The Middle East's Perpetual War

Given the current state of things in Israel and Gaza I thought it appropriate to rerun this post from 5/30/2019:

Ever since its founding in 1948 the Israelis have been fighting a defensive war against their neighbors, particularly the Palestinians. Their neighbors attack and Israel responds until the attack is repulsed and their enemies are too weakened to continue.

Then the world prevails upon Israel to relent, to show restraint, and retreat from the field which, of course, allows their enemy to recover, regroup, resupply, and at some future date restart the whole cycle all over again.

It seems like an exercise in endless futility, but this is the status quo in the Middle East, and it will continue until Israel's foes, who have sworn its destruction, ultimately wear it down and destroy it. It often seems that this would not bother the West overmuch, which perversely views the stronger more civilized side in a dispute to be ipso facto the evil aggressor and oppressor.

Nevertheless, the prospect of their ultimate destruction should at least bother Israel, one would think, unless, like the rest of the West, they've succumbed to the notion, promoted by the left for the last eighty years or so, that the civilized nations of the world just don't deserve to survive.

Roger Simon at PJ Media once made a shocking suggestion as to how perpetual war in the Middle East might be ended. He opined that perhaps it's time for Israel to create a new status quo. Perhaps it's time to eliminate Hamas in Gaza:

A permanent truce, i.e., genuine peace, does not seem part of the vocabulary of jihadists whose sworn goal is to make the world Islamic, sooner or later, like it or not. They just take a time out when it looks as if they could be in trouble, like a hockey player with a twisted ankle.

As an example, Hamas is known for its hudnas, cooling down (or pretending to) and then heating up again as soon as possible to do what the beginning of its charter always promised it would do — destroy Israel.

For years the bien pensant of the West (Europe, the U.S.) have urged, actually put strong pressure on, Israel to play the hudna game with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the sociopathic Islamofascist crew. The Israelis, from a humanistic tradition and anxious to be thought well of, have acquiesced, even when they have the extreme whip hand.

The results have been as one would predict: another war, another hudna and on and on. This has been going on since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 - even before that really. In other words, for a long while.

Maybe it’s time for a different approach. How about just...winning?

Whether one agrees with Simon or not it's true enough that what many Israelis realize but many other Westerners seemingly don't is that radical Islam is in a state of permanent war with the world. It's a war that's been raging since the 7th century and will continue until Islam is the only religion in the world (actually it will continue beyond that as Muslims will be killing each other to decide which sect of Islam will be the only sect in the world).

We will never be safe from this threat. To think that it's at an end, or that we have somehow made peace with the Islamists, is to confuse their temporary tactic of hudna with a genuine desire for peace.

The world shouts "peace, peace" but there is no peace. The Islamists don't want peace, they want total victory. That's why it often seems that there's no peaceful or lasting solution to the conflict in the Middle East and no realistic prospect of compromise.

Tragically, any clear-eyed American foreign policy must take that as its starting point. To do otherwise is to substitute wishful thinking and self-delusion for objective reality.

Human Language, Animal Communication

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

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

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

Much of the physiological apparatus for hearing and speaking is found in all land-dwelling vertebrates — the tetrapods — including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. “Humans share a significant proportion of our basic machinery of hearing and vocal production with other tetrapods,” Fitch writes in the Annual Review of Linguistics. Even so, only humans have language, Egnor argues. Here's part of his reasoning:

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

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

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

Animals can only think concretely. Their thought is of particulars—the particular bowl of food, thrown stick, or warm bed. They don’t contemplate nutrition, exercise, or rest. Humans can think abstractly, without any particular physical object in mind. For example, a vet might tell her client during an office visit, “Tuffy here needs to lose about 1.5 kg. I suggest a lower calorie kibble and more exercise—if possible, before bedtime.”

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

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

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

Language is a tool for abstract thinking and only human beings can think abstractly. Despite what some Darwinians aver, the gap between animals and humans is not just a narrow evolutionary jump. It's a chasm, a chasm the bridging of which has eluded evolutionary explanation for 160 years.

Mind-Boggling Numbers

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.

Enjoy:

After Death

I've written about NDEs (Near Death Experiences) before and have said that I used to be skeptical about them (although a character in my 2015 novel Bridging the Abyss has one), but the scientific and philosophical literature has become so large regarding these phenomena and the experiences people report have been documented by so many medical professionals, that I've come to believe that these reports, or at least some of them, are very likely to be veridical.

I'm still a bit leery of reports that the individual experienced heaven or hell. Those reports are, by their nature, not confirmable, since, with a couple of notable exceptions, the person who makes them can provide no details that can lead to a verification of the truth of what they recount.

So I'm generally withholding final judgment on those, but reports that contain details that the person could not have known apart from having an Out of the Body Experience (OBE) and which can actually be confirmed are another matter.

If those reports are indeed true they must count as very powerful evidence against philosophical materialism, a view which says that our conscious experience is the product solely of our physical brain. After all, if individuals who show no brain activity are having conscious experience then there's something else involved in producing that experience besides the material brain.

I recently came across a podcast that features an interview with a cardiac physician named Dr. Jeffrey Long who has investigated thousands of these reports and who is featured in the forthcoming documentary titled After Death (see the trailer below). The information discussed in the podcast is fascinating, and I commend it to anyone who's interested in NDEs.

I did have a couple of questions, though, about the podcast. For example, according to the trailer, 23% of those who report an experience of either heaven or hell describe something that sounds hellish, but Dr. Long says several times that the experience is wonderful for everyone who has had it. I'm not sure how to reconcile those two claims.

At any rate, here's the podcast:

Here's the trailer for After Death which is being released to theaters tonight (Oct. 27th):

The Marvelous Hummingbird

From time to time I've done posts on hummingbirds which are surely one of the most fascinating creatures in the natural world. From their unique tongues to their amazing acrobatics and from their gorgeous coloration to the tiny size of some species they're just amazing birds.

This short but beautiful video, put out by the John 10:10 Project, explains how the hummingbird's anatomy allows them to fly both forward and backward as well as upside down.

Check it out and ask yourself as you watch how blind, purposeless processes could've produced such a marvel:

Peaceful Palestinians?

