Are We Naked Apes?

It's not uncommon to hear human beings referred to as hairless apes. We look a lot like apes, after all, and according to Darwinism apes and humans have descended from a common ape-like ancestor.

Nevertheless, neuroscientist Michael Egnor isunimpressed by the morphological similarities. According to Egnor,

We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm. It is obvious and manifest in our biological nature. We are rational animals, and our rationality is all the difference.

Human beings, Egnor argues, have mental abilities or powers, that animals simply do not.

Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man.

Nonhuman animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite.

Humans also have these same material powers, of course, but they have additional powers that are immaterial:

Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts.

A universal is an abstract concept like humanity or treeness to which particular humans or trees belong. Egnor continues:

Human beings are rational animals.

Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.

Universals can be represented in matter — the words I am writing in this post are representations of concepts — but universals cannot be instantiated in matter. I cannot put the concepts themselves on a computer screen or on a piece of paper, nor can the concepts exist physically in my brain.

Concepts, which are universals, are immaterial.

Nonhuman animals operate on the purely material plane. They experience sensations like hunger and pain, but they don't contemplate abstractions like the injustice of suffering or the meaning of their lives.

It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes, Egnor argues. It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. It's a difference that creates the metaphysical chasm between humans and other animals.

Egnor concludes with this:

The assertion that man is an ape is self-refuting. We could not express such a concept, misguided as it is, if we were apes and not men.

Dragonflies

All of us have seen dragonflies around ponds and lakes, but there's a lot more to these fascinating creatures than perhaps we realized. They really are amazing and their anatomy and behavior is unique as the video below illustrates.

It's a bit long (18 minutes), but if nature is an interest of yours, once you start watching you'll probably want to watch the whole thing. It's certain that you'll never look at dragonflies quite the same way again, and you won't take them for granted.

One question you might keep in mind as you watch is how such amazing engineering ever could've evolved through chance genetic mutations.

Bridging the Abyss

Saturday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out three years later.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century ….

They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.

A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look.

They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

A Modest Christmas Gift Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our seventeen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more on Monday) on your Christmas shopping list.

The Pilgrims' Voyage

Every year since 1961 the Wall Street Journal has been running an account of the departure of the Pilgrims from Holland for the New World where they believed they could be free to worship without being threatened by an oppressive state church.

The recorder was a man named Nathaniel Morton, and he introduces his history with these words:

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

What follows is Morton's recollection of the Pilgrims' departure:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them.

One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears.

But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

They originally departed in two ships but one leaked badly and they had to turn back to England.

The leaking ship was found to be unseaworthy so some of the pilgrims abandoned the idea of trekking the ocean and returned to Holland. The rest, plus some others who wanted to accompany the pilgrims, boarded the one remaining ship, the Mayflower, and finally set sail six weeks after leaving Leyden.

One hundred and two men, women and children plus 30 crew made the voyage. They originally intended to land in northern Virginia and make their way to the Hudson river valley, but landed first near Provincetown on Cape Cod and later moved inland to establish their colony.

Morton goes on to write about what the company found upon their arrival in the New World:

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

These were doughty men and women. It's hard to imagine what must have gone through their minds when they faced the prospect of winter in a land where they had to start a civilization almost from scratch.

The hardships they endured seem almost unimaginable to those of us accustomed to the comforts of modern life, comforts which we take for granted and for which we should be thankful to God.

Gratitude

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans observe today is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) today will be a day filled with gratitude, love and joy.

Thanksgiving Proclamation

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. However, on September 28th, 1863 a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861 he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, though, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation only to become permanently an American custom and institution."

Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states.

President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, the actual proclamation was written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to raise money to benefit Union troops.

Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads quite as if it could have been written today.

I hope we all give thanks tomorrow for our many blessings, remembering especially, as we express our gratitude to God and to each other, those who suffer and grieve.

Have a wonderful and meaningful Thanksgiving day!

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Physicist and writer Brian Greene does a fine job of explaining the concept of the multiverse in a column at The Daily Beast which appeared some years ago.

In the piece he quotes the late Carl Sagan reminding us that in science extraordinary claims must be supported by extraordinary evidence and then tacitly acknowledges that there's not much evidence for the multiverse theory, so we're left to wonder why it has enjoyed so much popularity among some cosmologists.

Perhaps one reason is that our universe is comprised of forces and constants whose values are calibrated with unimaginably exact mathematical precision.

If any of dozens of forces, like gravity, for instance, deviated in their strength from the tiniest amounts - one part in 10^60 in the case of gravity - the universe could not exist, or if it did it would not be the sort of place where living things could emerge.

It's mind-bendingly improbable that such precision would have emerged by sheer chance and there are thus only two viable explanations for it. Either the universe is the product of an intelligent engineering process or there are so many different universes, an infinite number, that one like ours would have to exist as a consequence of sheer probability.

Just as the probability of a blindfolded rifleman hitting a postage stamp half a mile away is increased as the number of bullets fired increases, so, too, the chance of a universe as improbable as ours increases as the number of different universes that exist increases toward infinity.

It seems odd that scientists would posit an explanation which requires the existence of so many entities for which there's so little evidence, but consider that the only viable alternative is that the universe is the creation of an intentional agent, a God, and it's easier to understand why they do so.

It is, at least for some of them, an act of metaphysical desperation.

As physicist Bernard Carr once put it, "If you don't want God you better have a multiverse." They're the only two live options.

Anyway, it would be good to read Greene's article. It's written by a physicist who's sympathetic to the multiverse theory, and, like much of his work, it's very lucid and accessible to the layman.

Swinburne's Argument for the Soul

Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one the most prominent of contemporary philosophers. In his recent book, Are We Bodies Or Souls? he takes up Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul and amends it slightly to remove one of the classical objections philosophers have made to it.

The result is a succinct argument for the existence of the soul in human persons. His argument goes like this:

1. I am a substance which is thinking.
2. It is conceivable (i.e. logically possible) that while I am thinking my body is destroyed.
3. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that 'I am thinking and I do not exist.'
4. I am therefore a substance which, it is conceivable, can continue to exist while my body is destroyed.
5. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that a substance can lose all its parts simultaneously and yet continue to exist.
6. Therefore, I am a soul, a substance, whose only essential property is the capacity for thought.

