Naturalism Vs. Christianity: Ethics

There are in our contemporary Western society two live options when it comes to worldviews - theism and naturalism (or materialism). When considering the adequacy of these two alternatives one of the things that needs to be addressed is the ethical (or more precisely, metaethical) implications of each.

Naturalistic ethics are beset with difficulties, not least of which is that it's very difficult to live consistently with naturalism, and it's especially difficult to live consistently with the ethical difficulties.

Here are five difficulties for ethics that follow from a naturalistic worldview:

1. No naturalistic account of morality can explain why human beings have dignity, rights, and worth.Where do any of these things come from in a purposeless universe?

2. No naturalistic ethics, which by its nature excludes ultimate accountability, can have any binding force. If there's no transcendent moral authority to hold us accountable how can there be a moral duty or obligation to do anything?

3. No naturalistic ethics can give a plausible explanation of what it means to say that a particular behavior is morally wrong.The word "wrong," when used in the moral sense, has no objective meaning. It can only refer to our subjective feelings about something.

4. No naturalistic ethics gives a satisfactory answer to the egoist who asks why he should care about the interests or well-being of other people. Why would it be morally wrong to only care about oneself and what's important to oneself?

5. All naturalistic ethics are at bottom subjective. There can be no objective moral duties if there’s no transcendent moral authority and no ultimate justice. In other words, naturalistic ethics is simply an expression of an individual's feelings, preferences, prejudices, etc. On naturalism ethics is simply a matter of individual taste.

Judeo-Christian ethics are a subset of what philosophers usually call Divine Command ethics (DCE). Based on theism, DCE has several advantages over all forms of naturalistic ethics:

1. Being rooted in a transcendent moral authority who is both omnibenevolent and omniscient, DCE gives us a basis for moral right and wrong beyond human reason or subjectivity. It gives us a non-arbitrary source of principles of moral right and wrong grounded in a transcendent, personal moral authority. In other words, it answers the question of the source of moral obligation and gives us a basis for both objective moral duties and moral absolutes.

2. DCE offers an answer to the egoist's question why it’d be wrong to just live for oneself and offers a basis for rejecting the ethic of might makes right.

3. DCE gives us a reason to believe that we're ultimately accountable for how we live.

4. Because theism assumes that we are created in the image of God and loved by God DCE gives us a basis for believing that human worth, dignity, and rights are not mere illusions or fictions but actually exist objectively and that justice will ultimately prevail in the world.

When people who doubt the existence of God make moral judgments, when they say that racism or sexism, for instance, are wrong, they should be asked what they're basing their judgment upon.

If they're pressed to answer, they may say something like they're wrong because these things harm people and it's wrong to harm people. But then they should be asked why harming people is wrong. Other animals do it to each other all the time, why is it wrong for humans to harm each other?

The naturalist will ultimately take refuge in something like the good of society or one's own individual self-interest, but why should an individual care about the good of society? Why are they wrong to not care at all about society? And why is it wrong to harm others if someone can get away with doing so with no accountability in this life or the next?

Eventually, the "why" questions come to an end with the naturalist's admission that things are wrong because he or she simply doesn't like them, but the likes and dislikes of another person are hardly reasons to think that some behavior is morally wrong. Why should anyone think that they should live according to what someone else likes or dislikes?

As in many other of life's ultimate questions in the matter of ethics naturalism turns out to be an inadequate worldview and vastly inferior, metaphysically, to theism, particularly Judeo-Christian theism.

Perhaps, the most frequently cited difficulty with DCE is something called the Euthyphro Dilemma and, although many critics of DCE are fond of it, it doesn't seem to be all that serious. For a three-part treatment of the Euthyphro Dilemma on VP go here, here, and here.

Trump and Israel

One of the funnier slanders leveled by President-elect Donald Trump's opponents during the recent presidential campaign was that Mr. Trump was antisemitic.

This was alleged of him despite the fact that he has a Jewish son-in-law who was a prominent player in his first administration and instrumental in getting the Abraham Accords accepted by Israel and several of its Islamic neighbors. It was said of him that he was antisemitic despite his having moved our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized Israel's right to the Golan Heights, and having imposed crippling sanctions on Iran.

In any case, Israelis are celebrating his election and his foreign policy nominees. Andrew Tobin has details. Here are some excerpts:

Donald Trump named more than half a dozen pro-Israel hawks to key foreign policy roles this week, reassuring Israelis that the president-elect’s incoming administration will be as supportive as his first.

Trump’s picks largely ended talk in Israel that MAGA isolationism could weaken U.S. backing of the Jewish state. Israeli commentators hailed the roster—led by Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) for secretary of state and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense — as a "dream team."

"This is a great reassurance from Israel’s perspective. The new appointments point to a hawkish administration that will not be afraid to confront the Iranians and radical Islam, and even to present a credible military option against them and create a new reality in the Middle East," former Israeli diplomat Jacob Dayan wrote for Israel’s Channel 12 news. "This is undoubtedly the U.S. ‘dream team’ for Israel."

