How Physics Refutes Common Sense

Yesterday's post looked at some of philosopher Bruce Gordon's thoughts on the philosophical theory called idealism.

Idealism holds that the world is real, but it's subjectively real. Its reality is like that of pain. Pain is real, but it's completely in the mind of the one who's experiencing it. It's reality is subjective. If there were no creatures on earth whose nervous systems could create the sensation of pain, pain would not exist.

The common sense view, of course, is that most of the world is objectively real. It exists independently of whether or not anyone is experiencing it. The moon is there whether anyone sees it or not. This common sense view is called realism.

Realism is the view that there is a world outside our minds existing independently of our minds and perceptions, whereas idealism holds that the world is created by our minds by means of the observations we make. Idealism is a philosophical expression of the ideas popularized by the movie The Matrix.

Idealism strikes most of us as at best counter-intuitive. We're accustomed to think of matter as the fundamental reality (a view called materialism). Matter, we assume, is objectively real and exists whether we perceive it or not. On this view, whatever mind is it's somehow a creation or function of our material brains. Idealism turns this view on its head and declares that mind is actually the fundamental reality and that matter only exists as a subjective experience in our minds.

As I said, this view is counter-intuitive, but it's the view held by a lot of physicists who study the fundamental quantum structure of the world. This video gives a pretty clear idea of the thinking of many physicists, some of whom think that idealism is not only correct but that it leads to the conclusion that there is a God, or something very much like God.

The video's a bit long (17 minutes) and moves quickly. It also discusses some arcane physics at points along the way. Nevertheless, you don't have to understand the physics in order to follow the narrative. The science really only illustrates the basic idea which is that mind is fundamental and that matter is downstream, as it were, from mind.

Give it a click, kick back and savor how mysterious is the world in which we live and move and have our being:

A Philosopher Discusses Idealism

Bruce Gordon is one of the most brilliant and accomplished thinkers alive today. Among other things he's a historian and philosopher of science and was interviewed recently by another scientist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, on a number of topics, including philosophical idealism.

Gordon is one of a growing number of philosophers who find idealism a compelling hypothesis. The interview begins with Dr. Gordon explaining George Berkeley's (1685-1753) version of idealism:

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

Bruce Gordon: There are a lot of different varieties of idealism, and rather than go through a laundry list of its variations, let me just start with the kind of idealism that I would be an advocate of, which is an ontic theistic idealism, essentially a form of idealism that is probably most closely identified with the Anglican Bishop, George Berkeley.

George Berkeley 1727

Basically, it’s the idea that material substances, as substantial entities, do not exist and are not the cause of our perceptions. They do not mediate our experience of the world.

Rather, what constitutes what we would call the physical realm are ideas that exist solely in the mind of God, who, as an unlimited and uncreated immaterial being, is the ultimate cause of the sensations and ideas that we, as finite spiritual beings, experience intersubjectively and subjectively as the material universe....So we are, in effect, living our lives in the mind of God.

And he is a mediator of our experience and of our inner subjectivity, rather than some sort of neutral material realm that serves as a third thing between us and the mind of God, so to speak.

The discussion then turns for a bit to Plato's notion of idealism as expressed in his theory of Forms.

Plato believed that every particular thing that exists has an ideal essence or form that exists in some abstract realm of reality. Every chair, for example, is recognizable as a chair because it "participates" in the perfect abstract form of "chairness," every tree is recognizable as a tree because it "participates" in the perfect form of "treeness."

Likewise with everything, including humans.

Later Christian Platonists argued that these essences, or forms, or ideals existed not in some abstract realm but rather as ideas in the mind of God, and this, it seems, is Gordon's view as well.

Michael Egnor: There are, I believe, other kinds of idealism. For example, idealism by German philosophers. And how does that differ from Berkeleyan idealism?

Bruce Gordon: Well, .... [Immanuel] Kant (1724-1804) advocated a kind of epistemic, as opposed to ontic, idealism. Kantian idealism is entirely compatible with the existence of material substances, even though they are inaccessible as things in themselves.

So for Kantian idealism, you’ve got a self that .... precedes and grounds all of our experience. And our perception of reality, then, is governed by the innate structure of the human mind.

