Why Humans Are Exceptional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We show that, to date,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Factors

The war in Ukraine is expected to heat up this spring as Ukraine mounts a counter-offensive against Russian forces in the eastern part of the country. The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Fidler discusses five factors about warfare that will largely determine what happens this spring.

Fidler's article may be behind a paywall but here's a summary:

Mis-estimations: Almost everyone, including the Russians, overestimated Russia's military capabilities and underestimated Ukraine's. An operation that was supposed to take a few days or weeks has lasted a year and the Russians have been devastated. They've lost approximately 200,000 men killed or wounded and almost half of their tank force.

Like external analysts, Moscow overestimated its own capabilities and underestimated how much Ukrainian military capabilities had improved since Russia first occupied Ukrainian territory in 2014. Mr. Putin failed to anticipate Western unity in backing Ukraine. And military planners sent in too small a force to take and occupy a country nearly the size of Texas.

In return for this high cost they've gained almost nothing in terms of territory.

Morale: Napoleon considered the morale of an army to be much more important that manpower and equipment. If this is true the Russians are in serious trouble because the morale of most of their troops is very low whereas that of the Ukrainians is so far very high.

Russian troops are stuck with poor military leadership, badly maintained equipment and poor quality food and clothing. Many of the conscripts now in the battle are poorly trained and treated miserably by their officers.

Part of what has buoyed Ukrainian morale is the fact that early on, President Volodymyr Zelensky declined President Biden's offer to fly him to safety because the Russians planned to execute him. Zelensky chose to stay with his troops and much of his government stayed with him which inspired his troops to fight all the harder.

Planning: Russian president Vladimir Putin fully expected to roll into Kyiv with almost no opposition, but as soon as the tank columns moved across the border they were subjected to devastating attacks from Ukrainian forces. After that there didn't appear to be any Plan B and the Russians have been suffering terrible losses as they seek to regain the initiative.

One analyst cited by Fidler said he believed people had been fooled by U.S. military capabilities in our recent conflicts and our effectiveness in choreographing complex military operations. “They were given an unrealistic view of how war operates because of U.S. capabilities,” he said.

Intangibles: Here's Fidler:

That is partly because war is highly complex. Both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries have aspired to so-called combined arms warfare in which they try to orchestrate movement on the battlefield combining elements including armored vehicles such as tanks, infantry, artillery, air defense, engineering, communications and electronic warfare.

Ukraine has enjoyed the most success in combining these elements. Ben Barry, an expert in land warfare at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, said Kyiv had also “firmly demonstrated that both drones and counterdrone defenses are also part of combined arms.”

The Ukrainians, Mr. Cohen said, have shown two important, if less-measurable, qualities: the ability to adapt and the ability to move quickly. “You’re seeing that repeatedly demonstrated with the Ukrainians with their ability to incorporate all kinds of equipment that by normal peacetime standards, you would have thought that would take a very long time,” he said.

The Ukrainian military has been able to use dozens of types of disparate military equipment it has been given during the war by the West, many of which require separate training, and maintenance and logistics pipelines. It has also made better use of new commercial technologies.

Part of this success has come from Ukraine’s ability to devolve military decision-making down the chain of command to junior officers and noncommissioned officers in the field in contrast with the top-down direction of Russian forces, which has slowed decision making and made it harder for Russian forces to adapt to changing facts on the ground.

Defense Is Easier: An invading force has to maintain longer supply lines and operate in the midst of a hostile population, both of which make success more difficult. As Fidler notes:

Russia’s advance on Kyiv early in the war suffered just this problem as tanks stretched out on the road to the Ukrainian capital moved ahead of their logistics chain, cutting access to fuel and other supplies. Some Russian tanks were abandoned by their crews without fuel.

Technology: He closes with this:

In many ways, the conflict in Ukraine is the most visible in history, both to the outside world and to military commanders. That is thanks largely to newer technologies including drones that fly over the battlefield revealing enemy positions, and intelligence from commercial and military satellites. Even everyday smartphones are throwing light on the battlefield, creating a vast archive of so-called open-source intelligence on the conflict.

Ukraine may have better eyes on the battlefield. In a report last week, the IISS said space had been “an enabler” for Ukraine through external commercial and military support “while Russian limitations in the domain have become apparent.”

Overall, said [one analyst].... “What we have now is an interesting war of very strong intelligence…You should have a pretty good idea about where units are. It’s the most visible battlefield that there’s been. I can’t think of anything that compares to it.”

Some Consequences of the Russian War in Ukraine

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of Russia's brutal, inhumane invasion of Ukraine. To mark the occasion the Wall Street Journal has run an article that discusses eight ways that the war has reshaped the world. The article is behind a paywall, but I can give you the gist of it here.

The editors write:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a year ago today, set off a cascade of global repercussions for energy, economics, geopolitics and the role of American leadership.

More than 300,000 people are estimated to have been killed or wounded. Millions more have fled their homes. The war also united the West, recast global energy trade and exposed the limits of U.S. military manufacturing.

It also has produced a number of perhaps unintended consequences. Here are some of them:

It has resurrected the Western alliance: Just when it looked as if NATO was about to atrophy into irrelevance, Russia poked it awake. NATO countries, particularly in Wedstern Europe, disabused themselves of the notion that they didn't have to spend any money to defend themselves from an attack by Russia because Russia was really just interested in doing business with Europe and being pals.

Now not only has NATO been resuscitated, but numerous other countries (Sweden, Finland, Moldova, Georgia and, of course, Ukraine) have been jolted into expressing a desire to join.

It has rejiggered the way future wars will be fought: Heavily out manned and outgunned, Ukraine resorted to the use of cheap weapons (drones), cell phone communications, and small, agile units of guerilla fighters to completely flummox and degrade the much less adroit Russians.

The U.S. military industrial base has received an economic steroid injection: Much of the money promised to Ukraine is actually going to American munitions manufacturers to build the munitions and equipment that has been promised to Ukraine. It also has been used to bolster supply chains and hire workers.

America has shown itself to be an indispensible nation whose leadership is essential: No other nation could have done for Ukraine what America has done, even if the Biden administration has often been painfully slothful about doing it.

Russia and China have strengthened their relationship: China, a nation with few, if any, moral scruples (witness its genocide of the Uyghurs and its alliance with North Korea), has cozied up to Moscow in an attempt to secure cheap Russian oil and to wear down American resolve to defend Taiwan. Russia is desperate for friends, but they're likely to learn sometime in the future that China is not really their friend.

Global antipathy toward fossil and nuclear energy has shown signs of shifting: Since the West is no longer buying Russian oil, America has become the largest exporter of natural gas and shows signs of renewing offshore oil production. There are hints, too, that our infatuation with a carbon-free energy regime may be cooling. Europe, too, is reassessing their hostility toward fossil fuels and nuclear energy.

Green energy is all very nice in the abstract, but when families can't heat their houses in the winter their disdain for coal and nuclear power will quickly subside.

Young Men Are Twice As Likely to Be Single As Are Women

Young American men are in trouble and the reasons for it are not completely clear. The Hill has some troubling statistics, among which are the following:

• As of 2022, Pew Research Center found, 30 percent of U.S. adults are neither married, living with a partner nor engaged in a committed relationship. Nearly half of all young adults (twenty-somethings) are single: 34 percent of women, and a whopping 63 percent of men.
• Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America....Only half of single men are actively seeking relationships or even casual dates, according to Pew. That figure is declining.
• Young men commit suicide at four times the rate of young women. Younger men are largely responsible for rising rates of mass shootings, a trend some researchers link to their growing social isolation.
• Women now collect nearly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees. Men still earn more, but among the youngest adults, the income gap has narrowed to $43 a week.
• Scholars say the new era of gender parity has reshaped relationship dynamics, empowering young women and, in many cases, removing young men from the equation.

So, if single young men outnumber single young women nearly two to one, then who are all the young women dating?

Some of them are dating each other. Young women are also dating and marrying slightly older men, carrying on a tradition that stretches back more than a century. The average age at first marriage is around 30 for men, 28 for women, according to census figures.

Another question is why are young men not in a relationship?

One reason is that many more women today are finding careers outside of the home and aren't interested in "marrying down." For a successful woman a man with little ambition other than playing video games with his friends has little appeal.