In addition to Hegseth and Rubio, Trump’s picks included South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R.) for secretary of homeland security, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) for U.N. ambassador, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R.) for ambassador to Israel, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe for CIA director, real estate investor Steve Witkoff for Middle East envoy, and Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) for national security adviser.

All of these nominees have expressed strong support for Israel. Tobin adds that,

Pro-Israel stalwarts will also play leading roles in staffing the rest of Trump’s second administration. Billionaire financier Howard Lutnick, a major donor to Zionist causes who has said he joined Trump’s campaign in large part to support Israel, is the co-chair of the transition. Brian Hook, a special envoy for Iran during Trump’s first term who helped oversee the "maximum pressure campaign," will reportedly lead the transition at the State Department.

"A few more Trump appointments and Iran will ask Israel to calm America down," joked Ariel Schnabel, a staff writer at Israel’s Makor Rishon magazine. "And seriously — excellent appointments one by one of the true lovers of Israel in everything related to foreign policy. A dream and an opportunity that must not be missed."

Trump's election is definitely good news for everyone who values the only true democracy in the Middle East and bad news for those of Israel's neighbors who hate her, largely for being a tremendous technological, economic, and military success in a country that's like a postage stamp of freedom on a football field of Islamic oppression, backwardness, and hatred.

Children of Light

Australian geneticist Michael Denton is the author of several excellent books, two of which - Firemaker and The Wonder of Water - I discussed earlier this week.

In these works Denton explores the amazing properties of both fire and water that most of us take for granted or of which we are completely unaware, but which would, were they only a smidgeon different from what they are, make life, or at least advanced life, impossible.

Denton has also written a third book titled Children of Light in which he applies the same sort of analysis to light, the atmosphere, the leaf, and the eye, and the "coincidences" and design he highlights are breathtaking.

For instance, visible light is an electromagnetic radiation the spectrum of which is exceedingly vast. If a stack of playing cards were placed on the earth and extended all the way beyond the milky way to the next nearest galaxy to represent the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiations, the frequencies that are visible to the human eye would be just a couple of playing cards thick.

This extremely thin sliver of frequencies is not only visible to the human eye, but these are the only frequencies that can be used to drive chemical reactions, they're the only frequencies that can be utilized by plants for photosynthesis, they are the only frequencies that can penetrate the atmosphere and water, and they are the bulk of the frequencies produced by the sun.

If the sun didn't produce these frequencies, or if the atmosphere didn't allow them to reach the surface of the earth, or if they couldn't penetrate water to trigger photosynthesis in algae, or if that sliver of energy didn't have the precise physical properties it does, there'd probably be no life on earth except, perhaps, a few bacteria.

There's more. The sun radiates heat (infrared) which warms the earth, but if the dominant gases in the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, absorbed infrared then that heat would be trapped and the earth would be much too hot to sustain life. These gases make up about 95% of the atmosphere and they allow heat to reach the surface and to escape back into space.

On the other hand, carbon dioxide and water vapor both do absorb heat. They provide a blanket that keeps the earth's surface from getting too hot during the day and keep some heat from escaping the earth at night which prevents the temperature from dropping to intolerably cold levels after sundown.

For various reasons, if the amounts of these atmospheric gases were just slightly different, life on earth would be significantly more difficult and higher life would probably be impossible.

It's this array of "just right" physical and chemical factors which have led scientists like Denton, a former agnostic, to the conclusion that light and the atmosphere are the products of intentional design. His discussion of the astonishing structure of the leaf and the human eye leads one to the same conclusion.

Here's a short video in which Denton himself discusses some of this:

Denton has much, much more in Children of Light that will surely amaze you. Taken together his three books, Firemaker, Wonder of Water and Children of Light, offer a powerful, awe-inducing case for the conclusion that the best explanation for the dozens of properties of fire, water, and light being precisely what are needed for the emergence and sustenance of creatures like us is intelligent agency.

Firemaker

In yesterday's post on the amazing properties of water it was noted how easy it is to take some very extraordinary things for granted as we go through our everyday lives. Yet when we stop to contemplate the astounding nature of some of those things, like water, it can just take our breath away.

Consider another example - fire.

When we reflect upon all the characteristics of our planet that have to be just so for fire to even exist and then consider all the physical traits of an animal such as human beings that have to be just right for that animal to be able to use fire, and then contemplate what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed, it just leaves one shaking his/her head in amazement.

In this 21 minute video Australian geneticist Michael Denton walks us through the astonishing series of properties and characteristics of the earth, fire, and mankind that have to be precisely calibrated in order for humans to have developed the culture that we have today. Had any of those properties been other than what they are humans might never have survived at all, much less developed an advanced culture.

Someone hearing all this for the first time might well be stunned by how astonishingly fortuitous it all seems.

The book on which the video is based is available here.

The Wonder of Water

We take so much of what's going on all around us, both in our bodies and in the natural world, for granted. In the course of our busy days we rarely stop to think how marvelous the processes necessary for sustaining life are - processes like photosynthesis, cognition, metabolism, DNA replication, the functioning of our immune system and hundreds of thousands more.

Perhaps just as marvelous are the physical properties of substances like carbon, oxygen and other elements necessary for life as well as the physical properties of the sun, moon and earth. Were not all of these countless properties precisely as they are life would not be possible, certainly not higher life forms like human beings.