One of the myths that circulates whenever Hamas does something barbaric is that Hamas doesn't really represent the Palestinian people in Gaza, that Hamas may be savage but the Palestinians just want to live in peace. Our president perpetuated this myth in his Oval Office speech of October 20th when he said that “The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.”

Of course if this is so it's hard to explain why Hamas consistently gets over 50% of the vote in the Gazan "elections", but set that aside. No doubt there are some Palestinian Arabs who just want to live in peace with their Israeli neighbors, but this story by Andrew Tobin in the Washington Free Beacon makes one wonder how many of them there are.

Tobin begins by noting that the attackers of Israeli civilians on October 7th weren't just Hamas fighters. These terrorists were joined by a large mob of Palestinian civilians in their massacre. Here are some excerpts:

Whereas the Hamas terrorists wore uniforms and carried military-grade weapons, the Gazans who followed them into the Jewish state were dressed as civilians and mostly unarmed, two officials from Israel's devastated Gaza border region said. Young men with knives, overweight dads, and at least one elderly man on crutches were among those who exploited Hamas's rampage to create a second wave of carnage that rivaled the barbarism of the professional terrorists....

"The second wave of Arabs who came into the country were just as cruel as the terrorists of the first wave," Gadi Yarkoni, the mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, which encompasses most of the Gaza border communities, told the Free Beacon. "We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim....the people of Gaza, who we once thought were good, are responsible. It’s not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Ordinary people from Gaza took [our citizens]."

Yarkoni, who survived Oct. 7 in the safe room of his house in Kibbutz Nirim, estimated that 3,000 Gazans were involved in the attack, about half of them "civilians." The IDF has put the total number of terrorists at 2,500 to 3,500 but declined to specify whether that figure includes non-Hamas members.....

"I saw a scene [in the video footage] where a Gazan civilian chopped off a man's head. It took him several attempts to detach the head from the body," he said.

According to a video that was posted online, Gazans used a bulldozer to tear down a section of Israel's border fence, and hundreds of unarmed men and boys—wearing T-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers, and flip-flops—crossed into the country. They came mostly on foot but also by bicycle, scooter, and motorcycle. Someone appears to have brought a donkey.

Other online videos show ordinary Gazans taking selfies on and around Israeli tanks and ransacking a military base on the border. All the while, cries of "Allahu Akbar" rang out.

The mob soon arrived in nearby Israeli communities that Hamas was already terrorizing. Security footage and Hamas videos from Be'eri, Nir Oz, and other kibbutzim capture dozens of ordinary-looking Gazans looting and taking part in killings and kidnappings, including of women and children....

Meanwhile, in the streets of Gaza, crowds greeted the returning kidnappers as conquering heroes, online videos show. Some Gazans taunted the Israeli hostages and defiled the dead as they were paraded through the streets.

Raz Cohen, a 24-year-old former Israeli commando, saw both Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazans kill and rape revelers at the Nova music festival in Re'im, where at least 260 people were slaughtered. After escaping the Hamas terrorists, Cohen hid in a bush with a group of friends for almost seven hours. He watched as a gang of Gazan civilians—men wearing Adidas and armed only with knives and axes—raped and murdered a young Jewish woman.

"While they were raping and killing, they always laughed. I can't forget how they laughed," Cohen told the Free Beacon.

Several members of Cohen's group later ran from the bush and were caught by the same gang of Gazans. He said he heard his friends' screams as they were tortured and stabbed to death. "You know when you hear the screams of someone who is dying," said Cohen, who was eventually rescued by Israeli soldiers.

A young couple who were abducted at the Nova festival also appear to have been victims of ordinary Gazans. Footage shows that Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or were taken away by a group of about a dozen young men, some of them teenagers. As Or's brother told Israel's Channel 99, the kidnappers did not look to be armed. Minutes before Or was captured, he texted friends that 20 "people" were hunting down and lynching Jews, according to screenshots published by Israel's Ynet news site....

Daniel Meir, Nirim's security chief, said, "The civilians went into houses and turned them upside down. They took phones, computers, jewelry, whatever they could find," he recalled. "From what I know, they also took most of the hostages."

Even though Nirim suffered less than some of its neighbors, Meir said the attack—and particularly the role of ordinary Gazans—shattered his community's faith in coexistence. Many of the kibbutzniks were longtime peace activists, and there was widespread support among them for a program that allowed thousands of Gazans to work in Israel....

"Today we understand that [the Palestinians] are educated differently. They are educated for something else. Just as we crave peace, they crave jihad," Meir said. "They are raising monsters. And it is impossible to make peace with monsters."

There are additional details at the link. It's hard to believe, perhaps, but there are a lot of Americans on the left who are denying that any of this happened or that it's as bad as the reports indicate. Because the number of deniers is so large the Israeli Defense Force is planning to release captured video taken by Hamas and other Gazans that documents the atrocities.

No doubt the deniers will claim that those nefarious Israelis photo-shopped the videos, but for those who are still unblinded by anti-semitic hatred, the reports of the thousands of Palestinians who joined in the slaughter should put an end to the myth that the Palestinian Gazans are not sympathetic to Hamas.

What Dostoevsky Knew

Much of the civilized world looked on in horror at the videos of the Hamas savages murdering and torturing whole families on October 7th and, to the shock and surprise of much of the civilized world, a significant portion of those who are supposed to be the "best and the brightest," American college students, actually defended and even revelled in the butchery.

Northwestern University professor Gary Saul Morson tells us in the Wall Street Journal (subscription) that the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wouldn't have been surprised and we shouldn't either.

Morson opens with Dostoevsky's description of atrocities committed by Turkish Muslims in the 19th century including one episode where a young girl was forced to watch her father being flayed alive and then continues,

For the time being, “people are simply intimidated by some sort of habit,” Dostoevsky continues, but if some progressive expert were to come up with a theory showing that sometimes flaying skins can benefit the right cause because “the end justifies any means,” and if that expert were to express his view “using the appropriate style,” then, “believe me,” there would be respectable people among us “willing to carry out the idea.”

Despite our sophistication and professions of compassion, “all that’s needed is for some new fad to appear and people would be instantly transformed.”

Not everyone, of course, but the number of adherents of the new fad would grow while others would be afraid, or embarrassed, to cling to old ideas. And then, “where would we find ourselves: among the flayed or among the flayers?”

