Calling Half the Country "Garbage"

Donald Trump's rhetoric is often coarse, insulting, and indefensible. His opponents have seized on it as perhaps the main reason, along with abortion rights, voters should elect Democrats in 2024. Yet, when it comes to insults and disgusting rhetoric the Democrats play a pretty good game themselves.

Barack Obama demeaned conservatives by referring to them as "bitter clingers," clinging to their guns and Bibles. Hillary Clinton displayed her contempt for many Trump supporters by calling them "deplorables" and declaring them "irredeemable." Now President Biden has said what a lot of Democrats evidently believe by labeling Trump supporters "garbage."

“Donald Trump has no character," quoth the president. "He doesn't give a damn about the Latino community…just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage?…The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

You can watch the man who once promised to bring us all together deliver himself of this assessment here:

The Democrats, including both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, have been calling Trump and anyone who thinks he'd make a better president than Harris "fascists" and "Nazis" for a couple of weeks now, and President Biden's outburst fits right in with this view of their political opponents.

Their rhetoric is incendiary, hateful, and irresponsible. If one's opponents are Nazis and garbage then it's a logical next step to think that one is justified in using violence against them to prevent them from achieving political power.

It's certainly rational, given the pervasive moral relativism of our age, to believe that one is justified in engaging in electoral hanky-panky to keep the garbage out of the White House.

As the campaign winds to a close we can only hope and pray that the whackos out there choose not to take the Democrats' logic to either of those next steps.

What's Wrong with Evangelicals Who Support Trump?

In the wake of the 2016 election in which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton historian John Fea, an evangelical Christian, wrote a book in which he criticized his fellow evangelicals for supporting Trump. Aside from the fact that the Democratic candidate today is Kamala Harris and not Hillary Clinton, much of his critique is being repeated among liberal evangelicals today so I thought I'd rerun my response to Fea's book here:

Historian John Fea has written a book titled Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump in which he seeks to understand why so many people who call themselves evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump and at the same time chastise them for doing so.

Fea is himself an evangelical Christian who teaches at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, but he's "shocked", "saddened", "frustrated" and "angry" that 81% of his fellow Evangelicals pulled the lever for a man whose moral character should've disqualified him among voters who believe that the nation's leaders should be above reproach.

Fea is rightly critical of Christian "leaders" who, in one way or another, sought during the campaign to excuse Mr. Trump's well-documented prevarications, debaucheries, and vulgarities. He also offers some interesting, although perhaps not entirely relevant, historical insight into the oft misunderstood role of Christianity in the nation's founding, as well as the sometimes embarrassing relationship between Christian leaders and the White House.

In assessing the book these can all be set on the positive side of the ledger. On the negative side, unfortunately, there's much in Fea's book that I think is unfair to those in the 81% who, distressed by the choice between two very flawed candidates, chose to vote for the one whose political promises most closely aligned with their own hopes.

On page 73 he relates an incident in which a lady approached him after a lecture on this topic and said that she herself was a member of the 81% and she wanted Fea to tell her, given what we knew about the moral shortcomings of both candidates, how an evangelical could select between them if character was to be the deciding factor.

This was, I think, the salient question facing many Christians in November of 2016, and for reasons I elaborated upon in a couple of posts written around the 2016 election (See here and here), many saw the moral issue as a wash and chose instead to cast their ballot for the candidate whose policies were, if implemented, most likely to lead the nation out of the morass, both social and economic, it had fallen into during the previous decade.

Fea seems to recognize this motivation but chose to give it little attention, perhaps because he doesn't believe it's the chief reason why so many evangelicals lent their support to Trump. He may be right about that, but to lump those for whom it was a major consideration with those for whom it wasn't strikes me as somewhat simplistic and unfair.

In any case, he writes on page 7 of the Introduction that:

For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain that 81%.

In succeeding chapters he unpacks these three ideas in a way that sometimes makes them seem ignoble or unseemly motivators for Christian action. He suggests, for example that fear - of change, of the future - belies a lack of trust in God's providential control over the doings of men. "Fear," he quotes author Marilynne Robinson, "is not a Christian habit of mind."

Be it as it may that fear shouldn't be a mental habit, it's nevertheless difficult to agree with Fea that fear, in the sense I understand him to be using the word, is always an unbecoming motive for a Christian or an indicator of a lack of trust in God. In fact, I suspect, that Fea doesn't think this either.

After all, he himself must've been fearful - fearful for the future of the country - when he realized on election night that Trump was going to prevail. Otherwise, why be frustrated and angry with the 81% of evangelicals who voted for the president-elect? In fact, why else write such an impassioned book if not motivated by fear for what Christian support for Trump was doing to the church's witness?

Fea says that fear has no place in the life of one who trusts God, but if he truly believes that then when he realized on election night that Trump was winning why did he not just trust that this was God's will and that He had everything under control? Why get angry with those Christians who gave Trump his victory? There seems to me a dissonance between his standard for the 81% and his own reaction to Trump's election.

Fear, though it shouldn't control us, is nevertheless a perfectly reasonable and appropriate response to certain threats. The question is whether a particular threat or set of threats justify a fearful response. The 81% saw the threats posed by liberal progressivism, some of which Fea himself agrees are ominous, as ample justification for their fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Fea disagrees, though, that the threat reached a sufficiently high level of seriousness to warrant support for Trump, but he doesn't satisfactorily explain why a Clinton presidency should not arouse fear among Christians while the threats he believes to be posed by a Trump presidency should.

Fea strongly and, to a large extent, rightly criticizes Christians for aspiring to positions of power within the current administration. This aspiration can certainly be both disreputable and dangerous. It has seduced some evangelical "leaders" into excusing or rationalizing some of Mr. Trump's egregious behavior, behavior that should never be excused and which was rightly and roundly condemned by these same "court evangelicals," as Fea aptly labels them, when similarly engaged in by President Clinton.

In pointing out this hypocrisy Fea is excellent, but his analysis of "power seeking" when applied to the broader mass of the 81% is vague, and his use of the word "power," at least when applied to the hopes of the majority of Christian Trump voters, is unfair and gratuitously pejorative. "Influence" would've been a more charitable word choice, I think.

In other words, setting aside the court evangelicals - the handful of prominent leaders who have in some cases sold their souls for a mess of pottage - the average evangelical voter, like everyone else, hoped to gain some influence over the policies issuing forth from Washington, and surely there's nothing dishonorable with wanting to influence today's leaders, any more than there's anything dishonorable with wanting to teach history and write books to influence tomorrow's leaders.

Indeed, if the desire for influence is somehow nefarious then no Christian should ever run for political office, but surely Fea would not endorse such a principle.

