Where's the Outrage?

William Trachman makes a trenchant observation at The Federalist. He notes that in the wake of new voter integrity laws promulgated this year in both Georgia and Texas there was much virtue preening by our corporate CEOs and outrage from the left over what they characterized as even worse, in the words of President Biden, than the historical racial segregation in the deep South, commonly referred to as Jim Crow.

Trachman notes that,

Democrats and leaders of global corporations ... struck back, even convincing Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred to take away the All-Star game from Atlanta. Biden unequivocally supported moving the game out of Georgia. The move sadly cost businesses in Atlanta millions of dollars in revenue. For Major League Baseball, though, that price wasn’t too high to pay in order to make their point.

When Georgia passed its voter reforms last March failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams even called for a boycott of her state, and there was a great deal of indignation expressed by our corporate big wigs:

Corporations based in Atlanta, like Delta, Coca-Cola, and ViacomCBS, publicly opposed the bill. A large virtual meeting was attended by more than 100 corporate CEOs, some of whom were coincidentally in Georgia for the Masters golf tournament which carried on as usual.

Evidently, the CEOs weren't going to allow something like moral punctilio to interfere with their golf outing.

Similarly, in Texas, Democrat state legislators fled the state to try to stop the state’s voting bill; the method temporarily succeeded by depriving the legislature of a quorum.

The legislators instead fled to Washington, D.C., by private jet to lobby for the passage of sweeping federalization of voting laws — embodied in a bill commonly referred to as H.R.1 — which would have required every Democratic senator to vote to end the filibuster. They failed.

But now, as it happens, both Texas and Georgia have teams playing in the World Series and it seems someone must've pulled the plug on the outrage machine. There are no calls to boycott the series or to have the games played elsewhere. No corporate CEOs are threatening to move their headquarters to other states. Delta isn't blustering about cancelling flights to Houston or Atlanta.

It's as if all of the indignation over the allegedly atrocious voter integrity laws simply evaporated like a fad that consumes the popular interest for a moment and then suddenly disappears.

Trachman raises the relevant questions:

And where does that leave President Biden and all the other critics of Georgia and Texas? If the state-based voter integrity laws are truly worse than racial segregation ... it hardly makes sense for critics to stay silent as these teams host the World Series. Why should a boycott stop at the All-Star game, for instance, if the dire warnings of voter suppression and racial discrimination were accurate?

The question is whether Biden, Abrams, and Manfred have the courage of their convictions. Why didn’t they call for the World Series to be moved to a location outside of either Georgia or Texas?

Why hasn’t Manfred boycotted the games? Instead, he’s been attending them in person.

The answer, of course, is that they knew all along that their dire warnings were mere partisan rhetoric.

"Partisan rhetoric," we may suppose, is intended by Trachman as a euphemism for contemptible dishonesty.

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. II)

Yesterday I laid out an argument to the effect that one is not rational to believe that naturalism, i.e. atheism, is true and finished with some quotes, mostly from naturalists themselves, acknowledging that, in the words of J.B.S. Haldane, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

Nor, if one's mental processes are in fact the result solely of an evolutionary process that selects for survival rather than truth, does one have epistemic justification for believing that naturalism is true.

So how does the naturalist get around this apparent difficulty? Philosopher Jay Richards summarizes one common response:

If [the Darwinian natural selection] story is roughly correct, then there would seem to be a survival advantage in forming true beliefs. Surely our ancestors would have gotten on in the world much better if they came to believe that, say, a saber-tooth tiger, is a dangerous predator. And if they believed that they should run away from dangerous predators, all the better.

In contrast, those early humans who had false beliefs, who believed that saber-tooth tigers were really genies who would give three wishes if they were petted, would tend to get weeded out of the gene pool.

So wouldn’t the Darwinian process select for reliable rational faculties, and so give us faculties that would produce true beliefs?

On this account evolution would produce a propensity for holding true beliefs solely as a coincidental by-product of the process of selecting for behaviors that are likely to increase the chances of surviving. There are several problems with this argument, however.

One is that it assumes as a matter of faith that a non-rational process like natural selection can produce the rational faculties exhibited in human reason. What justifies the belief that rationality can arise from the non-rational?

But the bigger difficulty, as Richards writes, is that:

....there are millions of beliefs, few of which are true in the sense that they correspond with reality, but all compatible with the same behavior. Natural selection could conceivably select for survival-enhancing behavior. But it has no tool for selecting only the behaviors caused by true beliefs, and weeding out all the others.

What Richards is getting at might be illustrated by a hypothetical example: Suppose two prehistoric tribes both encouraged the production of as many children as possible, but tribe A did so because they believed that the gods would reward those who produce many offspring with a wonderful afterlife.

Imagine also that tribe B had no belief in an afterlife but did believe that the more children one has the more likely some would survive to adulthood to care for the parents in their old age.

Natural selection would judge both of these tribes to be equally "fit" since the "goal" of evolution is to maximize reproductive success. Natural selection would only "see" the behavior, it would be blind to the beliefs that produced it. Thus, true beliefs would have no particular survival advantage over false beliefs, and cognitive faculties that produced true beliefs would not be any more likely to be selected for than faculties which produced false beliefs.

Richards concludes,

So if our reasoning faculties came about as most naturalists assume they have, then we have little reason to assume they are reliable in the sense of giving us true beliefs. And that applies to our belief that naturalism is true.

Put differently, the naturalist cannot rationally justify his belief in naturalism. He can only maintain his belief that naturalism is true by an act of blind faith.

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. I)

One of the major difficulties with the naturalistic worldview is that it must explain how belief that naturalism is true is not self-refuting. For the purposes of this discussion naturalism, atheism, and materialism may all be considered synonyms. The argument which concludes that naturalism is self-refuting goes something like this:

On atheism there is no God. Thus, our reasoning powers must be the product of a purposeless evolutionary process that was geared to survival, not for discovering truth.

If that's the case, if we can't trust our reasoning powers to lead us to truth, especially the truth about metaphysical questions, then we have no grounds for believing that atheism is in fact true.

So, although atheism may be true, one cannot rationally believe that it is. This is ironic since most atheists argue that atheistic materialism is rational and theism is irrational, but, in fact, the opposite is actually the case.

Theism is a rational worldview since the belief that we are endowed with a trustworthy reasoning faculty which can reliably lead us to truth only makes sense if theism is true. Thus, the theist has grounds for believing that reason is trustworthy and is therefore rational in trusting his reason to lead him to truth, whereas the naturalist is irrational to believe that naturalism is true since she has no grounds for trusting her reason to lead her to truth.

Numerous naturalists have acknowledged in one way or another that this is a problem. To illustrate the point here's a baker's dozen of quotations culled from philosophers and scientists, the majority of whom, so far as I know, are atheistic materialists:

• "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Steven Pinker
• Evolution selects for survival and 'Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.' Patricia Churchland
• "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." John Gray
• "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." Francis Crick
• “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Charles Darwin
• “Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum
• “According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman
• "We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin
• “[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich
• “We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins
• “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.” Lisa Feldman Barrett
• “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” J.B.S. Haldane
• "Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." C.S. Lewis

So how does the naturalist address this apparent difficulty? We'll look at the most popular counter argument in tomorrow's VP.

Bad Moon Rising

Jim Geraghty writes in National Review Online that we're headed for some very difficult times and that much of our media is burying its head in the sand.