There's little doubt which group would be populated by a lot of those university students chanting for the elimination of Israel, the gassing of Jews, and insisting that whatever barbarisms Hamas inflicted upon those people in their kibbutzes, it was justified.

Morson again:

Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principles—“and this after Rousseau and Voltaire!”

We know, as Dostoevsky could only suppose, that during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured in the most degrading way possible; and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine and take bits of food away from bloated children.

In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism and anti-imperialism.

Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. “Believe me,” Dostoevsky addresses his readers, “the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.”

It's a mistake, Morson writes, to imagine that thuggish deeds are performed only by thugs, and he's right. As Alexander Solzhnitsyn famously wrote:

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Every human being is capable of doing evil given sufficient motivation, which is why we need to believe that some behaviors are wrong and that we'll be held accountable for what we do. If we don't believe that then there are no guardrails to our behavior.

Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, imprisoned and tortured in communist Romania in the late 40s and early 50s for being a Christian, wrote in his book Tortured for Christ, that,

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint fromn the depths of evil that is in man.

The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

The only adequate guardrail for the perfidy in the human heart is the belief that God commands us to love our neighbor, that our neighbor is whoever crosses our path and that we'll ultimately be held accountable for how we treat others.

Morson adds that, "If it seems that only uncivilized people could be such sadists, Dostoevsky cautions, know that the same thing could happen among civilized Europeans as well. 'For the moment it is still against the law,' he writes, 'but were it to depend on us, perhaps, nothing would stop us despite all our civilization.' "

Mathematician David Berlinski, in his book Devil's Delusion, recounts an illustrative episode from WWII:

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe...Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

Some people insist that human beings are basically good, but to believe that one has to ignore much of the history of the last two centuries.

Four Questions About Free Will

An article at Mind Matters lists and discusses four questions concerning free will that often arise in conversations on the topic.

Here are the four with a brief summary of the discussion. For the complete discussion see the article:

1. Has psychology shown that free will does not really exist? No, in fact the experiments of Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) show just the opposite. We've discussed these experiments on VP in the past, for instance here.

2. Is free will a logical idea? Yes, in fact denying it is often illogical. If all our decisions and beliefs are determined then our denial of free will is the inevitable product of our genes and childhood influences of which we may be only dimly, if at all, aware. We may think we have good reasons to disbelieve in free will, but whatever those reasons are they likely play a very minor role in our disbelief.

3. Would a world without free will be a better place? No, it'd be a dystopia in which there's no guilt, no moral obligation, no human dignity and in which people would inevitably come under the tyranny of totalitarian "controllers."

4. Are there science concepts that support free will? Yes, the concept of information is one. Check out the original article to see why.

It's interesting that the conviction that we're free seems almost inescapable. Even determinists can't shake it.

Philosopher John Searle, for example, writes that, "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."

John Horgan, a writer for Scientific American, states that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will."

So why do many people deny that we're free? Perhaps the overriding reason is that they've embraced a metaphysical materialism that eliminates from their ontology anything that cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics. Since those laws are strictly deterministic our intuition that we're free must be an illusion.

Another question we might ponder is why anyone should embrace materialism. Perhaps the answer to that is that the alternative, the belief that there are immaterial substances like minds, puts one on a slippery slope to belief in God and that belief is just not tolerable for many moderns.

Better to deny that we have free will, the thinking goes, than to open the door of our ontology to supernatural entities.

A University Student's Disillusionment

If you're a college student, planning to go to college or the parent of someone in either of these groups, you might be interested in the following 5 minute video featuring a young woman by the name of Jay Stephens. Ms. Stephens explains how as an idealistic university freshman she thought she'd learn how to change the world but was totally disillusioned by the education she received:

It's almost criminal that universities keep raising student costs in part to pay a burgeoning administrative staff comprised of people who often serve no real educational purpose, or any purpose at all.

At the same time universities and colleges enroll students who would probably be better off not going to college in the first place and who, after running up debt for a couple of years, ultimately drop out or flunk out.

Then, too, schools entice other students to take boutique courses and majors which eventually result in a useless degree that'll be of no help in enabling them to pay off their debt.

As if that weren't bad enough, a lot of schools have anandoned the goal of educating their students in favor of indoctrinating them in left-wing ideologies that cause them to despise people unlike themselves and to despise the country that has given them the opportunity to attend university in the first place.

Anyway, check out the video. Hopefully, Ms. Stephens' experience won't be your experience, but it is, unfortunately, the experience of thousands of young students in today's academy.

What Is Social Justice?

As anyone who has spent much time on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of many young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain. In that respect it's much like "systemic racism" or just plain "racism."

The terms are easy to wield as rhetorical weapons, but they're not so easy to define.

So what exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers a succinct explanation in a brief video at Prager U.

Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name. Indeed, at least one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, has acknowledged that she and her fellow organizers are communists steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology.

What's sought by these people is not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard his entire life to attain and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all.

One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if points were subtracted from their GPAs and awarded to students who didn't do as well so that everyone gets a C. 

I'll bet not many. Anyway, check out the Goldberg video. It's illuminating.

The Folly of Jumping to Conclusions

It would certainly be helpful to the cause of clarity if people, both at home and abroad, and especially in our media, would refrain from jumping to conclusions about events in the current war in Gaza based on what seems to be the expectation that the Israeli military and government are a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters and instead wait until the evidence is in.

If they would've done that this past week they would've spared themselves considerable embarrassment.

Twice in recent days Hamas claimed that the Israelis deliberately targeted civilians for death. The first instance was on a highway where civilians were fleeing south away from Israeli artillery and air bombardment. Just "by coincidence" someone in the traffic caught an explosion in a car ahead of them on the highway and the occupants of the car were killed.

Many were quick to condemn Israel for attacking civilians, but subsequent analysis of the video showed that the explosion originated from inside the vehicle.

The second instance was an allegation of an Israeli missile attack on a hospital in Gaza in which an indeterminate number of people were killed (Hamas put the number of dead at almost 500 but it appears that this was clearly an exagerration). The Arab world went into a frenzy as the news spread around the globe. Massive protests against Israel erupted even in Western cities and on American campuses.

But as the forensic evidence accumulated it became clear to objective observers, if not to those for whom facts don't matter, that the hospital explosion was due to the failure of a rocket launched by Hamas' ally Islamic Jihad. The rocket, intended for Israel, crashed into the hospital parking lot which should've raised some questions in the minds of fair-minded folks everywhere, even in our media.

