Plant Predators

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't.

But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

Some while ago Evolution News ran an essay that discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain. Here's what they said about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid. The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients.

The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey. The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volken­burgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival.

The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food. The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's a video that shows the Venus Flytrap in action:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture and digest prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

The trap mechanism is exceedingly complex and also completely gratuitous, but the digestion of the prey itself requires extensive modifications and genetic changes, all of which would have been unnecessary for the plants' survival and pretty much useless until they were all in place.

This kind of engineering requires foresight, and foresight, as biochemist Marcos Eberlin notes in his book by that title, is not a trait possessed by blind, impersonal Darwinian processes. It requires a mind.

Pascal on Hearts and Minds

Ever wonder why people who disagree with us are only infrequently persuaded by the presentation of our case despite the obvious (to us) superiority of our arguments? Maybe it has something to do with our demeanor. Here's the 17th century genius and polymath Blaise Pascal on that very topic. "[All] men in the world," he wrote, "are almost always led to believe not by proof but by agreeableness."

Pascal wrote that there are two doors to the soul, the mind and the heart, but that few enter solely through the door of the mind. He writes that, "[People] are introduced [to belief] in large numbers through the whims of the will, without the counsel of reasoning." In other words, most of our beliefs are based upon our desires, biases, prejudices, etc. We believe that which appeals to our subjective feelings, not our objective reason.

He adds that, "...whatever the point about which one wants to convince someone else, one must be attentive to that person: one must know his mind and heart, what principles he accepts, what things he loves....So that the art of persuasion consists as much in pleasing as in convincing, given the extent to which men are governed more by caprice than by reason!"

"The heart," he's famous for having said, "has reasons which reason can never know."

The door to the mind lies behind the door to the heart. If the latter is closed the former is often inaccessible.

Thus, if our mode of disagreement is angry, humorless, arrogant, and insulting we can be sure we'll gain few converts to our views. Such behavior closes the door of the heart. On the other hand, humor, kindness, and humility often cast wide the door to a person's heart. They often gain us a hearing even among those otherwise undisposed to listen to us, but once the door to the heart has been open, the door to the mind is also more likely to be set ajar.

At that point we need to be well-supplied with facts and able to deftly employ reason if we hope to pry open that door even wider.

Making the Wrong Point

At the website culturcidal.com John Hawkins puts up a couple of frames from a movie in which one character says that, "If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, rhat person is a piece of [crap]."

Hawkins goes on to write that "The majority of comments [to this movie scene] seemed to be, unsurprisingly, from atheists. Here are some fairly representative comments from those people:"

• "I met a man like that once, the only thing keeping him from hurting others was that his religion told him not to, those folks are truly terrifying that they even exist."
• "As an atheist I hear this often. "Well how do you live without morals and values?" As if living in fear of burning for eternity is the only thing that could make a person have values."
• "You can still have morals and not have faith. If you need a book to tell you how to be kind to people, you are the problem!"

The assumption, obviously, is that one need not be religious or believe in God in order to be good. Now, this is of course true, and I don't know any reasonably thoughtful person who would deny it. It's a truth, however, that wholly misses the point.

It's not a question of whether people can be good without belief in God. People can be loving, caring, generous, and honest whether they believe in God or not, whether they're religious or not. The question is whether, if there's no objective basis for moral right and wrong beyond the consensus of humanity, had someone chosen to be unloving, selfish, cruel, dishonest, would they be doing anything morally wrong?

Indeed, if there's no objective moral authority, no accountability for how we live, what does it even mean to say that something is morally "wrong"?

There may be behaviors that most people in a culture don't like, but why does what people like make a behavior wrong in a moral sense? Without an objective moral law to serve as a reference point we're like astronauts floating in space trying to decide which direction is up.

How can it be wrong to be racist, hateful, egoistic, callous, or exploitative of others if there's no moral law against such behavior? As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes in his magnificent novel The Brothers Karamazov, "If God is dead, everything is permitted."

Consider the third quote above:"You can still have morals and not have faith. If you need a book to tell you how to be kind to people, you are the problem!" Of course, you can be kind if your personality inclines you to kindness, but suppose someone's personality inclines them to cruelty. In such a case we should ask the above commenter to tell us why that person's cruelty is morally wrong?

It's not that people need a book to tell them how to be kind, that's an absurdity. Rather we need the book (or something) to tell us that we have a moral obligation to be kind and that we'll be held accountable for whether we are or not.

