Making Us Proud

While our nation suffers through the humiliation of a hurried, chaotic exit from Afghanistan, an exit which could leave behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghans who helped us over the last twenty years, one group of Americans are a source of genuine pride and gratitude.

ABC News released some details of a harrowing mission undertaken by a team of former special ops troops to rescue an Afghan colleague and his family who was being hunted by the Taliban and threatened with death. The rescue of this one man and his family evolved into the rescue of over six hundred other Afghan special forces troops and their families.

It's an incredible story of human loyalty, bravery and the very best of the American spirit. It's almost certain to be written about in books and depicted on movie screens.

Here's an excerpt:

With the Taliban growing more violent and adding checkpoints near Kabul's airport, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a final daring mission on Wednesday night dubbed the "Pineapple Express" to shepherd hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety, members of the group told ABC News.

Moving after nightfall in near-pitch black darkness and extremely dangerous conditions, the group said it worked unofficially in tandem with the United States military and U.S. embassy to move people, sometimes one person at a time, or in pairs, but rarely more than a small bunch, inside the wire of the U.S. military-controlled side of Hamid Karzai International Airport.

As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military.

That number added to more than 130 others over the past 10 days who had been smuggled into the airport encircled by Taliban fighters since the capital fell to the extremists on Aug. 16 by Task Force Pineapple, an ad hoc groups of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan who banded together to save as many Afghan allies as they could.

"Dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women, were secretly moved through the streets of Kabul throughout the night and up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom," Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret commander who led the private rescue effort, told ABC News.

The White House has set what appears to be an entirely arbitrary date of August 31st (today) to have all troops out of Kabul. Once they're gone anyone, American, Afghan or European, still remaining in the country will either have to find their own way out or risk eventually being discovered by the Taliban or ISIS.

Yet, there's no special reason for the August 31st deadline.

Military experts insist that it could've been made clear to the Taliban that we would stay in Kabul until we had gotten everyone out even if this meant inserting more troops, and that the Taliban would interfere with this rescue at their peril. For reasons that are unclear, however, the Biden White House was loath to delay our exit.

To the extent many are being rescued from certain death it's because people like those described above, but others, too, Americans and Europeans, are acting independently of the White House, and sometimes against orders, to save all those they can. It's a fascinating story and one which, in the midst of what appears to be a debacle, Americans can be proud of. Read the rest of it at the link. UPDATE: This video is another example of how Americans are working independently of the government to rescue, in this case, over five thousand of their fellow Americans and Afghans from Kabul. The last five minutes or so are quite powerful, especially as an indictment of the incompetence of how this evacuation has been handled by the Biden administration:

The Day Afghanistan Died

There's much in Mr. Biden's abrupt abandonment of the Afghans for which Americans might be deeply ashamed, but for novelist and veteran Brad Taylor writing at National Review the worst was June 16th. For him this was the day Afghanistan died. Taylor writes:

The Afghanistan Commandos are the only force in the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) that actually fight and win. They have done so since we began building them, first with the CIA, then with our own Special Forces. They were known as the only force that had no tribal affiliation and were the only force in the country that would fight for the state of Afghanistan regardless of the human terrain.

And they were really good. At one point, toward the end, they were conducting upwards of 90 percent of all combat actions inside the country — strained to the breaking point but succeeding with the support of the United States.

And then we pulled the support.

There was a nationwide plan for Commando use, which, put simply, was that they would insert and clear out Taliban influence, and then would be replaced with regular ANA components to keep the area secure and out of Taliban control. To this, they had been very successful. On that fateful day in June, everything changed.

The Commandos assaulted a village called Dawlat Abad and routed the Taliban. They called in the ANA to take over, and the ANA refused to enter, afraid of the Taliban.

The Taliban regrouped and surrounded the village, pounding it with mortar fire and conducting a siege, until the small contingent of Commandos had no recourse but to surrender. Calls for air support went unheeded, because America had pulled the maintenance capability of the very aircraft that would have responded. There was no help coming.

Twenty-two Commandos surrendered to the Taliban. All 22 were summarily executed — on video. One of the men killed was a soldier named Sohrab Azimi. He was the son of an ANA general, trained in the United States, and engaged to be married to a United States citizen. He could have done anything with his life, but he chose to lead the Commandos.

He was the best and brightest of Afghanistan, and he was killed on the street with a bullet to the back of his head because his pleas for air support went unheeded.

The news of June 16 didn’t even create a blip in the United States. Nobody cared, but make no mistake, the average soldier or civilian in the Afghanistan hierarchy did.

Sohrab Azimi was a national hero in Afghanistan. He was like a cross between Captain America and Saladin. I read the story and felt horrible at the loss. When I thought about it pragmatically, the only thought that entered my mind was, “This is the end.”

And that was two months before the fall of Kabul. Perception in insurgency has a sway all its own. It becomes reality, and when the action happened, I saw the reality.

There's much more worth reading in Taylor's column, but I'll just add this excerpt,

The signal sent by our lack of support was precisely the perception that the Taliban wanted: You are all going to die. And the people in positions of authority both low and high took that to heart. Afghanistan was done on that date.

Maybe pulling out of Afghanistan was the proper thing to do, though I'm not of that opinion, but in any case, the way the Biden administration did it, precipitously withdrawing air support from Afghans who were fighting bravely while trusting us for air cover, will shame America for as long as our nation lasts.

Baffling Misjudgment

One can hardly believe the breathtaking miscalculations and misjudgments of our political and military leadership that have led to the chaos, confusion and death at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan not to mention the unknown but probable horrors being inflicted on Afghans and perhaps Americans elsewhere in that country.

Almost every bit of news about how the Biden administration has handled the evacuation from Afghanistan defies belief. The average American is incredulous that our leaders, supposedly the best and the brightest, the ones who promised to restore America to preeminence in the world, would've made some of the baffling decisions they have.

One of the latest of these was the decision to actually hand over to the Taliban a list of the names of Afghans who should be allowed entry into the airport. The list, of course, was an implicit acknowledgement that those whose names appeared on it were in one way or another helpful to the United States.

With the list in hand it's a lot easier for the Taliban to know exactly who to hunt down and execute.

Politico offers some details of the Biden administration's bizarre, if inadvertent, complicity in the probable murders of dozens of people who assisted us in our effort to bring Afghanistan out of the seventh century:

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country.

It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.

One defense official quoted in the Politico report called the Biden administration's decision to share the names with the Taliban "appalling."

"Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list," said the official. "It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean."

Indeed. One wonders how many of those whose names were on that list are still alive today or will be alive a month from now. One also wonders how anyone could possibly have thought that furnishing the murderous barbarians - who made no secret of their intent to kill any and all Afghans who cooperated with the U.S. - with such a list was a good idea.

One also wonders how many people will be willing to risk allying themselves with the United States in any future conflict. We have scarcely shown ourselves to be particularly trustworthy partners, and it's obvious that throwing in with the U.S., at least under this administration, is a very risky business.

Reason or Violence

Nathan Beacom at The Federalist makes the case that our polity faces two alternatives: Either we resolve our political disputes through reasoned debate and discussion or we'll settle them by violence. The latter alternative has been the preferred option throughout history of totalitarians and utopians who rely on force to impose their will.

On the contrary, the "Open Society," to borrow the title of a famous book by philosopher Karl Popper, relies upon the use of argument, but, Beacom cautions, if Americans lose the virtues that make an open society possible, they will soon find themselves under the boot of a tyrant.