The media's disinterest notwithstanding the evidence pointing to a coming U.S. recession is starting to pile up:

At 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, October 28, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis will unveil the Gross Domestic Product numbers for the third quarter of fiscal year 2021, which covers July, August, and September.

Economists expect the third-quarter GDP to be a significant drop from the previous few quarters: “Buffeted by the delta variant, supply shortages and inflation, the world’s largest economy is projected by economists to have expanded by an annualized 2.8 percent, amid a sharp slowdown in spending by American consumers.

That’s less than half the 6.7 percent gain of the previous three months.”

Less than 3 percent growth would be pretty lousy for an economy that is supposed to be rebounding out of a pandemic. But it sounds as if Hassett [Kevin Hassett, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers],thinks it could be even worse, and he’s not alone: “IHS Markit, the gold standard among Wall Street forecasters, estimates GDP is on track to grow just 1.5 percent.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow forecast is even weaker: 0.5 percent.”

Those projections are perilously close to zero growth in the third quarter!

We should also expect worse in the fourth quarter that we’re currently in. Businesses can’t find workers — we have 10.4 million unfilled jobs. You’ve probably noticed that everything you buy seems to be getting more expensive, and every time you fill up your car, you wonder if they’re making gasoline out of diamonds these days.

Those GDP numbers would be bad enough. Coupled with inflation they're even worse. Geraghty notes that,

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted a few days ago that “Hyperinflation is going to change everything. It’s happening.” And when one respondent referred to how Nigerians experienced 16 percent inflation, Dorsey responded that, “It will happen in the US soon, and so the world.”

Sixteen percent inflation? The U.S. inflation rate was only at 5.4 percent in September. For inflation to skyrocket like that, someone would have to dump tons of money into a U.S. economy that already had too few goods and services to purchase — something like . . . er, $2 trillion in a “Build Back Better” bill and a separate $1 trillion in an infrastructure bill?

That's not all:

The supply-chain problems are just catastrophic: There are more than 100 cargo vessels now anchored off the California coast, waiting to unload their goods — about 200,000 20-foot containers, according to CNN. Factories are temporarily shutting down because of a lack of supplies.

As if oblivious to this perilous situation the Biden administration is planning to fire any employee of a federal contractor who refuses vaccination:

The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, an influential trade group that represents an industry with nearly 6 million workers, is pleading with the administration to delay a December 8 deadline for employees of federal contractors to get vaccinated.

“If tens or hundreds of thousands of employees are terminated just two weeks before Christmas . . . the result could be nothing short of catastrophic for the newly unemployed and their families and for the US economy,” Eric Hoplin, the NAW’s president and CEO, wrote in a Wednesday letter to Biden.

The trade group’s members include grocers, lumber, florists, beer, wine and various other distributors.

Read the rest at the link. Americans under the age of fifty are too young to remember the 1970s with their miles long gas lines and roaring inflation, but it did happen, and something like it could happen again. I doubt that this is what the majority of voters thought they were voting for last November, but here we are.

Proving Chesterton Right

Mind Matters has an interesting piece that addresses an article at Scientific American written by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Loeb states that all the theories which seek to explain the origin of our universe without positing an intelligence are inadequate.

In his Sci Am article Loeb writes:

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

Loeb's objection to each of these explanations is that they simply push the problem back a step or two or are otherwise unsatisfactory. He argues that the best explanation is that our universe resulted from the intentional efforts of an intelligent agent or agents:

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

There's more to Loeb's hypothesis at the link, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on what he's proposing in what's been quoted above. He's arguing that intelligent beings of some sort created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, and designed it to produce civilizations driven by Darwinian natural selection:

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

This hypothesis is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian creation story except that Loeb substitutes some sort of hypothetical superintelligent, superpowerful extra-cosmic aliens for a creator God, but these aliens seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace.

Why this puzzling aversion to identifying the designer as God? What is it about the concept of God that repels our naturalist friends like Dracula from a crucifix? One gets the feeling that were it to be somehow discovered that there really was a heaven and a hell awaiting the departed that our contemporary secularists would insist that these had in fact been established by aliens and that there's no reason to suppose that a God had anything at all to do with it.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that when men no longer believe in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Loeb’s suggestion is a confirming instance of Chesterton’s claim. Unwilling to attribute the universe to God, he posits creatures whose existence not only lacks any unwelcome religious implications and overtones, but also lacks any supporting evidence.

The universe, Loeb acknowledges, is the product of intelligent design, but the designer need not be anything so rebarbative as the God of traditional theism. Yet positing unobservable aliens is not in any way testable or scientific, so what advantage does one gain by positing such beings?

What's the practical difference, after all, between a transcendent superpowerful, superintelligent alien who brings about the creation of the cosmos out of nothing and a God who does the same?

It seems like a scientist can offer any explanation for the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. We might well ask why that is.

Materialism, Mind and Free Will

This episode in the Science Uprising series discusses the relationship between mind, materialism and free will.

Recall from previous episodes in the series that the narrators wear Guy Fawkes masks to symbolize their rebellion against the dogma of scientism, i.e. the belief that materialistic science can answer all the important questions in life and that whatever questions science can't answer aren't worth thinking about.

Scientism is popular among materialists despite being obviously wrong. I say "obviously wrong" because it's clear that science can say nothing about moral questions like whether I ought to help the poor or care for the elderly. Nor can it answer questions about the nature of justice and what obligates us to do justice.

Science, unaided by philosophy, cannot tell us what foreign and domestic policies our leaders should pursue or what kind of life we ought to choose for ourselves.

These are not unimportant or insignificant questions, quite the contrary, but science has nothing to say about them. Science can help guide us toward whatever ends we choose, but it can't tell us whether the ends we choose are the ones we ought to choose.

Indeed, scientism renders the entire fields of metaphysics, axiology (the study of aesthetic and moral value) and much of epistemology worthless.

By itself, without the aid of philosophy, science can't even tell us why one should value science or believe in scientism in the first place. Nor can it justify accepting its own basic assumptions like the uniformity of the laws of physics, the principle of cause and effect, or the reliability of human reason.

Anyway, here's the video. Note in the beginning the reference to eliminative materialism. This is the view that all that exists is material substance. It holds that there's no immaterial mind and that mental states, like the feeling of pain, and consciousness are both a kind of illusion.

There's more on Wilder Penfield's work here, and more on Benjamin Libet's work here.

Random Reflections

Here are a few questions and reflections on the absurdities our politicians and others are inflicting upon us during these crazy times:

• Carl Trueman at First Things observes that in 2018 police actions resulted in the deaths of less than 300 African Americans. That same year 117,000 African American babies were killed in utero. So where's the outrage?
• Also at First Things Liel Leibovitz notes that it's very odd that, according to progressives, "gender - [which is] literally coded into every cell of our body - is fluid, while race - a complicated concept made endlessly porous by intermarriage - is rigidly fixed."
• A question on the minds of many is why some of the same people (Joe Biden, Kamala Harris) who stoutly declared that they'd refuse any vaccine developed under the Trump administration are now mandating that everyone get the same vaccine that was developed under the Trump administration or lose their job.
• Jim Geraghty at National Review asks why it is safe for people to go to sporting events surrounded by tens of thousands of people who are all maskless, but kindergarteners who are at very low risk of getting seriously ill from covid still need to be masked all day long.
• Many folks have wondered why it is that when it comes to aborting a child in the womb the refrain has long been "My Body, My Choice," but when it comes to being injected with a vaccine against one's will it's either get vaxxed or get fired.
• Progressives frequently admonish the rest of us to "follow the science." Well, the science is clear that what's being destroyed in an abortion is a living human being, yet on this issue the left insists that we abandon the science altogether.
• The satirical Babylon Bee skewers the leaders of the city of San Francisco with a piece that states that the city administration is planning to require proof of vaccination before the homeless can poop on the sidewalks.
They were thinking about also requiring proof of vaccination before anyone would be allowed to shoplift at Walgreens but thought that might place an undue burden on the shoplifters.