Immanuel Kant 1768 

What Gordon is saying here is that Kant believed that a material world existed but that everything we know about it is based on our sensory perceptions which produce ideas or sensations in the mind. Our mind is so structured as to create these ideas, but they may be nothing at all like the thing they represent.

In other words, what we know about the "thing in itself" is the sum of the ideas (or sensations) we have of it in our minds. We can't know it as it exists independently of our perceptions of it.

For example, our minds, upon seeing, smelling and tasting chocolate, generate the ideas of a certain color, fragrance and flavor, but these ideas are in our minds, they're not in the chocolate. The chocolate itself doesn't have color, it simply reflects certain wavelengths of light. Likewise, it doesn't have fragrance or flavor. It simply exudes chemicals which interact with our senses to produce the ideas of fragrance and flavor in our minds.

As Kant put it, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am."

Bruce Gordon: So we never experience reality in itself, which he called the noumenal world, but only reality as it appears to us, a ... phenomenal reality that is ordered by the innate structures of the human mind.

Kantian idealism and its descendants are, in many ways, an epistemic form of idealism, whereas the Berkeleyan form of idealism is ontic.

By this Gordon means that Kant's idealism had to do with what we can know about the world whereas Berkeley's idealism had to do with the ontology of the world - what was actually real and what reality was like. Gordon adds:

[Berkeley's Idealism is] a denial that there is material substance and [is instead] an embedding of reality in the mind of God, such that it is finite spiritual beings experiencing the reality brought into existence by this unlimited, uncreated, immaterial being.

Berkeley's idealism, then, was different from Kant's. Berkeley held that there was no material world at all. Everything we experience we experience as ideas in our minds, ideas which are presented to our minds by the mind of God.

As Berkeley himself says, “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind.” This may seem bizarre at first reading, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.”

It's interesting that in the last fifty years or so many physicists have embraced idealism. They're persuaded by developments in quantum mechanics that reveal that at the subatomic level many properties of the entities scientists study at that level don't exist until they're observed.

For instance, the 20th century scientist Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, once stated that,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

And Sir James Jeans, in his book The Mysterious Universe, wrote that, "The universe is beginning to look more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists, but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks, especially those who are heirs to the Calvinist tradition and its doctrine of predestination and who believe that everything that exists, and thus everything that happens, is in fact predestined by God.

Such a doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally an idea in the mind of God.

Richard Dawkins, Cultural Christian

Mathematician William Dembski has some wry comments to make about Richard Dawkins' recent conciliatory statements about Christianity. Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion (2006), a book that has done more to extinguish Christianity in the Western world than probably any other book in the last century or so.

Dawkins has said that although he believes Christianity is nonsense he nevertheless considers himself a "cultural Christian" inasmuch as he enjoys the cultural benefits Christianity has conferred and because it's a far better option than Islam, which he utterly deplores.

Dembski writes:

Critics have been quick to jump on the irony here since Dawkins, as the leading voice for atheism in the English speaking world, if not in the world as a whole, has helped bring about this waning of Christian faith. But let’s be careful not to give Dawkins too much credit. Christians, through their own ineffectiveness in Christian education, have been complicit in helping Dawkins’s crusade against the Christian faith.

In any case, here is Dawkins the newly minted cultural Christian:

The current Dawkins is one who has mellowed with age. He no longer seems to be the stark, tough-minded Dawkins that made his reputation. This Dawkins would write in River Out of Eden: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Or consider how he characterized the God of the Old Testament in The God Delusion: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

....the tough-minded Dawkins of the past was not a cultural Christian. He had no use for religion, period.

Religious faith.... was a pernicious virus that needed to be eradicated. Certainly, he has played his part in helping to undermine religious faith, and Christianity in particular, in Europe and North America.

But there's more. Dawkins seems to realize that if you're going to dispense with Christianity you not only must forfeit Christmas carols and humanitarian institutions like orphanages and hospitals but also "reason, truth, merit, free speech, critical thinking and respect for science in the academy and wider culture." Dembski might also have added objective moral obligations and human rights to the list.

