Three Options on Creation

The book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos by cosmologists Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis discusses the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the forces, parameters and constants that comprise the structure of the universe.

Here's a video trailer that introduces the theme of their book:

The trailer suggests that there are four possible explanations for this incomprehensible level of precision, but for reasons I'll explain in a moment, there really are only three.

The first is that something about the universe makes it a logical necessity that the values cosmologists find are in fact the only possible values a universe could have. There is no reason, however, to think this is the case. There's nothing about the universe, as far as we know, that makes it impossible for gravity or the strong nuclear force, to take just two examples, to have slightly different strengths.

The second explanation is that even though it's astronomically improbable that any universe would be so fine-tuned that living things could exist in it, if there are other universes, all with different parameters, universes so abundant that their number approaches infinity, then one like ours is almost bound to exist. This option goes by the name of the multiverse hypothesis.

The difficulty with this idea is that there's no good reason to believe other universes actually do exist, and even if they do why should we assume that they're not all replicas of each other. Even if they're all different whatever is producing them must itself be fine-tuned in order to manufacture universes, so all the multiverse hypothesis does is push the problem back a step or two.

The third explanation is that our universe is the product of a very intelligent agent, a mathematical genius, which exists somehow beyond the bounds of our cosmos.

There are actually two varieties of the third option. One is to say that the designer of the universe is a denizen of another universe in which technology has advanced to the point that it allows inhabitants of that world to design simulations of other universes.

The trailer treats this as a fourth option but since it posits a designer who resides in some other universe it's actually a combination of the second and third options and suffers some of the same difficulties as the multiverse hypothesis. It also assumes that computer technology could ever simulate not only an entire cosmos but also human consciousness, which is certainly problematic.

The other version of the third explanation is to assume that the designer of our universe is not some highly accomplished computer nerd in another universe but rather that it is a transcendent, non-contingent being of unimaginable power and intellectual brilliance who is the ultimate cause of all contingent entities, both universes and their inhabitants.

Which of these options is most attractive will vary from person to person, but philosophical arguments won't settle the issue for most people. Human beings tend to believe what they most fervently want to be true, and what they most want to be true is often whatever makes the fewest demands upon their autonomy and their lifestyle.

Clash of Civilizations

In a column in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) by Jon Shields and Yuval Avnur the authors quote the late Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), author of a 1996 book titled The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington, writing on the differences between Western and Islamic cultures, observed that, “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

It's been years since I read Clash of Civilizations, so I don't recall everything about it and don't want to impute what follows to Huntington, but that one quote sums up a very serious problem the world faces today. Here are three reasons why.

First, as Huntington says, it is not just radical Islam that's the problem. It's Islam itself. Muslims will tell you that there's no radical, or extremist, Islam and no moderate Islam, there is only Islam. Anyone who seeks to moderate Islam is considered by "true" Muslims to be a heretic.

Ben Shapiro lays out some troubling math in this six minute video:

Second, a large number of Muslims are convinced not only of the superiority of their culture but also of the exclusiveness of their religion to the point that anyone who dissents from it deserves to be killed, especially if they convert from it to some other religion. There's no fault in believing one's religion to be true - many Christians believe that Christianity contains more truth than any other religion - but Islam holds that wherever Muslims have the power, Allah commands them to reduce non-believers to a subservient dhimmi status or be killed.

It might be replied that there are plenty of examples of Christians acting similarly in the Middle Ages, and although those examples are often not as dispositive as critics make out, nevertheless it's true that the Church has sometimes disgraced itself. The difference, however, is this: When Christians have oppressed and murdered they were acting contrary to the teaching of the New Testament and repudiating the message of Jesus. When Muslims oppress and murder, they're often following the instruction of the Koran and the example of Mohammad.

Third, the obsession with their inferiority - not only military but also cultural (compare the number of Arab Nobel Prize winners with the number of Jewish winners) - is a source of profound anger and hatred for all those kafirs or unbelievers in the West who seem to be thriving. It is that festering resentment and visceral hatred that is at the root of the Islamic obsession with destroying Israel and conquering the West.