The following short film illustrates the inability of the man without God to give a compelling answer to the question why cruelty is wrong, even when his life depends upon it. Caution: the film is not for the squeamish:

On Heated Rhetoric and Political Assassination

In the wake of the second attempt on Donald Trump's life in as many months some in the media are, astonishingly enough, actually blaming Trump for "overheated rhetoric." This is a bit like blaming a rape victim for dressing too provocatively.

Jim Geraghty had a few thoughts on political rhetoric in today's column:

Donald Trump is, in the eyes of many Democrats, the devil, the root of all evil, and the end of democracy. Some genuinely believe that if Trump is elected, 2024 will be the last free and fair presidential election for many years, and that Trump will “deploy the U.S. military to seize voting machines and rerun elections in swing states.” (That last prediction is from a December 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed by Liz Cheney, citing the feverish fantasies of retired general Michael Flynn.)

In last week’s debate, Kamala Harris declared, “Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Really? The worst? Pearl Harbor and 9/11 don’t make the cut? Nothing by al-Qaeda or ISIS or even Timothy McVeigh belongs in that ballpark? Don’t get me wrong, what happened on January 6 was appalling and an outrage, and the buck stops with the president. But this is building up Trump into our national Voldemort.

Vice President Harris also warned, during the debate: “The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the former president would essentially be immune from any misconduct if he were to enter the White House again.”

That is not accurate, of course. The Supreme Court ruled, “Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”

Those words “within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” are pretty darn important there. If it isn’t constitutional, the president can’t do it.

Harris continued, “Understand, this is someone who has openly said he would terminate, I’m quoting, terminate the constitution of the United States. That he would weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies.”

Of course, even if this were an accurate quote (it isn't) and even if he were serious, he'd be unable to do the former and the latter has already been accomplished by the current Biden/Harris administration which has employed the DOJ in an effort to do all it can to get Trump out of the race.

In any case, Harris isn't the only one whose rhetoric about Trump has been incendiary. This two and a half minute montage of Democrats abetting fear, loathing, and violence is pretty sickening:

2.5 minutes of Democrats explicitly calling for using political vioIence.

They own this. pic.twitter.com/vMpVbmJYmc

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 16, 2024

Here's a question: In the last one hundred years, has there ever been an assassination attempt against any left-wing, progressive politician? If not, what does that suggest about our political left?

The Collapse of One Key Argument for Determinism

In an article at Mind Matters neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses the debate between determinists (those who believe that there's no free will) and libertarians (those who believe we have free will). Egnor writes:

In a previous post, I argued that if determinism is true, we cannot have free will. That is, if everything we do is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, there is no room for genuine freedom. In that respect, I am an “incompatibilist”—I don’t believe that free will is compatible with determinism.

What do I mean by determinism? Determinism, in the scientific sense intended here, is the view that for every moment in time, the state of the universe is completely determined by the state that immediately precedes it.

If you knew all of the details of the universe — the location and state of every particle — at any given moment, you could know with certainty what comes next. Determinism is more or less the view that nature is a machine. If we know the position of the gears, we can know the future with certainty.

The basic argument for the belief that our choices are not free goes something like this:

1. Every event in the physical universe is the inevitable consequence of prior causes (i.e. every event is physically determined).
2. Our choices are events in the physical universe (i.e. they occur in the material brain).
3. Therefore, our choices are the inevitable consequence of prior causes (i.e. they're determined by our strongest motives)

This is obviously a valid argument. If each of the premises is true then the conclusion follows, but it's not clear that either of the two premises is true, and the first premise seems, in fact, to be false. Here's Egnor:

In 1964, Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990) published a paper titled “On the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen Paradox”. In it, he observed that there is a way to test determinism at the quantum level by measuring the ratio of quantum states of particles emitted by radioactive decay.

Bell’s experiment has now been done many times, and the answer is unequivocal: determinism at the quantum level is not true. Nature is not deterministic.

The experiments showed that every quantum process entails some degree of “indeterminism”; that is, there are predictable probabilities but there is never certainty. If we knew the exact state of the universe at any given moment, we could still never know with certainty what would happen next.

Determinism in nature has been shown, scientifically, to be false. There is no real debate about this among physicists. So the question as to whether determinism, if it really existed, would be compatible with free will is merely an academic question, an interesting bit of metaphysical speculation.

If all this is true, then the first premise in the above syllogism is false and the entire argument collapses. It may still be that our choices are not free, of course, but, if so, some other argument is going to have to be employed to demonstrate that, and it's not clear what that argument could be.

Naturalism and Reason, Pt. II

Yesterday I laid out an argument to the effect that one is not rational to believe that naturalism, i.e. atheism, is true and finished with some quotes, mostly from naturalists themselves, acknowledging that, in the words of J.B.S. Haldane, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

Nor, if one's mental processes are in fact the result solely of an evolutionary process that selects for survival rather than truth, does one have epistemic justification for believing that naturalism is true.