In other words, [Dawkins] laments the turn from modernity to postmodernity, from truth-based inquiry to make-it-up-as-you-go inquiry, from sober, rigorous habits of mind to minds at home in an insane asylum. And yet he’s probably done more than any other current figure to bring about this shift.

Dawkins is these days attempting to stand against the woke subversion of the academy, and of science in particular. Increasingly, Dawkins is casting himself as a defender of traditional academic virtues (reason, merit, free discourse, etc.).

And yet, a compelling case can be made that precisely because of the materialist ideology that he has promoted in the name of science all these years, he has helped bring about the state of affairs in the academy that he is now lamenting — in which woke ideology subverts all that he deems precious in the academy and science (and, as we’ve seen, also in cultural Christianity).

Dawkins has been marvelously successful at advancing scientific materialism, the view that science (especially Darwinian evolution) functions to advance materialism, with Darwin being this atheistic ideology’s principal prophet. And yet, this very scientific materialism is the Pandora’s box that has opened our culture to all the evils that he now laments. What Dawkins seems not to have realized — or perhaps now is realizing too late — is that scientific materialism is the suicide of reason, even undermining science as reason’s most compelling expression.

Scientific materialism attempts to use science as a club to enforce materialism. Yet instead, scientific materialism is a snake that eats its own tail and in the end consumes itself. It destroys itself, collapsing of internal contradiction, and thereby ruining science, as we now see happening in real time.

Dembski fleshes all of this out in his article at the link. It'd be a very good thing if more people recognized that ideas have consequences and that atheism of the sort that Dawkins and his fellow materialists have purveyed for over three decades has consequences that can only be described as pernicious and calamitous for Western civilization.

Hopefully, Dawkins, at least, is beginning to recognize what a catastrophe he has helped to unleash.

Thanks, Obama

Jim Geraghty, who in my opinion is among the best political commentators, especially among those who churn out a column every day, has a recent piece in which he recounts some of President Biden's liabilities, particularly, his lack of principles, and then engages in a fascinating bit of speculation about all that might have been save for one fateful 50/50 decision made back in 2008:

Back in the summer of 2008, Barack Obama and his top campaign staff had narrowed their options for Obama’s running mate down to two men: Biden and former Indiana governor and senator Evan Bayh. Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe quoted Obama as calling it a “coin toss” between the two men.

Geraghty goes on to say that,

Every now and then I think about how differently recent U.S. political history would have unfolded had Obama selected Bayh instead of Biden.

You figure this alternate history would have continued about the same as our reality until 2015 or so. A Vice President Evan Bayh, then age 61, would be likely to run for the presidency in 2016, and have a decent shot of knocking off then-69-year-old Hillary Clinton in the primary fight — an even-keeled moderate and reassuring Midwesterner riding Obama’s coattails, against all the Clinton baggage. It’s fair to wonder if Bernie Sanders becomes the phenomenon that he did in 2016 in this scenario.

It’s tough for one party to control the presidency for three consecutive terms, so perhaps the Republican nominee — maybe Donald Trump, maybe someone else — would have won the 2016 presidency. Wasn’t Republican fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency a major factor in the rise of Trump in the 2016 primaries? Without Obama picking Biden, we probably don’t get Hillary, and without Hillary, we might not have gotten Trump.

(We can probably assume that throughout the multiverse, there is no world in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency, at least not by running the way she did in our world in 2016. You can’t just refuse to visit Wisconsin for the final few months of a presidential campaign!)

Assuming Bayh hadn’t won the presidency in 2016, this means that in 2020, he would be in the top tier of candidates in that crowded Democratic field, although it’s possible Democrats would have dismissed him as the guy who lost to the GOP incumbent.

But in this scenario, Joe Biden probably retires from the Senate in 2014 or so. (Remember, Biden won his Senate reelection bid in 2008, while he was winning the vice presidency.) And no one would have been clamoring for a then-79-year-old retired senator to run for president in 2019.

If Obama had picked Bayh, Biden would probably have been an irrelevant afterthought on the political scene for the past decade, instead of the 46th president of the United States.

