Reading Books

This survey at Yougov.com is very disappointing. It found that just over half of all Americans said they read at least one book in 2023. Most of them read just a few books this year: 82% of Americans read 10 or fewer books.

One wonders where our presidential candidates would fall in this survey. At any rate, here are some of its other findings:

Book-reading is strongly associated with college education. 44% of U.S. adult citizens without a college degree said they read at least one book in 2023, compared to 73% of those with a college degree.

Americans who did read were more likely to read physical books. More than 40% of Americans read a physical book in 2023, compared to 21% who read an e-book and 19% who listened to an audiobook.

Mystery books and histories were the most popular book genres Americans read in 2023, with more than 35% of those who have read at least one book saying they read a book in each of those genres. Fantasy, historical fiction, biographies, and literary fiction were other popular genres.

Genre choice is heavily influenced by gender. 45% of female readers read at least one mystery or crime novel in 2023, compared to 28% of male readers. On the other hand, 49% of male readers read at least one history book, compared to 24% of female readers.

History was still a popular genre for female readers, like mysteries were for male readers. Mysteries were the fourth-most popular genre for men, and history was the sixth-most popular genre for women.

If you read or listened to only one book in 2023, then you read more than 46% of Americans. Reading five books puts you ahead of two-thirds of U.S. adult citizens. Readers of 10 books are in the 79th percentile, while Americans who read 20 or more books read more than 88% of their peers.

Charts at the link give more details on the above summary. They're very interesting. One of the data points that especially caught my eye is the number of college educated individuals who read no books last year - about one in four.

It's disappointing but not surprising that 46% of Americans read no books in 2023. It's also disappointing but not surprising that among the popular genres listed above only one, biographies, was non-fiction.

To quote Thomas Jefferson once again, "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."

Which Side Is Genocidal?

Bill Maher summed up the difference between the Israelis and the Palestinians in one sentence and in doing so showed all the empty-headed protestors on our university campuses what real genocide is.

The allegation against Israel is that they're committing genocide in Gaza. Maher responded that the difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis is this: The Palestinians would kill every Israeli but they can't. The Israelis could kill every Palestinian, but they don't.

The Palestinians have sworn to wipe out the Israelis, they even have it in their constitution. They earnestly desire to commit genocide against the Jews. The Israelis, on the other hand, have tried throughout their 70 year history to be at peace with the Palestinians even though they could eliminate them in a matter of weeks or less.

Even in the current war the Israelis are doing something historically unprecedented. They're trying to get humanitarian relief to the Palestinian people, the very people who voted Hamas into power and who overwhelmingly supported the slaughter of Jews on October 7th.

We didn't fly relief shipments to the Japanese or Germans while we bombed their cities in WWII, and it's quite impossible to imagine any Muslim or Arab state helping Israeli civilians if the Arabs were bombing Israel. Indeed, it's much easier to imagine the Arabs killing every Israeli civilian they could, just as they did on October 7th.

It's not the Israelis who are genocidal.

Why Would They Do This?

This piece by Matthew Xiao at The Washington Free Beacon should receive more air time than it's been getting.

Ever since October 7th we've heard that the Israelis are causing a huge humanitarian crisis in Gaza. This, despite the fact that the Israelis have been allowing hundreds of relief trucks into Gaza and the United States has been air-dropping food and medicine to Palestinian civilians.

The U.S. is even constructing a pier to offload humanitarian relief into Gaza, but true to their nature, Hamas has launched a mortar strike against the pier:

Gazan terrorists on Wednesday launched mortar shells at a site off the coast of Gaza where the United States is planning to construct a floating pier to deliver humanitarian aid, according to a report from Israeli outlet i24NEWS.

The mortar attack damaged American engineering equipment and left one person injured, i24NEWS reported on Thursday. The United States could start building the humanitarian pier as early as this weekend, with the Israel Defense Forces reportedly in charge of providing security during the construction.

President Joe Biden first announced the pier’s construction during his State of the Union address on March 7. U.S. military personnel will assemble the floating pier, an 1,800-foot-long causeway attached to the coast of northern Gaza, Pentagon press secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said the day after Biden’s speech.

"As the president has said, not enough aid is getting in [to Gaza]," Ryder said, noting the pier is expected to help deliver "up to 2,000,000 meals in a day."

One has to ask, what kind of individuals are these who would attack this facility in what was apparently an attempt to thwart efforts to get food and other necessities to their own people? Why would they do this if they cared at all about their own kin?

Well, in fact they're the same barbarians with whom the moral blank slates on our university campuses across the country have chosen to identify themselves.

This incident should tell us something about both Hamas and the young people who think Hamas is worthy of their praise and support.

Divine Hiddenness

There are two antitheistic (against the existence of God) arguments that non-theists have found particularly convincing over the last several centuries.

One of these is the problem of evil which has received perhaps its greatest literary expression in The chapter titled "The Rebellion" in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

The other argument, which is in some ways similar to the problem of evil (or suffering), is based on what philosophers call "Divine hiddenness" and which the Japanese Catholic Shusako Endo portrayed so powerfully in his novel Silence (See also the movie based on the book).

The technical form of the argument from Divine hiddenness can be found here, but in simpler English the argument goes something like this:

1. If a good God exists, He would not allow anyone who would otherwise believe in Him to remain ignorant of His existence and be lost for eternity.
2. There are people, however, who are ignorant of God's existence who would otherwise believe in Him if they knew of Him.
3. Therefore, there are people who would believe in God if they knew of Him who are lost for eternity.
4. Therefore, a good God does not exist.

Or, put more simply, because there are people who are innocently unaware of God's existence and who would believe in Him if they knew, therefore He doesn't exist.

This argument makes three questionable assumptions. It assumes that there really are those who are genuinely ignorant of God's existence; it assumes that those who are ignorant of God's existence will necessarily be lost for eternity; and it assumes that God could not possibly have overriding reasons for not revealing Himself in ways that persons ignorant of His existence, if such there be, would find compelling.

Each of these assumptions is doubtful, and in this form, at least, the argument is not very persuasive.

Perhaps a more psychologically compelling version of the argument is the one developed by Endo in his novel.

Roughly based on a true story, the novel describes the terrifying ordeal of a 16th century missionary to Japan who is put through mental tortures to persuade him to commit what seems to be a relatively minor act of blasphemy. He's required to step on a crude portrait of Jesus, and his refusal to commit this act of desecration is punished by Japanese samurai who subject innocent Christian villagers to unimaginable suffering until the missionary relents.

Despite his agonized prayers, however, there's no apparent answer from heaven. God seems silent, hidden, absent.

As emotionally gripping as this story is, in the end it doesn't demonstrate that God does not exist. The only thing it demonstrates about God is that He's sometimes, perhaps frequently, inscrutable, but believers already knew that.

It's interesting, too, that Endo's missionary, although crushed and broken by his ordeal, ultimately retains his belief in God.

To say that the argument from Divine hiddenness ultimately fails is not to minimize, however, its emotional and spiritual force.

God's seeming absence has been the cause of much anguish among many believers in the midst of great suffering and fear throughout most of human history. I have a friend who has drifted into agnosticism largely because of it.

A family member recently sent me a simple vignette that's a parable about the doubt materialists have about life after death but which actually, if perhaps inadvertently, also addresses the problem of Divine hiddenness. It goes like this:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well, I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only reasonable to believe that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

In other words, from the fact that the babies don't perceive her, don't see or hear her, it surely doesn't follow that she doesn't exist or care about them and their well-being. So it is with God's silence.