Perhaps another reason not mentioned in the Hill piece, but sometimes acknowledged among sociologists and anthropologists, is that it's easier for a moderately attractive woman to find a mate than it is for a moderately attractive male. Women who are of "average" attractiveness can attract men who, in terms of physical attractiveness, are above average, but men who are of average attractiveness, assuming that income, education, intelligence, etc. are equal between them, can not so easily attract above average women.

Historically, income and education were often not equal between men and women and the advantage males enjoyed in this regard made them more attractive, but, as noted above, that former disparity no longer exists so women today can afford to be more selective.

At any rate, there's more on this disparity between men and women at the link.

Who Are You?

One of philosophy's most fascinating puzzles is the question of personal identity. What is it about me that makes me me? Is it my body? Is it my brain? Is it the information in my brain?

If the body is constantly changing then in what sense does my self perdure through time? If my identity is just the contents of my brain how do I remain the same self over time as those contents change? What significant thing about me remains the same over time that keeps me the same person?

My fingerprints and my DNA stay relatively constant over time, of course, but are these what I'm referring to when I say "I"? Am I referring to my DNA or my fingerprints everytime I use the word "me" or "myself"?

The questions just keep coming. Suppose we say that it's our brains and their contents that make us who we are. Imagine that your body is dying but your mind is working well. Imagine further that doctors have, through amazing leaps in technology, developed the ability to transplant brains into different bodies. Suppose your brain is transplanted, at your request, into the body of a person named John who suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When you awaken from the surgery, who would you be, you or John?

Brain scientists know that if they cut the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, two different centers of consciousness can be created. If either hemisphere is destroyed it's possible that a person could live on as a conscious being. Suppose your brain is transplanted in such a way that one hemisphere is placed in the body of John and the other hemisphere is placed in the body of Mary.

Have you survived the operation? If so, are you now two people? If you're only one person, which person are you, John or Mary? Is it possible to be more than one person simultaneously? If so, if you committed a crime before the operation, should both John and Mary go to jail for it?

If we adopt a skeptical view and say that there is no personal identity but rather that the self evolves over time and we're not the same person today that we were ten years ago, then how can anyone be held responsible for promises they made or crimes they committed ten years ago? If we are not the same person who committed the crime then to punish us would be to punish an innocent person, would it not?

A theist might resolve this perplexing problem by claiming that our identity resides in our soul, not in our body or our brain, at least not completely, and that our soul is independent of whatever body or bodies it "inhabits." But how would a materialist or naturalist who has no belief in any non-material constituents to the self, who has no belief in souls, resolve the problem?

Perhaps their only recourse is to deny the existence of any significant self altogether, as did the philosopher David Hume, and declare that your self is just a bundle of perceptions that you experience from moment to moment.

Or they could maintain with biologist Francis Crick that you are nothing but a pack of neurons.

Unfortunately, neither of these options seems very satisfying nor plausible.

The Big Bang

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer explains in this short Prager U. video why scientists, or at least most of them, have come to believe that our universe had a beginning.

The evidence that accrued between the 1920s and the 1960s pointed to an absolute origin of space, time and matter, and this was significant because prior to the 60s the prevailing view was that the universe was probably infinitely old, and if it were infinitely old it would've had no beginning.

This would fit nicely into a naturalistic worldview, but an origin of space, time and matter, would require an explanation, and the fear among naturalistic scientists was and is that any explanation would sound very much like God.

Meyer explains the evidence that has led to the conclusion that the universe did indeed have a beginning and that the cause of that beginning looks indeed very much like God.

Take a look:

ChatGPT Gives Away the Game

In a debate on the origin of life between ChatGPT and a Brazilian biologist who goes by "Otangelo" ChatGPT tries hard to avoid the conclusion that the first genes had to have been intelligently designed, but ultimately seems to tacitly concede to Otangelo.

The remarkable AI chat bot, apparently "fearful" of incurring the wrath of every naturalistic materialist in cyberspace, keeps invoking a philosophical technicality that seems more like an evasion than a sound reason for not accepting the intelligent design of the first genetic material.

Yes, ChatGPT agrees, the chance creation of a even a simple gene is astronomically improbable. Yes, it agrees that it's very likely that such complex, specified information is the product of intelligent agency, but science is based on empirical evidence and since there's no direct observational evidence to support the hypothesis that there exists a supernatural mind, it just can't bring itself to conclude that the most probable explanation for the existence of life is that it's the product of intelligent engineering.

Here's the debate in full. There's a much more extensive exchange between Otangelo and ChatGPT at the link. "Me" is Otangelo, the boldface text is in the original:

Me: The odds to have even one very short gene with functional information are beyond what chance could produce, right?
ChatGTP: Yes, that is correct. The probability of even a short functional gene arising by chance is extremely low. This is due to the immense complexity and specificity of the genetic code, as well as the precise arrangement of nucleotides required for proper gene function.
The odds of even a small section of DNA randomly achieving the necessary sequence to encode a functional protein are astronomically low, making it highly unlikely that the genetic code and the information it contains arose purely by chance.

Me: So it is more likely that such information is due to the action of an intelligent agent, right ?
ChatGTP: As I previously mentioned, scientific inquiry does not rely on "likelihood" or "probability" alone to determine the cause of a phenomenon. In the case of the origin of life, there are different hypotheses and theories, and the scientific community continues to investigate and evaluate the evidence.
However, the current consensus is that there is no conclusive evidence to support the idea that an intelligent agent was involved in the origin of life.

Me: But you just agreed, that mere chance is highly unlikely. We know routinely, that intelligence produces blueprints, information, data, languages etc.
ChatGTP: Yes, that is correct. Intelligence has been observed to produce blueprints, information, data, and languages in many different contexts. In contrast, the probability of complex specified information arising by chance is extremely low. Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that the complex specified information in genes is the result of an intelligent agent, rather than unguided processes.

Me: So at the end of this discussion, would you agree with me, with this sentence ? Cells have a codified description of themselves in digital form stored in genes and have the machinery to transform that blueprint through information transfer from genotype to phenotype, into an identical representation in analog 3D form, the physical 'reality' of that description. The cause leading to a machine’s and factory's functionality has only been found in the mind of the engineer and nowhere else.
ChatGTP: As an AI language model, I cannot agree or disagree with statements. However, the statement you provided is a reasonable summary of the role of genes in encoding information about an organism's structure and function and the importance of intelligent design in creating functional machines and factories.

Me: So, if the information, data, and codes stored in genomes, and the assembly of machines and factories based on that information is best explained by an intelligent agent, and we observe all this in biological cells, we should conclude that intelligence was involved in creating the first living cell. Right?
ChatGTP: While it is true that genetic information and the molecular machinery involved in the assembly and function of cells are incredibly complex and seem to require an intelligent agent to explain, it is not necessarily a scientific conclusion to say that intelligence was involved in the origin of the first living cell. The scientific method relies on empirical evidence and testable hypotheses, and while there are currently gaps in our understanding of the origin of life, scientists continue to investigate and explore naturalistic explanations for the emergence of life.
It is possible that new discoveries or advancements in scientific research will eventually lead to a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, but until then, the question remains an open area of scientific inquiry. While philosophical and religious beliefs may offer alternative explanations, they are not strictly scientific in nature and do not necessarily rely on empirical evidence and testable hypotheses.

If the empirical evidence we have points to intelligent agency in the origin of life then it's simply an evasion to object that intelligent agency is a non-scientific explanation. Science is the search for truth, and scientists should go wherever the evidence leads them. Science is not a strictly empirical enterprise.

Metaphysical assumptions frequently come into play when a scientist theorizes. The assumption that non-physical causes must be excluded from any explanation of life's initial genesis is a prominent example of a metaphysical assumption. It's certainly not scientific. Where, after all, is the empirical evidence by which we can test it?

ChatGPT certainly knows a lot, but it needs to bone up on what it knows of the philosophy of science.

How Far Are We from Creating Life in the Lab?

James Tour is one of the leading chemists and nanoscientists in the world, and in a recent podcast he explains to journalist Eric Metaxas why scientists are further than ever from being able to create life in a laboratory or being able to solve the mystery of how life began in the first place.

Evolution News offers a summary of the podcast:

Tour explains that origin-of-life scientists aren’t even close to intelligently synthesizing life from non-life in the lab. The problem, Tour says, is that some leading origin-of-life [OOL] researchers give the impression they are right on the cusp of solving the problem.