There are a number of virtues which characterize discourse in an open and free society, perhaps the chief of which, according to Beacom, is humility:

Humility teaches that we, just like our neighbors, are prone to error, mistakes in argument, and ignorance. Humility is a disposition to recognize that reasoning towards the truth is a difficult process fraught with potential dangers and confusions.

[Humility] is actually a perquisite to real argument, for argument is not a matter of beating an opponent, but of working with a partner to come to an agreement about the truth of things. It is clear that the virtue of humility allows us to recognize that we need others to balance us, challenge us, and fill the gaps in our knowledge. This is how America’s founding figures generally understood the principle of tolerance.

The failure to develop this virtue is an invitation to violence. Indeed, the corresponding vice of dialectical pride is what lies at the heart of a tyrannical ideology.

The ideologue is so certain of her rightness that disagreement can only seem to be the result of an evil will, rather than a mere difference of opinion held in good faith. Evil is not to be reasoned with, but mocked and destroyed, so the opponent is not to be reasoned with, but forced into line.

I would add that a second virtue is a willingness to refrain from criticizing the "other side" for behavior one excuses in one's own side, especially when the behavior of one's own side is at least as bad as that of the opposition.

If, for example, I were to criticize a political candidate of the opposing party for his lack of honesty or competence, but enthusiastically support candidates in my own party who are equally deficient in these virtues, then not only do I forfeit the right to be taken seriously, I shut down communication with those in the other party. I lose credibility, and no matter how good my arguments may be, few people will be inclined to listen to them.

I think we witnessed this almost daily in the last two presidential elections wherein Republican and Democrat partisans each heatedly accused the other's candidate of offenses for which their own candidate was perhaps just as guilty, but whose guilt was ignored or explained away. The result is that Americans are more alienated from each other today, and our nation is probably more divided today than at any time since the late 1960s or maybe even since the Civil War.

Beacom continues:

The many ways in which the discussions of our own day fail in this fundamental virtue of argumentation indicates a dangerous seed of violence. Calling names, imputing bad motives, mockery, and the anger and emotivism that characterizes many of our public arguments are a failure of humility and fellow-feeling. Those who lack this virtue in conversation also, when in power, commit violence against their opponents.

It is unclear whether social media has accelerated the atrophy of these virtues or merely made it more apparent, but inasmuch as the discussions we see on Twitter and Facebook are typified by precisely the vicious tendencies we seek to avoid, we have reason to be a bit concerned.

Today we see the growing prevalence of radical movements in politics. On the Right there is a pull towards populism, nationalism, and even fascist tendencies. On the Left there is a growing draw towards Marxism and related radical programs. These ideologies are both distinguished by a rejection of the fundamental dialectical virtues.

I'd quibble with Beacom that the pull toward fascism is really a characteristic, both historically and contemporaneously, of the left, but I certainly agree that when people give up on argument, when neither side is willing to listen to the other, first we just stop talking to each other and then we ultimately resort to force - either via the judiciary, the military, or the mob - to impose our will on the other.

At that point comes the death of the free and open society which dies by a kind of asphyxiation.

There's more in Beacom's essay. Check it out at the link.

Testing Darwinian Predictions

In order for a hypothesis to be considered a sound scientific theory it has to satisfy several criteria. Perhaps the most important of those is that scientists must be able to make testable predictions based upon the hypothesis. That is, if we assume the hypothesis is true, what sorts of consequences might we expect to occur and what sorts of experiments can we conduct to test whether those predictions hold true?

The central, foundational prediction of Darwinian evolution is that if all living things, especially those with complex genetic codes, evolved over billions of years from an original primordial cell with very simple genetic codes then the genetic material, DNA, must have a virtually unlimited capacity for variation. Otherwise, how did a simple genome in a primitive cell give rise to the highly complex genome in a mammalian cell?

Yet, according to geneticist and philosopher Kirk Durston in the 15 minute video below, every time this key prediction is put to the test, it's found to fail. Despite the ability of researchers to accelerate evolution in the lab and to simulate natural selection, every attempt to confirm this foundational prediction of Darwinism has hit a wall beyond which variation results in the death of the organism.

Durston asserts that such failures have made Neo-Darwinian evolution the most falsified theory in the history of science that still maintains a grip on the allegiance of a majority of scientists. He also explains why, in his opinion, this state of affairs exists.

A second prediction that follows if Darwinism is true is that the genetic information encoded in the cells of living organisms must have started at near-zero and increased until it reached the present state of affairs in which there are entire libraries of information contained in the nucleus of every cell in the body of every "advanced" organism. Durston points out, however, that this prediction is completely at odds with what we actually see happening in the world.

To the extent that there's variation within a taxon of organisms, it's due, as Michael Behe points out in his book Darwin Devolves, to a kind of devolution, a breaking of genes and an actual reduction of information.

Durston goes into more detail in the video, and all of what he says is easy for the non-biologist to understand. At the end he hints at several fascinating questions that arise from what has gone before:

If evolutionary variation is in fact due to a loss of information then doesn't that mean that originally there wasn't near-zero information present in the biosphere but rather a vast amount of information that has subsequently suffered degradation to one extent or another? And if there was a vast amount of information present at the very beginning of life, where did it come from and how did it get there?

These are intriguing questions for which naturalism has no plausible answer.

Discussing the Mind's Reality

An article at Mind Matters invites us to imagine a hypothetical conversation arising at a party between a materialist and a dualist.

Materialists believe that "mind" is merely a word we use to describe the functioning of the human brain. It's what the brain does. The mind is to the brain like digestion is to the stomach. Just as there's no organ or immaterial substance in us called "digestion" so, too, there's no immaterial substance called mind.

Dualists believe that, there is something about us that's immaterial and which works in concert with the body (brain) in order to produce the phenomena of our conscious experience.

The debate is important because what one believes about this "mind/body" problem affects much else that one believes.

For example, if one is a materialist it's much harder to maintain a belief in free will (and thus moral responsibility), life after death (since there's nothing to survive the death of the body), personal continuity of the self (since if we're only material substance and that substance is in constant flux, what is it that makes us the same self over time?), or God (since God is an immaterial mind).

If one is a dualist of one sort or another, it's much easier to accommodate each of these in one's overall belief system.

Here are just three of the materialist claims presented in the Mind Matters article along with brief responses to each.

Claim: The mind just emerged, slowly over eons, from the brain.

Response: The mind cannot just “emerge from” the brain if the two have no qualities in common — the one is immaterial, the other material.

Claim: Brain damage shows that the mind is really just the brain. Damage the brain and the mind goes … poof!

Response: That might be a good argument if things always happened that way. But a common treatment for severe epilepsy is to split the brain in half. The patient usually suffers only minor disabilities. Some people think and speak with only half a brain.

Modern neuroscience is also shedding light on the minds of people in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). The preferred new term is “disorders of consciousness.”

For example, in one study, “Remarkably, five patients were able to willfully modulate their brain activity, suggesting that, though unable to express any outward signs of consciousness at the bedside, they could understand and follow the researchers’ instructions.”

Generally speaking, people in a coma can hear and understand us.

Brain damage is a serious business, but it hardly shows that the mind is not real. Modern neuroscience enables us to identify many instances of humans struggling to express themselves using the available resources. That’s sometimes called neuroplasticity.

Claim: Don’t most professional neuroscientists say that the mind is just the brain?