So how does the naturalist get around this apparent difficulty? Philosopher Jay Richards summarizes one common response:

If [the Darwinian natural selection] story is roughly correct, then there would seem to be a survival advantage in forming true beliefs. Surely our ancestors would have gotten on in the world much better if they came to believe that, say, a saber-tooth tiger, is a dangerous predator. And if they believed that they should run away from dangerous predators, all the better.

In contrast, those early humans who had false beliefs, who believed that saber-tooth tigers were really genies who would give three wishes if they were petted, would tend to get weeded out of the gene pool.

So wouldn’t the Darwinian process select for reliable rational faculties, and so give us faculties that would produce true beliefs?

On this account evolution would produce a propensity for holding true beliefs solely as a coincidental by-product of the process of selecting for behaviors that are likely to increase the chances of surviving. There are several problems with this argument, however.

One is that it assumes as a matter of faith that a non-rational process like natural selection can produce the rational faculties exhibited in human reason. What justifies the belief that rationality can arise from the non-rational?

But the bigger difficulty, as Richards writes, is that:

....there are millions of beliefs, few of which are true in the sense that they correspond with reality, but all compatible with the same behavior. Natural selection could conceivably select for survival-enhancing behavior. But it has no tool for selecting only the behaviors caused by true beliefs, and weeding out all the others.

What Richards is getting at might be illustrated by a hypothetical example: Suppose two prehistoric tribes both encouraged the production of as many children as possible, but tribe A did so because they believed that the gods would reward those who produce many offspring with a wonderful afterlife.

Imagine also that tribe B had no belief in an afterlife but did believe that the more children one has the more likely some would survive to adulthood to care for the parents in their old age.

Natural selection would judge both of these tribes to be equally "fit" since the "goal" of evolution is to maximize reproductive success. Natural selection would only "see" the behavior, it would be blind to the beliefs that produced it. Thus, true beliefs would have no particular survival advantage over false beliefs, and cognitive faculties that produced true beliefs would not be any more likely to be selected for than faculties which produced false beliefs.

Richards concludes,

So if our reasoning faculties came about as most naturalists assume they have, then we have little reason to assume they are reliable in the sense of giving us true beliefs. And that applies to our belief that naturalism is true.

Put differently, the naturalist cannot rationally justify his belief in naturalism. He can only maintain his belief that naturalism is true by an act of blind faith.

Naturalism and Reason, Pt. I

One of the major difficulties with the naturalistic worldview is that it must explain how belief that naturalism is true is not self-refuting. For the purposes of this discussion naturalism, atheism, and materialism may all be considered synonyms. The argument which concludes that naturalism is self-refuting goes something like this:

On atheism there is no God. Thus, our reasoning powers must be the product of a purposeless evolutionary process that was geared to survival, not for discovering truth.

If that's the case, if we can't trust our reasoning powers to lead us to truth, especially the truth about metaphysical questions, then we have no grounds for believing that atheism is in fact true.

So, although atheism may be true, one cannot rationally believe that it is. This is ironic since most atheists argue that atheistic materialism is rational and theism is irrational, but, in fact, the opposite is actually the case.

Theism is a rational worldview since the belief that we are endowed with a trustworthy reasoning faculty which can reliably lead us to truth only makes sense if theism is true. Thus, the theist has grounds for believing that reason is trustworthy and is therefore rational in trusting his reason to lead him to truth, whereas the naturalist is irrational to believe that naturalism is true since she has no grounds for trusting her reason to lead her to truth.

Numerous naturalists have acknowledged in one way or another that this is a problem. To illustrate the point here's a baker's dozen of quotations culled from philosophers and scientists, the majority of whom, so far as I know, are atheistic materialists:

• "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Steven Pinker
• Evolution selects for survival and 'Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.' 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." John Gray
• "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." Francis Crick
• “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Charles Darwin
• “Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum
• “According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman
• "We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin
• “[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich
• “We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins
• “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.” Lisa Feldman Barrett
• “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” J.B.S. Haldane
• "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." C.S. Lewis

So how does the naturalist address this apparent difficulty? We'll look at the most popular counter argument in tomorrow's VP.

How Radical Is Kamala Harris?

When Kamala Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019 she was asked by the ACLU to fill out a questionnaire to indicate what sorts of policies she would support. That document had been largely unnoticed since then, but a CNN investigative team called KFile recently found it and the answers Ms. Harris gave on the questionnaire are sincerely stunning.