As Ben Shapiro argues in the above video, there are an awful lot of Muslims in the world today who hold views in serious conflict with what Westerners generally hold, and as long as this is the case peace between Islam and the West will be very difficult to achieve.

Why Bigotry Is Wrong

Insistent demands to end racism and bias against women and LBGTQ individuals are rife in our culture, but rarely, it seems, does anyone ask why these bigotries are wrong. On those occassions when it is asked it's sometimes replied that any form of discrimination is morally wrong, but what, exactly, is meant by this is unclear.

Here's what I'm getting at: Let's assume we've all adopted a secular perspective in which either there is no moral authority that transcends human society or, if there is, that that authority should be permitted no role in our secular affairs.

Given this assumption what does it mean to say that racism, misogyny and discrimination against LGBTQ folks are wrong? If there's no moral authority how can "wrong" mean anything more than "something some people don't like"? And if that's all we mean then what reason is there for all the outrage? Why not just accept that different people hold different values and let it go at that?

After all, something can be wrong in any meaningful moral sense only if there's an objective moral authority who promulgates an objective moral law and holds people accountable for living according to that law. If no such authority exists, or if any such authority is excluded from our public lives, then racism is little more than a behavior some people practice and some people don't like.

An example of the former is the famous 19th century British evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Huxley was the man who coined the term "agnostic" to describe his own attitude toward God and was also a firm believer in the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest.

His evolutionary convictions led him to believe that some races were superior to others, and he argued that emancipation of the slaves in the U.S. had doomed blacks who would now have to fend for themselves, a task for which he believed them poorly suited.

Huxley stated that, "no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.”

Huxley's racism was little different from that of his hero Charles Darwin. Writing to the Rev. Charles Kingsley in 1862, Darwin stated,

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.

Almost twenty years later he offered similar sentiments in a letter to Irish philosopher and political economist William Graham:

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

People today would be aghast were they to hear preeminent thinkers voice such bigotry, but the question we should ask is why do we consider views like those of Huxley and Darwin to be morally offensive?

One might answer that they're offensive because they're hurtful, but that answer assumes that it is objectively wrong to hurt others. But why is it? Is it wrong to hurt others because we wouldn't want someone to hurt us? It's of course true that we wouldn't want others to hurt us, but how does that make it wrong for us to hurt others? If we had the power to hurt others with impunity, in what sense would it be wrong to do so?

The secularist has no convincing answers to these questions. He or she has to assume that there is no relevant objective moral authority, that objective morality therefore doesn't exist and that all of our moral judgments are simply expressions of our own personal, subjective preferences, like one's preference for Ford trucks rather than Chevys.

If the secularist wishes to maintain that moral judgments are objectively meaningful then he's piggy-backing on a theistic worldview while all the while insisting that that worldview is either utterly false or irrelevant to morality.

In other words, the moral secularist must behave irrationally in order to assert that racism is wrong. On his own secular assumptions he has no grounds for claiming that anyone or anything is objectively wrong. All he can say is that he doesn't like it.

But how does a Judeo-Christian view of the world provide grounds for affirming that racism and other bigotries are morally wrong? It does so because according to that view all men are created by God in His image and are loved by Him. We are all equal in the sight of God, and God, the creator of the universe, demands that we treat each other with compassion and justice. Moreover, He will ultimately hold us accountable for whether we actually do or do not treat others this way.

To harm others is morally wrong because it violates the objective will, nature, and law of God who, being perfect goodness, is Himself the ultimate source of moral knowledge and the ultimate standard of right and wrong.

Only if this is true can racism, sexism and bigotry of any kind be objectively wrong. Only if this is true does our belief that human beings have rights and dignity make sense. If it's not true then Huxley and Darwin were probably right, and we should cease our pretensions of believing in moral right and wrong and the equality and dignity of men and just do whatever serves our own interests and desires.

Of course, the decision to follow that road leads to all the horrors perpetrated by the state atheisms of the 20th century.