The problem with trying to satirize our cultural elites is that most of us wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Bee's satire is actually true.

Nietzsche's Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a man before his time. He was an atheist who saw clearly that atheism entailed far more than just the "death of God." Nietzsche saw that when modern men pushed God out of their lives they created a vacuum, an emptiness from which meaning, morality, and hope had all been swept out.

The "murder" of God meant that man was left to create his own meaning, his own morality, and to learn to live without hope. Man's existential predicament would inevitably lead him to despair.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, but most men of his age did not. In their exuberance and rejoicing over their "assassination of God" and the liberation they were sure their deed had brought them, they failed to grasp that when God "died" with Him died any hope of transcendent purpose and any solid ground for right and wrong.

Nietzsche expressed this failure in a parable he included in his book The Gay Science. It's called the Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers.

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?

Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

The madman carried a lantern in the daylight because darkness was imminent. Man has become unmoored, like the earth unchained from the sun. Cold despair settles upon us as we plunge in all directions, adrift in nothingness. We are haunted by the sense that all is becoming colder.

Nietzsche's lantern-carrying madman is an interesting and perhaps intentional counterpoint to another lantern-carrier depicted c. 1854 by the artist Holman Hunt.

Hunt's lantern-carrier, unlike Nietzsche's, did not bring despair, but hope. He did not wipe out the horizon we use to navigate through life but rather gave life direction and meaning. Nor did he set us adrift in an infinite nothingness, but set our feet on the solid ground of objective, transcendent reality:

We might suppose that Nietzsche's lantern-carrier was driven mad by the consequences that he foresaw following upon the murder of Hunt's lantern-carrier.

What's Wrong with Critical Race Theory?

The following was originally posted last June, but because the topic has become so contentious of late, I thought it might be helpful to repost it: News reports from around the country have revealed a great deal of discontent among parents with their local school board members who've introduced Critical Race Theory into their children's curricula. A number of defenders of CRT, like MSNBC's Joy Reid, have insisted that the objectors who criticize its implementation in schools and businesses don't really know what it is.

She and others of her progressive ideological leanings would have us believe that CRT is just a benign attempt to educate students about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. It is that, of course, but it's much more than that.

CRT, its own advocates have written, seeks to radically revolutionize America in the name of ending "oppression." It rejects the values of the earlier Civil Rights movement such as the belief that people can, or should, strive to be "color-blind." Race is paramount. To not consider race in any interaction is an instance of "white supremacy."

CRT also repudiates racial integration because, proponents argue, it leads to "cultural genocide" as the minority group is inevitably absorbed into, and assimilated by, the dominant (white) group.

It rejects classical liberalism and the notion of human equality, substituting instead an emphasis on "equity," i.e. the idea that if there are disparities between races in any metric such as mortality rates, life expectancies, incarceration rates, disciplinary actions in schools, etc. they are necessarily the consequence of racism. No other explanation is allowed.

CRT rejects logical reasoning, objectivity, standpoint neutrality and fairness in discussions about race as "white values," and the attempt to adopt these values by People of Color (POC) is to adopt whiteness and to betray one's own race by tacitly affirming the superiority of white values to the values of the oppressed class.

It furthermore dismisses the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the principle of blind justice. These ideals, too, are "white."

Its emphasis is on the subjective "lived experience" of POC. Their stories are self-validating. To question them is to engage in an act of white supremacy or racism. The idea that truth is objective is rejected. Knowledge is experiential and feelings are self-validating.

Science and reason are tainted by "whiteness." Statistics are meaningless if they conflict with what a member of the "oppressed class" feels deep in her soul to be true.

It also teaches that whites, and only whites, are inherently racist, and no matter how hard they may try, they're helpless to expunge the stain. All they can do is submit to the moral superiority of the oppressed, do some kind of penance and plead for forgiveness, which, if it is granted at all, is only tentative.

Moreover, according to CRT the structures of our society are irremediably saturated with racism and must be torn down. What will replace them, they don't know or say, but, like the Jacobins in 1789 and the Bolsheviks in 1917, it's enough at this point to destroy the old order. The new non-racist order will somehow arise of itself.

Further, anyone who benefits from this "structural racism" is ipso facto a racist and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist. "Whiteness" refers to anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society regardless of the beneficiary's skin tone. If you're black, but you integrate into the white status quo then you're white regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

But don't take my word for any of this. Instead, watch this video produced by a very bright young man who did his homework and dug into the original sources. His name is Ryan Chapman, and he presents the main points of CRT in a dispassionate, objective fashion that CRT proponents would doubtless dismiss because, after all, Chapman is a white person seeking to be objective, neutral and fair.

Even so, the video is quite good and is a very helpful explication of what the major figures in CRT are themselves saying about it. Maybe Joy Reid should watch it:

Epistemological Perversity

One of the most distressing idiosyncrasies of our post modern era is the loss of belief in objective truth.

To say that truth is objective is to say that the truth doesn't depend upon what we think about it, whether we like it, or how we feel. It's independent of us.

Today, however, we often hear people say things like, "We live in a post-fact world" or "What's true for you isn't true for me," or "Truth is whatever works."

Truth, to paraphrase the late postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty, is nothing more than whatever people will let you get away with saying.

Thus, our politicians don't see themselves as doing something so crude as lying when they tell us that men can be women, or that a child in the womb is not "alive," or that 3.5 trillion dollars in spending will cost nothing. As long as their peer group will let them get away with it - and the media is certainly eager to help them promote the nonsense - then their claims are true.

The New York Times' 1619 Project can be riddled with historical errors but if the errors are your truth, well, then, they're true.

Columnist Dan Henninger writes about this phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal (paywall):

Mr. Biden recently said: “Every time I hear, ‘This (his 3.5 trillion dollar spending bill) is going to cost A, B, C or D,’ the truth is, based on the commitment that I made, it’s going to cost nothing.” .... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who while repeating it days later held up her hand to form a zero.

Some journalists then wrote elaborate explanations of how Mr. Biden was correct that his trillions in new spending would “cost nothing.”

All the time now, one hears people say, “I don’t know what’s going on anymore.” Or: “Maybe it’s me, but I just don’t get it.” They don’t mean only in Washington. They mean everything. We’re in a crisis of consciousness.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that we're in a crisis of epistemological perversity. We've adopted the Nietzschean notion that truth is just a matter of one's perspective. Different people look at things differently and thus have different truths, we think, and the advantage of power is that it enables one to impose his or her particular perspective on everyone else.

Here are some more examples provided by Henninger:

Washington ... has become a round-the-clock supplier of manufactured realities. Many Americans, for instance, watch scenes on television of thousands of migrants crossing the Rio Grande River into the United States. Nonetheless, Mr. Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, says the border is “closed” and “no less secure than previously.”