She believes for example in requiring taxpayers to pay for sex-change surgeries for illegal aliens and federal prisoners, cutting Immigration and Customs Enforcement funding, granting citizenship to eleven million illegal; immigrants, requiring insurance companies to pay for abortions, and much else.

Here's a list of what she supported five years ago:

• End private prisons and illegal alien detention facilities;
• "Support the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use";
• Slash detention in illegal alien detention facilities by at least 50% and halt funding for the construction of new facilities;
• End the use of ICE detainers;
• "Pass immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million-plus people living in our communities";
• Seek a federal moratorium on the death penalty;
• "Fight" to make Washington, D.C., a state;
• "Require states with a history of unconstitutionally restricting access to abortion to pre-clear any new law or practice with the Justice Department before it can be enacted";
• Repeal the Hyde Amendment and "ensure that all insurers are required to provide full reproductive healthcare services"; and
• Ensure that "federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained."

When Ms. Harris was asked recently by CNN's Dana Bash about several policy reversals - among other things, she had condemned the idea of a border wall when Trump proposed it but now claims to favor it, and also wanted to ban fracking but now claims to favor it - she insisted that her values had not changed. Presumably, then, she still holds the beliefs outlined in her reply to the ACLU questionnaire, she still opposes a border wall, and still opposes fracking for natural gas.

Add to these her desire to heavily tax unrealized capital gains and to allow the Trump tax cuts to expire, and her ideas are guaranteed to devastate our economy.

All the happy talk she utters at her public appearances won't change that.

Let's Roll

Among the many heroes who died on 9/11/2001, especially the first responders who rushed into the World Trade Towers to save lives and lost theirs when the buildings collapsed, some who stand out were not on the ground but in the air on Flight 93.

Mene Ukueberuwa has a short piece in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) describing the actions of one of the many American heroes on 9/11 twenty two years ago.

For those readers too young to remember, this particular man's name was Todd Beamer, a young man who embodied in his courage, toughness and faith all that is great in America today.

Beamer was aboard United Airlines Flight 93 enroute to California when it was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists. It crashed into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, following an attempt by the passengers and crew to regain control of the plane. All 44 people on board were killed, including the four hijackers.

The hijackers stormed the aircraft's cockpit 46 minutes after takeoff, and the captain and first officer fought with them. One of the terrorists, Ziad Jarrah, had trained as a pilot, and took control of the aircraft, diverting it toward the east coast, in the direction of Washington, D.C. The hijackers apparently intended to crash the plane into the Capitol Building or the White House.

Several passengers and flight attendants learned from phone calls that suicide attacks had already been made by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many of the passengers then attempted to retake the plane, and during the struggle the hijackers deliberately crashed the plane.

Ukueberuwa writes:

A 32-year-old software salesman for Oracle, Beamer was among the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who attacked the hijackers and prevented them from crashing the Boeing 757 into the U.S. Capitol. His rallying cry, “Let’s roll,” rests in America’s memory. It is exalting to think of what he and his fellow passengers did on that short flight, and the people they saved on the ground.

Beamer remained poised under extreme pressure. Many passengers made phone calls during the flight, but Beamer’s call with Airfone operator Lisa Jefferson became the fullest account of what took place in the air that day. He remained on the line for 14 minutes, describing the direction of the plane, the hijackers’ behavior and, eventually, the passengers’ decision to revolt.

“His voice was devoid of any stress,” Ms. Jefferson later said. “In fact, he sounded so tranquil it made me begin to doubt the authenticity and urgency of his call.”

Beamer was also physically confident, and courageous. As a student at Wheaton College in Illinois, he played baseball and captained the basketball team. In a memoir, Beamer’s wife Lisa relates that he once played a soccer game with a broken jaw.

Todd Beamer's wife and children with photo of Todd two weeks after 9/11

It’s fortunate that Beamer and the three other passengers who spearheaded the revolt — Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and Tom Burnett — were athletes. The hijackers pitched the plane back and forth sharply in a failed attempt to shake their attackers off their feet.

The cockpit recording, filled with slams, shattering plates, and howls, reveals that the terrorists took the plane down only after six minutes of the passengers’ sustained assault.

A strong Christian faith also carried Beamer toward his fate. Lisa recounts that their life together was founded on faith — at Wheaton, while rearing children, and teaching Sunday school at Princeton Alliance Church.

Before ending his call with Ms. Jefferson, Beamer asked, “Would you do one last thing for me?”

“Yes. What is it?” she answered.

“Would you pray with me?”

They said the Lord’s Prayer together in full, and other passengers joined in. Beamer then recited Psalm 23, concluding, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.” Immediately after, he turned to his co-conspirators and asked, “Are you guys ready? OK, let’s roll.”

