2021 Favorites

Reflecting on the three dozen or so books I've managed to squeeze in over the past year I've decided that those listed below were perhaps my favorites. Some of them were books I'd read previously but wanted to reread, others were books that I picked up after reading a review or which were recommended to me by friends.

Even though I often read books that are recommended to me, I'm reluctant to recommend books (even my own!) to others, and this list isn't intended to be such. I learned long ago that recommending books to others who have different tastes and different background knowledge is a risky business.

It's been my experience that people rarely finish books that they purchased on a suggestion from me, so I've concluded that it's best not to encourage them to spend their time and money.

At any rate, for what it's worth and not in any particular order of significance, here are most of my favorite reads from 2021:

Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self - Carl Trueman: A lucid and arresting explanation of how our contemporary culture has been shaped by the development of the idea of personal autonomy.

The Dying Citizen - Victor Davis Hanson: An informative recounting of recent American political and social history and how the significance of American citizenship has been eroded by progressive policies.

Return of the God Hypothesis - Stephen Meyer: Meyer makes the case for a creator God based on the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, and the enormous difficulties with any purely natural explanation of the origin of life.

Animal Algorithms - Eric Cassell: A fascinating look at the phenomena of animal, particularly insect and arachnid, behavior and the neural mechanisms which control it. The book leaves one with the conviction that belief that such mechanisms evolved solely via natural mechanisms requires a supreme act of blind faith.

Gunning for God - John Lennox (reread): Lennox performs a superb evisceration of the "new atheists," particularly Richard Dawkins.

I'm Not a Racist, But ... - Lawrence Blum: A very interesting analysis of race and racism.

Fault Lines - Voddie Baucham (reread): A strong critique of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality written by an African American pastor dismayed by, among other things, the sheer divisiveness of these contemporary movements.

God and Churchill - Sandys and Henley: The authors argue that Churchill's greatness was due largely to the influence of Christian principles instilled in him in his youth. Sandys is Churchill's great grandson.

Revolution - Peter Ackroyd: An account of English history from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Ackroyd's histories read almost like novels.

The Pioneers - David McCullough: The story of the struggles of the people who settled the Ohio River valley.

Sword and Scimitar - Raymond Ibrahim: A very important recounting of the history of the warfare between Muslims and Christians from the 7th century to the siege of Vienna in 1683 with implications for our contemporary understanding of Muslim attitudes toward Christianity and the West.

Killing Crazy Horse - O'Reilley and Dogard: Interesting stories about the clash between whites and Native Americans in the 19th century west.

What Can We Know? - Louis Pojman (reread): A readable text on epistemology - the study of what and how we can know and its relationship to belief.

The Hidden Spring - Mark Solm: Solm is a South African neuroscientist who explores the sources of human consciousness. Preview: Consciousness, Solm argues, does not arise out of the cortex of the brain.

Lone Survivor - Marcus Luttrell: Luttrell's account of his training as a navy SEAL and the tragic Afghanistan mission that cost the lives of over a dozen Americans and which only he survived.

The Stranger - Albert Camus (reread): Camus' famous account of modern existential man, alienated and unmoored.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (reread): Conrad's novella illustrates the depravity, cruelty and greed of "civilized" Europeans in the 19th century. It also can be read as a metaphor for the state of man without God.

I also read some Dickens (Barnaby Rudge and Dombey and Son) this year, but most of my reading in 2021 - excepting the two short novels listed above - was non-fiction which is even more hazardous to recommend to people than fiction.

You can, if interested, read last year's list here.

Whatever your taste in books, I encourage you to try to read at least one book more in 2022 than you did in 2021. Books, like friends and family, enrich our lives.

Atheism and the Nuremberg Trials

In an essay titled On Not Obeying Immoral Orders the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote the following:

In 1946, the Nazi war criminals on trial at Nuremberg all offered the defence that they were merely obeying orders, given by a duly constituted and democratically elected government. Under the doctrine of national sovereignty every government has the right to issue its own laws and order its own affairs. It took a new legal concept, namely a ‘crime against humanity’, to establish the guilt of the architects and administrators of genocide.

Well, this raises a perplexing question, I should think, for those who've adopted a secular outlook on things. How can there be "a crime against humanity" in a world which denies any higher moral authority than the state?

What reason, exactly, can someone who denies the existence of a transcendent moral law-giver provide us for saying that the holocaust was evil? Rabbi Sacks, of course, was a theist and had ample grounds for condemning it, but what of those non-theists who in the wake of WWII were morally outraged by the genocide of the Jews and the Japanese atrocities in Nanking and elsewhere?

Aside from a lot of emotive rhetoric, perhaps, what rational justification can they give for saying that these horrors were immoral or evil?

There is none. They were simply emoting, giving expressions to their feelings, but why were their feelings any more "right" than the feelings of the Nazis?

Objective moral right and wrong require a standard beyond our subjective individual intuitions of right and wrong, and in the absence of God there is no such standard. Those who condemned the Germans at Nuremberg were tacitly adverting to a higher law than the law of the state, even if some of them had no grounds for thinking that any such law existed.

The world did something similar in 1948 when the U.N. passed its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which it pronounced that all humans on the planet were born free and equal and had a right to life, a right not to be enslaved or tortured, etc.

But where did the drafters of this Declaration think such rights come from? If we're all the result of eons of mindless evolution how do we come to have "rights" which everyone else is obligated to respect? And for that matter, where does the obligation to respect those rights come from?

These things are simply comforting, feel-good fictions unless they're mandated by a moral authority who has the right and the power to hold us accountable.

Men can pass laws which entail punishments if those laws are transgressed. They can, if they have the power, impose their will on other men and exact punishment if their will is violated.

But what men can't do, independently of God, is claim that any behavior is wrong in any moral sense. The Soviet communists could pass a law saying that it's illegal to speak out against the state and send transgressors to the Gulag or to the grave, but what they couldn't do, at least not logically, was declare that it was morally wrong to speak out against the state.