One of the substances whose properties are so necessary and astonishingly suited for life is water. This seven minute video, based on a book by geneticist Michael Denton, gives us just a glimpse of how amazing a substance water is. The video is as beautiful as it is informative:

Either our planet and the living things it hosts are the result of an unimaginable number of extraordinarily improbable coincidences or they were all specially designed by a transcendent super-intellect. These two alternatives seem to exhaust all the plausible options and believing either requires faith. The question is, which alternative requires the greatest leap of faith?

Criticizing the Qualifications of Trump's Nominees

Democrats are expressing much displeasure over many of President-elect Trump's picks for his cabinet and, truth to tell, some of their concerns about some of the picks seem to me to be justified.

This is particularly the case regarding Mr. Trump's wish to have Matt Gaetz head up the Department of Justice. Gaetz was, until he resigned from the House of Representatives the other day, under a congressional ethics investigation for, among other things, participating in sex parties with underage girls.

Whether the allegations are true or false, Gaetz is very unpopular among his congressional colleagues, and I'll be surprised if he's actually confirmed by the Senate.

One criticism leveled by Democrats against some of Trump's selections, however, is hard to take seriously. The opposition party is arguing that some of the nominees lack the qualifications for the position to which they're being appointed.

I say this is hard to take seriously because many of the folks in Congress and in the media who are expressing reservations about the qualifications of people like Pete Hegseth (Department of Defense) and Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence) were just fine with President Biden's cabinet nominations despite many of them having no qualifications whatsoever other than checking off some identity group box.

Elizabeth MacDonald, in a post on X, shines the spotlight on the paucity of qualifications that Democrats nevertheless thought sufficient to confirm much of Mr. Biden's cabinet. Here's her list:

• Xavier Becerra, Health and Human Services - not a doctor, he’s a lawyer, ex-attorney general of California
• Jared Bernstein, Chair of Council of Economic Advisors - not an economist, Bachelor’s degree in music, Masters in sociology
• Pete Buttigieg, Transportation - no transportation background, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana
• Alejandro Mayorkas, Department of Homeland Security - no security background, lawyer, Asst U.S. attorney, Obama transition team
• Jennifer Granholm, Energy - no energy background, Michigan Governor
• Gina Raimondo, Commerce - no trade background, Rhode Island Governor
• Deb Haaland, Interior - New Mexico Congresswoman
• And just for kicks…Bill Nye, the environmentalist “Science Guy” — no background in environmentalism or science, he’s a mechanical engineer and comedy writer

Anyone who's okay with these folks serving as the heads of their various departments really shouldn't complain about the qualifications of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard.

How Would the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life Affect Belief in God?

Suppose scientists discovered intelligent life on a planet in a distant solar system, or perhaps on several such planets. What would be the implications of such a discovery for the validity of one's belief either that God, or a being very much like God, exists, or for one's belief that no such being exists?

For a long time metaphysical naturalists - those who believe that nature is all there is and that there's no supernature - believed that the discovery of intelligent life on other planets would suggest that such life could and would arise anywhere the conditions for it are right and that the existence of living things on earth is thus not extraordinary. It would, in other words, seriously weaken the argument that the origin of life, especially intelligent life, is so improbable that it must be the product of a divine intelligence.

Physicist Paul Davies, an agnostic, believed this himself until he set out to write a book on the origin of life (The 5th Miracle). In the book Davies lists three possible explanations for life's origin, what biologists call abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-living matter).

The biggest problem for which any explanation has to account is the origin of complex, specified information such as we find in the DNA/RNA molecular architecture that forms the genetic code. According to Davies there are three possibilities: Either physical laws generate this specified complexity, or there are unknown biological laws that make it inevitable, or it was a genuine miracle.

Davies invokes science as justification for not considering the miraculous, but he also rejects the first possibility. He writes:

The heart of my objection is this: The laws of physics that operate between atoms and molecules are, almost by definition, simple and general. We would not expect them alone to lead inexorably to something both highly complex and highly specific....A law of nature...will not create biological information, or, indeed, any information at all. Ordinary laws....can shuffle information, but they can't create it.

This leaves him with the possibility of a kind of biological determinism which results from a heretofore undiscovered complexity law or information law that drives matter toward the goal of producing life:

Whereas the laws of physics merely shuffle information around, a complexity law might actually create information....I believe it is only under the action of an informational law that the information channel, or software control, associated with the genetic code could have come into existence.

From the standpoint of naturalism, however, such a law has at least two unacceptable implications. The first is that it flies in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy which claims that naturalistic processes are meaningless, purposeless and directionless. A law of information that exhibits foresight, purpose, meaning and direction and that pushes atoms and molecules toward the goal of increasing complexity would be the undoing of this claim.

The second is that if there is such a law and if the universe is actually suffused with purpose, meaning and foresight that would be compelling evidence for the existence of a super-natural mind, an intelligent architect of the cosmos.

If, though, scientists one day discover that life really is abundant in the universe then that would mean that the existence of such an information law and thus the existence of an intelligent supernatural agent are very likely. In fact, there's no significant difference between life resulting from a kind of biological determinism established by God and a supernatural miracle of instantaneous creation. They're both miraculous. The only real difference is the question of how long the process took.