They passengers apparently managed to kill one of the hijackers, but when they breached the cabin, or were about to, the hijackers decided to plunge the plane to earth.

You can read a full description of what happened on Flight 93 here.

A country that produces men like Beamer and those who fought alongside him is, despite the cavils of the whiny antifa types, still a great country.

PostModern Assumptions

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites.

Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes, but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent who perhaps works through natural processes, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.

Plato's Cave for Modern Man

As a follow-up to Saturday's post on Plato's Cave I'd like to share this version of Plato's allegory, one better suited, perhaps, to modern audiences:

Imagine that the year is 2030 and computer technology has advanced to the point where a sufficiently clever programmer (you, for example) can write software that would project beings onto the monitor's screen that can potentially evolve from very simple forms to highly complex structures capable, mirabile dictu, of rational thought.

One evening you download the software that confers upon these creatures this marvelous potential and sit back to watch what they'll do with it. Eventually, after much morphing and mutating, the creatures attain a level of mental ability at which they are capable of reflection, cognition, and language.

They begin to communicate among themselves, asking questions about their world and their existence. To them their world (we'll call it "screen world") is a three-dimensional space since, although they are confined to a flat screen, they think themselves, like characters on a movie screen, able to move in all directions.

You're very pleased with your creation. You're thrilled with the diversity of personalities that emerges among the creatures which you dub "screenies." You even find yourself growing fond of them.

As the night lengthens, you watch in rapt fascination as one of your screenies begins to think deeply about what exactly it (let's assume it's a "he") is. At first he explains himself in terms of shifting phosphor dots, but this, he realizes, is only a superficial level of explanation, and the screenie isn't satisfied with it. There must be a deeper understanding, a deeper level of reality, a reality that lies beyond the abilities you've programmed into the screenies to apprehend.

He and his fellows do some mathematical calculations and come to a breathtaking conclusion. The "ultimate" explanation for the population of creatures in screen world is a level of reality that they can never observe or visit, but which must exist. The equations demand it. They realize that there must be a whole set of complicated phenomena working to produce emanations from a multi-dimensional realm that somehow generates the relatively "flat" world they inhabit.

They do more calculations and come to an even more astonishing discovery. The mechanism that produces their world must be controlled by an even deeper level of phenomena: electrons, circuits, and microchips and who knows what all else.

Finally, awed by their findings, they realize that this whole theoretical edifice they've constructed must be run by an information source, a set of algorithms and codes, that exists somewhere but which is inaccessible to them.

Your creatures are very excited. They have plumbed the basic laws, parameters, forces and material constituents of their world. They don't know where these ultimate elements come from or how they came to be organized in the fashion they are, and indeed they're convinced that they can never know any of this for certain. They've taken their investigation as deep as it's possible for them to go, they believe.

Then these marvelous beings, which have really sprung from your creative genius, draw a disappointing philosophical conclusion. Having explained their existence in terms of the ultimate physical constituents and laws they've deduced from the phenomena of their experience, they conclude that they've pretty much explained all there is to be explained. Those circuits, microchips, electrical energy and even the software are all that's involved in generating them and their world.

It's an amazing thing, they agree, it's highly improbable, they acknowledge, but there you have it. There's no need to explain it any further, nor any way to explain it even if there were the need to. Unable to account for the world of microchips, codes and algorithms they simply accept it all as a brute fact. A given.

Screen world, to the extent that it's explicable, is explicable, they believe, solely in terms of the machinery in front of which you sit shaking your incredulous head. You're delighted that your creatures were able to reason their way so far toward the truth but dismayed that they lacked the wit to see that anything as fantastically complex as the laws and processes that generate their world cries out for even deeper levels of explanation.

Why, you wonder, don't the screenies realize that something as amazing as they and their world doesn't just happen through blind mechanistic forces and luck? Why don't they recognize that screen world demands an intelligent cause as its truly ultimate explanation?

You decide to tweak the program. You write the code for another being, one that is, perhaps, somewhat of a cyber-replica of yourself. He's your heart and soul, so to speak. You will, in a sense, visit screen world yourself through this "agent." He contains much of your knowledge about the reality beyond screen world, and when you download him into the computer up he pops on the screen.

You've programmed this agent to tell the rest of the screenies that their world, the world of the monitor and even the deeper world of the computer, is an infinitesimal fraction of the really real. By comparison it's next to nothing, a mere shadow of the world that exists beyond the screen.

Your agent proceeds to explain to them as best he can that they, contrary to their belief, actually inhabit only two dimensions and that all around them lies a third dimension that they could never perceive or comprehend but which nevertheless exists, and that even now you, their creator, are observing them from outside the screen in another world that they cannot begin to conceptualize, much less observe, from their "prison" within the screen.