Just Plain Evil

Abe Greenwald, executive editor of Commentary magazine, posted some penetrating questions for the Pro-Hamas demonstrators on our university campuses. Townhall's Guy Benson fills us in on Greenwald's fiery post.

Greenwald writes:

Why aren’t the “protestors” demanding that the terrorist group Hamas release hostages and surrender? Literally none of them are calling for that. All the fury is aimed at Israel, none at the party that started the war with an act of mass slaughter and rape and that keeps it going with hostage-taking and human-shielding.

Hamas has turned down every “ceasefire” offer. Why would pro-ceasefire activists support the side that refuses a ceasefire? Why would a supposedly anti-war movement overtly support the side of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, all of whom exist only to wage war?

Why haven’t these wonderful humanitarians mounted similar campaigns in response to actual genocides, such as those carried out against Muslims in China, Syria, Sudan, and Myanmar? Slaughters that have claimed many more innocent lives than the war in Gaza?

I’ve screamed and written about these atrocities for years. Where were they? Why do protesters cite Hamas statistics as gospel? Why do they ignore the fact that most wars—especially those wars that have been overwhelmingly celebrated as righteous—have far worse civilian to combatant ratios than does the current war in Gaza? World War II comes to mind.

Why did they start protesting Israel immediately after October 7, before Israel even launched its ground invasion in Gaza? Why do people who would be apoplectic over the most microscopic indication of anti-black racism or Islamophobia downplay the flagrant and widespread violent anti-Semitism of these rallies as the unrepresentative behavior of “just a few jerks”?

Have they not seen the total saturation of Hamas slogans at these events? Why are these protests growing larger, more active, and more violent at the moment that Gaza has been becalmed? Israel pulled out the majority of its troops weeks ago and the death toll dropped dramatically months before that (even by the bullsh*t Hamas numbers).

Why does a political movement that claims to believe in indigenous rights, immigration, gender-equality, refugee acceptance, democracy, and religious pluralism support a non-indigenous, conquering, theocratic tyranny of female servitude, murderous homophobia, religious intolerance, and totalitarian subjugation against a democratic state of an indigenous people that values equal rights and personal liberty?

Greenwald goes on to state what's pretty obvious to everyone who's paying attention. I'll paraphrase since Greenwald's anger leads him to use some intemperate language - These students and their professorial abettors are know-nothing hypocrites.

Either that or they're just plain evil. After all, what else can you call people who applaud those who committed the horrors of October 7th.

Haters

In a column highly critical of President Biden's waffling when asked if he condemns the anti-semitic bigots protesting on some of our university campuses, Jim Geraghty says something that bears especial emphasis.

He writes:

As I have pointed out before, notice that these people, who often insist that they’re just anti-Zionist, not antisemitic, take out their anger on any Jewish people they can find. They’re not marching over to the Israeli consulate. They’re not going down to Washington to protest outside the Israeli embassy. Nope, they’re protesting and harassing people outside campus Hillels, synagogues, and JCCs.

These bitter little hatemongers keep claiming they’re upset about Israel, but they keep taking out their rage on any Jew they can find. Folks, that’s antisemitism! Do not judge people by what they say, judge people by what they do.

The people protesting on our campuses, or at least many of them, are filled with hatred, not just for the Israeli government, not just for the nation of Israel, they're filled with hatred for Jews.

The longer the war in Gaza continues the more the mask they wear slips and the more blatant are the expressions of their hatred.

This is the American left. It began in the sixties talking about "peace and love' and has morphed over the last sixty years into a seething cesspool of loathing and violence.

The religion of the left is Marxism, its expression is anarchy. Its deepest desire is the destruction of the West, and any policy, any movement, which facilitates that end is embraced as a cause célèbre.

The means to this end, as Marx makes clear in his The Communist Manifesto, is the destruction of the traditional family, community, religion, the capitalist economic system, the education system, and every other institution that has made America the greatest nation in the history of the world.

The goal is the complete atomization of society, the dissolution of whatever glue holds individuals together in society, which is why it does all it can to drive wedges between the races. It's why the left pushes identity politics and anything else that divides us rather than unifies us.

As Hannah Arendt observes in her master work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, the individual, solitary and alone, cannot withstand the pressures exerted by the state to bend the masses to its will.

The left is driven by its detestations to "tear it all down," and their hostility is directed at anything and anyone that represents success, achievement, and merit.

Today it's the Jews because they're an easy and vulnerable target and have been hated all through history. Tomorrow it'll be some other group. Perhaps it'll be the group to which you belong.

The protestors, or at least many of them, at Columbia and elsewhere are anti-semtic bigots, and bigots who despise people who are Jewish should have no more place in our society than those who despise people because of their skin color.

Naturalism's Daunting Challenge

Within the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty, the belief that nature is all there is (i.e. naturalism) and that everything in the universe can be explained by natural processes, has run up against a serious, and perhaps fatal, difficulty. 

The problem is that biologists have come to realize that the fundamental substrate of living things is not matter, as naturalism has always held, but information. Information is contained in codes like the amino acid sequence in proteins or the nucleic acid sequence in DNA and RNA, and the origin of information, especially in the first living cell, is inexplicable in terms of random, unguided, unintelligent natural processes.

This 21 minute video does an excellent job of explaining the problem in terms that are easy to understand and follow. It features a protein chemist (Doug Axe) and a philosopher of science (Stephen Meyer), both of whom have played prominent roles in bringing the significance of biological information in the origin of life to public attention.

Any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life has to show how the enormous improbabilities of evolving just a single protein can be overcome by mindless chance.

It's a daunting challenge. Watch the video to see why:

Two Amazing Fish Stories

The following two short videos are really quite remarkable.

The first explains the astonishing biology that enables the Pacific salmon to navigate back to the same stream in which it hatched. The second tells a fascinating tale about a particular salmon that overcame enormous obstacles to return to its hatchery.

The amazing thing about this second feat is that the hatchery is not actually in the stream into which the fish was originally released, and how it got there was, for a time, a real mystery.

Check them out:

Liberal Fascism (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post, borrowing from Jonah Goldberg's 2007 book Liberal Fascism, addressed the relationship between progressivism and fascism, and sought to show that fascism is in fact an ideology of the left, and not, as is so often alleged nowadays, a species of extreme conservatism.

This post will try to bolster that case by going into a bit more detail about the origins and nature of fascism.

Fascism is a difficult concept to define and even scholars disagree on what it is. Nazi fascism under Hitler, for example, was much different than Italian fascism under Mussolini.

The Nazis were racist anti-semites. The Italians were not. In fact, Jews were relatively safe in both Spain and Italy until 1943 when the Germans took over the government of Italy. They were much safer in those fascist states than they were under the liberal regimes in France and the Netherlands.

Goldberg states that, "Before Hitler ... it never occurred to anyone that fascism had anything to do with anti-semitism."

What both forms of fascism shared in common, however, was a totalitarianism that was nationalistic, secularist, militaristic, and socialist. Mussolini began his political life as a radical socialist and the Nazi party was formally called the National Socialist party.

Both forms of fascism were strongly revolutionary, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian. Indeed, Mussolini was a firm atheist who despised the Catholic church and who declared Christianity to be incompatible with socialism.

