Visceral, Irrational Hatred

Douglas Murray is an author and columnist for the British Spectator who's unimpressed by accusations from the left that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In a recent column (subscription may be required) he makes the case that what's happening in Gaza, given the standards of the region, so far from being genocide, is not even remarkable.

Here are some excerpts:

I find it curious. By every measure, what is happening in Gaza is not genocide. More than that – it’s not even regionally remarkable.

Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians.

In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza.

Then there are the more than 9,000 Hamas terrorists who have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces. As Lord Roberts of Belgravia recently pointed out, that means there is fewer than a two to one ratio of civilians to terrorists killed: ‘An astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields.’

Most Western armies would dream of such a low civilian casualty count. But because Israel is involved (‘Jews are news’) the libellous hyperbole is everywhere.

About a month ago I noted on Viewpoint that British Colonel Richard Kemp stated in a tweet that the UN calculates that the civilian to combatant death ratio in conflicts around the globe is 9:1. In Gaza the IDF seems to have achieved a ratio of only 1.5:1, a fact which evinces remarkable restraint.

In the same post I pointed out that in the run-up to the Normandy invasion in WWII the allies bombed German-occupied French villages and towns, killing 50,000 French. In the campaign to take the Philippines back from the Japanese, 100,000 Filipinos were killed in Manila alone by allied shelling.

These were casualties of Allied civilians. They weren't even supporters of the enemy, as most of the Gazans are, but they were the tragic consequence of the need to defeat an aggressor enemy.

Anyway, Murray continues:

For almost 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza, we have heard the same allegations. Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza during exchanges with Hamas in 2009, 2012 and 2014. As a claim it is demonstrably, obviously false.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. Today it is more than two million, with a male life expectancy higher than in parts of Scotland. During the same period, the Palestinian population in the West Bank grew by a million.

Either the Israelis weren’t committing genocide, or they tried to commit genocide but are uniquely bad at it. Which is it? Well, when it comes to Israel it seems people don’t have to choose. Everything and anything can be true at once.

Murray totes up all the deaths in the three wars (1948, 1967, 1973) in which Israel's Arab neighbors attacked it with the goal of destroying the young Jewish state. He arrives at a figure of 60,000 people killed.

Although you may not have heard about it from our media, in the past decade Bashar al-Assad in Syria has killed over ten times that number. Why is there no outrage over this horrifying statistic?

There are lots of reasons you might give to explain this: that people don’t care when Muslims kill Muslims; that people don’t care when Arabs kill Arabs; that they only care if Israel is involved....

I often wonder why this obsession arises when the war involves Israel. Why don’t people trawl along our streets and scream by their thousands about Syria, Yemen, China’s Uighurs or a hundred other terrible things?....

But I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.

Perhaps so. It certainly seems undeniable that a visceral, irrational hatred of Jews has infected humanity for much of recorded history, and it's difficult to explain on naturalistic grounds why this particular hatred exists. The only explanation that seems capable of adequately accounting for it is that it's demonic.

Suicide and Martyrdom

On Sunday a mentally troubled anarchist named Aaron Bushnell, who also happened to be currently serving in the U.S. Air Force, burned himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. as a protest against Israel's ongoing war against the Hamas terror organization.

Since the man's suicide some left-wing media outlets have tried to portray his action as somehow noble and have gone so far as to claim that the early Christian martyrs did something similar to protest Rome's treatment of them.

They wish to make Bushnell into a martyr, but a martyr is murdered for his beliefs. A martyr is not someone who commits suicide as an act of protest.

Time magazine gets it all wrong when it writes that,

Self-immolation was also seen as a sacrificial act committed by Christian devotees who chose to be burned alive when they were being persecuted for their religion by Roman emperor Diocletian around 300 A.D.

This is false. The Christians Time is talking about did not "choose" to be burned alive.

The Time article's claim is based on a New Yorker piece from 2012 which asserted that the early Christian historian Eusebius recorded an "interesting instance of auto-cremation in antiquity."

Here's what the New Yorker writers said:

...around 300 A.D., Christians persecuted by Diocletian set fire to his palace in Nicodemia and then threw themselves onto it—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste.

Is this what Eusebius actually wrote? Well, no. Here's his statement concerning the relevant events in Nicomedia in 304 A.D.:

...a conflagration having broken out in those very days in the palace at Nicomedia, I know not how, which through a false suspicion was laid to our people.... Entire families of the pious in that place were put to death in masses at the royal command, some by the sword, and others by fire. It is reported that with a certain divine and indescribable eagerness men and women rushed into the fire.

In other words, It's not clear how the fire originated. Indeed, some historians suggest it was set on orders from Diocletian's second in command, Galerius, who wanted a pretense to carry out a more vigorous persecution of Christians.

More to the point, the Christians didn't willingly immolate themselves. They were being forced into the flames by the authorities and chose to embrace an unavoidable death. The comparison with what Aaron Bushnell did is completely inapt.

It took me about fifteen minutes to dig out these details. One would think that a professional journalist would've invested at least that much time in ensuring that he or she had the story correct.

Unfortunately, getting the story correct doesn't seem to be a high priority for many journalists today. It's no wonder so few people trust them to tell us the truth.

We Don't Need No Education

No doubt that in some precincts of some universities the best that has been thought and written, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, is still being taught by scholars who love the life of the mind and love teaching the great ideas and works of western civilization. In some campus alcoves the free exchange of ideas is still encouraged and vigorous debate and disagreement is relished, but one wonders how long these archipelagos of learning can survive, especially in the humanities, given the current climate in many of our institutions of higher learning.

Traditionally, courses in logic, mathematics and physics trained students to think clearly. History, literature and politics taught students that the world didn't come into being on their birthday and that there's much to be gained from studying the experience of those who went before.

Alas, Gone are the days when university students could expect as a matter of course to be immersed in Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant and other dead white males in order to imbibe their wisdom and learn from their errors.

Thinking clearly is unfortunately dismissed as an artifact of white supremacy, and the disparity in the racial composition of students in courses like logic, math and physics is "proof" that these courses are inherently racist. Moreover, the only history, literature and politics that matter today in some departments at some schools are those which highlight the history of racial and gender oppression.

Students nowadays can expect to be taught all about trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, transgender, cisgender, critical theory, their "right" not to be exposed to speech they find hurtful or insulting, their "right" not to be offended or made uncomfortable, their "right" not to be confronted with ideas that challenge their own fervently, if often inchoately, held orthodoxies, their "right" not to be disagreed with, the need to intimidate and suppress those who dissent, and the evils of privilege, patriarchy, and other horrors of our corrupt and evil society.

As a consequence it sometimes seems, as philosopher J. Budziszewski puts it in his book Written on the Heart, that the educated in some ways know less than the completely uneducated.