Not so, Tour says. He offers the analogy of someone claiming, in the year 1500, that he has the know-how to build a ship to travel to the moon, when no one yet knows even how to build an airplane, car, or car engine.

Tour says that if he took a cell that had just died a moment before and asked top origin-of-life researchers to engineer it back to life, they couldn’t do it. They’re not even close to being able to do it.

And yet all the ingredients, all the building blocks of life are right there, all in one place, in the right proportions. And not only can scientists not engineer those ingredients back to life, they still can’t synthesize even a fraction of the building blocks essential to cellular life, despite decades and millions of dollars poured into the problem.

And yet they assume that purely blind material processes turned prebiotic chemicals into all the key building blocks, and then mindlessly engineered those into the first self-reproducing cell on the early Earth.

There are no models that would make such a scenario plausible. And the more we learn about cellular complexity, the harder the problem gets.

Indeed, as Tour puts it, origin-of-life research is like moving down a football field in nanometer increments while the goalposts are racing away.

For OOL researchers to say we're close to creating life in the lab, Tour says, is like a man in the 1500s saying that he's close to being able to fly to the moon.

A big part of the problem is that scientists working in the field assume that however life came about it must've been through natural, physical processes. Intelligent agency is ruled out a priori and not even considered. Maybe this refusal to entertain the possibility that a mind was involved in creating life makes their project impossible from the start.

The podcast also touches upon the reaction Tour has gotten from the OOL community. They're understandably not happy about being told that their life's work is futile.

Assisted Suicide

Here's an ethical question for you: Is suicide always wrong? Is it always wrong for someone to seek medical help in taking their own life?

Assisted suicide is now legal in Oregon for out-of-state residents and although it's not clear how many out of staters are availing themselves of the opportunity. It seems that interest is growing.

This Daily Mail article provides details. Here are a few excerpts:

Oregon became the first US state to allow physician-assisted suicide in 1997, allowing terminally ill adult Oregonians, with less than six months left to live, to ask doctors for a fatal dose of drugs they then administer themselves, typically at home.

Now Oregon has become America's first 'death tourism' destination, where terminally ill people from Texas and other states that have outlawed assisted suicide have started traveling to get their hands on a deadly cocktail of drugs to end their lives.

In the liberal bastion Portland, at least one clinic has started receiving out-of-staters who have less than six months to live and meet the other strict requirements of the state's Death with Dignity (DWD) law.

Dr Nicholas Gideonse, the director of End of Life Choices Oregon, recently told a panel that he was advising terminally ill non-residents on traveling to Oregon to end their lives, despite a legal gray area.

Dr Gideonse ... said he was helping a Texan man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease and a hospice patient on the East Coast, but added that there were not yet 'tons of people coming from all over.'

'But for a small number of patients who otherwise qualify or are determined to go through that and who have the energy and the resources … it has started to happen,' he said.

How many people have availed themselves of the services of Dr. Gideonse and his colleagues?

In 2021, the most recent year for which data are available, doctors prescribed 383 fatal drug doses and 238 people ended their lives — mostly white people aged 65 and above suffering from cancer or diseases of the brain or heart.

There are a lot more details at the link, including a graphic of the form that must be filled out before one can legally qualify for end of life assistance.

The major ethical concern over the Oregon law, which may soon be adopted by Vermont and other states, is that, although it currently has safeguards that limit suicide assistance to adults who are terminally ill and able to make the decision for themselves, it will gradually expand suicide assistance to include others who are not terminally ill and who perhaps are not able to choose for themselves.

Wesley Smith speaks for many when he expresses concern over the trajectory that assisted suicide laws seem to be on, but assuming that there really are strict safeguards against a slippery slope (I grant that that's a big assumption), do you think it's morally wrong for persons in terrible pain with no plausible hope of recovery, to choose to end their life?

If you do, why do you? If you're a theist who believes in eternal life but you oppose assisted suicide how do you respond to the argument that the patient will be delivered from his or her pain, enjoy a far better existence in heaven, and that we should want that for people, shouldn't we?

No Warming in Eight Years

This article is interesting, especially given the exceptionally warm winter we seem to be enjoying in the Middle Atlantic states in the U.S.

The article claims that recently published data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that there has been no global warming for the past eight years.

This data set has been confirmed by NASA satellite data which shows no global warming for eight years and five months. This is not what we'd expect given all the talk of impending climate catastrophe, but if the planet is warming the upward temperature trend has apparently hit an extended lull.

The article goes on to point out that,

Recently published evidence also showed that there was actually a near-record low of major hurricanes in 2022, indicating that weather isn’t getting progressively and exponentially worse globally, despite the climate frenzy of the media and governments.

And the Northeast (though not, I hasten to interject, Pennsylvania) is currently experiencing record cold in a harsh winter, with Mt. Washington, N.H., yesterday dropping to -45.5 degrees Fahrenheit and -107 degree wind chill.

It's not wise, of course, to draw long term conclusions from less than a decades-worth of data, but still, if the numbers were gradually climbing the media would surely be extrapolating from the trajectory imminent doom for the planet.

Maybe we are doomed, but it's hard to draw that conclusion from the temperature data NOAA is publishing.

Good Writing

John Miller at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) tells us that the great American novelist Ernest Hemingway believed he owed his writing skill to a short stint he served at the Kansas City Star newspaper.

Miller writes:

Ernest Hemingway worked at the Kansas City Star for less than seven months—between graduating from high school in 1917 and driving a World War I ambulance in 1918—but the job launched him as a professional writer, and he knew how much he owed to the newspaper’s style guide.

“Those were the best rules that I ever learned for the business of writing,” he said in 1940. “I’ve never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides by them.”

Style guides provide publications with standards of grammar and usage. They often correct common blunders, such as mistaking “who” for “whom.” They also settle disputable questions: Is it “French fries” or “french fries”?

The Star's style guide offered some excellent tips to good writing, tips that every student would be wise to keep in mind when they write for their classes (unless they have ChatGPT do their writing for them!). Here's Miller:

[The guide's] opening instructions are both excellent advice for writers and a good introduction to Hemingway’s technique: “Use short sentences. Use short paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

Reading this about short paragraphs elicited an "amen" from me. Wading through a four page paper in which there are a mere two or three paragraph breaks is quite tedious.

Miller adds that,

Some of the Star’s edicts are broad and familiar: “Don’t split infinitives.” Others are precise: “Be careful of the word ‘only.’ ‘He only had $10,’ means he alone was the possessor of such wealth.’ ‘He had only $10,’ means the ten was all the cash he possessed.”

Writing well is a skill that every student should seek to master. Good writing comes in handy in all sorts of professions, and, fairly or not, it's a reflection upon one's education and one's intelligence.

I was reading an online article the other day in which the writer several times mentioned "political comedy." It wasn't until the second time she used this odd expression that I realized she meant "political comity." It was funny, but it made me wonder whether the writer might actually be a junior high school student.

Failure to achieve subject/verb agreement or using "there" for "their" are distressingly common, as is the declaration by a writer or speaker that "they could care less" when they obviously mean that "they could not care less." Or the surprisingly common blunder of stating that someone is taking something "for granite" when they clearly mean "for granted."

Sloppy writing, poor grammar and spelling and garbled syntax is sometimes amusing, but it makes the writer appear inept, careless, or worse, intellectually inferior, and no one should want to be seen as any of those.

The God Delusion (Ch. 10)

In the concluding chapter of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins ventures an explanation for how religions came to be. The short of it is that he thinks they may be an outgrowth of the childhood trait of having an invisible friend.

He has no evidence to offer us, of course, so he moves on to other matters on which to speculate.

For example he castigates people who believe in eternal life for what he sees as the inconsistency of grieving at the death of a loved one. If religious people really believed in heaven why shouldn't they rejoice at the loved one's good fortune, he asks?

Aside from the fact that grief is an emotion we feel because we are suffering a loss, not because our loved one is experiencing gain, Dawkins doesn't seem to realize that he has just spent pages deploring Islamists for acting completely consistently with their belief in eternal life when they sacrifice themselves in their suicide bombings.

He's appalled that people believe in an eternal reward and act in accord with that belief and then we turn the page to find him scoffing at people who believe in an eternal reward and act in ways he thinks to be at odds with that belief.