In the beginning of the last chapter Davies quotes one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, Freeman Dyson, who wrote in 1979 that, "The more I study the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming." The evidence to which Dyson refers has multiplied in the decades since 1979 many times over.

Davies concludes his last chapter with this:

The search for life elsewhere [in the universe] is thus the testing ground for two diametrically opposed worldviews. On one side is orthodox science, with its nihilistic philosophy of the pointless universe, of impersonal laws oblivious of ends, a cosmos in which life and mind, science and art, hope and fear are but fluky incidental embellishments on a tapestry of irreversible cosmic corruption....

There is an alternative view, undeniably romantic but perhaps true nonetheless, the vision of a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe, governed by ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve toward life and consciousness. A universe in which the emergence of thinking beings is a fundamental and integral part of the overall scheme of things. A universe in which we are not alone.

What Davies leaves to the reader to ask is where would such laws, laws that direct mindless matter to create biological information and consciousness, come from? Of the three possible explanations for the origin of life - physical law, biological determinism and miracle - the first is a non-starter and the other two both lead to the conclusion that there's an intelligence at work behind the universe.

Naturalists can't be happy with this state of affairs.

Tyranny for Our Own Good

One of the things that voters rejected in the recent election was the tyranny of elites on the left who believe that their intrusions into our lives is for our own good.

These elites believe that they're smarter than the rest of us and that we should defer to their superior knowledge and judgment. For our own good we should acquiesce to their wish to dictate what we can say, which cars we can drive, what sorts of appliances we can have in our homes.

For our own good we should've acquiesced to their demand during the covid outbreak that we all wear masks, forego socializing with family and friends, and close down churches and schools.

These elites are often moral pragmatists who believe that lies in the service of a righteous cause are righteous.

The great Christian apologist and literary scholar C.S. Lewis had something to say about such folks in his book of essays titled God in the Dock. He wrote:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963)

Ethics and Evolution

In an essay titled Evolution and Ethics written in 1893 Thomas Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for morality. One popular candidate for such a basis is the evolution of the moral sense in human beings, but Huxley, despite his total fealty to Darwinian evolution, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,”... adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution.

I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Huxley's right, of course. If the inclination to be kind and tolerant has evolved in the human species then so has the inclination to be selfish, violent, and cruel. So if evolution is to serve as our "moral dictionary" what grounds do we have for privileging kindness over cruelty? Both are equally sanctioned by our evolutionary history, and thus we can't say that either is better or more right than the other.

Huxley goes on to dispense with the notion that the evolutionary development of our ethical sensibility can provide us with some sort of guide to our behavior:

There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called “ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittest’; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.

The problem is that, for naturalists, the processes of nature are the only thing they can look to for moral guidance.

Having rejected the notion that there exists a transcendent, personal, moral authority, the naturalist, if he's to avoid nihilism, is left trying to derive ethics from what he sees in nature, which leads to what I regard as the most serious problem with any naturalistic ethics: There's simply no warrant for thinking that a blind, impersonal process like evolution or a blind, impersonal substance like matter, can impose a moral duty on conscious beings.

Moral obligations, if they exist, can only be imposed by conscious, intelligent, moral authorities. Evolution can no more impose such an obligation than can gravity. Thus, naturalists (atheists) are confronted with a stark choice: Either give up their atheism or embrace moral nihilism. Unwilling to do what is for them unthinkable and accept the first alternative, many of them are reluctantly embracing the second.

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

I had been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality….

I experienced a shocking epiphany that religious believers are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality….

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Joel Marks, An Amoral Manifesto

The world, according to this new picture [i.e. the picture produced by a scientific outlook], is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….

Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative. W.T. Stace, The Atlantic Monthly, 1948.

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality. Kai Nielson (1984)

What these thinkers and dozens like them are saying is that the project of trying to find some solid, naturalistic foundation upon which to build an ethics is like trying to find a mermaid. The object of the search simply doesn't exist, nor could it.

Why the Democratic Party Is in Trouble

John Hinderaker at Powerline.com tells us why the Democrat Party is in very deep trouble. It boils down to this: the Democrats hold a series of ideological positions that are extremely unpopular and about which no Democrat who wants to get elected will be explicit.

Here are some of his main points:

As the dust settles, I think Democrats will realize they are in a deeper hole than they thought. It was no coincidence that Harris refused to say what her position was on a variety of issues, earning the title of the “no comment” candidate–something that must be unprecedented in presidential history. The problem wasn’t that Kamala was tongue-tied, the problem was that the Democrats no longer have a coherent policy agenda.

The one issue that Harris never refrained from talking about was abortion. That is, today, the Democrats’ signature–and arguably only–issue. Apart from a fervent devotion to abortion, up to the moment of birth and beyond, what do they stand for?....

The Democrats are the party of DEI and Kamala Harris was a DEI candidate, but DEI is widely unpopular. The United States has labored under affirmative action, of which DEI is the current iteration, for 50 years. But Americans don’t like race discrimination or sex discrimination, and they believe in merit. An unbroken history of polling, stretching back for decades, has found that race and sex discrimination in employment and education are unpopular. Despite the massive corporate, government and cultural pressure that has tried to force DEI on Americans, that remains true....