This video, via Hot Air, takes a satirical look at the sad state of affairs that prevails in at least some of our contemporary universities.

Trigger warning: Some progressives may be offended by having their postmodern pedagogical eccentricities skewered:

Free Will Deniers

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor offers a rebuttal to those who wish to maintain that human beings do not have free will. He begins the rebuttal with a question: “What does it mean to believe we don’t have free will?”

He then adds the following:

Belief is behavior....Belief is what you do, not merely what you say. Consider the statement by a serial adulterer “I believe in fidelity and chastity.” Of course, such a claim is not credible, because his behavior makes a mockery of that belief.

Serial adulterers believe in serial adultery (otherwise, they wouldn’t do it), just as embezzlers believe in embezzlement and philanthropists believe in philanthropy. Belief is much more than words ....Belief is a way of living.

In other words, we can tell what a person believes not by what they say but by the way they live.

If you want to know what a free will denier really believes, steal his laptop or dent his fender and see if he holds you morally accountable.

The fact that people who claim to be determinists blame others for their behavior is an indication that the determinist does in fact believe that the other person is responsible and blameworthy, but if determinism is true there really is no responsibility and no one is really blameworthy.

No one can be responsible or blameworthy unless they made a genuine choice to do what they did, but a genuine choice is precisely what determinists believe we can't make.

So what are free will deniers really doing when they say that they don’t believe in free will, but never act like free will isn’t real? Free will denial is determinist signaling, in which materialists flaunt their bona fides. It is analogous to a political yard sign or a cross worn around the neck.

It’s a way of announcing to the world who you are — whether or not you really believe (i.e., behave in accordance with) your politics or your faith. The difference between a political belief expressed on a sign or faith expressed via a pendant and free will denial is that sometimes the sign or cross do correspond to a way of life, and thus are real expressions of belief. Free will denial, on the other hand, never constitutes genuine belief, because it is not possible to live as if free will isn’t real.

There's much more to Egnor's argument at the link. He closes by noting that "What you do is immeasurably louder than what you say. You don’t really believe that free will isn’t real unless you live like it isn’t real.”

To live as if free will isn't real, though, is to live as a complete and utter nihilist, and no one can pull that off.

Contemporary Slavery

I'm currently finishing up a book by Grove City College historian Paul Kengor, the title of which is The Worst of Indignities. It's a history of the Catholic Church's opposition to slavery, an opposition which was the first ever to emerge anywhere in the world and which remained almost completely consistent for over 1600 years.

In the final section of the work, Kengor discusses slavery as it exists today. What follows focuses on chattel slavery although sex slavery and other forms of bondage are also rampant in the contemporary world.

The chattel slavery practiced today is extremely cruel and largely a Muslim enterprise endorsed in the Koran. The victims of this barbaric practice are often Christians, especially black African Christians.

An article by journalist David Aikman on slavery in Sudan that Kengor discusses revealed that in the mid-1990s Christian slaves could be bought for as little as $15 but young women brought much higher prices.

Aikman writes that,

Many slave-owners would subject their human chattel to forcible genital mutilation. Slaves who tried to escape or displeased their owners were either beaten savagely, tied down in the sun without water, or subjected to what some escapees called "the insect treatment." This involved stuffing tiny insects into the victims ears, then sealing them with wax or small stones, and a scarf tied tightly around the head. Some victims ... simply went insane.

The skin of some ex-slaves was completely worn off their legs after being led along for days by ropes tied to camels.

Christians in the Middle East suffered horribly under the ISIS caliphate, especially in 2014 when ISIS was at its most powerful. During that time Islamists killed or enslaved about 10,000 Yazidi Christians in Iraq, subjecting the women and girls to systematic rape.

It's believed that more than 2,700 Yazidi women and children remain in ISIS captivity even though ISIS has been largely obliterated since 2019.

Tel Aviv University Professor Ehud Toledano, an expert on Islamic slavery, states that Muslims who engage in this horrific practice are "in full compliance with Koranic understanding....and that which the Prophet (Muhammad) has permitted, Muslims cannot forbid."

Kengor quotes black economist Thomas Sowell who writes of the seeming

inexplicable contrast between the fiery rhetoric about past slavery in the United States used by those who pass over in utter silence the traumas of slavery that still exist in Mauritania, the Sudan, and parts of Nigeria and Benin....Why so much concern for dead people who are now beyond our help than for living human beings suffering the burdens and humiliations of slavery today? Why does a verbal picture of the abuses of slaves in centuries past arouse far more response than contemporary photographs of present-day slaves....?

It causes one to wonder how much our contemporary justice warriors really care about those who are enslaved and how much they just want to use the historical issue to bash white America.

Christian Nationalism

There's much talk in our contemporary culture about the rise of "Christian nationalism" with seven books on the topic having been released in the last few years.

This has become controversial because, fairly or unfairly, Christian nationalism has become conflated in the popular mind with "far-right" ideologies like that of the Proud Boys or the extreme reaches of the MAGA movement. As such it has about it the odor of the disreputable.

The controversy has prompted sociologist of religion Ryan Burge to examine some data from a Baylor study to see if Christian nationalism is rising or fading.

The reader is invited to go to the link to see a list of the seven books and also to see a breakdown of the Baylor data. My concern in this post is not with the books or the data so much as it is with two other aspects of the study.

First, as Burge acknowledges, there's a lot of debate over exactly how to define Christian nationalism. For the purposes of his discussion, Burge sets that concern aside, but I'm not so sure how meaningful the data he cites are if we don't know what we're talking about when we use the term.

My second concern is that the Baylor study seeks to pin down the status of Christian nationalism by means of a series of statements, with which the respondent is asked if he or she agrees, disagrees, or is unsure. Agreement is considered indicative of an affinity for Christian nationalism, but the statements Baylor uses are just too imprecise.

The questions are as follows:

1. The federal government should advocate Christian values
2. The federal government should allow prayer in public schools
3. The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces
4. The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation
5. The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state
6. The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.

If a respondent answers "yes" to #1 that indicates a predilection toward Christian nationalism, but it seems to me that "yes" is the only answer many reasonable persons could give to #1. After all, what are Christian values but the mandate to help the poor and the needy, to serve others, to seek peace, to speak the truth, to love our neighbor, and so on.

There's nothing in ancient Roman or Greek paganism that mandates these, nor is there anything in Islam, Hinduism, or secularism. To the extent that others have adopted these values they've borrowed them from Christianity, or Judeo-Christianity. So why should almost all Americans not answer "yes" to question #1?

If a respondent answers "yes" to #2 that also suggests that the respondent leans toward Christian nationalism, but what is meant by the word "allow"? Does it mean that the federal government should permit students to pray in school? If so, then of course, they should. How can they stop them?

