The Evil Men Do

As the Christian world prepares to remember again this Friday the torture and cruel execution of Jesus some two thousand years ago, it would be good to be reminded that Christians still suffer today, often in horrific ways, for their devotion to Him.

In his book Live Not by Lies Rod Dreher takes us back to the Eastern Europe of the 1940s and 1950s and cites a number of examples of the suffering Christians experienced at the hands of the Communists in those years. He writes:

The Romania that Soviet troops occupied at the end of World War II was a deeply religious country. After Romanian Stalinists seized dictatorial control in 1947, among the most vicious anti-Christian persecution in the history of Soviet-style communism began.

From 1949 to 1951, the state conducted the “Piteşti Experiment.” The Piteşti prison was established as a factory to reengineer the human soul. Its masters subjected political prisoners, including clergy, to insane methods of torture to utterly destroy them psychologically so they could be remade as fully obedient citizens of the People’s Republic.

Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, held captive from 1948 until he was ransomed into Western exile in 1964, was an inmate at Piteşti. In 1966 testimony before a US Senate committee, Wurmbrand spoke of how the communists broke bones, used red-hot irons, and all manner of physical torture.

They were also spiritually and psychologically sadistic, almost beyond comprehension. Wurmbrand told the story of a young Christian prisoner in Piteşti who was tied to a cross for days. Twice daily, the cross bearing the man was laid flat on the floor, and one hundred other inmates were forced by guards to urinate and defecate on him.

Then the cross was erected again and the Communists, swearing and mocking, “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it.

Wurmbrand asked the priest how he could consent to commit such sacrilege. The Catholic priest was “half-mad,” Wurmbrand recalled, and begged him to show mercy. All the other prisoners were beaten until they accepted this profane communion while the communist prison guards taunted them.

Wurmbrand told the American lawmakers: "I am a very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the 20th century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes."

After his release, Pastor Wurmbrand, who died in 2001, devoted the rest of his life to speaking out for persecuted Christians. “Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”

Historian Hannah Arendt, in her magisterial work The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote of both the Communists and the Nazis that "It is because men lost their belief in a final judgment that they became monsters. The best had no hope and the worst lost all fear." When men no longer believe there's any accountability for how they behave they're capable of the most monstrous behavior.

Lurking in the heart of every man is a capacity for unimaginable evil. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent years suffering in the Soviet prison camps called the Gulag, observed that "“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts."

In his book Tortured for Christ, Wurmbrand echos Arendt. He writes,

When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man. The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I do not believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

Here's an excerpt from his book:

A pastor by the name of Florescu was tortured with red hot iron pokers and with knives. He was beaten very badly. Then starving rats were driven into his cell through a large pipe. He could not sleep because he had to defend himself all the time. If he rested a moment the rats would attack him.

He was forced to stand for two weeks, day and night. The Communists wished him to betray his brethren, but he resisted steadfastly. Eventually they brought his fourteen year-old son to the prison and began to whip the boy in front of his father, saying that they would continue to beat him until the pastor said what they wished him to say.

The poor man was half-mad. He bore it as long as he could, then he cried to his son, "Alexander, I must say what they want! I can't bear your beating anymore!"

The son answered, "Father, don't do me the injustice of having a traitor as a parent. Withstand! If they kill me I will die with the words, 'Jesus and my fatherland.'" The Communists, enraged, fell upon the child and beat him to death, with blood spattered over the walls of the cell. He died praising God. Our dear brother Florescu was never the same after seeing this.

Handcuffs with sharp nails on the inside were placed on our wrists. If we were totally still they didn't cut us. But in the bitterly cold cells, when we shook with cold, our wrists would be torn by the nails.

Christians were hung upside down on ropes and beaten so severely that their bodies swung back and forth under the blows. Christians were also placed in ice-box "refrigerator cells," which were so cold that frost and ice covered the inside. I was thrown into one while I had very little clothing on. Prison doctors would watch through an opening until they saw symptoms of freezing to death, then they would give a signal and guards would rush in to take us out and make us warm.

When we were finally warmed, we would immediately be put back into the ice-box cells to freeze. Thawing out, then freezing to within minutes of death, then being thawed out - over and over again! Even today there are times when I can't bear to open a refrigerator.

We Christians were sometimes forced to stand inside wooden boxes only slightly larger than we were. This left no room to move. Dozens of sharp nails were driven into every side of the box, with their razor-sharp points sticking through the wood. While we stood perfectly still, it was all right. But we were forced to stand in these boxes for endless hours; when we became fatigued and swayed with tiredness, the nails would pierce our bodies.

If we moved or twitched a muscle - there were the horrible nails.

What the Communists have done to Christians passes any possibility of human understanding. I have seen Communists whose faces while torturing believers shone with rapturous joy. They cried out while torturing Christians, "We are the devil!"

Some like to think that human beings are basically good, but history doesn't offer much support for that belief.

Around the world today, particularly in many Muslim countries and Communist countries like China and North Korea, Christians still suffer because they seek to model their lives after that of their Master whose own torture and death is commemorated on Friday. Voice of the Martyrs, the organization founded by Pastor Wurmbrand in 1966, is a good resource for those wishing to learn about the nature and extent of that suffering today.

Return of the God Hypothesis

Today is the day that philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's latest book is to be released. It's titled The Return of the God Hypothesis, and according to the reviewers it promises to present a very powerful argument in favor of the idea that the universe and life are the product of an intelligent, transcendent creator - either the God of traditional theism or something very much like God.

Meyer founded and heads the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England and is the author of two previous books that are essential reading in the scientific debate about evolution. The first, Signature in the Cell, examines the role of DNA and the cellular-level evidence for intelligent design.

The second, Darwin’s Doubt, shows how the explosive origin of animal life in the Cambrian era makes a case for intelligent design (ID).

Darwinians have been flummoxed by the arguments in both books and have apparently realized that the best response is to simply pretend they don't exist.

Meyer did an interview recently with World magazine. You can read the whole interview here, but one part of it was particularly interesting to me. Meyer is reportedly taking the debate about intelligent design to the next level. Heretofore, ID theorists were careful to avoid claims about who they thought the designer was, how long ago the designer acted, and so forth.

They simply argued that life showed ample evidence of having been intelligently engineered and that the naturalistic theory which asserts that it's the result of blind, purposeless processes is intellectually unsupportable.

In The Return of the God Hypothesis Meyer makes the case for explicitly identifying the designer with the God of theism. Toward the end of the interview he's asked this (The interviewer's remarks are in boldface, Meyer's reply follows):

Critics of intelligent design have accused the ID movement of secretly pushing creationism. You and your allies have insisted ID is a legitimate scientific inquiry that stops short of trying to identify the designer. Now you’re making the case for His identity. Could this book give fuel to your critics?

I’m sure it could, but that’s not an evidential objection. That’s an accusation as to motive. It is irrelevant to the merits of the argument itself.

The argument we’ve made is that nature points to a designing agent. In biology, we see evidence of design in the digital code that’s present in the DNA molecule. We know from our uniform and repeated experience that information in a digital or alphabetic form—what we call sequence-specific—invariably arises from an intelligent source.