Opening the borders and admitting millions of illegal immigrants has been the core policy priority of the Biden administration, as reflected in Biden’s day-one executive orders. But it was a policy prescription that Democrats were never able to openly articulate and defend. Thus, as the 2024 election approached they were reduced to making the absurd claim that “the Southern border is secure.” Open borders are deeply and correctly unpopular, and do not provide a platform on which any future Democrat can run,....

The energy issue is analogous. Occasionally a Democrat will say publicly what the party really believes, that Americans live too well, and we must reduce our standard of living in order to emit less carbon dioxide. This view is manifested in efforts to suppress oil and gas production and subsidize and mandate expensive renewables. But the Democrats can’t admit that their goal is to make gasoline unaffordable, so when elections roll around they release the strategic petroleum reserve to drive the price down....

The Democrats have always been the party of high taxes and unrestrained spending, ostensibly in pursuit of high-minded goals. But hardly anyone buys that anymore. Blue states are failing, without exception, and Americans are flocking to low-tax, low-spending red states–where they find that quality of life is better, not worse, than the states that spend vastly more on government programs.

Ever since the 1960s, the Democrats have been the party of peace (or, at least, anti-war). They have never repudiated the pacifism and borderline anti-Americanism of those days, and as recently as 2008, Barack Obama ascended from obscurity to a presidential nomination largely because he was almost the only prominent Democrat to oppose the Iraq war from the beginning. But now Republicans are running as a peace party, and it is Democrats who cling to international commitments and want to keep the Ukraine war, in particular, going.

Issues relating to war and peace are complicated, and the parties’ inclinations do not fall into a simple hawk/dove paradigm. But for the foreseeable future, Democratic Party platforms will not be based on opposition to foreign wars, nor will an “America last” ideology ever be a vote-getter.

So the Democrats’ problems go a lot deeper than a senile president and an inept candidate. At this point, the party’s historic policy agenda is in tatters and needs a complete reboot–something of which party leaders seem incapable.

Hinderaker didn't even mention another major Democrat albatross, the campaign to convince us that our gender is whatever we say that it is and that men who insist that they're women should be allowed to compete in sports against girls and insinuate themselves into girls' private spaces like restrooms and locker rooms.

He might also have mentioned the resentment engendered by attempts to use legal prosecutions to destroy their political opposition, their efforts to forgive student loan debt, their threats to both the first and second amendments, their promises to pack the Supreme Court with liberals and grant statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, which would give the Democrats a permanent majority in the Senate, the antisemitic protests on liberal campuses, the feminization of the culture which has driven many young men away from the Democratic Party, and half a dozen or so other issues.

Harris never defended any of these positions because she knew they were in fact indefensible and repugnant to the average American.

It's puzzling to me that Democrats simply can't bring themselves to admit that what's been summarized above is the reason they lost. They continue to insist that Trump won because the nation is comprised of 74 million bigots who despise women, blacks, and gays, i.e. Trump won because half of our voting population is comprised of "fascist garbage." As long as they keep trying to convince us, and themselves, that this is who we are they'll likely continue to lose elections.

The 4B Movement Is a Blessing

Since the election of Donald Trump last Tuesday there has been an effort among feminists on social media to take out their grief on men. To this end many of them, apparently, are embracing something that started in South Korea called the "4B Movement." Since men disproportionately supported Trump, proponents of the movement seek to punish them by henceforth refusing to date men, to get married to men, to have sex with men, or to have children.

Although the 4B threat sounds silly and will certainly be ephemeral there's a serious case to be made for encouraging it to be permanent. Brandon Morse, writing at RedState makes that case very convincingly.

His article is titled I Support the Feminist's '4B Movement' Because I Think Women Deserve More and the entire piece deserves to be read notwithstanding that it's behind a paywall. Here are some of Morse's main points:

I am all for enacting and maintaining the 4B Movement, because I honestly believe taking leftist women out of the mating pool will improve society in many ways.

For instance, ... if these leftist women do stop having sex promiscuously, then the abortion industry will crash and burn. The vast majority of abortions are done out of convenience for the would-be mother, and if they aren't getting pregnant, then they don't need to abort....

There would also be a diminishing of hookup culture, and that influence waning would push other women into having more realistic expectations for their love life and relationship, as it should be.... [Women] having higher standards actually raises the standards of society, making society a better place. It's funny how much sex impacts the quality of civilization when you think about it.

Women outnumber men by and large, meaning the competition for getting a good man is vast. Women are competing with millions of other women for an increasingly small pool of men who are successful, well put together, and physically and emotionally stable. In other words, "good husband material." However, feminists often search for "good husband material" for more selfish reasons.... Many are career-focused and don't want families.

Removing them from the dating pool would allow women who do want to have stable families, raise children in warm and loving environments, and focus on building a good home life to have an easier time finding "good husband material." These will often be conservative women who value and appreciate men, love children, and desire to have a home built on proven values and virtues.