One might very well think regarding #3 that Christmas creches, for example, should be permitted in public spaces and that individuals in public schools should be allowed to wear a cross on a necklace or a shirt with a religious message without having such symbols banned by the authorities.

Such opinions don't make one a "Christian nationalist," whatever that is.

Again, the problem with #4 lies in what is meant by the word "declare." If the word is taken to mean that the government implicitly or explicitly should acknowledge that the nation was founded by men, Christian or otherwise, who were steeped in Christian values then such an acknowledgement is only stating the obvious. It hardly makes one an extremist of some sort to recognize that.

The ambiguity in #5 arises from the word "strict." How strict should the separation of church and state be? One might believe that there should be a separation of the two without believing that the state should use its power to completely banish religion from the public square. Does that belief make one a "Christian nationalist"?

Finally, #6 prompts the question of what's meant by the word "success"? Is success defined here as economic? Military? Cultural hegemony? Suppose someone were to believe, as some of my liberal Christian friends do, that "success" should be understood as achieving racial harmony and socio-economic justice. If these left-leaning friends believe that this is God's plan does that make them "Christian nationalists"?

The fact is that Christians who are politically middle of the road could answer "yes" to each of these statements and thus be considered Christian nationalists. That being so, studies like the Baylor study that employ such vague indicators don't really tell us much.

Moral Blindness on the Right

Gerard Baker is an outstanding columnist at the Wall Street Journal who, in the wake of the murder of Russian dissident Alexi Navalny by the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, has applied his talents to the task of pointing out the moral blindness of those on the conservative right who seem to think that either Joe Biden is not much different than Vladimir Putin, or contrarily, that Putin's Russia - and indeed Putin himself - are not so bad.

In considering this latter option, Baker seems specifically to have Tucker Carlson in his sights - although he doesn't mention him by name - since Carlson recently took a trip to Russia in which he praised their subways and supermarket carts and conducted a rather anodyne interview with the murderous Putin himself.

Here's Baker's indictment of the moral myopia of those on the right who think Putin is some sort of exemplar:

The only response of all decent people to the death of Alexei Navalny, the brave critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, in a Siberian prison camp is grief, disgust and unqualified condemnation. It is the sort of event that defines the malevolent nature of Mr. Putin’s Russia.

But that sort of decency evidently was above the moral reach of some of the more prominent leaders of what used to be the conservative movement. Newt Gingrich saw a parallel that many others also highlighted: Navalny’s “death in prison is a brutal reminder that jailing your political opponents is inhumane and a violation of every principle of a free society,” he tweeted.

“Watch the Biden Administration speak out against Putin and his jailing of his leading political opponent while Democrats in four different jurisdictions try to turn President Trump into an American Navalny.”

This last sentence was a reference to the attempt by Democrats to ruin Donald Trump through the legal process so that he couldn't run against Joe Biden in November. Even so, Joe Biden, as autocratic as he may be, is a long way from being Vladimir Putin. Baker continues:

You can believe, as I do, that Joe Biden is doing significant harm to the U.S. You can believe, as I do, that he has weakened our national security, exposed us to dangerous levels of mass illegal immigration, and is contributing to the corrosion of our national cohesion with his promotion of progressive ideology.

You can believe, as I do, that he has many more questions to answer about his and his family’s work for foreign entities. You can believe, as I do, that he and his fellow Democrats have manipulated the levers of justice in pursuit of the man who stands as their principal political opponent.

He should be held accountable for all these.

But, need I say this? Mr. Biden isn’t Vladimir Putin. Mr. Biden doesn’t invade neighbors on a false pretext, killing indiscriminately. He doesn’t make people who have fallen into disfavor fall from the windows of tall buildings.

He doesn’t throw a foreign journalist in jail for reporting the truth about what is going on in his country. He doesn’t arrange the murder of his domestic political opponents on the soil of other countries. And he doesn’t imprison, torture and preside over the “death by sudden death” of his principal domestic critic.

Baker concludes with this, "If you can’t see the difference then I say, respectfully, that you have lost—or discarded—your capacity for moral reasoning. And that is an even bigger problem."

He's right, and the same goes for those on the left who try to convince us that Trump is the next thing to Mussolini, or even Hitler. The people who say such things are either incredibly ignorant of the men they're calumniating or the men to whom they're comparing them, or they're just lying.

Did the Universe Create Itself?

The brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking stated in his book The Grand Design that he believed that the universe could've essentially created itself out of nothing and that there was no need to posit the existence of a Creator. He wrote that, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."

The universe could just come into being out of nothing, Mr. Hawking suggested, as long as there are physical laws to mediate the process. I'm reluctant to disagree with the late Mr. Hawking because he truly was a genius, but geniuses often become ordinary thinkers when they step outside their rightful domain, which Mr. Hawking did in The Grand Design.

Early in the book he famously declared that, "Philosophy is dead," and that science no longer has need of it. He received a lot of criticism for this claim, not least because it is itself a philosophical assertion, but also because The Grand Design is filled with philosophical conjectures. For example, he speculates in the book about the existence of God which is clearly not a scientific, but rather a philosophical, musing.

Had Hawking been a bit less cavalier about philosophy he might've avoided the sloppy thinking involved in the statement that "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," an assertion that suffers from several philosophical shortcomings.

First, if gravity, or merely the law of gravity, exists then that's not nothing. Physical laws are existing somethings, but where, exactly, do such laws exist before* there's a universe?

They can't exist in matter because there is no matter until there's a universe. They can only exist either as abstract "objects" or they exist as ideas in a mind. If they're abstractions they cannot have produced the universe because abstractions - like, say, numbers - can't produce anything. Indeed, physical laws have no creative power, they're simply descriptions of how matter and energy behave.

If these physical laws exist as ideas in a mind it must be a mind that precedes or transcends the universe which means it's not material, spatial, nor temporal because neither matter nor space nor time exist until there's a universe. In other words, it's a mind which possesses at least some of the attributes of the immaterial, spaceless, atemporal transcendent God.

Second, the idea that anything, universes included, can somehow create themselves is incoherent. In order for something to create itself it has to exist before it exists which is nonsense. Pace Hawking and physicist Lawrence Krauss in his book A Universe from Nothing, if there was a "time" when there was literally nothing then there never could be anything now. Ex nihilo nihil fit (Out of nothing nothing comes) is one of the oldest principles in philosophy.

Folks like Hawking and Krauss are essentially asking us to choose between belief that God created the universe or the belief that physics created the universe, but it's a silly choice. It's almost like asking us to choose between the belief that Thomas Edison created the light bulb or that the laws of physics created the light bulb.