If we’re trying to reconstruct what happened in the past, we want to consider what we know about cause-and-effect patterns in the world around us. The same method of reasoning Darwin used has led us to a non-Darwinian conclusion: If there’s a program, then there’s a programmer. Now, I’m looking at a broader range of evidence to answer: “Who is the designer?”

This then is something new in your quest.

In making the original case for design in biology, I left unspecified whether the designing intelligence was a transcendent designer or an immanent designer, a designer within the cosmos or a designer that transcended matter, space, time, and energy, what we call the universe.

In this new book, what I’m doing is simply looking at a broader range of evidence to answer a question that’s been posed to me, which is, “What can we say from science about the identity of the designer? Is it more likely to be an alien or a god, and immanent or transcendent?”

And you’re seeing ... The designer must have preceded the universe, because the fine-tuning was established at the very beginning of the universe. No immanent intelligence, no space alien designer within the cosmos, can account for the laws of physics upon which its very life depends and which preceded its existence.

The fine-tuning problems point to a transcendent design that preexists matter, space, time, and energy.

Of course, the identity of the designer has been implicit in the fine-tuning argument from the beginning. Anything responsible for the universe had to be extremely powerful, extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgeable and had to transcend the universe it created which means it couldn't be spatial, temporal or material. This sounds very much like the God of theism.

Intelligent Design theorists, however, have for much of the last several decades focused on the biological rather than the cosmological evidence for design so they rarely "officially" drew this inference. Meyer's book evidently takes the next step and fuses the biological evidence with the evidence from physics, chemistry, and cosmology to present a unified philosophical and scientific argument for the existence of God.

I urge you to read the rest of the interview - it's not long - and if you're interested in getting a copy of The Return of the God Hypothesis you can order it from the good people at my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds. It's a small independent shop standing athwart the Amazonian goliath and the big box stores. I encourage you to check them out and give them your support.

Why Is It?

Why is it that conservatives are accused of being divisive but liberals almost never are? Conservatives find themselves today on defense against an onslaught of liberal attempts to "fundamentally change the country," as former president Barack Obama famously put it. They're like the guy being pushed and punched by an assailant, who puts up his arms to ward off the blows and is then accused of provoking his attacker because he tried to protect himself.

Our liberal friends evidently think it's divisive to believe that we have inalienable constitutional rights to free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion and freedom to bear arms; to believe that the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family has been a social disaster; to refuse to pretend that biological men are really biological women; to think that traditional marriage shouldn't be tinkered with; to believe that killing unwanted babies is a bad thing; to believe that people who come into this country should do so legally and that immigration should be controlled and orderly; and to believe that before we commit to bankrupting the country to address climate change we should be given some solid evidence that the climate is actually changing, profoundly and irrevocably, that the change is caused by human activity and is not part of a natural cycle and that the change is, on balance, a bad thing.

Liberals call conservatives divisive because conservatives refuse to just give in and accept their view of things. For liberals, bipartisanship and comity are only achieved when everybody agrees with them.

Here are several other questions we might ponder:

Why is it that President Biden wants to impose stricter gun laws on lawful citizens while his own son has apparently broken one of the gun laws already on the books but will almost certainly not be prosecuted? It's clear that Hunter Biden lied when applying for a firearm in 2018. His offense is a felony carrying a sentence of up to ten years in jail, but no one thinks he'll face charges let alone go to prison.

I'm not saying that Hunter should be punished, but I am asking why the president thinks it's a good idea to promulgate more laws restricting gun ownership if we're not going to enforce the laws we already have?

And speaking of firearms, why is it that progressives want to make owning a firearm as difficult as possible but casting a vote as easy as possible? Doesn't our Constitution grant us the right to do both? And speaking of making it easy to vote, why is it that it's widely considered racist to require people to produce proof of eligibility in order to vote but no one considers it racist to be required to produce a proof of eligibility, an ID, to get the Covid vaccine?

Finally, why is it that the media relished "fact-checking" President Trump's various departures from the truth, and roundly mocked him for them, but after President Biden served up a farrago of falsehoods and deceptions in his recent press conference the mainstream media pretty much decided that it's no big deal?

If Trump's uneasy relationship with objective truth was really all the justification one needed for despising him what must those who voted for Biden because of Trump's prevarications be thinking right now?

A liberal acquaintance of my wife's wrote to her shortly after the election saying, "Isn't it refreshing to have Joe Biden in the White House? No more lies." I hope she wasn't watching that press conference. It would've been a deeply disillusioning experience for her.

That is, if it really is a president's lies that repulse her.

Consciousness and Evolution

One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists, there is no supernature) is the difficulty of explaining how consciousness could have evolved. Natural selection acts on physical bodies, but consciousness seems to be something altogether different from physical, material body.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent highlights the problem when he writes:

Consciousness could not have evolved from “simpler” states of matter, because it is not a state of matter. To say that consciousness evolved from matter is like saying Newton’s theory of gravity evolved from apples.

Even if for the sake of argument one concedes that natural selection might account for the development of a material body, consciousness remains a mystery. There is still a vast uncrossable gulf between the physical body and mind.

In other words, the difference between body and mind is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t get an immaterial mind no matter how many slight successive modifications of the body there may have been.

Naturalist philosophers, of course, don't regard the mind as "a thing" like the brain. Rather they think of "mind" as simply a word we use to describe one of the functions of the brain, sort of like we think of digestion as the function of the stomach.

The brain itself is regarded as a computer made of meat, but the problem with this is that there are so many mental characteristics that are completely inexplicable as products of a lump of material neurons.

If we entertain for the sake of discussion the claim that the brain is analogous to a computer we might ask what computer can give meaning to the words it generates on the monitor? Can a computer convert electrochemical impulses into the sensation of color, or flavor, or sound or pain? What exactly are these sensations anyway?

Does a computer experience boredom, frustration, pleasure, guilt or regret? Does it have wishes and hopes, beliefs and doubts? Do computers understand what they're doing?

The fact that human beings do all these things is a serious problem for naturalism because most naturalists hold that naturalism entails physicalism (i.e. the view that physics fixes all the facts about the world), as well as materialism (the view that all of reality is reducible to matter).

Conscious experience, however, does not seem to be something explicable in terms either of physics or matter, which means that it is a prima facie defeater for naturalism.

Naturalists can avoid this unpleasant implication of their metaphysics by conceding that both physicalism and materialism are false and trying somehow to enfold consciousness into a naturalistic ontology, but this would be an accommodation most naturalists would find devastating and repugnant.

To grant that there's more to reality than just physical matter and energy is to open the door not only to the existence of immaterial, non-physical human minds, but a forteriori to the possibility of a transcendent Mind and that's a possibility that most naturalists want to avoid at all costs.

Naturalism dominated philosophy for the two centuries from about 1790 to 1990, but it appears that work being done in the last couple of decades in both neuroscience and the philosophy of mind is bringing an end to the hegemony it once enjoyed and making it increasingly difficult to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist," as atheist biologist Richard Dawkins once put it.