Response: Many scientists believe that, not because of evidence, but because they are materialists. Thinking it through carefully, the idea doesn’t even make sense, as neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out: “How do we believe that there are no beliefs?

If eliminative materialism (a form of materialism that claims that conscious experience is an illusion) is true, then their own belief in eliminative materialism isn’t a belief. It’s a physical state, a certain concentration of neurochemicals that we (the uninitiated) foolishly call a belief. In fact, the mind’s reality is consistent with neuroscience.

It’s not popular with many neuroscientists but that's (because of philosophical or theological reasons, not scientific reasons).

Read the rest at Mind Matters where you'll also find links to support each of the assertions made above.

Mr. Biden's Competence

Dan McLaughlin at National Review has written what may be the definitive article on the history, character and qualification of Joe Biden to be president of the United States. Here's his lede:

Joe Biden has badly, visibly bungled America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has compounded the problem with his sluggish and dishonest public statements. This has gone so badly that even people and institutions that are normally sympathetic to Biden and his party have noticed.

American allies have been appalled, and vocal about it. What is slowly dawning on people is that Biden’s critics were right about him all along. Not since James Buchanan has America had a president who came so prepared by experience for the job, yet had so little clue how to do it.

McLaughlin offers much about Biden that everyone knew, or should've known, but which didn't seem to matter to a lot of voters last November. Biden wasn't Trump, and he didn't send mean tweets, and that's apparently all that mattered to many Americans.

I'll reluctantly skip over McLaughlin's treatment of Biden's history and character and excerpt from what he writes about Afghanistan:

American allies have been aghast at this performance, given that we acted unilaterally and high-handedly in ending a collective NATO operation, and did so with little consultation with them.

In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr. Biden on the phone.

The Washington Post, maybe the newspaper with the most important readership among the center-left Washington establishment, published a column on Thursday titled “Withdrawal from Afghanistan forces allies and adversaries to reconsider America’s global role”:

President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan has triggered a globe-spanning rethink of America’s role in the world, as European allies discuss their need to play a bigger part in security matters and Russia and China consider how to promote their interests in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. . . .

In the European Union, which held an emergency session of foreign ministers on Afghanistan on Tuesday, officials offered rare criticism of Washington for risking a flood of refugees to their borders and the return of a platform for terrorism in Central Asia. . . .

Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, Armin Laschet, on Tuesday called the withdrawal of forces “the greatest debacle that NATO has experienced since its foundation.”

Weren't we told during the campaign that Mr. Biden would heal the rift with NATO that President Trump had caused? In fact, as Mclaughlin states, it appears that Biden lied to our allies about his intentions:

President Joe Biden told key allies in June that he would maintain enough of a security presence in Afghanistan to ensure they could continue to operate in the capital following the main U.S. withdrawal, a vow made before the Taliban’s rapid final push across the country, according to a British diplomatic memo seen by Bloomberg.

Biden promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating.

Critics in the British Parliament were scathing on Biden’s “dishonour.” As the BBC summarized the reaction in the British press:

A number of papers also highlight anger at Joe Biden — with the Daily Telegraph headline: “Parliament holds the president in contempt”.

The BBC, hardly a redoubt of hawkish or right-wing sentiment, has been blasting away at Biden all week. North America editor Jon Sopel, for example, thundered:

The shambolic unravelling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan comes from a yet to be written textbook of “how to lose at everything”.

Warnings hadn’t been heeded, intelligence was clearly totally inadequate, planning was lamentable, execution woeful. . . .

Did no-one think that it might have been better to have ordered the withdrawal for the dead of winter when Taliban forces weren’t there, poised to fill the vacuum? . . .

After the bewildering events of the past few days, how exactly is America back?

Politico found reactions in Europe to be something on the order of scales falling from their eyes:

Until Sunday, Europe thought Joe Biden was an expert on foreign policy. Now, the American president’s decision to allow Afghanistan to collapse into the arms of the Taliban has European officials worried he has unwittingly accelerated what his predecessor Donald Trump started: the degradation of the Western alliance and everything it is supposed to stand for in the world.

Across Europe, officials have reacted with a mix of disbelief and a sense of betrayal. Even those who cheered Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing short of a mistake of historic magnitude.

“I say this with a heavy heart and with horror over what is happening, but the early withdrawal was a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” said Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee. “This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.”

Here's Clarissa Ward of CNN reporting from Kabul airport declaring Mr. Biden's withdrawal an utter failure of planning:

But at least he isn't Trump, and he doesn't even tweet at all. So he has that going for him.

You must read the rest of McLaughlin's essay at the link. It's an education that's well worth the ten minutes it takes.

Did Unguided Forces Produce Mitosis?

The Veratasium video below illustrates just a fraction of the complexity of the process of cell division, a process that's going on in our bodies billions of times each day. The video depicts conventional cell division (mitosis), but meiosis, the cell division that produces ova and sperm, is even more complex.

Now this marvelous process came about either as the result of wholly unguided, random events, like monkeys pecking at a typewriter and somehow by chance producing a copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or, like Shakespeare's Hamlet it came about as a result of the intentional design of an intelligent mind.

There's really no third option. Mitosis is the end result of either guided or unguided processes. If one opts for the first choice then the obvious question is who or what is the intelligent mind that guided its development.

If one opts for the second choice then the obvious question is where an unguided process, like biological evolution, for example, acquired the information necessary to input into the creation of such an amazing duplication mechanism.

Information, the kind that programs computers or programs cells to reproduce themselves, comes, as far as we have experience of it, only from minds. Physical forces can create complex arrangements, like the distribution of pebbles left by the tide on a beach, but information that specifies a function, that specifies instructions for an operation in a computer or a cell, an operation like mitosis, only comes from minds.

Anyway, here's the video:

Diversity Is Not a Strength

Among the platitudes frequently uttered by our friends on the left is the refrain that diversity is a strength, that diversity enriches our culture, that diversity is, or should be, a preeminent value and goal among the institutions of our society.

Well, diversity does indeed carry with it a number of benefits, but it's not in itself a strength, nor a source of strength. In fact, diversity is a centrifugal social force which flings all the various social elements away from each other. Diversity weakens rather than strengthens the body politic, and that weakness must somehow be compensated for in a diverse society or else the society will find itself being ripped apart.

Our differences can readily create polarizing barriers between social groups. When we don't speak the same language or share the same race, ethnicity, religion, history, or values we easily become isolated and alienated from each other, balkanized in our own communities.

We tend to associate with people with whom we share commonalities. We naturally prefer the company of those who are most like us, and we frequently feel uncomfortable in the presence of those who aren't. We tend to wall ourselves off from them.

Our diversity, so far from bonding us together, tends instead to disconnect us from each other.

It's those things we share in common that unite us, which is why sports teams all wear the same uniform and the military makes their recruits do everything they do during their training together. It's one way they build a sense of team.

In order to counteract that centrifugal force a diverse society like ours needs some sort of tether, a kind of gravitational force, to pull us together and preserve a sense of team.

If we truly want to develop a sense of togetherness, of family, its imperative that we stop fixating on our differences, that we reject identity politics, for example, and focus on the qualities we share. Every difference is like a moat that potentially separates us, but every commonality is a bridge that potentially joins us together.

Those who insist upon stressing our differences, who keep picking at the scabs of our history, who seek to build moats are, intentionally or unintentionally, encouraging us to despise each other and making us weaker as a nation. Our strength comes from building bridges, from seeking to genuinely love each other.