What’s more, without nominee Biden pledging to pick a woman as his running mate, we probably wouldn’t have ended up with Vice President Kamala Harris.

With different presidents in office since January 20, 2017, does the Covid pandemic turn out differently? Does the investigation into the origin get as forgotten as it has in our world?

Does Afghanistan turn out differently? Without the Afghanistan withdrawal proceeding as disastrously as it did . . . does Russia invade Ukraine in February 2022?

Does Hamas attack Israel the same way on October 7, 2023? Does inflation take off like a rocket starting in 2021? Do we see the same waves of migrants at the U.S. southern border?

The alternative is probably not utopia, just different problems . . . but it would be edifying to see if different choices in leadership would have resulted in better outcomes for the country and the world.

As we used to say, “Thanks, Obama.”

Geraghty's column led me to reflect on how much difference our seemingly insignificant choices make to the future of our families and our communities. We have no way of knowing, of course, but the fact that decisions which seem unimportant at the time can snowball into major consequences in the future should cause us to be a smidge more thoughtful when making them.

Harrison Bergeron

In 1961 Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story titled Harrison Bergeron which, if written today, would be considered an excellent satire of the contemporary push for equity in all things.

The story was brief, only six pages long, and amazingly prescient. Here's the opening:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter.

Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

You can read the rest of the story here.

It has always been a goal of the left to do away with merit, which is today labeled a symptom of white supremacy, and force everyone onto the same level. Everyone must be equal whether it be in terms of academics, income, parent/child relationships, and in "every which way."

We don't yet have the equivalent of a "Handicapper General" but if it were ever up to our leftist friends, we probably would, and a lot sooner than 2081, too.

Why Religious Conservatives Support Trump

Back in February of 2020, nine months before the 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I wrote the following column. Now that we're about to reprise that election in six months I thought I'd post it again, especially since almost everything in it applies just as much today as it did then:

There's recently been a spate of controversy over whether Christians are betraying their principles by supporting Donald Trump. Andrew Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement who has written a fine response to this concern at National Review.

His article is a bit lengthy but it's worth reading if the question of how a religious conservative can support the president is one that interests you. Here are a few outtakes:

There are two competing interpretations of Trump’s enthusiastic support from religious conservatives: that it is a lesser-of-two-evils transaction based on self-interest, or that it shows a voting bloc compromised by every form of democratic vice, whether racism, nativism, or nationalism.

They will vote not so much for Donald Trump — with his uncouth speech and incessantly immature tweets — as they will vote against the worldview of the Democratic platform. Those who make this calculation are not sell-outs, nor have they forfeited the credibility of their values carte blanche. For blind allegiance does not explain the voting relationship. That religious conservatives are not progressives does. Between Never Trump and Always Trump is a third category: Reluctant Trump.

[A]n event on October 10, 2019 explains the odd-couple relationship of religious conservatives and Donald Trump. That evening, during a CNN townhall on LGBTQ issues, the now-former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proclaimed that churches failing to toe the line on gay and transgender rights would lose their tax-exempt status in his administration. O’Rourke’s comments represented a high-water mark of a culture that has jettisoned anything resembling a Christian moral ecology.

For years, religious conservatives predicted that the sexual revolution would eventually affect government policy and directly threaten churches. They can now point to O’Rourke and other examples as evidence of a massive cultural shift that has realized their predictions. Even the most convinced progressive should sympathize with religious conservatives who are concerned about federal law possibly turning against them.

Consider the Democrats’ garish and unapologetic devotion to abortion in the latest stages of pregnancy. Anyone who wonders why religious conservatives cannot bring themselves to vote for Democrats simply does not understand the religiously formed conscience that shudders at America’s abortion regime.

This sentiment was intensified during last week’s State of the Union address, when Democrats sat stone-faced at President Trump’s call for banning late-term abortion. A moment of such moral contrast demonstrates why religious conservatives do not care about the endless think pieces criticizing them as soulless hypocrites. They will endure that criticism if it means the chance to end abortion through Supreme Court appointments.