Dawkins' greatest consistency in TGD is his inconsistency.

He rules out miracles because they are so highly improbable, and then in the very next paragraph he tells us that evolution, which also seems highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time.

But if time and the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable why doesn't that work for miracles as well?

To apply Dawkinsian reasoning, in all the zillions of universes of the Many Worlds landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens.

Why should the Many Worlds (or Multiverse) Hypothesis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life, both of which are astronomically improbable, but not a man rising from the dead?

He argues that the fact that there is no afterlife should make this life all the more precious, but what it really does is make this life utterly meaningless. Death is the big eraser. It negates everything most of us have ever done. It renders everything pointless and absurd.

Dawkins avers that his life is meaningful because he fills it with a "systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world," but for what end? When he dies whatever knowledge he has acquired will do him no good.

He's like a man on his death bed trying to master a new language. It gives him something to do, like working crossword puzzles, but what does it really matter?

The Christian, on the other hand, views death from this side of it as a tragedy, a terrible evil, but from the other side as little more than an unpleasant interruption of one's ongoing life. All that we do in this life matters forever.

There's a purpose in learning a language, even late in one's life, because it'll be something useful and give one pleasure on the other side of death. There's also a purpose in scientific study because what we learn here and now will be useful in eternity.

But if death is the end then there's no purpose in anything and all that matters now is avoiding pain and perhaps experiencing pleasure.

The terrible irony is that Dawkins could be doing the science he loves and to which he is devoted, or something like it, forever. Tragically, though, he chooses to empty his love of real significance by despising the God who is the only ground of the truth and knowledge he longs to attain.

The God Delusion was acclaimed by atheists around the world, but in fact they should've been hoping to see the book pass quickly into oblivion. Its sloppy reasoning did more to set back their cause among intelligent readers than almost anything Christians could do.

If this is the best that can be mustered as an argument against God, an undecided seeker might rightly think, then perhaps the case against God is not nearly as strong as one might've assumed. Indeed, TGD is a book which should be read and discussed by everyone, theist or non-theist, who wrestles with doubt.

A thoughtful, informed reading will allay the doubts and persuade the doubter that the case against God must, at bottom, be pretty anemic.

The God Delusion (Ch. 9)

To fully appreciate the ironies of chapter 9 of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion one has to understand that Dawkins apparently has to reach all the way back to 1858 to find a story of how Church authorities in Italy seized an 8 year-old child, Edgardo Mortara, from his Jewish parents and raised him as a Roman Catholic.

The boy had been baptized by an illiterate house girl when he was gravely ill and for the Italian Inquisition that was good enough to make him a Catholic.

It's a very sad story, but Dawkins concludes, bizarrely, that such tragedies could easily happen in today's religious climate. In a sense he's right, but not in the way he intends. Moreover, if this tragedy could be so easily repeated today why did he have to go back 150 years to find an example of it?

But never mind. He's trying to discredit the Church by showing how it perpetrated terrible injustices on families in the 19th century. He neglects to tell his readers that the state atheisms of the 20th century did far, far worse and inflicted their horrors on millions of families throughout the world.

There've been myriad tragic accounts of Communist authorities in the 20th century taking children from "unfit" parents, particularly Christian parents, and raising them in state schools, but Dawkins is blind to the crimes committed in the name of atheism.

Or maybe he doesn't think taking children from Christian parents is all that bad an idea.

What I mean is, he calls such abductions as happened to the Jewish boy in 19th century Italy a form of child abuse and deplores it, but then he likens that abduction to teaching children about God and instilling in them the precepts of the parents' Christianity. He writes:

I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage them to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.

So, teaching children a traditional Christian doctrine is a form of child abuse, and what do humane societies do to parents who are abusing their children? They take them from them, of course, just like Edgardo Mortara was taken away from his parents by the Church.

In other words, the logic of Dawkins' belief that religious instruction is a form of child abuse puts him squarely in the company of the Italian Inquisition of the 19th century. Oddly, Dawkins fails to see the irony.

I said above that Dawkins was right that children today could easily be taken from their parents, but not by Church authorities. The contemporary fascists who seek to control what children are taught are the intellectual compatriots of Mr. Dawkins.

Consider these words of a colleague of Dawkins which Dawkins quotes with approval:

Children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it.

So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Yes, this is a revolting passage, redolent of the totalitarian mindset of the Nazi and Communist fascisms of the 1930s. If you teach your children that Jesus loves them you are just as cruel as if you knocked their teeth out. Both the man who wrote this and Dawkins who quotes it are beyond parody.

We should ask who decides what constitutes "nonsense"? No doubt this will be the task of the secular, liberal Darwinians in the academy. Who better qualified to recognize nonsense than people who write books like The God Delusion and who implicitly endorse inflicting the same cruelties on families for which they had just condemned the Italian Church?

We might also ask where Dawkins' kind of thinking ends? If parents are to be prohibited from passing on religious beliefs to their children what about moral beliefs which the cogniscenti deem substandard?

Or what about political beliefs, or any metaphysical beliefs - such as opposition to Darwinism - that offend the refined intellects of our contemporary arbiters of truth and reason? And who would be charged with enforcing these contemptible rules in Dawkins' Brave New World?

The God Delusion, amongst its many shortcomings, has this singular virtue: It gives the reader a pellucid glimpse into the workings and aspirations of the progessive mind. Their dream is to have total control over all that people think and do.

People like Richard Dawkins are a genuine threat to human freedom. In Jonah Goldberg's felicitous image, they constitute smiley face fascism.

There's also this bit of silliness:

Our society ... has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them [like "Christian child"] ....Please, please raise your consciousness about this and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening....

Richard needs to stay on his meds when he writes his books. To call a young child a "Christian" child is simply an economical way of saying that the child is born to Christian parents and has been baptized in a Christian church.

It says nothing about whether that child has actually made a conscious decision to be a Christian, but even if it did, so what? Most people reassess their religious beliefs as they mature and decide whether they want to retain them or not.

Dawkins himself did this, rejecting the baptism of his infancy, and it's hard to understand why he gets himself in such a swivet over the possibility that others might not make the same choice he made.

By the way, he wants parents to refrain from exerting any religious influence on a child, but I wonder if he was punctilious in not allowing his materialist beliefs to influence his own daughter. I doubt it.

I also wonder what he would have done had his daughter one day told him that she wanted to be baptized and that she thought her old man's Darwinism was as daft as his atheism. I wouldn't be surprised if Dawkins "raised the roof" but not for the reason he urges others to do it.

There is one more chapter to The God Delusion. We'll examine it tomorrow. Meanwhile, don't let your children out of your sight around these people. They are very, very dangerous.

The God Delusion (Ch. 8)

In chapter 8 of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins continues to pile implausible assertions on top of very dubious arguments. He delivers himself of the claim, for instance, that evolutionists believe in evolution because the evidence supports it and would abandon their theory overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Now that may be true of him personally, though I very much doubt it, but it's certainly not true of evolutionists as a whole. Consider the famous admission of evolutionist Richard Lewontin who doubtless speaks for many in his camp:

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 an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

That doesn't sound to me like a man particularly open to evidence. When Dawkins insists that absolutist belief systems are a source of evil in the world and that religion is absolutist, he should be reminded of the above very absolutist passage from Professor Lewontin.

The unmistakable trademark of the faith-based moralizer, Dawkins goes on to assure us, is to care passionately about what other people do (or think) in private. This reprehensible behavior is typical, he asserts, of religious people, especially those who condemn homosexuality and other forms of sexual libertinism.

Whether many Christians really care what others think and do in private I cannot say, but it certainly is typical of many of Dawkins' friends, if not he himself, to care about other people's private thoughts. If, for example, a student or faculty member of a high school or college knows all the facts of evolutionary theory but personally disbelieves their truth, many atheistic materialists have publicly admitted that they would, were it in their power, deny them a degree or a tenured faculty position.

We've noted on VP several examples of Darwinists who care very passionately indeed about what people think in private about evolution. Why is it despicable to concern oneself with what others think in their hearts about sex but not despicable when it is private doubts about an academic topic like Darwinism that must be purged root and branch from peoples' hearts and minds?

Moreover, Professor Dawkins is at pains in chapter 8 to defend abortion on demand and along the way ridicule religious believers for their opposition to it. He observes that Paul Hill, a Pensacola man who killed an abortionist and his bodyguard in 1994, was driven to his crime by his religious beliefs.