Mr. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in August the evacuation of Kabul couldn’t be called “anything but a success.” Ms. Psaki’s skill at reordering reality for Mr. Biden is mesmerizing, and I say without irony that she will be seen as an important figure in the transformation from believing what is real to believing what we’re told is real.

Reality resets have become commonplace. In Chicago some days ago, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx declined to prosecute any of the gang members who staged a broad-daylight shootout in a residential neighborhood.

Among the reasons her office gave for not bringing charges was that the gangs were engaged in consensual “mutual combat,” like in the movie “Fight Club.”

The relevant point here is that in our time more and more people—and not just in politics—think they can say anything. We’re living in a Peter Pan world: “You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.” The credibility cost is zero.

I wonder how many of the folks who scoff at the idea of objective facts, who believe that reality is whatever feels right to them, would buy a car from, or trust their finances to, someone who shares that epistemological perversity with them.

How Social Media Stokes Mob Mentality

In response to last Monday's (10/11/21) post titled The Tyranny of the Crowd a student wrote me the following explanation of how social media platforms stoke a mob mentality. I wanted to share it because it's quite interesting:

I would like to explore a few different social media apps, how they operate and how they relate to the subject of mob mentality. The apps I would consider in order from worst offender to least are Facebook, Reddit and Tik Tok. This initial assessment is based on my personal experience and knowledge of how the app operates and how they “reward” the user.

Starting with Facebook, the app has been constructed in a way to maintain the user to give them enough gratification that they feel good but not so much that they feel satisfied. A recent leak proved this long running theory.

The easiest way to maintain that happy medium of always needing more is with fear or outrage, Facebook actively shows you posts or information that it knows will elicit an emotional response, typically anger. It then gives you an avenue to express your disgust or anger and move on, feeling like you’ve done something.

Then to reinforce the behavior the app lets you know when somebody has “liked” your comment with a ding and a vibration giving your position validation. The aspect of the mob or the crowd comes into play when we address Facebook groups or pages where any number of individuals may come together and express the same view together.

A person could come to express an opinion that is counter to the majority and they will likely be ridiculed and insulted and possibly removed from the group depending on the administration's level of tolerance.

Moving on to Reddit we find that they have a very similar model and reward mechanism with one key difference. The algorithm does not decide what is popular or what you see, this is determined by “upvotes” and “downvotes." A group on Reddit is referred to as a subreddit, in a subreddit a user can post what they want pertaining to the sub and if other users in the sub like it or dislike it they can cast their vote. More upvotes means your post will be higher up on the list and the opposite for downvotes.

Further in the comment section of these posts things operate very similarly with one key difference, if a comment receives enough downvotes the comment will be replaced with a reveal button essentially punishing the user for upsetting the echo chamber. This goes even further when we consider Reddit's karma system, good and bad karma are given out by how many upvotes or downvotes you have received.

A number of groups have taken the position that you must have x amount of positive karma to post or comment in the group. This incentivizes the user to not try to counter the echo chamber.

This all sounds much worse than Facebook, however I rank Facebook worse as they are the ones in control whereas users on Reddit at least have the option of control.

When we take a look at TikTok it's a little less clear how things work. The user is shown videos at random and then as the user likes videos they are slowly shown more of what they like with random videos mixed in. The app has a very free feeling to it, less control by all parties where the comment section of the video is the only place for an echo chamber to exist.

The trouble surrounding this app is that it is seemingly a Chinese propaganda machine.

This is quite subtle but your posts are removed or your account is removed when you start addressing genocide in China or expressing the view that Taiwan is not part of China or expressing any view too loudly that is counter to what is popular in the mainstream.

We are reminded once again that this app isn't free and the user is being manipulated. This is lowest on the list as it seems this app maintains the least control over the user despite its constant manipulation of content.

In summary it seems that the user is the victim and that the way we counter this mob or crowd mentality isn’t by expressing an opposing view but instead by educating the entire public on the addictive properties of social media.

I suppose regular users of these platforms were probably aware of all this, but as someone who doesn't use social media, or know much about its ins and outs, it was helpful to read this analysis.

Did Humans Arise from Ape-like Ancestors?

Most of us learned in high school that the human species evolved gradually from ape-like ancestors and that we're really little more than relatively hairless apes. When students are taught this many assume that there's a massive amount of evidence for it in the fossil record, but the fact is there's not.

The reason it's so widely believed is not because of the empirical evidence but because it coheres with Neo-Darwinian theory. If naturalistic evolution is true, and all naturalists and many non-naturalists believe it is, then humans simply must've arisen from some earlier primate species.

Now, we may have, of course, but the empirical evidence, other than general anatomical similarity, doesn't warrant the conclusion that we did.

The following 8:00 minute video, the eighth in the current Science Uprising series, discusses why the fossil evidence that exists falls well short of being conclusive. Indeed, the fossils that have been unearthed have turned out to be those of either human beings or apes. There appear to be no definite intermediates.

An idiosyncrasy of the series is that the narrators wear Guy Fawkes masks. David Klinghoffer at Evolution News explains; the symbolism behind it:

The mask is a reference to the 2005 film V for Vendetta, inspired in turn by the historical English rebel Guy Fawkes, and a comic by David Lloyd, who is right when he says it has become “an icon of popular culture,” “a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny.”

The symbolism of masks has evolved in the meantime, but the tyranny of scientism has remained a constant, or in fact grown more perverse and obnoxious, making the series of short videos more relevant than ever.

Here's the video:

The Socratic Method

Socrates (470–399 BC) was one of the most influential philosophers in all of human history. He himself never wrote anything but his unique mode of discourse, which came to be known as the “Socratic method,” remains as one of the great teaching styles and modes of inquiry still in use today.

Dr. Paul Herrick writes a good overview of Socrates' style as well as the details of his trial and death at Philosophy News. Here are some excerpts from his discussion of the Socratic Method:

At some point around the middle of his life...Socrates became convinced that many people think they know what they are talking about when in reality they do not have a clue. He came to believe that many people, including smug experts, are in the grips of illusion. Their alleged knowledge is a mirage.

Similarly, he also saw that many believe they are doing the morally right thing when they are really only fooling themselves—their actions cannot be rationally justified.

As this realization sank in, Socrates found his life’s purpose: he would help people discover their own ignorance as a first step to attaining more realistic beliefs and values. But how to proceed?

Some people, when convinced that others are deluded, want to grab them by their collars and yell at them. Others try to force people to change their minds. Many people today believe violence is the only solution.

None of this was for Socrates. He felt so much respect for each individual—even those in the grips of illusion and moral error—that violence and intimidation were out of the question. His would be a completely different approach: he asked people questions. Not just any questions, though.

He asked questions designed to cause others to look in the mirror and challenge their own assumptions on the basis of rational and realistic standards of evidence. Questions like these: Why do I believe this? What is my evidence? Are my assumptions on this matter really true? Or am I overlooking something? Are my actions morally right? Or am I only rationalizing bad behavior?

This may not seem like such a big deal but it is. Most of us have no desire to question our beliefs about important matters like religion or politics, and when someone does question us our response is often to get defensive and to just shout louder than the other person until the exchange ends in anger.

We see a form of this when college students shout down speakers with whom they disagree and refuse to let them speak (for a couple of examples see here and here).