Martin includes a description of a friend of his who is doubtless typical of many religious conservatives:

To understand this complexity, take my real-life friend. Let’s call him Steve. Steve is a white evangelical in his forties, a middle-school teacher, the father of two daughters, and a deacon at his Southern Baptist church. These are identities that media narratives depict as culprits for Trump’s ascension: White, male, Christian, middle-class, husband, father. He’s the token “white evangelical” that the media depicts as red-state reprobates.

But there is more to Steve. Steve serves the homeless, sees diversity as a pillar of God’s creation, and helped an Iraqi refugee family resettle in his own hometown. I daresay he cares more about justice in real life than those who preen about it on Twitter.

Steve voted for Trump, and will again. Why? For one, he thinks abortion is America’s Holocaust, and will not support any party that supports abortion on demand. Whatever Trump’s eccentricities are, Steve won’t vote for a progressive, even if the media tells him that to do so would save America and its institutions.

For Steve, saving abstractions like “America” and its “institutions” can make America a lot less worthy of survival if abortion on demand continues apace. To the average religious conservative, in fact, saving America means saving it from the scourge of abortion.

Martin then adds some concluding thoughts:

Those are the stakes that many religious conservatives live with. My advice to progressives is that, if they want religious conservatives to let go of their devotion to the Republican Party’s platform, progressives should weaken their commitment to unfettered abortion access. The same goes for their support for gender fluidity, and opposition to any person or institution that does not affirm such things as gay marriage.

Until that happens, complaining about “white evangelicalism” and ascribing to it every imaginable authoritarian impulse will be like shouting into a void; no one will listen.

Donald Trump is not the savior of American Christianity. At best, he’s a bed of nails on the road, temporarily halting secularism’s advance. Yet the choice for so many religious conservatives is between someone who is crude and profane but who will defend their values and an eloquent politician who will undermine their faith and advance an agenda they see as barbaric and unjust.

Here’s my plea from one religious conservative to other religious conservatives in 2020. If the majority of us vote for Trump, let’s do so not because he’s a Protector of the Faith or a champion for “taking America back.” He’s neither. Instead, view him as a flawed, complex political figure whose admixture of vanity and pragmatism is resulting in a political agenda that is less hostile to Christianity than its alternatives.

Indeed, it's fair to say that this administration's political agenda is not just "less hostile" to all expressions of religious faith, it's actually, contrary to the alternatives, not hostile at all.

What was the alternative in 2016? Voters were given a choice between two morally compromised candidates, the policies of one were seen by religious conservatives as an almost certain disaster for the country and the policies of the other as possibly salutary. Which one should a religious conservative have voted for?

What's the alternative in 2020? Voters are given a choice between a party which is willing to demand that taxpayers subsidize and oversee the annual slaughter of a million unborn babies and an incumbent who, despite his character flaws, has appointed judges and jurists who will protect our freedoms and who may eventually end the slaughter. Which one should a religious conservative vote for?

Religious conservatives care about the poor and the marginalized, or at least they should. No president in history has done more to help the poor - by lowering minority unemployment to record lows, increasing blue collar wage growth, establishing enterprise zones in poor communities and implementing criminal justice reform - as this president. So who should a religious conservative vote for?

For many religious conservatives their support for Trump is tentative. It's contingent upon his conduct in office. As long as he does nothing Clintonian to disgrace the office and continues to uphold the First Amendment and appoint jurists who'll do so, they're willing to suffer his childish, neurotic outbursts and offer him their support.

He may be only a bed of nails on the road to a totally secular state hostile to traditional economic, social, civic and moral values, but sometimes a bed of nails in the road can force a change in direction. Meanwhile, I think most religious conservatives will prefer to vote for the bed of nails than for life in the fast lane to a secular nirvana.

Stephen Meyer and Piers Morgan

One of the foremost philosophers of science today is Stephen Meyer, author of three books on Intelligent Design and a very articulate advocate of the view that the evidence is overwhelming that the origin and fine-tuning of the universe and the origin of life are all the result of the agency of an intelligent mind.

Meyer has recently been on Joe Rogan's show and also been interviewed by Piers Morgan on Morgan's Uncensored podcast. The podcast is 33 minutes long, but anyone interested in the controversy surrounding naturalistic materialism and intelligent design will find it interesting and informative.