Either Luck or Design

Yesterday's post discussed the very narrow range of values to which the masses of subatomic particles must be restricted in order for a universe that can give rise to living things to exist.

Today's post addresses just a few of the amazing facts about the earth and our solar system that have to be almost precisely what they are in order for life to exist on earth.

The improbability of a planet having so many of these properties is so high that some scientists have speculated that life, at least complex life, might exist nowhere else in the universe no matter how many other planets are out there. This is the thesis of such books as Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards.

Here are just a few of the parameters a planet must satisfy in order to be able of giving rise to, and sustaining, life:

1. A life-bearing planet has to located in a region of the galaxy not too close to the center nor too far from the center, and where there aren't too many other objects that could collide with the planet.This is called the galactic habitable zone.
2. A life-bearing planet has to orbit a central star of just the right age, size, and energy output and at just the right distance so that the planet is not too hot or too cold (the circumstellar habitable zone).
3. A life-bearing planet has to be the right size, with the right period of rotation so that nights don't get too cold nor days get too hot.
4. A life-bearing planet has to have a large moon to stabilize its wobble on its axis and protect it from meteoric bombardment, it has to have a magnetosphere to protect it from cosmic radiation and it has to have plate tectonics to recycle minerals.
5. A life-bearing planet must have a lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans of a particular size and chemical composition.

There are many more such conditions that a planet must meet to be life-bearing, but here's one that's particularly interesting because we might never have suspected it. New Scientist reported on some research that shows that, as strange as it may seem at first, the orbit of Saturn has to be almost exactly as it is for life to exist on earth:

Earth's comfortable temperatures may be thanks to Saturn's good behaviour. If the ringed giant's orbit had been slightly different, Earth's orbit could have been wildly elongated, like that of a long-period comet.

Our solar system is a tidy sort of place: planetary orbits here tend to be circular and lie in the same plane, unlike the highly eccentric orbits of many exoplanets. Elke Pilat-Lohinger of the University of Vienna, Austria, was interested in the idea that the combined influence of Jupiter and Saturn – the solar system's heavyweights – could have shaped other planets' orbits. She used computer models to study how changing the orbits of these two giant planets might affect the Earth.

Earth's orbit is so nearly circular that its distance from the sun only varies between 147 and 152 million kilometres, or around 2 per cent about the average. Moving Saturn's orbit just 10 percent closer in would disrupt that by creating a resonance – essentially a periodic tug – that would stretch out the Earth's orbit by tens of millions of kilometres. That would result in the Earth spending part of each year outside the habitable zone, the ring around the sun where temperatures are just right for water [to exist in a liquid state].

Tilting Saturn's orbit would also stretch out Earth's orbit. According to a simple model that did not include other inner planets, the greater the tilt, the more the elongation increased. Adding Venus and Mars to the model stabilised the orbits of all three planets, but the elongation nonetheless rose as Saturn's orbit got more tilted. Pilat-Lohinger says a 20-degree tilt would bring the innermost part of Earth's orbit closer to the sun than Venus.

In other words, our solar system is like a delicately balanced ecosystem, all the parts of which seem to be important in making earth the sort of place where life can arise and be sustained. The odds of such a system existing elsewhere in the universe would seem to be very small.

It might be mentioned in passing that it's not just Saturn's orbit that makes life possible on earth. Scientists have shown that massive outer planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune act as gravitational vacuum sweepers sucking up a lot of debris that would otherwise invade the inner reaches of the solar system and threaten earth with constant collisions.

It really is astonishing how many factors must all be just right for life to exist on this one little planet. We're either unimaginably lucky or we're the product of intelligent engineering.

The Tiny Life-Permitting Range of Values

I've frequently referred on VP to the phenomenon of cosmic fine-tuning as a powerful argument in support of the claim that the universe was intelligently engineered by a transcendent mind, but have often felt the difficulty of conveying how amazing this phenomenon is.

However, back in 2015 Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes wrote an article for the New Atlantis in which he gives an excellent explanation of what scientists mean when they talk about fine-tuning and what the implications and possible explanations for it are.

His column is a little long, but it does a wonderful job of making the ideas comprehensible to readers with a modest understanding of physics. If this is a topic that interests you I urge you to read Barnes' entire column, since I can only give you a slight taste of it here.

He talks about how the universe consists of numerous physical constants which are numbers which must be plugged into equations in order for the equations to accurately describe phenomena. For example, the gravitational attraction between the earth and the moon can only be calculated if we insert into the equation which describes this attraction a number called the gravitational constant.

There are dozens of such constants that comprise the fabric of the universe. Barnes writes:

Since physicists have not discovered a deep underlying reason for why these constants are what they are, we might well ask the seemingly simple question: What if they were different? What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?

There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life. Or even the complexity upon which life relies to store information, gather nutrients, and reproduce.

A universe that has just small tweaks in the fundamental constants might not have any of the chemical bonds that give us molecules, so say farewell to DNA, and also to rocks, water, and planets.

Other tweaks could make the formation of stars or even atoms impossible. And with some values for the physical constants, the universe would have flickered out of existence in a fraction of a second.

That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.

He goes on to give us some examples:

Let’s consider a few examples of the many and varied consequences of messing with the fundamental constants of nature, the initial conditions of the universe, and the mathematical form of the laws themselves.

You are made of cells; cells are made of molecules; molecules of atoms; and atoms of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, are made of quarks. We have not seen any evidence that electrons and quarks are made of anything more fundamental.

The results of all our investigations into the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy are summarized in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is essentially one long, imposing equation. Within this equation, there are twenty-six constants, describing the masses of the fifteen fundamental particles, along with values needed for calculating the forces between them, and a few others.

We have measured the mass of an electron to be about 9.1 x 10-28 grams, which is really very small — if each electron in an apple weighed as much as a grain of sand, the apple would weigh more than Mount Everest. The other two fundamental constituents of atoms, the up and down quarks, are a bit bigger, coming in at 4.1 x 10-27 and 8.6 x 10-27 grams, respectively.

These numbers, relative to each other and to the other constants of the Standard Model, are a mystery to physics....we don’t know why they are what they are.

However, we can calculate all the ways the universe could be disastrously ill-suited for life if the masses of these particles were different. For example, if the down quark’s mass were 2.6 x 10-26 grams or more, then adios, periodic table! There would be just one chemical element and no chemical compounds, in stark contrast to the approximately 60 million known chemical compounds in our universe.

With even smaller adjustments to these masses, we can make universes in which the only stable element is hydrogen-like. Once again, kiss your chemistry textbook goodbye, as we would be left with one type of atom and one chemical reaction. If the up quark weighed 2.4 x 10-26 grams, things would be even worse — a universe of only neutrons, with no elements, no atoms, and no chemistry whatsoever.

Considering that we know of no reason why the masses of these particles couldn't have had a broad range of values these are incomprehensibly tiny differences - on the order of a decimal point followed by 25 zeroes and a 1. To give us an idea of how narrow the range of masses these particles must reside in if they're to build a universe that would have chemistry, Barnes invites us to,

Imagine a huge chalkboard, with each point on the board representing a possible value for the up and down quark masses. If we wanted to color the parts of the board that support the chemistry that underpins life, and have our handiwork visible to the human eye, the chalkboard would have to be about ten light years (a hundred trillion kilometers) high.

