The Killers' Commonalities

Kylee Griswold has a piece titled Fixed it for You: Here’s What The Vilest Headlines About The Nashville School Shooting Should Have Said in which she lists some of the most awful media headlines in the wake of the recent tragedy in Nashville, Tennessee and offers corrections that make them more objective and less tendentious.

Here's an example:

Reuters: ‘Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.’

The headline gives the misleading impression that the killer was a Christian rather than that the victims were.

Griswold suggests this more factual revision: “Transgender Killer Murders 3 Christian School Children, 3 Staff In Possible Hate Crime.”

This emendation would not sit well, however, with those on the left who wish to shape public opinion in favor of the current fashion in gender fluidity, so it's not likely that anything so blatantly factual would ever be considered.

Meanwhile, some in the media have been lucubrating, as they always do after these horrid massacres, over what those who perpetrate such crimes all have in common in order that their motivations might be better understood and such terrors more effectively forestalled in the future.

In the past all sorts of possibilities have been adduced: the shooters heretofore were usually male, often white, loners, disaffected, traumatized, alienated, and, of course, had easy access to weapons.

Some or all of this may be true, but there are two possible commonalities among mass killers I'd like to see researched but which I have little confidence the progressive media would be interested in pursuing.

I suspect, but don't claim to know, that almost all of the mass shooters, especially the younger ones, have, or had, either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship with him at all.

I also suspect, but don't claim to have statistical evidence, that these deranged individuals have or had a terrible relationship, or no relationship at all, with God.

For someone embittered toward their father, either earthly or heavenly, or both, it's easy to devalue human life. They see no objective reason to think that a life is precious nor to think that there's any ultimate accountability for what they do.

With no hope that their spiritually empty lives have a meaningful future, in this life or the next, and seething with resentment and anger, they vent their hatreds on others, often those who are most vulnerable. Children, after all, make easy targets, and their violent deaths are guaranteed to maximize pain in their families and communities.

I'd love to read the statistics on these commonalities if anyone has done the digging, but I rather doubt anyone has. It's not the sort of thing that most of our betters in elite circles care to think about, much less investigate. The results might be too unsettling for a secular society that has come to accept, and even celebrate, the disintegration of the family and religious faith.

Nevertheless, we reap what we sow.

Coming Apart

A recent Wall Street Journal poll had some very distressing news concerning Americans' attitudes toward family, patriotism, religion, etc.

According to the poll only 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and only 39% said religion was very important. In 1998, those figures were 70% and 62% respectively.

The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Moreover, tolerance for others, which was ranked as very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58%.

Some 21% in the survey said that America stands above all other countries in the world, a view that some call American exceptionalism. Half said that America is one of the greatest countries, along with some others. The share who said other countries are better than the U.S. rose to 27%, up from 19% when the same question was asked in 2016.

The biggest gap is between old and young. Only 23% of adults under age 30 said in the new survey that patriotism was very important to them personally, while 59% of seniors ages 65 or older said it was, and only 31% of younger respondents said that religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors.

Furthermore, only 23% of adults under age 30 said that having children was very important.

Respondents were also split along political lines:

The poll asked whether society had gone far enough—or had gone too far—when it comes to businesses taking steps to promote racial and ethnic diversity. Just over half of Republicans said society had gone too far, compared with 7% of Democrats. Some 61% of Democrats said diversity efforts hadn’t gone far enough, compared with 14% of Republicans.

Three quarters of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting people who are transgender, while 56% of Democrats said society hadn’t gone far enough.

Overall, 63% of people in the survey said that companies shouldn’t take public stands on social and political issues, while 36% of people said companies should take such stands. Among Republicans, 80% opposed companies doing so, while 56% of Democrats favored the idea.

Half of people in the survey said they didn’t like the practice of being asked to use gender-neutral pronouns, such as “they’’ or “them,’’ when addressing another person, compared with 18% who viewed it favorably. Some 30% of respondents under age 35 viewed the practice favorably, compared with 9% of seniors.

So, what accounts for the precipitous decline in how many Americans consider these matters to be important? Some possibilities suggested in the WSJ article were political division, the pandemic and a faltering economy, but none of these seem able to explain why people today wouldn't value family, religion and patriotism.

Whatever the reason, it appears that the United States will be a much different country twenty years from now than it is today and certainly very different from what it was in 1998.

I doubt that it will be better.

The Conflict Between Naturalism and Reason

One of the interesting epistemological developments of the 20th century was the increasingly widespread recognition among philosophers and other thinkers that metaphysical naturalism actually saws off the epistemic branch upon which it had been comfortably perched for the previous three centuries.

Ever since the Enlightenment philosophers inclined toward a naturalistic worldview had touted their devotion to reason and derided those whose beliefs seemed to them to be irrational. They were convinced that they were occupying the intellectual high ground, but in the latter part of the 20th century many thinkers, both naturalists and theists, noting that a naturalistic view of the world entailed a Darwinian account of the origin of human reason, recognized that on Darwinism there's no good basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth.

According to naturalism, evolution, unguided by any intelligent agent, has selected for cognitive faculties in human beings that lead to survival, but survival doesn't necessarily require truth. Indeed, survival could just as easily be enhanced by believing falsehoods as by believing truths.

Consider, for instance, a prehistoric society in which a gene mutation causes some people to believe that the more children they produce the greater will be their reward in the afterlife. Those who carry the mutation would tend, on average, to generate more children than those who don't, and since the mutant gene would be passed on to offspring the belief would spread throughout the population.

It would have very high survival value despite its being completely false.

As Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent notes, this is an awkward state of affairs for naturalists to find themselves in, but, even so, there are lots of examples of naturalists admitting that natural selection, at least naturalistic natural selection, entails precisely the conclusion that reason has evolved to aid our survival, not to discover truth, and especially not metaphysical truth.

Arrington offers a sampling of such quotes:

“[Our] brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” Steven Pinker

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman

"We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin

“[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich

“Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Patricia Churchland

“We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins

Of course, a further irony in all this is that if the naturalist cannot trust her reason to lead her to truths about her deepest metaphysical beliefs then she has no good grounds for believing that naturalism itself is true in the first place.

