Deportation Resistance

There's something odd about the resistance that some countries are trying to erect against American deportation of their citizens who've come here illegally. Repeatedly we've been told that these immigrants are hard workers who make a valuable contribution to American society and that America is better off for having them in it.

That's doubtless true for many of them, but then why is it that when Mr. Trump tries to fly them back to their country of origin the leaders of those countries refuse to accept them?

First Mexico refused to cooperate, then Columbia, and now Haiti. Leaders of the first two countries have since been persuaded by Mr. Trump that they should reconsider, which they quickly did and have subsequently declared that their initial refusals were something of an April Fools joke they played on their own public.

Haiti's interim president, Leslie Voltaire, is pleading with Pope Francis to help him because Mr. Trump's promise to send back most of the 1.5 million Haitians would be "catastrophic" for the country which is already reeling from anarchy and violence.

It's not clear that all of these 1.5 million Haitians are in the country illegally, but even so, why would Mr. Voltaire not want these his citizens, many of whom are doubtless among the most enterprising of his country's population, to return to Haiti where they can do some good for their fellow Haitians?

If the deportees are such an asset to the U.S. wouldn't they a forteriori be an asset to their home country? Why don't the leaders of these countries want their own hard-working citizens returned so that they can work to improve their native land? Perhaps there are at least two reasons:

1. They're lying to us about the quality of the migrants: Many, maybe most, migrants are in fact poor and unskilled and are thus a drain on services provided by governments that are already under financial stress. Sending them off to the U.S. is a kind of social safety valve that eases the pressure on the government to provide care for these people.

Furthermore, a not insignificant percentage of the migrants are criminals and otherwise undesirable ne'er-do-wells that their home countries are glad to be rid of. The leaders of those countries are more than happy to make their thugs our problem.

2. They're own economies benefit to some extent from "remittances" sent back from the U.S. by those migrants who find work here but who may not have opportunities in their home countries to be productive.

In either case, the benefit to the U.S. from Mr. Biden's "no border" policy is dwarfed by the costs to American citizens. Mr. Trump was elected largely because he promised to put a stop to the insanity of the last four years, and he seems so far to be following through on the promise.

18 Trillion Feet

One of the marvels of our bodies' engineering is the compactification of DNA in each of the three trillion or so nucleated cells each of us possesses. DNA has been called the most efficient information storage device known to man and the following six minute video explains why.

As astonishing as the storage of our genetic code is the video hardly scratches the surface of the multiple layers of complexity involved. There are entire systems of proteins devoted to unraveling the double helix, reading off the code, repairing errors, replicating the code, integrating the epigenome, and more.

See here for some additional details.

One of the most amazing examples of this bio-complexity is the ability of DNA to "make sense" at several different levels of structure. To see what I mean, imagine you read a paragraph in a book in which each word is read sequentially. The paragraph will have a meaning.

Now suppose you only read every third word and found that the paragraph still made sense but had a completely different meaning. That's how DNA works. Depending on where along the strand the "reader" begins it codes for different proteins and traits. (See here for a fuller explanation)

This is so baffling that many investigators doubt that there can be any naturalistic explanation and believe it points instead to an intelligent programmer who somehow designed the system.

In any case, watch the video and ask yourself how blind purposeless processes could have produced the ability to achieve this degree of compaction purely by chance.

Teleportation and Personal Continuity

Imagine that you're a crew member of the Starship Enterprise and are voyaging to another galaxy. Imagine, too, that you're a philosophical materialist who believes that all that exists is matter and energy.

When you arrive at your destination you're teleported to the surface of a planet. This process involves the total disintegration of your body on the Enterprise and instant reassembly out of completely different atoms on the surface of the planet.

Star Trek Teleporter

Assume that the reassembled person (RP) has all the memories and knowledge that you did before being disintegrated. Is RP really you?

If materialism is true, it's hard to see how it could be since RP is made of completely different material stuff than you were.

If you say that the material stuff has the same form as it did before being disintegrated you're adopting a kind of Aristotelian/Thomist view of the soul, which materialists would find offensive.

If you say that you have a mind that survives the disintegration process then you're again renouncing materialism because you're positing the existence of an immaterial substance, i.e. a mind or soul, that's an essential part of your being.

So, what is it that makes RP the same person as you? Memories? If it's memories how many of your memories must you retain in order for RP to be you? Every day we lose many of our memories. Can you remember word-for-word a conversation you had yesterday or the day before? Probably not.

Nor can you remember much about yourself from ten years ago, so what percentage of your memories must you retain for RP to be you? If memories give us our personal identity then an amnesiac or an Alzheimer's sufferer would be a different person than before losing his or her memory.

Besides, it's not clear in any case that our memories are material or physical. Perhaps the brain stores electrons or chemicals on neurons which somehow get translated into a recollection, but those electrons aren't the memory itself any more than an inflamed nerve is identical to the sensation of pain.

When you remember your mother's face you have a picture or image of her face, but the image is not electrons or chemicals in neurons. It's arguably something immaterial.

Perhaps you might say that you and RP are the same person because the genetic code inscribed on your DNA would be the same in both of you, but identical DNA would only mean that RP was a clone of you. It doesn't mean that RP would actually be you. Moreover, identical twins have identical DNA but they're not the same person.

It seems that the materialist has to assume that you have ceased to exist and that RP is not you but a new person very similar to you. Either that or they need to acknowledge that materialism needs to be rejiggered somehow.

Maybe, though, there's another option. Maybe materialism is just false and there's actually something immaterial about us that makes us who we are. Perhaps we have a soul that bestows upon us our identity and which is unaffected by the teleporter.

One more question: Suppose an exact replica of you appears on the planet but you do not disintegrate on the Enterprise. Which one is you? Could you and RP be the same person having a single soul but possessing two distinct bodies? Could it be instead that your soul splits betwen the two bodies such that now there really are, at least momentarily, two of you?

I'll leave you to wrestle with that scenario on your own.

Why Does the Left Oppose Trump's Border Policy?

President Trump is making good on his promise to close the border and deport those who are here illegally, especially those who have a criminal record in their country of origin or have committed crimes since they've been here (other than illegally crossing our border).

The left strenuously objects to these measures. They tell us that it's uncompassionate to deny people the opportunity to live in this country. They tell us that under Biden and Mayorkis the border was secure and that immigrants are all good people just trying to make an honest living. They tell us that it's cruel to separate families by sending parents back while the children, who may be U.S. citizens, remain.