Celebrated physicist and author of a number of popular books on science, Paul Davies, falls into the same error. Davies writes,

There's no need to invoke anything supernatural in the origins of the universe or of life. I never liked the idea of divine tinkering: for me it is much more inspiring to believe that a set of mathematical laws can be so clever as to bring all these things into being.

This makes no sense. The laws of mathematics are not "clever," they're not intelligent minds, and moreover they don't bring anything into being. If you have an apple in each hand the laws of mathematics tell you that you'll have two apples, but those laws don't put the apples in your hands, and they certainly don't bring the apples into being.

Stephen Hawking was, and the others are, very smart men, but very smart men sometimes say very foolish things, especially when they're trying to do away with God.

* Technically, it's inappropriate to use temporal prepositions like before and until when talking about the origin of the universe because time came into being with the universe. Even so, it's awkward not to use them so in this post I do.

The Five Worst

In honor of President's Day yesterday Ben Shapiro, one of the brightest young conservative minds on the contemporary scene, gave us thumbnail sketches of the five presidencies he believes to be the worst in American history.

The five honorees are:

5. Jimmy Carter
4. Barack Obama
3. James Buchanan
2. Lyndon Johnson
1. Woodrow Wilson

You can read his rationale at the link or watch him lay out his case below. You can also read why he thinks it's absurd to include George W. Bush and Donald Trump on this list, as many academics feel the need to do lest they incur the opprobrium of their peers.

I assume he omitted Joe Biden's presidency from the list because Biden's tenure is not yet over. It's hard to imagine Biden not making this select group otherwise.

Close-up Magic

This guy is absolutely amazing.

He's a French magician named Yann Frisch, and his performance with cups and balls was a sensation a decade ago and still is today. The act is named "Baltass," and it'll leave you stunned. See if you can figure out how he does what he does:

Frisch was named Champion of France in close-up magic in 2011 and was crowned European champion in 2012. Later that year he became World Champion, and has toured all over the world.

He certainly is a remarkable talent.

Naturalism and the Meaning of Life

One of the themes in my book In the Absence of God (See the link at the top of this page) is that if naturalism is true, i.e. if there's no super-nature, nothing beyond this space-time universe, then life is ultimately meaningless. As Shakespeare put it, "Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

To admit this is to poise oneself on "the knife edge of despair" in Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg's words, so it's not unusual for naturalists or atheists (the two words are close enough in meaning as to be considered synonyms) to push back.

One typical rejoinder to the claim that life in the absence of God is meaningless was stated by an atheist named Luke who wrote the following to Christian philosopher William Lane Craig:

I believe that purpose to life is not, nor should be cosmologically significant nor intrinsic but something we create and choose for ourselves. Hence, meaning comes from endeavors which could involve pursuing passions, raising a family, or helping others – pursuits which give your life purpose and make it feel as if it is worth living but have a finite and limited impact in any ultimate sense.

You may argue that if we are going to perish, why does it matter, it will not make any difference if I choose a or b. To illustrate why I disagree with this attitude, let’s consider two scenarios:

1. I have just finished my meal at a buffet restaurant and see a chocolate cake on a stand. Me choosing to eat the cake would be inconsequential in any ultimate sense. But the cake is sweet and delicious, eating it makes the moment temporarily more enjoyable, which is good enough. Eating the cake is a worthwhile experience despite the fact that it will run out and will not have any further impact on my life.

2. I am attending a classical concert and know that the music will end, and the event will become a vague memory. But while I am seated in the audience, I enjoy the music which is so powerful, elegant, and enlightening. In this sense, attending the concert was worth it – it was good while it lasted.

So, on naturalism, we will die and perish, the sun will swallow the earth, the universe will cease to exist. But I think it does matter that we were alive.

During the flicker of time while we were here, life was gratifying, engaging, and beautiful. So, under my conception of meaning, life is meaningful under naturalism, the fact that things to come to an end is not and should not be a cause for fear and despair, but rather something I have blissfully accepted. Instead, we should have gratitude that it happened.

Luke's letter reminded me of biologist Theodosious Dobzhansky's bleak asseveration that "The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life."

At the conclusion of his substantive response to Luke's argument Craig writes, "Let me close with a question for you to think about, Luke: you say that we should be grateful that the universe happened. Grateful to whom?"

Good question.

But Craig's response aside, my own answer to Luke would be this:

For something's existence to be meaningful it must have a purpose, that is, an end or telos or reasons for its existence. Reasons, however, presuppose a mind in which those reasons reside.

If there is no mind behind the reality in which we live, if the universe is a result of a mindless series of purposeless events, and if humanity is likewise the result of a mindless series of accidental evolutionary coincidences, then there's no reason for humanity's existence and thus no meaning to it. And, if the universe's existence has no meaning, and if life in general has no meaning, and if mankind's existence in particular has no meaning it's very hard to see how an individual life could somehow, in the midst of all that meaninglessness, nevertheless have a meaning, no matter how much chocolate cake we eat.

Certainly, while we exist some of us can enjoy life's pleasures, but is pleasure the purpose or reason for our existence? Is enjoyment the whole point of our lives? If so, then the lives of most people who've ever lived have had a very attenuated meaning at best because for most people throughout human history to live was to suffer.

And if pleasure is not the reason for our existence, then pleasure can't be what gives life meaning. It only helps to make life endurable.

So, if we are the accidental product of mindless processes that blindly and purposelessly brought us into being then there's no reason for our existing, no end or purpose for which we are made. We're just dust in the wind and all that we do and enjoy ultimately comes to nothing.

As filmmaker Woody Allen once said, "You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing, but it doesn't [amount] to anything."

If naturalism is true then the claim of another filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, is as apt as it is succinct: “You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.”

On the other hand, if naturalism is false and we're actually the product of an act of intentional creation - if a Mind brought us into being - then we can assume that this Mind had a reason for doing so. We can assume that we have a purpose, an end toward which we are to strive, and that our lives are therefore meaningful.

Even if we don't know the reason for which we were created we can at least assume there is one, and if we were purposely created then our existence is not just a meaningless random accident.

It's a wonderful prospect, but for some perplexing reason naturalists prefer to believe the melancholy view that they're headed for oblivion, that nothing really matters and that all we do is ultimately for naught, rather than embrace the possibility that they were created by a God who loves them and that their lives really do matter. Forever.

Foreseeable Consequences

Often the consequences of our choices are unforeseeable, as anyone familiar with Shakespeare's tragedies knows well.

On the other hand, sometimes they're completely foreseeable and even foreseen, but although those consequences may be harmful, people are often determined to make the dunderheaded decision. Unfortunately, when they do it's often other people who pay the price.