For example, if the blast had been caused by an Israeli weapon, does anyone think that the Israeli government would deliberately target a hospital? What on earth would they stand to gain from doing so? And if they did target a hospital does anyone think they would've missed? And if it was indeed an errant Israeli munition why was there no crater or damage done to surrounding buildings?

There's still more reason for doubting Hamas' account that it was an Israeli attack, aside from the fact that Hamas is a very unreliable source of information about anything having to do with Israel. There's audio of Hamas operatives discussing the blast and saying that it was one of their rockets that malfunctioned, and there's also video of rockets being fired in Gaza toward Israel and one of them blowing up in the sky and plummeting to earth in the vicinity of the hospital.

Finally, there's no record of any Israeli military activity in the area that could've caused the explosion, but none of this matters to those whose hatred for Israel and the Jews is so virulent that, as one young woman declared in a spasm of outrage, whatever Hamas did to the Jews on October 7th was justified.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Independent analysts poring over publicly available images of Tuesday’s explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza and its aftermath say the blast site doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a strike with a bomb or missile of the types usually used by Israel.

The amount of damage also appears inconsistent with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry’s assertion that 471 people were killed, experts said.

“We have none of the indicators of an airstrike—none,” said Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an expert on military and security issues. The U.S. has collected “high confidence” signals intelligence, which includes electronic surveillance, indicating that the blast at the hospital in Gaza was caused by the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, U.S. officials said, buttressing Israel’s contention that it wasn’t responsible for the blast.

Washington’s assessment that Israel wasn’t behind the blast at the hospital drew, in part, on communications intercepts and other intelligence gathered by the U.S., defense officials said. Independent analysts poring over publicly available images of Tuesday’s explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza and its aftermath say the blast site doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a strike with a bomb or missile of the types usually used by Israel.

The amount of damage also appears inconsistent with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry’s assertion that 471 people were killed, experts said.

“Our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza,” White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said, adding that the U.S. continues to collect information on the incident.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees said they had been briefed on the intelligence related to the blast, and concluded it wasn’t the result of an Israeli military action.

The small size of the open area where the explosion occurred, coupled with limited shock-wave damage, was inconsistent with the death toll claimed by the Palestinian Health Ministry, several open-source intelligence analysts said.

Those, like many in our media, who don't hold off their judgments of blame until the evidence is in are either very unwise or very iniquitous, or both.

The Myth of Israeli Occupation

Robert Spencer argues that the idea that Israel is occupying Palestinian lands is a myth. He writes:

[Those who call for an end to the "occupation"] all likely assume that there was a previous Palestinian state that the Israelis occupied and destroyed, but in reality, there has never been a Palestinian state of any kind, ever, at any point in history. There has been a region known as “Palestine” since 134AD, when the Romans applied that name to the land that had previously been known as Judea, that is, land of the Jews.

But “Palestine” was akin to “Staten Island” — it was only the name of a region, never of a people or a nation.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire had sovereignty over the territory that is now Israel and the supposedly occupied land as well. The Ottoman Empire was, however, known by this time as “The Sick Man of Europe.” In the early 1920s, just before the empire fell altogether, it conceded control of Palestine and the land that came to be known as Transjordan, and now as Jordan, to the League of Nations.

On July 24, 1922, the League granted administrative control over these territories to Britain with specific instructions to create a “national home for the Jewish people.”

Spencer doesn't say this but it was during this period that many Jews were settling Palestine and taming the desert. Thousands of Arabs thus migrated to Palestine to find work. They came from countries all over North Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. It's their descendants who make up the bulk of today's Palestinian Arabs. Relatively few Palestinians have been in the land for more than a few generations.

When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, it immediately had to fight a war for its survival against the surrounding Arab nations that had vowed to destroy it. Then there was finally an occupation — in fact, two: Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria (which it renamed the West Bank).

Israel won back those territories in the Six-Day War of 1967, but that was actually ending an occupation, not starting one: the only international law governing sovereignty over those territories stipulated that they were to be part of a national home for the Jewish people.

Prior to the 1948 war the Arab nations advised the Palestinian Arabs to leave the country so that they wouldn't be caught in the cross-fire. They were promised that after the war when the Arab nations had destroyed the new nation of Israel these "refugees" could return and plunder the property of the Jews. Israel, however, won the war and the "refugees" were stuck in refugee camps.

So from whom was the land stolen? Not from the Ottomans, who had ceded it to the League of Nations. Not from the league, which had granted administrative powers over it to the British. Not from the British, who only had it in order to help create a Jewish state there. And not from the Palestinians, who didn’t even exist until the 1960s, when the KGB and Yasir Arafat bestowed Palestinian nationality upon a group of Levantine Arabs as a rhetorical weapon to use against Israel.....

A Palestinian state, if it is ever created, would be the first-ever such entity in the history of the world.

Never Again?

There was a time when people in the U.S. were sickened and appalled by the images they were seeing from the Nazi extermination camps. How could this happen in one of the most culturally advanced nations in the history of the world, Americans wondered. Except perhaps for some fringe types, Americans were united in declaring with the Jews "Never again."

Disgusted by what had happened to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, we even supported the establishment of a Jewish state carved out of the desert in British-run Palestine.

Well, that was then. From what we've witnessed on our campuses this week there are lots of young people who are perfectly willing to see it happen again. There are lots of our children who have no qualms about aligning themselves in solidarity with those who raped, tortured and murdered 1300 people last weekend.

This act of almost incomprehensible savagery was, in their depraved minds, justified "resistance."

And those who think this way are not just on our campuses. There's been an effort in the progressive media to draw a kind of moral equivalence between the Israelis and those who slaughtered them, an effort to actually blame Israel for what the Hamas butchers did. There's also been a strange reluctance to identify those butchers as "terrorists" or to demand the release of the hostages held by Hamas.

We're now seeing the left for who they really are and the picture is not pretty. If anyone wonders how the holocaust in Germany could have ever happened all they need do is look at our elite campuses and left-wing media. Our contemporary brownshirts are crawling out into the sunlight and showing themselves to be cut from the same fabric as the hate-filled architects of the Nazis' Final Solution.