They insist that a wall won't work and that it's somehow inhumane. The pope himself weighed in on how awful it is for the U.S. to use a wall to exclude people, apparently forgetting that the Vatican is enclosed in one of the most massive walls in the world and that no one without a special clearance is allowed to stay there.

The Vatican Wall

None of the left's arguments against the Trump policy is very convincing.

They say that they think it morally repugnant to keep the needy out of the country, but I have little doubt that every person who makes this argument locks the doors to their homes and cars to keep people out who might otherwise benefit from having access to what's inside. If we have an obligation to let whomever wishes to come into the U.S. and enjoy the benefits of our welfare system, schools, hospitals, etc. why do we not have an obligation to keep the doors to our homes open for the same reason, albeit on a smaller scale?

If the immigration of eleven million people into the U.S. is viewed by the left with approbation why do they object so vociferously to the movement of a few hundred or a few thousand Israeli settlers into the West Bank? What's the significant difference? And if the left is concerned about families being separated why don't they encourage illegal aliens who are parents of U.S. citizens to take their children back to their countries of origin with them?

The reasons given for opposing President Trump's border initiatives are so flimsy that one may be forgiven for thinking that there's some other reason in play that they'd rather not acknowledge. I probably shouldn't speculate about what that reason might be, but it's quite possible that they see so many millions of immigrants as potential citizens and voters who'd likely be inclined to vote for the party they credit with allowing them to come in.

This may not be the reason that all on the left oppose closing the border and deporting illegals but do a thought experiment: Suppose it was demonstrably the case that once granted citizenship these immigrants would overwhelmingly vote Republican. Do you think the Democrats would still stand firm against a border wall and deportation?

Another reason some on the left, particularly the Marxists and their fellow-travelers, are eager to keep the flood of illegal immigration coming is because they embrace something called the Cloward-Piven Strategy. This is an argument put forward by two Columbia sociologists in the 1960s that the nation could be brought to its knees by overloading its institutions. Burden the schools, hospitals, law enforcement, etc. with so many people, especially poor people, and the whole capitalist system would collapse under the weight.

Cloward-Piven may well be behind a lot of the support on the left for open borders. In any case, it appears that President Trump is not a fan and neither is his border czar Tom Homan, and right now they're the ones whose opinion counts.

Scientism and Nice Nihilism

In Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality the author unabashedly promotes a scientistic view of knowledge. "Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it describes a view based on "scientism" which is the view that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not something we should even believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism."

Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, truths about justice, rights, beauty, and morality, for example, but Rosenberg thinks it's neither good science nor good epistemology to hold beliefs about these things.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor morally "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unrelentingly dark world and even this little glimmer is beset with problems.

Here's one: If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved behaviors that are not "nice." If we're the product of evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and nothing which is wrong to do.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to bravely and honestly face up to these consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in both of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of the page) that the consequences outlined in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism. The atheist who lives as if none of these consequences exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief or a worldview that entails conclusions one cannot live with, however, stands in serious need of reexamination.

The Not-So-Dark Ages

A lot of high school and even college students are taught that the historical period roughly from the fall of Rome to the 15th century was a time of intellectual stagnation with little or no scientific or technological progress.

The alleged ignorance that descended over Europe during this epoch has caused it to be called the "Dark Ages," a pejorative assigned to the Middle Ages by historians of the 18th century hostile to the Church and desirous of deprecating the period during which the Church wielded substantial political power.

Lately, however, historians have challenged the view that this epoch was an age of unenlightened ignorance. Rodney Stark has written in several of his books (particularly, his How the West Won) of the numerous discoveries and advancements made during the "dark ages" and concludes that they weren't "dark" at all.

The notion that they were, he argues, is an ahistorical myth. Indeed, it was during this supposed benighted era that Europe made the great technological and philosophical leaps that put it well in advance of the rest of the world.

For example, agricultural technology soared during this period. Advances in the design of the plow, harnessing of horses and oxen, horseshoes, crop rotation, water and wind mills, all made it possible for the average person to be well-fed for the first time in history.

Transportation also improved which enabled people and goods to move more freely to markets and elsewhere. Carts, for example, were built with swivel axles, ships were more capacious and more stable, and horses were bred to serve as draught animals.

Military technology also made advances. The stirrup, pommel saddle, longbow, crossbow, armor, and chain mail eventually made medieval Europeans almost invincible against non-European foes.

Similar stories could be told concerning science, philosophy, music, and art, and thus the view espoused by Stark that the medieval era was a time of cultural richness is gaining traction among contemporary historians who see the evidence for this interpretation of the time to be too compelling to be ignored.

This short video featuring Anthony Esolen provides a nice summary:

If someone in your presence refers to the "Dark Ages" you might ask them what it was about them that was so dark.

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 to which people go 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.

Belief Doesn't Always Require Evidence (Pt. II)

I closed yesterday's post with the assertion that just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

Yet the alleged lack of evidence for theism has long been one of the most popular reasons adduced for the refusal to accept it. As the 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell famously said when asked what he would tell God were he to stand before Him after his death and be asked why he never believed, Russell declared that he would simply tell God that "there wasn't enough evidence."

The 19th century writer W.K. Clifford insisted that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” and the 20th century philosopher Antony Flew, before his conversion to theism, wrote that,

If it is to be established that there is a God then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until or unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either atheism or agnosticism.

Theists contend that notwithstanding the skeptic's claim that there's not enough evidence to support a belief in God, the evidence is substantial and indeed, overwhelming.

It's not to the purpose of this post to recount that evidence here, but doubters are urged to read philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's latest book Return of the God Hypothesis to get an idea of why many theists believe the evidence is indeed dispositive for anyone who's not already dead set against it.

What is to the purpose in the present post, though, is to show that the demand for evidence before belief is warranted is very selective. What I mean is that religious skeptics often believe a lot of things for which they not only don't have evidence but for which evidence may not even be theoretically possible.

Here are some examples:

1. Memory beliefs (I believe I had a dream last night.)
2. Belief that we have (or don't have) free-will.
3. Belief that logical axioms are true and self-evident (If A then not ~A.)
4. Belief that there are an infinity of other universes.
5. Belief that every event has a cause.
6. Belief that nothing can cause itself.
7. Belief that life arose in some "warm little pond." (Darwin)
8. Belief that life is the product of material causes only.
9. Belief that justice is right and cruelty is wrong (What evidence justifies this or any moral belief?)
10. Belief that there is a past, present, or future.
11. Belief in the principle of cause and effect.
12. Belief that "the cosmos is all there is, ever was, or ever will be" (Carl Sagan).
13. Belief that evidence is necessary to warrant belief (Is there any evidence to support this belief?)