How does the conclusion follow from the rest of the argument? According to 4. it's logically possible that I exist when my body ceases to exist, but according to 5. it's logically impossible that anything can continue to exist when every part of it is destroyed.

Therefore, there must be more to my existence than just the existence of my body. There must be something about me that can continue to exist when every part of my body is destroyed.

That other part of me must be, from 1. and 2., that part of me which thinks, i.e. a soul (or mind), and which I identify as myself.

Swinburne gives a cogent defense of this argument in the book, which, though he claims it to be written for a broad audience, would be rather hard going for someone with little background in philosophy.

Nevertheless, in an age in which the reigning view on these matters is a philosophical materialism which denies the existence of a soul or mind, Swinburne's book is refreshing.

How Modern Culture Dehumanizes Women

Scanning the news we're often confronted with stories of mistreatment of women. Stories about campus rape culture, sexually hostile workplaces, spousal abuse, and other examples of violence and degrading behavior perpetrated against women seem to abound, and the question this all raises is "why?"

Why does it seem that more men today, more than in previous generations, hold women in such low esteem? Why are women so much more likely to be objectified and treated with disrespect today than in our grandparents' day?

I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the problem is a result of the moral revolution that took place in the 1960s and 70s concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.

During those decades pornography was mainstreamed, and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Three generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images. It can be argued that this has had several undesirable effects.

First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's much more to be seen anywhere one looks than merely a shapely ankle.

Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who's not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images. Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be like the women they encounter in movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women.

A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role, and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships. The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened, and trouble results.

At the same time that pornography exploded, sex was disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding of them any kind of permanent commitment.

This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was "no sense in buying a cow as long as the milk was free."

People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they're not respected. Respect may be feigned, of course, as long as the benefit is imminent, but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting a diminution of respect often follows and this results in the woman being treated accordingly.

Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to subordinate their natural impulses and to value instead hearth and family, but our entire culture has conspired in the last fifty years to minimize and deride that lesson. So, when many a modern man, unfettered by any profound commitment to a particular woman and children, grows accustomed to the woman he's with she'll eventually begin to bore him, and it won't be long before his eye is cast elsewhere in search of another potential source of sexual excitement.

Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality in the 60s and 70s was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint, even insulting, for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her.

Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and nurture them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

The more radical feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus, our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible.

This, too, dehumanized women by eroding the esteem in which their gender had formerly been held among men.

As with sex, so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent.

Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they're exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it.

When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males along the bell curve undergoes a shift in the direction of that line, spilling more men onto the other side of the line than would have been there otherwise.

This affects women as much as men, if not moreso, because women are often the victims of male violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger and aggression.

It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him if she does.

More on NDEs

Bruce Greyson is a psychiatrist and author of the book After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. He has spent decades studying NDEs and his work has challenged the materialism he grew up with.

In an article about Greyson's work in The Guardian, he's quoted as saying that,

I grew up without any kind of a spiritual background....I am convinced now, after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies. I recognise that there is a non-physical part of us.

If you're interested in NDEs I recommend the entire article to you. The lede is so fascinating it's worth copying in full:

When Gregg Nome was 24 years old, he slipped into the churn beneath a waterfall and began to drown, his body pummeled against the sandy riverbed.

What he saw there surprised him. Suddenly, his vision filled with crystal-clear scenes from his childhood, events he had mostly forgotten, and then moments from early adulthood. The memories, if that’s what they were, were vivid and crisp.

Was he reliving them? Not quite. They came at high speed, almost all at once, in a wave. And yet he could process each one individually. In fact, he was able to perceive everything around him: the rush of the water, the sandy bed, all of it brilliantly distinct.

He could “hear and see as never before,” he recalled later. And, despite being trapped underwater, he felt calm and at ease. He remembered thinking that prior to this moment his senses must have been dulled somehow, because only now could he fully understand the world, perhaps even the true meaning of the universe.

Eventually, the imagery faded. Next, “There was only darkness,” he said, “and a feeling of a short pause, like something was about to happen.”

Nome recounted this story at a support group in Connecticut, in 1985, four years after the experience. He had survived, but now he hoped to understand why, during a moment of extreme mortal crisis, his mind had behaved the way it did.

The meeting had been organised by Bruce Greyson, now a professor emeritus in psychiatry at the University of Virginia. (Some of the group’s members had responded to an ad Greyson placed in a local newspaper.) As Nome spoke, Greyson sat in a circle of 30 or so others, as if at an AA meeting, listening intently, nodding along.

Greyson had been hearing of events like these for years. A month into his psychiatric training, in the 1960s, he had been “confronted by a patient who claimed to have left her body” while unconscious on a hospital bed, and who later provided an accurate description of events that had taken place “in a different room”. This made no sense to him.

“I was raised in a scientific household,” he says, over Zoom. “My father was a chemist. Growing up, the physical world was all there was.” He felt certain someone had slipped the patient the information. He also thought, “What does that even mean, to leave your body?”

For years, he tried to put the account behind him, but repeatedly he faced heady stories of people experiencing other-worldly events, either when they had been pronounced clinically dead or thought they were close to it, before being wrestled back to life.

".... It occurred to me for the first time that this wasn’t just one patient,” Greyson says. “It was a common phenomenon.”

He became fascinated by the qualities of the episodes and the questions they raised, including perhaps the biggest of all: what actually happens when we die? “I plunged in,” he says. “And here I am, 50 years later, trying to understand.”

One thing seems pretty clear. As science progresses the physicalist dogma that we're just material beings seems to be getting harder and harder to maintain.

Are Ethics Self-Evident?

Philosopher Patrick Grim offers a Lecture for the Great Courses series in which he asks by way of introduction what kind of knowledge ethical knowledge is.

In other words, is our knowledge that it's wrong to abuse children like our scientific knowledge - subject to empirical verification? Or is it more like the intuitive knowledge we have upon reflection, like the axioms of geometry? He begins his query with this:

We do know things about ethics. We know that human life is important and valuable. We know that people have rights; rights to take their own paths in life. We know it is ethically wrong to violate those rights.

We know we have obligations to our family, to our friends, to humanity at large. I take that to be an important kind of knowledge, but a normal kind of knowledge.

The question, as I see it, is not whether we have that kind of knowledge. The question is a reflective question about what kind of knowledge that is.

Not having heard the lecture series, I don't know where Grim eventually comes down on this question, but I'd say two things about it here.