Christopher Bedford at The Federalist writes:

Our differences without unifying mores — an anthem, a language, a border, a history, a Constitution, a faith in God — make us weak, and this is deadly.

Roger Scruton, one of the finest philosophers of the past half-century, explained the danger succinctly in the stirring and controversial BBC documentary “Rivers of Blood:”

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbors, our countrymen: those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

There are many things that make us different, but let's stop obsessing on these, much less celebrating them and start celebrating the things we all share in common, especially those things we all share in common as Americans.

On the Occasion of the Death of Steven Weinberg

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer wrote a piece on Steven Weinberg for the Jerusalem Post on the occasion of Weinberg's death last month.

After summarizing Weinberg's considerable contributions to physics and our understanding of the universe, Meyer suggests that Weinberg's metaphysics somewhat less brilliant than his physics:

His death also marks the twilight of an increasingly dated view of the relationship between science and religion.... Weinberg wrote many popular books about physics in which he often asserted that scientific advance had undermined belief in God – and, consequently, any ultimate meaning for human existence.

The First Three Minutes, his most popular book published in 1977, famously concluded: “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

Nevertheless, many such religious skeptics have yet to recognize the most important reason to reject science-based atheistic polemics: The most relevant scientific discoveries of the last century simply do not support atheism or materialism. Instead, they point in a decidedly different direction.

In The First Three Minutes, Weinberg described in detail the conditions of the universe just after the Big Bang. But he never attempted to explain what caused the Big Bang itself.

Nor could he. If the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time had a beginning – as observational astronomy and theoretical physics have increasing suggested – it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of an adequate physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe.

After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy – no physics – would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.

Meyer goes on to discuss how such considerations have led a number of prominent scientists and thinkers to conclude that there must be a creator and that this creator must transcend space, time and matter.

Indeed, the only way to avoid that conclusion is to posit that the universe just popped into existence uncaused, a leap of faith and credulity in comparison to which belief in a transcendent creator seems almost axiomatic.

It's interesting that Weinberg's scientific beliefs were often strongly shaped by his aversion to theism. Meyer tells us that the inference to a creator who caused the Big Bang initially repelled Weinberg (and many others) from accepting the Big Bang, opting instead for the spatio-temporally infinite universe entailed by the Steady State theory.

Meyer states that before Weinberg eventually succumbed to the evidence for the Big Bang he embraced the Steady State theory because, in Weinberg's words, “the steady state is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis.”

This is a very unscientific reason for a scientist to embrace a theory. After all, if Young Earth Creationists are susceptible to criticism for sinning against science by allowing their view of Genesis to inform their science, why is it not also a sin against science for men like Weinberg to allow their view of Genesis to inform their science?

Weinberg is correct, though, about the implications of the Big Bang. Here's Meyer:

Fellow Nobel laureate and physicist Arno Penzias – whose discovery of the “cosmic background radiation” helped kindle Weinberg’s interest in Big Bang cosmology – noted the obvious connection between the Big Bang and the concept of divine creation. As he argued, “the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.”

Weinberg's own work led him to discover some of the astonishing fine-tuning of the universe, but once again he sought other explanations to account for this remarkable feature of the cosmos and to avoid the implication that it's the product of a Designer. Meyer again:

To explain such extreme “fine tuning” without recourse to a transcendent “fine-tuner,” Weinberg favored the postulation of a multiplicity of other universes, an idea he acknowledged as speculative. The “multiverse” concept portrays our universe as the outcome of a grand lottery in which some universe-generating mechanism spits out trillions and trillions of universes – so many that our universe with its improbable combination of life-conducive factors would eventually have to arise.

Yet, multiverse advocates overlook an obvious problem. All such proposals posit universe generating mechanisms that themselves require prior unexplained fine-tuning – thus, taking us back to the need for an ultimate fine-tuner.

Meyer concludes his column with this:

On his passing, Scientific American’s tribute to Weinberg described how scientifically literate people need to learn “to live in Steven Weinberg’s pointless universe.”

Yet Weinberg’s own research built upon, or helped to make, two key scientific discoveries – the universe had a beginning and has been finely-tuned from the beginning – that do not imply a purposeless cosmos.

Arguably, they point, instead, to a purposeful creator behind it all.

The Human Immune System

Aside perhaps from the brain there's no system in the human body as complex as the immune system.

The 10 minute animation below gives an overview of just some aspects of the system, but there's so much complexity involved in our immune responses that it would take more than 10 minutes to cover it all.

The immune system is an astonishing feature of our bodies, one that we largely take for granted and don't think much about until something in it goes awry. It's so amazingly complex and so dependent upon massive inputs of information that to believe it somehow arose through blind mechanistic processes requires a herculean exertion of one's will and a suspension of every ounce of skepticism.

In fact, the case could easily be made that it takes far more credulity, far more blind faith, to believe that the immune system is a fortuitous accident than to believe that it was designed by a mind.

After all, we have abundant experience of minds developing information-rich and complex systems, but we have no experience of such systems being produced by unguided processes and purposeless, goalless forces.

Between two possible competing causes, whichever one is the best explanation of a particular phenomenon is the cause we should accept.

In the case of the immune system the cause of this beautifully organized, highly complex, information-rich system is either a very long sequence of extremely improbable, unguided genetic "accidents," or it's a mind.

The former is something of which we have no experience. We have no experience of complex information systems being produced by mindless, atelic processes, but we experience minds producing such systems every day in our technological world.

Given that all of our experience makes mind the more rational explanation it seems that the only reason anyone could have for choosing unguided, natural processes as the cause of our immune systems is that they've a priori ruled out mind as an explanation, but that's an irrational, question-begging move.

It's like saying that the immune system must be the product of blind natural processes because the alternative, mind, simply cannot be the cause. But how do we know that it can't be the cause?

Here's the video:

Incomprehensible Precision

Ethan Siegel is a physicist who writes a regular column on science for Forbes magazine. In a recent column on the structure of the universe he mentioned that the expansion of the universe is proceeding at just the right rate to permit a universe that can give rise to life:

If the expansion rate is too small for the stuff within it, the Universe rapidly recollapses. If the expansion rate is too large for the stuff within it, the Universe rapidly dilutes so that no two particles will ever find one another.

Only if the Universe is “just right,” and I hope you’re saying “just right” the way you would when you tell the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, can the Universe expand, cool, form complex entities, and persist with interesting structures within it for billions of years.

If our Universe, at the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, were just a tiny bit denser or just a tiny bit less dense, or conversely expanded just a tiny bit more or less quickly, our own existence would have been a physical impossibility.

A universe with lower mass density would not form stars and planets. It's expansion would be so rapid that gravity would not be able to coalesce dust into stars.

If the density of matter at the beginning of the universe's existence were the tiniest bit greater the increase in gravity would cause all stars to be much larger than the Sun. Such stars emit very high intensity radiation and are subject to rapid changes in temperature and luminosity, characteristics which would render any planets orbiting them unsuitable for life.

Slightly more mass in the early universe would've slowed the expansion such that all stars would become black holes and neutron stars. The density near the surface of such bodies would exceed five billion tons per teaspoonful. Atoms, molecules and life would all have been impossible.

If the density of the early universe were not almost exactly what it is we would not have either the right amounts or the right diversity of elements, and the expansion rate of the universe would've been either too great or too small.