And that's for the masses of just two fundamental particles:

There are also the fundamental forces that account for the interactions between the particles. The strong nuclear force, for example, is the glue that holds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms. If, in a hypothetical universe, this force is too weak, then nuclei are not stable and the periodic table disappears again.

If it is too strong, then the intense heat of the early universe could convert all hydrogen into helium — meaning that there could be no water, and that 99.97 percent of the 24 million carbon compounds we have discovered would be impossible, too.

And... these forces, like the masses, must be in the right balance. If the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for the attraction and repulsion of charged particles, is too strong or too weak compared to the strong nuclear force, anything from stars to chemical compounds would be impossible.

Stars are particularly finicky when it comes to fundamental constants. If the masses of the fundamental particles are not extremely small, then stars burn out very quickly. Stars in our universe also have the remarkable ability to produce both carbon and oxygen, two of the most important elements to biology. But, a change of just a few percent in the up and down quarks’ masses, or in the forces that hold atoms together, is enough to upset this ability — stars would make either carbon or oxygen, but not both.

Here's a chart that shows the delicate balance that must exist between just two fundamental forces in order for carbon-based life to exist.

Barnes is himself persuaded that cosmic fine-tuning points to the conclusion that our universe has been designed by an intelligent agent, although many other physicists resist that conclusion. They hold out hope that some other explanation for this amazingly precise calibration of constants and forces will emerge.

Maybe so, but what we know right now about the universe does not engender optimism that their hope will ever be justified.

Crisis and Hypocrisy

Our border is being flooded by a tsunami of migrants seeking to enter the country. The Border Patrol has no place to put them while they're being processed so they're being packed into holding pens, sometimes at many times the capacity of the facilities. One facility built to hold 250 people is now custodian to 3,889 migrants, meaning it is currently at 1,556 percent capacity.

Others are being shipped to hotels, and still others are being simply let go into the country. We don't know who they are, whether they've got any diseases or criminal record. Our Border Patrol is overwhelmed and can't handle the influx.

The crisis is a direct result of President Biden's decision in the early days of his tenure to dismantle almost all of President Trump's immigration measures, including finishing the border wall, requiring people seeking asylum to apply in their home countries, and requiring others to remain in Mexico until their cases had been adjudicated.

These measures had slowed the tide of illegal immigration to a relative trickle, but Mr. Biden did away with all that and hordes of Central Americans and others from around the world are now pouring across our borders.

The facilities in which they're being housed are deplorable, although the media are loath to point this out after having spent several years of the Trump administration castigating the president for keeping "kids in cages."

                          A photo released by Congressman Henry Cuellar's office

So here's a modest proposal for solving, at least partly, the housing problem: Every person who voted for Joe Biden, including Mr. Biden himself, should offer to open their homes to house and care for one or more immigrants. Mr. Biden owns several capacious houses, and should be happy to open them to the immigrants who came here because they thought he'd welcome them.

The people who voted for him, who professed compassion for the huddled masses and voted Mr. Biden and open borders, can hardly now object that they only favor open borders unless that includes the borders of their own property.

Folks who voted to open the gates of the country to the rest of the world can not reasonably slam shut the doors to their own homes and lock their cars, can they? That would be, well, hypocrisy.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is seriously considering changing some of the traditional Senate rules, the filibuster and the reconciliation rules, to name two. They want to do this so that they'll be able to ram through enormous spending bills as well as bills that would change voting procedures nationwide so as to make it much easier to vote, and, it should be noted, to commit voter fraud.

Yet it wasn't too long ago that many Democrats were opposed to tinkering with the rules. For example, can you guess which Democrat Senator once said this?

I’ve been in the Senate for a long time, and there are plenty of times I would have loved to change this rule or that rule to pass a bill or to confirm a nominee I felt strongly about. But I didn’t, and it was understood that the option of doing so just wasn’t on the table.

You fought political battles; you fought hard; but you fought them within the strictures and requirements of the Senate rules. Despite the short-term pain, that understanding has served both parties well, and provided long-term gain.

Adopting the “nuclear option” would change this fundamental understanding and unbroken practice of what the Senate is all about. Senators would start thinking about changing other rules when they became ‘inconvenient.’

Instead of two-thirds of the vote to change a rule, you’d now have precedent that it only takes a bare majority. Altering Senate rules to help in one political fight or another could become standard operating procedure, which, in my view, would be disastrous.

If you guessed Senator Joe Biden you guessed correctly. So where does Mr. Biden stand now? We'll soon see.

Does He Still Have a Job?

A writer for a conservative media outlet recently posted the following on his website:

Blackness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people—white people and people who are not black, my mom included. There will be people who die, in 2050, because of Black Lives Matter decisions from 2020.

Blackness is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

He had much else to say, but you get the picture. This man is clearly a racist, a hater, and is promoting murder. Actually, he's promoting genocide. I would hope all Americans would join me in deploring, not only what he said but also the fact that the media has been uncommonly silent about this public advocacy of the violent extinction of a race of people he despises.

I'm quite sure that everyone who has read this feels disgust that anyone would think as this man does, and perhaps you wonder, too, why he's not being more widely censured. Indeed, you might be wondering, in light of the vigilance of our cancel culture in sniffing out racism, whether he still has a job.

Well, perhaps if I confess to a bit of chicanery you'll understand perfectly why our media has ignored this cancerous blight in our social body. The author of this ugly rant is not a conservative writer.

He's a black man named Damon Young who writes for a black-oriented commentary site, and everywhere in the quoted passage where the words "black" or "Black Lives Matter" appear Mr. Young referred to "white," or "whiteness" or "white supremacy" (You can read the entire article here).

The sentiments he expresses would be justly considered despicable were they penned by a white racist as I originally rendered them, and they're no less odious when penned by a black man. So why does Mr. Young get a pass from the media? Would similar hate-mongering by a white racist have been greeted with almost complete indifference by our media?

If a white writer had called for the extirpation of all blacks, or Jews, or Asians, what would the media reaction have been, do you suppose? Yet, like many on the left, our media seems to take no notice of minority racism, no matter how vicious. In their cockamamie way of seeing the world it's okay to be a racist if one is non-white, but a paramount evil if one is white.

There's a lot of talk currently about racial "equity." Well, one place equity is desperately needed is in our discussion of the phenomenon of racism. The idea that only white racism is evil or that only whites can be racist is not only ludicrously stupid, it's also terribly divisive and counterproductive.

It's counterproductive, that is, if our goal is racial harmony. If the goal is racial division and hostility then screeds like Mr. Young's are extremely efficacious.

Scorched Earth

There's been much talk among Democrats about eliminating the Senate filibuster which they rightly see as an impediment to enacting much of their agenda. The filibuster is a Senate rule that requires a supermajority of 60 votes to pass any legislative bill.

Since the Senate is evenly split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats (the Vice-President can cast tie-breaker votes), the Democrats would need ten Republican senators to pass their legislation, and given the radical nature of much of that agenda ten GOP votes are going to be very hard to come by.