These are the women that deserve good husbands, but it's harder to find them when you have other women in the way. These women deserve more.

So, all in all, the 4B Movement should be encouraged. It would reduce abortions, diminish the "hook up" culture, force men to develop better character, and be a boon to those women with high standards who want a good man to marry but find it difficult to compete with other women who make themselves sexually available while demanding little or nothing from men.

Radical feminists might blanch at the thought, but the 4B Movement is actually a very conservative idea and would be a blessing for our society.

Mr. Biden's Historic Presidency

President Biden claimed in a speech last Thursday that his presidency was "historic." Perhaps it was but historians will probably remember it in ways that Mr. Biden would doubtless wish they didn't.

Matthew Continetti at the Free Beacon has a rather different take on the historic nature of Mr. Biden's presidency than does Mr. Biden.

According to the Fox News Voter Analysis, only 40 percent of voters expressed a favorable view of Biden. His unfavorable rating was a whopping 58 percent. The economy and immigration were the two most important issues. Voters preferred Trump over Vice President Harris on the economy by 24 points. They preferred Trump over Harris on immigration by a jaw-dropping 77 points.

The country shifted right on Election Day. Trump made inroads everywhere, in all corners and among critical voting blocs. He is on track to win all seven swing states. He is the first Republican in a generation to win the popular vote. He has won the "blue wall" states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania twice, something no Republican since Ronald Reagan has accomplished. He is expected to enter office with a GOP trifecta of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. The electorate identified as Republican for the first time since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Biden's presidency is "historic" not for its accomplishments but for its ultimate outcome: Donald Trump's reelection, the first nonconsecutive presidential terms since the 19th century, and a working-class realignment toward the GOP.

Biden believed in the propaganda that said he could be the next FDR. His self-regard cost him the presidency. His policies created the border crisis. His spending produced inflation. His order to retreat hastily from Afghanistan eroded American deterrence. His equity agenda and transgender policies alienated voters. And his hubris led him to run for reelection despite his age and infirmity.

Regarding the presidential campaign I have some questions for my Democrat friends: For months people in your party, including both the president and the vice president, have been calling Mr. Trump and those who would vote for him the most vile names they could think of. They're "garbage," Mr. Biden told us, they're stupid, they're white supremacists, racists, fascists, "literally Hitler," etc. But now we read that the president and the vice-president are actually congratulating this historically odious man on being elected to lead the nation for the next four years!

The same man they were telling us was going to imprison his political opponents, monitor women's pregnancies, and impose a dictatorship on the country is now being offered felicitations by the same people who were insisting a short while ago that he should be himself locked up.

Aren't their well-wishes a clear indication that they don't really believe the things they were saying about him and his supporters, and if they don't really believe those things weren't they then lying to us about him? Weren't they knowingly and deliberately deceiving us by slandering both Mr. Trump and over half of the electorate?

What kind of people behave this way?

Perhaps you'll reply that their congratulations are insincere. If so, though, aren't they lying about that and doesn't their insincerity make them hypocrites? It is, of course, the gracious thing to do to congratulate the winner of an election, but in the minds of Democrats this wasn't like any other election in our history. This was an existential struggle for the survival of democracy, a conflict between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny, between light and darkness.

If Donald Trump is the horrid man so many Democrats have made him out to be, if he's "literally Hitler," if our democracy is now about to be extinguished under his administration, if the boot of oppression is now pressing on the neck of our freedoms, isn't graciousness rather out of place? Would the president and vice president really be gracious to Adolf Hitler?

Or again, do they just not really believe the vile slanders with which they've been smearing both Mr.Trump and his supporters? If so, what kind of people behave this way?

What Is Biological Information?

One of the most compelling arguments for the existence of a cosmic designer, a God, is based on the fact that there's an enormous amount of information packed into every cell in every living thing in the world. Since information, wherever we encounter it, is the product of a mind and never the product of chance or physical processes, it's reasonable to assume that the information in the cell is probably also the product of a mind.

The argument is especially compelling when we consider the information content of the very first cell, a structure which must've been at least as complex as a computer, which must've been able to metabolize nutrients and replicate itself and which must've emerged before the standard Darwinian processes of mutation and natural selection were operative.

But what is information?

Eric Holloway at Mind Matters helps us get a handle on it. He writes:

We know information when we see it. An article contains information. A photograph contains information. The thoughts in our mind contain information. So does a computer program and so do our genomes.

Yet other things we see around us clearly do not contain information. A handful of toothpicks dropped on the ground does not. Nor do the swirling tea leaves in a cup. Neither does a pair of tossed dice nor a sequence of 100 coin flips. But mere disorder is not the clue. An intricate snowflake does not contain information either.

Can we state the difference between the article and the scattered toothpicks precisely? That’s tricky.

Clearly, complexity is a necessary feature of an entity that contains information—but it is not sufficient.

A monkey pounding on a computer keyboard would produce a complex pattern of symbols, but it's not information, at least not in the relevant sense we find in living cells, such as the genetic code inscribed on DNA.

So, what's needed to qualify as information in this relevant sense? What's the difference between the sequence of letters produced by the monkey and the sequence of letters found in a Dickens novel?

