Is Everything One Thing?

Physicist Heinrich Päs has a book out in which he explains the thinking of a lot of contemporary physicists that some ancient philosophers were correct in thinking that everything that exists is actually a diverse manifestation of one thing.

The book is titled The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, and in it Päs argues that quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which sub-atomic particles are somehow connected even when they're light years apart, applies not only to very tiny particles but to everything in the universe. Everything is somehow "entangled" with everything else in such a fashion that at bottom there's really only one fundamental substance or being.

Separateness, according to the theory, is an illusion, and the illusion extends to everything, including space and time.

Here are a few excerpts from an article by Päs at Yahoo.com in which he gives some insight into his thesis:

[E]ntanglement implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole.

{I]n a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single “One.”

Nathan Seiberg, a leading string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is not alone in his sentiment when he states, “I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.” Moreover, in most scenarios proposing emergent space-times, entanglement plays the fundamental role.

As philosopher of science Rasmus Jaksland points out, this eventually implies that there are no individual objects in the universe anymore; that everything is connected with everything else: “Adopting entanglement as the world-making relation comes at the price of giving up separability. But those who are ready to take this step should perhaps look to entanglement for the fundamental relation with which to constitute this world (and perhaps all the other possible ones).”

Thus, when space and time disappear, a unified One emerges.

A reviewer of the book at Amazon observes that,

Päs explains the relation between the quantum world and our classical world by using the illustration of the film projector: is reality the film seen on the screen or is this simply derived from the roll of film in the projector? Even further: is reality the One undifferentiated white light of the projector's lamp that the film roll partially transmits (as a lens) to the screen and partially absorbs?

Are the multiplicity of things that comprise our classical world (matter, space, time, etc...) fundamental or are they derived from our partial knowledge of the One quantum cosmos (the white light in the above analogy)?

The idea that everything in the universe reduces to one fundamental entity raises the question of what that fundamental entity is.

If it's not matter, space or time could it be mind? If it is mind then the fundamental reality would seem to be an intelligence which creates the world by thinking it into being. That sounds a lot like the God of Genesis 1.

Seven Myths

In his book Unbelievable: 7 Myths about the History and Future of Science and Religion historian of science Michael Keas discusses seven myths that have seeped into our popular culture concerning the alleged conflict between science and religion, particularly Christianity, and shows that each of the first six is historically false and that the seventh is theologically false.

Here's a thumbnail outline of the thesis of his book excerpted from the Introduction:

Myth #1: Premodern scholars in the Western tradition thought the universe was small—a cozy little place just for human benefit. Modern science displaced this Church-sanctioned belief with a vast cosmos that revealed humans to be insignificant.

The truth: Even ancient thinkers recognized that the earth was tiny in relation to the immense cosmos. In any case, size doesn’t necessarily mean significance, as many theologians and philosophers recognized.

Myth #2: The medieval Catholic Church suppressed the growth of science, causing Europe to descend into the “Dark Ages.”

The truth: The medieval Catholic Church positively influenced science and other intellectual pursuits. There were no “Dark Ages.”

Myth #3: Because of Church-induced ignorance, European intellectuals believed in a flat earth until Columbus proved earth’s roundness in 1492.

The truth: Ancient and medieval intellectuals in the Western tradition had many evidence-based reasons for belief in earth’s roundness.

Myth #4: Giordano Bruno became a martyr for science when the Catholic Church burned him at the stake because he supported Nicolaus Copernicus’s contention that the sun, not the earth, occupied the center of the universe, and because he believed in extraterrestrial life.

The truth: Bruno’s execution occurred almost entirely for theological reasons, not scientific ones.

Myth #5: The Church jailed Galileo Galilei because it rejected his telescopic observations and rational arguments that had proved the Copernican system.

The truth: Most early modern astronomers up through the mid-seventeenth century resisted a moving earth primarily for scientific, not theological, reasons. Galileo failed to prove that earth orbited the sun (that came later).

Myth #6: Copernicus demoted humans from the privileged “center of the universe” and thereby challenged religious doctrines about human importance.

The truth: Copernicus and most of his scientific successors up through the nineteenth century considered his sun-centered astronomy to be compatible with Christianity and human exceptionalism. In fact, early Copernicans viewed earth’s new location not as a demotion for humanity but rather as a promotion, out of the bottom of the universe.

Myth #7: If and when we encounter extraterrestrial life, it will deal the death blow to certain religions, especially Christianity, with its doctrine of the uniqueness of man and the incarnation and redemptive work of God on earth. Any ET capable of traveling a vast distance to earth would have superintelligence, technology indistinguishable from magic, and moral-spiritual insights that would trigger global religious reorientation.

The truth: Many Christian thinkers have been open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and neither a single pope nor a major church council ever declared these ideas heretical. Alien life and Christianity are potentially compatible.

Despite the efforts of people like Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the PBS science series Cosmos, the idea that science and religion are incompatible, though popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, has long since exceeded its intellectual shelf-life. Very few reputable scholars hold to it today because the historical evidence against it is overwhelming.

Keas does a good job of explaining that evidence in his book.

Trump Resurgent?

Horror movie plots sometimes feature a fearsome antagonist who seems unkillable. We may be seeing something similar in our nation's political life. Just when everyone thought Donald Trump's star was fading and that it was time to write his political obituary he may well be surging back to terrorize Republicans and Democrats alike.

Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon explains that after watching Trump suffer wounds that would've been fatal to mortal politicians his enemies in both parties are making the same mistakes they made in 2016.

He writes:

Donald Trump spent the final months of 2022 reeling from electoral setbacks and media disasters. Many of his high-profile endorsements in the midterm elections flopped. His attacks on popular GOP governors in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Georgia did little damage to their reputations.

His 2024 campaign launch was a snooze. His infamous and inexcusable dinner at Mar-a-Lago with high-profile anti-Semites put him on the political fringe. By the end of last year, Trump appeared to be fading from the national conversation. His chances of winning the Republican nomination seemed to dim.

Now those chances are brightening. Trump continues to dominate in polls of Republicans. He's drawn even with President Biden in head-to-head matchups. He lobbied successfully for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) to become speaker of the House of Representatives.

His loyalists on the House Judiciary, Oversight, and Weaponization of the Federal Government committees will be sure to advance his interests. He's plotting his return to Facebook, Instagram, and possibly Twitter, and his connection with the Republican base remains strong.

Most important of all, Trump's rivals in both the Democratic and Republican parties are repeating the mistakes they made in the run-up to the 2016 election. The Democrats assume that there is no way for Trump to become president, while Republicans believe he will fade from the scene.

Their failure to learn from history has made it possible not only for Trump to win the GOP nomination for the third straight time, but to pull another inside straight in the Electoral College and return to the White House. For decades, Trump has said that the political class is corrupt, insular, and incompetent, and that Republican leaders lack guts. Washington is doing its best to prove him right.

Continetti goes on to explain why Trump has begun to rebound from his disastrous 2022, and his essay is a very interesting piece of political analysis. Even so, whether Trump can come all the way back from his nadir of two years ago to regain the White House is still uncertain.

Continetti closes with this:

The presidential campaign is just beginning. No one knows what lies ahead. The Trump rebound may soon pass and won't come again. There's a sleeper candidate or two out there who will make this race interesting.

For now, though, Democrats and Republicans are gambling that they can behave in 2024 just like they did in 2016, but produce a different result.

One thing, at least, is reasonably certain: For those who pay at least a bit of attention to politics the next twenty two months will be fascinating.

Who's Irrational?

People who believe that the physical world is not all there is, who believe instead that the world is the product of a transcendent Mind which is involved in world history are sometimes called “irrational” by secular folk who believe that the physical world is indeed all there is.

Dennis Prager has a piece at PJ Media in which he asks who is it, really, who’s irrational. He writes that examples can be found in every area of life of the non-religious actually believing what's irrational if believing what's irrational is defined as believing something that's contrary to common sense or lacking in any scientific justification.

For instance, it's mostly non-religious - or secular - people who believe that men can give birth; that males — providing they identify as females — should be allowed to compete against girls in women’s sports; that children conflicted about their identity should be given puberty-blocking hormones; and that young girls who think they're boys should have their healthy breasts surgically removed.

Prager believes that it's mostly non-religious folks who believe that it's okay for men in drag to dance in sexually suggestive ways in front of children; that it's racist to emulate Martin Luther King's aspiration to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; and that fewer police, fewer prosecutions and lower prison sentences (or no prison time at all) lead to less crime.

One could add to Prager's list that it's mostly secular folks who believe that there are a near infinity of other universes, all different, which lie beyond our own universe. They believe this despite the complete lack of empirical evidence for any universe but our own.

Furthermore, it's mostly secular people who believe that our universe sprang into being out of essentially nothing, and it's mostly secular people who believe that the equivalent of an entire library of information needed to create the first living cell somehow self-assembled by accident into a metabolizing, reproducing unit of life.

Again, thery believe this despite the utter dearth of evidence that it's even possible let alone that it happened.

Prager also touches on a few social and moral issues that are not actually related to the main topic of rationality, but since he brought them up I'll add one to his list:

We've seen dozens of mass murders over the last few decades, some of which seem to be completely unmotivated by anything other than the killer's desire to kill other human beings.

How many of these murderers are deeply religious Christians and how many of them have no belief in a God? I have no data to support my suspicion, but I'll go out on a limb and speculate that almost everyone, excluding Islamic terrorists, who has committed these horrific crimes has no significant belief in God at all.

I'd be willing to bet, too, that the same applies to those who commit almost all the other crimes afflicting our society - all of those, for instance, responsible for the fentanyl epidemic, all those who steal other people's property, and all those who engage in sex-trafficking.

The non-religious can claim that religious believers are irrational, but when it comes to matters of simple science and/or common morality, irrationality is often, and moral evil is almost always, found among the non-religious.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. III)

This is the third and final part of our look at an essay by Richard Weikart, a professor of modern European history at California State University, in which he addresses the inability of naturalism to provide a coherent basis for ethics. Scroll down for the first two installments.

In today's post we'll look at Weikert's critique of the attempt by biologist Jerry Coyne to derive ethics from biological and cultural evolution. He notes that Coyne's writing on this topic presupposes an objective moral standard, the existence of which he nevertheless denies:

Coyne is an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and a prominent atheist. In his 2015 book, Faith Versus Fact, Coyne argues that morality is the product of both evolutionary and cultural processes. He vigorously denies that there is anything fixed or objective about morality.

However, despite his moral relativism, later in his book Coyne inexplicably states, “Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most ‘religious’ morality.”

It escapes Coyne’s notice, apparently, that for one kind of morality to be superior to another, there has to be some yardstick outside both moral systems to measure them by.

In other words, if human beings are the product of evolution then all of our behaviors are also the product of our evolutionary development. How then do we determine that charity is good and selfishness is bad if they're both the residue of the evolutionary process?

The only way we can make that judgment is if we compare the two behaviors to some objective standard to see which one conforms best to that standard. Yet Coyne's philosophy doesn't allow for the existence of such a standard so his judgments of good and bad are completely arbitrary.

Weikert continues:

When Coyne confronts specific moral precepts, he falls into the same contradiction. In a 2017 blog he argues that infanticide and assisted suicide should be permitted, and he insists that the increasing acceptance of them in our society is a sign of moral progress. He proclaims, “This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide [i.e., its legalization in some states and countries] are the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world.”

Now, some commentators (such as myself) would argue the exact opposite: that the increasing acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide is evidence of our moral decline. But laying aside whether I am right or Coyne is right on this specific moral issue, both of our moral claims — that there is moral progress or moral decline — imply that we are moving toward (or away from) some objective moral goal.

Unless there is an objective moral standard how does Coyne know that any behavior represents moral progress? All that he actually seems to be saying is that a behavior represents moral progress if it's a behavior that he likes.

Weikert goes on to discuss a study done by John Evans, a sociology professor at the University of California, that shows a correlation between one's worldview and one's view of human rights:

[Evans] divided people’s views of humanity into three broad categories: theistic, biological, and philosophical. The theistic view of humanity is characterized by the view that humans are created in the image of God. The biological view of humanity sees humans as the product of evolutionary processes and as exclusively physical beings. The philosophical view understands humans to be defined by their having certain traits, such as consciousness, the ability to plan their future, and so forth.

What Evans discovered was that people embracing the theistic view of humans have greater respect for human rights than those espousing the two secularist views. Evans, as a secularist who nonetheless believes in human rights, is clearly uncomfortable with his discovery.

This result should not be surprising since only the theist who believes that all human beings are created by God in His image and loved by Him have any basis for thinking that objective human rights could even exist. In any other worldview human rights are simply an arbitrary fiction men fabricate to make it easier to live together in society.

For Evans to believe in objective human rights requires a non-rational leap of faith out of his naturalistic worldview and into the worldview of the theist. He must piggy-back, as it were, on theism to get him to objective human rights while all the while rejecting the theistic assumptions that allow for those rights to exist in the first place.

Secularists like Evans want a kind of Christianity without God, but a Christianity without God provides no more solid foundation for ethics than any other worldview, and is just as nonsensical as every other system of thought that tries to hold on to beliefs about right and wrong in the absence of any objective standard for them.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. II)

Yesterday I discussed an essay written by Richard Weikert on how modernity, which is characterized by a naturalistic metaphysics that excludes God, led to the massive bloodletting of the 20th century.

I'd like to continue looking at Weikert's column today as he focuses on one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell was one of the most famous British philosophers of the twentieth century. In an essay written in 1903, Russell divulged a rather stark view of humanity:

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 labors 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.

Because he viewed humans as merely “accidental collocations of atoms” and thus as merely the product of random processes, Russell complained that Christianity and other religions were wrong to believe that the earth and its inhabitants have a special place in the cosmos.

In 1925 he underscored this point by stating: “The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth, is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet.”

If you didn’t catch it, those “tiny parasites” are you and I and all our fellow human beings.

This reminds one of the claim made by cosmologist Stephen Hawking that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

Weikert continues:

In addition to denigrating humans as “tiny parasites,” Russell also stripped humans of any moral significance, claiming that morality was merely an expression of subjective desires or emotions. The moral command, “Thou shalt not kill,” according to Russell’s philosophy, does not really mean there is anything objectively wrong with murder. Rather, anyone making such a statement really means, “I don’t like killing.”

Moral statements are meaningless, Russell claimed, unless they are understood as merely an individual’s personal emotional preference. In his philosophy, then, Russell continually undermined any notion of objective morality or inalienable human rights.