Both forms of fascism suppressed free speech (as our contemporary progressive social media platforms are doing); both were eager to force people to be healthy for their own good (as many progressives are urging our government to do with mask mandates); and both feed on crises because crises present opportunities for government control and national unity.

Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency.

It was the progressive Rahm Emanuel, advisor to President Obama, who asserted that one should never let a crisis go to waste, and the perpetuation by the left of the sense of crisis over the current pandemic is a good example of how a crisis affords ample opportunities for the expansion of government power.

The differences between fascism and the communism usually associated with the left were minimal. Perhaps the biggest difference was that communists believed that the strongest bond between workers, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, was their struggle against the propertied classes. Communism was, and is, an internationalist movement.

Fascists recognized that this was nonsense. What bonded people together, they saw, was not class but ethnicity and nation, blood and soil. Other than that the two ideologies were fraternal twins.

When Mussolini founded his fascist party in 1919 their platform consisted of a number of proposals among which were the following:

• Lowering the voting age to eighteen
• Ending the draft
• Repealing titles of nobility
• A minimum wage
• Establishing rigidly secular schools
• A large progressive tax on capital that would amount to a partial expropriation of all riches
• The seizure of all goods belonging to religious congregations, i.e. repealing the church's tax-exempt status
• The nationalization of all arms and explosives industries

There's nothing in that list that wouldn't warm the heart of an old socialist warhorse like Bernie Sanders or a young one like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

As for the version of fascism embraced by the Nazis, Goldberg says this:

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anti-capitalist rhetoric that they indisputably believed.... Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other times and places: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, and emphasis on the organic and holistic - including environmentalism, health food, and exercise - and, most of all, the need to "transcend" notions of class.

For these reasons Hitler deserves to be placed firmly on the left because first and foremost he was a revolutionary. Broadly speaking, the left is the party of change, the right the party of the status quo. On this score Hitler was in no sense, way, shape, or form a man of the right. There are few things he believed more totally than that he was a revolutionary.

To somehow seek to conflate Hitler in particular and fascism in general with contemporary American conservatism, as many have tried to do ever since the 1950s, is historical idiocy. "American conservatives seek to preserve both traditional values and the classical liberal creed enshrined in the Constitution," Goldberg writes, "... whereas Hitler despised both of them."

In that his fascism, and that of Mussolini, has much more in common with today's left than with the modern right.

Liberal Fascism (Pt. I)

Back when antifa ("antifascists") were feeling their oats there was much written about this or that person or institution being "fascist." The word came to be used much like the term "racist," and indeed the two seem to be interchangeable in the jargon of the left.

Like the word "racist" the word "fascist" is an all-purpose epithet used to define anyone or anything that the user doesn't like, and just as the term "racist" is rarely defined by those who invoke it, rarely, if at all, do those who employ the word "fascist" to describe those they hate ever venture to tell us what they mean by it.

Usually, fascism is thought to be an ideology of the right, but as Jonah Goldberg explains in his excellent 2007 book Liberal Fascism,

[F]ascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead it is, and has always been, a phenomenon of the left.

This fact - an inconvenient truth if there ever was one - is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space.... [I]n terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.

Prior to WWII American progressives were enamored of fascism, especially the program promoted by Mussolini in Italy, and, in fact, Goldberg relates, American progressivism was the font from which both the Nazis and the Italian fascists drew many of their ideas.

After the war, when the crimes of Hitler were revealed, American progressives disavowed any association with German fascism, but the fact remains that in the 1920s and 30s fascist ideas like eugenics, for example, were very popular on the American left.

After the war Stalin, having been betrayed by his erstwhile Nazi allies, began to label as fascist all ideas and movements that stood in his way, and the American left, having thrown in their lot with the Soviet communists, followed his lead.

Thus, as Goldberg puts it, "Socialists and progressives aligned with Moscow were called socialists or progressives, while socialists disloyal or opposed to Moscow were called fascists." But they were all socialists and thus leftists.

Goldberg states that the United States temporarily became a fascist country under progressive leadership during WWI, making the U.S. the first country in the Western world to feature totalitarian fascism. How else, Goldberg asks,

[W]ould you describe a country where the world's first modern propaganda ministry was established; political prisoners by the thousands were harassed, beaten, spied upon, and thrown in jail simply for expressing private opinions; the national leader accused foreigners and immigrants of injecting treasonous "poison" into the American bloodstream; newspapers and magazines were shut down for criticizing the government; nearly a hundred thousand propaganda agents were sent out among the people to whip up support for the regime and its war; college professors imposed loyalty oaths upon their colleagues; nearly a quarter million goons were given legal authority to intimidate and beat "slackers" and dissenters; and leading artists and writers dedicated their crafts to proselytizing for the government.

All of this, not to mention official racism, was perpetrated by the Democrat progressives in the administration of Woodrow Wilson.

Goldberg documents this and much, much more in his book.

The affinity American progressives have for fascist policies is evident in President Biden's deliberate abnegation of his responsibility to defend our borders against the invasion of migrants from all over the world. The Constitution he took an oath to uphold imposes upon a president the duty to maintain the integrity of our borders, but Mr. Biden has decided that he's just not going to be bothered.

Isn't disregarding the law exactly what a Mussolini or Hitler would do?

Faith and Blind Faith

Physicist Michael Guillen has an interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which he argues that the "central conceit" of naturalism (atheism) is that "it is a worldview grounded in logic and scientific evidence. That it has nothing to do with faith, which it associates with weakness. In reality, faith is central to atheism, logic and even science."

He goes on to mention that atheism was his own belief during much of his earlier academic life:

I became an atheist early in life and long believed that my fellow nonbelievers were an enlightened bunch. I relished citing studies appearing to show that atheists have higher IQs than believers. But when I was studying for my doctorate in physics, math and astronomy, I began questioning my secular worldview.

In the course of this exploration he learned three things about worldviews:

First, ... all worldviews are built on core beliefs that cannot be proved. Axioms from which everything else about a person’s perception of reality is derived. They must be accepted on faith.

Even reason itself—the vaunted foundation of atheism—depends on faith. Every logical argument begins with premises that are assumed to be true. Euclid’s geometry, the epitome of logical reasoning, is based on no fewer than 33 axiomatic, unprovable articles of faith.

As has been pointed out in this space on other occasions, the naturalist must assume that our reason evolved to make us more fit to survive, it didn't evolve for the purpose of finding truth. Thus, both the theist and the atheist must accept by faith that reason is a reliable guide to truth.

The theist accepts that because the theist believes that reason is a gift from the Creator who is Himself reasonable. The naturalist believes reason is the result of a mindless process that by sheer chance produced the rational faculty that by a fortuitous coincidence sometimes helps us find the truth.

Second, ... every worldview—that is, every person’s bubble of reality—has a certain diameter. That of atheism is relatively small, because it encompasses only physical reality. It has no room for other realities. Even humanity’s unique spirituality and creativity—all our emotions, including love—are reduced to mere chemistry.

Third, ... without exception, every worldview is ruled over by a god or gods. It’s the who or what that occupies its center stage. Everything in a person’s life revolves around this.

For the naturalist, god is the cosmos, humanity, the state, or oneself. It is what they consider to be of ultimate importance and to which they pledge, consciously or unconsciously, their fealty and devotion.

What naturalists fail to grasp is that almost everything we believe, we believe to a greater or lesser extent by faith. Very little that we believe in life can be proven to be true. We can only accumulate more and more evidence in the belief's favor.