Thus, the talk about quashing the filibuster so that they can pass bills with a simple majority (all 50 Democrats plus the Vice-President).

But what would happen if the Democrats eliminated the filibuster. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promised a "scorched earth" Senate, the Senate would look like “100-car pileup—nothing moving,” but what does that mean? Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) provides the details for us:

...there are 44 standing rules of the Senate; the filibuster is but one....To the extent the Senate functions at all ... it is only because senators willingly relinquish those prerogatives. Mr. McConnell on Tuesday described a world in which they don’t, which he called a “scorched-earth Senate.”

It’s a world without “unanimous consent,” in which a senator asks all 99 colleagues to give up their right to object to a proposal. Senate leaders rely on unanimous consent dozens of a times a day. You need consent to open the Senate before noon, to dispense with the reading of the preceding day’s journal, to move to business, to avoid reading out loud the text of every amendment and resolution, to avoid roll call votes. The Senate functions because most consent requests are granted.

When they aren’t? It takes only one Republican to object to a request but a majority to overcome most objections. Mr. Schumer [The Democratic Leader in the Senate] might at any time need all 50 of his members—and the vice president—on the floor to move things along. Likewise to override a flow of “points of order.” All day, every day.

Republicans could flit in and out, and it would only take a handful of members to force roll calls for all these votes, eating up more hours. Democratic senators and Kamala Harris would essentially live at the Capitol, constantly on call. If even one was absent at a crucial moment, the Senate would essentially shut down.

Now add in “quorum” calls. Any senator can question, pretty much any time, whether the Senate truly has 51 senators on the floor (the vice president doesn’t count). It’s unclear whether a lone Republican could issue a quorum call, flee and stymie Senate business until the sergeant of arms rounded him back up. But even if that lone Republican stayed, quorum calls would eat up hours. The Senate secretary is required in each case to call the roll, of all 100 senators.

Anyone who has ever watched C-Span 2 knows this takes ages.

There are even more creative ideas, but these tools alone would be enough to paralyze the institution. The Senate convenes. Quorum call. The presiding officer asks for consent to forgo reading yesterday’s journal. Republicans object. Roll call vote. The officer asks for consent to speed through “morning business.” Republicans object. Democrats move to get on an issue. Point of order. Roll-call vote. Quorum call. Republicans object to the motion. Roll-call vote. A speech. Quorum call. Etc., and so on, until adjournment.

The irony here is that the Democrats anticipate that by eliminating the filibuster the Biden agenda could more easily pass through the Senate, but if they do abrogate the filibuster rule the result would be that nothing would get through the Senate.

The Democrats seem to have failed to learn a lesson they should've learned over a decade ago. Back then they were in the majority and were trying to get President Obama's left-wing federal judges confirmed, but the Republicans were loath to seat radical judges and used the filibuster rule, which back then applied not only to legislation but also to approving federal judges and Supreme Court Justices, to block their appointments.

The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Harry Reid, decided that, very well, he would eliminate the Senate filibuster as it applied to federal judges, and they were thus able to get Obama's appointees through.

At the time Senator McConnell warned that toying with the filibuster would someday come back to haunt the Democrats, and it did. When Donald Trump became president he had the opportunity to appoint several Supreme Court Justices.

The Republicans were now in the majority in the Senate so the Democrats planned to block Trump's appointments with the filibuster which still applied to Supreme Court nominees, but McConnell said that since the Democrats had removed the filibuster for federal judgeships there was no logical reason for keeping it in place for Supreme Court nominees, so he eliminated the rule for SCOTUS justices, and as a result Trump was able to get three conservative justices confirmed to the Supreme Court on simple majority votes.

Moreover, since the Democrats had already removed the filibuster as a barrier to federal judgeships, President Trump was also able to appoint a record number of conservative judges to the federal bench with simple majorities in the Senate.

If the Democrats continue to manipulate the Senate rules by eliminating the legislative filibuster, assuming that they have the votes to do it, they will once again rue their short-sightedness, and McConnell will once again see to it that they do.

What Are Memories?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things.

Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face.

As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain. But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored.

It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself.

The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face." But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face?

Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? The memory of where the key is stored must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory.

And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties, but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us.

Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of remembering in particular and the phenomenon of consciousness in general. That something else, many philosophers believe, is an immaterial mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of every aspect of the human species?

How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences?

It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Concerning White Privilege

A number of years ago I received a beautiful e-mail from a student who expressed her desire to give back to those who have less than she does something of the abundance with which she has been blessed. This young woman's wish to help others is wonderful, and I was deeply impressed by her commitment to the poor and marginalized.

There was one thing she said in her missive, however, which is a common sentiment on her campus and one which I asked her to reconsider. She stated that part of the obligation she feels to help the poor is a result of the fact that she's "a white, middle class, educated female with a tremendous amount of undeserved privilege."

I know students are encouraged by liberal professors to think that one's race or gender confer upon one a large measure of undeserved privilege, but to tell the truth, I think my colleagues are wrong about this.

The idea of white privilege is a shibboleth that's too often used to evoke in whites a sense of racial guilt. In my response to this student I tried to explain why I think her acceptance of this guilt actually diminishes the choices and sacrifices made by her grandparents, parents, and even herself. Here's what I wrote:

Dear S_,

Yours is a lovely e-mail, and I think it's wonderful that you want to give of yourself to those who subsist on the margins of society. I wish you well and pray God's blessing on your efforts.

I do want to urge you, though, to consider something. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into what you say, but you seem to suggest that your status in society is somehow an undeserved privilege. If that is what you're saying I don't think you should see it that way.

You are what you are and have what you have for a number of reasons. First, your parents and grandparents stayed married and worked very hard, sometimes 12 or more hours a day, I'll bet, to provide you with an opportunity to get an education. Your status is largely the fruit of their toil, as well as dozens of other important and wise choices they made in life, and it's not something you should feel guilty about.

Indeed, I think it diminishes their effort to think of your status as largely a consequence of your race. So far from feeling that your privilege is undeserved, I think you should be proud of the people who made it possible and grateful for their sacrifices and the choices they made.

A second reason you enjoy the status you do is because, once given the opportunities your parents and grandparents worked so hard for, you had the character to make the most of them. You took advantage of the opportunity to get an education, you held yourself to high personal and academic standards through your teen years, and you had the wisdom to not squander the heritage handed down to you.

None of this has much to do with your race. I know that some instructors on your campus think that being white somehow confers an unfair advantage over others in society, but I think that's mistaken. It was true historically, of course, but it hasn't been the case in the U.S. for a long time. No one has been legally denied opportunity in this country by virtue of his or her race for well over fifty years.

If people in the U.S. languish in poverty it's often - though of course not always - because of the choices both they and their parents have made, not the color of their skin.

The fact is that there are lots of African and Asian-Americans who are successful in this society, but no one talks about black privilege or brown privilege. Instead they talk, as they should, about how hard the parents of those people worked and the ordeals their parents endured in order to give their children a chance to make it in the world.

Contrarily, there are whites, blacks and Asians who enjoy historically unprecedented opportunities to make a positive mark in life but fail to do so because they lack the character it takes to make something of themselves.