Like most moderns, however, Russell couldn't live consistently with the entailments of his worldview. Having declared to the rest of us that there's no objective right nor wrong, Russell proceeded to live as if there is. He took a leap of faith, in other words, away from what his atheism told him was true and lived, at least to some extent, as if theism were true:

However, ironically, in his personal life he was an intense and committed moralist. In his Autobiography he stated that his whole life was animated by three passions: love, knowledge, and pity for human suffering. Indeed, in the same essay that he called humans “tiny parasites” with no cosmic significance, he also uttered the words, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

Russell’s passion for humanity also manifested itself in his opposition to nuclear arms. He even spent time in jail as a result of demonstrating for nuclear disarmament.

What was going on here? Was the arch-rational philosopher letting his emotions get the best of him? Whatever the explanation for this tension between his moral philosophy and his personal life, I am not the only one to notice the contradiction. In her memoirs about her life with her father, Russell’s daughter, Katherine Tait, called him a “passionate moralist” and an “absolutist” who would have been a saint in a more religious age in the past.

Ideas have consequences. If the consequences of our ideas, in Russell's case his atheism, are unlivable then there's doubtless something wrong with the ideas. Russell was not unaware of the tension:

Interestingly, now that we have access to some of Russell’s private correspondence, we also know that Russell was troubled by these inconsistencies in his life. In a private letter to a woman he loved he poured out his soul, explaining:

I am strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of all this, to my intense sorrow, pain to you must grow.

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain — a curious wild pain — a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite — the beatific vision — God — I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found — but the love of it is my life — it’s like passionate love for a ghost.

At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work, it fills every passion that I have — it is the actual spring of life within me. I can’t explain it or make it seem anything but foolishness — but whether foolish or not, it is the source of whatever is any good in me....At most times, now, I am not conscious of it, only when I am strongly stirred, either happily or unhappily.

I seek escape from it, though I don’t believe I ought to.

Russell's letter reveals the predicament of modern man. He recognizes his emptiness. He recognizes the contradiction between what his heart tells him is true and what his philosophy tells him he must believe. He has a profound inner yearning for God, but, despite being painfully conflicted, he simply will not yield himself to that which deep down he realizes has to be true.

Filled with angst from the tension between the emptiness within and the inability of his naturalistic worldview to satisfy it, he nevertheless refuses to conclude that his worldview is in error.

Russell's mistake, perhaps, was that he was looking for God to reveal Himself in some sort of supernal ecstacy or Pascalian emotional experience. But Russell, a man of reason and logic, had at his disposal all the intellectual and philosophical resources needed to justify a belief that God was real.

He didn't need the intense emotional revelation that Blaise Pascal experienced in order to jettison his atheism. All he needed was the willingness to submit to what his heart told him must be true, and that, for whatever reason, he was unable to do.

Tomorrow we'll look at two contemporary figures whose thinking Weikert discusses in his essay.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. I)

Richard Weikert has an interesting piece at Equip.org in which he writes about how the assumptions of 20th century modernity, i.e. that there is no God and therefore no objective morality, led to the horrors of the Gulag and the Holocaust.

He begins with an overview of the ideas of Marx and how they led to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin:

In 1945, the year that World War II ended, C. S. Lewis published That Hideous Strength, the third book in his science fiction trilogy. In that work Lewis depicted the dangerous consequences of embracing secular worldviews. His warning came at a time when Stalin and Hitler had committed horrific atrocities in the name of secular worldviews.

Stalin, in the name of a Marxist worldview, slaughtered millions in his collectivization campaign and in the Great Purge. Marx, based on his atheistic position, had promoted environmental determinism, the view that human behavior is shaped by the environment.

Marx, Lenin, and Stalin all believed that by altering the economy — specifically by eliminating private property — they could transform human nature, thus leading us into a society free from oppression, poverty, and strife.

Another corollary of the Marxist worldview was that objective morality and human rights are non-existent. Marxists believed that morality was a tool of bourgeois oppression, so they did not believe in any objective human rights. Lenin explicitly argued that the ends justify the means. Any measures necessary to reach the final communist state were justified, in his view.

Because of their view of human nature and morality, Marxists saw people as things to be manipulated. Through labor camps Soviet communists hoped to re-educate prisoners to bring them into conformity to communist ways.

The Holocaust was also a consequence of a secular worldview:

Hitler’s atrocities also flowed from a dehumanizing worldview. Instead of environmental determinism, Nazism promoted biological determinism. It held that human nature and behavior are shaped by one’s biological traits, especially those associated with one’s race....Hitler believed that humans were locked in an inescapable struggle for existence that fostered evolutionary progress.

The only criteria to judge human behavior, he thought, was whether or not it helped foster evolutionary progress. Because he believed in biological inequality, especially racial inequality, this meant that measures to benefit those deemed biologically superior, along with policies to eliminate those considered biologically inferior, were morally justified.

There's much more to Weikert's essay, and I'd like to look at more of it over the next couple of days, but for now it's important to note that ideas have consequences and the consequences of the naturalism embraced by many moderns were particularly horrific. Modernity sought to exalt mankind, to apotheosize man, but by putting man in the place of God it actually dehumanized humanity.

Instead of being created in the image of a God who loves us and endowed us with objective human rights, man was reduced to the level of a soulless brute.

Under the Stalinist and Hitlerian tyrannies, and the tyrannies imposed by lesser communists all over the globe in the 20th century, mankind was reduced to the level of cattle to be herded, manipulated and slaughtered whenever it suited the purposes of those who had the power to carry out their sick dreams.

And, let's note, given the truth of a naturalist worldview, a worldview that excludes God, there's no basis for saying that any of these slaughters was morally wrong. As atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins once observed, it's very difficult for one who holds to the atheistic view of reality to say that Hitler was wrong.

For anything to be objectively wrong there has to be an objective standard of goodness and there has to be accountability. Take away either of these, which atheism, of course, does, and the whole idea of objective right and wrong collapses.

This is why Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong could murder over 100 million people in the 20th century and think that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing.

None of them believed butchering human beings was objectively wrong nor that they would ever be held accountable for doing it, and, if they were right about God, they were right about that.

More on Weikert's essay tomorrow.

Echolocation

One of the amazing abilities of some animals is the ability to navigate and find food by echolocation. This is an incredible biological appurtenance, one whose mindless, accidental origin seems utterly implausible.

The number and complexity of organs that are involved in this amazing sense is astounding. These organs enable the animal to produce, send, receive and process sound waves.They enable them to use these sound waves to determine the distance, size and composition of a potential food source.

According to Darwinian evolution these structures all evolved nearly simultaneously by fortuitous genetic mutations and without any goal or purpose, and they all somehow managed to emerge in numerous different species of animals - bats, dolphins, whales, some (but not all) birds and a few others.

How? Let's not settle for any waving of the magic wand type answers, answers in which we're told that given enough time, blind, impersonal processes can somehow work magic.

Intelligent, thoughtful people should be more critical of such answers and less gullible in accepting them.

Nor should we settle for scientific "promissory notes," assurances that even though the evolution of such abilities is a mystery today, someday we'll find out how it happened. The problem isn't so much explaining precisely how it happened but rather explaining how it could have happened.

What plausible pathway could mindless forces have unintentionally followed that could've resulted in a set of systems and subsystems of such complexity and controlled by such sophisticated information as we see in an animal's echolocation sense?

Intelligent engineers can accomplish such feats, but how can unintelligent, random processes like genetic mutation, a process which is almost always harmful to an organism generate what's shown in this video describing the dolphin's echolocatory apparatus.

Watch the video and ask yourself which explanation for what you see is most plausible - intelligent engineering or mindless chance.