Your agent reveals to them, moreover, that you inhabit a reality infinitely richer than screen world, an idea they unfortunately find wholly preposterous. He tells them that as wonderful and impressive as their discoveries about their world are they've really just scratched the surface of understanding the really real and that, indeed, they aren't actually "real" themselves at all. They're simply epiphenomenal electronic manifestations of ideas in your mind, a congeries of shifting dots of color on a flat screen. They're in fact nothing more than virtual beings.

They scoff at all this. They grow angry. They tell your agent to get lost, his message is confusing and misleading to the young and impeding progress toward the goal of making screen world a better place. They wish to hear no more of his insane, superstitious babblings. They are the "brights" in screen world, the intellectually gifted, and they will stick to science and leave his untestable metaphysical speculations to the priests and shamans among them.

When the agent persists in trying to persuade them that mere mechanical processes could never by themselves produce such complex creatures as screenies, that the algorithms and coordinated flows of energy and pattern in their world, as well as the material organization of the computer, must have been intelligently engineered, they sneer and refuse to allow him to speak such nonsense any further.

They reason among themselves that their existence may indeed be improbable, but what of it? Had their world not been the way it is they would not be there to observe it, so it's not so extraordinary after all. Some of them suggest that there are probably a near infinite number of different screen worlds, and that among so many it's not so astonishing that there'd be one possessing the exact properties that their screen world has and boasting of creatures like themselves.

You're surprised, and a little hurt, that the screenies react this way. You can't believe that having come so far they'd refuse to entertain the idea that there must be more to the origin of the information that infuses their world than just blind matter, brute force and random chance. But they're obstinate. They have all the explanation for their existence they care to have.

To be dependent upon unthinking processes is one thing - they're still superior, after all, to the processes and forces upon which they are contingent because they can think and those processes can't - but to be dependent upon a being, you, who is so thoroughly superior to them in every way is, they think, degrading.

So that they might be more appreciative of what you've created, you entertain briefly the idea of adjusting their software in such fashion as to make the conclusion that an intelligent programmer has created them ineluctable. You decide against it, however, when you realize that compelled appreciation is no appreciation at all.

And so, with a sad sigh of disappointment and resignation, you erase the program, terminate the screenies, shut down the computer and go to bed.

Plato's Cave

In his great work The Republic the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.) relates an allegory that is doubtless the most famous tale in all of Western philosophy and probably discussed in every introductory philosophy course.

In the allegory Plato invites us to imagine a cave in which prisoners have been chained since childhood. Behind them is a fire and between the fire and the prisoners there are men walking back and forth carrying burdens. The fire casts shadows of these men on a wall which the prisoners have all their lives been facing.

The prisoners see the shadows and hear the echoes of the men's voices and they mistakenly believe that these shadows and muffled echoes are reality. It is, after all, all they've ever known. They confer honors on each other for their ability to contrive clever interpretations of the shadows.

One prisoner, however, is released from his chains and dragged up and out of the cave where he beholds the world in the light of the sun. At first he can scarcely open his eyes, accustomed as they are to the darkness, but gradually he's able to see that a world that's infinitely richer than the world of the cave.

He won't believe his eyes but gradually he realizes that the world of the cave is all illusion, that the world he sees in the light of the sun is the true reality.

He would take pity on his comrades still chained in the cave. He would care nothing for the honors they value. He would count it all so much empty and meaningless chatter. All that would matter to him is the brilliance of the sun and the beauty and variety of the world.

He might even return to the cave to tell his fellows what he has seen, but they wouldn't believe him. They'd think he'd lost his senses, and if he tried to persuade them to join him outside the cave they may even kill him.

Plato's parable works on many different levels. For Plato the man who escapes the cave is the philosopher who escapes the realm of darkness and shadows and apprehends the world in the light of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. When the philosopher returns to the cave to seek to enlighten his fellow prisoners they refuse to listen to him and, perhaps like Socrates, he may even be put to death.

For Christians for two thousand years the cave represents the present world with its empty and meaningless pursuits and illusions. The sun is the absolute Good, Beautiful and True, i.e. God, and the world illuminated by this "Sun" is the really real.

When the "prisoner" seeks to persuade his fellows that they're wasting their lives debating about shadows when there's a beautiful, meaningful life awaiting them outside the cave, they often think he's gone insane, and, as has happened to hundreds of thousands of Christians throughout the last two millennia, they may even kill him.

Plato's allegory of the cave has endured for 2300 years because, whatever his original intent, it neatly captures a deep truth about reality and the human condition.

Does Evil Exist?