If skeptics hold these beliefs even though there's no empirical evidence for any of them, why is it thought to be a legitimate criticism of theists that they believe in the existence of God, especially since, as I mentioned above, there's lots of evidence that God exists?

Belief Doesn't Always Require Evidence (Pt. I)

It's not uncommon to hear religious believers criticized for holding beliefs they can't empirically demonstrate to be true, or at least probably true. The critic assumes that if no scientific evidence can be adduced in support of the belief then it's mere superstition.

This was in fact a popular view among skeptical philosophers from about 1870 to about 1980, and is still trotted out and dusted off every so often today. It's a view called evidentialism, and philosopher Alvin Plantinga has a great deal of fun dismantling it in his book titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Indeed, since Plantinga's book came out philosophers are much more shy about using this argument against religious believers, but others unfamiliar with the philosophical literature are not so reticent.

Plantinga asks,inter alia, why our beliefs should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Why should beliefs not be counted innocent until proven guilty?

He wonders, too, why a person of sound mind, convinced in her heart that God exists, and who has never been confronted with an antitheistic argument that she found compelling, should be required nevertheless to suspend her belief until she has acquired overwhelming evidence that her belief is true.

Suppose, for instance, that you were accused of a crime. There's substantial evidence against you and little that you can offer to offset it. Even so, you're convinced you're innocent. You know you're innocent. You can't explain the contrary evidence, but it doesn't matter. You just know you didn't commit the crime. Should you, despite this assurance, acknowledge anyway that you're guilty because you can't present an argument to explain why you're certain of your innocence?

Many people believe in God on the basis of a totally subjective experience that they can't document or prove but which leaves them with an assurance that they could not deny even were they so inclined. The experience of former atheist Kirstin Powers, a liberal journalist, provides us with a good example. She writes:

Then one night in 2006, on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, "Here I am." It felt so real. I didn't know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn't shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

You can read her full account of her experience at the link.

There's a scene in the movie Contact, which was based on a book by atheistic astronomer Carl Sagan, in which the character played by Jodie Foster, a scientist named Ellie Arroway, is part of an experiment in which she's transported to the center of the galaxy. However, upon her return she's unable to offer any evidence that she actually left earth.

None of the data collected by her colleagues from her transporter confirm that the experiment worked. Yet she's convinced that she actually experienced all that she claims to have experienced.

Is she justified in holding that belief? If her belief is the product of properly functioning cognitive faculties belonging to an accomplished scientist not given to imaginative flights of hysteria, is what she says in the following exchange with an interrogator discredited by her inability to present empirical evidence?

Michael Kritz: "Wait a minute, let me get this straight. You admit that you have absolutely no physical evidence to back up your story."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that you very well may have hallucinated this whole thing."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that if you were in our position, you would respond with exactly the same degree of incredulity and skepticism!"
Ellie Arroway: "Yes!"
Michael Kitz: [standing, angrily] "Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony, and concede that this "journey to the center of the galaxy," in fact, never took place!"
Ellie Arroway: "Because I can't. I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish... I... could share that... I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish."

Ellie Arroway, in Sagan's telling of the tale, had what amounts to a religious experience. Sagan clearly wants us to believe that her experience was veridical and that she's warranted in believing her experience was veridical despite the lack of proof, or even of any objective evidence.

But if that's so, why are Christians faulted, by folks just like Sagan, for believing in God on the basis of a subjective assurance similar to that possessed by Arroway?

Indeed, far more people have had an experience like Kirstin Powers had than have had an experience like Ellie Arroway. If Arroway is justified in believing that she actually encountered a different world why would people like Powers not be similarly justified?

Just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

More tomorrow.

The End of the Biden Administration

It'll come as no surprise to readers of Viewpoint that I'm not sorry to see Joe Biden and his administration leave Washington. What kind of president Donald Trump will be, I can't predict, but he can hardly do worse than Mr. Biden.

Mr. Biden's administration was deeply disappointing, although no one who's been paying attention over the course of the last sixteen years should've been surprised at this. Mr. Biden has demonstrated himself throughout that time to be a venal, unprincipled man whose chief concern was himself and his family.

Mr. Biden has corrupted the executive offices he's held, allowing his family to peddle influence abroad to enrich themselves and then awarding them "pre-emptive" pardons on his way out the door to protect the family from accountability.

Moreover, his administration's attempt, at Mr. Biden's behest, to destroy Donald Trump through criminal indictments that would never have been brought against anyone else has besmirched trust in American legal institutions. Not only has this "lawfare" been brought to bear against Trump but also against many of his associates and some ordinary people who on January 6th were guilty of nothing more serious than trespassing on federal property.

He campaigned on bringing us together, on being a unifier, but he repeatedly disparaged ordinary citizens who disagreed with him, implying that they were "fascists" and at one point explicitly calling them "garbage."

The outgoing president was not only personally corrupt, he was lawless in other ways as well. He refused to obey the law requiring him to control the border, he refused to heed the judgment of the Supreme Court which ruled that his plan to pay off student loans was unconstitutional, and he absurdly announced last week that he was declaring the ERA to be constitutional and the law of the land.

His Attorney General's use of the FBI to harass ordinary citizens at school board meetings, branding those concerned parents as terrorists for expressing angry opinions at those meetings, was a disgrace, as was the DOJ's harassment of pro-lifers, and the pressure the Biden administration applied on social and other media to restrict the circulation of opinions at odds with the administration's narratives.

Mr. Biden and his aides lied to us repeatedly about matters great and small. Among the former were Mr. Biden's insistence that he would never pardon his son, that he never talked to his son about his business dealings, that Donald Trump called Neo-nazis "good people" after Charlottesville, and that Mr. Biden himself was cognitively sound. Anyone who offered a contrary opinion, as did special prosecutor Robert Hur, was smeared in the media.

The Biden administration coddled the progressive left and their most absurd ideological conceits such as DEI in general and the trans ideology in particular. The administration and the party have been congenial to some of the most vicious antisemitism we've seen in this country since the 1930s, and they also did enormous damage to our economy by trying to impose their green energy agenda on businesses and consumers and by restricting our ability to drill for fossil fuels.

Ironically, the Biden administration's commitment to green energy, particularly offshore wind energy, is endangering the Right whale and has caused the deaths of countless migratory birds.

Reckless infusions of trillions of dollars into the economy drove inflation up over 20% during the Biden presidency and caused mortgage rates to jump from 2.8% to over 7% which has erected a huge impediment to young first-time home buyers.