Such behavior is not just rude and intellectually immature, it's a signal that the shouters have no good reasons for believing what they do and deep down realize that their beliefs can only prevail if the other side is denied a hearing. The cause of truth is ill-served by such tactics, but then the thugs who engage in this behavior aren't really interested in truth in the first place.

Herrick continues:

Looking in the mirror in a Socratic way can be painful. For reasons perhaps best left to psychologists, it is easy to criticize others but it is hard to question and challenge yourself. There are intellectual hurdles as well. Which standards or criteria should we apply when we test our beliefs and values?

Socrates, by his example, stimulated a great deal of research into this question. Over the years, many criteria have been proposed, tested, and accepted as reliable guides to truth, with truth understood as correspondence with reality.

These standards are collected in one place and studied in the field of philosophy known as “logic”—the study of the principles of correct reasoning. Today we call someone whose thinking is guided by rational, realistic criteria a “critical thinker.” Our current notion of criterial, or critical, thinking grew out of the philosophy of Socrates.

So, moved by the pervasiveness of human ignorance, bias, egocentrism, and the way these shortcomings diminish the human condition, Socrates spent the rest of his life urging people to look in the mirror and examine their assumptions in the light of rational, realistic criteria as the first step to attaining real wisdom. Knowledge of your own ignorance and faults, he now believed, is a prerequisite for moral and intellectual growth.

Just as a builder must clear away brush before building a house, he would say, you must clear away ignorance before building knowledge. As this reality sank in, his conversations in the marketplace shifted from the big questions of cosmology to questions about the human condition and to that which he now believed to be the most important question of all: What is the best way to live, all things considered?

Socrates’s mission—to help others discover their own ignorance as a first step on the path to wisdom--explains why he expected honesty on the part of his interlocutors. If the other person does not answer honestly, he won’t be led to examine his own beliefs and values. And if he does not look in the mirror, he will not advance. For Socrates, honest self-examination was one of life’s most important tasks.

When our most deeply-held beliefs are at risk, when we're confronted by compelling challenges to those beliefs, honesty is often difficult. Not only are our convictions at stake but so is our pride.

It's humbling to have to acknowledge that we've been wrong about a belief we've held. We resort to all manner of diversion, obfuscation and fallacy in order to escape the conclusion our interlocutor's argument may be leading us toward. We resist it, we refuse to believe it, regardless of the price we must pay for that refusal in terms of our intellectual integrity.

There's an old ditty that captures the psychology of this well: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

Socrates himself encountered this resistance to having one's beliefs challenged and paid with his life for having discredited the certainties of very proud and vain men. You can read about what happened to him in Herrick's column at the link.

Divine Hiddenness

There are two antitheistic (against the existence of God) arguments that non-theists have found particularly convincing over the last several centuries.

One of these is the problem of evil which has received perhaps its greatest literary expression in The chapter titled "The Rebellion" in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

The other argument, which is in some ways similar to the problem of evil (or suffering), is based on what philosophers call "Divine hiddenness" and which the Japanese Catholic Shusako Endo portrayed so powerfully in his novel Silence (See also the movie based on the book).

The technical form of the argument from Divine hiddenness can be found here, but in simpler English the argument goes something like this:

1. If a good God exists, He would not allow anyone who would otherwise believe in Him to remain ignorant of His existence and be lost for eternity.
2. There are people, however, who are ignorant of God's existence who would otherwise believe in Him if they knew of Him.
3. Therefore, there are people who would believe in God if they knew of Him who are lost for eternity.
4. Therefore, a good God does not exist.

Or, put more simply, because there are people who are innocently unaware of God's existence and who would believe in Him if they knew, therefore He doesn't exist.

This argument makes three questionable assumptions. It assumes that there really are those who are genuinely ignorant of God's existence; it assumes that those who are ignorant of God's existence will necessarily be lost for eternity; and it assumes that God could not possibly have overriding reasons for not revealing Himself in ways that persons ignorant of His existence, if such there be, would find compelling.

Each of these assumptions is doubtful, and in this form, at least, the argument is not very persuasive.

Perhaps a more psychologically compelling version of the argument is the one developed by Endo in his novel.

Roughly based on a true story, the novel describes the terrifying ordeal of a 16th century missionary to Japan who is put through mental tortures to persuade him to commit what seems to be a relatively minor act of blasphemy. He's required to step on a crude portrait of Jesus, and his refusal to commit this act of desecration is punished by Japanese samurai who subject innocent Christian villagers to unimaginable suffering until the missionary relents.

Despite his agonized prayers, however, there's no apparent answer from heaven. God seems silent, hidden, absent.

As emotionally gripping as this story is, in the end it doesn't demonstrate that God does not exist. The only thing it demonstrates about God is that He's sometimes, perhaps frequently, inscrutable, but believers already knew that.

It's interesting, too, that Endo's missionary, although crushed and broken by his ordeal, ultimately retains his belief in God.

To say that the argument from Divine hiddenness ultimately fails is not to minimize, however, its emotional and spiritual force.

God's seeming absence has been the cause of much anguish among many believers in the midst of great suffering and fear throughout most of human history. I have a friend who has drifted into agnosticism largely because of it.

A family member recently sent me a simple vignette that's a parable about the doubt materialists have about life after death but which actually, if perhaps inadvertently, also addresses the problem of Divine hiddenness. It goes like this:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only reasonable to believe that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

From the fact that the babies don't perceive her, don't see or hear her, it surely doesn't follow that she doesn't exist or care about them and their well-being.

The Universe Is Amazing

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

Here's another example courtesy of biologist Ann Gauger. Gauger quotes philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon who writes that,

[I]f we measure the width of the observable universe in inches and regard this as representing the scale of the strengths of the physical forces, gravity is fine-tuned to such an extent that the possibility of intelligent life can only tolerate an increase or decrease in its strength of one one-hundred-millionth of an inch with respect to the diameter of the observable universe.

To which Gauger responds,

That is literally awesome. That 1/10^8 inch movement is the same as 0.00000001 of an inch, or about the width of a water molecule, in either direction compared to the width of the observable universe. That is an incredible amount of very fine-tuned order — the relationship between the strong nuclear force and the gravitational force has to be that precise for stars and planets to form, and the elements that are necessary to support life.

Just one water molecule’s width compared to the width of the whole universe — if the ratio were just a little too little, stars’s lives would be cut short and there would be no time for life to develop; too much and everything would expand too fast, thus preventing star and planet formation.

No wonder fine-tuning is called one of the best evidences for intelligent design. People have proposed ways around the challenge, mainly to do with the multiverse hypothesis. But there are so many other instances of fine-tuning and design perfect for creatures like us that it begins to look like a genuine plan.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Gauger refers to the assumption held by some that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must inevitably exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many moderns choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are quite remarkable.

Roger Scruton's Conservatism

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who published more than 40 books in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. He was interviewed shortly before his death in 2020 by Madeleine Kearns for National Review about his latest book which is titled Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, and he has some pithy things to say.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation with a few thoughts of my own interspersed:

Madeleine Kearns: In your most recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, you provide a distilled synthesis of modern conservative thought. First, I’d like to begin with your book’s last chapter, “Conservatism Now,” in which you reference William F. Buckley Jr.’s first book, God and Man at Yale (1951).

In that book, which arguably launched the conservative movement in America, a 24-year-old Buckley wrote: “I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”

Do you think Buckley was correct? If so, what are these “other vital battles”?