First, I'm not sure we do know the things Grim says we know, although it's certainly true that many of us believe those things.

Secondly, in order for those beliefs we hold to be knowledge they have to have some warrant or justification, and that leads us to a crucial question: What warrant do we have for thinking that our beliefs - for example, that others have rights - are true beliefs, i.e. knowledge?

If someone claims that other people have rights then we might ask where those rights come from. If our rights are inherent in us because we're human then it'd be wrong for anyone to deprive us of them, but where do "inherent" rights come from, and what do we mean when we say that depriving someone of an inherent right is "wrong"?

If the human species is nothing other than the end-product of a blind, naturalistic process of development that occurred over eons of time then to say something is wrong is to say little more than "I don't like it", but if "wrong" is just what someone else doesn't like then why should anyone care about refraining from doing what others don't like if it doesn't suit them to do so?

Philosopher David Hume in his book The Treatise of Human Nature came to the conclusion that right and wrong are simply whatever wins the general approbation or disapprobation of one's fellows, but if that's all we mean by right and wrong then the terms are synonymous with "socially fashionable".

To accuse someone of doing wrong is like accusing them of gaucherie because they slurp their soup. Such behavior may be unconventional and distasteful, but it's not morally wrong. When we say that child abuse is wrong, however, we surely want to say more than that it's unconventional and distasteful behavior. We want to say that it's evil.

Ethics are indeed self-evident, and we do have intuitive knowledge of right and wrong, but only because, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, we've been endowed by our Creator with a law "written on our hearts" (St. Paul). That law, being the gift of a perfectly good and wise being who will ultimately hold us accountable to it, is the source of all our moral understanding.

It's binding upon us only because it's bestowed by a personal being. If it were merely the product of impersonal evolutionary forces we would be no more obligated to obey it than we are obligated to refrain from flying in an airplane because it flouts the law of gravity.

If, as Grim says, we know that human life is important and valuable, that people have rights; rights to take their own paths in life, that it's ethically wrong to violate those rights, and that we have obligations to our family, to our friends, and to humanity at large, then we are tacitly acknowledging that there must be a God who has bestowed those rights and obligations upon us.

Either that or we're trying to hold on to the belief in right and wrong while discarding the only suitable foundation for that belief. It's like pulling the table out from under the dinner setting and expecting the dishware to all remain in place.

Earwig Origami

The earwig is an insect that inhabits almost every damp crevice and corner of your patio and lawn furniture in the summer. They're not big, about an inch long, but they look intimidating with two large but harmless pincers at the rear of their abdomen.

One fascinating aspect of these common creatures is the amazing way in which they fold their wings. They rarely fly, but when they do their wings unfold and refold in an astonishingly complex fashion.

We're told by evolutionary biologists that this folding evolved through blind, purposeless processes in which just the right series of genetic mutations accidentally resulted in this folding ability, but it takes more faith than I can muster to believe random chance could've produced this extraordinary piece of "origami."

In our experience an ability this complex doesn't just happen through a series of accidents, it requires intelligent engineering - a mind.

Watch the video and see what you think:

Further Reflections on the Election

According to exit polls, 63% of voters ages 18 to 29 voted for the left in the 2022 midterm elections. I don't think these younger voters actually favor most of the policies (inflationary spending, open borders, covid restrictions, higher taxes, defunding the police, repression of free speech, racial division, and late-term abortion) they voted for, but I do think they were venting their dislike of Donald Trump, the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and anti-abortion absolutism.

Democrats have become the party of the educated elite and Republicans have become the party of the less educated working class. Republicans used to be associated with big business, but that's no longer true. Union leadership is still Democratic, but rank and file blue-collar workers are moving toward the GOP.

The same is true of black and Hisapanic voters. The Democratic Party can no longer take their loyalty for granted. A large minority of them are thinking for themselves and realizing that the Democratic Party has abandoned the values they hold dear.

David Brooks at the New York Times states that both parties are fundamentally weak. The Democrats are weak because they've become the party of the educated elite. The Republicans are weak because of Trump. If Republicans get rid of Trump, they could become the dominant party in America. If they don’t, they will decline.

It's certainly true that they're in decline now. A party that can't pick up seats in a mid-term election when the incumbent party has produced record inflation, chaos at the border, shortages of consumer goods, a refusal to address crime, hugely unpopular covid restrictions, "cancel culture", racial animosity, and a failing education system, is a party that has achieved peak impotence.

Some are blaming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for not spending more to help Republican candidates, but this blame is largely misplaced. As The National Review editors note:

All this said, even by the harshest reasonable evaluation, McConnell’s midterm performance isn’t in the same universe as Donald Trump’s.

The former president chose poor candidates based on their fealty to him and his fevered and destructive 2020 delusions, spent hardly anything, made himself the center of attention to the extent he could, and conducted himself with his characteristic selfishness and lack of judgment.

For him to turn around and blame McConnell requires chutzpah even by his shameless standards.

Imagine a professional football team that has a marquee player on their roster. He excels at the sport, but he's constantly bad-mouthing his teammates in public. He behaves like a spoiled brat on the field and his presence in the locker room is corrosive to team morale.

Consequently, the team, which is loaded with talent, nevertheless fails to defeat even mediocre opponents.

Would not the management unload that player as soon as they could? Is not Donald Trump just such a player?

NDEs and Materialism

Back in 2012 Salon excerpted a piece from Mario Beauregard's book Brain Wars. The excerpt is a very interesting look at NDEs (Near Death Experiences).

The whole article is fascinating, bearing as it does on the question whether materialism is an adequate explanation of human cognitive experience, but I'll just give a couple of excerpts here.

It opens with the story of Atlanta-based singer and songwriter Pam Reynolds who, in 1991,underwent a surgical procedure in which her brain was completely shut down. She was clinically dead:

At this point, Pam’s out-of-body adventure transformed into a near-death experience (NDE): She recalls floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. She saw deceased relatives and friends, including her long-dead grandmother, waiting at the end of this tunnel.

She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving light, and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the light (the breathing of God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as Reynolds’s deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she described as “plunging into a pool of ice.”

NDEs are more common than one might think and they seem to be very cosmopolitan:

Surveys conducted in the United States and Germany suggest that approximately 4.2 percent of the population has reported an NDE. It has also been estimated that more than 25 million individuals worldwide have had an NDE in the past 50 years.