It may have been illegal in the antebellum South to harbor runaway slaves, but that certainly didn't make it morally wrong. Legality and morality are two different things. The men on trial at Nuremberg broke no laws of their state and no one who denies a law that supercedes the laws of men can say that they did anything morally wrong.

The non-theist who wants to condemn them has left himself with no grounds to do so, for if objective morality is not rooted in something higher than man, either individual man or collective man, then it does not exist. Morality is merely a matter of arbitrary personal feelings and the power to impose them on others.

A non-theist who believes in human rights and moral evil should either give up those beliefs and live as a moral nihilist or give up his atheism. Otherwise, his moral judgments are incoherent.

Five Short Talks

I've mentioned philosopher of science Stephen Meyer frequently in the past, most recently yesterday. I mention him again today because he has delivered a series of five short but worthwhile talks at Prager U. on why the evidence scientists have uncovered in cosmology and biology over the last couple of decades makes more sense when seen as products of intentional design than as products of blind mechanistic processes.

Meyer is the author of three excellent books on the subject, Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt and Return of the God Hypothesis. Each of these contains enough scientific evidence and cogent argumentation to convince anyone who's not already dead set against it that the universe and living things are not just exorbitantly improbable flukes but are rather the products of intelligent engineering.

The videos are each about five minutes long. Here are the first two in the series:

You can access the rest of the talks in the series at the link.

The James Webb Space Telescope

Philosopher of Science Stephen Meyer, in a short essay at The Federalist, explains some of the significance of the recent launch of NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope.

Among other things, the Webb telescope may add additional confirmation onto the standard model of the origin of the universe that states the universe had a beginning in time, and if it did that's very powerful evidence that the universe had a Creator.

The Webb telescope is a $10 billion, 21-foot device that features a massive umbrella-like sun shield. It also boasts 15 times the range of motion and six times the light-gathering capability of the Hubble Space Telescope—NASA’s next best instrument for peering deep into space and far back in time.

It will operate from an orbit 1.5 million miles from earth.

The Webb instrument, Meyer explains, will be capable of seeing the first starlight from just after the Big Bang — a light, and an event, that tell us about the creation of the universe and, in their own ways, reveal God to the world.

Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have already detected energy, called the Cosmic Background Radiation, left over from what they believe to have been the initial Big Bang, but the Webb telescope could provide further confirmation of that event.

Here's Meyer:

The light that NASA’s new telescope seeks to detect comes, not from those very earliest moments after the beginning, but from the first stars and galaxies that formed an estimated several hundred thousand years later.

Detecting that light will nevertheless provide further confirmation of an expanding universe. Since the new telescope can detect infrared light—invisible light with extremely long wave-lengths—it can establish whether the most distant galaxies exhibit the amount of red shift that astronomers expect given the Big Bang.

As space plasma physicist and long-time NASA contractor Rob Sheldon has explained, “The light coming from these ancient, extremely distant galaxies, should be ‘ultra red-shifted’ into the infra-red range that the Webb telescope is designed to detect.”

This additional evidence of an expanding universe would further deepen the mystery associated with the Big Bang and add weight to a growing science-based “God hypothesis.”

But why does evidence for an initial creation event point to God?

If the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning — as observational astronomy and theoretical physics increasingly suggest — it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of any physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe.

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

Instead, whatever caused the universe to originate must not have been material and must exist beyond space and time. It must further have been capable of initiating a great change of state, from nothing to everything that exists.

Moreover, though Meyer doesn't mention this, to have created a universe as precisely calibrated and complex as this one the cause of the universe must be unimaginably intelligent and purposeful, two qualities of personal agents. The vast majority of possible universes are universes in which nothing much could exist except for perhaps a few atoms of hydrogen, but our universe is exceedingly complex and, in our little corner, fit for life.

Such considerations have led other scientists — former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Gerald Schroeder and the late Caltech astrophysicist Allan Sandage, for example—to posit an external creator as the best explanation for the origin of the universe as revealed by modern cosmology.

Oddly, the detection of light from extremely old and distant galaxies could also further corroborate the specifically biblical account of the origin of the universe. After all, the first words of the Bible not only affirm a “beginning,” but also that the first light came soon thereafter.

As Tulane University cosmologist Frank Tipler has noted, “Genesis tells us that there was a beginning and that after the beginning, light was the first created thing — exactly what modern astrophysics confirms.” [Nobel Prize winner] Arno Penzias has similarly noted, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses. . . .and the Bible as a whole.”

A passage from the late astronomer Robert Jastrow, himself an agnostic, seems appropriate here. He wrote in his book God and the Astronomers, that,

Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth.

And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact....

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

The "Didn't See it Coming" Presidency

President Biden has had a tough first year in office. During his campaign he declared that any president who was "responsible" for over 220,000 Covid deaths should not remain President of the United States.

Altogether in 2020 there were about 385,000 deaths attributed to Covid. More than 386,000 have been reported in the first year of the Biden presidency, 166,000 deaths more than the number he set as disqualifying Mr. Trump to be president.

Moreover, it must be noted that Mr. Biden has had the advantage of vaccines, therapeutics and a much better understanding by our medical professionals of how to treat the disease. Yet, 166,000 more people have died during his tenure than did during Mr. Trump's last year.

During the campaign he promised the American people that, “I’m not going to shut down the country, I’m not going to shut down the economy, I’m going to shut down the virus!” But of course he hasn't.

Should he be blamed for this? No, it's not his fault or anyone's (except the Chinese) that the virus continues to plague us. What he should be faulted for is hubris and hypocrisy. He made a promise that he had no power to deliver on, blamed Trump for a failure that was not Trump's fault, and refuses to apply the same standard to himself that he set for his predecessor.

An honorable man, having declared Trump "responsible" for 220,000 Covid deaths and thereby unfit for office would apply that same standard to himself and resign or at least apologize, but Mr. Biden will apparently do neither.

Instead, we're subjected to a constant stream of excuses. After only one year in office his presidency has become the "We didn't see it coming" presidency.

As Jim Geraghty writes at NRO, they didn't foresee Omicron spreading so rapidly and weren't prepared with test kits for it. They didn't foresee the Taliban taking over Afghanistan so quickly. They didn't foresee inflation coming or lasting so long. They didn't foresee the supply-chain crisis coming. They didn't foresee the labor shortage coming or the hordes of migrants at the border.