The Trumpian slogan "Make America Great Again" is Fea's springboard for his critique of evangelical nostalgia. He focuses on the word "again" and rightly points out that any past era to which one directs one's gaze may have been "great" for some but not so great for others. As much as whites might pine for the "good old days" of the fifties, Fea observes, most African Americans would not be particularly nostalgic for those years, nor wish to return to them.

True enough, but I think this misses the point. It's not a particular era to which anyone wants to return in toto, it's rather particular qualities of the past that many, both blacks and whites, would like to recover while retaining the best of the present.

For instance, there was a time, prior to the 1960s, when for both blacks and whites families were stronger, neighborhoods were more secure and more communal, drugs were a much less serious problem, public education (even in segregated schools) was in many ways better, movies and music were less coarse and vulgar, babies in the womb were safer, the economy was sound, and religious liberty was not under assault.

When candidate Trump spoke of making America great again a lot of evangelicals reflected on how far we'd strayed from this historical reality and saw in Trump a hope that we might get some of it back. To suggest that MAGA was a "dog whistle" or "code" for reinstituting Jim Crow or undoing all the salutary social progress that's been made in America over the last fifty years, as some of Trump's critics have done, is simply specious and unfair.

Finally, Fea approvingly cites University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter's call for Christians to refrain from becoming activists in the culture war. In his introduction, he writes that, "Christians were never meant to change this world; instead they are called to .... [be] a 'faithful presence' in their local communities and neighborhoods."

This sounds a lot like a veiled call to Christians to surrender meekly to the forces of cultural decay and degeneration sweeping over our society. I wonder whether Fea would've urged William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect to abstain from fighting for the abolition of slavery, or for Martin Luther King and others in the American civil rights movement to have declined to fight for the right to vote for politicians who would advance the cause of racial justice, or for Christians today who fight on behalf of immigration reform or environmental causes to desist from their protests and political efforts.

I doubt it, but surely these are all as much cultural issues as are abortion, pornography and gay marriage.

I'm quite sure that Christians who campaigned for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not seen by Professor Fea as doing anything untoward. Why is it that it's only when Christians involve themselves in what are seen as conservative political or social issues that they're accused of bringing disrepute to the name of Christ? Why is it only conservative Christians who are called upon to be conscientious objectors in the culture wars?

Fea argues that had evangelical Christians spent as much money on simply being a faithful witness for the sanctity of human life rather than dirtying themselves in the political mud pit by seeking to elect politicians who would overturn Roe they'd be a lot more effective and compelling ambassadors for Christ, but this is a false alternative. There's no reason Christians shouldn't do both, and indeed they are doing both.

There's nothing wrong with Christians working to overturn unjust laws and to scrub some of the social toxins from our culture, but, to be sure, this is a task that must be undertaken as irenically and with as much integrity, civility, and winsomeness as possible.

If the world remains nonetheless repelled by such activism and advocacy then that's the world's problem, not the church's. So, too, was the world repelled by the ancient prophets.

Prager on the Irrationality of Secularism (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post addressed a number of reasons why Dennis Prager believes that it's not religious people who are irrational but rather secular folks who have the better claim to that dubious distinction.

Today we'll look at some other examples he gives in his article on the topic at The Daily Signal where he focuses on some of the bizarre deliverances of the Stanford University administration. He writes:

Stanford University, a thoroughly secular institution, ... released an “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” It informs all Stanford faculty and students of “harmful” words they should avoid and the words that should replace them. Some examples:

Stanford asks its students and faculty not to call themselves “American.” Rather, they should call themselves a “U.S. citizen.” Why? Because citizens of other countries in North America and South America might be offended.

Stanford asks its faculty and students not to use the term “blind study.” Why? Because it “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Instead, Stanford faculty and students should say “masked study.”

Two questions: Is Stanford’s claim that being blind is not a disability rational or irrational? And what percentage of those who make this claim are secular?

The list of irrational (and immoral) things secular people believe—and religious people do not believe—is very long. As a quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton puts it: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

Furthermore, it's not just that the beliefs held by secular folks about their religious fellow citizens are irrational - they're often false. The belief that religious people (primarily Christians) have been uniquely murderous throughout history is a good example. Prager points out that in the last century alone 100 million people were murdered by atheistic regimes.

He makes an important, and ultimately amusing, observation when he notes that "the religious beliefs that most people call 'irrational' are not irrational; they are unprovable." He gives an example:

[The] beliefs that there is a transcendent Creator and that this Creator is the source of our rights are not irrational; they are unprovable. Atheism — the belief that everything came from nothing — is considerably more irrational than theism.

[Moreover] human beings are programmed to believe in the non-rational. Love is often non-rational — love of our children, romantic love, love of music and art, love of a pet. Our willingness to engage in self-sacrifice for another is often non-rational — from the sacrifices children make for parents and parents for children to the sacrifices made by non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

What good religion does is provide its adherents with a moral, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually deep way to express the non-rational. Therefore, they can remain rational everywhere outside religion. The secular, having no religion within which to innocuously express the non-rational, often end up doing so elsewhere in life.

So only the religious believe that “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” but they do not believe that men give birth.

Meanwhile, the irreligious don’t believe that “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” but only they believe that men give birth.

Prager on the Irrationality of Secularism (Pt. I)

Dennis Prager writes that the "secular axiom" that "secular people are rooted in reason, whereas religion and the religious are rooted in irrationality" is absurd.Despite the fact that "this is what almost every college professor believes and what almost every student in America is taught," it's simply not true.

Prager adds that,

Among the intelligentsia, it is an unquestioned fact. It helps explain why, after their first or second year at college, many children return to their religious homes alienated from, and frequently contemptuous of, the religion of their parents—and often of the parents themselves.

The truth is that today, the secular have a virtual monopoly on irrational beliefs...Here are but a few:

Only secular people believe “men give birth.”

Only secular people believe that males — providing, of course, that they say they are females — should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.

Only secular people believe that a young girl who says she is a boy or a young boy who says he is a girl should be given puberty-blocking hormones.

Only secular people believe that girls who say they are boys should have their healthy breasts surgically cut off.

Only secular people believe it is good to have men in drag dance (often provocatively) in front of 5-year-olds.

Only secular people agree with Disney’s dropping use of the words “boys and girls” at Disneyland and Disney World.

Only secular people believe that “to be colorblind is to be racist.” That is what is taught at nearly all secular (and religious-in-name-only) colleges in America today.

Only secular people believe that fewer police, fewer prosecutions, and lower prison sentences (or no prison time at all) lead to less crime.

Far more secular Americans than religious Americans believed that the Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins needed to change their names because “Indians” and “Redskins” were racist—despite the fact that most Native Americans didn’t even think so.