Anyone interested in reading more about the problem of reconciling naturalism with a belief in the trustworthiness of human reason might check out a book by Alvin Plantinga, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. The book is titled Knowledge and Christian Belief, and it's a more accessible version of his earlier, more technical treatment of the same subject titled Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

Not Enough Evidence

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably plead a special exemption for this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity.

This evidentialism, or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 19th century and into the 20th among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink.

The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. Rather, our beliefs are based on an intuition of probability. The more intuitively probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it.

Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world.

When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult, if not impossible, standard for an inconclusive argument to live up to.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise.

Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in what was later collated into his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

Where Does Abstract Thinking Come From?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that among the things that a material brain cannot accomplish just by itself is abstract thought. Egnor concludes that this is evidence for mind/brain dualism because certainly human beings are capable of abstract thinking.

Why does he say that the material brain is incapable of generating abstract thoughts? He makes his case in a short essay at Evolution News, excerpts from which follow:

Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy.

He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.

His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.

Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.

During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:

There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mind-action"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind....If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact.

The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way.

But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[emphasis mine]

The brain was necessary for abstract thought, normally, but it was not sufficient for it. Abstract thought was something more than merely a process of the brain.

Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer, apparently, is that the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.

Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.

There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this: If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience, and since stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.

This is not proof that there's a mind, of course, but it is certainly consistent with the dualist hypothesis that we are a composite of mind and brain and it's certainly puzzling on the materialist hypothesis that the material brain is solely responsible for all of our mental experience.

The One

I recently read a book by theoretical physicist Heinrich Päs titled The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics.

In the book Päs argues that the findings of quantum mechanics entail the conclusion that everything in the world is entangled with everything else so that physical reality is actually just one thing. This is the ancient idea, Päs points out, called substance monism.

The book is interesting despite aspects of his discussion of quantum theory being over my head, but I had some philosophical reservations about a couple of things in his narrative.

Päs seems to claim at some points that physical reality is all One and at other places that all reality is One, and he seems to assume they are the same claim. In fact, though, these are two separate assertions. He apparently assumes without argument that physical reality is the only reality, but this is a metaphysical assumption for which a reader would like to see some reason for accepting.

It might well be that Päs is right in asserting that the physical universe is somehow an entangled unity, but it could still be the case that there's a transcendent realm, or God, that's distinct from the physical cosmos.

In other words, monism might prevail in the physical universe, but reality as a whole could be dualistic, but Päs ignores this possibility. It makes a difference, though, since if there is no God, or if, as Päs sometimes suggests, God just is the universe (pantheism) there are some serious moral conclusions which follow. Päs alludes to these in his concluding chapter. On pages 286 and 287, for instance, he writes that, "monism, just like science or nature in general, won't provide us with a moral compass," and then adds,

monistic ideas and the appeal to nature have also been abused to justify racism and social Darwinism. To avoid such perversions, we have to rely on moral values that have emerged and stood the test of orchestrating our social relationships over the course of history.

But why think that racism or social Darwinism are "perversions"? If the natural world is ultimate and if it's just a cold, impersonal cosmos that cares nothing for anything in it, if it provides us with no moral compass, upon what does he base his judgments as to what's perverse or morally wrong?

He leaves himself no basis for moral judgment other than his own subjective whims, and how he can say that his whims are "right" and someone else's are "wrong"?

Päs repeats this puzzling line of thought further down the page when he states that this, "doesn't imply that it is entirely hopeless to think that monism may make us less selfish and more open and tolerant."

Once again he's dragging in a moral judgment from who knows where when he implies that being selfish and intolerant are grave moral faults. Yet unless the standard he's basing his judgment on is personal, morally good, and able to hold us to account for our moral choices - a standard that only theism can provide - there's no reason to think that selfishness and intolerance are in any way wrong.

He appears to be piggy-backing on traditional Judeo-Christian moral thinking while dismissing the truth of Judeo-Christianity. Nevertheless, if Päs is right, if the only god that might exist is the pantheistic deity (i.e. the universe itself) then in the words of English essayist Alexander Pope, whatever is is right.

Modern man, of which Päs is representative, is in a pickle. He doesn't want to accept Pope's dictum and at the same time he resists accepting the only circumstance - the existence of the classical Judeo-Christian God - which would confute Pope.

So, like Päs, modern man lives as if the classical God exists, he poaches his moral sentiments from the Judeo-Christian tradition while insisting that that tradition is bogus.

He's like a man who wants to borrow money from a bank, but the whole way to the bank he scoffs at the belief that banks actually exist.

Our (Nearly) Unique Galaxy

Astronomer Hugh Ross discusses some fascinating facts about our Milky Way galaxy in an article at Salvo. In the article he points out that the age of our galaxy, it's uncommonly low luminosity for a galaxy its size, and its very unusual proximity to several smaller galaxies, all conspire to make the Milky Way habitable.

It's pretty interesting stuff. Here's why the age of the galaxy is important:

We must first explain how galaxies are categorized by color. Though it may seem counter to the colors we usually associate with hot and cold, young stars, which tend to be hot, are blue-colored, while old stars, which tend to be cooler, are red-colored.

So galaxies in which star formation proceeds aggressively shine with a blue color, while galaxies in which star formation has ceased appear red.... Astronomers have typically categorized galaxies as belonging to either the red population or the blue population.

The Milky Way (MWG), however, fits into neither the red nor the blue category. It has taken on a green hue. This is because, while star formation in the MWG has subsided some, it has not yet ceased. Thus, our galaxy contains a combination of blue stars and stars that aren't yet old enough to be red but have aged enough to be yellow. Blended together, these stars give the galaxy a green appearance.

Diagram of the Milky Way Galaxy showing the location of our sun

Green galaxies are rare, but they are exactly what advanced life requires. A galaxy dominated by blue stars will bathe its planets with many flares—flares too abundant and intense, and with too much ultraviolet and x-ray radiation, to permit life to exist on any of the planets.

A galaxy dominated by red stars will also bathe its planets with many flares—again, flares of deadly intensity. A red galaxy also exposes its planets to more supernova and nova events (stellar explosions) than advanced life can possibly handle.

