Snowflakes

John Masko at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) writes that,

A couple of days after the election, a closeted Republican friend sent me a compendium of messages and social-media posts he had gathered from some of his left-of-center colleagues. They were utterly wild.

One insisted that while all of us needed space to “grieve,” we had only a few months to prepare for “solidly authoritarian rule.” Another was looking for open university positions overseas in her specialty, since she couldn’t come to terms with living in a country “that hates so many of us,” where “half of us are denied the highest leadership position purely because of our gender.”

A Massachusetts resident asserted that “my rights as a woman are about to be compromised.” A man sarcastically congratulated his fellow Americans for voting for four more years of “fascist ideology,” “blatant misogyny and racism,” “toxic masculinity” and “spiritual bankruptcy.” A woman wrote late on election eve that while she didn’t exactly want to die, “it’s just that I don’t care if I don’t wake up” on Nov. 6.

Nonleftists wonder if fears such as these are sincerely held or merely performative. After all, while one could have plenty of reasonable doubts about a second Trump administration, the fear that we are in for a resurgence of fascist authoritarianism, that America voted against Kamala Harris because it couldn’t countenance a female president rather than due to her singular weaknesses as a candidate, and that Massachusetts is going to restrict abortion aren’t among them.

Yet as unrealistic as these fears are, they seem to reflect the sincere beliefs of at least some otherwise reasonable people. How can that be?

Right-leaning commentators regularly zero in on one key reason: the echo chamber of the media and the Democratic Party. The Harris campaign parlayed Donald Trump’s quips about being “a dictator on day one”—i.e., issuing lots of executive orders, as other new presidents have also done—into alarms about the return of fascism.

Mainstream journalists insisted that Mr. Trump must have intended to echo a pro-Nazi gathering in 1939 when he chose Madison Square Garden, site of the 1992 Democratic National Convention, for a rally. Oprah Winfrey suggested that if Americans didn’t elect Kamala Harris president, they may lose the right to vote.

Even worse than Masko's anecdotes were the stories of some of my family and friends whose own families have refused to spend time with them at Thanksgiving or Christmas because of how they voted. A relative of mine has been told by two of her sons that they will not be visiting her over the holidays because her vote for Trump was inexcusably immoral. She's heartbroken. A friend shared with me that his son has told him the same thing, and an acquaintance related that he was told something similar by his daughter.

Perhaps had Harris won the election there would be some Trump voters who would've reacted in the same way, I don't know, but I do know that neither my relative, nor my friend, nor my acquaintance would've responded in such an unloving, ungracious, and even hateful way.

Nor is it easy to imagine that television talk hosts on, say, Fox News, would recommend that family members be shunned over the holidays as hosts on The View and the Joy Reid show on MSNBC have.

What does politics do to people that causes them to want to hurt those who deeply love them by estranging themselves from them? Are their lives so empty that their political ideology is the only thing that gives them meaning and significance? Are their egos so fragile that they implode if someone votes differently than they do?

No wonder such people have been called "snowflakes."

Naturalism Vs. Christianity: Ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump and Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children of Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firemaker

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

Consider another example - fire.

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

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

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

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

The Wonder of Water

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

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

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

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

Criticizing the Qualifications of Trump's Nominees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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