Who was more likely, secular or religious Americans, to support keeping children out of schools for two years; forcibly masking 2-year-olds on airplanes; and firing unvaccinated police officers, airplane pilots, and members of the military?

How many Western supporters of Josef Stalin — the tyrant who murdered about 30 million people — were irreligious, and how many were religious?

I think Prager is exagerrating a bit when he uses the word "only," but he'd doubtless be correct if he said that the overwhelming majority of those who hold to the views he lists are secular. In any case, there's more from Prager's column that's worth repeating so we'll look at the rest of it tomorrow.

Free Will and Libet's Experiment

This post is from the archive but is relevant to a topic we're discussing, or soon will be discussing, in class:

Students of psychology, philosophy and other disciplines which touch upon the operations of the mind and the question of free will have probably heard of the experiments of Benjamin Libet, a University of California at San Francisco neurobiologist who conducted some remarkable research into the brain and human consciousness in the last decades of the 20th century.

One of Libet's most famous discoveries was that the brain "decides" on a particular choice milliseconds before we ourselves are conscious of deciding. The brain creates an electrochemical "Readiness Potential" (RP) that precedes by milliseconds the conscious decision to do something.

This has been seized upon by determinists who use it as proof that our decisions are not really chosen by us but are rather the unconscious product of our brain's neurochemistry. The decision is made before we're even aware of what's going on, they claim, and this fact undermines the notion that we have free will as this video explains:

Michael Egnor, at ENV, points out, however, that so far from supporting determinism, Libet himself believed in free will, his research supported that belief, and, what's more, his research also reinforced, in Libet's own words, classical religious views of sin.

Libet discovered that the decision to do X is indeed pre-conscious, but he also found that the decision to do X can be consciously vetoed by us and that no RP precedes that veto.

In other words, the decision of the brain to act in a particular way may be determined by unconscious factors, but we retain the ability to consciously (freely) choose not to follow through with that decision. Our freedom lies in our ability to refuse any or all of the choices our brain presents to us. Or, we might say, free will is really "free won't."

Egnor's article is a fascinating piece if you're interested in the question of free will and Libet's contribution to our understanding of it.

Attacking Determinism's First Premise

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.

Bad Promises

John Stossel interviews economist Allison Schrager concerning the economic promises made by both presidential candidates. Ms. Schrager finds much not to like in the promises of both. Stossel writes:

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris keep making new promises. Trump fans applauded when he said he'll eliminate taxes on tips. Then Harris proposed that, too. Her audience applauded. Trump then proposed not taxing overtime. More applause.

But narrow tax exemptions are bad policy. Economist Allison Schrager explains how they create nasty, unintended consequences. "No one likes tipping," says Schrager, "but all of a sudden, you'll have to pay tips for everything. ... More people will be paid in tips."

I want lower taxes, but awarding specific exemptions to certain people doesn't just let some of us keep more of our money, it tells workers and employers to change their behavior.

"If you're a restaurant owner, you need chefs, hostesses, managers," says Schrager. "All of a sudden, one group of your employees isn't paying taxes, and the rest are. Suddenly, it would be very hard to hire anyone who's not a server."

Likewise, Trump's proposal to eliminate tax on overtime would reduce hiring. "Employers may hire fewer people so they can give more overtime to employees they have already," says Schrager.

Harris promises to put a cap on rents. It sounds attractive to renters but everywhere it's been tried it has resulted in a scarcity of available housing:

[Harris] says she will "take on landlords that unfairly raise rent on working families." Just "working families"? Will she allow landlords to raise rents on non-working families? I hate the poll-tested jargon. Her supporters praise her promise, but rent control is destructive. "Sounds really good," says Schrager. "But all it means is that people are less inclined to rent to you."

"Why would you enter a market where it seems like the government is actively trying to hurt you?" Adds Mercatus Center economist Salim Furth. "You're providing an essential service, something human beings need to live, and the government views you as a hostile outsider. I wouldn't want to bring any service into a market like that."

Argentina's new libertarian president just scrapped rent controls. The supply of rental apartments doubled, and prices declined by 40%! That's good policy. But Harris proposes the opposite!

What about Harris' idea to give first-time homebuyers $25,000?

Schrager explains, "free" money from government doesn't increase the supply of homes. When every buyer has $25,000 more, "they just bid up prices even higher!"

There's more at the link. It's a very unfortunate fact about our politics that it's much easier to get elected if you promise people freebies. It's economically irresponsible, but if your opponent is offering free stuff and you're campaigning on fiscal responsibility, relatively few voters will find your scrupulosity attractive.

Why Young People Don't Vote

I was listening the other day to the host of a local talk show discussing with some college kids the lack of interest in politics among young people and why the young are so unlikely to vote.

The host thought that youthful apathy was a shame, but I didn't see what the problem was.

Why should young people care about politics? Most people become interested in the process when they start paying taxes, owning property, raising families, and serving in the military.

It's when they become invested in society and start thinking seriously about their future that they begin to see the importance of the ideas which will determine that future. Until then they're much too preoccupied with their studies, sports, and the opposite sex to spend the time it requires to learn about what's going on in the political arena.

The problem, in my opinion, is not that young people don't care about politics. That's normal.

Nor is it a problem that they don't vote. Those who don't keep abreast of the affairs of state are doing the right thing by not voting.

The problem is that our politicians, in an attempt to exploit the ignorance of the young for their own political gain, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1971 thereby enfranchising a demographic group which is very unlikely to go to the voting booth with an informed opinion on whom they should vote for.

It does not enhance democracy to have an electorate consisting of large numbers of uninformed voters. It's bad enough that many people over 21 really have no well-thought out idea why they're voting for the person they are, but it makes the problem worse when we add to their number by encouraging 18 year-olds to join them.

While we're on the subject here's a voluntary voter disqualification test. If you can't get at least ten answers correct perhaps you should consider recusing yourself from voting while you bone up. Answers below:

1. Which political party is most likely to lower taxes?
2. Which political party is most likely to appoint judges who will rule on matters of law according to what the Constitution says?
3. Which political party is most likely to scale back spending on national defense?
4. Which political party looks most favorably on a woman's right to choose, gender surgery on minors, and the secularization of society?
5. Which political party is most likely to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S.?
6. Which political party is most likely to favor measures which will make us a "color-blind" society?
7. Who is the current Secretary of State? Vice-President?
8. Which party currently controls the House of Representatives?
9. Which party currently controls the Senate?
10. Who is the current Speaker of the House? Senate Majority Leader?
11. Who is the current Chief Justice of the United States?
12. Which party favors policies which would increase the supply of oil?
13. Which party is more likely to reduce regulations on businesses?