Another problem for galaxies dominated by red stars is that they lack the necessary level of ongoing star formation to sustain their spiral structure. But galaxies dominated by blue stars, where star formation is advancing aggressively, experience major disturbances (warps, bends, spurs, and feathers) in their spiral structure, so they cannot maintain a stable spiral form either.

But the green Milky Way, in addition to being of appropriate size and mass to contain the elements that life requires, has another characteristic that allows for the existence of advanced life within it: its spiral arms are stable, well-separated, highly symmetrical, free of any significant warps or bends, and relatively free of spurs and feathers.

In part, these spiral-arm features are possible because the galaxy is dominated by yellow stars which are complemented by a significant population of blue stars.

[O]ur galaxy....is transitioning from a star-forming site to a no-longer-star-forming site. And this midlife period appears to be the "best of times" for the sustainment of living things....[T]he Milky Way has transitioned from its role in building the required ingredients for advanced life (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, calcium, iron, etc.) to one in which it can now, for a relatively brief time period, sustain advanced life.

There's more on why our galaxy is a suitable habitation for living things at the link. The sorts of things Ross says about the Milky Way can also be said about the solar system and the earth/moon complex. When all the unique factors which have to be pretty much just as they are for higher life forms to be sustained anywhere in the cosmos are tallied up the improbability of it all has led some scientists to conclude that it's very unlikely that there's any other place in the universe where life like ours could exist.

One could perhaps say that the existence of another habitable galaxy somewhere out there, with a solar system and a planet capable of sustaining life, would almost be miraculous.

Believing Impossible Things

In Lewis Carroll's classic Through the Looking Glass Alice is chided by the Queen for her inability to believe that the Queen is over a hundred years old:

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Thinking of the debate between naturalism and theism brought this exchange between Alice and the Queen to mind. If one is a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) one must, like the Queen, believe at least six impossible things before breakfast every day.

For example, to be a consistent naturalist one must believe that:

1. Something (the universe) arose uncaused from nothing.
2. Life emerged by chance despite the fact that as physicist Fred Hoyle put it the odds of just a single functional protein arising by chance are about the same as giving Rubik's Cubes to 10^50 blind people and finding that they all solve it at the same moment.
3. Organisms like the Venus flytrap emerged purely by blind, chance processes.
4. Human consciousness was somehow produced by non-conscious matter.
5. No objective moral duties exist. Moral rights and wrongs are simply fictions.
6. The notions of human equality and objective human rights are likewise fictions.

Technically, a naturalist might not find the last two impossible to believe, but they do find them impossible to live by unless they're nihilists.

Most naturalists, though, prefer to cling to the idea of human equality and the conviction that there really are objective moral obligations - the obligation to treat people fairly, for example - even though, if naturalism is true, there's no reason at all to hold either of these beliefs. They're just arbitrary preferences.

There are other beliefs that many naturalists hold that really are incompatible with naturalism. Belief in free will is one and belief in a mind or soul is another.

A worldview that forces one to believe things that are so unlikely as to be in all practical respects impossible is certainly not rational. It's not much different than a superstition. Or a Lewis Carroll fantasy. Yet many would rather live in this looking glass world of impossible beliefs than believe that theism is correct, even though each of those beliefs is completely compatible with theism.

That seems to be an odd fact about people that one might think would interest sociologists and psychologists more than it apparently does.

Greed

On his Substack page my friend Mike Mitchell gives one good reason why corporations are so often despised by the common people.

Citing a PBS documentary titled Age of Easy Money he explains that the "easy money" being referred to is a result of the Federal Reserve's attempt to stimulate economic expansion by lowering the interest rate businesses have to pay when they borrow money.

At low interest rates, the hope is, businesses will be incentivized to borrow money to expand operations, provide more and better goods and services and in the process create jobs.

Unfortunately, that's not quite how it has worked out. Mike writes:

According to the documentary....Large corporations definitely took advantage of the opportunities to borrow large sums of money with little cost, but instead of using it to create jobs and build better infrastructure (that is, for the sake of their country and fellow citizens), many used the money to buy back large portions of their own stock to raise their companies’ net worth.

He goes on to quote a number of reporters and other experts in support of this claim and interested readers are urged to go to the link and read the quotes for themselves, but I'll share one quote from a Wall Street Journal reporter named Dion Rabouin:

As a corporation you realize all that matters is the stock price. So what do we have to do to increase the stock price? And more often that is buying back the stock.

So it used to be the Fed would lower interest rates. Businesses would then take on more debt. They would use that debt to hire more workers, build more machines and more factories.

Now what happens is the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, businesses use that to go out and borrow more money, but they use that money to buy back stock and invest in technology that will eliminate workers and reduce employee headcounts.

They use that money to give the CEO and other corporate officers big bonuses and then eventually issue more debt and buy back more stock. So it's this endless cycle of things that are designed to increase the stock price rather than improve the actual company.

One reporter Mike cites says she “can’t fault the companies much,” but Mike says that she should. He comments:

She also says, “this [low] interest rate environment creates very strong economic incentives to do exactly what [businesses are] doing.” Yes, but only if “what they’re doing” is driven by the principle of profit maximization as the priority around which all business operations are oriented.

The more common word for profit maximization as the top priority is “greed.” I know that claim will evoke some eye rolling and accusations of naïveté from hard-nosed business types, but that’s probably just greed in self-defense mode.

There is a sense of inevitability in saying we can’t fault the corporate executives in such an “interest rate environment” for spending on themselves and forgetting about the millions of their fellow citizens whose financial priorities are rent and food rather than second homes and diversified portfolios. But this is not inevitable.

Mike closes with a quote from our second president, John Adams, in 1798. Here's part of it:

Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by…morality and Religion. Avarice [and] Ambition…would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Indeed, a society untethered to a moral sensibility anchored in the will of a transcendent God who will hold us accountable for how we treat our fellow man and how we use the blessings that we've been given, is a society in which anything goes.

Any policy is right as long as it works, and in this case "works" means "makes me wealthy."

A culture marinated in 165 years of Darwinian evolution can't help but learn the lesson that it's all about survival of the fittest. It's all about amassing wealth for oneself and, if there is no God, if we've all evolved up out of the slime with no higher purpose than to survive and pass on our genes, why are the corporate panjandrums wrong to think this way?