But we should be glad, in a way, that they are. It's instructive to see exactly what progressives in this country really believe as opposed to what they've wanted us, for the last two generations, to think they believed.

Destroying Hamas Is a Moral Duty

In a Wall Street Journal column (subscription required) Walter Block and Alan Futerman declare that Israel has a moral duty to destroy Hamas. They begin by pointing out that Muslim hatred of Israel is not contingent upon any of the usual excuses offered up by the apologists for Hamas' atrocities:

A mob of Islamist Arabs incited by Jew-hatred entered the town and killed as many Jews as they could find. They went door to door, broke into the homes of their victims, and slaughtered innocent men, women and children. These gangs raped, mutilated and tortured them while screaming “Kill the Jews!”

That was 94 years ago, on Saturday, Aug. 24, 1929, in Hebron. The picture is essentially the same, only that then the Arab riots that included this massacre ended with 133 Jews murdered. This time, it is several times as many, and we don’t know the final figure.

Given that the events are virtually the same, the question is: Why? There was no state of Israel in 1929. There were no “occupied” territories, no “settlers.” There was no “blockade.” No security fence, no checkpoints, nothing.

If the excuses of today’s murderers did not exist at that time, what did exist? A deep, maniacal, murderous and utterly destructive hatred of Jews—the same essential factor operating today, to which all other excuses are subservient.

They go on to point out that the ghastly videos of the weekend's raid showing the horrors perpetrated by Hamas were posted online by Hamas members themselves and they ask,

What does it say of a society that these monsters think this type of “propaganda” is a “good” way to mobilize the population? It screams of a deeply perverse and murderous culture, in love with death and destruction.

It is the same culture that teaches toddlers to hate. The same society that pays wages to mass murderers and celebrates on the streets with sweets and shootings when Jews get killed. It is the culture that creates the types of monsters capable of the evil they themselves proudly show to the world through social media.

The authors then turn their attention from Hamas and their supporters and enablers in the rest of the world to their morally depraved sympathizers in the West and they highlight the irony of who these sympathizers are and what exactly they're sympathizing with:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” chant the useful idiots at elite institutions and parades in the West.

Who are these people? Atheists who support theocratic lunatics, democrats who endorse medieval tyrants, feminists who defend misogynists who parade with the desecrated corpses of women, gays who defend maniacs who would joyfully hang them or toss them off the roof of a tall building.

They talk of a secular, democratic and socialist Palestine. As George Orwell observed: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

And what do the enemies of Israel want? Block and Futerman write that,

The enemies of Israel aren’t in favor of a Palestinian state. They aren’t in favor of anything positive, but only of a negative: the denial of life, especially of Jewish life. The goal is genocide. The method is mass murder of the type Jews haven’t experienced since the Holocaust.

There's no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas. The people who burn babies to death, who murder children in front of their parents, who rape defenseless women before killing them, who butcher both the living and the already dead are a modern incarnation of the Orcs in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. The authors of the WSJ piece conclude:

[T]he West needs to understand that to defend human life and dignity, it isn’t enough to claim to side with Israel. It needs to understand what this means: total, unrestrictive support. That is nothing less than allowing this beleaguered country to defend itself fully.

To recognize that Hamas needs to be destroyed for the same reason and by the same method that the Nazis were. Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil residing next to it. And, more important, that once it begins to proceed in that direction, it won’t be demonized for defending that which is the core of Western civilization and which its enemies hate the most: the love of everyone’s right to human life, dignity and happiness.

In other words, it needs to support a complete, total and decisive Israeli victory. If this implies an overwhelming, unprecedented use of military force, so be it. Hamas is and will be responsible for any civilian casualties. Cause and effect. They created their own destruction, and its consequences.

Israel has a moral right to finish the job, and the West has a moral duty to support it. Let Israel do what it must to finish this war in the fastest way possible, with the minimum civilian and military casualties on its side.

I want to emphasize that the authors are referring here to "minimum civilian casualties" among Palestinian civilians which Israel has always tried very hard to protect despite Hamas' repeated use of their own people as human shields. In any case, if the Israelis allow Hamas to survive then the grisly horror we witnessed unfold last weekend will be reprised just as soon as Hamas feels strong enough to carry out such an attack again.

Whatever consequences befall the long-suffering Gazan Palestinians in the weeks ahead, they are the result of the evil decisions made by their own political leadership whose depraved hatreds have brought upon their people all of the misery and grief entailed by the Israeli response.

Hamas Must Go

I'm a bit stunned that the immediate response of a number of Americans to the savage attacks of the Hamas terrorists was to call for a truce, restraint and negotiations.

This is like having someone break into your house, murder your children and then having your neighbors call for you to declare a truce and commence negotiations. What is there to negotiate? Hamas is an organization devoted to killing Jews. In its founding documents it calls for the destruction of Israel.

The Jewish website Forward gives us some history:

Hamas was founded in 1987 as an Islamic fundamentalist party — an offshoot, really, of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. In 2006, a year after Israel withdrew its armed forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip in what is widely known as the disengagement, Hamas won legislative elections, beating the rival Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas, 74 seats to 45. A year later, it launched a bloody military campaign against Fatah, and took complete control of Gaza.

After Hamas’ takeover, Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, controlling travel and trade in and out of the coastal enclave. Hamas, which the United States, Israel, the European Union, Canada, Egypt, and Japan designate as a terrorist organization, had by 2006 conducted terror attacks in Israel that killed 506 and wounded thousands. After the blockade, the number of attacks plummeted.

But Hamas has never changed its aspirations to wrest control of all of Israel by killing its Jews— a goal you will see clearly when you read the Hamas charter....

The first version of the charter, adopted in 1988, begins with a preamble: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

The 36 articles that follow are buttressed by quotes from the Quran and lessons of the Prophet Muhammed … as interpreted by the militant Islamists of Hamas.

After establishing the primacy of Islam, the charter pivots to removing Jews from historic Palestine. “Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land,” states Article 12.

The charter’s description of Jews echoes millennia of antisemitic tropes.

“With their money, they took control of the world media,” reads Article 22, “news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others.”

The 9000-word document blames Jews for the French and Communist revolutions, World War I and II, and for the Rotary Club and the United Nations, “to enable them to rule the world through them.”

“There is no war going on anywhere,” it reads, “without having their finger in it.”