What Real Heroism Looks Like

Among the many heroes who risked everything to rescue Jews from the Nazi psychopaths during WWII many names spring to mind. Raoul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler, Corrie Ten Boom, Maximilian Kolbe, Irena Opdyke, John Rabe and so many more are fairly well-known and deserve to be even more well-known, but one man and his wife with whom I was not familiar were the subject of an article in The Federalist written by Amy Lutz a few years ago.

The couple was Carl and Trudi Lutz (no relation to Amy), and they're credited by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. with having saved over 62,000 people during the war. Carl was a Swiss-American who worked for the Swiss diplomatic corps prior to WWII.

I encourage you to read the full article at the link to learn his background, but he was posted to Palestine before the war and then during the war to Budapest, Hungary. Here's Amy Lutz's account of what Carl did once he found himself in Budapest:

[An] incident occurred during Lutz’s time in Palestine that would forever alter his perception. One day while standing on the roof of their apartment, Lutz and his wife Trudi saw four Jewish men lynched in the street. The next day, Lutz wrote a letter to his brother in which he said the following, “As I swore to the victims, as they suffered hits and stabs, that one day I would speak up for them.”

That opportunity would come soon enough. In 1942, Lutz transferred to Budapest, where he resided when the Nazis arrived in Hungary in March 1944. Lutz recalled the protective papers he used to assist German Jews in Palestine and determined they could be used to protect Hungarian Jews from being sent to Auschwitz.

While it was unlikely anyone could find a way from Budapest to Palestine in the chaos and terror of 1944-1945, those holding the protective papers were considered to be under Swiss protection and exempt from deportation.

Lutz procured 8,000 protective “units” but realized his efforts would be for naught if he did not ensure that the Nazi forces ruling Hungary would honor them. He scheduled a meeting with a high-ranking Nazi official who had just arrived in Budapest, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann, one of the Third Reich’s leading facilitators of the Holocaust, was a bit taken aback by the request from the well-dressed, albeit soft-spoken diplomat. He even used their initial meeting as an opportunity to mock Lutz, comparing him to Moses attempting to rescue his people.

However, Eichmann did pass along the request. Soon after, Lutz received word that Germany would authorize the 8,000 protective papers, in part because of Lutz’s previous work in Palestine [on behalf of German civilians trapped there when hostilities broke out].

Lutz immediately launched a plan to rescue far more than 8,000 people. While Eichmann assumed the 8,000 “units” Lutz requested meant 8,000 individuals, Lutz instead determined that “units” meant “families,” thereby increasing the number of people he could protect. He immediately began to disseminate the papers throughout Budapest.

Forged Swiss protective documents also began to appear in the city, but Lutz looked the other way. He also placed 76 buildings under Swiss diplomatic protection, where he was able to house thousands of Hungarian Jews who had lost their homes and property. Lutz frequently stepped in to rescue individual Hungarian Jews, once jumping in the Danube river to rescue a Jewish woman shot by fascist militia.

Eichmann eventually discovered Lutz’s deception in late 1944. Instead of refusing to authorize any neutral protective papers, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators hatched a devious plan. They brought Carl and Trudi Lutz to a brickyard, where Hungarian Jews were kept prisoner before deportation to Auschwitz. The authorities forced the Lutzes to identify forged Swiss protective papers, and they complied to preserve the authority of the legitimate papers.

While the couple attempted to falsely validate the more convincing forgeries, they could not do so for all the papers. Hungarian Jews with documents that could not be validated were no longer protected from deportation and were sent to their death. The experience haunted Carl and Trudi Lutz for the rest of their lives.

In a 1949 report, Lutz summarized his motivations behind his rescue efforts, writing that he did not consider himself a “Christian in name only” and therefore found it a “matter of conscience” to rescue the Hungarian Jews “condemned to die.”

Carl Lutz  in 1944

There's more to their story which you can read at the link. Carl and his wife divorced after the war, and he died in 1975 largely unknown and forgotten. He shouldn't have been. In an age in which our heroes are often rock stars, athletes and Hollywood celebrities - people who are considered heroes simply because they're famous - it's good to pause and reflect on what real heroism looks like.

Big Brother on Campus

Mike Mitchell gives a much deserved lampooning to the decision by USC's college of social work (whose staff apparently has too much time on their hands) to henceforth prohibit mention of the word "field."

Here's USC's rationale, to use that word in its loosest sense:

We would like to share a change we are making . . . to ensure our use of inclusive language and practice. Specifically, we have decided to remove the term “field” from our curriculum and practice and replace it with “practicum.” This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language.

Language can be powerful, and phrases such as “going into the field” or “field work” may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign. . . In solidarity with universities across the nation, our goal is not just to change language but to honor and acknowledge inclusion and reject white supremacy, anti-immigrant and anti-blackness ideologies.

Well. Once begun where does this purging of the language end? Mitchell thinks the censors pretty much have an open, ah, field to play in:

If the scholars at the USC college of social work are on the right track, we better also get serious about eliminating other words that may be equally offensive. Why not change the points on the compass to "North, West, East, and That Realm of Racial Oppression"?

As for other verbal injustices, what about the word (trigger warning) "tree," since this was an object used to perpetrate some of the worst acts of racial oppression in the past. I wonder if any social work students at USC will be reprimanded for using the "c" word? Certainly no one in the department would be so morally blind as to wear cotton clothing.

I'm sure we can think of a near infinity of other words and expressions that need to be banned. How about "slavery," "whip," "chains," "rope," "noose," "buy and sell," all of which conjure in a perfervid mind horrific images of historical oppression and injustice.

For that matter, lets ban "oppression" and "injustice" because they might have unbenign connotations in the minds of the descendents of people who suffered at the hands (oops, "hands" is too close to "field hands") of others (and who among us doesn't have ancestors who were the victims of oppression and injustice?)

How about banning the word "mister" which derives from "master"? Or how about "shiftless" and "lazy," pejoratives that've been used ever since antebellum days to stereotype African Americans.

There's no end to this depauperization of the language, which is, of course, what the left is counting on. By constricting socially acceptable vocabulary the left seeks to increase its control over the discourse and thus over the minds of the American citizenry.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell illustrates how and why totalitarians of the left accomplish this.

Orwell argues that by controlling the language, the tyrant controls the way people think since with a limited vocabulary, the people are limited in how much they can think as well as what they can think about.

Language is the basis of human thought because it structures and shapes the way we think and the way we see the world. The richer the language, the freer and more fertile are the minds of a citizenry, but freedom of thought and fertility of ideas are anathema to the left.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother (the state) creates and enforces a truncated, sterile language that facilitates deception and manipulation, and whose purpose is to eliminate freedom and restrict understanding of the real world.

Big Brother's ideological descendents are evidently alive and well today at USC and indeed throughout numerous institutions of our culture.

Mr. Biden's Latest

Former President Trump has a penchant for making life much more difficult for himself than it needs to be. As is well-known he's currently in hot water for having stored documents classified Top Secret at his home in Mar-a-Lago. It's a crime for anyone to have classified documents in a private residence or office, and it's a much greater offense if the offender is a Republican. It's a crime against humanity if the miscreant is Donald Trump.

Bill Clinton's former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, was caught in 2003 pirating documents out of the National Archives in his socks, documents he subsequently destoyed, and received little more than a couple of "naughty, naughtys" from the authorities. Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, was discovered to have classified material on her phone and home internet server. She professed girlish naivete, was subjected to a bit of finger-wagging by the FBI, and sent on her merry way.