By the lights of his religious faith, Dawkins states, Hill was entirely right and moral to shoot the abortionist.

Be that as it may, the irony of Dawkins' complaint here against religion is that by Dawkins' own lights he cannot say, though he does anyway, that Hill was wrong or immoral to shoot the abortionist.

Dawkins must piggy-back on a theistic understanding and foundation of morality in order to make his case that Hill's act was contemptible because on atheistic grounds there simply is no justification for using the term "morally wrong" and no reason to think that murder is anything more than an offense against one's own subjective moral preferences.

Dawkins' main justification for killing the unborn, surprisingly enough, is not that they're not human but that, regardless of their humanity, they don't really suffer from being aborted.

This is an astonishing argument. If we were to adopt it how could we avoid taking the further short step to agreeing that no killing would be immoral as long as the victim didn't suffer? Where would this stop? Infants and the elderly could be put to death so long as it was done painlessly, but there'd be no reason to stop there.

Everyone who couldn't defend themselves in a Dawkinsian world would be fair game for those who are stronger provided the killers did their deed without inflicting pain. Children, the weak and infirm, the poor, all would be vulnerable to Dawkins' enlightened thinking.

Dawkins, though he apparently doesn't foresee it, would have us living in a Hobbesian world of war of every man against every man. To follow his logic would be to travel straight into a nightmarish dystopia.

At any rate, having served up the stunning thesis that what essentially makes killing humans wrong is not that it takes a human life but rather that it inflicts pain, our author passes on to chapter 9 where he'll make the case, or at least attempt to make a case, that teaching children to be religious is a form of child abuse.

The God Delusion (Ch. 7b)

Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a rambling, weakly argued polemic against God and religion in which no canard is considered too lame to be trotted out in service to the cause. In the second half of chapter 7, for instance, Dawkins reconstructs the obligatory sad history of religious oppression, conflict and bloodshed. He strongly implies that but for the baleful influence of religion all would be peace and light in the world.

As so often in his book, though, Professor Dawkins tells us only part of the tale, and a small part at that. Let's talk a little bit about what he leaves out, starting in 1915: First there was the Russian revolution (9 million dead), then the Ukrainian famine (15 million dead), the Nazi holocaust (6 million dead), the rape of Nanking (300,000 dead) the war in Korea (2.8 million dead), the cultural revolution in China (40 million dead), post-war Vietnam (430,000 dead), the Cambodian killing fields (1.6 million dead), the Rwandan genocide (750,000 dead).

These slaughters accounted for the deaths of about 80 million people, none of them had anything to do with theistic religion, but most of them were perpetrated by devotees of an ideology that was explicitly or implicitly atheistic. In other words, the record of slaughter in the name of atheism and by atheists dwarfs any of the murders committed in the name of God.

Moreover, if we consider not religion in general but only the Christian church the bloodshed which can be laid to the account of Christianity over the last four centuries is vanishingly small, especially compared to the crimes of state atheism.

Even the Spanish Inquisition, a church-sponsored attempt to eradicate heresy in the 15th through the early 19th centuries, was only responsible for the deaths of the relatively small number of about 3000 people or roughly 11 people per year.

Dawkins maintains that religion is a significant force for evil because religion, being a human enterprise, is subject to many of the flaws that humans possess, but he fails to recognize that it is the human element of religion that is the problem, not religion itself.

Because, he argues, there is a widespread consensus about what's right and what's wrong, and this consensus has nothing to do with religion, religion is unnecessary for morality. As an alternative to the Biblical commandments he offers a list of ethical rules that reflect what he calls the "moral zeitgeist." Some of the platitudes he serves up are: Always seek to learn something new; live life with joy and wonder; in all things strive to cause no harm.

To each of these, however, the question needs to be put: "Why?" What obligates anyone to observe Dawkins' rules? They're nothing more than banal expressions of his own preferences about how he'd like to see people live. Observing them or flouting them is neither right nor wrong.

Dawkins naively believes that the moral zeitgeist (i.e. the spirit of the age) is moving us forward and that we're making moral progress. Notwithstanding the absurdity of such a claim in light of the statistics given above for the 20th century (which represent, by the way, only a fraction of that century's horrors), it is remarkable for what it reveals about his utter obliviousness to the fact that he has no grounds for calling an evolving moral consensus either progress or regress. It just is.

He assures us that the "zeitgeist," pushed along as it is by people like ethicist Peter Singer, is moving us toward a post-specieist condition where animals will have rights similar to those of human persons. This, Dawkins' enthuses, would be a "natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women."

What Dawkins chooses not to tell his readers is that Singer is the world's most outspoken proponent of legalizing infanticide, which may certainly be seen as a "natural extrapolation" from a Darwinian worldview and an example of the progressive direction in which the zeitgeist is moving.

"The manifest progression of the zeitgeist is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good," Dawkins proclaims. In other words, as long as we can agree to follow certain precepts and platitudes who needs God?

This is so naive that it seems almost an indignity to respond to it. One of his ethical rules is "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or species" (Interestingly, he does not prohibit discrimination based upon religion). But why should we not discriminate on the basis of sex or race? Why is such behavior wrong? Why is it wrong to harm another person? Dawkins doesn't tell us because he can't tell us.

The Darwinian ethic is might makes right and survival of the fittest and under such a principle prohibitions against discrimination are ludicrous. Discrimination, or anything else, can only be wrong if we are somehow obligated to treat others with dignity and respect and we can only be so obligated if there is a God. Nothing else has the moral authority to impose moral duties or the power to hold us accountable to them.

Certainly, a long chain of blind, impersonal, purposeless accidental mutations in our genes has no authority to impose duties nor the power to hold us accountable.

A big problem for anyone seeking to show that atheists are good folk is the record of oppressors like Hitler and Stalin so Dawkins devotes several pages to explaining how these men and others like them were not really influenced to do what they did by their atheism. Their atheism was one thing, he avers, their deeds were another.

This is a laughable defense given that he was loath to make the same concession to the historical crimes committed by Christians. But even if we allow him the point it's still irrelevant. The question is not whether these men were consciously acting on their atheistic beliefs when they committed their crimes, but rather whether what these men did was in any way inconsistent with an atheistic worldview.

The answer to that is no. If atheism is true nothing Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao did as they slaughtered millions in the 20th century was morally wrong. Tragic? Yes. Unfortunate? Yes. Evil? No, for on atheism there is no such thing as moral evil.

Dawkins is offended that anyone would think that an atheist, qua atheist, would commit such atrocities as were recorded by Stalin and Hitler. "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of a belief?" he asks.

But this question is a diversion. Dawkins needs rather to answer the deeper question of why atheistic Marxists felt impelled to slay hundreds of thousands of Christian clergy and laypersons and to attempt to wipe out Christianity in almost every country in which they seized power in the 20th century.

If atheism is merely the absence of a belief, as Dawkins insists, why is it so hostile to believers? Why is it not simply indifferent? The reason is because for the Marxists atheism is indeed an absolutist belief system, and it sees Christianity as its most vigorous rival.

Richard Dawkins does not believe in miracles, but he should. The fact that a book as poorly argued as The God Delusion became a best-seller and made him wealthy is perhaps the most amazing miracle thus far in this century.

The God Delusion (Ch. 7a)

We continue our critical journey through Richard Dawkins' best-selling case for atheism, The God Delusion, with a look today at chapter 7. Here Dawkins sets two tasks for himself. The first is to discredit the Bible, particularly the Old Testament (O.T.), and the second is to offer an alternative ethical narrative, what he calls the "moral zeitgeist," to that of the Bible.

None of what he says in this chapter has anything to do with the question of God's existence, but it may nevertheless be of interest to theists.

It has to be understood that Dawkins' arguments are often logically flimsy, and his facts and interpretations are often suspect at best. The God Delusion is, in fact, so poorly argued that it would hardly be worth the time it takes to read it were it not that it has sold so many copies and had such a powerful impact on audiences around the world.

One part of Professor Dawkins' argument in chapter 7 seems to be that it is inconceivable that any God as great as theists imagine him to be would care about the paltry sins of tiny human beings on our speck of a planet. "We humans," he writes, "give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our pokey little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance."