The charter directs the killing of Jews, drawing on a hadith (prophetic saying of Mohammad): “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

How does one negotiate with such people? If Israel fails to eliminate Hamas the same sort of barbarism we saw over the weekend will recur. Hamas is not interested in peace, it's interested in stoking hatred and committing genocide.

Hamas has given the Israeli people a choice between three options:

1. Continue the status quo and get used to suffering similar attacks in the future.
2. Abandon Israel to the barbarians.
3. Eliminate the barbarians.

If there's a fourth option I don't know what it is.

It's true that Jesus Christ called us to be peacemakers, but after forty years of trying to make peace with Hamas through negotiation, and being rewarded with persistent rocket attacks on their homes and children, perhaps it's time to try for peace by doing something else besides talking.

A Very Sick Society

Hamas murders children killing forty babies, in one town alone, beheading some of them. They slaughter whole families, burning many of them alive. They rape women, mutilate corpses, torture captives and Black Lives Matter chapters in several major cities .... celebrates:

On Instagram, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles also joined in the celebration, insisting that Hamas’ “resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”

“We, too, understand what it means to be surveilled, dehumanized, property seized, families separated, our people criminalized and slaughtered with impunity, locked up in droves and when we resist they call us terrorist,” continued the chapter.

Campuses plan pro-Palestinian demonstrations:

We witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. As the Palestinian student movement, we have an unshakable responsibility to join the call for mass mobilization.

Thirty Harvard student groups published a letter supporting Hamas and blaming Israel for the atrocities committed by Hamas.

These people are moral pygmies, moral illiterates, but tragically that's what one must expect in a society that has thrown away its moral compass. A postmodern culture that denies the existence of objective truth, a culture in which people actually believe that everyone has their own truth, that what's right is whatever feels right to them, is a culture that can't help but suffer from moral vertigo.

Lacking any objective standard of right and wrong we find ourselves in a culture in which people actually praise, celebrate and support the beheading of babies, the rape of women, the cold-blooded murder of the elderly, and the burning of families alive.

It pains me to say it, but it's a very sick society in which so many people who think this is praiseworthy are to be found.

Cheering for Evil

Palestinian Muslims invaded Israel over the weekend, murderedf hundreds of Israeli men, women and children, raped numerous women, beheaded captured soldiers, and leftists on our campuses and elsewhere have cheered them on. It turns one's stomach to think that not only is the Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran axis of evil being celebrated by Muslims around the world, but the evil that we've seen perpetrated by Hamas over the weekend actually has supporters in this country.

Students on university campuses, talking heads in our leftist media, and some of our political leaders are expressing support for Hamas and blaming Israel which is like blaming a rape victim for not being nicer to her rapist.

What did the Muslim terrorists actually do? Noah Pollack describes the horror:

When Hamas invaded Israel this morning, terrorists streamed across the border in pickup trucks, by motorcycle, on foot, and even on paragliders.

Once inside Israel, they abducted and murdered Israelis. They shot people in cars and at bus stops, they rounded up women and children into rooms like Einsatzgruppen—yes, the comparison is appropriate—and machine-gunned them.

They went house to house to find and murder civilians hiding in their closets, and they dragged the bloody, dead bodies of Israelis back into Gaza where they are now being paraded, beaten, and mutilated in front of exultant crowds.

One young woman was murdered and stripped to her underwear, and her corpse was thrown in the back of a pickup truck so it could be paraded around Gaza while young Hamas men beat and mutilated her body.

Hamas terrorists attacked a music festival in the desert. Dozens were killed and injured, and many more are missing. Footage shows young Israelis running for their lives.

As if all that were not barbaric enough, they took videos of all this and posted them to social media.

The number of Israelis murdered is proportional, population-wise, to the murders in a single day of 25,000 Americans. It's an attack much worse for Israel than the 9/11 attack was for the U.S.

People who do this to other people are savages. They're evil. Those who approve are equally as despicable. Those who are seeking to draw some kind of moral equivalence between Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran and the Israelis should be prayed for and otherwise ignored. They're either ignorant or complicit in the evil, and, sadly, there seem to be a lot of them around.

Honeybee Engineering

Back in the 1940s Karl von Fritsch worked out the significance of the honeybee waggle dance. This astonishing behavior occurs inside a pitch dark hive when a bee returning from a feeding foray does a dance by waggling its abdomen that signals to other bees - which feel the dancer's moves with their forelegs - which direction and how far they should fly to find food.

The dance even factors in such variables as cloud cover and windage. It's truly astonishing and how and why such a behavior could have evolved is a profound mystery. It's especially mysterious since some research is suggesting that honey bees usually ignore the dance and rely on other methods to find food, but if the dance is irrelevant surely that just deepens the mystery.

After all, the dance is still an accurate means of directing other bees to food whether they ignore it or not so the question of how and why an insect with a brain smaller than a grain of sand developed such an elaborate behavior is still unanswered.

Moreover, if the dance is unnecessary or ignored then we're faced with the question as to how it evolved when it may not confer any particular advantage on the bees. We're also confronted with the puzzle of explaining, if the bees don't need it and don't pay much attention to it, how and why it's retained in the genome.

Anyway, the John 10:10 Project has released another beautiful and amazing film which features the honeybee's astonishing skill in engineering the hive in which the waggle dance takes place. The bees' ability to construct the combs in the hive really is uncanny given the size of their brain as this 7 minute video shows:

The more we learn about the biological world the more difficult it becomes for those who wish to defend the idea that it all happened naturalistically. Biological discovery in the last fifty years has made the hypothesis of intentional design of life by an intelligent agent more plausible and more intellectually appealing today than at any time in the last two hundred years.

Death of a City

An article by Mairead Elordi at The Daily Wire reminds us of the tragic trajectory that many, if not most, of our major cities are following. Elordi reports that,

Only 3% out of 74 restaurants surveyed said they had not experienced graffiti or property crime in the last month, according to a new survey from the Golden Gate Restaurant Association.

The city has spent $1 million on grants for vandalism relief since 2021, and nearly 800 businesses have received $1,000 or $2,000 grants for graffiti, broken windows, or other vandalism, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

San Francisco’s 311 call center has received 10,000 reports of graffiti on commercial buildings and sidewalks in the last six months, the outlet reported. Meanwhile, businesses are suffering, and repairing the damage is expensive.