Donald Trump, however, is being threatened with a prison sentence.

Mr. Trump's successor in the White House, Joe Biden, went on 60 Minutes in late September and asked, with righteous indignation, how anyone, meaning Mr. Trump, could possibly be so irresponsible as to take classified information out of a government facility. To do so, Mr. Biden implied, is the zenith of recklessness and foolhardiness.

Now we learn that the self-righteous Mr. Biden has himself been stashing Top Secret documents willy-nilly about his various private offices and residences like a squirrel storing up acorns for the winter. Mr. Trump must be gloating.

Jim Geraghty provides a few details:

Back on November 2, 2022 — before the midterm elections — one of Biden’s personal lawyers, Patrick Moore, was at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located in D.C., going through old papers from Biden’s time as vice president.

We haven’t gotten much of an explanation as to why, two years into Biden’s presidency, this was happening. Did the coverage of former president Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago spur someone on Biden’s team to worry that classified documents had gotten mixed in with Biden’s non-classified personal papers?

Did that make one or more of Biden’s staffers belatedly realize they had likely demonstrated the same irresponsibility?

The Washington Post reports, quoting people familiar with the matter, that “some of the classified material found in the Biden Penn Center office was marked top secret.”

Recall that the presence of security at a location, whether in the form of security guards, locks, or the U.S. Secret Service, does not mean it is considered secure for the storage of classified information. Classified documents are not supposed to leave government buildings, period.

Then, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, on December 20, President Biden’s personal counsel notified U.S. Attorney John Lausch that additional documents bearing classification markings were identified in the garage of the president’s private residence in Wilmington, Del.

And this past weekend, President Biden’s lawyers found six more pages of documents with classification markings at the Wilmington residence.

The argument from the Biden team is that this situation is completely different from former president Trump’s because the current president and his people aren’t hiding anything. And yet, these documents were found before the midterms, and no one revealed any of this to the public until January 9.

What affect this will have on Mr. Biden's presidency is uncertain, but it doesn't help any politician when at worst they look like a criminal and at best they look like a buffoon.

The News for Russia Is Pretty Bad

What with all of the news here at home about President Biden's sundry pratfalls a lot of folks have lost track of what's happening in the Russia/Ukraine war. Here's an update courtesy of Strategy Page:

Russia is desperate for some good news out of Ukraine, where Russian forces have suffered one failure after another.

Sensing an opportunity, Russian forces have suffered heavy casualties trying to push Ukrainian forces out of a few key locations in the Donetsk province, which is part of Russian occupied Donbas. Russia has been using Wagner Group mercenaries for most of the attacks because these troops are more effectively led and willing to continue making seemingly suicidal attacks on Ukrainian forces.

The Ukrainian defenders are special operations troops whose orders are to inflict maximum casualties on the attacker while minimizing enemy advances and Ukrainian casualties.

December 28, 2022: Ukraine reported that at least 620 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded on the 25th. Many of the wounded have since died because Russia still lacks sufficient medical facilities inside Ukraine and lacks the transportation resources to fly casualties to better medical facilities in Russia.

Since the invasion began, 102,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded or reported missing. Ukraine reports a growing number of Russian soldiers surrendering or deserting. These are often returned in prisoner exchanges.

A growing number of Russian prisoners of war resist being part of these exchanges because they deliberately deserted and face prosecution and prison if they return to Russia. Some of the Russian soldiers who were legitimate prisoners were prosecuted after being exchanged because the Russian government wanted more former prisoners jailed to discourage surrendering.

The current state of the Russian military cannot support any Russian military objectives in Ukraine, or anywhere else. What Russia lost in Ukraine will take years to replace. For example, most of the infantry officers the army had in 2021 have already been killed, captured or disabled in Ukraine.

There were no replacements for the lost infantry officers so Russia tried calling up retired officers and transferring non-infantry officers to lead infantry units. That did not work.

Another problem is the lack of NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers). These have been a staple of Western armies for centuries and are often capable of replacing infantry officers lost in combat. Russia abolished NCOs a century ago and has not been able to rebuild that after more than a decade of trying.

Any New Russian Army will take years to create and currently the loss of officers and experienced soldiers has Russia depending on Belarussian instructors to train new Russian troops. This is done in Belarus to the extent possible because Belarus’s tiny army has much smaller training capability than the pre-2022 Russian army.

Almost all new troops in Russia get no training at all and are just given uniforms, assault rifles and transportation to Ukraine where they find few officers to lead them and not much in the way of supplies, especially food, to sustain them. Because of the dismal current situation, the announcement of a new Russian Army is seen as a morale building exercise for pro-war Russians and the few army personnel who still support the war.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine almost one year ago is on track to be one of the greatest military blunders in history, certainly since WWII. That he can survive this decision and the damage and humiliation that has been wrought on the Russian military because of it grows more unlikely with every passing month.

The Socratic Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herrick continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On MLK Day

One of the differences between Martin Luther King's approach to the race problem and that of many of those who celebrate him today is that many of our contemporaries see racial guilt as a collective stain whereas King saw it as individual and color-blind. To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the guilt for crimes of the past runs not through races nor through nationalities but through every individual human heart.

The collective view, that whites, for example, share moral responsibility for what other whites did to blacks in the past, is implicit in demands for reparations and other racial preferences, but it's nonsensical.

Suppose you are of English descent and you read about how some Englishman two hundred years ago committed some atrocity against a Frenchman, would you feel that you personally owed contemporary French some sort of apology?

Suppose you are a male and you read about the horrific murder of four Idaho college students by Bryan Kohberger, another male. Would you feel that you are somehow responsible because you shared the same gender as Mr. Kohberger?

Would you feel some shared responsibility if your name was also Bryan? What if your surname just by happenstance was Kohberger? How much guilt would you bear for the Idaho murders?

If you think you would indeed be in some sense responsible, why do you? And if you think it absurd to claim that you are in any way responsible, that one's nationality or gender or surname do not make someone guilty for crimes committed by others who have those things in common with you, why is your race uniquely different?

Specifically, why are whites collectively expected to repent for what other whites did to blacks two hundred years ago?

Does a black man in Philadelphia share guilt when a black man in Los Angeles murders a white man? If a black man's great, great grandfather murdered a white man's great, great grandfather, does the contemporary black man bear guilt for the crime?

If your brother commits a crime and is sent to prison is it just to imprison you as well if you had no part in the crime?

No one today is guilty for what people of their same race did to others a century or more ago. Guilt is individual, not collective. We'll have a much healthier, cohesive society when everyone follows Martin Luther King's example and acknowledges that simple fact.

Reversing the Aging Process

I thought this CNN article was quackery when I first saw the headline but reading the article convinced me that it's actually legitimate science.

David Sinclair, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research is working on reversing the aging process and has enjoyed some success with mice that will be published soon in the journal Cell.

A brief summary of the article goes like this: There are control molecules all along the strands of DNA which turn our genes on and off as well as repair them. Environmental factors like diet, pollution, chronic lack of sleep, etc. can affect the operation of these molecules so that our genes get damaged and the information contained in our genes gets corrupted, much like the information on a computer hard drive can be corrupted.

Amazingly, though, our cells apparently have the ability to reset the genes to an earlier, younger state, and research is being conducted to discover the trigger for this rest function.

Here are some highlights from the CNN piece:

“The astonishing finding is that there’s a backup copy of the software in the body that you can reset,” Sinclair said. “We’re showing why that software gets corrupted and how we can reboot the system by tapping into a reset switch that restores the cell’s ability to read the genome correctly again, as if it was young.”