What's Woke?

Ever since Bethany Mandel, a conservative and co-author of a book that devotes a chapter to defining "woke," was unable to define it herself during an interview on The Hill’s online program called Rising, the left has been scoffing and conservatives have been coming up with their own definitions.

The problem with defining the word as it's used today is that "woke" is like "pornography." As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964, he may not be able to define it but "I know it when I see it."

One of the criticisms of Mandel is that anyone who writes a book about something ought to be able to define it, but tens of thousands of biology books have been written on the subject of "life" yet no biologist can define what it is. Should they be mocked for writing about something they can't define?

An irony of folks on the left snickering at a conservative who struggled to define "woke" is that progressives like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, like many progressives, is unable to define what a "woman" is.

It would seem that defining "woman" would be a far easier task than defining a protean concept like "woke," but the left seemed unfazed by Judge Jackson's consternation at being asked to explain in her confirmation hearing what is meant by the word.

The word "woke" gained currency among African Americans during the Civil Rights era when it was used in reference to the need for people to "wake up" to racial injustice. Those who were alert to the social and political situation were said to be "woke."

Earlier in this century it took on a broader meaning, encompassing a set of attitudes that combine progressive/left positions on race, climate, LGBTQ+, transgenderism, feminism, diversity, identity politics, etc. Conservatives latched onto the word as a term of derision for both the policies and the people who promoted them.

The conservative critique of "wokeism" focuses not only on the destructive and sometimes ridiculous nature of the policies themselves (e.g. allowing men to compete in women's sports, allowing them to enter private female spaces, insisting that men can become pregnant, paying millions of dollars in "reparations" to people who were never enslaved, and so on), but also on the behavior of those at whom the pejorative "woke" is directed.

For example, those who are so labeled are often closed-minded to arguments with which they disagree. They're often intolerant of dissent, preferring to shut down discussion by calling the dissenter a racist or homophobe, or just shouting the hapless dissenter into silence. Indeed, the "woke" often see every political statement with which they disagree as "code" for racism or a "dog-whistle" for racists.

Moreover, a lot of dissenters have lost their jobs because they disagree with the positions held by their "woke" colleagues or employers. "Cancel culture," the attempt to destroy a person's livelihood and/or their reputation because the person refuses to conform to progressive orthodoxy, is a phenomenon associated with the "woke."

When progressive orthodoxies are transgressed there's usually no forgiveness, no grace, but sometimes if the offenders are obsequious enough, if they debase themselves and grovel at the feet of their "woke" superiors in abject repentance they may be granted a tentative absolution.

Finally, "wokeness" is often characterized by embarrassing efforts at virtue-signaling - attempts to demonstrate to the wider public that the wokester is a morally superior human being and eager to flaunt his moral superiority at every opportunity so that everyone will stand in awe and admiration of the wokester's sheer goodness.

This moral preening manifests itself in universities and government institutions which trip over each other in their zeal to demonstrate that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is part of their institutional lifeblood.

Nor is our military exempt from "woke" virtue-signaling. While China is building a military to fight successful wars against us, our military is funding seminars to train recruits in proper pronoun usage.

Corporations are investing enormous amounts of money promoting "stakeholder" interests in causes like climate change that have nothing to do with giving shareholders a return on their investment.

Professional sports teams sanctimoniously signal their racial righteousness with messages in their stadiums, on the playing field and on their uniforms that display their piety for all the world to see and esteem.

Television shows and commercials take extraordinary pains to feature representatives of every racial and LGBTQ+ group - even featuring plus-size women in exercise clothing - in order to ensure that the viewer not miss the point that the advertisers are on the cutting edge of "woke" moral excellence. They don't though, seem to feel the need to feature positive portrayals of diversity in either religion or political ideology.

The super woke, in order to demonstrate that they are Olympian caliber moral athletes, are going beyond the concerns of their more pedestrian brethren and are throwing themselves into the struggle to secure legal rights for fish, insects and even rivers. It's remarkably noble of them, but one can't help wonder why their concern for rights usually stops short of rights for unborn humans.

I guess even the most virtuous of the "woke" saints have to draw the line somewhere.

Genuine Inclusivity

Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, makes an appeal in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) for genuine inclusiveness in our society rather than the ersatz variety promoted by those whose idea of inclusivity seems to be more about excluding than including.

Here's what Cardinal Dolan writes:

I am proud that my country and my church are both committed to the noble ideal of inclusion. Everyone should feel loved and respected. All people must share in all rights. We couldn’t dare to claim to be “one nation under God” if it were otherwise.

Yet society and the church are falling short of this noble ideal. By accepting one dominant cultural narrative that presumes to define those who are “excluded,” we are ignoring those who don’t tidily fit into the prevailing cultural story line. Want some examples?

• Moms and dads in lifelong, life-giving marriage, cherishing a large number of children, who are routinely ridiculed and regularly stereotyped as threatening to the planet.

• Fragile unborn babies, who have no legal protection in most states, with all of us forced to pay for the taking of their lives.

• Parents, especially struggling ones, who must pay constantly increasing taxes to support monopoly government schools and who are denied the right to use tax dollars to send their children to the schools of their choice.

• Citizens who for ethical reasons can’t obey the tidal wave of bureaucratic decrees on healthcare and are forced to choose between their consciences and their jobs.

• A gay person trying his best, with God’s grace, to live according to biblical teaching, who hears church leaders call that morality unjust and oppressive.

• Immigrants who came to this country eager to work in the belief that America was a sanctuary but who can’t get a labor permit and are treated with scorn.

• A woman who chooses to give birth to a baby while worried by hints and even outright threats that she’ll lose her job.

• Young people who are spiritually thirsty for a sense of awe, reverence and transcendence but who have difficulty finding a church to satisfy their needs.

• Relief agencies labeled as lawbreakers by members of Congress for welcoming, feeding and housing refugees.

• Our beloved elders near the end of life, who are coaxed into feeling useless, a burden, with euthanasia the answer.

• Folks who want only inspiration, encouragement and clear teaching from their pastors and religious leaders, but who instead must listen to dissent every Sabbath.

• Cops who face danger daily, who see their colleagues killed and wounded, their resources shrinking, and the criminals they apprehend released in an hour.