Of course, people, whether religious or secular, often believe things on the basis of little or no evidence. To believe something despite the lack of evidence is "blind faith," but true faith is believing (and perhaps trusting) despite the lack of proof.

Atheists like biologist Richard Dawkins are fond of saying that theisms like Christianity require "blind faith" whereas naturalism is based upon empirical evidence, but neither clause in that claim is true.

There's a substantial body of evidence for the main themes of theistic belief, so, if one insists on evidence to justify belief in God, there's plenty there to warrant it.

On the other hand, naturalists believe, and must believe, a host of things for which there's no evidence at all.

They believe, for instance, that life originated through purely unguided, mechanistic processes; that the universe came into being from non-being; that there are an infinity of other universes besides our own; that moral and aesthetic judgments are actually meaningful assertions despite lacking any objective ground for them; that there are no immaterial substances such as minds; that their reason is a reliable guide to truth; that the laws of physics apply consistently throughout the universe; and much else.

There's no evidence for any of these beliefs and lots of evidence, in some cases, against them. They're all instances of "blind faith."

Guillen adds this:

When I was an atheist, a scientific monk sleeping three hours a day and spending the rest of my time immersed in studying the universe, my worldview rested on the core axiom that seeing is believing. When I learned that 95% of the cosmos is invisible, consisting of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” names for things we don’t understand, that core assumption became untenable.

As a scientist, I had to believe in a universe I mostly could not see. My core axiom became “believing is seeing.” Because what we hold to be true dictates how we understand everything—ourselves, others and our mostly invisible universe, including its origin. Faith precedes knowledge, not the other way around.

Here's a short video featuring an interview with the very prominent agnostic astronomer, the late Robert Jastrow, who discusses his own struggle to maintain his agnosticism in the face of the theistic implications of the empirical evidence that scientists were discovering:

Running Out of Fuel

R.R. Reno at First Things writes:

America is a rich country, far richer than when I was coming of age. But life is lousy for young people.

If your parents are rich and ambitious on your behalf, you’ll be fed into the spiritual meat grinder of meritocratic competition at school, travel teams in sports, and endless activities aiming at enrichment.

If your parents are middle-class, they’re likely to be divorced. You probably attend public schools, which are run in accord with therapeutic principles that ask very little of you. Meanwhile, the smartphone colonizes your mind.

If you have the misfortune to be poor, your parents won’t have married, mom will be on her third live-in boyfriend, and some of your friends will have drowned in the ocean of cheap fentanyl.

As for love and romance, the dating game is almost entirely dysfunctional across all social classes. The country’s political culture isn’t healthy, either; it has been poisoned by sanctimonious Baby Boomers. Institutions are not trustworthy; employment is nakedly transactional.

Reno could have added the epidemic gender dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and serious mental health problems experienced by so many of our children and adolescents.

These dysfunctions and misplaced priorities are not true of everyone, of course, maybe not even a majority, but they're certainly much more prevalent today than they were fifty years ago.

Why is that? Why is it that in the richest country in the history of the world - a country even the poor of which are far better off in terms of physical comforts than were the very wealthiest people living as recently as a century or two ago - why in such a country is there unprecedented malaise?

The answer, as even many agnostics have suggested, may be that life has become meaningless and empty for millions, and it has become meaningless and empty because we are in the process of deeming irrelevant the only thing that could make life genuinely meaningful.

Like a plane that has run out of fuel it can continue to glide for a time, but it will gradually lose altitude and it will ultimately crash.

The fuel of Western culture has for over a millenia been a Christian worldview grounded in a transcendent God and out of which has sprung amazing achievements in science, medicine, art, music, morality, freedom, human rights, charitable organizations, and so much more that we moderns take for granted.

Tragically, though, the fuel that produced these wonders is in danger of being exhausted, and if that should happen, none of those blessings will survive.

To roughly paraphrase the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, the attempts to sustain our culture apart from Christianity and the Christian God are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground.

Without Christianity the blessings of our culture will not endure, just as without roots there can be no flower.

Mr. Biden's Estrangement from the Truth

President Biden seems to be living in an alternative universe.

In his political ads he repeatedly asserts that Donald Trump is campaigning to impose a national abortion ban, but Mr. Trump has said no such thing. His stated position on abortion is that he believes it's a matter for the states to settle. He has said this numerous times and quite unequivocally, yet Mr. Biden insists on mischaracterizing Mr. Trump's position.

This isn't the only instance of the President's loose affiliation with the truth. He has become notorious for his taradiddles, but when he blatantly lies about his political opponents and their records, his mendacities become morally serious.

Here's another recent example. In his daily column at National Review, Jim Geraghty observes that the president's representation of recent economic history is simply false.

Geraghty writes:

President Biden, tried to defend his record on inflation last week, saying “We’re in a situation where we’re better situated than we were when we took office where we — inflation was skyrocketing.”

Absolute horse-pucky; President Biden is counting on everyone else in America having as poor a memory as he does.

The inflation rate — the Consumer Price Index, measuring prices from one year to the next — was 1.4 percent in January 2021. It was 1.2 percent the month before in December 2020, 1.4 percent in November 2020, 1.2 percent in October 2020, and 1.2 percent in September 2020.

You could find a lot to complain about in American life in the second half of 2020, from the pandemic to schools remaining closed, to arguments about wearing masks, to rising crime. But inflation was not one of the problems in American life as that horrible year came to an end.

Critics of Mr. Trump often chastise him for his occasional prevarications, but the gold medal for dishonesty has to be awarded to Mr. Biden unless, of course, the President really believes the nonsense he utters. If that's the case, he's not being dishonest, but he is delusional and should certainly not be running for another term as president.

Unimaginable Immensity

Our sun and the planets it holds in thrall, including our earth, reside in a small corner of a vast galaxy called the Milky Way, a swirling mass of dust, gas and billions of stars. The Milky Way is so huge that it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, 100,000 years to get from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Yet, as huge as it is, our galaxy is just one of billions, maybe trillions, of galaxies strewn across an incomprehensibly immense universe. This short video explains how we know this:

Relative to all this our planet is an infinitesimally tiny speck and the inhabitants of our planet - us - are even tinier. It's no wonder that some philosophers have concluded that human beings and the quotidian pursuits in which we engage have no more significance than motes of dust bouncing around in a shaft of light.

Those philosophers are right - unless the universe was intentionally created and we were purposefully put here for a reason.

Ignorant and Free

According to theologian Thomas Joseph White there are two fundamental challenges to Christian belief in the West today.

The first he calls "indifferentism" which is the idea that all religions and worldviews are equally arbitrary or groundless. Modern folks just don't have the time or inclination to sort through and examine all the competing worldview claims so they just assume that they're all implausible, unhelpful, or irrelevant to their lives.

White says:

At base this is a form of skepticism that leads to spiritual resignation; it is the mark of intellectual discouragement and malaise or despair. It frequently arises from affluence and cultural distractions such as wealth, pleasure, and ambition. The culture of secular liberalism may hope to aspire to something more than this, but it is not clear that it succeeds.

The second challenge is scientific naturalism, which White describes as:

the hypothesis that human beings are merely highly complex material entities, evolved from random and accidental cosmic processes of physics and biology. The laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are the best and virtually the only resource we have to explain reality, and there is no other answer to why human beings exist. Enjoy the view; you will be dead soon.