The raw matter of an article is letters and punctuation. If we distribute letters and punctuation randomly on a page, without applying an external pattern, then we get something that is without pattern and uninformative. On the other hand, if we take our letters and punctuation, and arrange them so as to express our thoughts (an external, specified pattern), suddenly the arrangement becomes informative to a reader.

In other words, the sequence of letters produced by the monkey, though complex, doesn't inform. It has no meaning. It doesn't specify a recognizable pattern.

A landscaper who plants flowers in a pattern that spells out "Welcome to Our Town" has created a complex arrangement that specifies a meaningful pattern. It's information. The same flowers strewn randomly around a field may form a complex distribution, but they wouldn't specify a meaningful pattern and therefore do not constitute information.

The DNA/RNA arrangement is extremely complex and specifies a meaningful code responsible for synthesizing proteins. Moreover, it requires the assistance of proteins to aid it in synthesizing the very proteins it requires.

How this amazing ensemble arose apart from the input of a mind is orders of magnitude more mysterious than how the flowers would've spelled out "Welcome to Our Town" without the input of an intelligent landscaper.

Indeed, the only reason for doubting the existence of an intelligent "landscaper" is a metaphysical prejudice in favor of naturalism that leads one to conclude that despite the difficulties of explaining how an information-rich cell could have arisen by chance, we're mistaken to conclude that God did it.

And why are we mistaken? Because we know a priori that there is no God.

This is what's called circular reasoning, and it's not very convincing.

A Better Explanation for Last Tuesday

There have been a lot of theories bruited about to explain Donald Trump's historic victory in Tuesday's election. I've heard people suggest that Joe Biden waited too long to abdicate the throne and give his veep time to campaign. Others have said that she was just not a good candidate, that she should've picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate rather than the hapless fabulist Tim Walz. Still others, leafing through the dog-eared pages of the Democratic playbook, have blamed her loss on white supremacy, racism, sexism, etc.

The theory that I like to think contains more truth than any of these, however, is that advanced by Jim Geraghty at National Review who wrote that,

[The] Democrats just learned the hardest of hard lessons: The electorate — not just straight white males — doesn’t want their brand of deeply divisive identity politics, deliberate conflation of legal immigration and illegal immigration, policies that reflexively recommend and enact permanent bodily changes for teenagers questioning their gender identity, and basically the entire agenda of the 2019 Kamala Harris presidential campaign.

In other words, I prefer to think that it's the policies that the Democrats have come to embrace over the last two decades that did them in - the wokeness, DEI, Critical Race theory, the refusal of big city attorneys general to prosecute crime, the resort to lawfare against their political enemies, males competing against females in sports, the Green New Deal, high taxes, high inflation - the whole panoply of contemporary progressivism.

Washington progressives live in a media bubble that constantly reinforces their opinions and insulates them from how most Americans think. Those Americans whose contrary opinions do manage to seep through into the left's email boxes are considered "garbage," "fascists," "racists," and sundry other variations on the same theme.

This is how they think of much of America, but thinking of their constituents this way is not conducive to winning elections. It'll be interesting to see whether the Democrats have learned the salient lessons from their "shellacking" this time around or whether their ideology and mindset is so ingrained that they can't help but repeat the same mistakes throughout the second Trump administration.

The Fundamental Stuff of Reality

Materialists believe everything reduces to material stuff - atoms and the particles of which they are made. On this view, even phenomena like ideas and sensations are merely epiphenomena of the material brain. The brain, in other words, is all that's necessary to explain mental events. There is no mind.

This view is becoming increasingly untenable, however, as we learn more about the deep structure of living things. It certainly is beginning to look like matter is itself reducible to information and, since information lies downstream from mind, it would follow that immaterial mind is even more basic than matter.

The following video is a bit long, but it illustrates how the theory that matter is reducible to information plays out in biology. It's pretty good.

Perhaps the 20th century physicist Sir James Jeans was correct when he said that the universe is beginning to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.

An Election Day Prayer

Today is election day, or I should say it's the culmination of an election process that began weeks ago with mail-in balloting. I wrote to a friend of mine who was skeptical of Donald Trump that I think there's a spectrum along which both Trump supporters and Trump opponents lie.

At one end of the spectrum are those who don't care what Trump says or does, they love him. At the other end are those who don't care what Trump says or does, they hate him.

In between are three kinds of folks: There are those who consider Trump's personal behavior to lie along a range from unfortunate to odious but think the benefit of his policies to the nation supersedes the risk posed by his character flaws.

Another group consists of those who think his behavior is so bad that it overrides any benefit to be gained from his policies and who won't vote for him because of it.

A third group is comprised of those who dislike and reject his policies regardless of his behavior. As I see things, ... most Trump voters I know are in the first group. My friend, I assume, and most Never-Trump Republicans are in the second, and most Democrats are in the third.

In any case, it's my prayer that the person who wins this election is God's choice to lead our nation, that the election is not tainted by fraud, that whatever may be the result there is no consequent violence, and that whoever wins we still love and respect those who chose differently than we did.