A pizza shop in San Francisco’s Mission District was recently hit with acid, the owner told ABC7.

“This is acid so you can’t just remove it. They have to replace the glass,” Supreme Pizza owner Leandro Jayme told the outlet. He said replacing even one small glass square costs him $300.

Some restaurants said they gave up, including Shuggie’s, also in the Mission district, which received a grant, but gave up trying to clean up the almost daily graffiti.

Shoplifting is another major problem for the crime-ridden city.

In the past, San Francisco’s stores have geared up with unprecedented security measures to try to deter shoplifters.

Grocery stores, pharmacies, and other retailers have installed extreme security devices and paid for private security guards to combat rampant theft.

Supermarket chain Safeway installed exit gates that require customers to scan their receipts in some of its Bay Area grocery stores. A Walgreens locked its freezers with chains in response to shoplifters hitting the store 15 to 20 times a day, according to an employee.

In 2021, businesses in San Francisco’ Union Square hired private security to combat the “smash and grab” robberies that plagued the area.

Part of the reason for the shoplifting increase is Proposition 47, a 2014 voter-approved law that made the theft of merchandise under $950 in value a misdemeanor that is often not investigated.

The consequences for this barbarism are bad for everyone but they're especially hard on the poor who are often the victims either directly or indirectly of the permissiveness of those who run the city government.

Murder is up 3% to 40 murders so far. Robberies are up 16% to 2,039 robberies so far. Car thefts are up 11% to 5,038 thefts.

Crime, open-air drug use, and homelessness have caused businesses to flee San Francisco’s downtown, where foot traffic has thinned.

A string of major retailers have recently fled their downtown San Francisco locations. Mall company Westfield, AT&T, Nordstrom, Whole Foods, and two hotels have all shuttered locations in the city recently.

The city’s drug crisis hit a grim milestone last month with a record 84 accidental drug overdose deaths in August, according to preliminary city data. So far this year, a total of 563 people have died from a drug overdose in San Francisco.

Homelessness has only gotten worse since before the pandemic. About 38,000 people are homeless in the Bay Area on a given night, up 35% since 2019.

It's the poor who must live in neighborhoods plagued by violence. It's the poor who suffer when schools are out of control and when merchants decide they can no longer continue in such a chaotic environment. It's the poor who lose their jobs when these businesses pull out of their neighborhoods and tourists no longer venture into them.

It's the poor whose life is made more miserable when the city elects council members more worried about using correct pronouns than in making their city safe and it's the poor whose misery is exacerbated by woke prosecutors who think that it's somehow humane to refuse to prosecute criminals and get them off the streets.

Perhaps when people realize that they're the ones who are electing these feckless and corrupt leftists to run their city they'll also realize that things will continue to get worse until they start voting for people who are more serious about protecting their citizens, shops and restaurants than in lining their own pockets and blathering about "social justice."

If a Tree Falls in the Forest

In my classes we recently discussed the question of what we mean when we say that something is real. One aspect of our experience we specifically addressed were sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, and sound.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and so on.

After we had moved on to other topics I came across an article that describes how music is transferred to a computer and then to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made in our brains. If there's no ear to hear it, no brain to interpret what the ear hears, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves were picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses were converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals were compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code was written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructed the bits in their proper sequence and transmitted them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relayed the file to a router, where the file was packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembled the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embedded the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, accessed by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converted the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy traveling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands, into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all. The music is created by our brain and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation that we experience and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

Just something to think about over the weekend.

A Goldilocks Collision

Astronomer Hugh Ross, in a 2014 article at Salvo, discussed some of the current theories on the formation of our moon. Those theories posit a collision between an object about the size of Mars with the early earth and require such an astonishing precision in the masses, momentum and timing of the colliding objects that it's almost literally incredible that it happened at all.

Our astonishment is magnified by the fact that our moon, which is virtually unique in our solar system in terms of the ratio of its size to that of the earth and its proximity to the earth, has to have almost exactly the properties it has in order for life to be sustained on earth.

Like the story of Goldilocks and the three bears who sampled her porridge, everything about the collision had to be just right. Check out this computer simulation of the collision:

Robin Canup, the author of one of the more popular theories on the moon's origin, wrote that, "Current theories on the formation of the Moon owe too much to cosmic coincidences."

And earth scientist Tim Elliott observed that the degree and kinds of complexity and fine-tuning required by lunar origin models appear to be increasing at an exponential rate. Among those who study lunar origin, he notes, "the sequence of conditions that currently seems necessary in these...versions of lunar formation have led to philosophical disquiet."

Ross adds that,

Thanks to the exquisitely fine-tuned nature of this impact event, the collision:

1. Replaced the earth's thick, suffocating atmosphere with one containing the perfect air pressure for efficient lung performance, the ideal heat-trapping capability, and the just-right transparency for efficient photosynthesis.
2. Gave the new atmosphere the optimal chemical composition to foster advanced life.
3. Augmented the earth's mass and density enough to allow it to gravitationally retain a large, but not too large, quantity of water vapor for billions of years.
4. Raised the amount of iron in the earth's core close to the level needed to provide the earth with a strong, enduring magnetic field (the remainder came from a later collision event). This magnetic field shields life from deadly cosmic rays and solar x-rays.
5. Delivered to the earth's core and mantle quantities of iron and other critical elements in just-right amounts to produce sufficiently long-lasting, continent-building plate tectonics at just-right levels. Fine-tuned plate tectonics also performs a crucial role in compensating for the sun's increasing brightness.
6. Increased the iron content of the earth's crust, permitting a huge abundance of ocean life that, in turn, can support advanced life.
7. Salted the earth's interior with an abundance of long-lasting radioisotopes, the heat from which drives most of the earth's tectonic activity and volcanism.
8. Produced the moon, which gradually slowed the earth's rotation rate so that eventually advanced life could thrive on earth.
9. Left the moon with a just-right mass and distance relative to the earth to stabilize the tilt of the earth's rotation axis, protecting the planet from rapid and extreme climatic variations.
10. Created the moon with the just-right diameter and the just-right distance relative to the earth so that, at the narrow epoch in solar-system history when human life would be possible, humans on earth would witness perfect solar eclipses, which would help them make important discoveries about the solar system and universe.