People from all walks of life and belief systems have this experience. Studies indicate that the experience of an NDE is not influenced by gender, race, socioeconomic status, or level of education. Although NDEs are sometimes presented as religious experiences, this seems to be a matter of individual perception.

Furthermore, researchers have found no relationship between religion and the experience of an NDE. That is, it did not matter whether the people recruited in those studies were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, or agnostic.

Another very interesting case is that of a woman named Maria whose case was first documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark:

Maria was a migrant worker who had a severe heart attack while visiting friends in Seattle. She was rushed to Harborview Hospital and placed in the coronary care unit. A few days later, she had a cardiac arrest but was rapidly resuscitated. The following day, Clark visited her. Maria told Clark that during her cardiac arrest she was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body.

At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building. She was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn.

Maria wanted to know for sure whether she had “really” seen that shoe, and she begged Clark to try to locate it.

Quite skeptical, Clark went to the location described by Maria—and found the tennis shoe.

From the window of her hospital room, the details that Maria had recounted could not be discerned. But upon retrieval of the shoe, Clark confirmed Maria’s observations. “The only way she could have had such a perspective,” said Clark, “was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe. I retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very concrete evidence for me.”

This case is particularly impressive given that during cardiac arrest, the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted. When this happens, the brain’s electrical activity (as measured with EEG) disappears after 10 to 20 seconds. In this state, a patient is deeply comatose. Because the brain structures mediating higher mental functions are severely impaired, such patients are expected to have no clear and lucid mental experiences that will be remembered.

After considering a number of possible materialist explanations for NDEs Beauregard's article concludes with this: The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest).

Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs [Out of the Body Experience] associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs [Near Death Experiencers] can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality. [Italics mine]

Naturalism and Nihilism

French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to take atheism to its logical conclusion. Many atheists are reluctant to do this because they can't live consistently with their belief that man is all alone in the cosmos.

The thought of our "forlornness," many have concluded, leads to a kind of despair and emptiness and ultimately to nihilism.

Some there are, though, who call upon their fellow non-theists to face up to the gloomy entailments of the belief that nature is all there is. Philosophers Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist's Guide to Reality, and Joel Marks are two who seek to face squarely the logic of their unbelief.

Another example is a commenter at Uncommon Descent who lays out clearly and without sugar-coating what one should also believe if one embraces atheism.

He/she (It's not clear which) writes that if one has a naturalistic worldview one should also be a nihilist:

I’m a nihilist because it shows reality. If there is no higher power, then everything humanity holds dear was constructed by humanity and therefore not real.

There is:

• No objective, absolute, inherent meaning in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent purpose in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent value in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent morality in life or the universe. No good, no evil, no right, no wrong
• No objective, absolute, inherent truth in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent knowledge in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent logic in life or the universe

There's more:

• We are the cobbled together Frankensteins of billions of years of trial and error
• We have no free-will, mind, consciousness, rationality or reason. They are illusions and [the notions of] personhood, identity and humanity are not real.
• The emotions we express are just chemicals in our brain. The very things we seek in life like happiness, peace, contentment, joy are just chemicals reducing us to nothing more than chemical addicts.
• We are no more important than other animals. A dog is a rat is a pig is a boy.
• There is no afterlife. Once we die, we fade from existence and all our memories, experiences, knowledge, etc. goes with it. In time, we are forgotten.
• All the things we do in life are just for survival. Learning, loving, seeking, being positive, eating, relating, having fun are created for the sake of ignoring the real reason we are here and that’s to live as long as we can.
• There is no help coming to save humanity as a species or as individuals. We are all alone and on our own. If you can’t survive, you die.

The reader might wonder why anyone would embrace such a melancholy set of beliefs, but if the only alternative is to accept that there's a God, then nihilism, as depressing, hopeless, and dreary as it may be, will still be more appealing to a lot of people than the divine alternative.

Reflecting on the utter despair that infuses the above assertions, I thought of a character in Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed named Kirilov. Kirilov was an atheist and a nihilist. He says at one point in the story, shortly before taking his own life, "I don't understand how a man can know there is no God and not kill himself on the spot."

Another fellow who realizes that we can't dispense with belief in God and have everything go on as before is an anonymous commenter at CrossExamined.org. The author of the blog, J. Warner Wallace, by way of introducing the commenter's submission, said this:

Several weeks ago, a gentleman (we’ll call him “John”) replied to a blog I posted at CrossExamined.org. As a skeptical non-believer, John wasn’t responding to what I had posted, but to his fellow atheists who had been interacting with Christians in the comment section.

John’s post was controversial but honest. In fact, he clearly delineated the problem of atheistic moral grounding. Here’s what John had to say:

“[To] all my Atheist friends.

Let us stop sugar coating it. I know, it’s hard to come out and be blunt with the friendly Theists who frequent sites like this. However in your efforts to “play nice” and “be civil” you actually do them a great disservice.

We are Atheists. We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself. While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, civility seem to exist, we know they do not.

Our highly evolved brains imagine that these things have a cause or a use, and they have in the past, they’ve allowed life to continue on this planet for a short blip of time.

But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it.

All human achievement and plans for the future are the result of some ancient, evolved brain and accompanying chemical reactions that once served a survival purpose. Ex: I’ll marry and nurture children because my genes demand reproduction, I’ll create because creativity served a survival advantage to my ancient ape ancestors, I’ll build cities and laws because this allowed my ape grandfather time and peace to reproduce and protect his genes.

My only directive is to obey my genes. Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.

We deride the theists for having created myths and holy books. We imagine ourselves superior. But we too imagine there are reasons to obey laws, be polite, protect the weak etc. Rubbish. We are nurturing a new religion, one where we imagine that such conventions have any basis in reality. Have they allowed life to exist? Absolutely. But who cares?

Outside of my greedy little genes' need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Some of my atheist friends have fooled themselves into acting like the general population. They live in suburban homes, drive Toyota Camrys, attend school plays. But underneath they know the truth. They are a bag of DNA whose only purpose is to make more of themselves.

So be nice if you want. Be involved, have polite conversations, be a model citizen. Just be aware that while technically an Atheist, you are an inferior one. You’re just a little bit less evolved, that’s all. When you are ready to join me, let me know, I’ll be reproducing with your wife.