So how finely calibrated must the mass density have been in the early stages of the universe's development to produce a life-permitting universe? Physicists have calculated the value to have been one part in 10^60.

This is a tolerance so incomprehensibly precise that according to astronomer Hugh Ross it's like an almost invisible fleck of paint on an aircraft carrier. If we compare this ship to the universe in its earliest moments, removing the fleck or adding one like it would make the carrier uninhabitable.

Or, to use a different analogy, the universe's mass had to be so precise at the beginning that if it deviated by the mass of a single dime it never would've been able to support life.

Moreover, as mentioned above, the rate at which the universe expands is also fine-tuned to a value of no less than 1 part in 10^90 and perhaps as high as 1 part in 10^120. To get an idea of the magnitude of just the lower of those two values, in the entire universe - 200 billion galaxies each with a 100 billion stars plus planets, dust, etc. - there are "only" 10^80 atoms.

The chances of a blindfolded person selecting by chance a specially-marked atom from anywhere in the universe are 10 billion times better than a universe just happening to chance upon the expansion rate necessary for living things to exist in it.

Imagine some sort of meter with a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion calibrations. Turning a knob points a dial to precisely one of them, but if the dial was off by just one calibration the meter wouldn't work at all. That's roughly analogous to the fine-tuning of both the mass density and the expansion rate of the universe.

And these are just two of the dozens of finely-tuned constants, forces and parameters that must be set at these exquisitely precise values in order for life to be possible in our universe.

In the words of the the brilliant physicist Fred Hoyle, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."

If that's so, the next question is what or who could that superintellect possibly be?

Smart Power

Jim Geraghty has an excellent column at National Review on the hubris of Democrat administrations of the last thirty years and their utter failure to understand the world as it is.

You really should click on the link and read the whole thing, but in case you don't here are a few excerpts:

As the U.S. mission in Afghanistan ends in disaster and the Taliban returns to rule with wanton and widespread cruelty again, it is time to once and for all cast away the notion that the Democrats are the party of “smart power” abroad.

Every four years, a Democratic presidential candidate pops up and reminds us that he — or, one cycle, she — represents the smart party when it comes to foreign policy. These Democrats boast that they’re not isolationist, like Donald Trump, and they’re not unilateralist cowboys, like George W. Bush. They, and their top advisers, assure us that they are right, tough, smart, nuanced, and sophisticated.

And every four years, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment — think-tank wonks, retired diplomats, columnists and authors, certain retired generals — almost uniformly swoons at these Democratic presidential candidates’ keen grasp of a complicated and dangerous world. And these top Democrats are not shy about telling us how they understand the world better than anyone else does.

Sadly, too many Americans trust them.

"But something odd happens," Geraghty writes, "whenever the self-identified 'smart' Democratic foreign-policy thinkers come to power. Somehow, randomly — through no fault of their own, they insist — disaster strikes."

As its eight years came to a close, the Clinton administration assured Americans that it had “defined a new security agenda that addresses contemporary threats.” There was no mention of that once-obscure extremist who steadily and gradually expanded his power until he commanded a worldwide army of Islamist terrorists, probing for holes and weak spots in America’s open society — detonating truck bombs in New York City, leveling embassies, blowing up U.S. Navy ships.

Clinton’s decision-making on Osama bin Laden was so sterling that Sandy Berger was left stuffing official documents in his socks at the archives.

In Syria, the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers declared a foreign-policy “red line” about the use of chemical weapons . . . and then stood and watched as Assad gassed his own people. The Syrian civil war killed so many people that the world couldn’t get a reliable estimate, and waves of refugees poured into Europe, destabilizing European politics.

Bashar al-Assad said he got rid of his chemical weapons, and the Obama team chose to believe him.

The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers offered Russia a “reset,” convinced that the Putin regime would come around now that the dreaded cowboy unilateralists were gone. Nearly two terms later, Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, was left appealing to the consciences of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

“Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you? Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin?” The answer is no, and that answer was clear long before 2016.

The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers insisted they had safely withdrawn from Iraq, and dismissed this group called ISIS as just the “jayvee team,” and then watched as the “jayvee team” created the Islamic State in the empty vacuum and set about committing genocide and launching and inspiring terrorist attacks all around the world.

The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers patted themselves on the back for “leading from behind” in Libya and then watched as American diplomats and security personnel got killed while begging for assistance in Benghazi. The U.S. has not had a significant diplomatic presence in Libya since 2014.

Russia rolled into Crimea, but the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers didn’t really do much. Russian forces shot down a civilian passenger airliner over Ukraine, but the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers dithered until the world’s anger faded. China repeatedly violated its treaty agreements, but the Obama administration believed Chinese promises to honor its commitments in the future.

Iran seized ten U.S. sailors in international waters, paraded images of their capture on state-run television, and the Obama administration thanked the regime for releasing them.

Iran built secret nuclear facilities, but the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers didn’t really do much. The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers pledged that the U.S. would never accept North Korea as a nuclear state . . . after North Korea tested nuclear weapons. The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers seem to think that the primary obstacle to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is that past American presidents just haven’t tried hard enough.

Every four years, the message is the same: Trust us, we’re the ones who know what we’re doing.

And yet, the oddest thing happens — the Democratic foreign-policy establishment gets in power, and a short while later, so many things go wrong.

One month ago, the president of the United States stood before this country and assured Americans that, “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.” “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Of course, all of what Mr. Biden assured us would not happen has happened over the last few days, and as if to underscore Geraghty's point Nancy Pelosi declared that the Taliban better be careful about how they treat women because world opinion will censure them if they're not. What planet is she living on? Does she really think that these brutes care about what a bunch of effete Westerners say about them at their soirees?

And the same people who have brought us this profoundly shameful debacle in Afghanistan now want us to trust them when they tell us that passing a $4 trillion spending bill will be great for the country. No thanks.

The President's Self-Inflicted Crises

Mr. Biden's average approval rating is currently hovering at 50% and trending downward. There are probably a number of reasons for the decline - rising inflation, the ambiguous messages from the administration about Covid, rising rates of violent crime, and despite the president's attempt to talk tough, the perception that he's really just a malleable figurehead for the far-left of his party.

A piece at Hot Air suggests that there are at least three crises responsible for his declining approval which the Biden administration has brought upon itself through it's own incomprehensible incompetence: Immigration, Afghanistan, and inflation. To these might be added a few more: a resurgent pandemic (though it's not a self-inflicted crisis), and the ongoing soap opera that is the Hunter Biden saga.

Anyway, at least two of the foregoing crises appear at this point to be complete disasters. The first of these is the president's immigration policy, or rather the lack thereof.

From the link:

The crisis on our southern border began shortly after President Biden took office. President Trump had managed to stem the flow of migrants by building a border wall, increasing support for Border Patrol, and getting Mexico to use its military to block migrants from traveling north.

Most importantly, Mr. Trump sent a clear message that the days of open borders were over.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris struck a much different tone, which has paved the way for the present crisis.

Before taking office, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris signaled their intent to stop deportations. Once in office, President Biden began rolling back immigration enforcement and proposed a plan to legalize millions of illegal residents without first funding basic border security priorities.

These actions have sent a clear message of openness to migrants, who are now crossing the border at a rate of 6,000 per day.

Illegal border crossings have increased every month under President Biden. In June, Border Patrol recorded 178,000 border arrests – a 571 percent jump from June 2020. In July, officers in the Rio Grande Valley arrested 20,000 border crossers in a single week – the most ever recorded. Border arrests have now already reached their highest since 2000 and are on track to reach 1.8 million this year.