White points out that most secular people live in a kind of academic or social cocoon and are never confronted with an intellectual defense of Christianity.

It also should be said that most people have almost no access to Christianity in a university context or in their work environment, however intellectual the latter may be. Our specialized university and work formation play little to no part in our quest for meaning.

Once young people are out of college or the military they become less and less exposed to those whose views would challenge their own. They gradually find themselves surrounded by friends and colleagues who think pretty much as they do, and if one or two members of the social or work circle do happen to be Christians, they often feel constrained by the unwritten rule that it's impolite to raise religious (or political topics) unless the views adduced conform to those of the rest of the group.

Another problem that often arises is that even when a Christian does have an opportunity to offer a contrary opinion, they're simply unprepared, intellectually, to do so. Too few of us know much about scientific naturalism, Critical Theory, or Islam to speak intelligently about them and so, rather than put our igorance on display, we choose to just be quiet. Yet all of these are posing powerful challenges to Christianity today and if we don't understand the nature of the challenge we'll have a very difficult time resisting it.

Relatively few Christians today, including, unfortunately, many pastors, even know their Bibles, much less their Dawkins, Kendi, or Koran. They don't read outside what's necessary to perform their day job, and consequently, they don't know much science, history, literature, or philosophy.

Given the extraordinary cultural pressures we face today, this ignorance is unsustainable. To quote Thomas Jefferson, "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."

Substitute "Christian" for "nation" and his warning applies equally as well.

Rufo on Critical Race Theory

Christopher Rufo, a writer at City Journal who has done a lot of research and reporting on Critical Race Theory (CRT) gave an address on the topic a few years ago at Hillsdale College.

I can't excerpt everything from his speech that I'd like to, but I'll pull a few things from it. Rufo's topic is very important and his lecture is very informative, and I urge readers interested in what's happening in our culture today to go to the link and read the whole piece.

He begins with a brief history of Marxism and explains how Marx's economic class theory mutated into a theory about race:

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living.

Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s.

Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

He follows with an explanation of CRT:

Critical Race Theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions.

It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula.

Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism” would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality.

But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, equality — the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — is explicitly rejected by critical race theorists.

To them, equality represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.

In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism.

In the name of equity, UCLA Law Professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth and redistributing them along racial lines.

Critical race guru Ibram X. Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail the speech of political leaders and others who are deemed insufficiently “antiracist.”

One practical result of the creation of such a department would be the overthrow of capitalism, since according to Kendi, “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In other words, identity is the means and Marxism is the end.

An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of private property, but also of individual rights, equality under the law, federalism, and freedom of speech.

These would be replaced by race-based redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination, and omnipotent bureaucratic authority....critical race theory prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.

Rufo disabuses anyone who might think something like this would never gain a foothold in America. He describes how CRT is being taught throughout our government, universities, even in elementary schools:

Last year, I authored a series of reports focused on critical race theory in the federal government. The FBI was holding workshops on intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was telling white employees they were committing “microinequities” and had been “socialized into oppressor roles.”

The Treasury Department held a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.”

And the Sandia National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white supremacists,” and “mass killings.”

The executives were then forced to renounce their “white male privilege” and write letters of apology to fictitious women and people of color.

This year, I produced another series of reports focused on critical race theory in education. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school forced first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, and rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”

In Springfield, Missouri, a middle school forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert white supremacy.”

In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced fifth-graders to celebrate “Black communism” and simulate a Black Power rally to free 1960s radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had once been held on charges of murder. And in Seattle, the school district told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

I’m just one investigative journalist, but I’ve developed a database of more than 1,000 of these stories. When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, it is not an exaggeration—from the universities to bureaucracies to k-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.

Rufo then goes on to discuss why attempts to halt these encroachments have been ineffective and explains what people can do to stop it from taking over the culture completely. He argues that it must be countered on three levels - governmental action, grassroots mobilization, and an appeal to principle - and he explains each.

Most of all, though,

... we must have courage — the fundamental virtue required in our time. Courage to stand and speak the truth. Courage to withstand epithets. Courage to face the mob. Courage to shrug off the scorn of the elites.

When enough of us overcome the fear that currently prevents so many from speaking out, the hold of critical race theory will begin to slip. And courage begets courage. It’s easy to stop a lone dissenter; it’s much harder to stop 10, 20, 100, 1,000, 1,000,000, or more who stand up together for the principles of America.

Truth and justice are on our side. If we can muster the courage, we will win.

For an example of the kind of courage Rufo's talking about, read this remarkable letter, written by an angry father who explains to his fellow parents why he's taking his daughter out of an elite girls school in Manhattan.

The Depressing Demise of Literature

Those readers who've attended college, or who've been involved in academia for a while, may have noticed that enrollment in Humanities disciplines in general and English in particular have plummeted in recent decades.

Mark Bauerlein at First Things has an interesting essay on why he thinks this has happened. He writes:

Today’s job market is beyond depressing. Openings in English dropped by 55 percent between 2007–08 and 2017–18—from 1,826 listings to 828—and undergraduate demand for the services of the lucky few who obtain a job continues to decline. From 2011 to 2017, the number of English bachelor’s degrees fell by more than 20 percent.

Why? Bauerlein argues that the decline is due to an infatuation among teachers of literature with French deconstructionism and theorists like Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault:

Derrida’s dense dialectical presentation in Of Grammatology wasn’t going to make many wavering sophomores decide to major in English or French. Foucault’s treatment of torture and prison wouldn’t lead parents and alumni to become donors.

Their vocabulary reduced the audience for academic criticism. American undergraduates couldn’t understand it, but so what? The obscurity wouldn’t be a problem as long as resources and students were pouring in. If classes were full, the American scholars who embraced the new theorists could welcome a foreign discourse steeped in Hegel, Freud, Heidegger, and European linguists that only a few sub-sub-specialists had mastered.

But the indulgence in a form of literary criticism that no one could understand had a baneful effect on student enrollment. Bauerlein cites a typical passage from the work of one deconstructionist:

A choice must then be made: either to place all texts in a demonstrative oscillation, equalizing them under the scrutiny of an in-different science, forcing them to rejoin, inductively, the Copy from which we will then make them derive; or else to restore each text, not to its individuality, but to its function, making it cohere, even before we talk about it, by the infinite paradigm of difference, subjecting it from the outset to a basic typology, to an evaluation.

Such gibberish turned students off. As Bauerlein notes:

Students majored in English because they’d read Shakespeare in a freshman course or Hemingway on their own and found in these and other works satisfying reflections of themselves and their lives. They identified with Odysseus and Nick Adams, and they wanted their classes to help them refine their enthusiasm and appreciation for works of literature.

But deconstructionism forced students to ignore the skill of the author and the truth the author sought to convey and focus instead on the authors' "center":

Derrida pushed a radical skepticism that targeted the very idea of core meaning, original intention, or truth in or behind or before or under the work itself....Claims to true interpretation, Derrida said, rested upon a “center,” something outside the work that explained constituents of it—an author’s psychology, his religion, his class relations, and so on.

Race and gender were soon to be included. Interpreting and appreciating the writing itself was secondary to the status and circumstances of the writer. Everything must be interpreted in light of that status and that interpretation was open-ended. The interpreter or reader never arrive at any final conclusions:

This embrace of the heroic role of the endless interpreter swept everyone away. The search for the central truth of a literary work was over. The rehearsal of the forever-deferred and “problematized” truth of the work took its place. No more truth, only “reading.”