Check it out:

Russian Losses

From time to time the British Sun publishes assessments of the British intelligence agencies regarding Russian losses in Ukraine. Their most recent summary is shocking:

According to British intelligence Putin's forces have lost 450,000 soldiers killed, wounded or captured since their invasion began. The Sun states that this is 100,000 more than the previous UK estimate shared in February by Britain’s Defence Intelligence.

The article continues:

And Russia's losses have surged to 1,300 troops a day in just the last two months.

The eye-watering casualty figures don’t include mercenary groups like Wagner who were famously slaughtered during “human wave” assaults in the meat grinder battle of Bakhmut last year.

In December the UK said 20,000 of Wagner's soldiers had been killed and another 40,000 had been injured.

The latest figures also don't account for the humiliating “tens of thousands” of soldiers who have deserted Putin's armed forces.

They refer to the Russian soldiers taken out of battle by death or injury at the hands of Kyiv's impressive and resilient army.

Armed Forces Minister Leo Doherty also estimates Moscow has lost almost 3,000 tanks – up from 2,000 a year ago. The Sun exclusively revealed in February that Putin had lost almost all of his valuable tank force since invading Ukraine.

All this carnage, death, and destruction and for what? Where are the protestors at our universities demonstrating against the war crimes committed by Russia against Ukraine?

Campus Nihilism

From a short essay by Carl Trueman at First Things:

Now, expressing criticism of Israeli military action is of course entirely legitimate in a democracy like the United States. There is a right to dissent and a right to protest.

But the nature of these particular protests reveals something very disturbing. It is clear that they are not motivated by legitimate concern for Arab and Muslim lives, whatever the rhetoric. If they were, then Israel would hardly be the only, or even primary, target.

The death toll from over a decade of government-led bloodshed in Syria is catastrophic but has not gripped the imagination of campus activists. The slaughter there continues to this day, though one could be forgiven for not knowing this, given the lack of media and student interest in the conflict. Rather, these campus protests are motivated by hatred of Jews.

One can offer the specious dodge that Hamas’s 2017 manifesto speaks of Zionists rather than Jews as the enemy. But Hamas thinks Israel is the result of a Jewish conspiracy. To replace “Jews” and “Judaism” with “Zionists” and “Zionism” is thus to change words but not to change direction.

Anti-Semitism is the motivation of both Hamas and the student activists who care only for Muslim lives when they are threatened by Israeli rather than Syrian bombs.

This also points to the nihilism that lurks just below the surface. When one notes the craziness of some of the protests—queers professing solidarity with Palestine, for example, or a drag queen leading children in pro-Palestinian chants—it becomes clear that, for all of the blather about “human rights,” these people share no common vision about what it means to be human.

The thing that unites these groups is neither concern for Arab lives nor a respect for Islamic culture. They are united only in wanting to tear down. In short, these protests are a manifestation of the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration.

To borrow from Marx, all that is holy must be profaned. What is to replace it—Shariah law, drag queen story hour, Judith Butler reading groups—is anybody’s guess. There is no agreed moral vision here. There is only consensus on a hatred of Jews, of Israel, of America, and of what is. And ironically, it comes from those who enjoy some of the greatest privileges that America has to offer.

The ignorance of these protestors and their faculty abettors concerning the history of the region as well as the nature of Islam in general and Hamas in particular, is appalling. But then the point isn't to rectify wrongs or get the history right. These protests are just one battle in a long war to destabilize and destroy the institutions and culture of the West, and Israel is just one battleground on the front lines in that war.

Lincoln's Proclamation

In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed April 30th to be a National Day of Prayer, and the nation has observed that day ever since. Last Tuesday marked this year's observance, and in honor of the day the John 10:10 Project produced a short video recounting Lincoln's proclamation.

It's a powerful speech, so much of what he said sounds as though he were speaking to us and our culture today. Here it is:

Materialism Is a Superstition

John Zmirak offers an acerbic critique of Woke culture in an essay at The Stream and wonders how we've come to the place where so many highly educated Americans have been reduced "to a Stone Age level of fanatical superstition." His answer is, "In a word, Darwin."

He explains:

[Darwinism] insists that the existence of the universe itself is a meaningless cosmic accident. No purpose or mind lies behind it. Likewise the emergence of life, which Darwinists believe by some secular miracle leapt fully-armored from the mud like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Mere chance somehow engineered not just the baroque complexities of the humblest bacterium, but the vast, elaborate rococo of higher mammals, then primates. Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not their arrival.

But somehow this combination of infinitesimally unlikely genetic mutations, and ruthless natural selection red in tooth and claw produced … human beings with brains perceptive and reliable enough to generate Modern Science.

I'd quibble that it may be more accurate to use the term naturalistic materialism, of which Darwinism is one expression, for what follows, but no matter. Zmirak continues:

Even though this Science tells us that we’re meaningless epiphenomena of random cosmic burps and vicious competition, somehow we also have dignity and rights, including the right to Equity. (Insert stolen premises from the biblical worldview here.) But the science that teaches us about that dignity and those rights - theology - should curl up and die once we’ve taken ... the gold fillings out of its teeth.

The Woke folk will decide what “Equality,” “Equity” and “Justice” mean. And they’ll do so with all the arbitrary, random, irrational whimsy that the universe showed in mutating us into existence. They’ll enforce their capricious verdicts with all the ruthlessness of Natural Selection, throwing their failed competitors onto the fossil heap of history.

True enough. Once a substantial percentage of the educated population comes to believe that life, including human life, is all a big accident, that there's no meaning to any of it, that death is the end of existence, then the only ethics that makes sense is an egoistic form of might makes right.

In a world devoid of purpose there can be nothing that's wrong in any meaningful sense, and thus there's nothing wrong with destroying, either literally or figuratively, people who disagree with them.

So, in the universe of the naturalistic materialist, whatever it takes to make my own existence more pleasant - including using others as means to my ends and imposing my will upon them - whatever I have the power and desire to do, I might as well do.

In this purposeless world, whoever has the loudest voice and the most political heft makes the rules, and it's pointless for the less powerful to object that the rules make no sense or are immoral. Sense and morality depend upon the existence of objective truth about human nature, and in a Godless, Darwinian world there is no objective truth about human nature that binds us or constrains us.

Human nature is malleable. It's whatever humans are able to make it. What rules there are, about morality and about human nature, we make for ourselves.

All of this follows from the embrace of an antitheistic materialism by our cultural elites. Our ivy educated betters scorn what they like to call "religious superstition," but they adopt instead all manner of other superstitions - superstitions about human nature, race, gender and evolution to name just a few.

As G.K. Chesterton famously observed, "When people no longer believe in God they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

Spring Migration

Long time readers of VP know that I enjoy birds. It's something of a hobby of mine, and the spring migration is a great time to get out and try to get a good look at some of the beautiful bits of feathered fluff passing through on their northward trek.

Here are a few of my favorites from this past week. All of these pics are of males of the species. Females are often more drab, and, in the case of the last two species, they look much different than the males:

The bird above is a Magnolia warbler. It's the bird that inspired a young teen-ager named Roger Tory Peterson to take up birding which led to a lifetime of painting birds and a whole series of nature field guides. Peterson saw the Magnolia warbler in New York's Central park and was immediately hooked on birds.

The Blackburnian warbler is in my mind one of the most striking birds in all of North America. When the sunlight hits the bird's throat it's as if it has been set aflame.

The Cape May warbler nests in boreal forests in the U.S. and Canada and is only found in Cape May, NJ during migration. It was first described by ornithologist Alexander Wilson in Cape May, NJ but not seen there for a hundred years afterward. The Cape May warbler's tongue is unique among warblers. It's tubular, like the hummingbird's tongue, and enables the bird to sip nectar from flowers on its wintering grounds in the Caribbean.

The Prothonotary warbler is famous, those who've read about the "Red Scare" of the early 1950s might recall, for being instrumental in convicting Alger Hiss on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. You can read about it here. The Prothonotary warbler got its name from the bright yellow robes worn by papal clerks, known as prothonotaries, in the Roman Catholic church.