• Elderly people who are scared to take the bus or subway, or to walk down the block for milk and bread.

• Parents who worked two jobs and saved for decades to send their children to college, and struggled to pay back the loans they had to take, only to see their neighbors with weekend homes have their loans forgiven.

These good people tell us they are also marginalized and excluded. Rarely do I find them bitter, angry or judgmental. They, too, want a society that is inclusive—not merely for the groups now chic to defend, but for all.

I wonder how many of the bureaucrats and school administers assigned to monitor "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" ever give a moment's thought to the millions of people marginalized in our culture because they don't fit into the privileged pigeon-holes chosen by our progressive elites.

Becoming a Butterfly

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies highlight the incredible difficulties faced by any purely unguided and natural account of the origin of metamorphosis.

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no plausible answer.

The standard Darwinian account, remember, maintains that this process evolved through an unguided, purposeless series of genetic mutations combined with natural selection. No intelligent agency was involved.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

Irish scriptoria

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

No Center, No Cause

Contemporary cosmologists - scientists who study the origin and structure of the universe - believe that the universe has no center and had no cause.

These are two strange claims.

We often think of the expanding universe like an exploding firework whose fragments all radiate out from the rocket, but that's evidently not the best way to think of what's going on in our universe.

Imagine instead a child blowing soapy film in a plastic ring.

Now imagine the plastic ring shrinks to a diameter so tiny it can't be seen, and the bubble emerging from this tiny aperture pinches off and breaks free of the ring.

As the bubble floats in the air it continues to expand, but - and this is the point - there's no central point from which the expansion grows. The whole bubble expands as if every point were the center.

This is something like what scientists have in mind when they say that the universe has no center. The universe is, strangely enough, like the surface of the bubble, and it's unimaginably vast.

Watch this five minute video to get an idea of how immense it is:

When scientists say the universe had no cause they mean that it had no physical cause in space and time. It arose out of nothing and there's no scientific explanation for how it happened.

It's not that we don't know the scientific explanation, but rather that there can't be one. This is because until there was a universe there was no space, time nor matter, nor were there any physical laws that could have mediated its creation.

Science can't operate in a scenario in which there are no parameters, no laws and no forces. Apart from these, science has nothing to work with and nothing to investigate.

Thus, either the universe was uncaused or, if it did have a cause, its cause was beyond space, time and matter. In either case, science can't say anything about it, although theology can since a cause beyond space, time and matter powerful enough and intelligent enough to create a vast, finely-tuned universe sounds very much like God.

Of course, one who believes the universe is uncaused can side-step the conclusion that God created it, but rejecting the principle of causality merely to avoid the God conclusion is intellectually regrettable.

If, on the other hand, you accept the principle that whatever comes into existence must have a cause of its coming into being then you're acknowledging that the cause of the universe's coming into being must either be God or something very much like God.

It's hard to imagine any other plausible option.

To put it simply, God is a little bit like the girl in the picture producing the bubbles.

Young, Liberal and Depressed (Pt.II)

Yesterday's post addressed the sense of hopelessness that, according to surveys, seems to be afflicting the young, particularly liberal, or progressive, young people.

This "nihilism index," as it was called in yesterday's post, is much more pronounced among young females than young males and to a greater extent among young progressives than young conservatives.

According to an article at slowboring.com,

[L]iberal girls have the highest increase in depressive affect and conservative boys have the least. But liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls, suggesting an important independent role for political ideology.

Why should this be? One possibility suggested in the article is that "progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.

The article quotes a podcaster named Jill Filipovic who writes that she is increasingly convinced that,

there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent.

Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.

This makes sense. Young progressives are often see themselves as perpetually oppressed and victimized. They often believe the world is soon going to end in climate catastrophe, and they find it very difficult to maintain much of a sense of humor.

They're often bitter, angry and judgmental. Such individuals can hardly help being depressed.

Filipovic continues:

That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstrap their way into well-being.

It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off.

Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

It's also a pretty reliable way to make oneself feel miserable, angry and perhaps bitter, and other people don't usually enjoy spending much time around someone who's miserable, angry and bitter unless they themselves are also miserable, angry and bitter. And when the only people who care to spend time with a person are people who are themselves miserable, angry and bitter then everyone's misery, anger and bitterness is amplified and reinforced.

Why, though, are girls more affected than boys? Perhaps it's because girls are more sensitive to all the things mentioned above than are boys, and being more sensitive they're more vulnerable to them.

I don't know, but whatever the case, it does seem that progressivism is a very unhealthy mindset. At least it is if one wishes to be a happy person.

Young, Liberal and Depressed (Pt. I)

The statistics are alarming. Rusty Reno writes about them in the recent First Things (Paywall):

According to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, 57 percent of high school girls say they persistently feel sad or hopeless. That’s up from 36 percent a decade ago. For boys, what might be called the nihilism index went up from 21 percent to 29 percent.

Not surprisingly, the number of teenagers reporting that they have seriously considered suicide has also increased, reaching 30 percent for girls.

Why? Reno doesn't think much of what usually passes as reasons for this slide into despair. Instead he argues that it's a consequence of overweening secular progressivism:

[T]oday’s cultural propaganda forbids our acknowledging the obvious fact that the last decade has seen the imposition of gay marriage, “shout your abortion,” transgender ideology, and lots of Rainbow flag-waving. During the same ten years, marijuana has been legalized and “white privilege” has been demonized. Black Lives Matter announces that our country is hopelessly racist; environmental activists tell us we’re on the brink of extinction.

In short, we’ve created a toxic culture.

He goes on to claim that,

The nihilism index should include more than the percentage of teens reporting despair and contemplating suicide. Marriage and fertility rates belong as well, as do drug overdose deaths, murder rates, and mass shootings.

Other factors are relevant, too: workforce participation, civic involvement, religious attendance.

I invite social scientists to give rigorous formulation to a nihilism index, a much-needed measure of how bad secular progressivism has made life for so many people.

Over the last fifteen years, the United States has gone from hosting no pediatric gender clinics that facilitate “transitions” to hosting more than one hundred. Over the same period of time, mental health for young people has declined and the rate of teen suicide has increased.