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Answers:

1. Republican
2. Republican
3. Democrat
4. Democrat
5. Republican
6. Republican
7. Anthony Blinken, Kamala Harris
8. Republican
9. Democrat
10. Mike Johnson, Charles Schumer
11. John Roberts
12. Republican
13. Republican

How'd you do?

Our Amazing Universe

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

Here's another example courtesy of biologist Ann Gauger. Gauger quotes philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon who writes that,

[I]f we measure the width of the observable universe in inches and regard this as representing the scale of the strengths of the physical forces, gravity is fine-tuned to such an extent that the possibility of intelligent life can only tolerate an increase or decrease in its strength of one one-hundred-millionth of an inch with respect to the diameter of the observable universe.

To which Gauger responds,

That is literally awesome. That 1/10^8 inch movement is the same as 0.00000001 of an inch, or about the width of a water molecule, in either direction compared to the width of the observable universe. That is an incredible amount of very fine-tuned order — the relationship between the strong nuclear force and the gravitational force has to be that precise for stars and planets to form, and the elements that are necessary to support life.

Just one water molecule’s width compared to the width of the whole universe — if the ratio were just a little too little, stars’s lives would be cut short and there would be no time for life to develop; too much and everything would expand too fast, thus preventing star and planet formation.

No wonder fine-tuning is called one of the best evidences for intelligent design. People have proposed ways around the challenge, mainly to do with the multiverse hypothesis. But there are so many other instances of fine-tuning and design perfect for creatures like us that it begins to look like a genuine plan.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Gauger refers to the assumption held by some that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must inevitably exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many moderns choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are quite remarkable.

The Most Technologically Sophisticated Place on Earth

How does technology develop? Everywhere we find it it's the product of intelligent minds. It's never the product of blind luck and mindless, physical forces.

The philosopher David Hume (d.1776) used to be frequently quoted by naturalists when, in arguing against belief in miracles, he said that the uniform experience of humanity amounts to a proof, that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable, and that we should always give preference to those explanations which are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Hume and other naturalists throughout the 20th century thought this was a knockdown argument against miracles since, they believed, there was a uniform experience against any event that violated the laws of nature. The laws of physics were never violated therefore miracles were impossible.

Set aside the flaws in this reasoning for now and let's accept the premise that a uniform experience of humanity counts at least as powerful evidence. If so, and if it's our uniform experience that technological innovation is always the product of intelligent, rational minds with the capacity for intention, purpose, foresight and conceptualizing a goal, then we must conclude that the technology we find in living things is almost certainly the product of such a mind.

This, however, is a conclusion anathema to the naturalist who believes that material nature is all there is and that no mind was involved in the creation of life. Since, however, the most technologically advanced structures in the world are found in living things, specifically in every cell in our bodies, and because Hume's argument leads to the unpleasant conclusion that living things must therefore be the work of an engineering genius, his argument has fallen into desuetude among many of its former enthusiasts.

The following fascinating 12 minute video gives insight into just why the cell is in fact a technological marvel. If we have a uniform experience of technology being produced by intelligent agents and never otherwise then what do we make of this:

Information and Life

Materialist scientists and philosophers have long held that the fundamental substance that makes up everything in the universe is matter - protons, neutrons, and electrons. That view, however, seems to be giving way among a significant number of thinkers to the view that even more fundamental than matter is information.

Everything, these philosophers and scientists assert, can be reduced to bits of data. But if this is so then the question arises how information can come to exist unless there are minds to create it and apprehend it.

This fascinating 17 minute video gives insight into the problem as it pertains to living things. The information required to form every structure in the body is enormous, but the video highlights the development of bones. It's astonishing.

At the end of the video the narrator, Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe, asks the obvious question - how did so much information get incorporated into every living thing? There are only two possibilities, lucky chance or the product of an intelligent mind. Watch the video and ask yourself which alternative seems to you to be the most plausible.

In the Middle of the Night

A recent survey of British millennials found that a shocking 89% of them believe their lives are meaningless.

Reading that depressing statistic I was reminded of a piece writer James Wood did for the New Yorker a number of years ago which the magazine titled Is That All There Is? The book he reviewed attempted to counter the nagging angst among thoughtful atheists (Wood himself is one) occasioned by the realization that their lives are meaningless and that they're headed for eternal oblivion.

Wood opens with this:

I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life — beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward — is cosmically irrelevant?”

In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts.

....as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night.

The book is titled The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now edited by a scholar named George Levine. Wood explains that,

[T]he book’s aim is to “explore the idea that secularism is a positive, not a negative, condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”

Wood focuses on the book's first essay, written by Columbia philosopher Philip Kitcher, in which Kitcher argues that a theistic worldview founders on a couple of philosophical reefs. If I can summarize Wood's summary, Kitcher argues that two of theism's strongest claims are false.

First, Kitcher believes that the claim that God is necessary for there to be objective moral value and duties is refuted by Socrates' response to this claim from an interlocutor named Euthyphro. This has come to be known as the "Euthyphro Dilemma" and goes like this:

If an act is good because God commands it then cruelty would be good if God commanded it. If, on the other hand, God commands certain acts because they are good, then goodness is independent of God and we don't need God in order to do what's good.

It's surprising to me that this argument still finds employment in contemporary atheistic writings, having been long ago adequately answered by theistic philosophers.

Very quickly, the reason why any act is good and willed by God is because it conforms to God's essential nature. He is Himself perfect goodness. The more closely an act conforms to the ideal the better it is, just as the quality of a photocopy depends on how closely it reproduces the original.

An act, then, is morally better the more closely it conforms to the nature of God whose nature consists, inter alia, of compassion, mercy and justice.

Thus goodness is neither independent of God nor arbitrarily willed by God, but rather emerges from His being somewhat like light and heat flow from the sun. If God did not exist there would be no objective moral good.

The second claim that Kitcher believes to be in error is that theism (Wood uses the word religion, but I think theism is a better word choice for what he's trying to say) is no better at putting meaning into life than is secularism. In other words, it may be true that life is a pretty bleak business if atheism is true, but God's existence doesn't help matters.

I think this is patently false. Imagine a man imprisoned in a slave labor camp sent out every day to dig ditches. He's told by the authorities that his work is necessary, although any prisoner can do it, and that not only will he never be released, but when he can no longer perform the work he will be executed.

Another prisoner is given the same tasks but told that if he performs them well he will be released and given all the amenities of a comfortable life. Do you suppose both lives will seem equally significant to the prisoners?

The first prisoner will constantly be wondering, "How does anything I do really matter? Isn't it all pointless and absurd?" But those questions might scarcely occur to the second prisoner who sees his labor as the means to something much greater.

The skeptic might reply that the promise to the second prisoner of eventual release is false. In real life everybody dies in the prison.

Perhaps, but the skeptic doesn't know that. We do know, though, that unless the promise is true there really is no hope and no meaning to either prisoners' toil.

In other words, our human existence can only have genuine meaning if we are created and loved by God and destined to an existence beyond this one. On that point, it seems, Wood might agree. He closes with this:

Thomas Nagel [once] wrote a shrewd essay entitled “The Absurd,” in which he argued that, just as we can “step back from the purposes of individual life and doubt their point, we can step back also from the progress of human history, or of science, or the success of a society, or the kingdom, power, and glory of God, and put all these things into question in the same way.”

Secularism can seem as meaningless as religion when such doubt strikes. Nagel went on to conclude, calmly, that we shouldn’t worry too much, because if, under the eye of eternity, nothing matters “then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.”

This is impeccably logical, and impishly offers a kind of secular deconstruction of secularism, but it is fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

In thoroughly secular England it seems that young adults are discovering the hard way that the materialism proffered by a secular society is indeed fairly cold comfort in the middle of the night.

Critical Race Theory

The following was originally posted a couple of years ago, but because the topic has become prominent in this election season, I thought it might be helpful to repost it: News reports from around the country have revealed a great deal of discontent among parents with their local school board members who've introduced Critical Race Theory into their children's curricula. A number of defenders of CRT, like MSNBC's Joy Reid, have insisted that the objectors who criticize its implementation in schools and businesses don't really know what it is.

She and others of her progressive ideological leanings would have us believe that CRT is just a benign attempt to educate students about the history of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. It is that, of course, but it's much more than that.

CRT, its own advocates have written, seeks to radically revolutionize America in the name of ending "oppression." It rejects the values of the earlier Civil Rights movement such as the belief that people can, or should, strive to be "color-blind." Race is paramount. To not consider race in any interaction is an instance of "white supremacy."

CRT also repudiates racial integration because, proponents argue, it leads to "cultural genocide" as the minority group is inevitably absorbed into, and assimilated by, the dominant (white) group.

It rejects classical liberalism and the notion of human equality, substituting instead an emphasis on "equity," i.e. the idea that if there are disparities between races in any metric such as mortality rates, life expectancies, incarceration rates, disciplinary actions in schools, etc. they are necessarily the consequence of racism. No other explanation is allowed.

CRT rejects logical reasoning, objectivity, standpoint neutrality and fairness in discussions about race as "white values," and the attempt to adopt these values by People of Color (POC) is to adopt whiteness and to betray one's own race by tacitly affirming the superiority of white values to the values of the oppressed class.

It furthermore dismisses the classical liberal ideals of freedom of speech and the principle of blind justice. These ideals, too, are "white."

Its emphasis is on the subjective "lived experience" of POC. Their stories are self-validating. To question them is to engage in an act of white supremacy or racism. The idea that truth is objective is rejected. Knowledge is experiential and feelings are self-validating.

Science and reason are tainted by "whiteness." Statistics are meaningless if they conflict with what a member of the "oppressed class" feels deep in her soul to be true.

It also teaches that whites, and only whites, are inherently racist, and no matter how hard they may try, they're helpless to expunge the stain. All they can do is submit to the moral superiority of the oppressed, do some kind of penance and plead for forgiveness, which, if it is granted at all, is only tentative.

Moreover, according to CRT the structures of our society are irremediably saturated with racism and must be torn down. What will replace them, they don't know or say, but, like the Jacobins in 1789 and the Bolsheviks in 1917, it's enough at this point to destroy the old order. The new non-racist order will somehow arise of itself.

Further, anyone who benefits from this "structural racism" is ipso facto a racist and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist. "Whiteness" refers to anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society regardless of the beneficiary's skin tone. If you're black, but you integrate into the white status quo then you're white regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

But don't take my word for any of this. Instead, watch this video produced by a very bright young man who did his homework and dug into the original sources. His name is Ryan Chapman, and he presents the main points of CRT in a dispassionate, objective fashion that CRT proponents would doubtless dismiss because, after all, Chapman is a white person seeking to be objective, neutral and fair.

Even so, the video is quite good and is a very helpful explication of what the major figures in CRT are themselves saying about it. Maybe Joy Reid should watch it:

Indigenous Peoples Day

A student came across this post from Columbus Day 2019 and suggested that it'd be worthwhile to run it again this year. I concurred so here it is, a day late:

Yesterday was Columbus Day here in the U.S., past observances of which have elicited protests and disdain for the savage legacy of early European conquerors. The topic, in fact, brings to mind a stomach-churning book I read several years ago titled The Destruction of the Indies by a Spanish priest named Bartholomo de Las Casas. The book is an eyewitness account of the horrors inflicted upon the native American people in the West Indies by the Spaniards in the 16th century.

I thought of that book when I read of people who see Columbus as the initiator of the terrible oppression inflicted upon native Americans. I think the record regarding Columbus himself is a bit ambiguous, and I don't have too much sympathy for those who wish to efface his memory. Indeed, it's easy to suspect some of them of ulterior motives, but, be that as it may, neither have I much sympathy for those who wish to replace Columbus Day with what they're calling "Indigenous Peoples Day."

In the first place, there are no indigenous people, or if there were, they're lost to history. The Indians the Spaniard explorers encountered and often massacred had themselves driven out, slaughtered or assimilated other groups who preceded them hundreds, or even thousands, of years before.

But more importantly, if the Spanish Conquistadors were unimaginably savage and cruel, and they certainly were, many of the Indians they conquered (though not all) were their equals in barbarity. Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto illustrates this disturbingly well. So does an essay by Michael Graham at The Federalist.

About the Indians the Spanish encountered in the New World Graham writes:

[I]f we really want to commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect holiday: “Indigenous People’s Day.”

“Long before the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman in the book Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten. “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned.”

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865, by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas, for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of The Last Days of the Incas.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Nor was the bloodlust and oppression limited to Central and South America:

According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s The Jesuit Relations—captives had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skin stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed their prisoners as “marching meat.”

The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.

The lesson in all this is that there is no race of people who is exempt from the human inclination toward savage depravity. White, black, brown and yellow, no race is free from the stain of a deeply corrupted human nature. As Graham points out, racism, violence and conquest are part of the human condition, they're not endemic to Europeans.

If Europeans have managed to dominate and oppress others throughout much of the last millenium or so it's not because they're more evil than others but because for the last thousand years they've been more technologically advanced. Every other group has behaved in exactly the same cruel fashion whenever they've been more powerful than their neighbors.

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously observed that,

[T]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

What Solzhenitsyn said is true of every human being no matter what the race or ethnicity of the individual may be. In these days of identity politics that's worth remembering.