In other words, you enjoy the status you do, S_, not because you're privileged by your race but because you're privileged to have the parents and virtues you do. It's wonderful to want to "give back" but don't let anyone imply that you should do so out of guilt over your race or class. Your motivation should be your love for God and the conviction that he wants you to be an instrument to help others to live a better life.

There are three or four things that people can do to lift themselves out of poverty and none of them have much to do with their race: 1. Stay in school and graduate, 2. Get married before having children and stay married afterward, 3. Be a solid, dependable employee at whatever job they get, and 4. Stay away from drugs, alcohol and pornography.

Few people who do these things are poor, and one doesn't have to be "privileged" in order to do them.

There's nothing more lethal to the aspirations of those born into poverty than the claim that they can't make it out of their circumstances because of their race, that the deck is stacked against them. That falsehood seeps into the psyche of a man or woman and becomes an excuse for failure and a rationalization for not trying.

Nor does it ennoble the efforts of those who choose to do good work among the poor to be motivated by a mistaken need to expiate some false sense of racial guilt.

If the Multiverse Exists So Does God

As Denyse O'Leary explained in a column some years ago at Evolution News cosmic fine-tuning presents a profound difficulty for any naturalistic view of cosmic origins. The term fine-tuning refers to the exquisitely precise calibration of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of parameters, constants and forces that comprise the fabric of the universe.

If any of these were set at values only slightly different than they are either the universe couldn'texist or it wouldn't be the kind of place where life could exist.

According to many scientists there are only two possible realistic explanations for this astounding state of affairs. Either the universe was created by an intelligent supernatural agent, i.e. God, or there is in fact an infinite array of universes, like bubbles in a bubble bath, each one possessing different physical properties. This is what has come to be called the multiverse hypothesis.

If there are indeed an infinity of different universes then one like ours, as improbable as it would be if it were the only universe, must exist since in an infinite series of possibilities anything that's possible to exist must actually exist. In other words, the multiverse hypothesis evades the problem of our universe's astronomical improbability by making the universe statistically necessary.

O'Leary gives us a couple of examples of scientists clearly acknowledging these two alternatives. Science writer Marcus Chown at New Scientist magazine writes:

Should the fine-tuning turn out to be real, what are we to make of it? There are two widely-discussed possibilities: either God fine-tuned the universe for us to be here, or there are (as string theory implies) a large number of universes, each with different laws of physics, and we happen to find ourselves in a universe where the laws happen to be just right for us to live. After all, how could we not?

Elsewhere in the same magazine the editors tell us that,

But the main reason for believing in an ensemble of universes is that it could explain why the laws governing our Universe appear to be so finely tuned for our existence … This fine-tuning has two possible explanations. Either the Universe was designed specifically for us by a creator or there is a multitude of universes — a multiverse.

The multiverse hypothesis has been embraced by those - scientists, philosophers and laypersons alike - who hold to a naturalist worldview because that worldview has no room for the alternative that the universe is the product of an intelligent creator. There are, notwithstanding its appeal to these thinkers, numerous problems with the multiverse hypothesis, not the least of which is that there's no empirical evidence for it.

The multiverse idea is also extraordinarily unparsimonious, positing a virtual infinity of universes in order to avoid positing a single creator. It also merely pushes the problem of fine-tuning back a step since whatever is generating all those universes must itself be extremely fine-tuned.

One other difficulty for the hypothesis, at least as a means of avoiding God, is that it actually dovetails with a version of what philosophers call the ontological argument for the existence of God. I've never seen the argument worded quite like this so if there's a flaw in it the fault is with me and not with the ontological argument itself. The argument goes like this:

1. It's logically possible that there exists a being that is the self-existent creator of all else that exists. By logically possible is meant that the idea doesn't entail a contradiction like, say, the idea of a square circle does. There's no contradiction in the concept of a self-existent creator of all else that exists.
2. If the existence of such a being is logically possible then there is a logically possible world (i.e. universe) in which a self-existent creator of all else that exists is part of the description of that world. In other words, there's a possible world in which a self-existent creator of all else that exists is the creator of that world.
   Note: A possible world is simply the way the actual world could've been. It's possible that the Kansas City Chiefs won the last Super Bowl so there's a possible world in which the Chiefs are the current Super Bowl champions. As another example, there's a possible world in which Covid-19 never created a pandemic. Possible worlds are conceptual, they don't actually exist.
3. But, if all logically possible worlds do actually exist, as posited by some multiverse scenarios, then there must be some actual world in which it is true to say that a self-existent creator of all else that exists actually created that world.
4. If it is true to say of some actual world that it was created by a self-existent creator of all else that exists then a self-existent creator of all else that exists must itself actually exist.
5. If a self-existent creator of all else that exists does itself exist, then by definition it must have created every world that exists. If there were some world which this being did not create then it wouldn't be the creator of all that is, which is a contradiction.
6. Therefore, our world must have been created by the self-existent creator of all else that exists.

In simpler terms, given the fine-tuning of the universe either God exists or there's a multiverse, but, as the preceding argument shows, if there's a multiverse then God exists. So, given cosmic fine-tuning, either God exists or God exists.

It seems God's existence is inescapable.

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick's Day

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day even if because of Covid everything is closed and there are no parades.

The Cult of Wokeness

In the course of a book review at First Things theology professor James Keating gives a helpful summation of why "Woke culture" seems so odious to so many:

The concern for the less privileged encouraged by identity politics is praiseworthy, as is the moral revulsion at the horrors of the American past. Indeed, to agonize over the fact that transgressions forever outpace justice is about as pure an expression of Christianized Western civilization as one can find.

In their very effort to distance themselves from their American and Christian inheritance, our social justice warriors are giving that inheritance new expression, albeit shorn of its most appealing elements.

Nonetheless, there are aspects of woke politics that must be denounced. The ease and even joy with which too many condemn, slander, and seek to destroy those who have done or said something deemed racist, sexist, or homophobic is disgraceful.

The lack of mercy shown even to those whose “thought crimes” are unintentional or the result of not knowing the new rules bespeaks unbridled aggression rather than biblical charity. There is nothing inclusive or tolerant about such behavior. Far from building a diverse community, such scapegoating makes community impossible.

Condemning whole groups of wicked oppressors is not only evil but futile. Human beings are too entangled in sin for scapegoating to do anything other than produce the need for more victims.

Redressing the tremendous transgression of American enslavement and post-emancipation degradation of African Americans by scapegoating another set of Americans on the basis of their race is not progress but a reinvigoration of the worst aspects of our past, a new Jim Crow of those who are pure and those who are dirty and defiled.

The book he's reviewing is titled America Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time by Josh Mitchell, a professor of politics at Georgetown University. Mitchell writes that we're in the midst of a fourth religious "awakening" in our history, but unlike earlier such awakenings, this one is "without God and without forgiveness."

There is indeed original sin in this religion, which taints some but not all, and there's plenty of punishment, intolerance and scapegoating based on race and gender.