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 produced horrors that defy description. Serb soldiers raped Bosnian women and girls and butchered their men and even their babies by the tens of thousands. The record of their barbaric inhumanity is as hard to believe as it is to read, and is a sickening testament to the depravity that lies within the human psyche.

That so many men were capable of such cruelty is surely compelling evidence of human fallenness and the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece at the New English Review, a couple of years back offered some insight into the terrifying iniquity that plagues our world.

Francis reminds us that,

The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:

. . . All of us are his [God's] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.

When the crowd laugh at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it.

All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath. But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter.

All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on Naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!

Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?

The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:

. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.

Indeed there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them. An atheist like Leff has no grounds for believing that there is evil in the world. The most he can say is that there are behaviors he doesn't like.

The word "evil" has no meaning in a godless world other than as an expression of personal, subjective revulsion. Those who share Leff's unbelief have a choice. They can acknowledge that evil exists or they can continue in their atheism, but they can't do both.

Eliminative Materialism

When one embraces naturalism and the materialism which follows from it one is confronted with the problem posed by human consciousness. The existence of consciousness seems to support the view that our mental experiences are in part the product of an immaterial mind, but materialism has no room in its ontology for anything immaterial.

One materialist strategy for dealing with the problem is to deny the existence of consciousness altogether. This is called "eliminative materialism" and is the view promoted by the late Daniel Dennett who argued that what we call conscious experience is just an illusion generated by our material brains.

According to Dennett, what we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it’s all smoke, mirrors, and rapidly firing neurons…Our brains, pulling such tricks, are robots.

An article at Mind Matters elaborates. Here are few highlights: But it goes even further than that: if our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which are in turn made up of even smaller robots. So even if we lose the concept of consciousness along the way, we’re still pretty incredible “machines.” In Dennett’s scheme, the robots that form our minds have evolved via Darwinian evolution:

Dennett’s integration of popular evolution theory into his work appeals to many science writers, as this snippet from a BBC news item shows: From an evolutionary perspective, our ability to think is no different from our ability to digest, says Dennett. Both these biological activities can be explained by Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, often described as the survival of the fittest. We evolved from uncomprehending bacteria. Our minds, with all their remarkable talents, are the result of endless biological experiments. Our genius is not God-given. It’s the result of millions of years of trial and error.

Yet each of these claims is false as is explained at the link, and you'll find much more there critical of the materialist point of view.

Now, you might wonder how it matters whether we have an immaterial mind or not. What difference does it make? Well, ideas have consequences. Here are five or so consequences that follow if materialism is true:

1. It makes it harder to believe that there is a God or immaterial spiritual beings in general.
2. It makes it harder to believe that there's anything about us that survives the death of our material bodies.
3. It makes it harder to believe that we have free will since matter is completely subject to the laws of physics which are deterministic.
4. It makes it harder to believe that there's anything like human dignity (since on materialism there's probably no God in whose image we are) or human rights (since on materialism there's probably no God to grant them) or objective moral rights and wrongs (since on materialism there's probably no God whose mature serves as the standard for objective morality and who has the power to hold us ultimately accountable).
5. It makes it harder to believe that we are the same self that we were ten years ago since nothing material stays the same over time.

If a materialist's worldview encompasses any of these beliefs then there's a serious intellectual tension at play that insists upon some kind of resolution. The materialist must, if he or she is rational, give up the belief or give up materialism.

Many people, however, do neither, preferring instead to live with the unresolved tension and simply choosing not to think about it, pretending it doesn't exist.

The Ukraine/Russia War

Let's look at what's happening right now in the Ukraine/Russia war according to Strategy Page. Here some high points from a longer article:

In early August 2024, Ukraine sent several thousand troops and hundreds of vehicles into Russia. This incursion into the Kursk region, which borders northern Ukraine, was meant to demonstrate, especially to the Russian people, how weak the Russian military had become.

The Russian military was very slow in reacting and after eleven days, the Ukrainians managed to seize 1,150 square kilometers of Russian territory with 82 towns and villages. This included the town of Sudzha. Russian leaders promise to halt the Ukrainian offensive and push them out, but that has not happened yet and may never happen. Russia is losing the war that it started in early 2022 by invading Ukraine.

The Russians are trying to mount an offensive in eastern Ukraine but the cost in casualties for every few yards of territory gained is enormously high:

Since early 2022, Russian forces have suffered nearly half a million soldiers killed, wounded or missing. A growing number of Russian troops are surrendering to the Ukrainian forces. Morale among Russian troops is low and getting worse while the Ukrainians have lost far fewer troops since 2022, and many Ukrainian soldiers have been in action for over two years and are far more experienced and better trained than their Russian counterparts.