I know it’s not PC to speak so bluntly about the ramifications of our beliefs, but in our discussions with theists we sometimes tip-toe around what we really know to be factual. Maybe it’s time we Atheists were a little more truthful and let the chips fall where they may.

At least that’s what my genes are telling me to say.”

Several readers questioned whether John really was an atheist or just a theist posing as an atheist, so Wallace clarified:

Since posting this comment, I’ve been able to peek at John’s life in a very limited way, and I’ve had a brief interaction with him. He appears to be a creative, responsible, loving husband and father....When John first posted his comment many of the other atheists who post at CrossExamined were infuriated.

Some denied John’s identity as a skeptic and accused him of being a disguised Christian. But in my interaction with John, he told me he was weary of hearing fellow atheists mock their opponents for hypocrisy and ignorance, while pretending they had a definitive answer to the great questions of life. He simply wanted his fellow atheists to be consistent.

As it turns out, though, theism provides the consistent moral foundation missing from John’s atheistic worldview.

"John" is, of course, correct. Given atheism (or naturalism) there's nothing morally wrong with doing any of the things he mentions because on atheism there are no objective moral duties, nor can there be.

This outrages some who think such a claim is tantamount to accusing atheists of being wicked or immoral, but this misses the point. A person can be kind, honest, and generous, and presumably many atheists are, but the point is that there's nothing in atheism that would make cruelty, dishonesty, or selfishness wrong. On atheism no one has an objective duty or obligation to be kind rather than cruel.

As "John" suggests above, the only constraint on anyone's desires is what that person can get away with. "John" is acknowledging that a man who has the power to act with impunity is not violating any moral law by torturing children or shooting up a movie theater. In a world with no transcendent moral authority might makes right.

The famous French writer Voltaire expressed it this way. He said, "I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants and even my wife to believe in God, because it means I shall be cheated, robbed, and cuckolded less often." This is the theme I try to amplify in my novel In the Absence of God and also in my soon-to-be released novel Bridging the Abyss (See links at top of page).

Some have asked, essentially, So what? What's the point? The point is that when one adopts a worldview, whether theistic or naturalistic, one must be prepared to also adopt the consequences of that worldview. Otherwise one is acting irrationally.

To be consistent an atheist must either be a complete nihilist, or, like "John," he or she must simply live by his or her own predilections, recognizing that it's a purely subjective choice, and that it's no better nor worse, morally speaking, than any other choice. Moreover, one must forfeit the "right" to make any moral judgments of anyone else's behavior regardless how cruel or revolting that behavior may be.

Moral judgments, after all, imply an objective moral standard and naturalism rules such standards out. The atheist who makes moral judgments of others, who condemns, for example, child abuse, racism, exploitation of the environment, or opposition to gay marriage, is living as if there is an objective standard that's being violated while adopting a worldview that makes that standard impossible.

A Few Thoughts on the Election

For what they're worth here are a few reflections on last Tuesday.

1. People don't vote for a candidate, they vote for a party. As we saw in the Fetterman/Oz debate debates don't matter. No matter how awful the debate performance voters will stand by their candidate.

Mr. Fetterman has been seriously impaired by a stroke, scarcely campaigned, was completely unable to put together a coherent sentence in the his debate with Oz, and sti;ll won a senate seat.

A candidate doesn't even have to be alive for voters to vote for him as long as he's their party's nomineee. A dead man actually won in a race for a Pennsylvania state house seat.

The country is in terrible shape, but people still voted for their team. The quality of candidates doesn't seem to matter so much as the letter they have after their name.

2. The failure of the predicted "red wave" to materialize strengthened President Biden against those in his party who would've tried to ease him out of running in 2024 had the election been a complete debacle. On the other hand, Donald Trump was weakened by the failure of his endorsed candidates to do very well.

Both outcomes work to the advantage of Florida governor Ron DeSantis if he chooses to run for president in 2024.

3. Mr. Biden's glee at having avoided getting clobbered like most presidents do in the mid-terms is understandable, but a little premature. He'll still probably lose the House of Representatives and may still lose the Senate, albeit not by the margins that some were predicting.

If the GOP does wind up taking both House and Senate then Biden's boasting about not losing as badly as other presidents have in the mid-terms will sound like a man in a sword fight who loses an arm and brags that he didn't lose both arms.

4. Crazy speculation of the day: There's one senator who must be harboring very bitter feelings against his leadership and the president for what he perhaps believes to have been a betrayal.

If the senate finally comes down to a 50/50 split, giving VP Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote and the Democrats effective control of the Senate, what sweeter vengeance might this senator exact than to switch parties and give the raspberry to Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden.

I speak, of course, of West Virginia's Joe Manchin. Manchin would have nothing to lose by making the switch to the GOP since he has no future in West Virginia as a Democrat and no future within his own party which pretty much holds him in disdain.

In exchange for Manchin's crucial vote to pass the party’s $740 billion tax and climate spending law, Manchin was evidently under the impression that Mr. Biden would not do anything to hurt West Virginia's coal industry. Yet last week the president said in a speech that he was going to shut down coal plants all across the U.S.

Manchin was angry and doubtless felt betrayed. He probably thinks that he's been played for a sucker, and it certainly does look that way.

I'm not predicting that Manchin will actually bolt the Democrats, but I'd be surprised if the Republican leadership isn't going to try to woo him away from the party that has pretty much humiliated him if it turns out that the GOP needs one more senator for a majority.

It would certainly be karma from Manchin's point of view if the wooing was successful.

When the Brain Shuts Down

An intriguing new study of NDEs (Near Death Experiences) has found that resuscitated patients often report phenomena that seem to count as evidence that there's something more to our cognitive experience than just the material brain.

Here's an excerpt:

One in five people who survive cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) after cardiac arrest may describe lucid experiences of death that occurred while they were seemingly unconscious and on the brink of death, a new study shows.

Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and elsewhere, the study involved 567 men and women whose hearts stopped beating while hospitalized and who received CPR between May 2017 and March 2020 in the United States and United Kingdom.

Despite immediate treatment, fewer than 10% recovered sufficiently to be discharged from hospital.

Survivors reported having unique lucid experiences, including a perception of separation from the body, observing events without pain or distress, and a meaningful evaluation of life, including of their actions, intentions and thoughts toward others.

The researchers found these experiences of death to be different from hallucinations, delusions, illusions, dreams or CPR-induced consciousness.