Ackman's Reasons

In the recent edition of First Things Liel Leibovitz notes how absurd the debates at stake in today's culture would've seemed to people three decades ago. In a column titled "The Screwtape Election" Leibovitz writes:

As if the elevation of Kamala Harris, to the role of national savior wasn't enough, we gawk at our media in amazement and witness debate that, not very long ago, would've seemed patently absurd. Should a nation have borders? Should it keep convicted felons from ambling in whenever they please? Should males announce themselves to be female, saunter into the women's locker room at will, and compete freely in women's sports? Should we have a police force, and if so, should our cops be permitted to uphold law and order?

That these matters, once uncontested givens in public life, are hotly debated - rather than, say, bothersome hypotheticals in some agitated adjunct professor's introduction to political philosophy class - is all the proof we need that this is a grave moment for our republic.

The Democrats have moved so far to the left so quickly that they're losing many of their most rational adherents. One example is Democrat megadonor and investor Bill Ackman who has declared that he's seen enough from his party. Writing on Twitter/X he gives 33 reasons why he can no longer support the Democrats.

,Every voter inclined to vote for Democrats should read the whole list. I've only copied the first twelve here. He staes that he can no longer support the party to which he has donated multiple millions of dollars because their policies either would do, or already have done, the following:

(1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents,
(2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt,
(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
(4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interfere with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects,
(5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail,
(6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense,
(7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and LNG so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence,
(8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world,
(9) educate our elementary children that gender is fluid, something to be chosen by a child, and promote hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries to our youth without regard to the longer-term consequences to their mental and physical health, and allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women's sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities that they would have rightly earned otherwise,
(10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings,
(11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies,
(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,

I think it's fair to say that the Democrats have given us only two reasons to vote for them: 1) They'd do what they can to get the Dobbs SCOTUS decision overturned, and 2) They're not Trump. Based on the last four years and based on what they've told us so far in the current campaign, voters have no reason to think that what we'd get from another Democrat administration isn't just more of what Ackman lists above plus his other 21 reasons.

Paying Their Fair Share

Politicians are fond of telling us that the rich must pay their "fair share" of taxes, but "fair share" is almost never defined. What is the fair share of the very rich? Should they pay all of the taxes required to feed our voracious federal government? What percentage of the total tax burden would be fair?

Parts of the following are excerpted from an article by William McBride, Vice President of Federal Tax Policy. It may surprise you to know that according to the latest IRS data for 2020 the top 1 percent of taxpayers (about 1.6 million filers who earn more than $548,336) paid $723 billion in income taxes, or 42.3 percent of all income taxes paid—a larger share than the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers (about 7.9 million filers that earn more than $220,521) paid in aggregate $1.1 trillion in income taxes, amounting to 62.7 percent of all income taxes paid that year.

I couldn't find more recent data but economists think the tax paid by the highest earners is even greater since 2020. According to White:

High income taxpayers also pay the highest tax rates, according to the IRS. The average income tax rate in 2020 was 13.6 percent.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers paid a 22.4 percent average rate while the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 26.0 percent average rate—more than eight times higher than the 3.1 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers.

The top 0.001 percent, or the richest 1,575 tax returns filed in 2020, paid nearly $71 billion in income taxes and had an average tax rate of 23.7 percent.

The next time you hear a politician demand that the rich "pay their fair share" ask yourself why they don't tell us what they think a fair share would be. Maybe the answer is because they know that the rich are already paying a very hefty share of the taxes collected by the federal government every year and that they're just demagoguing the issue.

American Christian Nationalism

For some time there's been concern among many of our fellow citizens, especially those on the left, for what they believe is a threat to our polity from what they call "Christian nationalism." I've been perplexed by this concern, indeed for some folks it's even a fear, and have asked a few of my liberal acquaintances for a definition of this threat.

Unfortunately, "Christian nationalism" has proven to be a difficult term to define. Different people give different answers and often the definition reduces to something benign, like "patriotism" or "American exceptionalism," in which case one wonders what the concern is all about. Others define Christian nationalism as something more virulent but advocated by a relatively tiny fringe group, in which case one again wonders what the concern is all about.

Feeling the need to more deeply educate myself on this issue, I recently read Michael Austin's brief volume titled American Christian Nationalism in which he lays out five features of Christian nationalism culled from the writings of some of its proponents. He states that Christian nationalists adhere to most and sometimes all of the following five beliefs:

1. America was founded as a Christian nation
2. The American government should promote a particular kind of Christian culture
3. American Christians should pursue political and cultural power in order to take "dominion" over America
4. American Christians should prioritize American interests over the interests of other nations.
5. To be American should be identical to being a Christian nationalist

Austin is careful to point out that there are subtleties and complexities in these and that - if I can put it in my words, not his - whether there's anything wrong with any of them, particularly #2 through #5, depends a lot on how Christians go about achieving them.

I personally agree with #1 through #4, and, depending on the definition of "nationalist," maybe #5, but Austin points out that there are those who call themselves Christian nationalists who urge implementation of #2 and #3 by force, if necessary. If that's what Christian nationalism is then I want no part of it, but I doubt that those who support the use of compulsion and violence are more than a small fraction of those who, like me, think that all these beliefs are anodyne and/or desirable.

Let me explain why I think each of these admits of a perfectly innocuous or even salutary formulation.

#1 I think this statement is manifestly true in the sense that the values promoted in the founding documents were explicitly Christian values. Some of the men who founded the nation may themselves have not been Christian but the values they sought to base the nation on were derived from the Christian worldview in which they were immersed. Justice for all, equality under the law, liberty, individual rights, etc. all arose gradually in Europe in a Christian milieu, and there's little doubt that our founders, though not wishing to establish a particular religious denomination, nevertheless were operating from Christian assumptions.

#2 Of course these values - justice, equality under the law, liberty, individual rights, etc. - should be promoted by our government. They should also promote the Christian values of compassion, peacefulness, concern for the poor, honesty, etc., and the government should seek to protect its citizens from vices like greed, lust for power, and tyranny that are expressly forbidden in a Christian worldview.

#3 Christians should seek to be involved in every area of culture and society. That's what it means to be salt in the earth. Why would any Christian think that any profession that's not inherently immoral should be off limits to Christians? We need more Christian influence in the world, not less.

#4 We have obligations of loyalty to those whom God has placed us among and those obligations radiate in concentric circles. First, is our duty to our family, to protect and advance their best interests, then we have a similar but secondary duty to our communities - our neighbors, our church, then a similar duty of loyalty to our nation and then to the world. To the extent that those radiating responsibilities are acknowledged or affirmed by Christian nationalism I fail to see the problem with it.