Writing for National Review, Jim Geraghty, the author of one of the best daily news columns in the country (Morning Jolt) tells us that we are today reaping the consequences of decisions made in the fairly recent past whose consequences were entirely foreseeable. Not only were they foreseeable but those who made those awful decisions were repeatedly warned that terrible consequences would follow, but they made the decisions anyway.

Geraghty discusses four "painful consequences" of our political leaders' failure to heed the warnings. Here's number three:

Down in Georgia, the state legislature belatedly realized that eliminating cash bail was putting too many dangerous criminals back on the streets too quickly. The Wall Street Journal editorial board lays out the hard lesson:

The Georgia General Assembly passed a bill this month to mandate cash bail for 30 crimes, including certain types of domestic violence, rioting and drug dealing. The change limits the power of judges to return arrested suspects to the streets without a pretrial deposit. The bill awaits a signature from GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, who began an anticrime campaign last year by tightening sentences for gang-related offenses.

The new bail law is a quick reversal for Atlanta lawmakers, who in 2018 granted judges the power to release people arrested for most misdemeanors. Dispensing with bail was part of a package of reforms enacted under former GOP Gov. Nathan Deal, which also included tripling the threshold for felony theft. The GOP-controlled Legislature whooped these reforms through amid the relatively low-crime 2010s.

By 2019 Atlanta police were raising the alarm about the number of crimes committed by defendants out on bail, and Judge Robert McBurney described a “revolving door” of offenders. Atlanta convened its Repeat Offender Commission of law-enforcement officials to report on how to curb the trend, only to see crime surge along with the rest of the nation after the summer 2020 riots.

In 2022, the Atlanta Police Department’s Repeat Offender Tracking Unit determined that roughly 1,000 people were responsible for 40 percent of the crimes committed in Atlanta: “In just one week, Atlanta Police arrested 20 repeat offenders who had a total of 553 previous arrests and 114 felony convictions.”

That year, the city experienced about 22,300 “type A” incidents — homicide, rape, aggravated assault, and six different kinds of property crimes — which means that on average, those 1,000 criminals committed nine felonies per year.

This strongly suggests that our cities are not overrun by an overwhelming number of criminals; they are plagued by a limited number of felons who are not kept behind bars for a sufficient amount of time considering the seriousness of their crimes.

Read the entire column to see a few other very foolish decisions for which our political elites are responsible.

The IDF Captures Twenty Terrorists in a Hospital

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) captured twenty Hamas militants in a hospital the other day without firing a shot. They then proceeded to assist in the supply of oxygen to the hospital.

This is notable for a couple of reasons, the most important being the extraordinary lengths the IDF goes to to minimize civilian casualties.

Contrary to claims from the political left, and even from some on the right, that the Israelis are deliberately committing "genocide" in Gaza, the evidence is that, despite the extremely difficult conditions they face in eliminating the terrorists, they're making every effort to prevent harm to civilians.

This article illustrates just one instance of those efforts.

The war is now moving to Rafah in southern Gaza where over a million Palestinian refugees have fled to avoid the combat, but Rafah is where Hamas apparently intends to make a last stand. Because Hamas insists on operating among civilians and civilian institutions such as hospitals, the toll on non-combatants is severe.

It could all end if Hamas would surrender and release all Israeli hostages. Much of the world community, however, is demanding that Israel stop fighting. This makes no sense. Why are there so few calls for Hamas to surrender themselves and the hostages? It is, after all, Hamas who started this war on October 7th when they barbarously slaughtered over 1200 Israeli civilians.

It's not wise nor charitable to speculate on people's motives but, nevertheless, that so many are placing the onus on the Israelis to impose a cease-fire rather than demanding that Hamas surrender, leads one to wonder whether these folks don't want Hamas to surrender and don't want to see the terrorists defeated.

On Valentine's Day

A number of years ago I wrote a post on C.S. Lewis' book titled Four Loves because I enjoyed especially his treatment of friendship. He said so many interesting things on the topic that I thought it might be appropriate to once again share some of them with Viewpoint readers on this Valentine's Day. Here are some of his thoughts:

• "Nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to each other about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best."
• "Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)."
• "The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends.
  
  In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer."
• "That is why those pathetic people who simply "want friends" can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be 'I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend,' no Friendship can arise - though Affection, of course, may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and friendship must be about something."
• "A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies, do what he can for our widows and orphans. But such good offices are not the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost interruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in another not. Relevant, because you would be a false friend if you would not do them when the need arose; irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always remains accidental, even a little alien to that of Friend.
  
  It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection's need to be needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have been necessary - and now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude is no enrichment to this love. The stereotyped 'Don't mention it' here expresses what we really feel.
  
  The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it had to be devoted to affairs!"
• "In most societies at most periods Friendships will be between men and men and women and women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where men are educated and women are not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about."
• "When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later."

This last is particularly interesting. If Lewis is correct then the common notion that men and women can be "just friends" is something of a delusion. If a man and a woman really are friends, in the sense of the word that Lewis explicates, then it's almost inevitable that they'll wind up being more than friends.

Lewis is famous for his trenchant insights into human nature. His insights into friendship do nothing to diminish that reputation.

This Would Solve the Problem

The Democrats from the top down profess ignorance as to how to fix the southern border and stem the tide of illegal immigration.

Actually, all President Biden has to do is call up President al-Sisi of Egypt and ask him how Egypt stops Palestinians from getting into his country.

No Arab country wants the Palestinians and given how they've behaved in whatever country has offered them a home, who can blame them, but Egypt has made sure they don't have to deal with the problem.

What they've done is construct a wall along their border with Gaza, and a formidable wall it is. Watch this 22 second video.

If Mr. Biden really wanted to stanch the torrent of illegal immigration into the U.S., a flood that includes large numbers of terrorists, criminals and other ne'er-do-wells, all he has to do is follow Egypt's example. So why doesn't he? Maybe he still believes the old canard that "Walls don't work."

Well, this one does.

Eternal Life, of a Sort

David Goldman, writing at PJ Media, makes an interesting point. Some of the same secular folk who scoff at the Judeo-Christian concept of a God-granted immortality of the soul nevertheless believe that such immortality is possible through technology, and they're excited by the prospect.

He introduces his thoughts by referencing the belief of ancient elites, particularly in Egypt, that they'd live forever:

What was the upshot of Egyptian idolatry? The ruling elite wanted to live forever, and enslaved my ancestors to build grand tombs in which their mummified bodies would migrate to another life, surrounded by their wealth and some conveniently dead servants. A remarkably large part of Egypt’s economic output fed the fantasies of the Pharaohs, at which we laugh today.

The desire for eternal life is not new, and hardly unique to Jews or Christians. Neanderthals buried their dead with grave gifts. Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero, set out to find eternal life. The pharaohs built pyramids with [Jewish] sweat and blood.