It's hard to imagine how brutal the media would be, how brutal candidate Biden himself would be, if the Trump administration described itself as unable to foresee so many difficulties.

Surely they would declare Mr. Trump and his leadership completely inept, and they'd have good reason to do so.

A Christmas Eve Noel

I thought it fitting on Christmas eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

Three Christmas Symbols

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. Actually, the X is a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin, it has signified the opposite of any attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word is.

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A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

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No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young, and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be quite likely condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (Say the words "Saint Nicholas" quickly with a European accent and you'll understand how we got the name Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

Christmas Magic

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding an incomprehensible idea, the idea of the Incarnation.

The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and we could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, that hope, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with mystery and magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the real source and traditional meaning of the night are irrelevant or that they're something other than what they really are.

People feel they should be joyful at Christmas, but they can't say why. They seem to be trying to manufacture some sort of artificial "Christmas spirit," just like they try to gin up a feeling of near-delirium on New Year's eve.

An analogy: Picture the celebrations of players and fans after winning the Super Bowl or the World Series, but imagine the revelry and rejoicing even though the game hadn't yet been played. It'd certainly seem nonsensical and strange, but this is pretty much what a secular Christmas is like. No "game" has been played, nothing has been won, there's really nothing to celebrate, but the merriment and partying goes on nonetheless. Why?

All the talk of reindeer, ads for cars, beer, and phones, all the insipid "holiday" songs and movies - none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. The "joy" seems phony, empty and forced.

Indeed, Christmas Eve is hollow without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

One of the things that makes Christmas "good news that will cause great joy for all the people," is that the One who came to dwell among us has made it so that we can break out of the prison-house of meaninglessness and hopelessness that enchains us if all there is to life is being born, enjoying a few good meals, suffering and dying.

Christmas represents the possibility that we can throw off the crushing weight of purposelessness, emptiness and despair that plague modern life. It reminds us that our lives can matter for eternity.

Lovely thought, that, and one of the good things about it is that it's never too late for the transformation to begin. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of What Child Is This on their album Lost Christmas Eve.

The line that I find most poignant and hopeful is when an older man, though dying, finds his life transformed by reflecting on the Christmas story and cries out, "To be this old and have your life just begin!"

Here's Rob Evan of TSO performing the song.

The Messengers

There are a lot of Christmas songs and movies out there that, unfortunately, have almost nothing to do with Christmas. The medieval Church allegedly co-opted a pagan festival and turned it into a celebration of the birth of Jesus, and now, it seems, our secular culture is seeking to take the celebration of the birth of Jesus and turn it into a secular festival.

In doing so, however, the true significance of the day is missed.

If you'd like to watch an artistically outstanding portrayal of the event that Christians around the world will celebrate this Saturday, if you haven't already seen it, you might check out a special titled The Messengers produced by the makers of The Chosen.

The Messengers depicts the birth of Christ as recounted by His mother Mary some fifteen years after His Resurrection and Ascension.

The story takes up the first 35 minutes of this video and opens with Mary Magdalene being secretly smuggled into the residence at which Jesus' mother was staying, the smuggling being made necessary because of the persecution the early Christians were suffering.

The actual story begins at the 1:24:45 mark:

After you watch, I highly recommend listening to the Bonner family sing O Holy Night. It's spectacular:

Why Christians Celebrate Christ's Birthday

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities with the movie are purely coincidental, although the similarities with my novel Bridging the Abyss, are not.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him.

Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

One Solitary Life

Most readers of Viewpoint have probably heard the vignette about the enormous historical impact made by the life of Jesus titled "One Solitary Life." It originated in a sermon delivered on July 11, 1926 by pastor and author James Allan Francis who was speaking to the Baptist Young People's Union in Los Angeles.

His message finished with a description of Jesus' impact on the subsequent history of the world, and the concluding excerpt went viral. It received global circulation and is still a powerful yet concise statement of the world-changing effect Jesus' short life has had over the last two millenia.

As we approach the Christmas season it's fitting that we share this three minute film adaptation of Francis' words produced by Illustra Media:

Astonishing Behavior

This wonderful video raises some fascinating questions:

How did the physiology necessary to camouflage itself like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these cephalopods display evolve by those same mechanisms?

If mutations affect DNA, and DNA generates proteins, and proteins create tissues and enzymes, etc. what is it that mutations act upon in the organism that gives rise to behavior? How does the octopus "know" to make itself look like the particular background it finds itself in, and how did, or could, such a phenomenon evolve through mechanistic processes that didn't "know" what they were doing?

The evolution of any behavior requires not just the appropriate genetic mutations to create the neural algorithms that control the behavior but also the physiological structures necessary for the behavior. These changes, moreover, must occur gradually over eons of time and pretty much simultaneously in a population of organisms, and, according to the naturalistic account, as a result of purely blind, undirected mechanisms.

If you keep all that in mind, you might find yourself strongly tempted to think that maybe the cephalopod's amazing abilities are the result of intelligent engineering of some sort and that naturalism, despite its popularity among intellectuals, offers completely inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.

The Language Chasm

An interesting short article by Michael Egnor at Mind Matters explores the difference between human language and the vocalizations of other animals. Despite having much of the hearing and vocal apparatus necessary for speech, animals are not capable of language.

Egnor begins by quoting science writer Tom Seigfried who states that:

It’s true that humans, and humans alone, evolved the complex set of voice, hearing and brain-processing skills enabling full-scale sophisticated vocal communication. Yet animals can make complicated sounds; parrots can mimic human speech and cats can clearly convey that it’s time for a treat.

Many animals possess an acute sense of hearing and are able to distinguish random noises from intentional communication.

Much of the physiological apparatus for hearing and speaking is found in all land-dwelling vertebrates — the tetrapods — including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. “Humans share a significant proportion of our basic machinery of hearing and vocal production with other tetrapods,” Fitch writes in the Annual Review of Linguistics.