Sir Roger Scruton: Yes, Buckley was right. There is the vital battle to defend fundamental institutions, such as marriage and the family, and to counter the censorship of all opinions that express an attachment to our cultural and political inheritance.

MK: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative?

SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

MK: Why do many on the left consider conservatism to be inherently evil (rather than cuddly)?

SRS: The principal reason is that people on the left have illusions about human nature and think they prove their virtue by broadcasting those illusions. Anyone who punctures those illusions is therefore not just a spoilsport but a threat. What the self-declared “virtue” of the left amounts to can be witnessed in what happens to ordinary humanity when the left takes power.

I think here I would add to what Scruton says. A big part of the left's hatred for conservatives, IMO, stems from the fact that The left bases their policy prescriptions on emotivism and conservatives base theirs on reason and experience. For example, the left believes in their heart that socialism should work, but reason and experience demonstrate that it doesn't.

Thus, when people are shown that the ideas that they've invested their lives in are utterly wrong, it generates resentment, bitterness and ultimately hatred for those who show them to be wrong.

MK: Can one be a hopeful conservative without God?

SRS: Yes, but it helps to believe in God, since then one’s hopes are fixed on a higher reality, and that stops one from imposing them on the world in which we live.

Actually, I don't know how anyone can be a hopeful anything without God.

If there is no God what is there to hope for? What difference does it make what the world will be like after our deaths? Hoping that our descendents have a pleasant world to live in is a nice sentiment, but a couple of generations down the line you and they are utter strangers to each other, and their lives are just as pointless as are ours today. What does it matter to anyone living today whether the world's a better or worse place in 2100?

If there is no God, hopefulness seems quaint, meaningless, and out of place.

MK: You mention a reluctance on the part of some conservatives to self-identify as such. Surprisingly, perhaps, you include George Orwell and Simone Weil in this category. Can you explain why they, too, belong to the “great tradition”? How can you spot a conservative?

SRS: I try to explain this in my book. Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

MK: How is Islam to be best accommodated in Western democracies?

SRS: By engaging Muslims in discussion and explaining to them that we live under a rule of law which is man-made, not God-bestowed.

It's not clear, however, why Islam should be specially accommodated at all. Western democracies have freedom of religion; that's all the accommodation the state should make for any religion.

If there's to be accommodation it should run the other way. Muslims should accommodate themselves to living in a country that holds constitutional values that their religion may make no allowance for.

In other words, the Muslim should accommodate him or herself to the laws and values of the land in which he/she chooses to live, not vice-versa.

Living in Unity

The pastor of one of the churches in my town, a man who considers himself a progressive, has put up Psalm 133:1 on the signboard outside his church: "How good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity."

Reading this as I drove by the other day caused me to reflect.

The sign is doubtless intended as a critique of the social and political hostilities that beset our nation and to serve as a pastoral adjuration to our townspeople, who are overwhelmingly conservative, to refrain from participating in these bitter conflicts.

Yet it was not conservatives but the left who split the country over the 2000 Bush/Gore election.

Nor was it conservatives but rather the left who refused to accept Trump's legitimacy in 2016 and spent four years dividing the country by trying to oust him from office with phony allegations of "Russian collusion" and sundry other mendacities.

Nor is it conservatives but rather the left who today attack anyone who follows their 2000 and 2016 example by questioning the legitimacy of Biden's election, and it's the left that has torn the country apart by attacking freedom of speech and religion as well as traditional views of marriage, gender, race and immigration and by trying to destroy the careers of anyone who opposes, or even just disagrees, with them.

Perhaps the pastor meant to post the message, "How good and pleasant it is when people acquiesce to the socialist/progressive agenda" but found it too long to fit on the signboard.

Of course, no one of good will would dispute that it is good and pleasant to live together in unity, but a man of the left might do well to understand that we live in a historical moment in which it is his political fellow-travelers who most of all need to hear and heed that message.

The Tyranny of the Crowd

Robert Kaplan, writing for the Wall street Journal, discusses a 1960 book by a scholar named Elias Canetti who, Kaplan says, "may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years."

The book is titled Crowds and Power, and it discusses among other things the role of technology in accelerating the decline of the West.

Kaplan points out that the mass movements of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, would've been impossible without the technological advances that made mass communication possible:

It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.

Kaplan then notes that,

The mass ideologies of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, represented a profound abasement of reason. Yet those ideologies reveal more than we’d like to admit about our own political extremes....Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity.

Condemning others, destroying others, compensates for one's own inadequacies and spiritual impoverishment. It fulfills one's need for power, self-importance, self-righteousness and purpose. It's a need that the individual is unable, by himself, to gratify but which can be satisfied by one's participation in "the crowd."

Here's Kaplan:

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.

Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”

There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own.

Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology—first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook —has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.

Social media amplifies the individual's sense of power. It amplifies all the worst characteristics of crowds (or mobs) which no longer need to be comprised of people physically present to each other as they did in the previous century. By folding solitary persons into a like-minded mass of anonymous individuals modern social media enables the otherwise impotent individual to slake his thirst for significance and meaning.

It also enables him to manifest his bitterness and vent his hatreds in politically effective ways.

Kaplan again:

There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.

But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies.

In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.

The need to parade one's own "virtue" is a major impetus behind "cancel culture." To condemn the sins of others, to humiliate them for their transgressions, is a means of drawing attention to one's own moral superiority. Social media mobs offer unprecedented opportunities for moral preening.

The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.

This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in the introduction to his recently released book The Dying Citizen:

...everything that we once thought was so strong, so familiar, and so reassuring about America has been dissipating for some time....Contemporary events have reminded Americans that their citizenship is fragile and teetering on the abyss....

If we soon tumble over the edge of that abyss it'll be hate-filled crowds of shrivelled souls on social media who'll be largely responsible.

Can we be Good Without God (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an argument by biologist Jerry Coyne the gravamen of which was that morality is not contingent upon a transcendent moral authority such as God. I'd like to continue our critique of this argument in today's post.

Coyne writes that,

though both moral and immoral behaviors can be promoted by religions, morality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.

Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one.

Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK.

Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.

Coyne here adverts to the classic Euthyphro dilemma which, contrary to what he thinks, has been discredited by philosophers for centuries (see here, and here). It's unfortunate that Coyne is unaware of this, but it illustrates the hazard of experts in one field speaking dogmatically on matters in other disciplines.

But what he says next merits a more thorough response.

So where does morality come from if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness.

This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.

Assuming this is correct what makes the behaviors he mentions moral or right? If a chimp acted contrary to these tendencies would we think the chimp immoral? Would we call its actions evil or wicked? Why, then - if we're nothing more than hairless apes - do we call humans evil when they torture people or abuse children? We have an aversion to such things, to be sure, but aversion doesn't make something wicked.

And the conditions under which humans evolved are precisely those that would favor the evolution of moral codes: small social groups of big-brained animals. When individuals in a group can get to know, recognize and remember each other, this gives an advantage to genes that make you behave nicely towards others in the group, reward those who cooperate and punish those who cheat. That's how natural selection can build morality.

In other words we should be nice because we've evolved to be nice. This is fallacious. Philosophers since Hume have recognized that one can't derive an ought from an is. Because we've evolved a certain tendency, if indeed we have, it doesn't follow that we have an obligation to express that tendency.

As mentioned above, we've also evolved the tendency to be selfish and mean and a host of other unsavory behavioral traits. Are these behaviors morally right just because they've evolved? Should we consider cruelty good because it's an evolved behavior?