But of course our sins are of cosmic significance, and so are we, if it's true that the creator of the cosmos created humanity for the express purpose of living in a reciprocal love relationship with them. Dawkins, almost child-like, seems to equate significance with relative size. Since we're so tiny compared to the universe, he reasons, it's absurd to think that a creator God would care about us.

His reasoning reminds me of a scene in the classic film The Third Man where a criminal named Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, takes his antagonist to the top of a Ferris wheel. From that vantage the people all look so small and their lives seem so insignificant. From that perspective it was easy for Lime to justify the crimes he committed against them. His victims were little more than ants.

Dawkins apparently holds the Harry Lime view of humanity. We're so small that a God, if He existed, couldn't possibly care about us, but this is a fallacy. There's no logical connection between the size of something and its significance. Our universe, after all, is immense and yet cosmologists tell us it began as an infinitely tiny point. Surely that initial point, what cosmologists call a "singularity," was incomprehensibly significant despite its miniscule size.

Perhaps humanity is itself a kind of cosmic or spiritual singularity.

In any case, the Oxford don goes on to examine some Old Testament (O.T.) stories and wonders why Christians would think that the people who are featured in them, people like Abraham, are moral exemplars. I know of no one, though, who has ever said that they were.

The stories we read in the O.T. are instructive precisely because they teach us about the failings and faults common to humanity and how we are lost without God, not because they hold up the often sordid behavior of the characters as a model for the rest of us to emulate.

His basic point in the chapter (p.279) is that because the O.T. characters are so depraved we can conclude that wherever modern moral ideas come from they don't come from the Bible, which is yet another piece of silliness. How does it follow from the fact that the Bible tells us about human sinfulness that therefore there are no moral principles to be found within its pages? Here are three principles that leap off almost every page of the Old Testament: Love God, do justice, and show compassion to the weak and poor.

Dawkins apparently thinks that because these principles are often not followed in the O.T. that therefore they're not there.

Not only does Dawkins actually make the startling assertion that the Bible is a poor source of moral principles, he also says that he doesn't think there's an atheist in the world who would do the sort of thing that religious people (Taliban Muslims) did in Afghanistan when they destroyed ancient Buddhist shrines and other sites of historical and religious value. Only religious people would be so philistine as to commit such an atrocity, he avers.

Perhaps he was suffering a brain-freeze when he wrote this and had simply forgotten the crimes of the communists, committed in the name of state atheism, against Christian churches and clergy all through the twentieth century. In the name of state atheism Joseph Stalin had some 40,000 churches destroyed, many of which were relatively ancient, and 50,000 clergy murdered, many by scalping, crucifixion or other forms of torture. The number of murdered laity, moreover, stretched into the hundreds of thousands.

Is Mr. Dawkins unaware of all these historical facts that he could've learned from a quick Google search?

He wonders, too, who God was trying to impress by allegedly dying on the cross. Presumably, Dawkins sneers, God was trying to impress himself. This puerile comment reveals the distressing shallowness of Dawkins' theological thought.

If the crucifixion was intended to impress anyone it was intended to impress us. If the New Testament accounts of it are true it was the greatest demonstration of love in the history of the world. The creator of the universe became one of us, not only to atone for our sin, but to give us a glimpse of how deeply he cherishes us.

It'd be wonderful enough that a man would die for those whom he loves, but, Christians believe, God died as well for those who, like Richard Dawkins, despise him. He wanted, among other things, to impress his beloved with the immensity of His love and what better way to do it than through such an unimaginable act of self-abnegation and sacrifice?

Dawkins might've better understood this concept had he ever read Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities which dramatically illustrates how love can motivate such deeds.

Again Professor Dawkins errs when he vouchsafes to us the further revelation that Jesus never intended for his teaching to be given to anyone other than the Jews (p.292) and that it was Paul who thought up the innovation of taking the gospel to the gentiles. He quotes with approval another writer who asserts that Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he knew that Paul had taken his message of love and forgiveness to the "pigs" (gentiles).

Regrettably, Dawkins doesn't try to explain how this speculation squares with the last couple of verses in Matthew's gospel where Jesus directs his disciples to take the gospel to the whole world, baptizing them and teaching them all that he has commanded. Nor is this claim easily reconciled with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point of which is that we are enjoined to show compassion to everyone with whom we come in contact.

There is so much in chapter 7, as in the book as a whole, of which to be critical that it's difficult to limit oneself to spotlighting these few samples of Dawkinsian logic.

Moreover, his reasoning is often so bad and his understanding of that which he's at such pains to tear down is so thin, that one feels it almost unsporting to deconstruct it. Even so, we'll plod on and look at some more of chapter 7 next time.

The God Delusion (Ch. 6)

Biologist Richard Dawkins concerns himself in chapter 6 of The God Delusion with an attempt to explain the relationship between God and morality and to argue that God is not necessary for good behavior.

Dawkins claims that evolution gives a much better explanation for morality than does the God Hypothesis.

Before we consider his argument we might pause for a moment to note something he says which I find intriguing. He argues that acts of altruism in animals are demonstrations of one individual's superiority over another:

The dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, "Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to give you food." Or "Look how superior I am, I can afford to make myself vulnerable to hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground." ....And when a subordinate [bird] attempts to offer food to a dominant individual, the apparent generosity is violently rebuffed.

This makes sense to me. I've long thought it an interesting quirk of human nature that many people actually resent favors done them by others. Rather than see the favor as a kindness, people sometimes react to it as though it were a personal affront.

Perhaps the ingratitude is due to the fact that at some subliminal level the beneficiary of the favor realizes that he is being implicitly put in a position of inferiority relative to the benefactor, and no one likes that.

Anyway, Dawkins' point in chapter 6 is that we don't need God to be moral. The urge to be kind, for instance, is a product of our evolutionary history, and we'd have that inclination whether God told us to be kind or not. There's much in his reasoning on this matter of which we can be critical.

The problem is not how to explain "moral" behavior. People can certainly do "good" things whether God exists or not. The problem is trying to account for moral obligation.

How are we obligated to do something just because evolution has inclined us to do it? Why should we be kind if there's no advantage in it for us or if cruelty will benefit us in some way? Why is it wrong to be cruel? What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" anyway? How do we justify the belief that moral good and bad have any non-arbitrary meaning apart from an objective transcendent moral authority?

Evolution has bestowed upon us other tendencies besides an inclination to kindness (which, by the way, not all humans appear to possess) which we do not consider good. How do we decide which of these tendencies are good and which are bad? Evolution has given us a tendency to be aggressive and violent, to be racially biased, to be selfish toward non-kin, to be sexually promiscuous, etc.

Is yielding to these inclinations morally wrong? If so, why? Dawkins comes very close here to committing the genetic fallacy, the error that says that because humans have evolved to be a certain way that therefore we should be that way. Indeed, that we have a moral duty to be that way.

He also informs us that he is himself a moral consequentialist - i.e. one who bases moral rightness on the results of the act - but who do those results have to benefit in order to be right? Other people? Himself? How does he decide which it is to be, and why would it be wrong to just care about the benefits of one's actions for oneself?

Dawkins cites studies which show that there's little difference in the way atheists and believers make moral judgments and concludes from this that "we do not need God in order to be good."

This is quite an unusual conclusion to draw from these studies. All they show, if they show anything at all, is that atheists have moral convictions that are completely unsupported by their deepest beliefs. Their atheism gives them no basis for thinking anything is right or wrong, but they believe there is right and wrong anyway.

What the studies Dawkins cites suggest is that most atheists are inconsistent, since every atheist who makes a moral judgment of others is acting as if her atheism were not true.

Dawkins goes on to allege that the Christian tries to be good only to seek God's favor. He concurs with Michael Shermer that "If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself to be an immoral person."

Well, no. In the absence of God there just is no morality or immorality, only amorality, but set that aside. Dawkins misunderstands the Christian motivation for the moral life. It's not fear of punishment and hope of reward that motivates Christians to do good deeds, when they do them, but rather love and gratitude to the God who has done so much for them.

Believers do not seek to win God's love by being good. They try to live the way God wishes them to live, to the extent they do, because God loves them and they love Him.

To say that anyone who rapes or murders is immoral, as Shermer and Dawkins do, begs the question. It assumes that the word "immorality" actually can mean something significant even though there's no ground for any objective moral value.