The work also included tests for hidden brain activity. A key finding was the discovery of spikes of brain activity, including so-called gamma, delta, theta, alpha and beta waves up to an hour into CPR.

Some of these brain waves normally occur when people are conscious and performing higher mental functions, including thinking, memory retrieval, and conscious perception.

Identifying measureable electrical signs of lucid and heightened brain activity, together with similar stories of recalled death experiences, suggests that the human sense of self and consciousness, much like other biological body functions, may not stop completely around the time of death, adds Sam Parnia, the lead study investigator.

"These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink death," says Parnia. As the brain is shutting down, many of its natural braking systems are released.

Known as disinhibition, this provides access to the depths of a person's consciousness, including stored memories, thoughts from early childhood to death, and other aspects of reality. While no one knows the evolutionary purpose of this phenomenon, it clearly reveals "intriguing questions about human consciousness, even at death," says Parnia.

Wesley Smith at Evolution News states that,

...maybe there is no evolutionary explanation. There is certainly no discernible natural-selection benefit. Moreover, what purpose would such a “soft exit” offer? Why would it appear? How would it develop if consciousness is solely generated by the brain and is purely a materialistic phenomenon?

Good questions, but the study also raises the question of whether there might be more involved in our cognitive life besides just our material brain. Perhaps we also possess another substance, an immaterial mind or soul.

NDEs certainly point in that direction.

The Bearded Nut

Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon had some sage advice a few years ago for consumers of news in our hyper-politicized, hyper-partisan media culture.

He wrote:

Events are turning me into a radical skeptic. I no longer believe what I read, unless what I am reading is an empirically verifiable account of the past. I no longer have confidence in polls, because it has become impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

What I have heard from the media and political class over the last several years has been so spectacularly proven wrong by events, again and again, that I sometimes wonder why I continue to read two newspapers a day before spending time following journalists on Twitter. Habit, I guess.

A sense of professional obligation, I suppose. Maybe boredom.

The fact is that almost the entirety of what one reads in the paper or on the web is speculation. The writer isn't telling you what happened, he is offering an interpretation of what happened, or offering a projection of the future.

The best scenario is that these theories are novel, compelling, informed, and based on reporting and research. But that is rarely the case.

More often the interpretations of current events, and prophesies of future ones, are merely the products of groupthink, or dogma, or emotions, or wish-casting, memos to friends written by 27-year-olds who, in the words of [former Obama advisor] Ben Rhodes, "literally know nothing."

There was a time when newspapers printed astrology columns. They no longer need to. The pseudoscience is on the front page.

There's much more of interest in Continetti's column at the link, and I encourage you to read it. For my part, I think he's right, even though I suppose what he says could apply to Viewpoint as much as any other blog. The difference is, I think, that this blog is clearly a platform for opinions, not news, and I don't pretend it's anything else.

In any case, I don't think we should give up on trying to be informed by our media, but we do need to be very critical readers, viewers and listeners. This is especially the case if we get our information from cable news shows and talk radio.

Not every show on either of these venues is overly biased, but both are populated with programming and personalities who are committed advocates of a particular ideology. Even when I think what the people I'm listening to are saying is correct I'm often dismayed by the manner in which they say it.

For just one example, hosts on both left and right on television and radio will make criticisms of their opponents (i.e. Trump or Biden) which could just as well apply to their preferred heroes (i.e. Trump or Biden) whom they wouldn't dream of criticizing. This is not only tendentious, it seriously diminishes their credibility, not to mention that it makes it extremely hard to refrain from turning them off in disgust.

On occasion, hosts on one of these venues will have someone of a contrary viewpoint on their program, but they'll frequently step all over their guests, interrupting and talking over him or her, to prevent them from being heard. Sean Hannity at Fox is a particularly egregious example of the type.

It's probably a good rule of thumb whenever we read or hear some personality make a criticism of someone to ask oneself what evidence is being offered to buttress the criticism, and does the criticism being made apply with equal force to the personality's own political champions.

If the answers to those questions are "not much" and "no" then tune them out. You're not being informed, you're being propagandized.

Continetti closes his piece with a quote from the late author Michael Crichton: "Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts. We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It's not sensible to listen to it."

Sadly, as concerns much of the media - and not just cable and talk radio, either - this is good advice.

Clash of the Titans

Tomorrow is one of the most consequential midterm elections in recent memory, and it has a lot of otherwise apolitical folks thinking politics.

The White House is not officially on the ballot tomorrow although it certainly is on the ballot unofficially. Many see tomorrow as a tacit referendum on the Biden presidency.

Donald Trump is gearing up for another run at the Oval Office and has already started taking pot shots at his potential rivals for the Republican nomination, which is unfortunate because such conduct probably hurts him more than it helps.

In any case, National Review's Rich Lowry has an essay up in which he compares the relative merits of Trump and Florida's governor Ron DeSantis.

Lowry makes a compelling case that DeSantis is the better option for Republicans going into the 2024 campaign season. He writes:

There are huge pitfalls to Trump 3.0 that would be easily and nearly completely avoided by nominating and electing DeSantis, or any other Republican alternative. (I don’t take it as an absolute certainty, by the way, that DeSantis will run, or that if he does, it will come down at the end to the Trump–DeSantis contest everyone expects.)

The difference between nominating Trump and DeSantis — the delta in terms of Republican prospects and governing potential — is hard to exaggerate.

Lowry makes several good points, among which are these:

1. A President Trump would be four years of mayhem. "Democrats would certainly find a reason to deny the legitimacy of a President DeSantis, but his cabinet secretaries probably wouldn’t have to have bomb-sniffing dogs checking their cars every morning."

2. Trump at 76 is much more vigorous than Biden, but, if Biden does run again, which I seriously doubt, " a Trump–Biden race will be aged-on-aged violence that will be a great victory, one way or the other, for the American gerontocracy. A DeSantis–Biden race, on the other hand, would set up a simple future-vs.-past contest like Clinton vs. Dole in 1996 or Obama vs. McCain in 2008.

"Although Trump looks as if he could be doing campaign rallies until he’s 90, time comes for us all. There’s no guarantee that Trump won’t start encountering Biden-like aging problems, either during a general election or in a prospective second term. Why risk it, when there are palatable, new-generation alternatives?"