The bird pictured above is an Indigo bunting. Here's an interesting fact about birds that many people have a hard time believing. Birds do not have blue pigment in their feathers. The blue color found in many birds is due to the way their feathers refract sunlight. The Indigo bunting is common in eastern North America but is often overlooked because it's small, and the dazzling blue color only shows up in good light against a proper background.

The Rose-breasted grosbeak is a handsome woodland species that occasionally visits sunflower feeders during migration. The female looks like a large brown sparrow.

Bird migration is one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature and it's occurring this week across much of the United States. Since it happens largely after dark most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring in the skies above them most nights at this time of year.

Even so, millions of birds are traveling each night from their winter haunts in Central and South America to their breeding territories in North America. The migration involves birds of all types, hundreds of different species, navigating their way north to find a mate, establish a territory, breed and return south again in the Fall.

To help give a sense of the movements of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How and why did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales, dragonflies and numerous other creatures, ever evolve in all these different groups through mindless, unguided processes like random mutation and natural selection? Did it evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it? How did that ability evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

Birds truly are a marvel.

What's Important to the Voters?

Jim Geraghty consults the recent CNN poll to see what issues are of greatest concern to voters. It turns out that what voters care about is not at all what either presidential candidate seems to care about:

Joe Biden would love for this year’s election to be about forgiving student loans, union jobs, climate change, gun control, abortion, those oh-so-plausible tales of him saving six people from drowning as a lifeguard, how he was arrested for standing with a black family during protests of desegregation, and how he was “runner-up in state scoring” in football . . . until his teenage asthma kept him out of the draft for Vietnam.

Donald Trump wants this election to be about how unfairly he’s been treated and how he’s being persecuted for his political views, how he was the real winner in the 2020 presidential election, and how he embodies “retribution” for his supporters.

So what are the major concerns of the electorate?

The average American voter is desperately yearning for a candidate who would just focus on fighting inflation and getting the cost of living under control. Yes, American voters have other priorities, but that is the most-often-mentioned priority by a wide margin.

Don’t take it from me, take it from this weekend's CNN poll which had Trump ahead of Biden, 49 percent to 43 percent:

In the new poll, 65% of registered voters call the economy extremely important to their vote for president. . . .

Considering other issue priorities for the upcoming election, 58% of voters call protecting democracy an extremely important issue, the only other issue tested that a majority considers central to their choice.

Nearly half call immigration, crime and gun policy deeply important (48% each), with health care (43%), abortion (42%) and nominations to the US Supreme Court (39%) each deeply important to about 4 in 10 voters.

At the lower end of the scale, just 33% consider foreign policy that important, 27% climate change, 26% the war between Israel and Hamas, and 24% student loans.

You get slightly different answers when Americans are asked which issue is their top priority, compared to whether an issue is important to their vote for president; more on that in a moment.

The average American doesn’t lose any sleep thinking about climate change, gun control, LGBTQ+ rights, DEI initiatives, or whether the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have access to enough food. This is not to say that if the average American doesn’t think about an issue very much, it doesn’t matter.

In other words, neither the issues pressed by Mr. Biden's progressive handlers nor Mr. Trump's grievances are foremost in the minds of most voters. It'll be interesting to see how the candidates seek to deal with his fact once the campaign gets underway in earnest this summer.

Meanwhile, check out the rest of Geraghty's column at the link.

Reading Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Side Is Genocidal?

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

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

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

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

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

It's not the Israelis who are genocidal.

Why Would They Do This?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divine Hiddenness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just Plain Evil

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

Greenwald writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haters

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naturalism's Daunting Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

Two Amazing Fish Stories

The following two short videos are really quite remarkable.

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

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

Check them out:

Liberal Fascism (Pt. II)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberal Fascism (Pt. I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith and Blind Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guillen adds this:

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

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

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

Running Out of Fuel

R.R. Reno at First Things writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Biden's Estrangement from the Truth

President Biden seems to be living in an alternative universe.

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

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

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

Geraghty writes:

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

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

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

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

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

Unimaginable Immensity

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

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

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

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