Contemporary secular elites are too sophisticated for such "superstitious nonsense." Their belief in eternal life relies on advances in technology, but it turns out to be at least as "faith-based" as some traditional views:

Today our progressive opinion-makers ridicule the concept of an eternal God and a world to come, but they believe that we soon will upload our minds to the Internet where our consciousness will continue intact.

We laugh at the idea that the blessed would spend eternity strumming harps while seated on clouds, but enlightened opinion now believes that we shall maintain our conscious minds in Google’s cloud. Add to this a robotic body, and supposedly we can live forever. A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires take this seriously.

According to Wikipedia, mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: Copy-and-transfer or gradual replacement of neurons. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by copying, transferring, and storing that information state into a computer system or another computational device.

The biological brain may not survive the copying process. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively the simulated mind could reside in a computer that is inside (or connected to) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological body.

That is not science, but science fiction. The urge to escape death, though, remains as powerful today as it was when Moses confronted Ramses.

A tech startup now offers a method to preserve the chemical arrangement of your brain until such time as it can be uploaded, with the minor side-effect that you will have to die in the process.

It's not uncommon to hear materialists declare that they're satisfied with the one life they have and have no desire to live on forever. What they apparently mean is that they have no desire to live forever if that means that they must come to terms with God. If eternal life can be accomplished otherwise, then they're all in.

If they're promised that they can bypass God and find eternal life through technological advances they'll grab hold of that shred of possibility like a drowning man grasping at a piece of flotsam.

There's more in Goldman's article, but this, I think is noteworthy. Comparing our modern elites to the ancient pharaohs who expended huge quantities of both money and human life to achieve immortality for themselves he writes:

Our new pharaohs believe in methods to achieve immortality as silly as the old ones. And they entertain such fantasies for the same reason: They want to make themselves into immortal gods who have no more constraint on the satisfaction of their appetites than the rapacious, concupiscent and murderous gods of ancient paganism.

Well, as long as none of it involves God.

Mr. Biden's Dilemma

President Biden has placed himself in a dilemma. Special Prosecutor Robert Hur has released his report on the president's handling of classified documents on Thursday and concluded that Mr. Biden committed a serious breach of law in removing those documents to his private residences and keeping them there. But the Prosecutor also decided that he wasn't going to recommend charges against the president since the jury would doubtless find Mr. Biden to be a sympathetic, "elderly man with a poor memory."

An angry Mr. Biden then held a press conference Thursday night in which he vigorously denied being non compos mentis. Several of the claims he made in that conference, however, served only to buttress fears in many minds that he has indeed suffered serious cognitive decline.

Nevertheless, that's not the dilemma. The dilemma is this: If we're to accept Hur's description of the president as in failing mental condition to the point where he should not be brought to trial, then how can we think that he should continue to serve as Commander in Chief of the nation's military and chief executive officer of the nation's government?

And, if we accept Mr. Biden's protestations that he's in fine mental fettle, what justification remains for not charging him with a felony?

Either he's mentally incompetent and thus a danger to the country or he's competent and should stand trial. Mr. Biden did himself no favors by going before the press on Thursday night and denying that he's in mental decline.

Moreover, the Special Prosecutor's report has provided the House Republicans with more ammo for an impeachment of the president and has also triggered calls for invoking the 25th amendment which allows for the removal of a president who is deemed unable to perform the duties of his office.

What a mess. How, after this, can the Democrats continue with plans to nominate Mr. Biden to run for a second term? And how will they go about ushering Mr. Biden out of the campaign?

Related to the matter of the president's senility, I wish people would stop referring to Mr. Biden's age (81) as though that were his problem. It's not. There are lots of people older than the president who are still physically and mentally sharp. Mr. Biden's problem, and ours, is not his age but his physical and mental debility.

His party simply cannot allow him to run for another four year term. Indeed, if he were to run, and win, it's almost a certainty that Kamala Harris would soon be ensconced in the Oval Office.

Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal

Sasha Stone's Confessions of a Corrupt Liberal is a remarkable essay written by a former leftist who once felt it her moral duty to "Always vote blue, no matter who."

She's a "former" leftist because she realized at some point that the Democrat left, including its media arm, has been thoroughly corrupted by power and that she could no longer remain a part of it.

Here are a few excerpts from her piece:

[For] most of my life.... I was a devoted Democrat, a good soldier for the Left. I went along with everything, even when I knew it was wrong, even when I knew I was lying, because I had convinced myself that winning meant more than just putting a president in power.

I have been a willing participant in taking us to this desperate moment we now face, where both political parties seem crippled and bottle-necked, but only one of them has turned to corruption to stay in power. Only one of them has blocked any challengers to their preferred candidate. And unfortunately, it’s the one I chose to support.

I supported a party that became corrupt over time, and in supporting them, I became corrupt too. If you’re wondering how seemingly respectable people like Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow, Rob Reiner, Barbra Streisand, or Stephen King can go along with such obvious corruption of our trusted institutions, that’s why. They are who I used to be.

Stone goes on to compose a scorching indictment of her former political affiliation:

Corruption is the last resort when you can’t get voters to turn out, you can’t beat a charismatic Reality-TV star, and you can’t fix what ails the people. Corruption is easy. Just get everyone to agree, silence dissent and no one will be the wiser.

Who’s going to call them out on it? NPR? PBS? The New York Times? The Washington Post? MSNBC? Not a chance. They’re complicit.

Corruption can be the cozy relationship between corporations and politicians. It can be taking bribes from foreign leaders. But it can also be weaponizing our justice system to turn it into something that looks more like a Soviet-Union show trial, the Jim Crow juries, the Oyer in Terminer in Salem, or Nazi Germany.

Corruption can be declaring attacks on your political party as attacks on Democracy. It can force all major Big Tech institutions to do your bidding. It can be deciding that the people of the United States don’t have the power unless they choose the candidate they force upon them.

It can be overt censorship by the state via Big Tech and a lying media that refuses to ask the hard questions because they know they’ll get a call from the White House. It’s a president who is failing on the job but with a media that needs polls to tell the people the truth because they can’t do it themselves.

That we’re now watching a political party attempt to take down their chief rival by fast-tracking legal cases in hopes of a conviction, maybe jail time, because that will finally move the needle for Joe Biden, is terrifying.

Stone, a committed leftist, was moved by the corruption she saw infecting the left to abandon it altogether:

All of this corruption, exposed to anyone who cares about the truth, has turned me into a Trump supporter. But more than that, I vow to devote what’s left of my life to helping to undo some of the damage I helped cause.

On some level, I knew what I was doing was wrong. But I convinced myself I was serving a higher purpose - climate change, racism. That is the danger here. It isn’t that they see themselves as dirty-dealing cheaters. Would that they were that honest. No, they see themselves as the new Puritans who have a right to claim this country, this internet, this Republic for themselves.