For Dawkins an immoral act is nothing more than an act which he doesn't like. If there is no God it simply can't be any more than this. To say that something is immoral is to say no more than that he wishes people wouldn't do it. Notwithstanding his wishes, the person who does do such things is, assuming the truth of atheism, no more "wrong" than a cat is wrong to torment a mouse.

In a classic illustration of the fallacy called Division* Dawkins makes the ridiculous claim that rioters in Montreal during a police strike in the 1960s were mostly religious people because most Canadians are religious people. Perhaps we can forgive Dawkins this bit of logical asininity if it weren't that he comes right back on the next page and makes the same sophomoric argument again, this time by quoting a section from a book by fellow atheist Sam Harris.

In that book Harris seeks to disprove the belief that religion leads to better behavior by observing that most of the crime in the U.S. occurs in our cities and most of the cities with the highest crime rates are in states which tend to vote Republican and are therefore most likely to be populated by Christian conservatives. I am not making this up. This is Harris' argument, and Dawkins signs on to it.

Overlook the fact that most of the cities with the highest crime rates (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore) are actually in Blue states, what Harris and Dawkins are apparently unaware of is that even in cities in Republican states the populations of these municipalities are overwhelmingly Democratic and secular.

Instead of employing such a juvenile argument perhaps Harris should have just visited a prison and taken a poll of the inmates and asked them how many were devout, church-going believers who prayed daily up to the time they committed their crimes. I think there'd be little wonder as to what the results would show.

It's hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people would make such embarrassing arguments, but when your task is to try to give a defense of morality without God there just aren't any compelling polemical resources laying about. Thus, Dawkins and Harris find themselves taking a chance on an argument that would be laughed at by middle-schoolers.

The fundamental moral problem for the atheist, a problem which Dawkins never really addresses, is this: What is there which obligates us to behave in one way rather than another? What makes kindness better than cruelty? Why should I not just live for myself? Why should I care about others? What's wrong with selfishness?

It's really no surprise that Dawkins doesn't address these questions. Indeed, the surprise would have been if he had, because for the atheist there just is no good answer to them.

It's perhaps fitting to close with a quote from Dawkins' hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin writes in his Autobiography these words:

One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best.

In the absence of God, all we have to guide us are our "impulses and instincts," and no one's impulses and instincts are any more morally authoritative than anyone else's.

Ironically, the fact that for the atheist one's own subjective feelings are no more morally superior than anyone else's doesn't prevent Mr. Dawkins from repeatedly making moral judgments of religious believers throughout his book and especially in the next chapter.

* The fallacy of division occurs when someone concludes that because a thing possesses a particular trait or property that every part of the thing must possess that same trait or property. For example, it would be the fallacy of division to conclude that because the United States has a large population that therefore every state in the U.S. has a large population.

The God Delusion (Ch. 5)

Having shown to his own satisfaction, if not to that of many professional philosophers and scientists, that there's almost certainly no Deity, Professor Dawkins next assays to consider where the whole business of religion came from anyway.

He asserts in chapter 5 that religion is an evolutionary misfiring, or by-product, of something else that evolution has produced.

By way of explanation he invites us to consider the self-destructive behavior of moths which spiral into a flame. Why do they do this? Well, over the eons they have evolved light sensors that enable them to navigate by the moon and the stars.

These luminous objects are very far away and to the moths are like stationary beacons in the night sky, but when artificial light was introduced into the moths' environment the lights were so close that they appear to shift as the moth moves, requiring any moth that's fixing on them to also deviate from a straight-line path to keep the light at a fixed point.

The result was that the confused moth takes a spiral path toward the light, or something like that.

Professor Dawkins doesn't trouble himself to explain why moths need to navigate by celestial objects in the first place since they don't migrate and spend much of their adult lives confined to a localized area. When they do travel it's along chemical trails of pheromones produced by females. So why would they have evolved these light sensors?

But this is a digression. His point is that the spiraling behavior of moths is really a by-product of something else and that likewise religious behavior in humans is a by-product of some other behavior which evolved because it conferred a selective advantage.

Dawkins avoids the simpler explanation that religion itself confers a selective advantage and thus humans evolved it.

This is an unacceptable explanation, even if it has the merit of being less cumbersome, because if it were the case that religion is a beneficial adaptation Dawkins would have to admit that atheism is a maladaptive mutation, and he certainly doesn't want to have to make the case that atheists are genetic mutants.

So what is religion a by-product of? It turns out that all we have are guesses, but one guess is that natural selection produced in children the tendency to believe whatever their parents and other elders tell them, a bit of news that'll surprise most parents. Listening to parents aids the child's survival, parents tell the child about God so the child grows up believing in God.

It's not clear whether children lose this gullibility as adults, but if they do why do they retain belief in God when they don't retain other childhood beliefs like belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Why, too, do so many people come to belief in God as adults? Why isn't Dawkins himself religious since he received a lot of exposure to it when he was a child?

If one's belief about God is a result of psychological misfires in the brain then isn't atheism also a result of such a misfire and thus can't we conclude that atheists don't believe in God not because of evidence or arguments against God but rather because of some psychological quirk?

Professor Dawkins doesn't help us with these questions. He's in too much of a hurry to rush on to his next grievance against the religious - their irritating tendency to be substance dualists* - which he also sees as a holdover from childhood.

There are other guesses as to what religion is a by-product of, of course, - love, projection, wishful thinking - but the general idea Dawkins wants to advance is that it's a by-product of something advantageous for survival.

Another reason why religion has survived and diversified, he suggests, has to do with memes. A meme is not an online cartoon or joke, it's more like a mental gene. It embodies an idea or set of ideas (called a memeplex) that spreads through a culture. For example, the belief in human rights is a meme, as is any belief.

Natural selection acts to weed out unsatisafactory memes in the same way it culls unfit genes. Religious beliefs are also memes which have spread, not because they are true, but because they afforded those who held them some survival advantage.

Dawkins is obviously pleased with this explanation for the widespread occurrence of religion even though the theory is completely speculative and even self-defeating. After all, if all our beliefs are merely memes then so is atheism a meme, so is Darwinian evolution a meme, and, indeed, so is belief in memes a meme.

He closes the chapter with a rambling discussion of cargo cults, religions that spring up among primitive people when they encounter for the first time the "magic" of modern technological society. He notes that ignorant people often regard the radios and machines of visiting Europeans as being supernaturally produced because they never see them being made or repaired.

None of this, like much else in the remainder of the book, has anything at all to do with the question of whether God exists.

Dawkins seems convinced that the existence of God and the manner in which some people express their homage to God are one and the same thing. He seems to think that if he can discredit odd or outré religious practices and beliefs then he can discredit belief in God, but it hardly follows that because people are mistaken about how they should worship God that therefore God must not exist.

To believe otherwise is perhaps the strangest "God delusion" of all.

*Substance dualism holds that there are two (at least) fundamental substances that comprise human beings and perhaps much else - matter and mind. Matter is material, physical. Mind is immaterial and non-physical. Dawkins is a materialist who believes that only matter exists and that everything else, including energy as well as our mental processes like ideas, is reducible to it.

The God Delusion (Ch. 4c)

Although confident that he's just demolished any rationale for believing in God with his argument based on God's alleged improbability, professor Dawkins loads another round into the chamber just in case theism is still twitching.

Recall that his argument is a reply to the theist's claim that the complexity of the universe, its finely-tuned forces and parameters, are so extraordinarily improbable as to make an intelligent cause the most plausible explanation for them.

Dawkins has argued, incorrectly, that this cause would itself have to be even more complex than the universe and thus even more improbable and therefore not a plausible explanation at all.

Now he administers the coup de grace to theism by presenting what he fancies to be a more plausible explanation for the universe's existence. Since we should always believe that which is more plausible instead of that which is less plausible he thinks we should accept his explanation he's about to offer rather than the God Hypothesis.

His argument combines what has come to be called the Anthropic Principle (actually Dawkins employs what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle, WAP) with the Multiverse Hypothesis MH).

Suppose you purchase a lottery ticket and learn that you are the only person who did so. Nevertheless, on the day of the drawing your five-digit ticket number, as highly improbable as it may be, comes up. You've won. The odds against it are extraordinary, but there's no point in wondering at the almost impossible chance that your number could have been randomly drawn since it obviously was.