The Electoral College

One of the many issues at stake in tomorrow's election is the fate of the electoral college. Democrats want to do away with it and Republicans want to keep it, but many voters, unfortunately, have no idea what the electoral college is and why it matters.

To help us understand this institution here's a short five minute video that explains how the electoral college works and why it's important. The video was originally made about ten years ago so some of the references to political figures may seem a little anachronistic, but that doesn't detract from its message.

It's disturbing that there's so much support on the left for abolishing the electoral college. One gets the feeling that those who wish its demise do so because it's an impediment to their own electoral success. If they can't win playing by the traditional rules then they want to change the rules.

That same sentiment is also at the root, it seems, of the desire among many Democratic leaders to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices and to grant statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

If a Democratic president was able to appoint two or four more progressive justices progressives would have a permanent majority on the Court which would allow them to circumvent Republican legislatures until a Republican president and Senate were eventually elected and added another two or four conservative justices of their own. This could theoretically continue until the Supreme Court had more members than the Congress.

If both D.C. and Puerto Rico became states the overwhelming likelihood is that they would elect Democratic senators which would give Democrats an almost invincible majority in the Senate for at least a generation.

So, there's quite a lot at stake in tomorrow's election.

Abetting Anti-Semitism

Is the leadership of the Democrat Party indifferent to anti-Semitism? It certainly seems so from a congressional report on the campus troubles of last spring.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has produced a report on campus anti-Semitism which states, among other things, that campus anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic disturbances were "permitted to operate unabated, in flagrant violation of university policies, culminating in widespread encampments and pro-Hamas demonstrations."

The report details a meeting between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Columbia president Minouche Shafik in January in which Schumer, who's a Democrat, sought to reassure Shafik that she "didn't need to worry about pesky congressional investigations." He advised her to tell her administration to just "keep their heads down" and that the concerns being raised about her handling of the campus protests were "really only among Republicans."

The report also revealed that,

...in the wake of Oct. 7, Harvard's top administrators, including former president Claudine Gay, "excised language from a university statement that would have condemned Hamas's terrorist attack." Gay also privately urged Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker not to label the phrase "from the river to the sea" anti-Semitic, as doing so "would raise questions about why the University was not imposing discipline for its use."

"The report also shows that alumni wrote to Gay expressing concern in the wake of a Washington Free Beacon report about the assault of an Israeli student during an anti-Israel protest, noting, 'Harvard's tolerance of violent hate speech toward Jews versus likely reaction to such behavior directed at other ethnic groups.'

Harvard never took disciplinary action against the students captured on video accosting their classmate, though the Suffolk County District Attorney's office has slapped two of them with criminal charges — an investigation the university has not cooperated with."

The full story is at the link and it's replete with interesting details.

Evidently, the highest echelons of the Democrat Party as well as the administrators of these universities, who are probably themselves all Democrats, see no problem with the harassment of Jews and explicit support for one of the most horrible terrorist organizations of the 21st century.

One can only marvel at the moral vacuity displayed by the contemporary left in general and these individuals in particular.

Cleaning Up the Mess

So President Biden pretty clearly called Trump's supporters "garbage" (see yesterday's post), whether he intended to or not, and the Democrats are scurrying about trying to clean up the mess he created.

Andrew Stiles and Thaleigha Rampersad at the Free Beacon describe the Democrats' efforts:

Doing what comes naturally, mainstream journalists and other partisan Democrats rushed to Biden's defense, denying reality out of fear that the hateful comment could damage Kamala Harris's campaign in the final days before the election.

The White House insisted—contrary to the available evidence—that Biden was referring to a single Trump supporter, Tony Hinchcliffe, the off-color comedian who described Puerto Rico as a "floating island of garbage" during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend.

Axios reporter Alex Thompson asked the White House to clarify how it came to that conclusion, but he did not receive a response.

Stiles and Rampersad write that some in the media have blamed Biden's gaffe on his childhood stutter. Others have tried to convince us that Biden was describing the sort of thing Trumps' supporters said, not the supporters themselves.

Numerous media outlets actually faulted Republicans for "seizing on the gaffe" for political gain. Other commenters simply bit the bullet and acknowledged that our superannuated Chief Executive said it and ought to have the integrity to own it.

See the Free Beacon article for details and links to the above summary. For her part Ms. Harris dissociated herself from all criticism of people based upon whom they support:

Vice President Kamala Harris said she spoke with Biden on Tuesday night following her primetime address on the National Mall, where she denounced Trump as a "petty tyrant" whose election would incite "chaos and division."

Biden's "garbage" remark did not come up during the conversation, Harris told reporters on Wednesday. "First of all, he clarified his comments, but let me be clear, I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for," she said.

What's amusing about all this is that Democrats have accused Trump supporters of being racist, sexist, antisemitic fascists and Nazis, but now the Democrats are emphatically denying that the President labeled Trump supporters "garbage." And Kamala Harris who has herself called Trump a fascist, "a petty tyrant," and a "dictator" nevertheless "strongly disagrees" with criticizing people she believes are okay with Trump being a Nazi and who will do their best to see that he gets elected?

If you or your colleagues have called Trump - and, by extension, his supporters - all those other names why shrink from the accusation that the President has also called them garbage?

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.