#5 Every American should hold the values stated above and enjoined upon us by a Christian worldview. Anyone, Christian or non-Christian can hold those values and if holding them, if adhering to what I've said about #1-4 makes one a Christian nationalist then I see nothing wrong with the term.

However, if someone wants to define a Christian nationalist as someone who believes that any of this should be accomplished through compulsion or violence then we part company. If someone believes that the government should actively promote specifically Christian doctrines and that those who don't accept them must be relegated to second-class status then he and I again part company.

So, when we hear people throw around the term "Christian nationalism" as either a threat to democracy or the savior of democracy, either derogating it or affirming it, we need to ask them what they mean by it, and, if what they mean is a resort to violence or compulsion in order to transform the country Christian into a Christian nation then we should distance ourselves from it but we might also ask how many people really hold to that view.

I suspect that, among genuine, thoughtful Christians, as opposed to nominal Christians, it'd turn out to be relatively few, and if that's the case I fail to see why anyone should see it as a serious or imminent threat to our national fabric.

A Sea of Incoherence

I've often made the argument in these pages that moral judgments are vacuous unless there's an objective standard of moral goodness that transcends human feelings or subjectivity. I've also argued that the only such standard that can qualify is God, so that if God does not exist there really is no basis for moral judgment and no obligation to live one way rather than another.

But, why must the objective standard be God? Why can there not be a standard that transcends human subjectivity but also be something like Plato's ideal form of the good?

Plato (c. 427-c.347 B.C.), you might recall, believed that there existed in some ethereal realm the ideal (or form) of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True and everything that existed, to the extent that it contained some goodness, beauty, or truth did so because it derived these qualities from these ideals or forms. But ideal goodness cannot serve as the basis for moral obligation because a) it's not personal and b) it's unable to hold us accountable.

How, for example, can an impersonal standard of behavior communicate to us how we should act and how can it obligate us to act that way? And how can an impersonal abstraction hold us accountable for how we live?

The only adequate foundation for meaningful moral behavior is a transcendent, personal moral authority who is perfectly good and thus able to serve as a universal standard of goodness, and who has somehow intentionally instilled that standard in us and is powerful enough to hold us accountable for our fidelity to it.

This is very close to saying that in order for there to be objective moral duties there must be a God who grounds them.

So, if one refuses to accept that God exists several things follow:

1. Their moral judgments - whether about racism, sexual abuse, child abuse, torture, war and peace, whatever - are moral nullities. They're simply expressions of the speaker's personal predilections or tastes, and are of no more significance than their expressed preference for Coke rather than Pepsi. Individuals may adopt any attitude toward any of these behaviors they wish. They can choose to be kind, respectful, gentle and honest, but these are just individual preferences. Had they chosen to be the opposite they wouldn't be wrong in any moral sense, they'd just be different.

2. Anyone who asserts that racism, torture and the rest are objectively wrong but who denies there's an objective standard of right and wrong is sailing on a sea of incoherence.

3. The only rational position for such a person to hold regarding morality is moral nihilism - the denial of any objective moral duties altogether.

Of course, most people find moral nihilism repugnant, but it's the inevitable endpoint of any worldview that denies a personal, good, and very powerful God to whom we are morally accountable.

Brilliant Engineering

Drew Berry creates computer generated animations of cellular processes and this particular video (below) is especially artful. The processes he depicts are occurring 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies. As you watch the video 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?

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

There may indeed be naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions which we'll someday discover, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible and remote such explanations sound to all but the most inveterately committed and the more it looks like the living cell has in fact been engineered by a mind.

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

They Just Want to Kill Jews

Jim Geraghty's recent Morning Jolt column is so important and so good, and since it's free anyway, I wanted to share just about the entire piece with you. Most of the claims he makes are linked to a source at the original Morning Jolt column, so go there if you wish to follow up on anything he says: This planet is full of people who just want to kill Jews, and this country has no shortage of people who just want to cheer on the murderers. I hate to begin your Monday morning with such a bracing statement, but that’s the lesson of the past year.

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs? (Perhaps the students are just following the guidance of billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?”)

Russia has kidnapped an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Ukrainian children over the course of the war, sending them deeper into Russian-occupied territory or to Russia, and a couple hundred have been shipped off to a boot camp, where the Russians are training them to become child soldiers against their own homeland. This is separate from the 11,743 Ukrainian civilians killed during the war through August, the 24,614 injured, and the 168 summary executions of civilians, including five children, committed by the invading forces.

Anybody on campus want to march in the quad about that?

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Taliban and its nightmarish oppression of women? How many college students even know that the Taliban has now banned all women from public spaces — banned their faces, banned their voices?

Anybody seen any campus protests against the Iranian government’s rapidly increasing rate of executions — in August, 29 executions in one day?

Have you seen any college protests against the Houthis’ “partial and limited reintroduction” of slavery and child marriages?

There are ongoing “atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan — wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago.” Nicholas Kristof reports:

After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.

“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.

Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.

Do these black lives matter? Apparently not, judging from the lack of reaction of the overwhelming majority of America’s college students.

Any activists even notice new claims of the mass killing of the Rohingya by the Arakan Army in Myanmar?

Nope, the only “genocide” that seems to interest the angry young leftists on America’s college campuses is the Israeli use of military force against Hamas in retaliation for the massacre perpetrated by the terror group.

If your lone measuring stick of geopolitical events was the reaction of American college students, you would think that (a) the October 7 massacre and mass rapes were a minor provocation, not even worth much discussion, and (b) the Israeli military response to that massacre is a greater outrage than the Rwandan genocide, the Islamic State’s brutality, the “ethnic cleansing” of the Balkan wars, or the millions killed or displaced in Congo.

Maybe, if you look hard enough, you can find a sparsely attended, largely ignored, on-campus effort against these other moral abominations, one that garnered little or no media coverage and minimal student interest. But only Israel gets American college students’ blood pumping, propelling them up off the dorm bed and out to march, protest, occupy buildings, and assault their classmates. (From an Anti-Defamation League report released last month, summarizing the 2023–24 academic year: “Twenty-eight assaults were recorded on approximately 20 campuses across the country in the following states: California (10), Massachusetts (4), New York (4), New Jersey (2), North Carolina (2) and one assault each in Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Washington and Wisconsin.”)

I would ask how many of these students could find the Uyghur homeland or Sudan or Myanmar on a map, but we learned that many of those protesting Israel, and chanting “From the river, to the sea, Palestine will be free,” have no idea which river and which sea are the subject of their chants. (My favorite answer is “the Caribbean.”)

Allow me to offer an ugly theory: The antisemitism is the point. You could hate the Chinese regime for what it’s doing, or Russia for what it’s doing in Ukraine, or the Iranians or the Houthis. (Let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea who the Rapid Support Forces or Arakan Army are.) Lord knows those regimes — not the people trapped under the boot heels of those thuggish governments — deserve to be hated.