The universe is something like that. It's admittedly incredible that the forces and structural parameters are what they are, but we shouldn't be too surprised, the argument goes, since if they weren't exactly as they we wouldn't be here to notice the fact. Thus, the universe has to be the way it is for us to be here at all.

That's the WAP and, Dawkins believes, it's all the explanation that's needed or which can be given for how the world happens to be so exquisitely calibrated for life.

This, of course, sounds like sophistry to most people who don't think like Professor Dawkins. Consider a prisoner placed in a room with a dozen card tables each of which has on it ten complete packs of thoroughly shuffled playing cards. The prisoner is told that from each of the decks on each of the tables he is to draw four cards at random. The first time he draws something other than an ace a poison gas will be released and he will die instantly.

The man begins his task, despairing of making it past even the first card. Yet to his astonishment he completes the first table having drawn all aces, then the second, and finally the last. Unable to comprehend his good fortune, he wonders aloud how it could possibly have happened that he drew all aces, purely by chance, and is still alive.

He's convinced, quite reasonably, that someone must have tinkered with the cards. A voice comes over the intercom, the voice of Richard Dawkins, say, and intones that he shouldn't conclude that there was any tinkering. After all, would it not be even more astonishing that an invisible man of some sort had somehow influenced the card selection?

No, it was all just coincidence, and the prisoner shouldn't marvel that he drew 120 aces because if it had been otherwise he wouldn't be alive to notice. That's essentially Dawkins' explanation for the way the world is.

Needless to say, many people find the WAP less than persuasive, so Dawkins imports another idea to buttress it. This is the theory that our universe or at least our region of the universe is just one of a near infinite number of such regions (called domains) all having different physical properties.

Dawkins seizes upon this idea, called the Multiverse Hypothesis, and argues that given so many possibilities it's highly likely that there's at least one domain which has the particular set of properties necessary to sustain advanced life forms, and it just happens that we're in it. In other words, if enough lottery tickets are sold one of them just has to have the winning number.

The MH serves as a deus ex machina for Dawkins and by combining it with the argument from God's improbability Dawkins had atheist hearts palpitating the world over. You, however, may be asking yourself several questions:

1. Is a near infinite number of worlds likely to exist? Dawkins replies that no, it's very unlikely, but it's even less likely that God exists so it makes more sense to believe the MH than to believe in God.
2. You may also wonder where all those universes came from and how they came to have the properties they do. If you do you're wondering about more than Dawkins does. There's no conceivable mechanism for generating these universes, nor for producing the laws which would govern them. How do physical laws get created anyway?
3. You may also be asking whether this has anything to do with science. After all, Dawkins tells us several times in the book that he bases his beliefs on evidence. What's the evidence for other worlds? There is none.

The MH violates the principle that the preferred explanation be one for which we have evidence or which can be inferred from what we already know. We have reason to believe that information and fine-tuning can be produced by minds. We have no evidence, nor can we have, of other universes.

We have evidence that minds can create beauty, elegance, harmony, etc. but we have no evidence that chance can.

Yet Dawkins is prepared to believe, despite the lack of any empirical evidence, that there's an infinity of universes before he'll believe that there's a mind behind it all. It reminds me of something I read somewhere about another prominent atheist who was alleged to have said that even if we were to discover a planet with the words "Yahweh Made Me" inscribed in letters so large as to be visible from a vast distance he'd still believe that it was an amazing accident.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga observes that Dawkins seems to be arguing that because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:

It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders.

The argument form seems to be something like: We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p; Therefore, p is true.

Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one.

I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.

Dawkins rests his entire case on the arguments of chapter 4, but those arguments come nowhere near demonstrating what he thinks they do. Indeed, they're an exceedingly flimsy platform upon which to rest a conclusion so weighty as that God does not exist.

Perhaps aware of the logical muck into which he has stepped, he subtly changes the subject, diverting our attention from his attack on God to an attack on creationism, organized religion, and anything else religious that crosses his field of vision.

Whatever may be the merits of these criticisms, they're irrelevant to the question of the existence of God. Indeed, belief in God is left completely unscathed by The God Delusion.

We'll continue tomorrow.

The God Delusion (Ch. 4b)

Last week we began a critique of the crucial chapter 4 in Richard Dawkins' atheistic best-seller The God Delusion. Chapter 4 contains the argument that the author believes establishes his claim that God "almost certainly does not exist."

Dawkins takes the theist's argument that the complexity of the world and of living things makes it highly improbable that they are accidental products of impersonal forces and seeks to turn that assertion back against the theist.

His argument distills to the following steps:

1. The universe and life are very complex and therefore their existence is highly improbable.
2. Whatever creates the complex world must itself be even more complex than what he creates and his existence is therefore even more improbable than that of the world.
3. Thus, whatever creates the world must itself be explained in terms of another creator, and so on, in an infinite regress of creators.
4. It's absurd to posit an infinite regress. It's more parsimonious to conclude that the world is just a brute fact and that there is no creator.

As we stressed in the previous post, premises 2 and 3 are at best dubious and at worst false, and this is fatal to Dawkins' argument. Dawkins, despite his confident assertions to the contrary, is far from proving that God "almost certainly doesn't exist" since it's not possible to draw a certain conclusion from false or dubious premises.

But there's more that's wrong with chapter 4 than what we discussed last time.

Dawkins argues that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that the universe and living things could have easily come about without any divine intervention. In support of this claim he cites the marvels posited by evolutionary theory.

Does life's complexity, he asks, lead you to believe that there must be something supernatural behind it? Then you are too naive, or unobservant, or unimaginative to see that the appearance of design is just an illusion.

Dawkins quite astonishingly compares the illusion of design to a magic trick performed by Penn and Teller. Just as there is a perfectly natural explanation for the magic trick, he insists, there's a perfectly natural explanation for the illusion of design in living things.

I say that this is an astonishing comparison because it doesn't seem to occur to him that his comparison actually defeats his own case.

The magic trick is performed by intelligent agents, it would not happen without intelligent purpose and skill. If the "design" of living things really is analogous to a magician's trick then that design should be recognized as the result of intelligent agency, just as the trick is.

Dawkins confounds himself again when he says that the complexity of living things, though seemingly beyond the ability of chance and chemistry to accomplish, can nevertheless be built up by natural processes much like a stone arch is built by craftsmen. The arch cannot function or stand by itself until the keystone is finally added, so in order to support it while it's under construction a scaffolding is erected to hold the stones in place until the arch is completed.

The scaffolding is then removed and the arch has the appearance of having been erected without it.

This, Dawkins believes, is analogous to how irreducibly complex structures in cells, structures like the famed bacterial flagellum, are put together by evolution. Molecular scaffolding holds the components in place until the whole structure is complete and functioning and then the scaffolding disappears.

The problem with his analogy, though, is that the arch's scaffolding doesn't, and indeed couldn't, come about through the action of random, undirected processes. Rather, it's intentionally erected by intelligent artisans with a specific end in mind.

A scaffolding erected for the purpose of holding up stone arches is much more closely analogous to intentional design than it is to blind, purposeless evolution.

Finally, it's unfortunate that almost every line in chapter 4 drips with an unseemly disdain for scientists like Michael Behe, an evolutionist who nevertheless thinks that intelligence has somehow played a role in the creation and diversification of life.

Dawkins' contempt for this view leads him to say the most regrettable things. For example he caricatures scientists like Behe in these words:

Here is the message that an imaginary 'intelligent design theorist' might broadcast to scientists [note that for Dawkins ID theorists are in a separate class than scientists - RLC]: 'If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.'

Notwithstanding the fact that many of the greatest minds in the history of science have held to ID in some form, or the fact that many scientists today are theists and believe that God is somehow behind the phenomena they study, or the fact that there is no example of such reasoning as Dawkins invents ever having been offered by anyone in the ID camp - blithely indifferent to all of this Dawkins claims that belief in God is a "science stopper."

He's dismissive of those men and women who labor everyday in their labs to unlock the mysteries of nature despite the fact that he himself hasn't done any real scientific research since his doctoral work. He simply writes books about the work of others.

It ill-becomes him, then, to speak so disparagingly of the science being done by others just because he despises their metaphysical commitments.

In any event, not having yet satisfied his penchant for intellectual self-immolation Professor Dawkins concludes the chapter by insisting that if it's possible for something to happen, like the origin of life from non-life, then it's almost certain that it did happen.

We'll address this remarkable assertion next time.