Even so, Egnor argues, only humans have language. Here's part of his reasoning:

[Animals] can make and respond to signs—gestures, grunts and the like. A dog, for example, can respond appropriately to simple words directed at him (“Sit!” “Fetch!”). But all animal communication is symbols, that is, signals that point directly to an object.

In this case, the object is a simple expected action the animal is to perform immediately.

What animals cannot do is communicate using abstractions. They cannot use designators, — words employed abstractly as language. For example, a dog can be trained, by reward and punishment, to stay when told, “Stay!”

He associates the sound “s-t-a-y” with a behavior and performs the behavior. But he doesn’t know what you mean when you say “Let’s stay a bit longer on the beach,” “He extended his stay in Peru,” or “The judge issued a stay of the eviction order.”

Animals can only think concretely. Their thought is of particulars—the particular bowl of food, thrown stick, or warm bed. They don’t contemplate nutrition, exercise, or rest.

Humans can think abstractly, without any particular physical object in mind. For example, a vet might tell her client during an office visit, “Tuffy here needs to lose about 1.5 kg. I suggest a lower calorie kibble and more exercise—if possible, before bedtime.”

She can explain it to her client but not to the dog because it’s all abstractions about times, places, things, and concepts. Of course, he might recognize his name, “Tuffy,” and raise his ears slightly to see if he is being told to do something concrete.

Concrete thought needs no language because the concrete thinker focuses on a perceived object. Tuffy thinks of his bowl of food. If he were to think of nutrition, an abstract concept, he would need abstract designators as objects, not only to express his thought but even to think it.

In short, animals don’t have language because they don’t have abstract thought and thus have neither the capacity nor the need for abstract designators—words as language.

Language is a tool for abstract thinking and only human beings can do that.

The gap between animals and human beings is not just a narrow evolutionary jump. It's a chasm and there's no plausible explanation for how blind evolutionary processes could've bridged it.

The Kingdom of Speech

Yesterday I put up a post in which I noted that many researchers investigating the uniqueness of human language have concluded that it defies any naturalistic explanation for its origin. That post sent me back to one I did several years ago on the last book written by the late Tom Wolfe which was also on the mystery of human language and thought I'd repost it.

Here it is:

I've been enjoying Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the theory of evolution and/or the history of the study of linguistics. Michael Egnor at Evolution News concurs with this commendation, and goes even further. Rather than me telling you what the book is about, I'll quote Egnor:

Tom Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and it's superb. Wolfe's theme is that human language is unique and is not shared in any way with other animals. He argues forcefully that evolutionary stories about the origin of human language are not credible.

In the first chapter of his book, Wolfe describes an article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology from 2014, co-authored by leading linguist Noam Chomsky and seven colleagues. Wolfe declares that:

"The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever," [researchers] concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we'll keep trying, they said gamely... but we'll have to start from zero again.

One of the [researchers] was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. "In the last 40 years," he and [others] were saying, "there has been an explosion of research on this problem," and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia....

One hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced, and they had learned...nothing....In that same century and a half, Einstein discovered the ...the relativity of speed, time and distance... Pasteur discovered that microorganisms, notably bacteria, cause an ungodly number of diseases, from head colds to anthrax and oxygen-tubed, collapsed-lung, final-stage pneumonia....Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the so-called building blocks genes are made of...and 150 years' worth of linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline discovered...nothing...about language.

What is the problem? What's the story?...What is it that they still don't get after a veritable eternity?

Wolfe provides a précis of his argument:

Speech is not one of man's several unique attributes -- speech is the attribute of all attributes!

Yet despite almost two centuries of speculations and hypothesizing we're no closer today to being able to explain what language is or how we come to have it than we've ever been. Indeed, Darwin and his votaries tried to come up with a plausible explanation and failed so utterly that scientists gave up for almost eighty years trying to explain it. Says Wolfe:

It is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man - language - was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

It's also hard to believe that it's been 72 years since 1949 and still no progress has been made on this question. Egnor writes:

And yet, as Wolfe points out, Darwinists are at an utter loss to explain how language -- the salient characteristic of man -- "evolved."

None of the deep drawer of evolutionary just-so stories come anywhere close to explaining how man might have acquired the astonishing ability to craft unlimited propositions and concepts and subtleties within subtleties using a system of grammar and abstract designators (i.e. words) that are utterly lacking anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Egnor, who is himself a neuroscientist, closes his piece with these words:

I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities -- the intellect's ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing -- and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses.

We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language -- a simulacrum of our abstract minds -- has no root in the animal world.

Language is the tool by which we think abstractly. It is sui generis. It is a gift, a window into the human soul, something we are made with, and it did not evolve.

Language is a rock against which evolutionary theory wrecks, one of the many rocks -- the uncooperative fossil record, the jumbled molecular evolutionary tree, irreducible complexity, intricate intracellular design, the genetic code, the collapsing myth of junk DNA, the immaterial human mind -- that comprise the shoal that is sinking Darwin's Victorian fable.

The charm of Wolfe's book is that it reads like a novel, which is the metier for which Wolfe is famous. It's free of scientific jargon, it's funny and contains some fascinating insights into several of the major figures in the history of the search for an explanation for the origin and nature of language. Plus, it's only 169 pages long.

All in all a great read.

The Extraordinary Gift of Human Language

Biologist Ann Gauger holds the heretical opinion, at least it's heretical in today's cockeyed culture, that among all life forms, human beings are exceptional. Here's a quick summary of some of the traits she lists as making us not just different from other mammals but radically, qualitatively different:

We have specific traits that are well outside the norm, so far outside the norm that some scientists see the gaps as unbridgeable. These include abstract thought, foresight, speech, art, music, sociality, theory of mind, manipulation of the material world, charity, wickedness, and religion.

There may be others I haven’t thought of. We see rudiments of these things in animals, but human abilities are orders of magnitude higher than animals (or lower in the case of wickedness). Our specific abilities are greater than are necessary for survival, so unless they are linked to other traits why should we have a Mozart or an Einstein or a Galileo? What we do as scientists is pretty esoteric, right? Is there a selective advantage to any of it?