If we didn't have a moon like the one we have we wouldn't be here, and yet the existence of our moon is such a highly improbable occurrence that anyone who studies it is almost overwhelmed by how fortuitous it is.

No wonder, then, that many of the people who study it, astronomers like Ross, believe that the earth/moon system, just like virtually every other aspect of cosmic architecture, is not an accident, but is rather the intentional product of an unimaginably intelligent and powerful engineer.

There's much more in Ross' article. It was written nine years ago which leads one to wonder how much more we know about the moon today that adds to the breathtaking scope of coincidences than was known in 2014.

The Miracle of Mathematics

Perhaps the grandest pursuit of contemporary theoretical scientists is their search for a single theory that would explain all the laws of physics in a single equation. The quest is based on the assumption that there's a rational unity to the universe, that the universe can be completely explained mathematically.

Suppose, though, that the standard explanation for the origin of the universe, that it came into being in a massive expansion of mass/energy from a single infinitely dense point, is true. If so, why should scientists, or at least naturalistic scientists, assume that a mindless eruption of mass/energy out of nothing should obey the laws of mathematics? Where does the math that describes the world come from?

A fellow at Uncommon Descent quotes several very bright people on this question.

For example, there was this from Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner who wrote in 1960 that,

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Wigner also wrote this:

certainly it is hard to believe that our [mathematical] reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.

In a 1952 letter to his friend Maurice Solovine, Albert Einstein stated that the mathematical order of the cosmos and the fact that we can comprehend that order is something of a miracle:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world ... as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different.

Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods but “bared the miracles.”

The astonishing ability of human reason to comprehend the universe, the fact that the universe is explicable in terms of our mathematics, is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic view of the universe's origin. Why should scientists entertain the expectation and hope that they'll eventually discover a single unified theory that explains everything? Why, on naturalism, should they assume that there's an underlying rational, mathematical structure to the cosmos?

The fact that there is such a structure makes sense on a theistic worldview but is simply a leap of blind faith on any naturalistic view.

As David Klinghoffer, writing at Evolution News, once put it:

Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn’t the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless?

Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe’s structure?

I would argue that the only finally reasonable ground for that assumption is the belief in an intelligent Creator, who has already thought into the world the very mathematics that the patient scientist discovers.

Whatever the case, it truly is remarkable that the universe lends itself to rational inquiry by intelligent minds. Is this just an enormously improbable coincidence or is Klinghoffer correct?

Imagine that an 18th-century linguist constructed an entire language - replete with grammatical rules, a dictionary, etc. - completely in his mind. Imagine that he then learns of the discovery of tribe of people previously unknown to exist who spoke exactly that language.

Few would think that a coincidence. Rather they'd think instead that the linguist must've know about this tribe. Coincidences like that are so astronomically improbable as to cast a lot of doubt on the linguist's honesty.

The relationship of mathematics to the world is something like that. Mathematicians create mathematical systems and then it's discovered that they actually describe phenomena in the physical world.

This is why people like Einstein and Wigner think this correlation to be a "miracle."

This short video gives further explanation of the problem:

Bad Idea

Republican candidate Nikki Haley has floated the idea that we should use our military against Mexico's drug cartels. Emotionally, that's an attractive proposal; rationally, it's not so clear. National Review's Jim Geraghty walks us through why:

I don’t think that it’s just because I’ve watched Clear and Present Danger a bunch of times that I hope we have exceptionally clear objectives, plans, and terms of engagement for this proposal — including how we define victory, and when we would declare the operation complete and over.

Because this proposal sounds like a messy, dirty war against transnational criminal organizations known for their exceptional ruthlessness and brutality, that also have exceptional practice at sneaking into our country.

You think we have hostage crises now? Roughly 1.6 million Americans live in Mexico, and tens of millions of U.S. tourists go there each year. If a cartel wants to make retaliatory attacks against American civilians, it will have a near-limitless supply of easy targets.

Cartels are indisputably evil and violent, a menace, an enemy of the United States and its people. But their primary objective is almost always to make a profit. They’re not “at war” with us in the way that a traditional terrorist group is.

The cartels aren’t out to topple our government or establish a theocracy. They’re more akin to the mafia.

Look, if someone can point to compelling evidence that sending a cruise missile into some cartel chief’s mansion really will make a serious and lasting dent in the drug trade, I’m all for it. This wouldn’t be the first time that U.S. military forces have played a role in the war on drugs.

But our experience in the drug war has been that taking out one kingpin creates a messy fight among the underlings and lieutenants to fill the power vacuum, followed by the gradual emergence of another kingpin.

This doesn’t mean we stop attempting to arrest, capture, prosecute, and incarcerate kingpins. But it’s a question of which tool is most effective for achieving our objective. Using the military to blow up drug labs or bases of operation isn’t quite like trying to use a sledgehammer to kill a fly, it’s more like using a flamethrower to kill mosquitos. I mean, you might get them, but you’re going to create a lot of new problems in the process.

Geraghty goes on to discuss a few more drawbacks, such as using our military in a sovereign country which hasn't requested it and doesn't want it.

Just how cooperative do you think these governments will be on anything — including migration and enforcement of borders — if we start bombing targets in their countries against their will? Are we willing to occupy any territory in the course of executing these operations?

Are you starting to see how this could get very complicated and difficult to end, very quickly?

There's more at the link, but he concludes with this:

How can so many voters in the current GOP electorate be convinced that interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophic failures that cost the country far too much in blood in treasure, and sending arms to Ukraine is a terrible waste with no moral dimension or geopolitical upside, but using U.S. military forces to launch a war against drug cartels in Mexico and Central America is going to be easy-peasy?

There's a political principle called the Law of Unintended Consequences that says that any novel action, unless thoroughly thought-through, is very likely to produce consequences that were completely unforeseen, unintended and often catastrophic.

Conservatives have raised this principle almost to the status of a totem, progressives almost completely disregard it. It seems to me that conservative reverence for it is much the wiser course, which is why we should be very careful about undertaking any military action in Mexico.

The Amazing Structure of the Genetic Code

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each. Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence.

The only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be. But why decide that? What reason can be adduced upon which such a decision might be based? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is that they have a strong preference that no such being exist and they allow their preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Gauger doesn't address that question, but her article is still very good.