Hamas Bears All the Guilt

The Western media have been very vocal in condemning Israel for alleged starvation in Gaza, even to the point of using photos of children with Cerebral Palsy as instances of starving children, but an article in the Free Beacon by Andrew Tobin paints a much different picture of the situation in Gaza. Everyone who thinks Israel is to blame for hungry Gazans should read it.

Here's the lede:

Every day this week, hundreds of U.N. trucks stacked with pallets of humanitarian aid have exited Israeli-patrolled routes and rumbled into population centers across the Gaza Strip, where Israel has implemented daily pauses in military operations.

Many of the trucks, though traveling under enhanced Israeli protections introduced on Sunday, have not reached U.N. warehouses, according to Gazans on the ground. Once the trucks have arrived in the population centers, armed Hamas militants have hijacked the cargo, the Gazans said, and what aid has arrived at the warehouses has disappeared into a patronage system controlled by the Palestinian terrorist group.

Most Gazans have been forced to buy the aid at exorbitant prices from merchants handpicked and heavily taxed by Hamas.

"Fifty trucks arrived yesterday at warehouses in Gaza City, and Hamas stole all of the aid," Moumen al-Natour, a 30-year-old lawyer in the northern Gaza capital, said on Tuesday. "Today, the aid went on sale in the black markets at very high prices."

Al-Natour said a childhood friend, seeking to feed his family, joined a hungry mob trying to loot the trucks and was trampled to death along with a number of other civilians.

Gazans and Israeli military officers say this has been the reality in Gaza since fighting resumed in March. Hamas exerts near-total control over U.N.-led aid operations and seizes nearly all the incoming goods to feed and finance its terrorist regime, according to the people. Rather than confront the problem, the United Nations has effectively aligned with Hamas, prolonging the Gaza war and the suffering of Gazans, the people say.

"Hamas has unfortunately been able to infiltrate the mechanism of the United Nations for a long time," said Al-Natour. "They take all the aid for their own people and leave nothing for the civilians. This is how they maintain their criminal government while their popularity is collapsing."

Tobin goes on to explain how Hamas and the U.N. essentially work together in a way that results in the immiseration of the Gazan people. Contrary to what the antisemites in our media and universities want us to believe, the war, the thousands of casualties, and the suffering of the Gazans are all crimes perpetrated by Hamas, and it is Hamas who bears the guilt and the blame for them.

Those critical of Israel in this war would be hard pressed to think of any other country in history that has done more in wartime to avoid civilian casualties and done more to try to ease the suffering of the very people (the Gazans) who have overwhelmingly supported their government (Hamas) in its efforts to annihilate the very people (the Israelis) who are coming to their aid.

The Evil That Men Do

International Christian Concern (ICC) reports that of the five most populous nations in the world, in four of them either the government persecutes Christians or it tolerates persecution of Christians by other groups within the country.

Here are some excerpts from the report:

Four of the five most populous countries in the world share a disturbing reality: Christians are systematically and harshly persecuted within their borders.

China (1.41 billion people), India (1.46 billion people), Indonesia (285 million people), and Pakistan (255 million people) routinely strip Christians of fundamental human rights like worshiping freely and sharing their faith with others. The United States (347 million people) is the other country in the top five.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China is openly atheistic and continuously attempts to curb the religious expression of Christians within its nation. According to a 2023 report from Pew Research, the CCP’s religious restrictions “are part of a long-standing strategy by the Chinese government to align religion with communism and ensure loyalty to the…CCP, which espouses and promotes atheism.”

In May, Chinese authorities released a plan to incorporate lyrics that applaud communism into church worship music.

In India, Christians endure being evicted from their homes simply for following Christ. Evictions are often carried out by Hindu nationalists who want Indians to adhere to Hinduism only.

According to the European Center for Law and Justice, Christians were the targets of more than 160 violent attacks [in India] in 2024, including physical assaults and attacks on church meetings.

Indonesian authorities, functioning in a Muslim-majority nation, routinely condone the suppression of Christian rights. A prayer house was attacked in July, and Christian churches have been closed in recent years due to restrictive Indonesian law.