Maybe at low levels, but being Shakespeare or understanding the molecular dynamics of ribosomes or however you would describe your work is purely gratuitous.

In other words, it's hard to see how or why natural selection would have sorted out from among our primitive ancestors a few who possessed the capacity to do calculus.

One of the most inexplicable uniquely human traits is our capacity for language. Gauger quotes the late psychologist David Premack who challenged anyone to:

...reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or proto-humans were hunting mastodons…Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers, to be able to remark, ‘Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack’?

Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like.

For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

Gauger also cites an abstract from a scientific article on language evolution at the website Scorched Earth which concludes that there's simply no evolutionary explanation for human language:

We argue ... that the richness of [speculations about how language evolved] is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.

We show that, to date,

(1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity;

(2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved;

(3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon;

(4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable.

Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.

So, there is no plausible naturalistic explanation for how language arose in human beings, just as there's no plausible naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, or the origin of human consciousness, the origin of biological information or even for biological processes like meiosis, mitosis, metamorphosis, or sexual reproduction.

Nor can naturalism provide us with a satisfactory scientific account of cosmic fine-tuning or moral obligation.

When confronted with the most fundamental ontological questions naturalism simply shrugs its shoulders, and yet we're told by some that naturalism is nevertheless the most rational position to hold. Its chief competitor, the belief that there's an intelligent mind underlying the cosmos and all that it contains, we're told, is mere superstition.

We might be forgiven for suspecting that between these two worldview alternatives - unconscious, purposeless forces or an intelligent purposeful mind - the latter is actually the more rational explanation for the phenomena Gauger lists and the former is the more superstitious.

Two Excellent Books

Since our inception in 2004 VP has focused largely, though certainly not exclusively, on topics that lie at the intersection of science, philosophy and religion. These interests have led me this past year to two outstanding books that fit this profile well.

The first was philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's Return of the God Hypothesis which came out last spring and has received excellent reviews in places like the Wall Street Journal and The Claremont Review of Books. It is the sort of book that would lead most open minded readers to conclude that the scientific case for a designer of both the cosmos and life is exceedingly strong.

Meyer's argument is based on the overwhelming evidence for a cosmic beginning, the extraordinarily improbable fine-tuning of the constants and forces that make the universe suitable for life, and the massive obstacles facing any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life itself.

Each of these phenomena is much more likely to be the result of an intentional design than a series of astronomically improbable accidents. The arguments in Meyer's book make the denial of this assertion intellectually absurd.

The second of the two books is one that I've referenced in several recent posts (see here, here and here). It's a book titled Animal Algorithms by an expert in navigational systems named Eric Cassell. The posts to which I've linked will give the reader a sense of the amazing abilities that have somehow been programmed into animals, especially insects, and Cassell's explanation of these abilities in Animal Algorithms should be read by every biology student and teacher.

Here's an excerpt from a review of the book by Jonathan Witt at Evolution News:

In Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts author Eric Cassell explores the buzzing, migrating, web-spinning, and colony-building world of ingenious animals blessed with gobsmackingly impressive skills — in many cases, from birth.

How do blind mound-building termites know passive heating and cooling strategies that dazzle skilled human architects? What taught the honeybee its dance, or its hive mates how to read the complex message of the dance? How do monarch butterflies known to fly thousands of miles to a single mountainside in Mexico, to a place they’ve never been before?

The secret, according to author Eric Cassell: behavioral algorithms embedded in their tiny brains.

But how did these embedded programs arise in the history of life? There’s the problem for evolutionists. “Specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and the Cambrian explosion are inexplicable from a Darwinian viewpoint,” comments Baylor University computer engineer and intelligent design theorist Robert J. Marks. “In this book, Cassell masterfully adds animal algorithms to the list.”

Return of the God Hypothesis is excellent but hefty and in places a bit technical. Animal Algorithms is about 200 pages of fascinating explanation of what the latest research shows about animal behavior. Meyer's book is a must read for anyone who has an interest in the origin of life, or the origin and structure of the cosmos.

Cassell's book is must reading for anyone who has an interest in whether unguided Neo-Darwinian evolution can really provide a plausible explanation for the astonishing behaviors of living things.

They'd both make perfect Christmas gifts for someone whose interests lie along these lines.

Weaver Ants

In his book Animal Algorithms, Eric Cassell describes the amazing behavior of what are perhaps the most astonishing creatures on the planet - ants.

Somehow, in a brain so tiny that it's almost invisible to the naked eye, ants store the information that allows them, among other things, to farm, engage in warfare, practice slavery, exploit division of labor, build consensus, form castes, construct cities and architecture and use trigonometry, polarized light, and chemical tracks to navigate as well as employ a variety of chemicals (pheromones) to send and receive communications.

These behaviors require software algorithms whose origins are simply inexplicable in terms of unguided Darwinian processes like genetic mutation, natural selection and genetic drift.

Below are a couple of videos that describe the incredible abilities of one species of ants called weaver ants. As you watch keep in mind that none of these behaviors is learned, they're all innate, and each one requires a separate suite of genes and algorithms. Where did the information necessary to do all this come from?

What's especially astonishing is that these tiny creatures know instinctively to carry larvae to the leaves and to draw the silk from the larvae to sew the leaves together.

One argument against intelligent design is that it's not a scientific hypothesis, presumably since it posits a designer that's not subject to scientific scrutiny. Even so, consider this disjunctive proposition:

Either the behavior of weaver ants and other social insects is explicable in terms of blind, purposeless processes acting by chance in a coordinated fashion to produce the physiology and behavior seen in these videos, or the physiology and behavior are the result of intentional, purposeful and intelligent engineering.

If this proposition covers all the live options, and if the first disjunct is as astronomically improbable as Cassell's book makes it seem, then the second disjunct is most likely to be true. In other words, it's more probable that the physiology and behavior of ants is the product of intentional engineering than that it's the product of blind, purposeless processes.

If one doubts this conclusion one really should read Animal Algorithms.

Educational Philosophies: The U.S. and China

A Chinese mom doing graduate studies in America is dismayed by the quality of her son's education compared to that he'd receive in her native China. She wrote scathingly of her concerns in a piece for the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which she noted that the flaccid state of our educational system is putting us at a real disadvantage to the emerging economic and military competitor across the Pacific.

She writes:

As a Chinese doctoral student raising a young son in the U.S., I am mystified by how American elementary schools coddle students. In China, schools are run like boot camps. What do the therapeutic comforts America showers on its youth portend for a growing competition with China?

Good question, but what does she mean when she says that schools coddle students?

I recently registered my son in the third grade at a New Jersey public school. Hattie had recently finished two years of elementary school in Chengdu, China, where he trotted off to school each day with a backpack stuffed with thick textbooks and materials for practices and quizzes. Here he leaves for school with little in his backpack other than a required “healthy snack.”

The first day he came home with a sheet of math homework: 35 addition problems. He finished in about a minute. On the second day, he was asked to write 328 in different configurations. He first wrote down 300+20+8, following the prompt, and then 164x2, 82x4 and 656÷2.

My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age. When he was 5, I taught him fractions. Two years later, I introduced him to algebra. It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children. Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests.

This is not a philosophy shared by American schools. On Friday night my son came home announcing in bewilderment that he didn’t have any homework. In China students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it.

How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists and engineers?

Well, the answer is, we won't. We've already decided that what children do outside of school is more important than what they do in school. Social activities, recreation, athletics all are greater priorities than learning.

Teachers know that if they assign homework many students simply won't do it, and there'll be no penalty for not doing it. If a teacher tries to impose a penalty of some sort he or she is likely to run afoul of both irate parents and unsupportive administrators.

Ms. Zhang continues her critique:

Chinese education pushes the young in directions that serve the party and the state. Youth are trained to be skilled laborers ready to endure hard work and brutal competition. Such political indoctrination is taught side by side with math and science.

American education is supposed to be about opening minds but appears not to fill them with much. Worse, young Americans are not prepared for the demands of being an adult.

This phenomenon started in higher education. For years attending American universities, I have been disturbed to watch colleges fabricate “anxiety” and “depression” in students who are not mentally ill.

Administrators have used grossly exaggerated terms such as “trauma,” and melodramatic expressions such as “I cannot begin to imagine what you have suffered,” to turn into a catastrophe what is best described as disappointment. This creates a culture of victimization.

The absurdity peaked after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Students from elite universities claimed existential despair, finding comfort in cocoa, coloring books and therapy dogs. Classes were canceled and exams postponed, all in the name of soothing 20-somethings who need to be learning how to adapt to reality as adults.

Chinese citizens enjoy mocking the Western “snowflakes.” Less amusing is what this trend means for the U.S. as China no longer hides its enmity for America.

Her analysis of American education would be funny were it not so serious.

It's hard to imagine the left, which largely controls education in this country, being overmuch concerned about competing with China. Competition in education, as in most other spheres of life, is anathema to the left, because it entails a hierarchy of ability and a perpetuation of socio-economic classes.

Progressives whose goal is "equity" and a classless society will never commit themselves to higher standards of educational excellence if it means that some will fail to measure up. Besides, an ignorant, uneducated citizenry is, they believe, much easier to manipulate.

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote: "A nation that expects to remain ignorant and free...expects what never was and never will be."

The Astonishing Hypothesis

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

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

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

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair. The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism is wrong.

Why that belief is "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are very good reasons for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true.

Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

Spider Webs

This BBC time lapse video shows a spider spinning its web and implicitly elicits a deeply important question in the mind of the viewer.

Here are a few interesting facts about spiders gleaned from an article at Evolution News by Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms, a book every biology student should read:

• Spiders can make different types of silk, depending upon its function. For example, the golden orb-weaver spider has seven kinds of silk glands, with six spinnerets. Some is used for spinning webs, but other types are used for wrapping prey and encasing eggs.
• The webs consist of sticky “catching threads”; radial “spokes” for holding the sticky threads; “bridge threads” that act as guy-lines for holding the web up; “signal threads” that inform the spider through vibrations sensed in the legs that prey is in the web; and “drag lines” for access into the web from her home.
• Spiders are able to determine both the angle and distance of the prey from the center of the web. They are able to determine the prey location using the same basic technique we use to determine the location of the source of sound. Humans use the difference in intensity of sound received by our ears to estimate the relative location. Spiders do something similar based on the intensity of vibrations received, in their case sensed through eight legs.
• Silk can be stronger than steel of the same thickness, can stretch more than rubber, and is stickier than most tape. A typical garden spiderweb is made of 65 to 195 feet of silk.
• Silk has been described as “easily the most remarkable building material on the planet, and it has one source: arthropods.”
• Despite great effort, humans have yet to produce anything functionally equivalent to silk. Through genetic engineering, attempts have been made to duplicate it without success.

The spider, Cassell states, "exhibits many characteristics of human engineering, and engineering of a very high order." The pattern of the web, how it is to be spun, the spider's predation behavior, all of this requires an enormous amount of information, and it's all innate, contained in a brain the size of a pinhead.

So, here's the question I mentioned in the first sentence: How did all of this, the anatomical, physiological and behavioral properties of spiders, evolve by blind, unguided processes. No one knows. Maybe that's because they didn't.

Why the Universe Cannot be Infinitely Old

One thorny problem for any naturalist metaphysics is that the consensus among scientists is that the universe came into being at some point in the past. If that's true then, for reasons discussed in this post, it's strong evidence for the existence of a creative, intelligent, transcendent, eternal, and personal first cause, i.e. either God or something very much like God.

If such a cause exists, of course, then naturalism is false, so naturalists, understandably chary about accepting the conclusion that their metaphysics is false, sometimes take refuge in the argument that the universe is infinitely old, past eternal, or beginning-less. The post linked to above offered scientific reasons for rejecting this argument, but there are philosophical reasons as well.

One of these is that an actually infinite set of any physical entities, whether they be moments, or atoms, or whatever, is probably impossible. Philosopher William Lane Craig explains in the following short video some of the paradoxes that arise in an infinite series of entities and why such a series is highly implausible:

Moreover, if the universe were in fact infinitely old it could never have arrived at the present moment.

Kirk Durston in an article at Evolution News and Views explains why:

The evidence from science points to a beginning for the universe. Some atheists, understanding the possible theological implications of a beginning, prefer to set aside science and assert that the past is infinite either in terms of the number of years this universe has existed, or in terms of a fantasized infinite series of universes in a multiverse....

In the real world, an infinite past means that if you were to set the current year as t = 0 and count back into the past, there would never be an end to your counting, for there is no year in the past that was the "beginning."

No matter how long you counted, you would still have an infinite number of years ahead of you to count and, if you were to look back at the set of years you have already counted, it would always be finite.

In other words, if the universe is infinitely old then, if you began counting back from the present moment, you could never count back to a starting point. No matter if you counted forever you would never reach a first moment of the universe.

Likewise, neither could you count forward from infinity past to the present moment. If the universe extends infinitely into the past and contains an infinity of past moments then no matter how many of those moments tick by the present moment would never arrive.

Put differently, in order for a series of moments to arrive at the present there has to be a starting point, but if the past is eternal then the necessary starting point keeps receding further and further into the past and in fact does not exist at all. If there's no initial moment then there's no second moment, and if no second then no third, and so on, and if all this is so, then there is no present moment either.

But obviously there is a present moment, so it would seem that the assumption of a past eternal universe is false.

Durston goes into more detail than this, but the implication is clear. If the universe is not past eternal then it had a beginning. And if it had a beginning it had a cause. And any cause of the universe must have the properties listed above, all of which is to say that a finite universe is strong evidence that theism is true.

Will Roe Go?

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case which has the possibility of resulting in the overturn of Roe v. Wade. SCOTUS will probably deliver their judgment in late June or early July.

Roe is the 1973 decision in which five justices found lurking somewhere in the Constitution a right for women to kill their unborn babies if they so chose.

A lot of folks on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate are concerned that the present Court will find that no such right exists anywhere in the Constitution, and a lot of people on the pro-life side are equally concerned that the Court will manufacture some reason not to overturn Roe.

I'm not a legal scholar, but for my part I can't imagine that the Founding Fathers inserted language into some Constitutional nook or cranny that endowed women with such a right, and a lot of pro-choicers agree, including the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who acknowledged that Roe was bad law.

The role of the Court is to rule on what the Constitution says, not on what the justices wish it said or imagine it to say, but that seems to be what they did in 1973 when, in an act of legal prestidigitation, they produced from the Constitutional hat a right to abort a pregnancy.

In any case, if Roe is overturned it will not end abortion in America, but it will return to each of the states the responsibility of deciding what restrictions, if any, they wish to place on it. Some states will permit abortion on demand up until birth, maybe even after. Others may prohibit it almost entirely. Most will land somewhere in the middle.

The point is that it will be left to the people of each state to decide, through their legislatures, what they want the law to be. This is how a democratic Republic is supposed to work.

By overruling the states in the Roe decision five Justices on the Supreme Court stripped millions of citizens in this country of the right to determine their own laws on an issue the Court had no Constitutional warrant for removing from the purview of the states.

As Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) writes:

It [the abortion controversy] won’t be settled for a few years. But then it will settle. This path—overturning—is the closest America will get to justice and democratic satisfaction on this issue. Overturning Roe would mean returning a furiously contested national issue of almost 50 years standing to the democratic process.

This wouldn’t “solve” the problem or “end” the struggle. It would bring the responsibility for solving and ending it closer to the people. In the short term it would cause new disruption and renewed argument, as Roe itself did when it negated abortion statutes in 46 states and the District of Columbia.

... It will take time to play out. Politicians who stray too far from true public opinion, as opposed to whatever got burped up in a recent poll, will fairly quickly face backlash at the polls.

It's possible that the Court chooses to allow Roe to stand in some form, but if they don't overturn it now they're just kicking the can down the road, ensuring continued cultural battles and guaranteeing that many more cases come before them in the future.

Who Designed the Designer?

Philosopher of science Jay Richards is a proponent of intelligent design, i.e. the view that the universe and life show evidence (lots of it) of having been intelligently engineered. Richards asserts that one of the most frequent objections he encounters, one raised in fact by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion is, "If the universe and life are designed then who designed the designer?"

Laypeople can be forgiven for asking the question because it seems common-sensical, but someone of Dawkins' stature should know better and he took a lot of heat from philosophers, even philosophers sympathetic to his metaphysical naturalism, for his evident lack of philosophical sophistication.

Here's a short video in which Richards addresses the question:

It's worth noting, I think, that the attempt to use this question as an indictment of the intelligent design hypothesis is misguided for other reasons besides those Richards gives.

Let's look at the first part of the question: "If the universe and life are designed...." implies a willingness to accept for the sake of argument that the universe is designed, but as soon as he's granted that the naturalist has gotten himself into trouble.

Once it's conceded by the naturalist, even if only hypothetically, that the universe is designed then whether there's just one designer or an indefinite number doesn't much matter. Naturalism would stand refuted since naturalism holds that the universe is self-existent.

Moreover, to posit more designers than what's necessary to explain the universe is a violation of the principle that our explanations should contain the minimum number of entities necessary to explain what we're trying to explain - in this case, the universe. So the simplest, and therefore the best, explanation is that there's only a single designer of the universe.

There's no good reason to think that anyone who believes there's a designer of the universe must allow for an infinite regress of designers.

We might also point out that the universe is a contingent entity. Now contingent entities require a necessary being as their ultimate cause and a necessary being is, by definition, not itself dependent upon anything else for its existence.

So, if the universe was designed by a non-contingent being then it makes no sense to ask what designed that being. Nothing designed it. If it were designed it would be contingent upon whatever designed it.

Finally, it should be noted that if there is an intelligent designer it must not only be a necessary being, but it must also transcend space and time because these are aspects of the designed universe. Therefore, the designer must be non-spatial and non-temporal. It must also be very intelligent and very powerful. In other words, it must be something very much like God.

Given all this, the naturalist would be better off resisting the temptation to ask "who designed the designer." It's a question which carries far less polemical punch than they think it does.