Mr. Biden's disastrous Afghanistan pullout and his ridiculous talk about how a minor incursion by Russia into Ukraine wouldn't be so bad encouraged Vladimir Putin to launch a massive invasion in 2022. Biden's reluctance to give needed military supplies to both Ukraine and Israel has prolonged both of those conflicts, needlessly increasing the death toll. He released billions of dollars to Iran when that terrorist state was all but moribund from the Trump sanctions. The infusion of cash allowed the Iranians to get back on their feet, finance more bloodshed in the Middle East, and accelerate toward their goal of achieving a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, at home, our own military preparedness and recruitment have been allowed to wane.

Finally, it's doubtful that Mr. Biden, who spent 40% of his time in office on vacation, was even the person running his administration. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that when he asked the president why he signed an executive order freezing the exports of natural gas crucial to Europe Mr. Biden was unaware that he had in fact actually done so.

I can't think of any positive accomplishment for which President Biden will be remembered, and he may well be regarded by future historians as perhaps the worst president of the modern era. It's hard to feel regret - at least it is for me - that he and his associates are no longer in charge.

A Thought for MLK Day

One of the differences between Martin Luther King's approach to the race problem and that of many of those who celebrate him today is that many of our contemporaries see racial guilt as a collective stain whereas King saw it as individual and color-blind. To paraphrase the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the guilt for crimes of the past runs not through races nor through nationalities but through every individual human heart.

The collective view that whites, for example, share moral responsibility for what other whites did to blacks in the past, is implicit in demands for reparations and other racial preferences, but it's nonsensical.

Suppose you are of English descent and you read about how some Englishman two hundred years ago committed an atrocity against a Frenchman, would you feel that you personally owed contemporary French some sort of apology?

Suppose you are a male and you read about the horrific 2022 murder of four Idaho college students by Bryan Kohberger, another male. Would you feel that you are somehow responsible because you shared the same gender as Mr. Kohberger?

Would you feel some shared responsibility if your name was also Bryan? What if your surname just by happenstance was Kohberger? How much guilt would you bear for the Idaho murders?

If you think you would indeed be in some sense responsible, why do you? And if you think it absurd to claim that you are in any way responsible, that one's nationality or gender or surname do not make someone guilty for crimes committed by others who have those things in common with you, why is your race uniquely different?

Specifically, why are whites collectively expected to repent for what other whites did to blacks two hundred years ago?

Does a black man in Philadelphia share guilt when a black man in Los Angeles murders a white man? If a black man's great, great grandfather murdered a white man's great, great grandfather, does the contemporary black man bear guilt for the crime?

If your brother commits a crime and is sent to prison would justice be served by imprisoning you as well, merely because you're related, if you had no part in the crime?

Interestingly, the notion of collective guilt, a favored trope of the left, only applies when it works against whites. The left is today insisting that Israel has been cruelly punishing the Palestinian people in Gaza for what other Palestinians did on October 7th. But if collective guilt is a legitimate concept, why shouldn't all Palestinians pay for the atrocities of Hamas?

In fact, campus left-wingers at some of our major universities hold American Jews reponsible for what Israeli Jews are doing in the Middle East, yet these leftists claim it's a war crime to punish the Palestinians for what the savages that the Palestinians elected, supported, and cheered for, did to Jews on October 7th.

The concept of collective guilt is absurd. Guilt and merit are individual, not collective. No one today is guilty for what people of their same race did to others a century or more ago or are doing today. They're only guilty to the extent that they themselves participate in harming others or explicity or implicitly condone harming others.

We'd have a much healthier, cohesive society if everyone honored Martin Luther King by following his example and acknowledged that simple fact.

Living With the Incoherence

Readers of Viewpoint are doubtless well-aware that I think the question of how we ground our moral beliefs is of paramount importance.

They're doubtless aware, too, that we live in an era in which some secular folk are extremely judgmental of the behavior of others, to the extent that they're willing to destroy the careers of those who deviate from what the censorious deem morally acceptable opinions or behavior.

One of the ironies of this is that the most judgmental people in our society are often secularists or non-theists yet these are the very folks who should be the most non-judgmental of all.

I say this not because I think that non-theists (or naturalists) are more noble than others but because a naturalistic worldview, which naturalists presumably embrace, offers them no basis for making any judgment at all about the moral rightness or wrongness of other people's behavior.

Here's why:

Humanity, generally speaking, shares a basic moral understanding (i.e. that loyalty is good, betrayal is bad; kindness is good, cruelty is bad; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad, etc.). This understanding seems to be inherent in human beings as though it were somehow inscribed on our DNA.

Granting that this is so, how do we explain the existence of this basic moral understanding?

There are, it seems, two possibilities. Either we've acquired this understanding through an impersonal, unguided, naturalistic process like Darwinian evolution, or we've acquired it through the intentional act of a creator (i.e. God).

There's no plausible third option. It seems that naturalism and theism exhaust all the possibilities.

Suppose then, that the answer is that we've evolved this moral understanding naturalistically. If so, then what makes acting against this understanding "wrong"? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal processes like gene mutation, the accidents of genetic drift, and natural selection impose an obligation on us today to live according to a moral understanding that evolved to suit us for life in the stone age?

Moreover, if evolution is the source of our moral sentiments then it's also the source of our propensity for selfishness, violence, and tribal hatreds. That being so, if a propensity for kindness and a propensity for cruelty have both evolved in human beings, why should we assume that it's right to be kind and wrong to be cruel?

If we insist on making that assumption then we must be comparing kindness and cruelty to some higher standard that transcends our evolutionary history, but naturalism admits of no such higher standard.

On the other hand, if that moral understanding - call it conscience - is instilled in us by a perfectly good, all-knowing creator of the universe who both loves us and has the authority to insist that we act in accord with that moral understanding, and if that creator also possesses the power to hold us accountable for how we live, then we have a good reason for thinking that we have an objective duty to live according to what our conscience tells us is good and right.

On naturalism we can certainly intuit that we should be kind rather than cruel, selfless rather than selfish, but we have no obligation to follow those intuitions. Human nature being what it is we're often pulled and tugged in a direction opposite to what we think we should go, and in a naturalistic universe there's no compelling reason why we should resist those tugs. It's not morally wrong to yield to them.

In sum, if naturalism is true then ethics is just a bunch of socially fashionable and arbitrary conventions which have no real moral binding force.

If theism is true, though, there can be genuine moral right and wrong and genuinely objective moral obligations.

Anyone who believes that we have a moral obligation to do justice and to show compassion to the poor and oppressed should, if they're consistent, be a theist.