I think it should be pointed out that the reason Stone has found so much corruption on the left is that secular moderns, especially those who have rejected any serious religious commitment and who are politically involved, have no basis left for any ethical standards. Consequently, many of them have simply adopted a Machiavellian pragmatism that says that whatever works to help one acquire power and hold on to it is ethically right.

If the corrupt practices Stone enumerates above work to help the Democrats grasp and hold power then they're ethically justified.

She adds that, "What should make all of us concerned is the desperation they feel in trying to jail Trump BEFORE the election. Why? Because they are afraid he will win. Imagine thinking you had more power than the American people to decide who should and shouldn’t win an election. And then force everyone to go along with it."

There's much more that I couldn't include here at the link, and I recommend reading the entire essay. It's worth the seven minutes or so that it takes to read it. Thanks to HotAir.com for the tip.

Why the Bipartisan Border Bill Was Unsatisfactory

There's been a lot of controversy over the Republicans' failure to support the supposed bipartisan Senate bill that would have provided funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, which the Democrats wanted, in exchange for legislation that would secure our borders against illegal immigration, which the Republicans wanted.

The Republicans looked at the border provisions and decided that although there were some good elements, the overall effect of the bill would be to make legal what President Biden and Secretary Mayorkis are already doing illegally.

To get an idea of why the Republicans balked at the recent bill, here's a comparison of the recent proposal with the bill the Republicans passed in the House of Representatives last May (HR 2) but which the Democrats refused to take up in the Senate:

 

Where Are Memories Stored?

Most of us have been told all our lives that everything having to do with our cognitive experience is controlled by our material brains, but an increasing amount of research and an increasing number of scientists and philosophers are coming to doubt that the physical brain is all there is to us.

One area of research that's casting doubt on the material view of the human self has to do with the storage of our memories. Our memories are immaterial but our brains are material, so how is an immaterial memory of, say, your mother's face stored in a material object like a brain?

Does the brain store memories the way a computer stores information? Despite a lot of looking, no one has been able to locate where in the brain memories would be stored.

The following 6 minute video discusses why a lot of people who study this problem think that memories must actually be stored outside the physical body, in an immaterial soul or mind. It's a novel way to think of human memory storage. Take a look:

Does the Queen of Diamonds Refute the Fine-Tuning Argument? (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post featured a response by Casey Luskin to astrophysicist Paul Sutter's rebuttal to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God.

Luskin wrote that Sutter's argument would, if generalized, destroy science since it could be employed to defeat any scientific theory, and he's right about that, but there's another problem with Sutter's argument. Before I state it, it'd be helpful to repeat what Sutter says about cosmic fine-tuning:

To that line of thinking [cosmic fine-tuning] I [Sutter] have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities.

We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.

Sutter is asserting that in order to say whether the fine-tuning of our universe is improbable we have to be able to compare our universe to other universes, but since there are no other universes (that we know of) such a comparison can't be done. His objection is not quite correct, however.

What we can do is ask how much different this existing universe could possibly have been. How much different, for example, could the strength of the gravitational force have been? Or the strong nuclear force?

Given a range of possible force strengths, we can conclude that there must be far more ways that any possible universe would be life-prohibiting than that it be life-permitting, and it's thus far more probable that a life-prohibiting universe exist than that a life-permitting universe exist.

Our universe must be very improbable, and no other universe needs to actually exist in order to draw this conclusion.

Sutter's objection would only work in the case that our universe with its particular set of properties is the only universe that could possibly exist, but why think that? What reason do we have for thinking that any universe other than the one we inhabit is not possible?

Maybe Sutter has an answer to that, but if not, his Queen of Diamonds analogy just doesn't work.

Does the Queen of Diamonds Refute the Fine-Tuning Argument? (Pt. I)

At the site Evolution News Casey Luskin responds to astrophysicist Paul Sutter who believes he has found a fatal flaw with the argument for a cosmic Designer based on the fine-tuning of the universe.

Sutter first frames the fine-tuning argument this way:

Some argue that the way the universe is constructed is a little too particular. That if any one small thing were to change, from the speed of light to the amount of atomic matter assembled during the big bang, life as we know it would be outright impossible.

Perhaps some other form of intelligence could rise up in that strange cosmos, shuddering at the impossible thought of creatures anchored to a planet and swimming in its water oceans. Perhaps not. Either way, it appears that our universe is especially tuned for the appearance of life as we know it, indicating either divine intervention or some conspiracy of physics too far beyond our comprehension to grasp.

He then responds to the argument as follows:

To that line of thinking I have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities.

We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.

In other words, Sutter is claiming that we can't conclude that our universe is improbable because it's the only universe we know anything about. We have nothing else to compare it to. Maybe there's an infinity of other universes out there, but we don't know. So without something to compare ours to we can't say whether ours is improbable or not.

Luskin offers an interesting counter-argument to Sutter's Queen of Diamonds analogy he calls the Cancer Cluster:

Imagine that 100 percent of an entire town of 10,000 people got cancer within one year — a cancer cluster. It turns out the chemical plant in the town produces carcinogenic chemicals, so the townspeople sue the chemical plant.

During the trial, the townspeople hire scientists as expert witnesses who testify that the odds of this occurring just by chance are 1 in 10^10,000. Under normal scientific reasoning, they argue, such low odds establish that chance cannot be the explanation, and that there must be some physical agent causing cancer in the town. In this case, the best explanation is that chemicals from the chemical plant caused the cancer.

The chemical plant has a lot of money, and they hire a wily defense attorney who invokes the multiverse defense, saying:

"Yes, 1 in 10^10,000 is a very low probability. But there could be 10^10,000 universes out there in the multiverse, and our universe just happens to be the unlucky one where this unlikely cancer cluster arose — purely by chance!

"You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right? That means you can’t conclude that my client’s chemical plant had anything to do with this — the whole thing could have happened as a chance occurrence!"

Should the jury trust the scientists and conclude the cancer cluster is highly improbable and caused by chemical plant, or should they trust the lawyer and invent 10^10,000 universes where this kind of cancer cluster becomes probable enough to happen by chance?

The shady attorney deflects criticism saying: “You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right?” Right — but that’s the point. There’s no way to test the multiverse, and science should not seriously consider untestable theories.

Multiverse thinking makes it impossible to rule out chance, which essentially eliminates the basis for drawing many scientific conclusions. What we have before us is a cancer cluster and a chemical plant, and that’s enough to make a sound scientific conclusion.

In the same way, Sutter doesn’t argue that there is necessarily a multiverse. Rather, he argues that if we can’t know that there isn’t a multiverse then we can’t draw a conclusion of design.