According to Christianity Today, “a 2006 law requires churches to secure signatures of approval from 60 Christians and 90 people from another faith” to build a Christian church. This allows those opposed to Christianity to stop the construction of churches.

In predominantly Muslim Pakistan, blasphemy laws are egregiously used to target and punish Christians for following Jesus. Christ followers are often discriminated against and not given equal opportunities in employment. Jobs like sewer maintenance and street sweepers are typically reserved for Christians, and believers are jailed for their faith if they are found to have violated the nation’s strict blasphemy laws.

Christians in these nations may face harassment, intimidation, and imprisonment for following Christ. The most basic human right, the liberty to follow one’s own conscience, is often out of reach for believers in these countries.

They also face murder as in several countries in Africa where 62,000 Christians have been murdered by Muslims in Nigeria alone in the last two and a half decades, and any Christians caught practicing their faith in North Korea are subjected to horrific suffering.

This is evil and the religion, in the case of Islam, and the ideology, in the case of communism, that spawn this evil are rooted in a profound hatred for anyone who refuses to accept the haters' belief system, but any belief system that's rooted in hatred and which gives rise to so much evil, is itself evil. What else could it be?

D.C. Crime

Democrats are attacking Trump for taking action to clean up Washington by federalizing the city's law enforcement, a move the D.C. police themselves support and the mayor doesn't oppose. Apparently, some on the left think it's racist to fight crime, which says a lot about who they think the criminals must be. Either that, or they think that black and brown people should be left alone to pillage, rape, and murder.

One of their arguments is that violent crime in D.C. has declined by 30% so there's no need to bring in the National Guard, but what they don't say is that the former police commander is under investigation for falsifying crime data.

In any case, what are the facts about crime in D.C.? Here are some from the White House via Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com:

• In 2024, Washington, D.C. saw a homicide rate of 27.3 per 100,000 residents. That was the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country — nearly six times higher than New York City and also higher than Atlanta, Chicago, and Compton.
• If Washington, D.C. was a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation. It's murder rate is roughly three times higher than that of Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than that of communist-run Havana, Cuba.
• The number of juveniles arrested in Washington, D.C. has gone up each year since 2020 — many of whom have had prior arrests for violent crimes.
• There were 29,348 crimes reported in Washington, D.C. last year, including 3,469 violent offenses, 1,026 assaults with a dangerous weapon, 2,113 robberies, and 5,139 motor vehicle thefts.
• So far in 2025, there have already been nearly 1,600 violent crimes and nearly 16,000 total crimes reported in Washington, D.C.
• There have been nearly 100 homicides, including the fatal shootings of innocent civilians like three-year-old Honesty Cheadle and 21-year-old Capitol Hill intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym.
• Vehicle theft in Washington, D.C. is more than three times the national average — ranking it among the most dangerous cities in the world. Carjackings increased 547% between 2018 and 2023. In 2024, there were triple the number of carjackings compared to 2018.

What President Trump is doing is perfectly legal, so one can only assume that those who oppose him on this are concerned about...what? Are they concerned that D.C. will be made safer and cleaner? Are they concerned that it'll be a bad look if more minorities are incarcerated?

One thing they should be concerned about is that once again they're going to find themselves on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue, but that doesn't seem to bother them. Maybe the Democrats' real concern is that they fear people will see that Republicans get things done that the people want done while Democrats do nothing but sit on their hands and fuss over pronouns.

Beautiful Ugliness

The title of this post is an oxymoron, but it befits the subject of the following wonderful 8:00 minute video about vultures.

In eastern North America there are two species of vultures that can be commonly seen - the turkey vulture and the black vulture - and neither of them would ever win a beauty contest. Yet, they're graceful flyers and play a very important role in the ecosystem of which they're a part.

Moreover, vultures in general are impressively designed to accomplish all that they do. Their digestive features are unique among birds.

In the video, the turkey vulture is the one shown in connection with Darwin's observation in South America, and the black vulture is shown at the end flying along with the photographers. Enjoy: