually mean. We no longer even know what we're saying when we make moral judgments.

We act as if we believe our moral judgments are righteous and true and those who disagree are moral reprobates, but, in the absence of an objective standard it's like believing that our judgment that Coke tastes better than Pepsi is righteous and true and those who disagree are aesthetic reprobates.

How have we come to the place where one of the most important aspects of being human, the ability to objectively distinguish right from wrong behavior, turns out to be an illusion?

As long as people believed that God had woven a moral law into the fabric of the universe and inscribed it on our conscience, people could believe that the law was objective and independent of our feelings about it. There was a moral right and wrong regardless of what we thought.

But when belief in God became less tenable among our cultural elites, so did belief in an objective moral law. If there's no transcendent moral authority who imposes moral duties and who can hold us accountable for obeying them then morality becomes a delusion, an insubstantial shadow.

We still use the words, as MacIntyre says, but the words are just tools for expressing our attitudes and emotions. They don't have any real meaning in themselves.

Consider this question: What does it mean to say that something is morally "wrong" if there are no objective standards and no ultimate accountability for violating whatever subjective and arbitrary standards there may be? It doesn't mean anything more than that the speaker is expressing disapproval of the act.

One wonders, as more and more people come to realize that in a secularized world morality is both an illusion and a delusion, what the consequences will be for our ability to live together in a coherent society and indeed what the structure of that society will ultimately be.

Ethics and the Secular Life (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post examined an argument frequently made by secular folk that a person need not believe in God in order to be good. I'd like to continue that examination in today's post with a look at some comments made by another atheist, Robert Tracinski, who, in an otherwise fine discussion at The Federalist of the thought of philosopher Ayn Rand, makes a couple of missteps.

He begins by explicitly acknowledging, rightly, that most thoughtful atheists, at least those on the left, embrace moral subjectivism. He writes:

Probably the most important category [Rand] defied is captured in the expression, “If God is dead, all things are permitted.” Which means: if there is no religious basis for morality, then everything is subjective. The cultural left basically accepts this alternative and sides with subjectivism (when they’re not overcompensating by careening back toward their own neo-Puritan code of political correctness).

This is mostly correct except that I'd quibble with his use of the term "religious basis."

Morality doesn't require a religious basis, it requires a basis that's rooted in an objectively existing moral authority - personal, transcendent and capable of holding human beings responsible for their choices. The existence and will of such a being - God - may or may not be an essential element of a particular religion, and the belief that such a God exists and has imposed moral duties upon us is certainly a metaphysical belief, but it's not necessarily religious.

Tracinski, then claims that:

The religious right responds by saying that the only way to stem the tide of “anything goes” is to return to that old time religion.

This, too, is wide of the mark. It's not necessarily a return to "old time religion," or any religion, for that matter, which is needful for eliminating the subjectivity of moral judgments. It's a return to a belief that the world is the product of a morally perfect being who has established His moral will in the human heart and who insists that we follow it, i.e. that we treat others with justice and compassion.

Those beliefs may be augmented by a belief in special revelation and by the whole edifice of the Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) tradition, but the core belief in the existence of the God of classical theism is not by itself "religious" at all. Furthermore, that core belief may not by itself be a sufficient condition for an objective morality but it is absolutely necessary for it.

Which is why people ask the question Susan Jacoby found so insulting in yesterday's post. Put a different way, it's the question of how an atheist can avoid making right and wrong merely a matter of personal taste.

If that sort of subjectivity is what the secular life entails, and it does, then its votaries really have nothing much to say, or at least nothing much worth listening to, about matters of right and wrong.

Ethics and the Secular Life (Pt.I)

A few years ago Susan Jacoby had a review in the New York Times of a book by atheist Phil Zuckerman titled Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions in which she served up several examples of missing the point. As an atheist herself Jacoby is eager to defend Zuckerman's thesis that one can live a life that's just as morally good, or better, than that of any theist. Belief in God, both Jacoby and Zuckerman aver, is not necessary for the moral life.

I think it'd be worthwhile to revist their argument today and tomorrow because much of what they say is still commonly heard from many secularists today. She writes:

Many years ago, when I was an innocent lamb making my first appearance on a right-wing radio talk show, the host asked, “If you don’t believe in God, what’s to stop you from committing murder?” I blurted out, “It’s never actually occurred to me to murder anyone.”

In addition to the usual tendentious use of the word "right-wing" whenever a progressive is referring to anything to the right of the mid-line on the ideological highway, her answer to the question is a non-sequitur. The host is obviously asking her what, in her worldview, imposes any moral constraint on her. To answer that it never occurred to her to do such a thing as murder is to duck the question. The question is, on what grounds would she have thought murder to be morally wrong if it had occurred to her to commit such a deed?

She continues her evasions when she says this:

Nonreligious Americans are usually pressed to explain how they control their evil impulses with the more neutral, albeit no less insulting, “How can you have morality without religion?”

We might want to pause here to ask why Ms Jacoby feels insulted that someone might ask her what she bases her moral values and decisions on. Is it insulting because she's being asked a question for which she has no good answer?

Anyway, after some more irrelevant filler she eventually arrives at the nub of Zuckerman's book:

[Zuckerman] extols a secular morality grounded in the “empathetic reciprocity embedded in the Golden Rule, accepting the inevitability of our eventual death, navigating life with a sober pragmatism grounded in this world.”

Very well, but what does the inevitability of our deaths have to do with anything and why is it right to embrace the principle that we should treat others the way we want to be treated? Why would it be wrong to adopt the principle that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others? Is it just that it feels right to Zuckerman to live this way? If so, then all the author is saying is that everyone should live by his own feelings.

Apparently, Zuckerman and Jacoby believe that morality is rooted in each person's own subjective behavioral preferences, but if that's so then no one can say that anyone else is wrong about any moral matter. If what's right is what I feel to be right then the same holds true for everyone, and how can I say that others are wrong if they feel they should be selfish, greedy, racist, dishonest, or violent?

Just because I, or Susan Jacoby, feel strongly that such behaviors are wrong that surely doesn't make them wrong. Jacoby seems unaware of the difficulty, however:

The Golden Rule (who but a psychopath could disagree with it?) is a touchstone for atheists if they feel obliged to prove that they follow a moral code recognizable to their religious compatriots. But this universal ethical premise does not prevent religious Americans (especially on the right) from badgering atheists about goodness without God — even though it would correctly be seen as rude for an atheist to ask her religious neighbors how they can be good with God.

This paragraph is unfortunate for at least three reasons. First, Jacoby's insinuation that only a moral pervert would reject the Golden Rule (GR) is a case of begging the question. She's assuming the GR is an objective moral principle and then asks how anyone could not see it as such, but the notion that there are objective moral principles is exactly what atheism disallows. Indeed, as indicated above, it's what Zuckerman and Jacoby both implicitly deny.

Second, the fact that someone can choose to live by the GR is not to the point. Anyone can live by whatever values he or she chooses. The problem for the atheist is that she cannot say that if someone disregards the GR and chooses to live selfishly or cruelly that that person is doing anything that's objectively wrong.

In a Godless world values are like selections on a restaurant menu. The atheist can choose whatever she wants that suits her taste, but if her companion chooses something she doesn't like that doesn't make him "wrong."

Third, Jacoby seems to imply that belief in God doesn't make one good, and in fact makes it hard to be good. This is again beside the point. One can believe in God and not know what's right. One can believe in God and not do what's right. The point, however, is that unless there is a God there can be no objective moral right nor wrong, no objective moral obligations or duties. There can only be subjective preferences people have to which they are bound only by their own arbitrary will.

Morality requires a transcendent, objective, morally authoritative foundation, a foundation which has the right to impose moral strictures and the ability to enforce them. That is, it requires a personal being. If no such being exists then debates about right and wrong behavior are like debates about the prettiest color. They're no more than expressions of personal taste and preference.

Jacoby unwittingly supplies us with an interesting example from which to elaborate on the point:

Tonya Hinkle (a pseudonym) is a mother of three who lives in a small town in Mississippi....Her children were harassed at school after it became known that the Hinkles did not belong to a church. When Tonya’s first-grade twins got off the school bus crying, she learned that “this one girl had stood up on the bus and screamed — right in their faces — that they were going to HELL. That they were going to burn in all eternity because they didn’t go to church.”

Jacoby thinks this was awful, as do I, but why does Jacoby think that what these children did to Tonya's children was wrong - not factually wrong but morally wrong?

She might reply that it hurt the little girl, and so it did, but on atheism why is it wrong to hurt people? Jacoby, falling back on the GR, might say that those kids wouldn't want someone to hurt them. Surely not, but why is that a reason why it's wrong to hurt others? How, exactly, does one's desire not to be hurt make it wrong to hurt others?

All an atheist can say by way of reply is that it violates the GR, but then she's spinning in a circle. Where does the GR get it's moral authority from in a godless universe? Is it from social consensus? Human evolution? How can either of these make any act morally wrong?

At this point some people might reply that it's wrong to hurt others because it just is, but at this point the individual has abandoned reason and is resorting to dogmatic asseverations of faith in the correctness of their own moral intuitions - sort of like some of those obnoxious fundamentalists might do.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is, though, that, on atheism, if those kids can hurt Tonya's children and get away with it, it's not wrong, it's only behavior Jacoby doesn't like, and we're back to right and wrong being measured by one's personal feelings.

It's a common error but an error nonetheless when non-theists like Jacoby and Zuckerman seek to defend the possibility of moral values while denying any transcendent basis for them, and it's peculiar that Jacoby feels insulted when she's asked to explain how she can do this.