It doesn’t matter if the body is 50 or 75, healthy or wracked with disease, Sinclair said. Once that process has been triggered, “the body will then remember how to regenerate and will be young again, even if you’re already old and have an illness. Now, what that software is, we don’t know yet. At this point, we just know that we can flip the switch.”

Sinclair Lab geneticist Yuancheng Lu created a mixture of three of four “Yamanaka factors,” human adult skin cells that have been reprogrammed to behave like embryonic or pluripotent stem cells, capable of developing into any cell in the body.

The cocktail was injected into damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of the eyes of blind mice....The mice regained most of their eyesight.

Next, the team tackled brain, muscle and kidney cells, and restored those to much younger levels, according to the study.

“One of our breakthroughs was to realize that if you use this particular set of three pluripotent stem cells, the mice don’t go back to age zero, which would cause cancer or worse,” Sinclair said.

“Instead, the cells go back to between 50% and 75% of the original age, and they stop and don’t get any younger, which is lucky. How the cells know to do that, we don’t yet understand.”

Today, Sinclair’s team is trying to find a way to deliver the genetic switch evenly to each cell, thus rejuvenating the entire mouse at once.

What’s next? Billions of dollars are being poured into anti-aging, funding all sorts of methods to turn back the clock.

In his lab, Sinclair said his team has reset the cells in mice multiple times, showing that aging can be reversed more than once, and he is currently testing the genetic reset in primates.

All of that is fascinating, of course, but there's a downside as well:

But decades could pass before any anti-aging clinical trials in humans begin, get analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for federal approval.

Anyway, there's an interesting theological corollary to this work. Skeptics have long scoffed at reports in the Biblical book of Genesis of ancient people living for many centuries, but if environment plays a role in maintaining the integrity of the epigenome, if environmental changes can degrade our DNA, then long life spans in the pristine earth should not be surprising.

Then, as Genesis relates, after the occurrence of a global catastrophe the ages of the ancients went into a sudden decline which would again fit with Sinclair's theory of environmental changes corrupting DNA.

Maybe those old narratives aren't just legends and myths after all.

What Good Has Christianity Ever Done for Us?

In his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, atheistic historian Tom Holland observes that all that we cherish as goods in the West - our belief in human equality, human dignity regardless of gender or age, justice for all regardless of station, the trustworthiness of our reason as a guide to truth - all of these and more are the fruits of two millenia of Christianity, and to the extent they exist anywhere else on the globe it's due to the influence of Christianity.

Another atheist, philosopher Jürgen Habermas, once stated that,

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

I was reminded of Holland and Habermas - and others who've made similar observations - when reading the 2022 Erasmus Lecture (paywall) sponsored by the journal First Things and delivered by Anthony Fisher.

At one point in his talk Fisher cites a scene from an old Monty Python film, Life of Brian:

In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, John Cleese plays Reg, a member of the People’s Front of Judea. In a terrorist cell meeting, Reg asks rhetorically: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” His fellows respond with example after example of the benefits of Roman civilization.

“All right, all right,” Reg concedes. “But apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

For all the historical ignorance, revolutionary fantasies, and plain ingratitude of modernity, the debt of Western civilization to Christianity is much greater.

All right, all right. But apart from the sanity that sanctity brings to a world of sin; the building of hospitals, hospices, and leprosaria; the creation of the university and the most comprehensive primary, secondary, and tertiary school system in the world; the endowment and staffing of orphanages, aged-care homes, and other welfare institutions—apart from those things, what [has Christianity] ever done for us?

Apart from ending human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, infanticide, and the chattel conception of women and children; the explication of a sublime moral code and vision of the virtuous person; the shaping of our language and discourse; the promotion of literacy, printing, and libraries; the sponsorship of much science, medicine, and technology, and of traditions of art, music, literature, and architecture; the development of much of Western common, civil, and constitutional law; and the establishment of a corpus of theological and philosophical thought that has provided metaphysical grounding for our politics and so much else—apart from all that, our secular antagonist presses, what have the [Christians] ever done for us?

The point made by Holland, Habermas and Fisher is that so much that we take for granted in the West we would not have ever had were it not for the Christian worldview that began 2000 years ago and has largely influenced the West for the last 1700 years.

It's good to remember this when people take Christianity to task for the sins of the Church. It's also edifying to ask on what other moral grounds would anyone be able to assert that the Church was wrong to, say, torture and burn people at the stake during the Inquisition or more recently for clergy to sexually abuse boys, or to commit any of the other crimes, real or imagined, imputed to the Church.

Take away the Christian understanding of the dignity of the person created in the image of God, take away the Christian understanding of human rights and what foundation is the critic standing on to criticize or condemn Christianity?

Certainly none of the offenses mentioned above would've been considered morally reprehensible in ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt. None of them would be thought to be wrong under Hindu morality or under strict Islamic law or according to the moral practices of the Orient.

The critic's moral judgment upon Christianity is unwittingly based on the residuum of two thousand years of Christian teaching that the critic has absorbed and adopted without even realizing it. He rejects Christianity while oblivious to the fact that apart from Christianity he has no basis for whatever moral beliefs he brings to bear to discredit Christianity and the Church.

To their credit, Holland and Habermas recognize this and acknowledge it which causes one to wonder why they don't abandon their atheism and become Christians.

They might claim that they just can't bring themselves to believe Christianity is true, but that would be a very odd response. It would mean that they're basing their whole way of life on principles they believe to ultimately be arbitrary and false, even as they celebrate those principles.

Why would anyone knowingly do such a thing?

From Head Transplants to Brain Transplants

In the past I've written about the work of Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon who was attempting to perform full head transplants (HT), taking a viable head from a dying body and affixing it to a viable body with a dying brain.

For the past few years he's been working in China where there's less squeamishness in the government about such experiments, and although he claims that the procedure works, he's been unable to present verification of his claims.

Now comes word that Canavero is working on a much more complicated surgery - brain transplants (BT):

In 2017,... Canavero and Chinese colleague Xiaoping Ren [reported] a head transplant rehearsal with human cadavers. A live volunteer subject, a Russian man with a genetic degenerative muscle atrophying disease, pulled out of the planned procedure in 2019.

Also in that year, ... Canavero and Ren ... reported a successful spinal cord repair in animals.

Canavero told Motherboard he’s not free “to talk about the HT project that unfolded in China, other than saying it works.”

In his latest paper [see here] —which is co-edited by himself and Ren—Canavero describes how to theoretically remove one person’s brain to place it into the skull of either a clone or a donated and brain-dead “immunoconditioned” body.

In addition to describing a “robotic scoop with retractable tines” that would pluck the brains from their skulls, Canavero also provides possible solutions to several outstanding questions surrounding brain transplants, including nerve and vascular reconnection methods.

“The unavailability of technologies that can successfully rejuvenate an aged body suggests that it is time to explore other options,” the paper notes. “Contrary to common lore, a full BT is achievable, at least theoretically.

Of course, further extensive cadaveric rehearsals will be necessary, followed by tests in brain-dead organ donors (as e.g., done recently in kidney xenotransplants). New surgical tools will have to be developed. With appropriate funding, a long-held dream may finally come true.”

But an HT is much simpler than a BT. Why undertake the more difficult procedure?