This model was never going to attract very many American sophomores, who thrill to literature for its love and hate, intrigue and action, conflict and lyricism. It did not impress the literary reading public, either, the individuals who had season tickets to local theaters and subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Sophomores today who want teachers who will teach them that Faulkner has special insight into the human psyche and that Pope’s couplets are the height of verbal refinement won’t easily find them. When I finished graduate school in 1988, those kinds of evaluations were already off the table. Theory had made everyone cannier, or so we thought.

You had to be careful not to “privilege” literature. You did not permit yourself overt enthusiasm for great novels or poems. You submitted “texts” to analysis—you “performed” a “reading.”

A well-written novel was no longer considered a work of art in itself. It was only important in light of what it said about the author's "center." This may be of interest to sociologists and psychologists, but many lovers of literature found it sterile, arcane and disappointing.

In any case, there's more to Bauerlein's essay at the link.

Not being in the field of literature myself I can't say whether Bauerlein's analysis of the decline of English as an academic discipline is correct, but it's certainly interesting and seems plausible. I would add, though, that the dearth of career opportunities in which a degree in deconstructive literary criticism is helpful is doubtless also a factor in the decline of the number of students who choose to major in English.

The First Cause Problem

An article by Marcelo Gleiser at Big Think is titled The First Cause Problem but it's not until Gleiser gets toward the end of the piece that he actually mentions the problem and even then he spends only a couple of sentences on it. Nevertheless, there are a couple of interesting things about his brief mention of the problem that are worth talking about.

The term "first cause" refers to the initial cause of the universe, the impetus for the Big Bang. According to what's called the Standard Model of cosmology, the universe came into being from a tiny point smaller than a single subatomic particle of near-infinite density. This point is called a singularity. In an unimaginably brief time (10^-33 sec.) it "inflated" to about the size of a grain of sand and then began a more modest expansion which continues to this day.

These first phases of the creation of the universe would've seemed instantaneous to an observer like us.

But where did the singularity come from. Here's what Gleiser writes:

The first cause — the cause that must be uncaused and that unleashed all other causes — lies beyond the reach of scientific methodology as we know it. This doesn’t mean that we must invoke supernatural causes to fill the gap of our ignorance.

A supernatural cause doesn’t explain in the way that scientific theories do; supernatural divine intervention is based on faith and not on data. It’s a personal choice, not a scientific one. It only helps those who believe.

So, at the end of a lengthy article purporting to discuss the first cause problem, Gleiser tells us that the problem has no scientific or naturalistic answer. Okay, but his rationale for excluding supernatural causes is unconvincing.

He states that a supernatural cause for the universe is based on faith, not on data, but this is not correct. He himself provides a lot of data for accepting a supernatural cause in his first sentence where he infers that the first cause must be uncaused and that it unleashed all other causes.

If this is so it follows that the first cause must have at least the following attributes: Since it's uncaused it's self-existent and non-contingent (i.e. it's logically necessary); it must also transcend the universe itself since it's the cause of the universe. It must therefore be non-spatial, non-temporal, and immaterial. Finally, it must be unimaginably powerful since it "unleashed" all other causes and is the "creator" of an enormously vast universe.

In other words, from the data that Gleiser acknowledges it appears that the first cause of the universe has many of the attributes of God.

If we take him one step further and consider the fact that the universe seems to be purposely fine-tuned for living things we may add to the list of data that the first cause seems to be both highly intelligent and purposeful (i.e. personal).

None of this requires anymore faith to accept than ais required of scientists to accept the implications of many of their hypotheses. If it's scientifically legitimate for scientists to infer the existence of unobservable particles, fields, and even other universes from what they can observe in their particle accelerators, telescopes and mathematical equations, why is it not scientifically legitimate to infer the existence of a being that we can't observe from the existence of evidence that we can observe?

The only reason for ruling out such a step is an irrational prejudice against the existence of a being that embodies the traits listed above.

A Duty to Die

If, as seems likely in many Western and Asian countries, their populations continue their failure to reproduce themselves at replacement levels and they continue to age and shrink, pressures will mount to cull those who consume resources without producing anything of value to society.

This would be primarily the elderly who require vast sums of money for social security and medicare to maintain lives which have very little future and are of very little use to society at large.

Wesley Smith at the Discovery Institute sees legalization of voluntary euthanasia as the first step. It'd initially be available only to the terminally ill and those in chronic pain. However, once people are allowed to end their lives, Smith argues, it won't be long before they're encouraged to do so, and ultimately social pressure will mount for imposing a duty to die upon those who are a drain on public resources.

Smith quotes from a column published in the Times of London in which former Tory MP Matthew Parris argues that euthanasia/assisted suicide should not only be permitted — but encouraged. In “We Can’t Afford a Taboo on Assisted Dying,” Parris writes:

I can’t dispute the objectors’ belief that once assisted dying becomes normalized we will become more apt to ask yourselves for how much longer we can justify the struggle.

The word “justify” is telling. It does not only concern the suffering of the person who is ill, disabled, or elderly but the suffering that person is supposedly causing to family and society. Parris believes that, eventually, for such a person to continue to live will be considered unjustifiable:

Is life still giving us more pleasure than pain? How much is all this costing relatives and the health service? How much of a burden are we placing on those who love us? How much of a burden are we placing on ourselves? . . .

If assisted dying becomes common and widely accepted, hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — will consider choosing this road when the time comes, and in some cases, even ask themselves whether it would be selfish not to. . .

Within a decade or more [assisted suicide] will be seen as a normal road for many to take, and be considered socially responsible — and even, finally, urged upon people.

In other words, the creation of a “duty to die.”

Parris sees the future as a war between the old and sick and the young and healthy based on the cost of caring for people with dementia, disabilities, and serious illnesses:

This [resource] imbalance helps explain the government’s desperate reliance on immigration — to the rage of electorates who won’t face the fundamental question: how are our economies going to pay for the ruinously expensive overhang that dare not speak its name: old age and infirmity?

Not everyone desires this end, Smith acknowledges, but it's the logical endpoint of legalizing euthanasia. Once it's legal, it'll become acceptable and once it's acceptable it'll become the responsible thing to do.

Once that point is reached it'll be just a short step to making it an obligation for those who are a "burden" on everybody else to just shuffle off this mortal coil.

Can't Have Both (Pt. II)

Two days ago I wrote that naturalists, i.e. those who deny that the ultimate reality is a personal intelligent being, are in an intellectually untenable position. They want to maintain a belief in moral responsibility, objective moral duties, human equality, objective human rights, free will, consciousness, and so on even though their fundamental assumption, that material nature is all there is, reduces all of these to illusions.

Here are some quotes, all from philosophical naturalists, to illustrate the point:

• "Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused...[yet] the world as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events."
• "The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe ...[but] when those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."
• "A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion." Steven Pinker MIT in How the Mind Works.
• "The physical world provides no room for freedom of the will...[yet] that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. {So] We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false." Marvin Minsky MIT in The Society of Mind.
• "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom even though there's no ground for it." John Searle
• "We cannot live adequately with ...a complete awareness of the absence of free will ...[thus] we ought to hold on to those central but incoherent or contradictory beliefs in the free will case." Philosopher Paul Smilansky
• "Free will is a very persistent illusion. It keeps coming back." Harvard Psychologist Daniel Wegner
• "Consciousness has to be an illusion." Cambridge Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
• "Common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist." Philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland
• "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." Philosopher John Gray

If free will and consciousness are illusions then there simply can be no objective moral duties or truth, thus no responsibility for anything we do no matter how cruel or harmful to others. There can be no human rights beyond what one powerful group of human beings arbitrarily confer upon another, nor can there be any grounds for trusting our sense perceptions or even our reason.