And these arrests are just a partial snapshot of the situation, as many others are crossing our borders undetected.

This chaotic situation could get even worse because of a recent decision by the Mexican government. This past week, Mexico announced it will no longer take back non-Mexican migrant families who have been caught by U.S. border agents.

This is a major shift from last year, when President Trump struck a deal with Mexico to have asylum seekers “remain in Mexico” while their applications were being processed. President Biden has clearly failed to exert the pressure needed to obtain Mexico’s help in solving the border crisis.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently admitted that the situation is unsustainable:

“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said Thursday, according to the audio obtained by Fox News’ Bill Melugin through a Border Patrol source. “We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can't continue and our system isn’t built for it.”

Entry into the U.S. from Canada is still closed (until Aug. 21st), but hundreds of thousands are waltzing across our border with Mexico and being transported all around the country at taxpayer expense with no apparent concern for Covid infections. Why?

As Bryan Preston notes, either President Biden is surprised by this massive influx of immigrants or he's not. If he is surprised he's incompetent because everyone else saw this coming. If he's not surprised then he's criminally negligent and grossly irresponsible.

If Biden's immigration non-policy can be fairly called a disaster, there are no words to describe the moral recklessness and horrific consequences of his decision to abandon millions of Afghans to the meager mercies of the Taliban.

On July 8th, Mr. Biden delivered himself of this piece of quasi-prescient prose: "The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely." Well, tragically, that's exactly what the Taliban are doing as you read this:

Thousands of Afghans have fled their homes amid fears the Taliban will again impose a brutal, repressive government, all but eliminating women’s rights and conducting public amputations, stonings and executions.

The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months [Update: The Taliban entered Kabul yesterday].

The Afghan government may eventually be forced to pull back to defend the capital and just a few other cities in the coming days if the Taliban keep up their momentum. [Update: Afghanistan's president Ashraf Ghani has fled the country]

The onslaught represents a stunning collapse of Afghan forces and renews questions about where the over $830 billion spent by the U.S. Defense Department on fighting, training those troops, and reconstruction efforts went — especially as Taliban fighters ride on American-made Humvees and pickup trucks with M-16s slung across their shoulders.

Meanwhile, President Biden has gone on vacation in Delaware, and Afghans allied with the U.S. have been relegated to begging acquaintances here to try to find them and their relatives safe passage out of the country before they fall into the Taliban’s hands and are executed.

It's probably too late for many of them to escape, and it's hard to imagine the fear these people must be experiencing not only for themselves but for their loved ones. Yet Mr. Biden told us the other day that he has "no regrets."

Thousands of Afghans who helped us will be, or are being, tortured and slaughtered by the Taliban. Young girls will once again be consigned to the burka, forbidden to go to school and forced to "marry" Taliban fighters.

It didn't have to be this way. There was no good reason for Mr. Biden's precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. had suffered no combat casualties in that country in the last year and a half, and it's been noted that American soldiers were safer in Afghanistan in 2021 than are policemen in many major cities in the U.S.

Nor is the fact that we've been there for two decades by itself a compelling reason to have left. We've been in Japan, Germany and South Korea since WWII and show no signs of leaving any of those countries.

As with immigration, either President Biden is surprised by the collapse of the Afghan military or he's not. If he's surprised he's incompetent because many others saw this coming.

If he's not surprised, if he knew what would happen when he announced our immediate withdrawal, then he's morally culpable of a horrific betrayal, and the blood of all those Afghans we've abandoned will stain his legacy for the rest of history.

Unyielding Despair

In the first week of the upcoming semester my classes will be talking about the view of life called existentialism, so I thought it might not be out of place to offer a little mood music here on VP to perhaps nudge us toward reflection upon what's sometimes referred to as our "existential predicament."

The question this song by the group Kansas raises is, if it's true that all we are is dust in the wind what meaning or significance is there to our lives?

A character in a novel (The Nausea) by French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre is sitting in a restaurant ruminating on the pointlessness of human existence. The man reflects, "I was thinking ... that here we are eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing."

Sartre also claims that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Pretty depressing, but that's the existential view in a nutshell.

Of course, one need not be an existentialist to think life is an absurd exercise in meaninglessness. All one need believe is that our existence ends with our death.

The psychologist Sigmund Freud wrote that "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence."

The filmmaker Ingmar Bergman adds that, “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”

And the great philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer perceived the problem more clearly than most when he noted that, "Unless the point of life is to suffer, there is no point."

He adds this lamentably droll observation: "Life is bad today, tomorrow will be worse, until we die," and, "Life is a task, the task of staying alive and staving off boredom." The world, for Schopenhauer, is a "penal colony" in which "happiness is measured by the absence of suffering."

Schopenhauer titled the book from which these quotes are taken, Studies in Pessimism. It's not hard to see why.

Alex Rosenberg, the philosophy department chair at Duke University, frames the problem of our human predicament succinctly when he writes: "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."

Bertrand Russell put the same miserable thought this way:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

What these thinkers are urging us to recognize is that death annihilates all, it's the big eraser, obliterating everything we do and rendering our existence on the planet a pointless exercise in absurdity.

They urge upon us a realistic view against those who agree on the one hand that death is the end of our existence but on the other that there can nevertheless be some purpose to our lives.

Maybe so, but the purpose is a bit like that of a prisoner who insists on making his bed and brushing his teeth before accompanying the executioner to the scaffold.

At least that's how the existentialist, and many others who reject the belief that human beings survive the death of their material bodies, see this life, and they're doubtless correct if indeed death really is a personal annihilation. Unless what we do matters forever it's hard to see how it can really matter at all.

Maybe, though, what we do in this life does matter forever. Maybe our physical death is not the end of our existence. If so, that changes everything.

What Exactly Is Matter?

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe - including our bodies, our brains, our thoughts, our sensations - all of it is reducible in principle to material "stuff." There's no mental substance, no mind, just brains and the functions the brain performs. But if that's so, then what is the material stuff everything is made of? What, exactly, is matter?

Physicists, many of whom are materialists, tell us that matter is made up of particles which are themselves simply a "wave function," but then what's a wave function? What's it made of? No one seems to have an answer.

This video takes the viewer down to the smallest bits of matter, but when we ask what these smallest bits are comprised of the only reply from physicists is a shrug of the shoulders.

At some point matter just seems to dissolve into energy, forces, and fields which are themselves inscrutable. They can be measured, but if we ask what it is, precisely, that we're measuring we just get another shrug for an answer. The fundamental nature of matter is a riddle:

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor helps us understand the provenience of the idea that everything is made of matter. He writes:

The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.

Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia [our sensory experience of, for instance, pain or color] and intentionality [the fact that something like ink on paper can be about something, can have meaning], were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?

In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right. Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.

Modern materialists have discarded Descartes’ mental substance, and have tried to explain nature and consciousness via matter alone. Modern materialists are Descartes’ descendants: although they have discarded Cartesian dualism, they retain Cartesian materialism. To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter. Hence the bizarre cornucopia of materialist theories of mind, such as philosophical behaviorism, identity theory, computer functionalism, and eliminative materialism.

Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:

How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?

The nature of matter is a profound mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.