Canavero makes the point that putting an aging head with sagging skin, fading eyesight, hearing, teeth, etc. on a younger body doesn't allow the patient to enjoy the full benefit of the more youthful body. Transplanting the brain into the complete body would be more desirable:

The ultimate goal of such a procedure would be to extend the number of years a person could enjoy living in a “pristine body,” Canavero writes in his paper.

....Problematic or not, there is big interest in extending human life, and an entire branch of science and pseudoscience dedicated to “transhumanism” and life extension, including among Silicon Valley elite. These methods include everything from taking specific substances to “young blood” transfusions, cryogenics, and attempts to recreate humans as immortal AI.

Some of my students have objected to such a procedure on ethical grounds. In their opinion, transplanting a head or brain is more morally problematic than transplanting a heart or liver.

Whatever the validity of the ethical objections may be, one question that a BT raises is who, exactly, is the recipient after he or she has received the new brain?

Is the recipient now the person whose brain he/she has received or is the recipient the same person with a new brain, just as patients who receive a new heart are still the same person they were before they received the heart?

Or is the recipient a new person altogether?

Where does "personhood" reside, anyway? In the brain or in the body? Or both?

If you believe individuals have a mind and/or a soul does the BT recipient now have a new mind or soul? If the individual whose brain has been donated had committed a crime or owed a debt is the recipient now liable for those?

If the recipient was married are they still married to the same spouse after the procedure?

Canavero has yet to show that what he proposes can be actually be done, but assuming that it can, it raises perplexing philosophical questions in the matter of personal identity.

What the HFC Won

The Republican House members had a lot of difficulty electing Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker of the House last week, finally getting him the necessary 218 votes to secure a majority and win the gavel after fifteen ballots.

McCarthy needed 218 votes to gain a majority of the House members in order to be elected, but there are only 221 GOP members and twenty of the conservative members refused to vote for McCarthy, so McCarthy had to cut some deals in order to get their votes.

The conservatives, members of what's known as the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), refused to add their votes to McCarthy's total until they were able to wrangle from him guarantees that he would initiate a number of reforms in the House rules and procedures that conservatives have pressed for for years, but which the Democrat Congress under Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to give them.

Finally, after four days of voting, the HFC got assurances for most of what they wanted and what this cadre of conservatives won will make the House of Representatives a much more functional body. And despite their mockery of the Republicans' days-long inability to elect a Speaker, many Democrats and much of the liberal media know that the House will be a better institution for the concessions the HFC won.

Emily Jashinsky at The Federalist provides us with an outline of what the HFC reforms will entail:

• As has been reported, it will only take a single congressperson, acting in what is known as a Jeffersonian Motion, to move to remove the speaker if he or she goes back on their word or policy agenda.
• A ... committee will be convened to look into the weaponization of the FBI and other government organizations (presumably the CIA) against the American people.
• Term limits will be put up for a vote.
• Bills presented to Congress will be single subject, not omnibus with all the attendant earmarks, and there will be a 72-hour minimum period to read them.
• The Texas Border Plan will be put before Congress. From [the website] The Hill: ‘The four-pronged plan aims to ‘Complete Physical Border Infrastructure,’ ‘Fix Border Enforcement Policies,’ ‘Enforce our Laws in the Interior’ and ‘Target Cartels & Criminal Organizations.’’
• COVID mandates will be ended, as will all funding for them, including so-called emergency funding.
• Budget bills would stop the endless increases in the debt ceiling and hold the Senate accountable for the same.

These are good initial steps toward making Congress a body that serves the interests of the American people rather than a body that serves the interests of its members, and we should thank the Freedom Caucus for their resolve in not bending to the pressure they were put under by the media, and indeed their fellow Republicans, until they won this agreement.

Power and Anger

Columnist David French laments how today's conservatives seem to have evolved from the hope and freedom of the William F. Buckley/Ronald Reagan years to the power and anger era of the Donald Trump/Marjorie Taylor Green era.

He doesn't put it in quite those terms, but he's correct that there's a lot of anger on the right today than there once was. It might be worthwhile, however, to spend a little time exploring precisely why this is. What has happened over the past five or six decades that animates those who believe that dialogue and compromise are no longer efficacious and must be shelved in favor of the pursuit of political power and the exercise of political partisanship?

Quite clearly, it seems to me, many on the right have come to recognize both how the left has been waging the cultural/political war for at least a century, and they've come to believe that the left's goal is not merely to make the U.S. a better country but to tear it down altogether.

If this seems too strong consider that theoreticians of the left like Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) and Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Tolerance), as well as many lesser figures, have openly acknowledged this as their goal.

The left wages the struggle by capturing the nation's cultural institutions, particularly the media, the academy, the bureaucracy and the courts, turning the latter two into legislatures which the people are largely powerless to influence.

The right sees the decline of our culture as the result of a purposeful effort by the left to create atomized individuals, moral chaos, and to realize the supremacy of their own power. The pattern is similar to that followed by almost every tyrant and totalitarian since the latter half of the 19th century. In fact, the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote presciently about it in his novel The Demons (1871).

In any case, conservatives see all this as profoundly unjust. The left's ideas are being forced upon the people, and the people feel helpless against that imposition. This impotence breeds fear and frustration, and fear and frustration breed anger and a desire for power to offset the perceived threats to the culture, traditions and moral health of the nation.

So, French is correct that the right seems to be angrier than it was in the Reagan years (when the left was mocking Reagan as an "amiable dunce" and "war-monger").

He's correct that the right is angrier today after a highly qualified Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork, was humiliated and rejected by Democrats in the early nineties, and other nominees since, e.g. Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have had their reputations sullied in the left's all-out attempt to destroy them and their nominations because they were perceived as threats to the left's arrogation of power.

He's correct that the right is angrier today than it was sixty years ago when they could send their children to school without having them indoctrinated into the left's sexual, racial and climatological agenda.

He's correct that the right gets angry today when they're told, on pain of being labelled bigots, that they have to believe that men can get pregnant, that males and females should share private spaces like lavatories and locker rooms and that their daughters should be compelled to compete in sports against physically superior males. They're angry, too, that their children are being taught that they're racists by virtue of being white and that they're headed for a climate Armageddon in their lifetimes.

He's correct that it makes many on the right angry when they see a president sworn to uphold the law do nothing about the flood of illegal migrants across our southern border, when they see leftist prosecutors sworn to enforce the law releasing criminals back on to the streets, when they see January 6th rioters given years-long sentences for trespassing while rioters in 2021 who destroyed millions of dollars worth of property and murdered over thirty people have not even been prosecuted, and were even allowed to take over substantial chunks of a couple of major cities.

He's correct that the right is angrier today as they witness our country spending trillions of dollars we don't have, much of it on pork, and saddling our grandchildren with a debt that'll seriously undermine their future standard of living.

He's correct that the right is angry when they see peoples' livelihoods destroyed by arbitrary, capricious and foolish regulations such as school closures, vaccine mandates and pipeline cancellations.

He's correct that the right is angrier today than it was decades ago when one had the freedom to voice one's opinions without fear of losing one's employment, or being "doxxed" or having one's children harassed and vilified at school.

He's correct that the right is angrier today than a few decades ago when folks on the left weren't demanding unjust reparations and racial and gender preferences, when no one was demanding that they forfeit their 2nd amendment right to defend themselves and their families, and when hostility toward Christianity and Judaism (but, strangely, not toward Islam) was not a fact of everyday experience.

The left has all but completed their "long march through the institutions" and their century long program to "fundamentally transform" the country, as Barack Obama once put it, so, I agree with French that the right today is angrier than it used to be.