If they're a non-theist and nevertheless maintain that there are objective moral obligations they're irrationally importing those beliefs from an alien worldview (theism). Their own worldview offers no basis for them.

It's one of the more remarkable features of our times that so many secular people who pride themselves on their intellectual perspicacity either don't see this or don't mind living with the incoherence.

Are We Alone in the Cosmos?

In an interesting piece at Evolution News physicist Jonathan Witt asks whether there other thinking, speaking creatures living on faraway planets? What are the chances? Just focusing on the odds of intelligent life forms existing on planets in our galaxy the improbabilities are daunting.

There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy and possibly several trillion planets so it might seem likely that intelligent life has arisen on at least one of them, but there's much more to be considered than just the number of stars and planets.

As scientists' knowledge of the factors necessary for a planet to produce intelligent life grew it became apparent that it could very well be that our earth is the only planet in the entire galaxy, and maybe in the entire universe with its up to two trillion galaxies, that satisfies the conditions necessary for life.

Witt points us to a book written by astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards titled The Privileged Planet, in which the authors compile a list of factors necessary for a planet to be habitable. Here's the list with some explanation that I added in parentheses:

• Orbits an early G dwarf type star (These are stars that are very close to the sun’s mass, temperature, brightness, and spectral type. Most stars are either much more massive or much less massive than G dwarf type stars) that is at least a few billion years old.
• Orbits a star in the galactic habitable zone (The habitable zone is a region not too close to the galactic center and not too distant from it).
• Orbits a star near the co-rotation circle (This is the circular band around a spiral galaxy’s center where the stars move at about the same speed as the spiral arms) and with a low eccentricity galactic orbit (This is an orbit that's almost circular).
• Orbits a star outside the spiral arms (A planet within a spiral arm would be constantly bombarded with space debris).
• Is a terrestrial planet the right distance from the host star to have liquid water on the planet’s surface (a distance known as the circumstellar habitable zone).
• Is near enough the inner edge of the circumstellar habitable zone to allow high oxygen and low carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
• Orbits a star with no more than a few giant planets comparable in mass to Jupiter and that are in large, nearly circular orbits (so that the gas giants do not mess up the earth-like planet’s orbit).
• Has a low eccentricity orbit outside of regions around a star that would destabilize a planet’s rotation axis and orbit due to the gravity of giant planets.
• Is in the right mass range (A planet that's too massive would retain toxic gases in it's atmosphere due to it's strong gravity. If it were not massive enough, its graavity would be too weak to hold oxygen and nitrogen which are necessary for life).
• Has the right concentration of sulfur in its core.
• Has a large moon and the right planetary rotation period to avoid chaotic variations in its obliquity (i.e. its tilt on its axis).
• Has the right amount of water in the crust.
• Has steady plate tectonic cycling (No planet without crustal movements can recycle nutrients to the surface).
• Is a habitable planet where single-celled life actually emerged.
• Experienced a critically low number of large (meteorite) impacts during its history.
• Experienced a critically low number of transient radiation events from outer space during its history.
• Is a planet where plant and animal life successfully evolved from single-celled life.
• Is a planet where an intelligent, technology-wielding life form evolved from lower animals.
• Is among that subset of planets that have hosted technological life where the technological life has not destroyed itself or otherwise gone extinct.

Witt goes on to explain that,

Gonzalez and Richards assign a 10 percent chance for each of these 19 factors, but they make a strong case that the odds are much slimmer in many instances. Some of the factors may have an infinitesimally small probability of occurring by happenstance. For instance, perhaps the origin of the first self-reproducing cell is improbable or even impossible given the limited tool kit of materialists (chance + natural laws). The same may hold for the origin of plants and animals.

Richards and Gonzalez are skeptical that chemistry and natural selection alone can evolve fundamentally new forms of life, as am I. But for the sake of argument they generously grant even these factors a 1 in 10 chance of occurring on any terrestrial planet where all the other necessary factors are in place.

We are multiplying out fractions here, so the odds get geometrically smaller with each additional factor. Multiply out just the first 13 [to avoid the controversial evolutionary assumptions] and we find that the odds of any one star system having a habitable planet is less than one in a trillion, meaning that even with all the billions of stars in the Milky Way, the odds are strongly against there being even one other habitable planet in our galaxy besides Earth.

And note, Gonzalez and Richards further low-balled the odds by leaving out several factors. Also keep in mind that for some time now the calculated odds have been getting slimmer and slimmer as new habitability requirements are discovered.

So, is it reasonable to think that there are intelligent beings elsewhere in our galaxy? No. Such a phenomenon is exceedingly improbable, unless, Witt points out, our galaxy is not the product of chance and natural forces at all, but is instead the product of a unfathomably intelligent and powerful Creator.

If that's the case, our galaxy could be teeming with life, but unfortunately that's not a hypothesis open to the naturalist.

Read more on this topic at the link.

Is Torture an Absolute Evil?

Yesterday's post was instigated by a remark by Senator Angus King during the hearing for President-elect Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth didn't answer King's questions on the use of torture to the senator's satisfaction which elicited from him the rather gratuitous comment that Hegseth must think "torture's okay."

I argued yesterday that this was unfair inasmuch as torture is not an easy thing to define. Today, I'll argue, furthermore, that even though it's morally wrong, evil, in fact, to use torture purely to punish or for a sick amusement, it's not an absolute wrong.

To make my case I've dredged up an old post from several decades ago. See what you think:

So there I was the other night in thrall to the taut drama and machinations unfolding in the second season DVD of the thriller series called 24.

Determined to be patient with several gaping holes and other silliness in the story-line, I let myself be caught up in the suspense as terrorists planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Los Angeles and set it to go off "today." The Counter Terrorism Unit led by superhero Jack Bauer is tasked with saving the lives of millions of people.

Well, what should happen but that one of the terrorists who knows where the bomb is located falls into Jack's hands. Time is short and he has to discover the whereabouts of the weapon before it explodes, incinerating everything and everyone within a radius of a couple of miles and spreading a deadly cloud of radiation for hundreds of miles more.

Naturally, the terrorist refuses to talk. Jack cuffs him about the head once or twice but he knows that such measures are futile. He could, of course, employ waterboarding but that seems to be unknown to the script writers and besides it would violate the tenets of woke ideology, not to mention the Geneva Conventions which sagely affirm that the lives of millions of Americans are simply not worth the panic experienced by a single thug who wishes to slaughter them.

So, what does our superhero do? Those of you who are fans will find this to be very old news, but for those of you who have more important things to do on Monday nights than to watch a television show, I shall tell you and then ask some questions.