Unthinkable in Fifty Years

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week on a case out of Mississippi that could very well overturn Roe v. Wade and/or Casey v. Planned Parenthood. If that should happen the laws governing abortion abortion would then be left to each state to decide.

The Court's decision will probably not be announced until late June, but the controversy surrounding the possibility that the current abortion regime may be undone brought to mind a post I did a couple of years ago which featured a claim by an English professor and writer named Karen Swallow Prior who argued that fifty years from now abortion will be "unthinkable."

Here's the post:

Vox.com has been running a series in which guests are invited to offer their opinion on something commonly experienced today that they think will be considered unthinkable in fifty years. Some sample selections are "eating meat", "youth tackle football", "self-driving cars", etc.

In her submission, English professor Karen Swallow Prior believes that just as we look back today at chattel slavery and wonder how people could ever have justified the idea of owning other human beings, fifty years from now people will shake their heads as they look back at the practice of abortion on demand.

Here's the lede for her argument:

The list of those who have had few or no legal rights throughout history is staggering: women, children, orphans, widows, Jews, gays and lesbians, slaves, former slaves, descendants of slaves, those with leprosy, undocumented immigrants — to name a few.

Nothing marks the progress of any society more than the expansion of human rights to those who formerly lacked them. I believe that if such progress is to continue, prenatal human beings will be included in this group, and we will consider elective abortion primitive and cruel in the future.

The eradication of abortion may be difficult to imagine. But consider how difficult it would have been for our grandparents to foresee a culture in which nearly one in four women has an abortion by age 45. Certainly, some factors leading to this situation reflect real and substantial progress for women: greater equality, more work options, improved understanding of sexuality, and increased moral agency.

But rights for women that come at the expense of unborn children aren’t true liberation; they merely, as one writer put it, enable the “redistribution of oppression.”

Prior goes on to make the case that a fetus is a human being entitled to the same rights as humans which have been born and that pro-choice advocates tacitly acknowledge this when they declare that they want abortion to be "safe and rare." Why should it be rare if it's just a benign medical procedure like an appendectomy? Who would bother to insist that they want appendectomies to be rare?

It's also ironic that those who declare themselves firmly on the side of science will twist themselves into pretzels denying the science that shows the tiny form in the womb to be a developing child.

Ultrasound technology and prenatal surgical interventions provide dispositive scientific evidence that what's in the mother's womb is not some alien blob of tissue and extravagant gender reveal parties and the insuppressible personality of the child in the womb offer psychological confirmation to an increasing number of mothers that what they're carrying is in fact a baby.

Prior concludes with this:

Our modern-day willingness to settle for sex apart from commitment, to accept the dereliction of duty by men who impregnate women (for men are the primary beneficiaries of liberal abortion laws), and to uphold the systematic suppression of sex’s creative energy and function are practices that people of other ages would have considered bizarre.

As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.

When we do, we will look back at elective abortion and wonder — as we do now with polluting and smoking — why we so wholeheartedly embraced it.

We will look at those ultrasound images of 11-week old fetuses somersaulting in the waters of the womb and lack words to explain to our grandchildren why we ever defended their willful destruction in the name of personal choice and why we harmed so many women to do so.

It will be interesting, for those still around in fifty years, to see whether abortion will be to those alive then what slavery is to us today.

Interested readers can peruse Prior's full column at the link.

The Left's Race Problem

Recently a white cop shot a 61 year-old man in a wheelchair, in the back, nine times. The man had shoplifted and refused to cooperate with the officer and so the officer shot him. Nine times. In the back. It was pretty much a one day story in the media.

There was no consequent violence in the streets, no calls to defund the police, no outpouring of grief for the shoplifter.

Several days ago a man named Darrell Brooks drove his vehicle into a crowd at a Wisconsin Christmas parade, killing six, including an 8 year-old child:

Investigators allege Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, turned into the parade route in Waukesha on Nov. 21 and swerved the vehicle side-to-side without slowing down as he struck dozens of people.

That was a two day story. There was no talk about race or racism in the progressive media, despite the fact that Brooks' social media was filled with racial hate and vitriol.

So why the reticence? In the first case a white cop shot and killed a white wheelchair-bound victim. The media evidently saw no opportunity to use this incident to incite racial animosities so they quickly lost interest.

In the second case, the driver was black and the victims were all white, but this, too, did not fit the media narrative of a virulent white supremacy stalking the land looking for black victims. So after a day or two they let pretty much let the story fade out.

So here's your homework assignment: Imagine in case number one that the wheelchair bound victim had been black, and imagine in case number two that the races of the driver and his victims had been reversed. What do you suppose the media reaction would've been then, and what would the state of our cities be as you read this?

It probably doesn't take much imagination to picture the difference in the media's reaction to these horrors were the circumstances as we imagined them, and, if the response to the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake are any indication, it's quite likely our cities would be ablaze right now.

Which might lead one to wonder why our major media yawn at crimes that would have them churning out condemnations and deprecations of white society had things been the other way around.

Is it not itself racist to be relatively indifferent to murders that would elicit moral apoplexy were the races reversed, and isn't this unequal treatment at best irresponsible? Is it not a contributing source to the deep racial resentments and polarization in our society when the crimes of whites are maximized and similar crimes perpetrated by blacks are minimized?

And why is so much of our society so eager to racialize everything that they were calling Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist despite the fact that there was nothing at all racial about the shooting in which he was involved?

Jason Riley (I shouldn't have to mention that Riley is black, but in today's climate I guess I better) writing at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) says this:

The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white.

Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters.

Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind.

Liberals want us to believe that racial disparities in police shootings and incarceration rates stem from a biased system and have little to do with racial disparities in criminality. They want to talk about so-called hate crimes that involve white assailants and black victims, but not those involving black assailants and white or Asian victims.

They want headlines to read “White Cop Shoots Black Suspect,” even when there’s no evidence that the encounter was racially motivated. This is playing with fire.

Riley's right, and no amount of rationalization by those on the left can excuse the irresponsibility of their tendentious behavior.