Captured Russian soldiers are surprised at how well off the Ukrainian troops are and how well they treat the Russian prisoners. The Ukrainians observe the Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of prisoners, including allowing prisoners to let their families know they are safe and well. Russia tries to prevent Ukraine from notifying families of prisoners, but in the age of widespread internet use, it’s impossible to block all of those messages.

Not only are Russian troops demoralized, so is the citizenry, but there's not much either can do about the situation as long as Putin holds power:

Over two years of this have demoralized Russian military age men to the point where Russia cannot recruit many Russians to serve in Ukraine. Increasingly, Russia is trying to hire foreign mercenaries, or pay very high cash bonuses to reluctant Russians to fight in Ukraine. Neither is working. The sustained support Ukraine has provided for its forces is in sharp contrast to the dearth of support for Russian troops.

Inside Russia, business and political leaders are openly and privately calling on their President Vladimir Putin to get out of Ukraine and get the Russian economy free of the crippling sanctions.

The pressure on Putin is now very visible but he still refuses to quit. That has led to more rumors from inside Russia that Putin’s political, economic and military advisers are urging their president to back down before the situation inside Russia gets out of control.

The Russian tyrant probably has an entire staff of food tasters and not a few body doubles. No doubt he needs them.

Conflict of Worldviews

A couple of generations ago the culture in the United States was predominately Christian even if many people in the culture were not themselves Christian. Times have changed. Today the culture is predominately secular. In today's culture people have two major worldview options. That is, there are two major sets of assumptions people hold that help them interpret both life and the world, theism and naturalism.

In a secular culture most people, either consciously or unconsciously, embrace naturalism. Naturalism is the belief that the natural world is all there is, there is no supernatural, no God, no soul, no immaterial substances, nothing that cannot be analyzed by science.

Now, if we're naturalists it's very likely that we're also materialists, that is, we believe that everything in the universe, including human beings, reduces to material stuff and energy. There's nothing that's not physical.

But there's a serious problem here. If we are materialists there's no room in our worldview for free will, mind, reason, or objective moral values.

If we're materialists we believe that everything that happens in our brains is the product of non-rational chemical reactions. These reactions are the product of environmental influences that have acted on us all our lives or they're the product of the chemistry of the genes we've inherited from our ancestors. In any case, they determine the choices we make. There's no such thing as a free choice. The laws of chemistry operating in our material brains determine everything we do. On materialism, we're flesh and bone automatons.

Moreover, if we're materialists we believe that our reasoning process is merely the result of the movement of atoms in the brain, but the collisions of atoms are not something that can be true or false. Our reason has evolved to aid in the survival of the species, not to find truth. If truth helps the species to survive that's just a happy coincidence, it's just as likely that error would have survival value. Almost every other species on the planet has survived for eons, after all, without the benefit of a reason that leads to truth.

Since materialism holds that we have no rational mind, just electro-chemical reactions in our brains, it can give us no basis for trusting those reactions to produce truth and thus no basis for trusting what we call reason.

Finally, if we're materialists we have no basis for believing that some behaviors are objectively wrong in a moral sense. Why, for example, is cruelty wrong? If naturalism is true, the most we can say is that the society we live in disapproves of cruelty, but why is that a reason why someone should not be cruel, especially if they can get away with it? Suppose a society approves of genocide, infant sacrifice, torturing children, slavery, or rape, would that make those things right?

On naturalism the term "morally wrong" means nothing more than that which society disfavors but then it doesn't really mean anything at all, unless one has a deep desire to conform one's behavior to societal expectations. It's simply nonsensical for a naturalistic materialist to make any moral judgments of anyone's behavior. On naturalism, the word "wrong," when used in a moral sense, can only mean something of which the speaker disapproves.

The difficulty is that most people, even if they're naturalistic materialists, believe they have free will, or at least live as if they believed it. Most naturalistic materialists live as if they believe that they have a mind, that their reason is a trustworthy guide to truth, and that some things are objectively and profoundly evil. Yet none of these beliefs are consistent with naturalistic materialism.

So, if our worldview leads to conclusions that we can't consistently live with then, if we're a rational person, we should trade in our worldview for one that allows us to live consistently within it.

The best alternative to naturalism is theism, specifically Judeo-Christian theism, the belief that there is a personal, supremely rational and good being who created us and endowed us with free will, reliable rationality, and whose nature serves as the objective standard of moral right and wrong.

Indeed, it's very difficult to live consistently with any other set of assumptions.

Against Raising the Minimum Wage

Note: This post is a rerun of one originally written just before the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry, but it's still relevant today:

On Labor Day perhaps it's appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Davidson noted that,

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of them, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.