About Mitchell's depiction of original sin Keating writes:

No longer guided by the Christian insight that the universality of sin means its resolution must be a divine act, identity politics apportions guilt and innocence according to a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, each weighed according to intersectional theory. Guilt and innocence no longer attach to one’s freely chosen actions over the course of a life but are imputed on the basis of one’s inherited and immutable characteristics, skin color above all.

The idea of original sin abides but is tragically twisted. It is still something one is born with, but it is no longer universal.

And about scapegoating there's this:

Scapegoating gains support from those who hope to escape its fury. Stroll down the hallway of any academic department and you’ll see door after door festooned with “safe space” stickers, rainbow decals, Black Lives Matter signs, the latest flier from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office.

Each one is an attempt at what Shelby Steele calls “disassociation.” I may be white, even male, even married to a white woman, with white kids, but I am not the one you are looking for. He is over there.

These rather obvious attempts at what Mitchell calls “innocence-signaling” must be backed up by a readiness to denounce fellow whites for their thought-crimes. Mere sentiment will not suffice: “Silence is violence.”

This explains why efforts at diversity and inclusion at colleges and corporations so often amount to little more than certain whites turning states’ evidence against other whites.

Contemporary woke culture has the character of a highly intolerant, unforgiving, unloving, grace-less, works-based, narcissistic, secular religion. It preaches hate not only for the sin but also for the sinner. It seeks to destroy people rather than redeem them. It's a merciless religion of rigidly narrow dogma in which there's no room for freedom, for questioning, for doctrinal deviation - only closed-minded conformity.

So far from promoting unity and harmony, it nurtures resentments and breeds bitterness, exacerbating our divisions rather than drawing us together.

It is, in fact, a cult in which atonement is possible, if at all, only through a penance of self-abasement in which the penitent must obsequiously and publicly beg forgiveness for the sin of saying or doing something that transgresses the constantly evolving standards of acceptable thought, speech and action. The range of what's "offensive" grows ever-broader so that it becomes increasingly easy to fall inadvertently into sin and come under the judgment of the twitter inquisitors.

Keating concludes his review of Mitchell's book with this: "A thoroughly Christian vision of a post-racial American future, Mitchell insists, must inform all efforts to heal our racial wounds. If this happens, America just might have yet another, and much better, awakening."

Let's hope.

Fighting Off Viruses - Biological and Metaphysical

The BBC has a short video out that shows how the cell defends itself against viruses. It's a two step process in which one protein identifies the virus and attaches to it and then a second protein complex anchors to the first protein and eviscerates the virus. It's astonishing.

To think that such a system arose by random processes purely by chance rather than having been intelligently engineered requires a prodigious quantity of blind faith, but such is the faith of our naturalist friends that no feat of biological complexity is so astronomically improbable as to challenge their credulity.

As you watch the video note not only the wonderful defense mechanism the cell employs against the invaders but also note the amazing means of locomotion that the virus employs to traverse the cell.

The ability of the protein "feet" on the virus to attach to the proteins in the microtubules that serve as the highways in the cell is reminiscent of one of the first animations of cellular processes ever made. It was produced by Harvard University scientists in 2006 and is titled the Inner Life of the Cell.

At the 1:14 mark, the motor protein Dynein, which carries vacuoles across the cell, is shown "walking" along a microtubule. Anyone who can witness this and not see intelligent engineering can look at the clear blue noonday sky and not see the sun.

If you'd like to know more about what's being depicted in this video you can watch the following version of it. It's fascinating.

If you do watch it notice how the woman narrating it, in describing what's going on, uses language which implies intention and thus intelligence. She may not herself think that intelligence has anything to do with the incredible cellular choreography, but even so, the phenomena she's showing us are so much easier to describe in terms of intentional design:

Darwin and the scientists of his day knew nothing about the biology of the cell. They assumed it was a simple blob of jelly, but investigations of the last 70 years or so have shown that each of the trillions of cells in our bodies is in fact more like an enormously complex city. Each new discovery puts increasing strain on the belief that purely natural processes can account for how such a marvel came about.

Those who cling to this idea often do so because it's a pillar of their naturalistic worldview. If they give it up their worldview would undergo a psychologically devastating collapse.

So, like lonely Japanese soldiers holding out on Pacific Islands long after the war was over, some simply refuse to acknowledge what is plainly evident to anyone who looks at the evidence without an apriori commitment to naturalism.

Their adamantine refusal to grant that intelligent agency is the best explanation for the cellular machinery depicted in these videos brings to mind the story of the man who told his psychiatrist that, despite appearances, he was really dead. Nothing the psychiatrist could say or do persuaded the man that he wasn't dead. “Oh, yes doctor!" he insisted, "I’m completely dead!”

Finally, the psychiatrist showed him in several medical books that dead men don't bleed. The man accepted the authority of the books and agreed that it must be true that dead men don't bleed. The psychiatrist then said to the man, “Now look, I want you to go home and several times a day, tell yourself: Dead men don’t bleed! Dead men don’t bleed! Say this over and over again, come back to me in a month, and I’ll show you something very interesting indeed!”

The man did as the doctor instructed. He went home, repeated the phrase several times a day and returned a month later. “Well,” said the doctor, “what have you been saying to yourself?” “Oh,” replied the man, “Dead men don’t bleed, doctor; dead men don’t bleed.”

“Good,” said the doctor, “now watch this!” He deftly pricked the man’s finger with a needle, and a drop of blood oozed out. The man watched his finger bleed. “Oh, dear!” he gasped, “My Goodness! Dead men DO bleed after all!”

The Star Spangled Banner

A friend forwarded this short video to me, and I thought it'd be good to share it. It explains when and how the custom of playing the Star Spangled Banner at sporting events began.

It's an interesting piece of American history and only takes a few minutes to watch:

I wonder how long it'll be before the wokesters label the Star Spangled Banner a symbol of oppression and white supremacy and get it dropped from our athletic contests. The Dallas Mavericks toyed with the idea last year, but the NBA insisted that the National Anthem be played before all games when the fans return to the arenas, so the Mavericks yielded.

Even so, the wokesters are nothing if not relentless, and with all the controversy surrounding player conduct during the Anthem, especially in the NFL and NBA, the leagues might at some point just decide it's no longer worth the trouble.

Close-up Magic

This guy is absolutely amazing.

He's a French magician named Yann Frisch, and his performance with cups and balls was a sensation a decade ago and still is today. The act is named "Baltass," and it'll leave you stunned. See if you can figure out how he does what he does:

Frisch was named Champion of France in close-up magic in 2011 and was crowned European champion in 2012. Later that year he became World Champion, and has toured all over the world.

He certainly is a remarkable talent.

Darwin's Racism

Well, since the left is in a "canceling" mood, and everyone who exhibits the slightest taint of white supremacy is being condemned to exile if they're still alive and tossed down the memory hole if they're not, I'm wondering how long it will be until the book burners come for the most revered prophet in the secular pantheon.

I speak of one of the most prominent racists of the 19th century, Charles Darwin.

Darwin's follow-up to The Origin of Species, his Descent of Man, is littered with racist and sexist sentiments which are far more unsavory than anything one would find in Dr. Seuss. Here's just one example of dozens that could be cited:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked will no doubt be exterminated.