Naturalism holds that there are no supernatural entities. If there were supernatural entities they'd be immaterial, thus naturalism cannot allow something like an immaterial mind into its ontology because that would lead to the conclusion that humans, at least, have souls. And once souls are allowed to exist then the naturalist fears he will have stepped onto a slippery slope leading to an affirmation of the existence of God and other things supernatural.

In other words, naturalism is heavily reliant for support upon materialism. Without it naturalism loses much of its ability to persuade.

Nevertheless, there's no reason not to believe that the fundamental stuff of the universe isn't material at all but rather mental. Indeed, this is the direction in which modern physics has been moving since the early years of the twentieth century.

Perhaps, so far from mind arising from matter, our perception of matter actually is a product of mind.

Just as Copernicus sparked a revolution in science by getting us to look at the solar system from a different perspective - a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective - looking at the world from the perspective of mental substance rather than material substance could spark an analogous revolution not only in science but also in metaphysics.

Code Red for Humanity!

It's a core principle of left-wing movements that tend toward totalitarianism, as most do, to create a perpetual atmosphere of crisis. If the movement is out of power, the crisis destabilizes the government in power, and if the movement itself controls the government crises afford ample opportunities to consolidate and expand their control.

Both the Covid pandemic and climate change have perhaps been hyped into crises for this very reason.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released its latest climate report, and the analysis in many quarters has been apocalyptic.

Bjorn Lomborg, author most recently of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, has a piece at The New York Post in which he derides the attempt to create a sense of crisis from a report that actually offers pretty meager grounds for it. He writes that,

[T]he always-breathless Guardian literally summarized this scientific report as finding mankind “guilty as hell” of “climate crimes of humanity.” (Needless to say, the report never says any such things.)

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the findings a “code red for humanity,” saying we can only avert catastrophe by acting in the next couple of months. Of course, the United Nations has a long history of claiming catastrophe is right around the corner:

The first UN environment director claimed half a century ago that we had just 10 years left, and the then-head of the IPCC insisted in 2007 that we had just five years left.

In contrast to the hyperventilating media, the report is actually serious and sensible (and very, very long). It doesn’t surprise, since it is a summary of already-published studies, yet it reconfirms that global warming indeed is real and a problem.

The earth is indeed gradually warming and according to an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal by theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, author of the 2021 book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, the IPCC report predicts that the mean global temperature will be about 1.5 degrees higher in 2100 than it is today, an increase that will have minimal economic impact.

Koonin also notes that the IPCC report was less balanced than it might've been. For example,

The summary of the most recent U.S. government climate report...said heat waves across the U.S. have become more frequent since 1960, but neglected to mention that the body of the report shows they are no more common today than they were in 1900.

The Summary for Policy Makers section [of the report] says the rate of global sea-level rise has been increasing over the past 50 years. It doesn’t mention that it was increasing almost as rapidly 90 years ago before decreasing strongly for 40 years.

Lomborg culls this interesting nugget from the report:

Since the heat dome in June, there has been a lot of writing about more heat deaths. And the IPCC confirms that climate change indeed has increased heatwaves.

However, the report equally firmly, if virtually unacknowledged, tells us that global warming means “the frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased.”

This matters because globally, many more people die from cold than from heat. A new study in the highly respected journal Lancet shows that about half a million people die from heat per year, but 4.5 million people die from cold.

As temperatures have increased over the past two decades, that has caused an extra 116,000 heat deaths each year. This, of course, fits the narrative and is what we have heard over and over again. But it turns out that because global warming has also reduced cold waves, we now see 283,000 fewer cold deaths.

Another thing we haven't heard much from our media about is that warmer winters mean less heating fuel being burned and thus less CO2 being spewed into the atmosphere.

Anyway, here are a couple of other points from Lomborg's column:

Likewise, we have heard a lot about flooding in Germany and elsewhere being caused by climate change. But the new UN report tells us it has “low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale” — and low confidence in attributing “changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events.”

The report tells us that the evidence isn’t there to say floods are caused or driven by climate change. You don’t hear this, but so far climate change saves 166,000 lives each year.

It also mentions climate upsides like the fact that more CO₂ in the atmosphere has acted as a fertilizer and created a profound global greening of the planet. One NASA study found that over a period of 35 years, climate change has added an area of green equivalent to twice the size of the continental United States.

But don’t expect to read about this in any of the breathless articles on climate impact.

Lomborg goes on to argue that the calamity scenarios always assume that human beings will be frozen in place in the face of impending disaster and unable or unwilling to adapt to the changing conditions, but this, of course, is nonsense.

I recall that in the 1970s we were told that we were reaching "peak oil" and that the supply was running out. Then we developed fracking technology, and the "crisis" passed.

We were told that world population would far outstrip food supply by the 1990s and that we'd be overwhelmed with famine or plague or both, but the population "bomb" never materialized, and the "crisis" passed.

We were told that the need for paper would soon outstrip supply, making it extremely costly, but then computers came along, followed by the internet, the need for paper dropped precipitously, and the "crisis" passed.

We were told, too, that photographic film would become prohibitively expensive because it used silver which was becoming increasingly scarce. Then people developed digital photography which doesn't use film, and the crisis passed.

With climate change we're told that melting of the polar ice will be disastrous but aside from requiring humans to cope with rising sea levels it's hard to see why. Would the net effect of melting Greenland's ice be a detriment or a benefit? Certainly it would open a vast expanse of territory for human habitation and resource exploitation.

Is that not a good thing? Has anyone studied this?

Instead of playing Chicken Little over climate change perhaps we should first consider all the consequences, or at least those we can reasonably foresee, and stop making crises out of things that aren't a crisis.

After all, this world presents us with enough genuine worries without people inventing more.

Lomborg closes his article with this:

[T]he scare stories on climate impacts are vastly overblown and not supported by this new climate report. One of the clearest ways to see this is through climate economics. Because of climate change, the average person worldwide will be “only” 436 percent as well off in 2100 as they are now, instead of 450 percent.

I think our descendants can live with that.

Do We Have a Duty to the Unvaccinated?

We're once again being confronted with "a crisis." The Delta variant of Covid is more contagious than the original and this is inducing a panic in some quarters.

Some media precincts are excited about "breakthrough" cases in which a fully vaccinated individual nevertheless comes down with the disease. Demands for mask mandates, even for children, and talk of lockdowns are being bandied about because we must "do something" to "save lives."

It should be noted that people who contract the Delta variant don't get any sicker and are no more likely to die than if they contracted the original Covid, but, even so, the impression is given that this form of the virus is much more virulent than the form that afflicted the world in 2020.

It is more contagious, though, and that has stoked fears that even vaccinated people are at risk and need to wear masks, most of which offer only marginal protection, just like unvaccinated people. This is nonsense as an ABC News analysis of the CDC data makes clear:

More than 99.99% of people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 have not had a breakthrough case resulting in hospitalization or death, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC reported 6,587 Covid-19 breakthrough cases as of July 26, including 6,239 hospitalizations and 1,263 deaths. At that time, more than 163 million people in the United States were fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

Divide those severe breakthrough cases by the total fully vaccinated population for the result: less than 0.004% of fully vaccinated people had a breakthrough case that led to hospitalization and less than 0.001% of fully vaccinated people died from a breakthrough Covid-19 case.

In other words, a vaccinated individual has less chance of being hospitalized due to Covid than they have of being struck by lightning (.0065%).

Moreover most of the breakthrough cases -- about 74% -- occurred among adults 65 or older. So, if you're not in that age group and are fully vaccinated your chances of getting the disease are even lower.