If truth is subjective, if beliefs aren't true in an objective sense, then the belief that naturalism is true is simply an expression of a subjective preference. It can't be objectively true.

Naturalists (i.e. atheists) have to live in two contradictory worlds. In their everyday lives with family and friends they live like everyone else, behaving as if the common sense view is obviously correct, but in their professional or intellectual lives they live as if human beings are machines with no free will, consciousness or dignity.

In other words, in their daily lives they live as if theism is true while in their intellectual lives they adamantly deny it.

They oscillate back and forth between these two irreconcilable worlds, unable to give up the common sense entailments of theism yet unable to live consistently with what the logic of naturalism, the philosophical worldview they embrace, tells them is the case.

It makes one wonder if perhaps naturalism is a mental illness.

Can't Have Both (Pt. I)

There's a fascinating struggle going on today for the hearts and minds of American youth, a struggle between two very different philosophical views of reality.

It's a struggle being waged primarily in our institutions of higher education and in our entertainment media.

Currently, the prevailing view in those institutions is naturalistic materialism - the idea that nature and matter are all there is and that there's no supernatural nor immaterial substance.

This view stands in diametric opposition to its rival, theism, which predominates, of course, among Christians, Jews and Muslims. In its broad outlines this view of the world (worldview) holds that human beings are the intentional product of a personal, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient Mind which both created, and thus transcends, space, time and mass/energy.

One of the criticisms that philosophical naturalists level at theists is that theism, they claim, is irrational - it's irrational to believe in the existence of entities that are undetectable by the human senses.

There's much that could be said in response to this particular criticism, but in this post I want to ask which of the two views is really most at odds with reason and which conforms best to our own personal experience of the world.

Here's the problem for the naturalist: In order to embrace it one must, if one is to be rational, either give up believing in a host of things that most naturalists don't want to give up believing in, or come up with some secondary or ad hoc explanation for them.

For instance, on naturalism there's no basis for believing in human equality, objective human rights, or human dignity. Nor is there any basis for believing in objective moral obligation, moral responsibility, free will, the existence of the self, human consciousness or the trustworthiness of our reason.

None of these can be accommodated by a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, except by forcing them, Procrustus-like, into it. Yet they all fit quite comfortably in theism.

Moreover, on naturalism one must hold that human beings are simply machines made of meat, that the universe came into being uncaused and out of nothing, that the fine-tuning of the parameters and constants of the universe which permit life are just a fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, that the origin of life is another fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, and that the amazing ability of mathematics to describe the world and the ability of humans to not only comprehend it but to articulate it in language are even more fortuitous accidents.

Either one believes all that or one must believe, despite the lack of any evidence, that there's an infinity of different universes and/or that we're really living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix.

If one claims to be a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) and yet believes that there are some things that are wrong for anyone to do (like torture children), if they believe that people are responsible for their actions, that we all have a conscious mind, that our beliefs and sense experiences are not illusions, that our reason can be generally trusted and that the notion that we're living in a multiverse or a computer simulation is extremely far-fetched, then one is simply not thinking consistently with one's worldview, and is therefore being irrational and they're certainly not a very good naturalist.

Naturalists, to be consistent, must confront this choice: Either give up all (or most) of the beliefs enumerated above or give up naturalism. One simply can't hold on to both and be rational.

It's an interesting fact that when facing this choice many people would rather cling to naturalism than hold on to the belief in moral responsibility or in the existence of conscious minds. They know that abandoning naturalism means accepting the unpleasant fact that theism is true, and they'd apparently prefer to continue to live irrationally than accept that they've been wrong about God.

Why that is would make for an interesting psychological study.

Total Eclipse of the Sun

There's lots of talk about the upcoming solar eclipse next Monday. What doesn't seem to get much airtime is any discussion of how extraordinary a total eclipse of the sun is - not just its rarity but also the factors that have to be precisely fine-tuned for such a phenomenon to occur.

For instance, the apparent circumference of the moon's disc is exactly the same as that of the sun. This can only happen if the earth, moon and sun are almost exactly the distances they are from each other and almost precisely the sizes they are.

The following five and a half minute video was made during and after a 1995 solar eclipse and features astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher of science Jay Richards.

Richards points out that our location in the galaxy, the size of our earth, the nature of its atmosphere, the type, size and age of the star we orbit, the structure of the solar system we're located in, as well as a host of other factors, are not only optimal for observing solar eclipses from which we can glean an enormous amount of scientific information about our universe, but these factors are also optimal for the existence of intelligent life and scientific discovery.

If that's a coincidence it's certainly a remarkable one. The beauty of the eclipse inspires awe and wonder. So, too, should the amazing precision necessary to produce such a beautiful event.

Here's the video:

Engineering Genius

I've shown this video to some of my classes in the past because it's so well done. Drew Berry is an animator who creates computer generated animations of cellular processes. The processes he depicts here are occurring all the time in each of the trillions of cells in your body. As you watch it keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

And notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did they evolve in the first place?

Perhaps we'll eventually discover naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible naturalistic explanations sound to all but the irrevocably committed and the more it looks like the living cell has been intelligently engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

It's a Little Late for Regrets, Richard

British biologist and uber-atheist Richard Dawkins has reiterated a claim that he's made in the past which I find interesting. He asserts that he's a cultural Christian but that he disbelieves every doctrine of the Christian faith.

From an article at The Daily Caller:

"I do think that we are culturally a Christian country, and I call myself a cultural Christian,” Dawkins said. “I’m not a believer, but there’s a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. I love hymns and Christmas carols. I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.

“It’s true that statistically, the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down, and I’m happy with that,” he continued. “But I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So, I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we substituted any alternative religion. That would be truly dreadful."

What Dawkins doesn't seem to realize is that we can't have all those wonderful fruits of the Christian worldview while simultaneously killing the tree that produces them. Destroy the tree, which Dawkins has spent much of his adult life trying to do, and the fruit eventually withers and dies on the branches.

Dawkins is also alarmed that Islam is growing in his native England with 6000 mosques currently active in Britain and more in the planning stages:

“If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time," he says. "It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not.”

Set aside the puzzling reference by an atheistic evolutionist to "fundamental decency" (What criteria does he base "decency" upon?). Having done his best over the last thirty years to create a religious vacuum in the English-speaking world, he's now dismayed that Islam is rushing in to fill the void he's helped create, but what did he expect?

There are really only four live religious options in the contemporary Western world:

1. State atheism, such as we see in communist North Korea, China, and the old Soviet Union with all the attendant horrors that those nations inflict on their people,
2. Islam, with its repressive treatment of women and its long-term goal of world conquest,
3. Paganism, a religious syncretism rooted in superstition and sensuality,
4. Christianity, with its heritage of beautiful art, music, hospitals, universities, science, human dignity and equal rights, and a morality based on compassion and justice rather than power.

Dawkins has devoted himself to eradicating #4, but to the extent he's had success, he's mostly succeeded in opening the door wide for the other three.