Jack has anticipated his prisoner's reticence and, unbeknownst to the viewer, has had the police in the terrorist's home country (which for some reason is never named) arrest the man's family (two sons and a wife). They bind and gag the hapless innocents in chairs and train a television camera on them. The video feed is up-linked and sent to a computer screen that the prisoner in L.A. can see. Already I can envision Andrew Sullivan and the editorial staff of the New York Times yelling at their televisions that Bauer can't do this, he's flouting the Geneva Conventions, he's a cruel, amoral imperialist pig, he's no better than the terrorists, etc. But it gets worse.

Agent Bauer then tells the prisoner that unless he spills the beans right now about where the bomb is to be found he will order the police in the unnamed foreign country to execute the man's eldest son. The terrorist's resolve is shaken but not broken. Bauer gives the order by phone, and the viewer sees on the computer screen a policeman kick over the boy's chair and shoot twice. The terrorist's family screams, the terrorist is traumatized, and the viewer is stunned, mostly at how little regard Bauer seems to have for the Geneva Conventions, international law, and enlightened moral opinion.

Now Bauer is screaming at the terrorist to tell him where the bomb is or he will order the execution of the youngest boy. The terrorist cannot withstand the psychological and emotional torture any longer. He breaks and gives Bauer the information he needs. The terrorist is then taken out of the room, and the scene focuses on the computer screen where we see the foreign police untying and releasing the man's family, including the boy who was supposedly shot.

The whole thing was a set-up, a ruse to deceive the prisoner into thinking that his family was being murdered when in fact they were not.

Now this ploy was certainly a violation of the Geneva Conventions on torture, even if no one was physically harmed (although no doubt both the prisoner and his family were terrified). So here's my first question: Given the circumstances, was Bauer justified in deceiving the prisoner in this way?

Is what he did so beyond the pale that it would have been better to allow millions of people to die a horrible death than to lie to this man in such a way as to make him believe that his silence was costing the lives of his loved ones when it really wasn't?

A great many people would answer that question with a resounding "Yes, it would be better that millions die than that this man have to endure the pain of that awful deception". Certainly the authors and signatories of the Geneva Conventions would answer this way, and presumably so would Senator King.

Does that strike you as absurd?

Suppose your family were visiting the city in which the bomb was planted and you are somehow privy to the events as they unfold. You're terrified. Your children could be incinerated if that bomb goes off. Would you object to what Bauer was doing?

If after the bomb is disarmed and you're hugging your spouse and children and thanking God that everyone is okay could you say to your children and spouse that you're so happy that they're okay, that they weren't harmed, but that, truth to tell, you think it would've been better had they been burned to death in a nuclear fireball, than that the terrorist be administered the ghastly treatment to which Bauer subjected him?

Those who insist that torture is an absolute moral wrong would have to answer that, yes, they would.

Some say that it's unchristian to engage in such dehumanizing behavior, but is it Christian to be able to possibly prevent a great evil but choose to not do so? Would it be loving to refrain from preventing the suffering of thousands of people out of moral squeamishness? Sometimes life hands people excruciating choices. At such times one has to do what in their honest judgment is least evil and most loving.

Saving the lives of one's family and tens of thousands of others at the cost of traumatizing the terrorist is, I think, both. Feel free to disagree.

"So, You're Saying That 'Torture's Alright.' "

During yesterday's Senate confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, Senator Angus King (I. ME) quizzed him on his views on torture. Mr. Hegseth's answers didn't satisfy the senator who concluded with implicit disdain that Mr. Hegseth was simply acknowledging that "torture's alright."

This is the sort of intellectual muddle-headedness that gives politicians a bad name.

The problem with trying to answer Senator King's questions is that there really are at least two issues with the use of torture by the authorities of the state which need to be teased apart unless one is simply trying to score political points to titillate the media.

One question is definitional or ontological, the other is ethical. They are: What actually constitutes torture, and, secondly, whatever torture is, is it ever justified? The argument in some quarters seems to boil down to this: "Don't worry about what torture is. Just don't do it." This position is quite unhelpful and more than a little ludicrous.

To start let's agree that torture is at least almost always wrong. If we're going to absolutely prohibit it, however, we have to have a pretty good idea what it is, especially if we risk abolishing a useful tool in preventing terror attacks that could potentially take the lives of our spouses and children.

The Geneva Convention of 1984 defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person...."

Let's apply that definition to one of the most notorious, and effective, means of coercing cooperation among suspected terrorists interrogated by the CIA - waterboarding. The CIA is believed to have used waterboarding in certain special cases to prevent the deaths of innocent victims.

In waterboarding a detainee is strapped to a table, his face is covered with a thin cloth and water is poured over it. This somehow produces a gag reflex, the sensation of drowning, and induces panic in the person to whom it's done. It's said to be very effective in eliciting accurate intelligence, intelligence which has saved lives.

Be that as it may, let's set aside the question of its justification for now and ask why we should think that this particular technique, if not abused, constitutes torture according to the Geneva Convention. What are some possible answers to that question?

Perhaps it's torture because it's painful.

But apparently there's not much pain involved, and if there were it would only be brief since people only hold out for a few seconds when subjected to it.

Perhaps it's torture because it does lasting harm to the detainee.

Evidently not. If done properly, the individual is no doubt shaken but none the worse for the experience. In fact, interrogators have had it done to them as part of their training just so they know what it feels like.

Perhaps it's torture because it's done to punish.

No. It's done to elicit information. Once the subject cooperates the treatment ceases.

Perhaps it's torture because it's unpleasant.

It is unpleasant, but surely an unpleasant experience is not ipso facto torture. If it were, then putting someone in restraints or feeding them institutional food would be torture.

Perhaps it's torture because it frightens the terrorist.

Indeed, it does frighten the terrorist, but so does the prospect of being executed for their crimes or being put in prison for the rest of their life. Should they not be threatened with these possibilities? Why must we be so squeamish that we're reluctant even to scare people who are trying to murder our children?

Perhaps it's torture because it elicits information against the detainee's will.

It certainly does motivate the terrorist to divulge information, but the fact that they don't do so willingly is hardly reason to think that the method is somehow tainted. If it were then phone taps, etc would be torture since they are means by which we obtain information from people who would not otherwise willingly give it.

Perhaps, it's torture because some men are exerting power over another.

Yes, but so is a police officer who stops you for a traffic violation, and we don't consider that torture.

Perhaps it'storture because it can be abused by the interrogator causing lasting harm to the suspect.