3. Trump would be a serious problem for other Republicans in other races. "If he’s the nominee, every Republican in the country would either have to endorse his delusions about the 2020 election or find a way to dodge them. And Trump would be paying attention. He’d presumably be happy to take shots at anyone in the party not showing sufficient loyalty to 'stop the steal,' no matter how destructive."

4. Trump would have much more difficulty governing than DeSantis. "Trump did a number of truly consequential and creative things policy-wise while in office, but his erratic nature also limited his ability to deliver. A vendetta tour against all his real and perceived enemies would now be layered on top of this.

"Assuming that Mitch McConnell is still the GOP leader in the Senate, do Republicans really want a newly elected president and a Senate majority leader who don’t speak to each other and, worse, a president who has insulted that majority leader in crude and personal terms?"

5. Related to the above, Trump would likely find it very difficult to find top level people willing to work in his administration, knowing that they'd be setting themselves up for harsh personal public insults as soon as they crossed him.

"He has much more of a policy apparatus and government-in-waiting than in 2016, but he’ll still have trouble hiring for top positions, and a miasma of legal controversies will continue to trail him everywhere. Again, why choose that when there are other alternatives who’d start with a clean slate and be able and willing to work with everyone in the party?"

6. Finally, Trump is much more likely than DeSantis to allow his personal character flaws to alienate voters and cause him to lose a race that should be easily winnable (like 2020).

DeSantis has most of Trump's virtues with none of his vices. He's a solid conservative - socially and economically - with apparently no scandal in his background, and he's a fighter, albeit of a different style than Trump.

At this point, he looks like a much better choice for Republicans in 2024, than a man who did most of the things conservatives elected him to do but who did them in a fashion that repelled far too many voters who would've otherwise been inclined to deny Joe Biden their vote in 2020.

Are We Headed for Climate Catastrophe?

An article by Chris Melore emphasizes that some of the most dire predictions concerning our changing climate are probably wrong.

By 2100 the change will probably be neither as catastrophic as some models predict nor as benign as others project.

Here's Melore:

Yes, climate change is very real and poses a serious threat to the health of our planet. However, researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder have a simple message for scientists who focus on the most dire effects of global warming: chill out.

In a letter in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors write that many scientists are focusing way too much on the worst-case scenarios of climate change and environmental shifts all around the globe.

While the team notes that these problems are real, constantly preaching impending doom is counter-productive and overshadows the more likely outcomes of global warming.

These more-likely outcomes fall into the middle of the climate change conversation — not good, but also not extremely bad.

CU Boulder assistant professor Matt Burgess, a fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences states that “We shouldn’t overstate or understate our climate future.”

He adds that,

People need to think in terms of gradations, not absolutes. Yes, we need to be aware of the extremes, like climate solutions that get us to net zero before mid century, or on the flipside, global catastrophes.

But it’s what’s in the middle that is more likely. And that deserves more research.

The most extreme scenarios require that,

...all the regions in the world in 2100 would need to have over $100k GDP per capita, with no climate policy the whole century, all-in on coal, despite facing unlivable heat in tropical regions with the warming that that scenario produces. That’s just not realistic.

At the same time, the researchers note that models which come in on the low-end of the climate change spectrum are probably going to be incorrect too. These forecasts predict that temperatures will only rise by less than three degrees by 2100.

“That would be a daunting task to keep us that low—we are almost there now,” Burgess explains.

The new report notes that several experts agree that temperatures will likely rise by 3.6 to 5.4 degrees by 2100. By focusing on these “middle-ground scenarios,” the team says scientists can focus on how that change will impact local communities and humanity as a whole.

This includes the impact of more severe heat waves and the shrinking number of areas seeing snow in the winter.

It'd be good to keep all this in mind when assessing the claims made by our politicians about our climate future, claims that often skew toward the lower extreme (Republicans) or the upper extreme (Democrats).

Off the Rails

In the wake of the attack on Paul Pelosi by an illegal immigrant lunatic in San Francisco a lot of people on the left have been pointing to what they perceive to be violent rhetoric on the right as responsible for this sort of political violence.

With that in mind my jaw dropped the other night when NBC historian Michael Beschloss on MSNBC's All In With Chris Hayes went completely bonkers as he predicted the horrors that await if there's an electoral "red tsunami" on Tuesday.

He claimed that Tuesday's election could signal the end of democracy in the United States if the Republicans win. He expressed fear that we could be headed for a brutal authoritarianism, that our freedom to speak and write what we want could be lost and that our children will be arrested and killed - all if the Republicans win the House of Representatives, the Senate and a number of governorship's in Tuesday's mid-term election.

Now, aside from the fact that Beschloss' fear-mongering sounds a lot like Chicken Little running about shouting that the sky is falling, and aside from the fact that it's the left that's the source of almost all attempts to curtail freedom of speech in our society - from suspensions of social media accounts to university cancel culture - consider how Beschloss' febrile prognostications of doom might affect a mentally unbalanced listener prone to violence.

Such a person - think of James Hodgkinson, a left-wing political activist and Bernie Sanders supporter who shot six people in 2017, nearly killing Republican Steve Scalise - might well reason that if Republicans are a threat to our democracy and the lives of our children then killing Republicans is not only justified, it's a moral imperative.

How many Democrats are likely to hold Beschloss accountable for his irresponsible, paranoid rant, especially if there's violence against Republicans in the coming days.

Let's hope we don't have to find out.

Here's the clip of Mr. Beschloss venting his fantasies on Chris Hayes' show (it might take a moment to load):

Consciousness and Atheism

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, in a column at The Week, observes that arguments surrounding human consciousness comprise one of the most animated debates in contemporary philosophy.

He goes on to note that one reason why consciousness is so vexing to academic philosophers is that "a great many of them are atheists, and the reality of subjective consciousness frustrates an extremist but widely held version of atheistic metaphysics called eliminative materialism."

He writes:

This form of metaphysics takes the position that the only things that exist are matter and mindless physical processes. But in a world of pure matter, how could you have subjective, conscious beings like us?

To someone schooled in the great historical philosophical traditions — which have been largely dismissed following the adoption of post-modernism in the academy — this debate is immensely frustrating. In fact, much of the ongoing conversation about consciousness is self-evidently absurd.

"The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no non-physical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that," writes philosopher David Chalmers. The New York Times backed him up, calling this a "succinct" summation of the status quo.

Except that it's not.