There's more on Dawkins' regrets at the link.

Beauty, Morality, and Reason

Biologist Ann Gauger, in an article at Evolution News, discusses three aspects of the world that C.S. Lewis thought eluded any naturalistic explanation or account.

The first of these is beauty. She writes:

Why should there be beauty? What is it for? We find joy in beholding something truly beautiful, a sense of awe even. And we never grow tired of that beauty, unless some spiritual sickness has entered and sapped us of all capacity for joy. Even more strange, it is a great pleasure to participate in the creation of something beautiful, something that moves other people, that brings joy to them.

Why should this be, that there is joy for the creator in the creative act and joy for the audience also?

Scientifically speaking, does beauty indicate design or un-design? The answer is this: there is no reason to expect random mutation and selection to produce beauty, and no particular reason for us to find certain things beautiful. Functional, yes. But the beauty we see does not necessarily correlate with safety or suitability for eating or mating. It has no particular survival value. Instead, beauty is a lovely surprise that points toward the transcendent Something that is the source of beauty.

The second aspect of the world that Lewis believed could not be adequately explained within a naturalistic framework is morality. Here's Gauger:

As [Lewis] observed, when people quarrel, they often appeal to moral standards: “You promised,” or “You shouldn’t treat people that way.” They appeal to these standards expecting to be understood.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Or even our belief that there is such a thing as right or wrong?

There are certain acts that are universally acknowledged to be morally wrong, such as the killing of innocent human beings. Where does such objective certainty come from? If someone says, “Well, we evolved that view,” then there is no reason to suppose it has any basis in objective truth. Any moral view selected for its survival value loses any claim to objective truth. Should it not be just as moral, if not more so, to kill innocent humans if it benefits you, under that scenario?

On the other hand, if we concede that we didn’t evolve morality, a lot of people then default to the position that there is no objective basis for morality. We must define it for ourselves. Why, then, do most people still choose to adopt the moral precept that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings?

All this argues for the objective reality of moral values, and for our innate sense of them, sometimes called the natural law. And the existence of objective moral law points toward a designer who set this law into our hearts.

Lewis' third point is the existence of human reason. Gauger explains:

The fact that we reason at all, and that our reason corresponds with reality, is a remarkable thing. Have you never thought that it should be surprising that our minds are capable of probing the deep things of the universe, and that the universe is constructed in such a way as to be discoverable? That it should be founded on laws that we can grasp and that surprisingly find a match with our abstract mathematics?

Ape brains that evolved to hunt prey and run from lions should not be expected to do higher-order mathematics or particle physics. Yet our brains are fitted for the task, as deep as we need to go. Our brains and our abilities go so far beyond what survival requires that no evolutionary explanation could possibly account for the things we can do.

If evolution is all there is, then rationality hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Natural selection may favor the fastest or strongest or most fertile, but it doesn’t care about syllogisms or propositions or inferences. And if all we have is an evolved feeling that our minds are trustworthy, then our minds aren’t trustworthy.

She quotes Lewis:

All possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really “must” be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them — if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work — then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

Her argument is that "naturalism has cut itself off at the knees." She adds that,

Naturalism depends on the idea that science has discovered the truth about the world — what the world really is — namely, that it is nothing but matter and energy, particles in motion, and neurons firing, with consciousness an epiphenomenon and free will an illusion. But see — on what basis do they claim to know? Science is supposed to be a logical enterprise that interrogates the natural world and discovers its hidden reality using reason and logic, which naturalism cannot justify as being reliable.

Just so. We can add to what Gauger wrote the words of atheist philosopher John Gray who stated that,

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.

And in his book On Miracles Lewis wrote this:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

It's a marvel that a worldview, naturalism, that's so intellectually thin would nevertheless be so attractive to so many intelligent people.

The Stolen Body

Saturday's post was a comedic look at the argument that the disciples conspired to steal Jesus' body from the tomb thus leaving the tomb empty on the first Easter morning.

Today's post, courtesy of Marc Tapscott, offers a more scholarly look at the significance of the empty tomb for the Resurrection of Jesus.

Tapscott asserts that the empty tomb of Jesus is the single most consequential fact in all of history. I'd quibble with him on a technicality. It wasn't the empty tomb per se which was the most significant fact but rather what the empty tomb signified, i.e. the resurrection of Jesus, but set that aside.

What of the possibility that the body was stolen from the tomb? Tapscott writes:

There are only three candidate groups who logically might have had a motive for stealing the body of Jesus. First, there are the disciples themselves. Critics have long claimed the disciples stole the body and then invented the Resurrection myth.

Here's why that claim is preposterous: the disciples scattered when Jesus was arrested. They were terrified that they would be next. Peter's thrice denial of even knowing Jesus is indicative of the group's cowardice.

Why is that significant? None of the disciples is known to have had any military training, yet we are to believe that this scattered crew of cowards somehow found the courage to overcome a crack unit of the Roman Legion that was guarding the tomb, or buy them off, then hide Jesus' body where it would never be found, and afterwards go out and tell everybody that Jesus was God?

The second candidate group would be Jesus' enemies, chiefly, the Pharisees and Sadducees who were the religious leaders of Israel. Throughout His three-year ministry, Jesus had tangled with these religious leaders who accused Him of blasphemy for claiming to be God-become-man. That's why they demanded that Pilate order Jesus crucified.

But let's say they did steal Jesus' dead body because they were quite aware that He had said He would "rise again." (Mark 9:31). Weeks after Jesus' crucifixion and burial Peter spoke to thousands of people on the Day of Pentecost, explicitly claiming Jesus was alive. Three thousand people became Jesus's followers that day and the Christian church was born.

But if they had stolen His body from the tomb, as soon as Peter began claiming the Resurrection, Jesus's enemies would have rolled his stinking, rotting corpse down Jerusalem's Main Street to prove He was dead, not alive.

Then they would likely have arrested Peter and any of the rest of the disciples they could lay their hands on and crucified them. Instead of the day it was born, Pentecost would have been the day the Christian church died.

And the third candidate group for stealing Jesus' dead body? Grave robbers had been around for centuries and robbing the tombs of famous people was not uncommon. After all, as with the Pharaohs, who loaded up their tombs with valuables for the next world, robbers could make one big hit and be set for life.

But here's the problem: Nobody ever accused Jesus of being rich, so they had no reason whatsoever to think His tomb would be stuffed with gold, silver and precious jewels. Remember: He was so poor, He had to be buried in somebody else's tomb!

That tomb was owned by Joseph of Arimathea, who, being a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, might well have been wealthy. So maybe the local robbers figured it was at least worth a shot?

But how likely was it that a band of grave robbers that would have been made up of only two or three men could have overcome the [soldiers] guarding Jesus's tomb?

One point I might add to Tapscott's argument: If thieves stole the body why would they take the time to unravel the grave cloths and remove the body from them, leaving the grave linens in the tomb? Wouldn't they have been in a great hurry to get out of there before the guards found them out?

Anyway, there's really only one reason for thinking that Jesus' body was stolen and that the Resurrection didn't really happen. That's the belief that miracles aren't possible, but we can only be sure that miracles aren't possible if we already believe that there's no God. If God exists then miracles surely are possible, and we should judge each report of a miracle on the basis of the historical evidence.

And the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus is about as strong as any evidence for any historical event could possibly be.

Tapscott has more about this evidence for the Resurrection at the link.