The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Oof. This is very awkward. Darwin's Descent of Man should obviously be burned, his statue at the London Museum of Natural History pulled down and his tomb at Westminster Abbey dug up and his bones thrown into the Thames, but on the other hand, if Darwin is discredited what happens to the chief pillar of contemporary materialistic atheism, Neo-Darwinian evolution?

How can a good materialist cling fervently to a theory associated with such a wretched bigot as the quiet professor from Down? Indeed, how can his theories be allowed to be propounded in our classrooms and featured on PBS specials? It's past time, is it not, for all good men, women and the other 50 or so genders to get on their Twitter accounts and demand that the name of Darwin be expunged from every nook and cranny of our culture.

It's certainly time to demand that the execrable Darwin Day be abolished. It's unconscionable that we have a day in which we celebrate a racist. It's as bad as having a Nathan Bedford Forrest Day.

So when will the bells toll for Mr. Darwin? When will he be thrust into outer darkness and his books banished from ebay? Or are these just idle questions?

To anyone who thinks the quote above is not enough to establish Mr. Darwin's guilt there are two things to say: First, you must be a racist yourself or else you wouldn't raise such an objection, and second lots more examples of his pernicious views on race and sex can be found on Denise O'Leary's post at Uncommon Descent.

So, let the bonfires begin!

Okay, I'm kidding, at least a little, but on a more sober note it would be good to watch this 9 minute video. The similarities between what's said and shown on the video and what's happening in our country today are uncanny. Watching it brought to mind the words of philosopher George Sanatyana who declared that "Those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it."

Please watch the whole thing. We need to be reminded of the lessons of history and to take seriously what the people interviewed in the clip are telling us.

Our Least Trusted Professionals

In a column titled The Media's Miserable Record on Getting it Right National Review's Jim Geraghty includes this tidbit:

The Civil Unrest and Presidential Election Study (CUPES), completed last month, asked 980 adults two questions.

The first was, “If you had to guess, how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?” Options ranged from “about 10” to “more than 10,000.” The second question was “If you had to guess, in 2019 what percentage of people killed by police were black?” Respondents could choose any number from 0 to 100.

So, how do you think these questions were answered?

According to the Washington Post database, regarded by Nature magazine as the “most complete database” of its kind, 13 unarmed black men were fatally shot by police in 2019. According to a second database called “Mapping Police Violence,” compiled by data scientists and activists, 27 unarmed black men were killed by police (by any means) in 2019.

The CUPES survey found that “over half (53.5 percent) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were killed,” and 26.6 percent of those identifying as “liberal” believed it was “about 1,000.” Fourteen percent of those identifying as “very liberal” believed “about 10,000” unarmed black men were killed, and almost 8 percent of those identifying as “very liberal” believed that more than 10,000 black men were killed by police in 2019.

There's a chart at the CUPES link which illustrates the data very clearly.

The disparity between liberals and conservatives in terms of how familiar they are with the actual data is remarkable. Of those who consider themselves "conservative" or "very conservative" about 46% thought there were about ten unarmed black men killed by police in 2019 and about 37% of this cohort thought the number was about 100, whereas only 16% of "very liberal" and 22% of "liberal" respondents thought the number of unarmed black men killed by police was about ten.

Why are liberals so much more poorly informed than conservatives? I'll return to that question in a moment, but let's let Geraghty finish:

The study noted that, according to peer-reviewed research, 26.7 percent of the victims of police-shooting fatalities between 2015 and 2020, were black. Another source, BBC News’s “Reality Check Team,” reported that in 2019 specifically, 23.4 percent of the victims of police-shooting fatalities were black.

The second question found similar results. “Those who reported being ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ were particularly inaccurate” in their guesses of what percentage of people killed by police were black, “estimating the proportion to be 56 percent and 60 percent, respectively.”

If you walked around believing that 1,000 or 10,000 or even more unarmed black men were killed by police each year, with minimal if any consequences, you would probably distrust the police and want to see them abolished or defunded or, at minimum, torn down and rebuilt from the ground up with a completely different culture.

Well, I think if you believed what liberals believed there'd be a civil war raging in this country. It's little wonder race relations are in such a mess. How can there be so much ignorance in a country that has so much information at its fingertips? And why are liberals so much more poorly informed than conservatives?

Here's a theory: The progressive media whose job it is to disabuse the masses of false ideas and educate them as to the truth has done a miserable job of both. Journalists have doubtless by now surpassed lawyers and used car salesmen as the most untrustworthy and untrusted professionals in our culture, and it's largely because so many of them on the left have opted to be cheerleaders instead of referees.

If our media were doing their job, they'd be incessantly stressing the truth of these statistics until people on the left realized how wildly wrong their assumptions are, but so far from being an agent for truth and justice, the media seems intent on dousing the flames of racial conflict by spraying them with gasoline.

Perhaps it's too strong to suggest that they "intend" to be inflammatory, but I think it's accurate to say that if provoking racial animosities was indeed their goal, hiding the truth about these stats would certainly be one of their preferred tactics.

PC Logic

It seems like every day brings new examples of the politically correct beclowning themselves. Here's just the latest:

Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced Tuesday they are no longer reproducing six Dr. Seuss classics (“And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer”) because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

President Joe Biden also refused to acknowledge Dr. Seuss in his remarks on Read Across America Day, a departure from a White House tradition even former President Barack Obama upheld.

After the banning, owners of the six books began listing copies for up to tens of thousands of dollars on online retailers like eBay and Amazon. Arkansas native Carol Carson was trying to sell a copy of “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street” on eBay until her listing was taken down on Thursday.

A screenshot Carson shared with the Examiner shows a message from eBay explaining her book was delisted because “it didn’t follow our Offensive material policy. Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t allowed.”

It will come as news to generations of Dr. Seuss's readers that as children they were reading books that promoted hatred, violence and discrimination, but the PC sleuths at Dr. Seuss Enterprises and ebay would be pleased to enlighten them.

For the PC crowd there's no molehill so small and insignificant that it can't be transformed into a mountain.

The stupidity of ebay's decision is even more apparent when one looks at what else they're evidently okay with. A cursory scan of a few book titles shows that one can still buy the antisemitic diatribes of Louis Farrakhan, the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Adolf Hitler's even more infamous Mein Kampf.

You can’t make this stuff up. @eBay is blocking my listing of @DrSeuss’s “The Cat’s Quizzer” & citing it as offensive material. Yet anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan’s books are okay? #cancelcancelculture pic.twitter.com/9Au62lagcW

— Clare Ath (@clare_ath) March 4, 2021

What exactly is @eBay’s policy on “hate and discrimination”? Dr Seuss is apparently out, but Mein Kampf still fetches a pretty penny! pic.twitter.com/Y6pN1cH9UI

— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) March 4, 2021

The thought police at ebay deem books that "promote or glorify hatred, violence or discrimination" to be completely unacceptable unless they promote or glorify hatred, violence or discrimination against Jews. Then ebay is happy to list them.

Dr. Seuss is intolerable, Adolf Hitler is okay. Is this what passes for logic and commonsense in contemporary liberaldom?