Here's a graphic posted on VP last week that illustrates the chances of a fully vaccinated individual suffering a breakthrough case. The graphic uses slightly different numbers but their significance is the same as those used in the ABC report:

Nevertheless, CDC leaders have updated the agency's mask guidance, recommending that fully vaccinated people also wear masks indoors when in areas with "substantial" and "high" Covid-19 transmission to prevent further spread of the Delta variant. But why?

Why should people who have chosen to get vaccinated who have little risk of getting seriously ill, endure the inconvenience of wearing an all but useless mask to "protect" those who've chosen not to get vaccinated.

If someone chooses not to be vaccinated that's their choice (Isn't it the left which insists, "My body, my choice"?), but why should everyone else be obliged to accommodate them and protect them from the possible consequences?

Why do some people insist on treating their fellow citizens like children?

What's the Point?

When one side in an argument deploys facts and the other chooses to employ rhetorical irrelevancies that score points with an unthinking audience but which do not address the other side's facts, we can be sure that the discussion is headed nowhere.

This is one reason why people today often cannot get anywhere discussing politics and/or religion, and why such discussions often degenerate into mindless name-calling and insults. Too many people think that whoever unleashes the most clever zingers against his adversary has won the argument.

This is very unfortunate for any society that seeks to embrace truth and avoid superstition, prejudice and bigotry. An argument ideally should be a discussion between two people, or two groups of people, both of which want to arrive at the truth.

When one side is interested only in obfuscation or scoring zingers, truth is not their goal and engaging in an exchange and defense of ideas with that person or persons is pointless.

Bill Maher, a man of the left, had on his show recently a conservative, Ben Shapiro, and a liberal, Malcolm Nance to discuss Critical Race Theory (CRT) and, presumably, whether CRT should be taught, or is being taught in schools.

Shapiro started off the segment with a succinct and lucid description of CRT, summarizing it in less than two minutes. Malcolm Nance responded by promptly changing the subject, confusing the issue by accusing those who oppose having CRT taught in schools of really saying they don't want history taught in schools.

This is, of course, disingenuous. If anything, conservatives like Shapiro want more history taught in schools. Many Americans are scandalously ignorant of anything that happened in their country or the world the day before yesterday, and that ignorance has pernicious consequences.

As Thomas Jefferson once said, "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."

What conservatives don't want taught, as Maher suggests at the end of the segment, is that all whites and only whites are racist, that every disparity between blacks and other races is proof of institutional racism, that whites qua whites enjoy a privilege denied to others, that objective truth, facts, reason and logic are oppressive tools of white supremacy, and that people living today have a responsibility for what people of their same race may have done two centuries ago.

The nine minute video of this segment of Maher's show is instructive in illustrating how an argument should not be conducted and how fruitless it is to debate someone whose main goal is looking clever rather than mounting a reasonable defense of his position.

Biological Extravagance

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival.

Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't. But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

An essay at Evolution News discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain.

Here's what the article says about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid.

The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients. The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey.

The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volkenburgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival. The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food.

The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's the video mentioned above:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

Regarding the prodigious memory capabilities of the human brain - ten times what neuroscientists had previously estimated and in the same ballpark as the Worldwide Web (!) - one wonders what need is there for such extravagance? How and why would such enormous capacity evolve by chance?

Evolution News comments:

A petabyte is 1015 bytes, or a thousand terabytes — and that’s a conservative estimate. An evolutionist might be able to defend enough memory in a hominid brain to remember dangers from predators and where to find food or a mate, but why this superabundance of capacity?

It’s also efficiently stored, searchable, and quickly accessible. It is so good, in fact, that computer engineers want to imitate its “design principle” to reach that kind of incredible power and energy efficiency.

I'm reminded of a quip by philosopher Alvin Plantinga who was discussing the brain's superfluous ability to do higher math and the utter implausibility of such an ability being explained by a process that merely suits human brains for reproductive success.

Plantinga observed dryly that, after all, it's only the rare graduate student whose prospects for reproductive success are enhanced by his ability to solve differential equations.

Liberal Fascism (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post, borrowing from Jonah Goldberg's 2007 book Liberal Fascism, addressed the relationship between progressivism and fascism, and sought to show that fascism is in fact an ideology of the left, and not, as is so often alleged nowadays, a species of extreme conservatism.

This post will try to bolster that case by going into a bit more detail about the origins and nature of fascism.

Fascism is a difficult concept to define and even scholars disagree on what it is. Nazi fascism under Hitler, for example, was much different than Italian fascism under Mussolini.

The Nazis were racist anti-semites. The Italians were not. In fact, Jews were relatively safe in both Spain and Italy until 1943 when the Germans took over the government of Italy. They were much safer in those fascist states than they were under the liberal regimes in France and the Netherlands.

Goldberg states that, "Before Hitler ... it never occurred to anyone that fascism had anything to do with anti-semitism."

What both forms of fascism shared in common, however, was a totalitarianism that was nationalistic, secularist, militaristic, and socialist. Mussolini began his political life as a radical socialist and the Nazi party was formally called the National Socialist party.

Both forms of fascism were strongly revolutionary, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian. Indeed, Mussolini was a firm atheist who despised the Catholic church and who declared Christianity to be incompatible with socialism.

Both forms of fascism suppressed free speech (as our contemporary progressive social media platforms are doing); both were eager to force people to be healthy for their own good (as many progressives are urging our government to do with mask mandates); and both feed on crises because crises present opportunities for government control and national unity.

Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.

It was the progressive Rahm Emanuel, advisor to President Obama, who asserted that one should never let a crisis go to waste, and the perpetuation by the left of the sense of crisis over the current pandemic is a good example of how a crisis affords ample opportunities for the expansion of government power.

The differences between fascism and the communism usually associated with the left were minimal. Perhaps the biggest difference was that communists believed that the strongest bond between workers, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, was their struggle against the propertied classes. Communism was, and is, an internationalist movement.

Fascists recognized that this was nonsense. What bonded people together, they saw, was not class but ethnicity and nation, blood and soil. Other than that the two ideologies were fraternal twins.

When Mussolini founded his fascist party in 1919 their platform consisted of a number of proposals among which were the following:

• Lowering the voting age to eighteen
• Ending the draft
• Repealing titles of nobility
• A minimum wage
• Establishing rigidly secular schools
• A large progressive tax on capital that would amount to a partial expropriation of all riches
• The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations, i.e. repealing the church's tax-exempt status
• The nationalization of all arms and explosives industries

There's nothing in that list that wouldn't warm the heart of an old socialist warhorse like Bernie Sanders or a young one like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

As for the version of fascism embraced by the Nazis, Goldberg says this:

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anti-capitalist rhetoric that they indisputably believed.... Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other times and places: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, and emphasis on the organic and holistic - including environmentalism, health food, and exercise - and, most of all, the need to "transcend" notions of class.

For these reasons Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left because first and foremost he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right the party of the status quo. On this score Hitler was in no sense, way, shape, or form a man of the right. There are few things he believed more totally than that he was a revolutionary.

To somehow seek to conflate Hitler in particular and fascism in general with contemporary American conservatism, as many have tried to do ever since the 1950s, is historical idiocy. "American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution," Goldberg writes, "... whereas Hitler despised both of them."

In that his fascism, and that of Mussolini, has much more in common with today's left than with the modern right.