Coyne concludes with this thought:

Secular reason adds another layer atop these evolved behaviors, helping us extend our moral sentiments far beyond our small group of friends and relatives — even to animals.

This is silly. Secular reason says no such thing. What secular reason dictates is that I should look out for my own interests, I should put myself first, and use others to promote my own well-being and happiness.

That may entail that I give people the impression that I care about them in order to get them to assist me in my own pursuit of happiness, but people who are of no use to me are of no value to me. Thus, it'd be foolish of me to sacrifice my comforts to help some starving child in some other part of the world who will never be of any use to me.

Indeed, why, on Coyne's view, is it wrong to refuse aid to victims of poverty and starvation?

Atheistic philosopher Kai Nielson stresses this very point:

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

Secular reason and evolution have no answer to the question why we should help those who are in no position to help us, at least none that doesn't reduce to the claim that helping others just makes us feel good. It's an ugly fact about naturalism that its logic entails such conclusions, and either Coyne knows it's ugly and doesn't want his readers to know it, or he has no idea.

In either case he should stick to biology.

Can We be Good Without God? (Pt. I)

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. He's also a prominent atheist who has written a book titled Faith Vs. Fact in which he tries to explain why theism is false.

A few years ago he wrote a column for USA Today in which he argued that belief in God is not necessary for one to live a moral life. He complains that:

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."

Coyne believes that human morality is a consequence of the evolutionary process coupled with human reason. God is unnecessary. There are at least four things wrong with Coyne's rejection of the belief that God is in some sense necessary for ethics. First, "God-given morality" is not incompatible with evolution. God could be the ground both of moral value and of evolutionary change.

There is a serious incompatibility, however, between "God-given morality" and Coyne's naturalism, i.e. his belief that the natural world is all there is. If naturalism is true then there is no God and thus no "God-given morality."

Second, no one argues that evolution could not, at least in theory, have bestowed upon us the sentiments Coyne lists. The problem is that if evolution is the source of these impulses then it's also the source of avarice, bigotry, cruelty, etc.

If we believe that evolution has produced all human behavioral tendencies, on what basis do we decide that one set of behaviors is good and the other bad? Are we not assuming a "moral dictionary", so to speak - a standard above and beyond nature by which we adjudicate between behaviors to determine which are right and which are wrong?

If so, what is that standard?

Third, if an impersonal, mindless, random process is the ultimate source of these behaviors it can't in any moral sense be wrong to act contrary to them. If moral sentiments are the product of natural selection and chance chemical happenstances in the brain there's no non-arbitrary moral value to anything.

Right and wrong reduce to subjective likes and dislikes, and that leads to moral nihilism.

Finally, in the absence of God in what sense are we accountable for our actions? And if we're not accountable, if there's no reckoning for how we behave, what does it mean to say that a given behavior is "wrong"? If there are no posted speed limits on a highway and no enforcement, what does it mean to say that one is "wrong" to go as fast as one wishes or thinks is prudent?

The most it can mean is that other people won't like it, but why should anyone care whether others approve of how he or she behaves?

We'll look at another aspect of Coyne's argument tomorrow.

Refuting the WAP

Over the years I've put up numerous posts on what's called cosmic fine-tuning, i.e. the idea that the forces, parameters and constants that make up the fabric of our universe must be exquisitely fine-tuned to unimaginable precision in order for the universe to be life-permitting.

The fact of fine-tuning is such strong support for the belief that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer that those who wish to evade that conclusion have been forced to come up with some pretty desperate counter hypotheses to rebut it.

One of these is the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinity of other universes, all different from each other. Given the assumption then a universe like ours, no matter how improbable, must exist. See here and here)

Another response to the fine-tuning phenomenon is what's called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP).

WAP proponents argue that the fine-tuning of the cosmos isn't anything to marvel at since if the cosmos wasn't fine-tuned no life would exist and we wouldn't be here to observe it. This argument sounds very peculiar, but it may be difficult to see exactly what's wrong with it. In fact, a number of very bright people have embraced it, but its popularity began to wane once philosophers began to give it some thought.

This eight minute video by Inspiring Philosophy explains why the WAP is more like a scientific card trick than a plausible scientific theory:

Moral Beliefs and Proper Basicality

One of the arguments we've made here over the years is that if there is no God the notion of moral obligation becomes meaningless. Apart from a transcendent ground for moral right and wrong, there can be no duty to act one way rather than another.

Now atheistic philosophers, no doubt weary of having their theistic colleagues point out to them the nihilistic implications of their atheism, have adopted a strategy to answer this criticism of the attempt to develop an atheistic ethics or morality. A paper in Faith and Philosophy (available by subscription only) authored by Erik Wielenberg, makes the bold claim that moral beliefs are what epistemologists call properly basic.

Properly basic beliefs are beliefs which do not require that they be based on any other beliefs. We are within our epistemic rights to hold them even if we can give no reasons or evidential support for them.

Traditionally, many philosophers held that such things as my belief that I'm experiencing pain-like sensations in my tooth (beliefs evident to the senses), that I had cereal for breakfast (memory beliefs), or that I exist (beliefs that are incorrigible or can't be wrong) are all properly basic.

It's self-evident, Wielenberg claims, that cruelty is wrong and kindness is right. There's no need to defend or justify that belief, and no one with properly functioning cognitive faculties would deny it. Thus, there's no need to ground moral beliefs in God or anything else. They're just brute facts and that's all there is to it.

This is a clever move, especially since some Christian philosophers want to assert that belief in God is also properly basic. Wielenberg compares the basicality of belief in God to belief that, say, cruelty is wrong. He then goes on to argue that if belief in God is properly basic then so, too, is a belief that cruelty is wrong.

Now if moral beliefs are indeed, properly basic then it will do no good to ask what the atheist bases his beliefs upon. He'll simply answer that there's no need to justify them or warrant them. Kindness is better than cruelty and that's the end of the matter.

But I'm not so sure. What does it mean to say that something is wrong if there is no God? Presumably it means that you shouldn't do it, but if we ask why we shouldn't, the answer is simply that you just shouldn't.

Suppose I can profit from harming someone and get away with it. Why is that wrong? Wielenberg replies that it just is, that most people agree that it is, and that no further reasons are necessary. This strikes me as inadequate and question begging.

Moreover, setting that aside, the problem is not so much with beliefs about this or that moral act but with the notion of moral obligation. An obligation is something which binds us to act. It must be imposed.

If there is no God then what obligates us to behave one way rather than another? If one person is kind and another is cruel what obligates the first to behave the way he does and obligates the second not to behave as he does?

How can we have a moral duty if there is no transcendent moral authority to impose that duty and to enforce it? In lieu of God where does such a duty come from and why should I feel bound by it?

Finally, what can it mean to say that a behavior is wrong if there's no sanction for performing it?

If there were no law enforcement or judicial system laws would be meaningless. If there's no God then to whom, or what, are we accountable for our acts? Society? Ourselves?

Why should anyone care what society thinks, and if I impose the obligation on myself, surely I can release myself from it if it proves inconvenient.

If Wielenberg is correct, to say that cruelty is wrong is simply to say that a lot of people don't like it, but what people like and don't like can hardly be the ground for what's moral, much less for moral obligation.