This isn’t all that different from the shady attorney who says, “You can’t say there aren’t 10^10,000 universes out there, right?” But as the hypothetical cancer cluster shows, we could extend multiverse logic and appeals to unknown causes to destroy virtually any scientific conclusion. But that’s not how science works.

What we have before us is a universe that is, to all appearances, finely tuned for life. That’s data, and that’s enough to draw a sound scientific conclusion: design.

Read Luskin's whole piece at the link.

I'll offer a slightly different response to Sutter tomorrow.

Will China Invade Taiwan?

There's been a lot of concern expressed in recent years about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Taiwan is an independent island off the coast of China which China claims as its own territory and which it has repeatedly threatened to invade and annex.

The U.S. has a defense agreement with Taiwan, which is the world's chief producer of quality computer chips, and the fear is that a Chinese move against the island would draw the United States into a major war with a nuclear-armed China.

Whether an invasion is imminent or not an article published by the Council on Foreign Relations outlines the enormous difficulties China would face in trying to take Taiwan.

The article features some excellent graphics and lots of helpful information so I recommend that interested readers check it out. Here are a few excerpts:

[I]nvading Taiwan or mounting a successful blockade would be the most complex military operation in modern history, and China’s military has not fought a major war in more than seven decades.

To invade Taiwan, China would have to conduct an extraordinarily complex military operation, synchronizing air, land, and sea power as well as electronic and cyberwarfare.

The Taiwan Strait [which separates Taiwan from mainland China], over ninety miles wide, is incredibly choppy, and due to two monsoon seasons and other extreme weather events, a seaborne invasion is only viable a few months out of the year.

Transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers across the Taiwan Strait would take weeks and require thousands of ships. Each crossing would take hours, allowing Taiwan to target the ships, mass troops on potential landing sites, and erect barriers.

Some questions remain about whether China has the naval vessels it would need to invade Taiwan successfully. China’s amphibious fleet is relatively small, and although Beijing will likely turn to civilian ships to sustain and supplement an invading force, those take longer to unload and would be more vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles.

Even if Chinese troops successfully cross the strait, few deep-water ports and beaches in Taiwan could accommodate a large landing force.

Beijing would also have to assume Taiwan could destroy its major ports at a conflict’s outset to prevent an invader from using them.

Taiwan’s west coast has shallow waters extending from most of its beaches, meaning they are not ideal for an invading force. Due to the shallow water, China would have to anchor ships far from Taiwan’s coast and move equipment to the shores slowly, making the ships vulnerable to Taiwanese missiles and artillery.

Taiwan’s east coast is lined by cliffs that are too steep for an invading force to scale. Moving to Taiwan’s major population centers is only possible via a few narrow passes and tunnels, which Taiwan can destroy or defend.

To prevent China’s military from seizing the capital [Taipei], Taiwan can choose to destroy the city’s major port and the tunnels and highways leading into the city.

Read the rest at the link. It's a good response to claims that China will almost certainly invade Taiwan in the next couple of years.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. III)

In the previous two posts I argued that Philosopher Peter Atterton failed in his attempt to show that there's a contradiction between God's goodness and the evil in the world and that his conclusion that the theist's concept of God is incoherent is unwarranted.

Atterton is not finished, however. He next turns his attention to another alleged contradiction, the supposed incompatibility between God's omniscience and His moral perfection:

What about God’s infinite knowledge — His omniscience? Philosophically, this presents us with no less of a conundrum.

Leaving aside the highly implausible idea that God knows all the facts in the universe, no matter how trivial or useless (Saint Jerome thought it was beneath the dignity of God to concern Himself with such base questions as how many fleas are born or die every moment), if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.

But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?

There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy.

But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.

Atterton is here committing the fallacy of equivocation, slyly using the word "know" in two different senses.

He first uses "know" propositionally, e.g. as someone might "know" who won the 1980 World Series, but then he gives the word an experiential meaning, as in one may "know" the pleasure of a fine wine.

When philosophers talk of God's omniscience they're speaking of propositional knowledge. God knows all true propositions. Omniscience doesn't entail that God knows what something like guilt or lust feels like experientially.

Nevertheless, I'd argue that it certainly seems possible that God knows very well what lust feels like without himself ever having experienced it, just as he can know what sweetness is like without ever having tasted anything sweet or what red would look like before he ever created light or eyes to see it with.

After all, if God designed and created man's emotions and sensations it's reasonable to think that He has an exhaustive understanding of what he has created even if he himself never has the experiences that give rise to those sensations in humans.

If this is possible then Atterton has not demonstrated a contradiction between God's omniscience and moral perfection and has therefore failed again to show that there's an incoherence in the theist's concept of God. His argument is very unpersuasive.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we discussed an attempt by philosopher Peter Atterton to show that God's goodness is incompatible with the evil we find in the world. He concludes that this incompatibility renders the concept of God held by most theists incoherent.

Atterton concedes that moral evil can be explained by God having granted human beings free will, but, he insists, human free will cannot account for natural evils such as result from tsunamis, disease, etc.

Here's Atterton:

However, this [human free choice] does not explain so-called physical evil (suffering) caused by nonhuman causes (famines, earthquakes, etc.). Nor does it explain, as Charles Darwin noticed, why there should be so much pain and suffering among the animal kingdom.

Actually, however, the Judeo-Christian theological tradition does explain it. According to this tradition the world and all that is in it was created good and given to Man as a gift for him to superintend, much like a husband might out of love build a house as a gift to his new bride.

God was in some sense present in this "home," and His presence acted as a governor on the laws of nature, holding them in check, overriding them and restraining them from producing the cataclysmic events which cause the awful pain and suffering we see today.

Man, however, chose to rebel against God in an act of cosmic betrayal akin to a much-loved wife cheating on a good and faithful husband. That act of infidelity resulted not only in the estrangement of Man from God but also the estrangement of Man's world from God.

The Fall of Man corrupted everything associated with Man and consequently the goodness of creation was distorted and altered. God withdrew from the home He had built for Himself and Man, the laws of nature were no longer constrained, and the world became a much less hospitable place.

Pain and suffering in both the moral sphere as well as in the natural world, according to this view, are ultimately a consequence of Man's free choice. The fault lies with Man, not God.

Now one may believe that this tradition is wrong. One may believe that nothing like it ever happened, but the starting point of Atterton's argument is the stipulation that God created the world. If that stipulation is accepted then something very much like this narrative is possible.

Moreover, if this account of the Fall of Man is approximately correct, then it's possible that the world as we find it today is not at all the world that God originally created. The present suffering of the world, given this scenario, is a result of Man's betrayal, not God's will, and there's therefore no contradiction between God's goodness and human suffering.

And if there's no demonstrable contradiction then, pace Atterton, there's no demonstrable incoherence.

More tomorrow.