We have gone from no pot shops to thousands of them—and from 27,000 drug overdose deaths per year to more than 100,000.

Correlation does not prove causation, but it demands investigation.

Whatever you think of the particulars of Reno's indictment it seems plain that for many modernity has drained the meaning out of life.

People used to find meaning in family, church, community and work, but today many families have disintegrated, church no longer seems a realistic option, and neighborhoods are rarely comprised of people who have a generational attachment to them.

All that's left is work, and work by itself doesn't usually satisfy our yearning for purpose, especially when so many work from home, isolated from meaningful human contact.

Indeed, we're evolving into a nation of social isolates, atomized individuals with few, if any, emotional connections to other people.

A sense of loneliness, emptiness and pointlessness is pervasive, and people, including the young, have turned to ersatz emotional and psychological fixes - facebook "friends," drugs, alcohol, pornography, gaming, progressive causes, even bullying - but none of these satisfy the deepest hungers in the human psyche.

Which is why the needle on the "nihilism index" is pointing to the red.

More tomorrow.

Who Perpetrated the Violence on January 6th?

Just as we were apparently not told the truth about "Russia Collusion" and the origins of Covid, neither have we been given all the information about the January 6th riots of which many in Congress were aware.

Apparently, the stories that had circulated after the riots that provocateurs such as Antifa had infiltrated the crowd and were responsible for much of the violence - stories which until now were difficult to assess - have now been confirmed by a series of videos that have recently come to light.

The videos, with commentary, can be seen here.

A government that consistently lies to its citizens for partisan reasons is illegitimate. It's not much different than totalitarian governments throughout the last hundred years which have sought to manipulate their citizens in order to consolidate and retain their own power and oppressive policies.

When people talk about draining the swamp it is ensconced bureaucrats in our law enforcement agencies like the Department of Justice and elsewhere in the executive branch which need to be drained.

Too many of these folks live by a pragmatic ethic that holds that whatever works to accomplish their aims - whether those aims be destroying their political opponents or imposing their preferred policies on the nation - is right and moral, but pragmatic ethics are incompatible with justice and have no place in a healthy republic.

If you're interested in what many on the House of Representatives January 6th committee must have known but refused to share with you, watch the videos.

Meanwhile, kudos to those in Congress who are now seeking to make transparency a reality.

Policy Has Consequences

I often remind my philosophy students that ideas have consequences in the real world. Victor Davis Hanson reminds us in his latest column that public policy also has consequences, and the consequences of a lot of the policies enacted by federal, state and local authorities today are calamitous.

In his lede he comments on a video of shoplifters in Portland confronted by a man who urges them to return their purloined merchandise:

Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.

More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage — of the thieves!

They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished.

The criminals entertained no fear of any consequences for walking out with bags of things that were not theirs.

They had no care that mainstreaming their habits would undermine the entire fabric of society.

What is common to the pandemic of smash-and-grab, carjacking, fighting on airliners while in flight, and deadly Saturday night shoot-outs is this same apparent assurance there will be no consequences.

Hanson argues that the failure of authorities to prosecute crime is a contagion spreading across the urban landscape of our nation.

That expectation of exemption is why the Antifa thugs in Atlanta were so bold in their latest violent attacks on the police.

And why not, after the 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, and assault in the summer of 2020 which resulted in few Antifa indictments, fewer convictions, and almost no imprisonments?

But it's not just the urban underclass who know that their behavior will not be prosecuted. Our elites know it, too:

Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal investigators, apparently with the prescient expectation he would never be prosecuted.

The same hubris was true of former CIA Director John Brennan, who admittedly lied under oath to Congress — twice — with absolute impunity.

The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper not only lied under oath to Congress, but crowed that he gave the “least untruthful” answer. He too faced zero consequences.

Read his column. There's much more in it and it's quite good.

Liberal/Progressives who dominate both our federal Department of Justice as well as city council members and District Attorney's offices in most of our major municipalities seem to be under the impression that the best way to reduce crime is to decline to punish it.

They're apparently guided by the deeply counterintuitive notion that if criminals know they won't be held accountable for their crimes then, by golly, they won't commit them.

The possibility that this delusion is rampant among progressives charged with enforcing the law is one explanation for what we see happening, but it's not, in my opinion, the most plausible explanation. These people, after all, are not stupid. They know what they're doing.

A more plausible explanation is that a significant number of progressives are Marxists or heavily influenced by Marxist theory. They would rarely acknowledge it publicly, but many of them hate this country as it's currently constituted.

They see the United States as irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They despise capitalism and the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights, especially in the first two amendments.

They'd love to reconstruct the nation along Marxist lines through the ballot box, but that seems too difficult to accomplish given the inherent conservatism of the American people, so the only way to "fundamentally transform" the nation - to quote Barack Obama - is to overload the structures and institutions of society to the point of collapse.

If crime is rampant, if people are living in fear, if the institutions that serve as glue holding society together - government, police, schools, hospitals - are so overburdened that they cannot function, then the people will be ripe for revolution - preferably peaceful (liberals) but violent if necessary (leftists).

The Marxist model is to disarm the populace (repeal the 2nd amendment), control and manipulate the public discourse (cancel culture and the Twitter files), emasculate the church and destroy the nuclear family.

Marxists strive to reduce people to atomized individuals who believe themselves to be solitary voices standing in the path of an ideological behemoth and helpless to resist it. Once the left has secured their political hegemony they'll be able to impose their will on society, just as they did in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba and numerous lesser states.

Then the flame of freedom will flicker and go out and the hapless ciphers who comprise the citizenry will find themselves inhabiting a bleak totalitarian dystopia.

That's the implicit consequence of the policies of the contemporary left. They will not admit this, of course, and many perhaps would not even admit it to themselves, but the policies they enact are leading ineluctably in this direction, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not.

Turning Hume on His Head

The skeptical philosopher David Hume, in arguing against the reasonableness of belief in miracles, famously declared that,

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined....There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.

And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle....

Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature is deeply problematic, but let that go for now (see here for a discussion of some of the problems with that definition).

Hume goes on to say that,

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Having written those lines, the great Scottish philosopher would doubtless be aghast at the implications of this maxim (or rule) for the contemporary controversy over intelligent design. He employed the rule against belief in miracles, arguing that because we have an overwhelming experience against violations of the laws of nature we should reject any report that a "violation" occurred.

If we grant Hume his rule (which I don't - the rule only entails a reasonable skepticism of the report of a miracle, it doesn't warrant outright rejection of it) there's no reason not apply it to the discovery over the last fifty years that the universe and life are both information-rich.

Couple that discovery with the fact that we have a uniform experience of information, whether in a library, on a hard drive, or wherever, being produced by intelligent minds, and it would seem that Hume would have to grant that we should believe that the information contained in biological cells and organisms must be the product of an intelligent mind.

We have no experience, after all, of information being produced by random, impersonal processes and forces. Indeed, we have a uniform experience of random, unguided processes degrading information and generating disorder.

Hume intended his maxim to be a knockout blow to the idea that there's a personal deity at work in the world, but if we take the maxim seriously it actually leads to the conclusion that such a deity must, in fact, exist.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer discusses the problem biological information poses for naturalism in this video:

Collapsing Bird Populations

A column by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times a couple of years ago bears the alarming news that scientists studying the populations of over 500 species of birds in North America reported that the number of individual birds has fallen by 29% since 1970.

There are almost 3 billion fewer birds in North America today than there were fifty years ago.

If this is correct it's deeply disturbing. I don't doubt that habitat loss, both in the birds' breeding grounds and in their wintering grounds in Central and South America have taken a toll.

It's interesting that among the species hardest hit were grassland species in the midwest (717 million fewer birds) where vast tracts of grassland acreage have been sacrificed to development and agricultural production.

I do have a concern about the methodology of the study, however. It relies heavily on estimates of numbers by amateur observers, and among the species showing severe declines are blackbirds (440 million fewer since 1970) which are so numerous and which in the non-breeding season throng together in flocks numbering in the thousands, that accurate counts are very difficult to obtain.

Much more distressing than the drop in numbers of abundant species like blackbirds, though, is the decline in woodland species like warblers which breed in the boreal north. The warbler population has shrunk, according to the study, by some 617 million birds since 1970.

Cape May Warbler

Oddly, however, vireos, which are similar to warblers and which share similar habits and habitat, have shown a jump of 53% in their population. Why that should be is apparently a mystery.

Whatever the explanation, it seems obvious that habitat loss, and perhaps diseases like West Nile virus, wind turbines, collisions with skyscrapers and even feral house cats are taking a toll. Every new shopping center and housing development eliminates acres of habitat, and every new highway is a killing field for birds and other wildlife.

But if these stressors really are what's causing the collapse it's very hard to imagine a solution.

Wisdom and Good Intentions

A column from a few years ago by Dennis Prager contains a lot that's worth pondering.

For instance in the column he offers the reader six rules of life that we'd all do well to memorize:

• Ingratitude makes happiness impossible.
• Corrupt people think everyone else is as corrupt as they are.
• Human nature is not basically good.
• Feelings are far less important than actions.
• Most men need a woman to mature.
• Most women need a man to mature.

Each of these deserves a column of its own, but Prager has other fish to fry. He writes that there's another rule that accounts for many of the horrors of the 20th century. It's this:

GI - W = E (Good Intentions minus Wisdom leads to Evil).

Prager explains what he's getting at as follows:

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity.

They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity -- eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens "free" education and "free" health care.

They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

Convinced of their own goodness such folk often have nothing but contempt for those who oppose them. After all, to oppose the good requires that the opponent must be bad ab defino.

That's why Hillary Clinton could condemn those who could not bring themselves to vote for her as "deplorables," and it is, Prager makes bold to assert, the position of virtually every editor and columnist at The New York Times.

Be that as it may, he goes on:

The problem with communists and with leftists who don't consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It's that they lack wisdom. There are wise and foolish liberals, wise and foolish conservatives; but all leftists are fools.

....This is not, however, a description of their totality as a human being. Fools may be personally kind and generous, may be loyal friends and devoted spouses, and of course, they may be well-intentioned. But in terms of making the world worse, there is little difference between a well-meaning fool and an evil human being.

Why does he call them "fools"? That language seems unnecessarily strong and insulting, and causes those of us who wish for a more civil public discourse to cringe, but Prager explains his meaning:

Tens of millions of well-intentioned Westerners supported Stalin. The Westerners who supplied Stalin the secrets to the atom bomb were not motivated by evil. They were simply fools. But few evil people did as much to hurt the world as they did.

They are fools partly because they believe good intentions are all that matter. Therefore, they never ask perhaps the most important moral question one can ask: What will happen if my policy is enacted? Leftist supporters of communism never asked.

I'd prefer he had said that they were "foolish" rather than call them "fools," but admittedly that will probably seem to most readers to be a distinction without a difference. In any case, Prager elaborates:

Democrats who push the country-bankrupting Green New Deal provide a contemporary example. They not only deny the economy and society-crushing consequences of the Green New Deal, they deny any price will be paid. Every home, office, hospital, school and business will be forced to stop using fossil fuels, yet only good [they say] will come from that.

Giving that amount of coercive power to the state is of no consequence to leftists. In their make-believe world, no one will suffer.

On the contrary, America will become richer, and millions of jobs will be created while we destroy our economy. Poor Africans trying to electrify their countries will be told not to -- yet they, too, will somehow become rich using only wind and sun.

If the Green New Deal is enacted, the American economy will tank -- and with it, much of the rest of the world. Tyrannies like China and Iran will be emboldened, as will dictatorships like Russia.

About all of this he's surely correct. The Green New Deal would be a disaster which is why even Democrats who said they supported it withheld their support when it came up for a vote in the Senate.

Prager concludes with this:

The left pushes for a Palestinian state although even Israelis on the left know this would mean a Hamas-Hezbollah state on the Israeli border. But they know they mean well.

They routinely label the beacon of freedom on Earth [U.S.A.] racist, misogynistic, homophobic, imperialistic, genocidal; cheapen the label "Nazi"; promote all-black dorms and graduations; promote preteen boys' performing drag shows; tell young women career is more important to happiness than marriage; believe a country can remain a distinct nation with open borders; condemn parents who try to reassure their 3-year-old son that he is a boy; and ruin the university, the arts, late-night comedy, pro football and religion.

But they mean well.

That's quite an indictment. Is he right or does he overstate his case? What do you think?

Mind Or Mindlessness

One of the many strengths of the concept of intelligent design is that it's a superior explanation to Darwinian naturalism for the existence of information in the cells of living organisms.

A software program or a textbook is loaded with information, but no one would think that the information came to be there by some sort of random shuffling of symbols. Rather, information is a product of intelligent minds - not mindless, impersonal forces - and the biosphere is shot full of it.

Information is especially prominent in the tiny protein machines that mediate and choreograph many of the cell's functions. When we watch a video, such as the one below, that uses animation to illustrate how just a few of these machines work, we have to ask ourselves how blind chance could've produced them.

How, before there were any reproducing cells and thus no natural selection, could these machines have evolved? How, before the information coded in DNA ever existed, could these machines have arisen since that information is necessary to create them? And how, before these machines appeared in living cells, could DNA have created them since DNA needs these machines to do what it does?

It would seem that both the information-rich DNA as well as the entire suite of molecular machines necessary for DNA to function must've all arisen simultaneously, but to believe that this actually happened requires an enormous exertion of blind faith in the capacities of blind chance.

Watch the video and see what you think:

Moral Depravity

The graphic below, taken from The Sun, shows the horrific losses suffered by Russia to date in their senseless war in Ukraine. Now Russian generals are adding to the carnage by throwing waves of young Russian boys against Ukrainian forces holding out in the town of Bakhmut, and every inch of territory the Russians gain is coming at an enormous cost in lives lost.

The battles are taking Ukrainian lives as well, but Russia has far more men under arms than does Ukraine. The Russian strategy, apparently, is to simply overwhelm the defenders to the point they're forced to withdraw from the town and forfeit it to the Russians. Russian President Vladimir Putin can then proclaim to the people back home that their sons have won a glorious victory.

The slaughter is as unconscionable as it is unnecessary, but Putin and his generals evidently don't care about the lives they're destroying and the grief they're causing. They're intent on conquering Ukraine no matter how many Ukrainians and Russians have to die to satisfy their ambitions.

If wantonly committing mass murder is a moral evil then Vladimir Putin and his civilian and military leaders certainly qualify as evil men in the same league as Napoleon and Hitler. They're responsible for enormous crimes against humanity and their names should forever be synonomous with moral depravity.

You Don't Really Have Free Will (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an argument by philosopher Stephen Cave that can essentially be stated thus:

1. Materialism entails determinism
2. Materialism is true
3. Therefore, determinism is true

The argument hinges, of course, on the second premise, but the truth of that premise is by no means obvious. It's an assumption based on a commitment to a naturalistic metaphysics. At any rate, ideas have consequences and Cave next addresses the human and social consequences of a widespread belief in the truth of determinism. They're not good:

Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency....This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly non-theoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Some philosophers have suggested that given the consequences of living consistently with an awareness of the truth of determinism that the philosophical elites ought (strange word in this context) to deceive the masses and just not tell them about it. The elites should foist upon the public a kind of Platonic Noble Lie. Cave, however, demurs:

[F]ew scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand.

This is a peculiar reaction, it seems, for if determinism is true, why should scholars be uncomfortable promoting a lie? What would make such a tactic morally wrong if they really had no choice in employing it? They're only doing what they've been determined by their genes and/or their social and professional environment to do.

Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower.

There's something very odd about a metaphysical view - physicalism - the implications of which are so destructive that they can't be shared even among many of those who accept the view. If a belief is such that one cannot live with it consistently there's probably something deeply wrong with the belief.

Physicalism - the belief that everything is reducible to the laws of physics - does entail determinism, however, and as Cave points out in his essay, the consequences of determinism are bleak. In addition to those Cave mentions, determinism also has the following consequences:

• Praise and blame, reward and punishment, are never deserved since these assume that the recipient could have acted otherwise than he or she did act.
• There are no moral obligations, no moral right and wrong, since morality is contingent upon uncompelled free choice.
• There's no human dignity since dignity is predicated on the ability to make significant choices.

It's hard to see how people could live with a belief which has these consequences without falling into nihilism and despair. Yet that's where physicalism - and the closely related views called naturalism and materialism - leads.

Philosopher John Searle offers an antidote to the determinism described by Cave in this Closer to the Truth interview:

You Don't Really Have Free Will (Pt. I)

Philosopher Stephen Cave wrote in The Atlantic a few years ago that the idea that human beings have free will is dying out among scientists.

The results of the experiments of neuroscientists, he argues, all seem to support the notion that at any given moment there's only one possible future. Our "choices" are determined by causes of which we may be completely unaware but which make our decisions ineluctable.

I've excerpted parts of Cave's essay below and follow the excerpts with critical comments.

Cave observes that,

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will.

Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment.

But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most, but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

It should be noted that the agreement to which he refers is a tacit consequence of a metaphysical assumption shared by many researchers - the assumption that there are no non-physical, non-material factors at play in the universe or in human beings. Of course, if physicalism or materialism are true then determinism follows, but there's no good reason to think that either are true and good reasons to think they're not.

He goes on to say that,

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Quite so, but it doesn't follow from the fact that changes in the physical brain cause changes in behavior that therefore the physical brain is all that's involved in behavior. A viewer can change the physical settings on his television and thereby change the image on the screen, but it would be foolish to conclude that therefore the image can be completely explained in terms of the workings of the television set, while ignoring the role played by the broadcast or cable station.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move.

The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

This is a misreading of Libet's work, a clarification of which can be read here. Libet himself believed that human beings had free will. It would've been peculiar of him to hold this view after he had proven that the view was wrong.

The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond.

In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

If the system which produces our choices is indeed "a physical system like any other" then determinism is very probably true, but the assumption that our choices are solely the product of physical causes is an unprovable metaphysical faith-claim. If we are also possessed of an immaterial, non-physical mind or soul, as many philosophers believe, that faculty could possibly function as a locus of free choice.

The only reason for thinking that such minds don't exist is an apriori commitment to materialism, the belief that there are no immaterial substances such as minds in human beings or anywhere else in the world. More on Cave's essay tomorrow.