True enough, but any treatment of a suspect can be abused and cause lasting harm. The objection here is to the abuse not to the technique.

The fact is that the suspect has complete control over how long the process lasts or whether it will even begin. This is an important point. The terrorist is essentially in complete control of what, if anything, happens to him. He's no more damaged when it's over than when it started. He experiences no sensation other than panic and though he's frightened, he knows that he really is not drowning.

So why would waterboarding be considered torture but, say, lengthy imprisonment, which may do some, or even all, of the things mentioned above, is not? I really have no answer to the question.

Whatever one thinks about waterboarding there are certainly other forms of coercion that might violate the Geneva Convention, but the definition that the signatories to the Convention have endorsed appears to be inadequate.

Defining torture is difficult enough, but insisting that it's use is absolutely wrong and should never be employed is perhaps even more difficult, as tomorrow's post will attempt to show. Please don't draw any conclusions about the present post until you've read tomorrow's offering.

The Rise of Non-denominational Christianity

Ryan Burge is a sociologist of religion and he has an interesting graph on his website. It'll come as no surprise to anyone who's been tuned into what's going on in the Christian church for the past decade or two, but it might be a surprise to those who haven't been paying much attention.

Here's Burge:

A lot of what I do is talk about decline. I am painfully aware of that fact. Religious attendance is down in the United States. The proportion of young people who identify as Christian has declined significantly over the last couple of decades. The share of Americans who don’t believe in God has risen, as has the share of folks who take an agnostic view of God. Many religious groups are significantly smaller now than they were twenty years ago....

· However, there is one group that is much larger and is growing. It’s not really a denomination. And it’s not really a tradition. They are united by what they reject - that is the idea of organized denominations. I always tell people that the rise of the nones (those who reject religion entirely) is the biggest story in the faith space. But the second most important story is the rise of the nons - that is those folks who identify as non-denominational Christians.

In the early 1970s, non-denominational Protestants were little more than a rounding error. Just 2% of all respondents said that they were non-denominational - it was 3% of the Protestant sample. You could forgive any religious demographer for ignoring this part of the sample.

Both figures slowly began to increase over the next couple of decades. But, really noticeable growth would not begin until the mid-1990s. By 2000, about 10% of all Protestants and 5% of the entire sample were non-denominational.

By 2010, the percentage of Protestants who were non-denominational would rise to about 20% and they were about 10% of all Americans. In the most recent survey, which was collected in 2022 - one in three Protestants did not identify with a denomination like Southern Baptists or Evangelical Lutherans. That was a twelve point increase from just a few years earlier.

Here's the graph:

Nearly 35% of all protestants identify as non-denominational as of three years ago and the trajectory appears to have been almost straight up. What do the numbers look like today? What will they look like by 2030? If I may be permitted a prediction based on nothing more than a hunch and perhaps some wishful thinking, I think the decline in the overall numbers of Christians is soon going to bottom out, if it hasn't already, and begin to reverse.

People are looking for something that can put meaning, hope, and objective moral values into their lives and the secular worldview does not, and cannot, offer any of these. We may well be on the threshhold of another "Great Awakening."

Naturalism Excludes a Trustworthy Reason

In past VP posts (see here for example) I've written that the metaphysical doctrine of naturalism and the biological doctrine of evolution cannot both be true. It may be that one or the other is true, but they can't both be true.

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if naturalism (which entails materialism) is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic naturalist has no rational basis for believing that naturalism, materialism, or anything else, is true.

Moreover, naturalism is dependent upon evolution as an explanation for the origin of our cognitive faculties, but evolution is, theoretically, a process whi ch leads to survival, not truth.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument.

And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” - Atheist philosopher Patricia Churchland.

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

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.- Atheist biologist Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them in his book On Miracles where he writes:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought.

But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E.

The naturalist is faced with a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false.

On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet, despite all this, the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.

Fantastic Design (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper one gets into it.

Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here are some further questions: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Moreover, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

And how is all of that produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution?

Finally, given all we know about the marvels discussed in yesterday's post and today's, why is there so much resistance to the hypothesis that living things are not the product of chance mutations and serendipitous selection, but rather the product of intentional engineering?

Fantastic Design (Pt. I)

A couple of years ago I read the book Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD and was truly dazzled by the amazing degree of engineering that the human body displays.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents over a billion or so years of genetic mutation and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's more probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's an excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.

CRT and Historical Inversion

Why do so many people oppose the teaching of Critical Race Theory? I've offered a number of reasons here, but a historian and literature professor emeritus at the University of California Santa Cruz named John Ellis offers a rather different take. Ellis has a piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which he asserts that:

The Biden administration had quietly implemented policies throughout the federal government based on this theory, and it is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It has overrun much of the corporate world, and it has even secured a place in the training of many professions.

The accusations made in closed training sessions are astonishingly venomous: Arrogant white supremacy is ubiquitous; white rage results when that supremacy is challenged; whites hold money and power because they stole it from other races; systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going.

Ellis declares that all of this is based on historically false assumptions and that Critical Race Theory (CRT) has actually inverted the history of global interactions between the races. He says that, "the thinkers and engineers of the Anglosphere, principally England and the U.S., are the heroes, not the villains, of this story, while the rest were laggards, not leaders."

For most of recorded history, neighboring peoples regarded each other with apprehension if not outright fear and loathing. Tribal and racial attitudes were universal. That’s a long way from the orthodoxy of our own time, which holds that we are all one human family. Before that consensus arose, a charge of racism made no sense. By today’s standards, everyone was racist.

It’s not hard to understand why tribalism once reigned everywhere. Without modern transportation and communication, most people knew nothing about other societies. What contact there was between different peoples often involved warfare, and that made everyone fear strangers. The insecurity of life in earlier times added to this anxiety.

Protections we now enjoy didn’t exist: policing, banking, competent medical care, social safety nets. The supply of food was uncertain before trucks and refrigeration. In a dangerous world people clung to their own kind for safety, and that was a natural and even necessary attitude.

So, what was the impetus that led to the belief that we are all one common humanity? Ellis gives the credit to British and American engineers:

They invented the steam engine, then used it to develop the first railways. They followed this by inventing and mass-producing cars, trucks and finally airplanes. They pioneered radio, television, films, newspapers and the internet. The result was that ignorance of other peoples was turned around.