The anger may be regrettable, but it's certainly understandable. Noting that it exists is important, I suppose, but more important is understanding why it exists.

Common Misconceptions about the Crusades

It's common to hear people cite the Crusades as a terrible debacle and a stain on the history of Christian Europe, and while there definitely were horrible atrocities committed by some undisciplined mobs, especially against the Jews in the Rhine valley of Germany, the history of the Crusades is much more complex than some history textbooks would have us believe.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Crusades, and the belief that they were unprovoked attacks against innocent Muslims who were minding their own business in the faraway Middle East is one of them.

Steve Weidenkopf had an article at Crisis Magazine a few years back titled Crash Course on the Crusades in which he lamented the historical distortions and fabrications about the Crusades in the popular culture. He began his essay with this lede:

The Crusades are one of the most misunderstood events in Western and Church history. The very word “crusades” conjures negative images in our modern world of bloodthirsty and greedy European nobles embarked on a conquest of peaceful Muslims.

The Crusades are considered by many to be one of the “sins” the Christian Faith has committed against humanity, and together with the Inquisition the two comprise the go-to cudgels for bashing the Church.

While the mocking and generally nasty portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders on the big screen ranges from Monty Python farce to the cringe-worthy big budget spectacles like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), it is the biased and bad scholarship such as Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones (of Monty Python acclaim) that does real damage.

From academia to pop-culture, the message is reinforced and driven home with resounding force: the Crusades were bad and obviously so. The real story is of course far more complicated and far more interesting.

It is worth our time to be versed in the facts and especially to recall the tremendous faith, sacrifice, and courage that inspired the vast majority of the Crusaders to act in defense of Christendom.

Weidenkopf then sought to set the record straight by debunking the following five myths:

• The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression.
• The Crusades were about European greed for booty, plunder and the establishment of colonies.
• When Jerusalem was captured in 1099 the crusaders killed all the inhabitants – so many were killed that the blood flowed ankle deep through the city.
• The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be considered the first Holocaust.
• The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West.

None of these beliefs, despite being widely held, is true, or at least not the whole truth. I encourage readers to go to Weidenkopf's article and read what he says about each of them. As you might expect, the actual history is much more complex and far less damning of the Crusaders than it has been portrayed by those who wish to grind anti-Catholic axes.

For those looking for an excellent and very readable book on this topic I highly recommend God's Battalions by Rodney Stark and Sword and Scimitar by Raymond Ibrahim.

Infinity As Theological Metaphor

A short piece in the Wall Street Journal by a lawyer named Mike Kerrigan does a lovely job of tying together the mathematical concept of infinity with a couple of theological ideas.

Kerrigan mentions that his son Joe is a senior math major in college and that over dinner recently Joe was discussing the concept of infinity:

He said that between integers—say, 1 and 2—there are infinitely many real numbers, like 1.1 and 1.265. Such thinking scared me straight into law school at his age, yet somehow I grasped it now, if only conceptually.

“Like the Incarnation,” I offered. An instance of the Creator, while remaining fully God and fully man, entering into his creation: the infinite bounded by the finite.

“I suppose,” Joe answered, checking my catechism against his set theory. Then he said something even trippier.

Although whole numbers can be listed out to infinity, the hypothetical list of real numbers is necessarily larger than the hypothetical list of whole numbers. Not all infinities are equal.

Infinity and infinity-plus? Had that notion entered my mind in college, I’d have reclined in darkness with a cold compress on my head. I didn’t get the underlying math but, thinking I understood the broader concept, parried with another analogy: “Like higher and lower degrees of heavenly perfection.”

Long ago I’d accepted how a shotgun shack in heaven’s outermost borough was good enough for a sinner like me. Joe concurred, and when he did, I was relieved.

The rest of the article is an amusing read although you may need a subscription to access it.

In any case, it highlights an interesting point about mathematics - at it's most arcane and abstract it gives us insight into the nature of the Creator.

We gain similar insight in quantum physics where, to take just one example, we learn that the light of our everyday experience behaves as a wave and also as a particle, and which it shows itself as depends on the nature of the observation that we make of it.

It seems paradoxical to think that light can be an immaterial wave and a material particle at the same time, just as it seems paradoxical that God can be God and human at the same time. Yet the former is a truth of physics and the latter a truth of Christian theology.

The nature of light, like infinity, teaches us something very interesting and important about the nature of God.

Necessitists and Contingentists

Philosopher/theologian William Lane Craig writing on Origin of Life researchers:

One interesting thing about origin-of-life research is that scientists tend to divide into two camps on this subject: what I would call necessitists and contingentists.

Necessitists claim that given the laws of nature, the origin of life from chemicals is inevitable. Life is necessary, not in the logical sense, but in the nomological sense, that is, the laws of nature make it unavoidable that life will originate.

By contrast, contingentists maintain that the origin of life is an enormous accident, an event so improbable that it is unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the observable universe. The sufficient conditions for the origin of life on Earth just happened to come together against all odds.

The contingentists criticize the necessitists as holding to a sort of closet theism: a God has written the origin of life into the very laws of nature. The necessitists accuse the contingentists of making the origin of life into a miracle.

So both sides accuse each other of holding surreptitiously to belief in God—which is the mortal sin in these discussions!

Realizing this distinction between necessitists and contingentists helps us to understand why some scientists speak so confidently about the inevitability of the origin of life from chemicals: they are committed to the view that life is necessary, even though there is no scientific evidence for this claim.

Instead, most researchers recognize that the origin of life on Earth is a highly improbable, singular event.

The Necessitists put their faith in the existence of laws which, as far as we know, have never been discovered whereas Contingentists put their faith in pure chance and serendipity.

If blind faith is belief in something for which there is no evidence then both Necessitists and Contingentists must possess an extraordinary amount of blind faith.

Dissenters from Darwinism

One of the top stories in theoretical biology in 2022 is the growing schism between traditional Darwinian evolutionists and those biologists who are growing increasingly disenchanted with the ability of the standard Darwinian model to explain the data.

The standard model states that all living things have descended from a simple original cell over vast periods of time through genetic mutation, natural selection and genetic drift. But that model is coming under increasing skepticism from within the biological community.

The dissension gained public notice when science journalist Stephen Buranyi did a piece last summer in The Guardian in which he outlined the problems facing the traditional view. David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a summary of Buranyi's lengthy article which can be read in its entirety here.

Klinghoffer observes that, "The headline from the left-leaning British daily asks, “Do we need a new theory of evolution?” Answer in one word: yes. The article is full of scandalous admissions."

He then adds this quote from Buranyi's column in which he highlights in boldface some of those "scandalous admissions" of which most people in the public and students in the nation's biology classrooms are completely unaware:

Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection….

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. 

And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance.

But how exactly these processes interact — and whether other forces might also be at work — has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”…

[T]his is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline.

“The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

Klinghoffer comments:

“Absurdly crude and misleading”? A “classic idea” that “has so far fallen flat”? “A fairytale we need to finally give up”? Scientists locked in a desperate struggle for “professional recognition and status”? What about for the truth?

The problem, at least in large part, is that most scientists work on the assumption of materialism. They cannot, or will not, allow for any explanations that involve non-natural, non-physical forces or interventions. This commitment to materialism was famously articulated by biologist Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As long as the operation of a mind is ruled out a priori biologists are going to struggle to make sense of life. The words of the early 20th century philosopher/psychologist William James come to mind in this context:

A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

The refusal to allow the possibility of intelligent agency as a biological explanation is a good example of what James was talking about.