But if you’re really mad at Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or the Taliban, whom do you protest?

Most of the Chinese-government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are gone, having withered away once Congress cut off Department of Defense research funding to any school that had one. But there are still enormous financial ties between America’s higher-education system and Chinese companies, often either state-run or state-influenced. The Wall Street Journal reported: “Nearly 200 U.S. colleges and universities held contracts with Chinese businesses, valued at $2.32 billion, between 2012 and 2024, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of disclosures made to the Education Department. The Journal tallied roughly 2,900 contracts.”

That’s separate from the $4 billion from Qatar, the nearly $3 billion from Saudi Arabia, and the nearly $2 billion in contracts and gifts from Chinese-controlled Hong Kong. The higher-education administrative blob will be extremely sensitive to any student actions that might mess with any country with institutions that are paying U.S. universities a giant pile of money.

If you’re an angry young man (or woman) — “boring as hell,” as a lyric once accurately described the type — you’ve got no easy, convenient, or useful target for your fury when it’s those autocratic, brutal regimes that are the object of your rightful outrage.

But if you hate Israel, well, just about every college campus has a Hillel:

Hillel International, the premier Jewish on-campus organization that supports Jewish life at hundreds of colleges across the United States and abroad, has been one of the most frequent targets of anti-Israel activists and other antisemites in recent months, totaling more than a hundred incidents in the U.S. since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

Jewish students and Hillel staff members have received threatening emails and phone calls; Hillel buildings have been vandalized and tagged with graffiti; and Hillel-sponsored events have been protested; and in some cases, anti-Israel student groups have even launched campaigns demanding that Hillel be banned entirely from universities.

Most recently, on July 19, 2024, an anti-Zionist student group at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee posted a message on social media declaring that “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM,” calling out Hillel and the Jewish Federation by name. The post went on to ominously state that these organizations “will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned.”

The university administration quickly denounced the threatening language, but UW-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine — the group that published the original post and also served as a key organizer of the anti-Israel encampment at the school earlier in the spring — doubled down on its rhetoric in a follow-up post that reiterated that Zionist groups “will not be normalized or welcomed on our campus.” The group’s statement was endorsed by UW-Milwaukee’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) and others.

The university has since temporarily suspended the SJP chapter and those of SDS and YDSA.

These folks don’t really care about human rights in some far-off land. They just want someone to hate; more specifically, someone whom it is socially acceptable to hate. These people would likely insist that they’re not racist, homophobic, or sexist. They just appointed themselves the arbiters of who is “normalized or welcomed on our campus” and have decided that the kinds of people who go to Hillel must be treated like extremist criminals, driven out and barred from returning.

Hey, what do we call the kinds of people who go to Hillel? Oh, that’s right . . . Jews.

These snot-nosed punks found someone they can openly hate without too much of a negative social or legal consequence.

A dear friend told me of their rabbi’s Rosh Hashanah sermon last week — I nearly typed “homily” — discussing the three concepts of “Israel” covered by that name. The first is the people, the greater Jewish community. The second is the nation, the land long called by that name. And the third is the current government of the nation. The rabbi talked about the challenges of always supporting the first and the second while having disagreements with the third.

I would note that it works in the other direction as well. A whole lot of people who claim they only hate Israel, the government, let out their bile at anybody who is Jewish, looks Jewish, or they think is Jewish — which means they really loathe the greater Jewish community.

When you’re tearing down the menorah on the quad, or in the public square, or outside some family’s home — as we saw at Harvard, and in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Framingham, Mass., Montgomery County, Md., Palm Beach, and Oakland, screw you! You’re not an anti-Zionist, you just hate Jews.

Unspeakable Evil

A few days after the horrific slaughter of Israelis on October 7th of last year I wrote the following. It bears repeating today, one year after the barbarism of the Gazan Muslims:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if all that were not barbaric enough, they took videos of all this and posted them to social media. Some even called their mothers to boast about how they slew their victims.

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

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

Fire and Water

Geneticist Michael Denton has favored us with a number of books that are very much worth reading. Two of my favorites are Fire-maker, and The Wonder of Water. A non-scientist would have no trouble following and understanding either book.

Each of them provides the reader with fascinating information on almost every page as they examine two commonplace phenomena in our environment, fire and water, and explain that if those two phenomena didn't have precisely the properties they do, and if everything that relies on them didn't have precisely the structure it has, life would be either very much diminished, or even impossible. Certainly living things as complex as human beings would be impossible.

In Fire-maker, for example, Denton reflects upon all the properties of planet earth that have to be just right for the phenomenon of fire to exist and then recounts all the physical characteristics of human beings that have to be just as they are for us to be able to use fire. He then examines what human culture would be like were we or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed. It all just leaves one shaking one's head in amazement.

Here are a couple of related videos that'll give you an idea of what the books are about:

The more we learn about the world in which we live the harder it is to think that it's all just a marvelous coincidence that everything just by coincidence has precisely the properties it does.

For those who may have a stronger background in science and wish to probe more deeply into these matters, I recommend an earlier book by Denton titled Nature's Destiny.

The Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a man before his time. He was an atheist who saw clearly that atheism entailed far more than just the "death of God." Nietzsche saw that when modern men pushed God out of their lives they created a vacuum, an emptiness from which meaning, morality, and hope had all been swept out.

The "murder" of God meant that man was left to create his own meaning, his own morality, and to learn to live without hope. Man's existential predicament would inevitably lead him to despair.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, but most men of his age did not. In their exuberance and rejoicing over their "assassination of God" and the liberation they were sure their deed had brought them, they failed to grasp that when God "died" with Him died any hope of transcendent purpose and any solid ground for right and wrong.

Nietzsche expressed this failure in a parable he included in his book The Gay Science. It's called the Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his 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.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

The madman carried a lantern in the daylight because darkness was imminent. Man has become unmoored, like the earth unchained from the sun. Cold despair settles upon us as we plunge in all directions, adrift in nothingness. We are haunted by the sense that all is becoming colder.

Nietzsche's lantern-carrying madman is an interesting and perhaps intentional counterpoint to another lantern-carrier depicted c.1854 by the artist Holman Hunt.

Hunt's lantern-carrier, unlike Nietzsche's, did not bring despair, but hope. He did not wipe out the horizon we use to navigate through life but rather gave life direction and meaning. Nor did he set us adrift in an infinite nothingness, but set our feet on the solid ground of objective, transcendent reality:

We might suppose that Nietzsche's lantern-carrier was driven mad by the consequences that he foresaw following upon the murder of Hunt's lantern-carrier.