But in the 18th century the British did something even more important: They began to develop our contemporary attitudes toward race. How? By being the first modern state to foster individual liberty. Liberty fostered prosperity, and prosperity led to widespread literacy:

Widespread literacy created the first large reading public: By the beginning of the 18th century, dozens of newspapers and periodicals were being published in Britain. An extensive reading public allowed public opinion to become a powerful force, and that set the stage for manifestos and petitions, even campaigns about matters that offended the public’s conscience.

A series of British writers began to promote ideas about the conduct of life and the role of government. Among the most important was John Locke, who argued that every human life had its own rationale, none being created for the use of another. Another was David Hume, who wrote that all men are nearly equal “in their mental power and faculties, till cultivated by education.”

These and many others were launching what would become the modern consensus that we are all one human family. The idea gained ground so quickly that in Britain, and there alone, a powerful campaign to abolish slavery arose. By the end of the 18th century that campaign was leading to prohibitions in many parts of the Anglosphere, while Africa and Asia remained as tribalist and racist as ever.

As this idea took hold it made the British see their empire differently. Like other European countries, Britain had initially sought empire to strengthen its position in the world—others would add territory if Britain didn’t, and Britain would be weakened. But if the peoples of the British Empire were one human family, how could some be subordinate to others?

The British began to consider themselves responsible for the welfare and development of their subject peoples, and for giving them competent administration before they had learned to provide it themselves. That change inevitably led to the dissolution of empire, and to a consensus that the time for empires (of which there had been hundreds) was over. The world’s most influential anti-imperialists were British.

As the influence of Britain grew the belief in human rights and equality spread across the world. Ellis concludes with this:

There’s a simple explanation for what critical race theory calls “white privilege.” Because the Anglosphere developed prosperous modernity and gave it to the world, English-speakers were naturally the first to enjoy it. People initially outside that culture of innovation are still catching up.

Asians and Asian-Americans have done this with great success, but critical race theory impedes the progress of other groups by persuading them to demonize the people who created the modern values they have adopted. It betrays those values by stoking racial hatred.

Critical race theory tells us that all was racial harmony until racist Europeans disturbed it, but the truth is rather that all was tribal hostility until the Anglosphere rescued us.

I would add to Ellis' column that the spread of the idea of racial equality across the globe was facilitated by the work of countless thousands of missionaries from the Anglosphere, supported by countless thousands more Christians in the home country, who carried the message everywhere that all people are created in the image of God, loved by Him, and are His children.

People who truly believe this proposition have a hard time thinking that one race of people is inferior in any significant respect to another.

Scientists Leave Atheist Organization Over Transgender Ideology

John Sexton has an interesting piece up at HotAir.com. It seems that several prominent atheists are resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) because of a split over the biological reality, or unreality, of transgenderism.

The latest to resign is Richard Dawkins who served on FFRF's board. Dawkins and the other resignees are scientists who reject the left's contemporary infatuation with transgender ideology whereas FFRF is evidently totally committed to it to the point that they actually unpublished an article written by one of their members rebutting a previous article which argued that the only way one can define what, or who, a woman is is by what the individual in question tells you.

Here's Dawkins's letter of resignation:

It is with real sadness, because of my personal regard for you both, that I feel obliged to resign from the Honorary Board of FFRF. Publishing the silly and unscientific “What is a Woman” article by Kat Grant was a minor error of judgment, redeemed by the decision to publish a rebuttal by a distinguished scientist from the relevant field, namely Biology, Jerry Coyne. But alas, the sequel was an act of unseemly panic when you caved in to hysterical squeals from predictable quarters and retrospectively censored that excellent rebuttal.

Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own Honorary Board. A Board which I now leave with regret.

You can read an excerpt from the article which triggered Jerry Coyne's rebuttal at the above link (the entire article is also linked to there). It was written by a lawyer named Kat Grant and she appears to argue that the existence of intersex individuals makes any attempt to define "woman" problematic. Intersex individuals are people born with some sex characteristics such as chromosomes, genitals, reproductive organs, secondary sex traits, and/or hormonal patterns that don't align with their other sex characteristics.

I was particularly interested in Coyne's rebuttal which was originally published by FFRF and then yanked when members complained that Coyne was committing heresy by refuting Grant's argument. Sexton writes that "[Coyne's] basic response is that a) biology doesn't care about your feelings and b) a tiny number of exceptions to these universal categories of male and female does not mean the categories are useless or unscientific."

Here's a part of Coyne's argument:

In the Freethought Now article “What is a woman?” author Kat Grant struggles at length to define the word, rejecting one definition after another as flawed or incomplete. Grant finally settles on a definition based on self-identity: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”

This of course is a tautology, and still leaves open the question of what a woman really is. And the remarkable redefinition of a term with a long biological history can be seen only as an attempt to force ideology onto nature. Because some nonbinary people—or men who identify as women (“transwomen”)—feel that their identity is not adequately recognized by biology, they choose to impose ideology onto biology and concoct a new definition of “woman.”

Further, there are plenty of problems with the claim that self-identification maps directly onto empirical reality. You are not always fat if you feel fat (the problem with anorexia), not a horse if you feel you’re a horse (a class of people called “therians” psychologically identify as animals), and do not become Asian simply become you feel Asian (the issue of “transracialism”). But sex, Grant tells us, is different: It is the one biological feature of humans that can be changed solely by psychology.

But why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality.

Instead, in biology “sex” is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (“gametes”). Males have small, mobile gametes (sperm in animals and pollen in plants); females have large, immobile gametes (ova in plants and eggs in animals). In all animals and vascular plants there are exactly two sexes and no more. Though a fair number of plants and a few species of animals combine both functions in a single individual (“hermaphrodites”), these are not a third sex because they produce the typical two gametes.

It’s important to recognize that, although this gametic idea is called a “definition” of sex, it is really a generalization—and thus a concept—based on a vast number of observations of diverse organisms. We know that, except for a few algae and fungi, all multicellular organisms and vertebrates, including us, adhere to this generalization. It is, then, nearly universal...

Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary.

Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly—without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)

Sexton adds that that's not even half of Coyne's essay:

[Coyne] closes by saying, "One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights." But apparently the FFRF disagreed. After a backlash, they pulled Coyne's response down. He responded in an email, calling the decision "quasi-religious."

“That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”

“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”

Coyne left FFRF as did psychologist and author Steven Pinker. Dawkins was the third person to leave the group.

I'd add that the argument that one cannot define what a woman is because the boundary between male and female is indistinct is like arguing that we cannot define the color red because in a color spectrum the boundary between red and orange is indistinct. Though there may be a very small number of instances in which an observer cannot really tell where orange ends and red begins it does not follow that red cannot be defined or that we cannot accurately discern the color red in the overwhelming number of cases.