The fact remains that moral obligation can only exist in a world in which there is a transcendent moral authority. Atheists can live just the same as theists in terms of their ethics. They can adopt the very same values, but if they chose to adopt the opposite values they would be neither wrong nor right to do so.

In a Godless world, there simply is no wrong or right. There are just things that people, like any other animal, do.

The Hard Problem Is Really Hard

Philosophers of mind speak of two kinds of problems involved in the study of consciousness. The first, the "easy" problem, is mapping which parts of the brain are involved in producing our various mental experiences.

In other words, when you see a red surface or feel a pain which part of the brain is activated by that experience. The "hard" problem, so named by David Chalmers in 1995, is the problem of explaining what sensations like red or pain actually are and how a material brain can produce an immaterial sensation like color or sound.

The "hard problem" is, in other words, the problem of explaining what consciousness is and where it comes from.

Michael Hanlon at Aeon elaborates:

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Dennett wrote that: ‘Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.’ A few years later, Chalmers added: ‘[It] may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.’ They were right then and, despite the tremendous scientific advances since, they are still right today.

I do not think that the evolutionary ‘explanations’ for consciousness that are currently doing the rounds are going to get us anywhere. These explanations do not address the hard problem itself, but merely the ‘easy’ problems that orbit it like a swarm of planets around a star.

The hard problem’s fascination is that it has, to date, completely and utterly defeated science. Nothing else is like it. We know how genes work, we have (probably) found the Higgs Boson; but we understand the weather on Jupiter better than we understand what is going on in our own heads. This is remarkable.

Consciousness is in fact so weird, and so poorly understood, that we may permit ourselves the sort of wild speculation that would be risible in other fields....We can speculate that it is consciousness that gives rise to the physical world rather than the other way round. The 20th-century British physicist James Hopwood Jeans speculated that the universe might be ‘more like a great thought than like a great machine.’

Idealist notions keep creeping into modern physics, linking the idea that the mind of the observer is somehow fundamental in quantum measurements and the strange, seemingly subjective nature of time itself, as pondered by the British physicist Julian Barbour.

I don’t know. No one does. And I think it is possible that, compared with the hard problem, the rest of science is a sideshow.... The hard problem is still the toughest kid on the block.

Perhaps, as Denyse O'Leary muses at Mind Matters, the problem with trying to solve the hard problem is the underlying materialistic assumption that consciousness is explicable in terms of material substance, that somehow matter (the brain) produces consciousness.

Perhaps things are the other way around. Perhaps mind is fundamental and matter is somehow a product of immaterial mind.

O'Leary writes,

Almost certainly, the human mind is not a material entity but an immaterial one, like information. If we accept that, we can perhaps convert it from an opaque mystery that can never yield any results because we are on the wrong track to a mystery that is difficult but solvable in principle because we are now looking in the right places.

Philosophical Idealism

My students will be discussing philosophical idealism this week so I thought it'd be appropriate to rerun this post from earlier in the year: Bruce Gordon is one of the most brilliant and accomplished thinkers alive today. Among other things he's a historian and philosopher of science and was interviewed recently by another scientist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, on a number of topics, including philosophical idealism.

Gordon is one of a growing number of philosophers who find idealism a compelling hypothesis. The interview begins with Dr. Gordon explaining George Berkeley's (1685-1753) version of idealism:

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

Bruce Gordon: There are a lot of different varieties of idealism, and rather than go through a laundry list of its variations, let me just start with the kind of idealism that I would be an advocate of, which is an ontic theistic idealism, essentially a form of idealism that is probably most closely identified with the Anglican Bishop, George Berkeley.

George Berkeley 1727

Basically, it’s the idea that material substances, as substantial entities, do not exist and are not the cause of our perceptions. They do not mediate our experience of the world.

Rather, what constitutes what we would call the physical realm are ideas that exist solely in the mind of God, who, as an unlimited and uncreated immaterial being, is the ultimate cause of the sensations and ideas that we, as finite spiritual beings, experience intersubjectively and subjectively as the material universe....So we are, in effect, living our lives in the mind of God.

And he is a mediator of our experience and of our inner subjectivity, rather than some sort of neutral material realm that serves as a third thing between us and the mind of God, so to speak.

The discussion then turns for a bit to Plato's notion of idealism as expressed in his theory of Forms.

Plato believed that every particular thing that exists has an ideal essence or form that exists in some abstract realm of reality. Every chair, for example, is recognizable as a chair because it "participates" in the perfect abstract form of "chairness," every tree is recognizable as a tree because it "participates" in the perfect form of "treeness."

Likewise with everything, including humans.

Later Christian Platonists argued that these essences, or forms, or ideals existed not in some abstract realm but rather as ideas in the mind of God, and this, it seems, is Gordon's view as well.

Michael Egnor: There are, I believe, other kinds of idealism. For example, idealism by German philosophers. And how does that differ from Berkeleyan idealism?

Bruce Gordon: Well, .... [Immanuel] Kant (1724-1804) advocated a kind of epistemic, as opposed to ontic, idealism. Kantian idealism is entirely compatible with the existence of material substances, even though they are inaccessible as things in themselves.

So for Kantian idealism, you’ve got a self that .... precedes and grounds all of our experience. And our perception of reality, then, is governed by the innate structure of the human mind.

Immanuel Kant 1768 

What Gordon is saying here is that Kant believed that a material world existed but that everything we know about it is based on our sensory perceptions which produce ideas or sensations in the mind. Our mind is so structured as to create these ideas, but the ideas may be nothing at all like the thing they represent.

In other words, what we know about the "thing in itself" is the sum of the ideas (or sensations) we have of it in our minds. We can't know it as it exists independently of our perceptions of it.

For example, our minds, upon seeing, smelling and tasting chocolate, generate the ideas of a certain color, fragrance and flavor, but these ideas are in our minds, they're not in the chocolate. The chocolate itself doesn't have color, it simply reflects certain wavelengths of light. Likewise, it doesn't have fragrance or flavor. It simply exudes chemicals which interact with our senses to produce the ideas of fragrance and flavor in our minds.

As Kant put it, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am."

Bruce Gordon: So we never experience reality in itself, which he called the noumenal world, but only reality as it appears to us, a ... phenomenal reality that is ordered by the innate structures of the human mind.

Kantian idealism and its descendants are, in many ways, an epistemic form of idealism, whereas the Berkeleyan form of idealism is ontic.

By this Gordon means that Kant's idealism had to do with what we can know about the world whereas Berkeley's idealism had to do with the ontology of the world - what was actually real and what reality was like. Gordon adds:

[Berkeley's Idealism is] a denial that there is material substance and [is instead] an embedding of reality in the mind of God, such that it is finite spiritual beings experiencing the reality brought into existence by this unlimited, uncreated, immaterial being.

Berkeley's idealism, then, was different from Kant's. Berkeley held that there was no material world at all. Everything we experience we experience as ideas in our minds, ideas which are presented to our minds by the mind of God.

As Berkeley himself says, “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind.” This may seem bizarre at first reading, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.”

It's interesting that in the last fifty years or so many physicists have embraced idealism. They're persuaded by developments in quantum mechanics that reveal that at the subatomic level many properties of the entities scientists study at that level don't exist until they're observed.

For instance, the 20th century scientist Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, once stated that,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

And Sir James Jeans, in his book The Mysterious Universe, wrote that, "The universe is beginning to look more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists, but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks since the doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally a projection of the mind of God.