First of all, there can be no scientific consensus or evidence about non-physical realities, because science is only concerned with physical realities. As for the "philosophical consensus," well, anyone who knows anything about philosophy knows that there has never been such a thing and never will be. And even if there were, it wouldn't mean anything, since philosophy is not a science; in science, an expert consensus does represent the state of the art of knowledge on a particular issue.

In philosophy, it merely represents a fad.

The problem for materialist philosophers is that there's no plausible physical explanation for consciousness. For example, sensations like pain are caused by physical processes in the nervous system and brain, but the sensation itself is not physical. It's not something that can be observed or measured by anyone other than the person experiencing it.

How do atomic particles like electrons zipping along neurons produce the sensation of pain or sound or color? What is the bridge between the physical stimulus and the non-physical sensation? No one knows.

Some materialists claim to solve the problem by asserting that the sensations just are the electrochemical stimuli, but not many philosophers are willing to agree that their experience of pain is nothing more than the firing of specific nerve fibers.

Surely the agonizing sensation of pain is more than just atoms whizzing about. The sensation of sweet is something other than a chemical reaction in the brain. The sound of middle c is something other than the vibrations which elicit it.

The 18th century mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz argued that if an observer were miniaturized so that he could be inserted into a patient's brain he wouldn't see the brain light up red when the patient looked at a red object. We know today that all he'd see would be the flux of molecules coalescing and coming apart, so where does the red come from?

Gobry continues with a look at the work of philosopher Daniel Dennett:

Another argument on consciousness that enjoys a bit of consensus, especially lately, is that consciousness is an illusion. Our brain constructs models of the world around us and then tricks itself into believing that this is an expression of the world.

The foremost proponent of this view is the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

But again, this view is literally nonsense. The concept of an illusion presupposes that there is a subjective consciousness experiencing the illusion.

There's more from Gobry at the link. He's right that Dennett's view seems nonsensical. If consciousness is an illusion then the sensations we have of pain, sound, fragrance, and so on are also illusions. So, too, are our ideas and thoughts.

If this is so, then almost our entire experience of the world is an illusion, including Dennett's idea that consciousness is an illusion.

What's the point, Dennett might be asked, of writing a book full of ideas which, if true, are themselves illusions? Isn't the very act of trying to persuade someone of the truth of one's illusions a rather vain exercise?

This is a good example, unfortunately, of the silliness into which very intelligent people lapse when they're determined to efface any vestige of the "supernatural" from their metaphysics.

The phenomena of consciousness strongly suggest the existence of a non-physical mental substance, and if such a substance exists, then materialism is false. And if materialism is false then an atheistic worldview loses one of its main supports.

That's one reason why atheistic philosophers are so determined to deny the existence of consciousness regardless of the difficulties that that denial poses.

Philosopher J.P. Moreland has written on how odd it is that consciousness poses very serious problems for an atheistic worldview but rather than give up their worldview many atheistic philosophers have given up consciousness.

The Human Embryo

Ever since I was an undergraduate biology major I have been intrigued by the mystery of how a zygote (a fertilized egg) develops from a single cell into a multi-cellular embryo and from there to a complete organism.

The reason this is such a profound mystery is that the initial cell somehow "knows" to divide and the daughter cells somehow "know" to form different kinds of cells which somehow "know" to migrate around the embryo and form different kinds of tissue which somehow "know" to integrate with other kinds of tissues to form organs, and so on.

So, how do cells with no brains "know" how to do all this? Where are the instructions located which choreograph this astonishing process and tell all the parts what to do and how to do it, and how are those instructions communicated?

The information doesn't seem to be found in the genome or the epigenome, so where is it, what is its storage medium, and how is it stored and accessed? What mechanisms control it so that the entire assembly unfolds in a flawless sequence with each step occurring precisely when it must in order to successfully construct an adult organism?

And how, exactly, does the zygote "know" to produce, say, a flower rather than a fish, or a bird, or a human?

These questions are fascinating and they emerge again in an article at Uncommon Descent that quotes geneticist Michael Denton. Referring to an illustration of the development of the fertilzed ovum Denton writes:

The earliest events leading from the first division of the egg cell to the blastula stage in amphibians, reptiles and mammals are illustrated in figure 5.4 (in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis).

Even to the untrained zoologist it is obvious that neither the blastula itself, nor the sequence of events that lead to its formation, is identical in any of the vertebrate classes shown.

The blastula stage is an early step in embryogenesis when the zygote divides several times to produce a ball of cells. When those cells then evaginate and begin to take on the form of the early embryo biologists call that the gastrula stage.

Denton continues:

The differences become even more striking in the next major phase of in embryo formation – gastrulation.

This involves a complex sequence of cell movements whereby the cells of the blastula rearrange themselves, eventually resulting in the transformation of the blastula into the intricate folded form of the early embryo, or gastrula, which consists of three basic germ cell layers: the ectoderm, which gives rise to the skin and the nervous system; the mesoderm, which gives rise to muscle and skeletal tissues; and the endoderm, which gives rise to the lining of the alimentary tract as well as to the liver and pancreas....

In some ways the egg cell, blastula, and gastrula stages in the different vertebrate classes are so dissimilar that, were it not for the close resemblance in the basic body plan of all adult vertebrates, it seems unlikely that they would have been classed as belonging to the same phylum.

There is no question that, because of the great dissimilarity of the early stages of embryogenesis in the different vertebrate classes, organs and structures considered homologous in adult vertebrates cannot be traced back to homologous cells or regions in the earliest stages of embryogenesis. In other words, homologous structures are arrived at by different routes.

Incredibly, different types of animals that are all alleged to have arisen from common ancestors and to be evolutionarily related evidently follow different pathways in building morphological structures such as the arm of a man, the foreleg of a horse, the wing of a bird, and the pectoral fin of a fish.

If they follow different pathways then there must be a different set of assembly instructions for the development of these "homologs," and thus all of the above questions arise again.

There is in the organism from the time it's just a single cell at least until it's fully developed, a massive amount of information that programs its development.

The locus, nature, and modus operandi of this information are unknown, but one thing I think can be inferred: If information of such astonishing sophistication controls the progression of the cell's development, it seems very unlikely that that information is the product of blind, impersonal, random processes.

Complex information such as we find in computer code or architectural blueprints are never the product of random processes like genetic mutation, but are always, insofar as we've ever experienced it, the product of a mind.

Computer programmer shares some of the wonder of all this in the following 9 minute TED Talk: