Are We Alone?

Prolific science writer and cosmologist Paul Davies asks in a recent NYT column whether we are all alone in the universe. He cites speculation featured prominently in the news that some astronomers have speculated that there are as many as 40 billion planets in our galaxy that are suited for life, which speculation leads to the assumption that the universe must be teeming with life. Davies is skeptical of these claims. He writes:

What can be said about the chances of life starting up on a habitable planet? Darwin gave us a powerful explanation of how life on Earth evolved over billions of years, but he would not be drawn out on the question of how life got going in the first place. “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter,” he quipped.

In spite of intensive research, scientists are still very much in the dark about the mechanism that transformed a nonliving chemical soup into a living cell. But without knowing the process that produced life, the odds of its happening can’t be estimated.

When I was a student in the 1960s, the prevailing view among scientists was that life on Earth was a freak phenomenon, the result of a sequence of chemical accidents so rare that they would be unlikely to have happened twice in the observable universe. “Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance,” wrote the biologist Jacques Monod.

Today the pendulum has swung dramatically, and many distinguished scientists claim that life will almost inevitably arise in Earthlike conditions. Yet this decisive shift in view is based on little more than a hunch, rather than an improved understanding of life’s origin.

Put bluntly, there's no more evidence now than there was in the 1960s that there's life elsewhere in the universe. Claims that there is are based more on wishful thinking than on empirical evidence. Davies continues:

The underlying problem is complexity. Even the simplest bacterium is, at the molecular level, staggeringly complex. Although we have no idea of the minimal complexity of a living organism, it is likely to be very high. It could be that some sort of complexifying principle operates in nature, serving to drive a chaotic mix of chemicals on a fast track to a primitive microbe. If so, no hint of such a principle has been found in laboratory experiments to re-create the basic building blocks of life.

This is, of course, the big obstacle facing any naturalistic account of the origin of life. No one has been able to come with a plausible explanation as to how the enormous complexity of a living cell could ever have arisen through purely mechanistic processes.

On the other hand, if life arose simply by the accumulation of many specific chemical accidents in one place, it is easy to imagine that only one in, say, a trillion trillion habitable planets would ever host such a dream run. Set against a number that big — and once you decide a series of unlikely accidents is behind the creation of life, you get enormous odds very easily — it is irrelevant whether the Milky Way contains 40 billion habitable planets or just a handful. Forty billion makes hardly a dent in a trillion trillion.

So why are scientists striving so earnestly to find evidence of life on planets elsewhere in the galaxy? Why do they keep reassuring each other that it just has to be out there? Perhaps it's because they need to find life elsewhere to bolster their faith in metaphysical naturalism. The likelihood of life emerging on earth solely through chance and chemistry is deemed so low that many people believe that something more than chance and chemistry, an intelligent agent, must also have been at work. But if it can be shown that life does occur throughout the galaxy it becomes much easier to think that it's not so improbable after all and that no intelligent agent is necessary to account for it.

In other words, the search for life in the galaxy is spurred by much the same sort of motivations that drive people to search for Noah's ark. Just as the ark's discovery would provide strong confirmation of the truth of the Old Testament narrative, the discovery of alien life would provide strong confirmation of the truth of the naturalist narrative. I wonder if it's not a sign of a deep-seated insecurity surrounding the truth of the narrative that compels people to seek such confirmations.

Male Chauvinist Pigs

It's common nowadays to hear the left bewail the "war on women" allegedly being waged by the right. People who don't follow matters very closely hear the refrain so often that they quite naturally assume it must be true, yet if there's a war on women occurring in this country it's being waged by the misogynists at the most liberal network on television, MSNBC.

MSNBC hosts like Ed Schultz, Alec Baldwin, Chris Matthews, and former host Keith Olbermann, have leveled disgusting insults at women. Each time it happens their bosses require a pro forma apology, of course, but it's just a matter of time until another of their colleagues follows suit. When you have contempt for people of a certain race or gender it's hard to keep it pent up inside.

The latest malefactor is Martin Bashir who, in the course of a vitriolic string of insults of Sarah Palin's intelligence, described a disgusting punishment meted out to slaves in 18th century Jamaica. The punishment involved forcing human excrement and urine down a slave's throat. Bashir concluded his diatribe by pronouncing that such is what should be done to Sarah Palin. The irony is that he calls the degradation inflicted on the Jamaican slaves barbaric and inhumane and then says it's what Palin deserves. What, then, does that say about Mr. Bashir?



This is how much of the left thinks and talks when they let their guard down. They pay lip service to civil discourse, but they just can't bring themselves to maintain the appearance of decency for very long before they revert to form. David Letterman and Bill Maher are not on MSNBC, but their squalid comments about female politicians like Palin and Michelle Bachmann certainly qualify them for a job there.

Go here for a brief review of some of the vileness that has emanated from the left over the last five years.

Rush Limbaugh rightly got himself into hot water for suggesting Sandra Fluke was a "slut" for demanding that taxpayers pay for women's contraceptives. The media castigated him for his "crudity," "insensitivity," and his "contempt" for women. Yet the men at MSNBC and elsewhere on the left talk about women as though they think they're cattle and the only way anyone hears about it is if they read the Drudge Report.

I challenge anyone to find anything on Fox, a right-leaning cable network, or on conservative talk radio remotely close to the incessant misogyny and degradation of women, particularly conservative women, one routinely hears from liberals.

If there's a war on women being waged in this country it's awful hard to find evidence of it on the right, but easy to find ample evidence of it in the regular dehumanization of women by spokespersons of the left, and the silence of liberal women's groups when these men spew their filth demonstrates that among liberals ideology is thicker than principle.

Spear Tips and Speciation

Scientists have found chiseled spear heads that predate the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens by 85,000 years, a discovery which raises a few uncomfortable questions for our darwinian friends.

For example, did our supposed ancestors create these sharpened pieces of obsidian? If so, why do we think that these members of the genus Homo, specifically H. heidelbergensis, are actually ancestral to our species? Why are sapiens and heidelbergensis separated into different species anyway?

The answer one usually hears is that heidelbergensis is morphologically different, though not much, from modern humans, and if one assumes an evolutionary progression it makes sense to think that they were the species that eventually evolved into H. sapiens.

This reasoning, though, is questionable. The biological definition of a species is a reproductively isolated population of organisms. That is, if a certain population of creatures cannot interbreed with members of other populations and produce fertile offspring the two groups are considered taxonomically distinct species.

But how do we know that H. heidelbergensis could not interbreed with H. sapiens? Morphological differences are hardly a reason for thinking that they couldn't. After all, there's far more morphological variation among the different breeds of dogs, but every one of them is a member of the same species.

Maybe there are really just two kinds of hominids: Men and apes, and any attempt to draw arbitrary and hypothetical gradations between them is simply an attempt to find an evolutionary connection that isn't there.

Here's the lede from the story of the spearheads:

Remains of the oldest known stone-tipped throwing spears, described in a new paper, are so ancient that they actually predate the earliest known fossils for our species by 85,000 years.

There are a couple possible implications, and both are mind-blowing. The first is that our species could be much older than previously thought, which would forever change the existing human family tree.

The second, and more likely at this point, is that a predecessor species to ours was extremely crafty and clever, making sophisticated tools long before Homo sapiens emerged.

Homo heidelbergensis, aka Heidelberg Man, lived in Africa, Europe and western Asia from at least 600,000 years ago. He clearly got around, and many think this species was the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens in Africa and Neanderthals in Europe and Asia. The new paper, published in the latest PLoS ONE, focuses on the newly identified stone-tipped spears, which date to 280,000 years ago. They were found at an Ethiopian Stone Age site known as Gademotta.

....the spears were made from obsidian found near the site. The toolmakers had to craft the pointy spearhead shapes and spear shafts. They then needed to attach the points securely to the shafts. Even today, all of this would require skill, concentration and multiple steps.

Could it be that the human species - our species - actually has no true ancestral hominid precursors? If it should ever turn out that that's the case, it would throw Darwinian explanations of human evolution, already tenuous enough, into a tailspin.

A Bundle of Contradictions

In the wake of the accumulating wreckage of the Obamacare rollout and millions of cancelled insurance policies, with millions more still to come, a number of political prognosticators are forecasting the implosion of modern liberal statism.

We'll see if that actually comes to pass, but I'm reminded that Marxists used to assure us that it was capitalism that would soon collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. This assurance is amusing given that if anything is groaning under the weight of contradiction and paradox today it's modern liberalism, particularly the secular variety. Consider some of the odd beliefs to which secular liberals cling:

• They believe that it's absurd to think, as some religious folks do, that we all bear the guilt of our primeval ancestors' sin, but while they scoff at this idea they themselves insist that it's almost self-evident that if you're white you bear guilt for the sin of slavery committed by other whites (and some blacks) 200 years ago.
• They believe that capital punishment is immoral, that executing a heinous murderer is wrong, that it dehumanizes us as a people, and that society should proscribe it. At the same time they believe that the grisly execution of an innocent child in its mother's womb is not a moral matter and is certainly not any of society's business.
• They declaim that those who believe in a supernatural creator are uneducated, superstitious bumpkins who believe in things without much evidence. But at the same time they believe, despite the complete dearth of evidence, that life arose by sheer accident from non-life, that consciousness evolved from brute unconscious matter, and that there are innumerable other universes, a multiverse, beyond our own.
• They scoff at the "blind faith" of those who place their trust in the words of men who lived 2000 years ago, while at the same time placing total confidence in politicians who voted for a 2000 page health care reform law without ever having read it and who insouciantly urged their colleagues to pass the thing so they could find out what's in it.
• They mock those who appeal to faith as a justification for belief, but they themselves place complete faith in the pronouncements of scientists who prophesy that the earth is headed for eco-catastrophe because of global warming, even though the average global temperature has remained inexplicably static for 16 years.
• Liberals believe that a 16 year-old girl is the best judge of whether she should have an abortion while at the same time they tell adults that they're simply not competent to decide for themselves how much soda they should drink and what kind of health insurance they should have, or even if they should have any at all. On these matters the government must dictate, but terminating a life in the womb should be a personal choice.
• The liberal chortles at the mere mention of "trickle down" or "voodoo" economic theories that teach that lower taxes actually increase revenues. Yet at the same time he believes that raising the minimum wage and thereby increasing an employer's costs will perversely motivate him to actually hire more workers. Liberals also believe with all their heart that we can extend insurance coverage to everyone, including people with costly preconditions, and that the cost to the average family will nevertheless shrink by $2500.
• The liberal believes society can change the definition of marriage from one man and one (biologically unrelated) woman by removing the restriction on the gender of the participants while still retaining restrictions on the number of participants and their biological kinship. They can't say why they're so certain that one part of the definition can be changed while keeping the rest of it intact, except that they just know no one would want to be involved in a group marriage or marry his sister.

It's not just that to be a liberal one must believe impossible things, but rather that while believing impossible things one must also reject common sense.

Evolutionary Ethics

VJ Torley at Uncommon Descent reminds us of a passage from Thomas Huxley's essay Evolution and Ethics (1893) in which Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for ethics. One popular candidate for such a ground is the evolution of our species, but Huxley, despite his arrant fealty to Darwinian evolution, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,” when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Leader by 2015

As bad as the economy is, it's all poised to turn around if we don't kill the goose laying the golden eggs before the bird has a chance to deliver its blessings.

I'm talking about the fact that the United States is projected to become the world's largest producer of oil in two years. This could have enormous economic benefits for Americans, especially for the poor and the middle class, but the windfall will only last for a couple of decades because only private and state lands are currently open to oil drilling, and the drilling is being done largely by fracking of which the Obama administration takes a dim view. The administration has, moreover, refused to open federal lands to drillers and has also refused to expand offshore wells. If, however, people less in thrall to environmental extremism than is the current administration are elected in 2014 and 2016 the bonanza could be extended for another fifty or sixty years.

Here are some excerpts from a McClatchy report on what lies immediately ahead:

The United States will surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest oil producer in 2015, the International Energy Agency forecasts.

But the IEA’s long-term energy outlook, released Tuesday, predicted the Middle East will retake its position a decade later as the dominant source of global oil supply growth.

American energy production is skyrocketing, led by Texas and North Dakota, as oil companies use the techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to tap oil and natural gas trapped in shale rock. “Technology and high prices are unlocking new supplies of oil, and of course also gas, that were previously thought to be out of reach,” Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA’s executive director, said Tuesday.

The International Energy Agency, which advises governments on energy issues, said America’s ascendancy as the world’s oil king is coming sooner than expected, and that North America’s need for oil imports will all but disappear by 2035.

This means that we won't be vulnerable to extortion by OPEC, we won't be sending our money to nations where it's simply redirected to wealthy sheiks and terrorists, we won't have to fight wars for oil in the Middle East, and fuel prices will remain relatively low helping all Americans enjoy a better standard of living than we otherwise would.

But the Middle East, boosted by a surge in Iraqi production, is expected, starting in the mid-2020s, to take back its role as the world’s oil powerhouse as America’s shale oil output peaks and then starts a decline.

The International Energy Agency forecasts that “sweet spots” in America’s top shale oilfields will run out and that the drilling will move to less productive areas that struggle in cost competition with other nations. But the agency added that it could be wrong about a U.S. decline.

“United States performance has consistently overshot most projections to date and it is possible that more resources will be found and developed to sustain production at a higher level and for longer than we project,” the IEA report said. “Especially if oil prices hold up, technology advances continue and environmental concerns are allayed.”

And, of course, if Washington permits more offshore drilling and environmentally safe petroleum extraction on federal lands the predicted decline could be postponed till closer to the end of the century.

The revenues this would generate would go a long way toward paying down our national debt, restoring us to fiscal health, and would be an enormous benefit to those who struggle to pay bills, every one of which rises directly with rising energy costs. The benefits would ripple through the economy, creating jobs and providing states with the wherewithal to address the manifold needs of their citizens.

There's light at the end of the tunnel, if only the federal government would get out of the way and let us get there.

There's more at the link.

Operation Underground Railroad

Glenn Beck related a story on his radio program yesterday morning that everyone should hear. It was about human trafficking of children to be used as "sex toys" by men and what one group of Americans is doing to curtail and hopefully end the practice.

The organization is called Operation Underground Railroad and their website can be found here. They're a kind of international SWAT team that finds these children, extracts them from the hell in which they're living, and puts the pedophiles who abuse them in jail.

I have to say that it all sounds like something out of a television crime drama, and I was a little concerned that they don't actually name any of the people they've helped bring to justice, but apparently they're for real. One reason for thinking this is that I can't imagine Glenn Beck putting his national credibility on the line unless he was convinced that this organization is, and does, what it claims.

I've read about a number of organizations involved with trying to get kids out of these terrible situations, but often their personnel simply lack the ability to do much more than try to kidnap the children away from the men who control them. This is heroic, but it can only work so often before the rescuers find that most of the children in need of saving are beyond their reach and capabilities.

In any event, if the metastasizing cancer of child sex slavery is something which horrifies and repulses you, go to the first link above and read what Beck talked about on his show yesterday. Then visit the O.U.R. website and decide for yourself. The video on their home page explains more about the work they do and how you can be a part of it.

Navigators

The Affordable Care Act, which is producing huge premium and deductible increases when it's not causing people to lose their insurance altogether, is beset with so many other problems that it's hard to keep up with them.

Ed Rogers has a column at the Washington Post in which he gives six reasons why things are just going to get worse for the Democrats responsible for this fiasco.

The six reasons Rogers gives are these:

• There will be more canceled health insurance plans. Millions of Americans are losing the insurance plans they had and with which they were satisfied.
• If you like your doctor, you can’t keep your doctor. Millions will soon discover that this promise was simply false.
• Sticker shock. Premiums for many people are going through the roof and so are their deductibles.
• Obamacare ads. Republicans can be expected next Fall to air ads over and over showing the President and many Democrat office-holders declaring that people will be able to keep their doctors and their insurance plans.
• Navigators. See below
• Security breaches. The online exchanges are going to be a playground for hackers and identity thieves. There's no security and the administration seems blithely indifferent to the fact.

Go to the link for Rogers' explanation of these.

It was all predictable and, in fact, had been predicted by lots of people ever since Obamacare was enacted into law in 2009. There was no way that coverage could be extended to millions of people who couldn't pay for it without raising the costs to everyone else, but those who did the math were dismissed as bitter clinger, tea party racists by those who voted for the bill or otherwise supported it without having read it. The skeptics were nevertheless right and now we find ourselves on the brink of a massive social upheaval as millions of people face medical bills without coverage and are unable to afford whatever coverage is out there.

Meanwhile, James O'Keefe the intrepid undercover videographer who has documented numerous scandals and criminality at ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and elsewhere has turned his documentary skills to the "navigators" who have been hired to help people find their way through the thicket of Obamacare's insurance options and rules.

It turns out that these people are largely untrained and unvetted. Many of them have been hired from the ranks of community activists and radical ideologues. Despite not having been subject to background checks these navigators will have access to much of their client's personal financial information, including, perhaps, social security numbers. The potential for identity theft is enormous, and the dismal ethics of the navigators appearing in O'Keefe's video does little to assure us that our information is in safe hands.

Nor is it comforting to learn that the people manning the exchanges are working hand in glove with the Democratic party to enroll new Democrat party members and voters:

For an elaboration on the video read John Fund's column at NRO. Reading Fund's piece makes one wonder why would anyone go on these exchanges to purchase insurance.

Veterans' Day

National Review's Quin Hillyer reviews two books apropos for this Veteran's Day. One of the books, Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior, by Rorke Denver with Ellis Henican, describes the brutal training undergone by men who aspire to be SEALs. The second book, Cold Days in Hell: American POWs in Korea, by William C. Latham recounts the many acts of courage and endurance demonstrated by American POWs in Korean prisoner of war camps in the early 1950s.

Hillyer discusses Denver's book first:

Where this book fully captivates is in its description of the process of creating a SEAL in the first place. We may know, intuitively, that the training (and winnowing-out process) is incredibly arduous, but the details still astound.

Despite Denver’s assurances that SEAL training stays just on the right side of “the fine line between tough and torture,” his descriptions of “the random acts of instructor violence” — “more random and more violent every day” — are enough to give pause to any reader. Forced swims in 52-degree Pacific surf, on next to no sleep after days of physical abuse, “sand and salt water in your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth,” followed by paddling sea races so intense that participants hallucinate: It’s enough to make one cringe just to think about them.

To read about this training, and then to read about the missions for which the training prepared the SEALs, is to understand that the warrior’s life is not one of video-game glamour but of grit and pain — pain borne, as Denver goes to great lengths to emphasize, by real human beings with real fears and real families.

Hillyer then turns to Latham's account of a different kind of heroism:

The privations suffered by many of the POWs matched some of the horrors of World War II’s Bataan Death March. In one particularly horrific incident, a Korean major nicknamed “the Tiger” summarily executed a lieutenant, Cordus H. Thornton, for the offense of having too many of his men “fall out” of a forced march because of severe exhaustion, grievous injuries, and rampant dysentery.

In one prison compound, “typhus, hepatitis, and pneumonia spread throughout the camp, and the doctors soon found themselves treating more than 350 cases a day, with very limited success.” Day after day, more would die, with one historian writing that “here were the bodies of America’s finest young men, covered with filth and lying in stacks in a hostile country.”

In the midst of these horrors, numerous incidents that Latham recounts involved heroic acts of mercy and courage: men carrying each other despite Korean (or Chinese) orders to abandon them; other prisoners sneaking around camp, at mortal peril if caught, to forage for extra food or medical supplies for the wounded. Chief among these heroes was a chaplain, Father Emil Kapaun, whose ministries to the sick and suffering, despite his own serious infirmities, went far beyond the ordinary call of duty.

Particularly riveting was Latham’s description of Easter Sunday 1951:

Kapaun openly defied Communist ideology by celebrating an ecumenical sunrise service in the ruins of a burned-out church. Holding a makeshift crucifix, Kapaun wore his priest’s stole, as well as the purple ribbon signifying his pastoral office, and recited the Stations of the Cross. Most of the men in the officers’ compound attended, including Catholics, Protestants, Jews and atheists. While the Chinese guards watched nervously, Kapaun ended the service by leading the men in song; “America the Beautiful” echoed from the surrounding mountains, still blanketed by snow. The officers sang at the top of their lungs, hoping the music would reach the other prisoners at Pyoktong.

Two months later, Kapaun was dead. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously last April.

In addition to these books I would add a favorite of my own, Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini, written by Laura Hillenbrand. Zamperini was an Olympic distance runner who became a bomber pilot in WWII. His plane crashed into the Pacific during a mission and Hillenbrand recounts his absolutely astounding tale of human endurance and survival. He and another crewman were afloat for over forty days on a tiny life raft in the vast ocean only to be "rescued" by Japanese soldiers and sent to a POW camp on the mainland where he and thousands of others were held for years, all the while subjected to unimaginable deprivation and suffering.

As Hillyard says in his concluding sentence, on this special day each year we should thank God for putting such men and women in our midst.

The Interaction Problem

I've run a few posts on the topic of mind and matter this past week, largely because we've been discussing it in my classes and the topic is, I think, fascinating.

There's one more thing I'd like to say about it, particularly with regard to one of the common objections materialists make to the belief that we are at least partly comprised of immaterial mental substance.

This is the objection based on what's called the interaction problem. The problem is that it's inconceivable or unthinkable that two completely different substances, mind and matter (brain), could in any way interact with each other. Given that we can't describe how brains interact with immaterial minds and vice versa, belief that they do is unwarranted, or so it is said.

The problem with the interaction objection is that it seems to be based on the assumption that something can only be affected by other things which are like them. That is, matter, the brain or bodies, can only be affected by other things which are material, but this principle - that like can only affect like - is surely not true. We see counter examples all around us:

• The idea of food, an immaterial phenomenon, causes the physical reaction of salivary glands secreting saliva.
• The excitation of cone cells in the retina, a physical reaction, produces the sensation of red which is non-physical.
• Swirling fluid in your inner ear, a physical condition, causes the sensation of dizziness which is non-physical.
• Getting your fingers caught in a closing car door, a material situation, causes pain which is an immaterial phenomenon.

And so on. The only way that the principle that "like causes like" can be known to be true is if we know materialism to be true, but the truth of materialism is the very point that's in question in this discussion.

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My friend Jason said he thought of me when he came across this joke relevant to the topic of philosophical materialism. Don't read it if bad jokes make you cringe:

Why don't materialists trust atoms? Because they're quite sure they make everything up.

Atheism and Nihilism

French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to take atheism to its logical conclusion. Many atheists are reluctant to do this because they can't live consistently with their belief that man is all alone in the cosmos.

Some there are, though, who call upon their fellow non-theists to face up to the gloomy entailments of the belief that nature is all there is. Alex Rosenberg and Joel Marks are two who seek to face squarely the logic of their unbelief. Another example is a commenter at Uncommon Descent who lays out clearly and with no sugar-coating what one should also believe if one embraces atheism.

He/she writes:

I’m a nihilist because it shows reality. If there is no higher power, then everything humanity holds dear was constructed by humanity and therefore not real.

There is:

• No objective, absolute, inherent meaning in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent purpose in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent value in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent morality in life or the universe. No good, no evil, no right, no wrong
• No objective, absolute, inherent truth in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent knowledge in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent logic in life or the universe

There's more:

• We are the cobbled together Frankensteins of billions of years of trial and error
• We have no free-will, mind, consciousness, rationality or reason. They are illusions and [the notions of] personhood, identity and humanity are not real.
• The emotions we express are just chemicals in our brain. The very things we seek in life like happiness, peace, contentment, joy are just chemicals reducing us to nothing more than chemical addicts.
• We are no more important than other animals. A dog is a rat is a pig is a boy.
• There is no afterlife. Once we die, we fade from existence and all our memories, experiences, knowledge etc goes with it. In time, we are forgotten.
• All the things we do in life are just for survival. Learning, loving, seeking, being positive, eating, relating, having fun are created for the sake of ignoring the real reason we are here and that’s to live as long as we can.
• There is no help coming to save humanity as a species or as individuals. We are all alone and on our own. If you can’t survive, you die.

The reader might wonder why anyone would embrace such a melancholy set of beliefs, but if the only alternative is to accept that there's a God, then nihilism, as depressing, hopeless, and dreary as it may be, will still be more appealing to a lot of people than that alternative.

Mind and Materialism

Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel argued that there is something it is like to be a bat whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a stone. Bats, and people, have conscious experience that purely material objects do not have, and it is this conscious experience that is the defining feature of minds.

This experience, Tallis observes, is not a fact about the physical realm:

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system.

When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Nagel goes on to make the claim, a claim that has put him in the bad graces of his fellow naturalists, that naturalism simply lacks the resources to account for conscious experience. Tallis writes:

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and [moral] value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s [naturalism's] identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, or by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

One might wonder why naturalistic materialists are so reluctant to acknowledge that there's more to us than just physical matter. What difference does it make if an essential aspect of our being is mental? What does it matter if we're not just matter but also a mind? Indeed, what does it matter if we are fundamentally mind?

Perhaps the answer is that given by philosopher J.P.Moreland. Moreland makes an argument in his book Consciousness and the Existence of God that naturalism entails the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy, that is, there are no immaterial substances. Thus, the existence of human consciousness must be explicable in terms of material substance or naturalism is likely to be false. Moreland also argues that there is no good naturalistic explanation for consciousness and that, indeed, the existence of consciousness is strong evidence for the existence of God.

Nagel, an atheist, doesn't go as far as Moreland in believing that the phenomena of conscious experience point to the existence of God, but he comes close, arguing that there must be some mental, telic principle in the universe that somehow imbues the world with consciousness. There is nothing about matter, even the matter which constitutes the brain, that can account for conscious experiences like the sensations of color or a toothache. There's nothing about a chemical reaction or the firing of nerve fibers that can conceivably account for what we experience when we see red, hear middle C, taste sweetness, or feel pain. Nor is there anything about matter that can account for the existence of moral value.

If it turns out that naturalism remains unable to rise to the challenge presented by consciousness then naturalism, and materialism, will forfeit their hegemony among philosophers, a hegemony that has already been seriously eroded.

Read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.

The Evolution of Consciousness

One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists. There is no supernature) is the difficulty of explaining how consciousness could have evolved. Natural selection acts on physical bodies, but consciousness seems to be something altogether different from physical, material body.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent highlights the problem when he writes:

Consciousness could not have evolved from “simpler” states of matter, because it is not a state of matter. To say that consciousness evolved from matter is like saying Newton’s theory of gravity evolved from apples.

Even if for the sake of argument one concedes that natural selection might account for the development of a material body, consciousness remains a mystery. There is still a vast uncrossable gulf between the physical body and mind. In other words, the difference between body and mind is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t get an immaterial mind no matter how many slight successive modifications of the body there may have been.

This is a serious problem for naturalism because most naturalists hold that naturalism entails physicalism, i.e. the view that physics fixes all the facts about the world, and materialism, the view that all of reality is reducible to matter. Consciousness, however, does not seem to be something explicable in terms either of physics or matter which means that it is a prima facie defeater for naturalism.

Naturalists can avoid utter defeat by conceding that both physicalism and materialism are false and trying somehow to enfold consciousness into a naturalistic ontology, but this would be an accommodation most naturalists would find devastating.

Naturalism dominated philosophy for the two centuries from about 1750 to 1950, but it appears that work being done in the last couple of decades in the philosophy of mind is bringing an end to the reign it once enjoyed and making it increasingly difficult to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist," as Richard Dawkins once put it.

Good at Killing People

This report has created a bit of a controversy among those interested in plumbing President Obama's character and psyche:

President Barack Obama told his staff that he’s “really good at killing people,” according to a new book set to hit shelves Tuesday.

The book, titled “Double Down” and authored by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, reportedly says the Nobel Peace Prize winning president made the comments while discussing drone strikes with his aides.

This is a disturbing revelation, all the moreso since Halperin and Heilemann are both Obama supporters who would not be expected to be trying to make the President look bad.

In time of war most of us certainly do want our leaders to be resolute in taking the fight to the enemy, but it's alarming that a president would actually boast about killing people, especially when, as with Mr. Obama's drone strikes, those whose bodies are blown apart are sometimes women and children.

I don't know the manner in which Mr. Obama said this, or if in fact he even did say it, but I hope that if he did, it was with a sense of deep remorse and not a spirit of gloating. Killing terrorists may be necessary, but it should never be something about which we should brag. To do so erodes our humanity, hardens our hearts, and reduces us to the level of savages. If President Obama was indeed gloating, and he may not have been, what would that say about the man that rather than be filled with deep anguish at being responsible for the deaths of children and other innocent bystanders he would actually find their deaths something to brag about?

Let's hope that our President uttered those words with regret, pain, and irony and not as though he had just birdied a par three on a golf outing.

Gay Marriage and Other Arrangements

Robert George at First Things shares some thoughts that tie in with our recent post at VP on polyamory. George writes:

The logic of the sexual revolution continues to play itself out in exactly the way defenders of “traditional” marriage and norms of sexual morality saw (and said) that it would. When I and many others noted that the abandonment of the idea of marriage as a conjugal union and its replacement with a conception of “marriage” as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership would swiftly be followed by the mainstreaming of polyamory and eventually demands for the legal recognition of “poly” partnerships and families, we were accused of “scare mongering” and making illicit “slippery slope” arguments.

What we saw—and what anyone should easily have seen—is that the displacement of the conjugal conception of marriage left no ground of principle for supposing that marriage is the union of two and only two persons, as opposed to three or more (“throuples,” “triads,” “quadrads,” etc.) in multiple partner sexual ensembles....

Today, fewer and fewer people on the liberal side of questions of marriage and sexual ethics are even pretending to have moral objections to polyamorous sexual relationships or their recognition. ... Moral objections to their ”identity” and the sexual expression of their love is condemned as mere “prejudice.” We must, we are told, fight the “bigots” who are stigmatizing them and “harming their children.” When you have a script that works, I guess you keep using it.

When I posted recently on this topic I added that the mainstreaming of polyamory and other conjugal exotica was inevitable once marriage was no longer restricted to the union of one man and one woman. Some readers protested, not to the argument that legalizing gay marriage would result in opening the legal doors to other marital arrangements, but rather to my conclusion that we therefore shouldn't change the definition of marriage to include homosexual unions.

The objections to the assertion that gay marriage is not a good idea were varied, but they essentially had in common the claim that it's unfair to gays, who are often wonderful people, to deny them the rights that heterosexuals enjoy. Of course, I never said that gays were not fine people, but I did aver that legalizing gay marriage would ultimately mean the end of traditional marriage, which certainly is in a precarious enough state as it is, and that that would not be a good outcome for society.

Some readers took umbrage with my claim that changing the laws that specify that marriage be between a man and a woman will ultimately result in changing the laws that specify that marriage must only be between two people. Their objection was based on their personal incredulity that anyone would really want to do this. Their inability to imagine that people would push for various forms of polyamory notwithstanding, however, it's almost inevitable that once we no longer limit marriage to men and women limiting marriage to just two people will also become equally anachronistic.

If requiring that marriage be between a man and woman is merely an arbitrary limitation based on personal taste and custom why isn't limiting marriage to just two people also arbitrary and unjustifiable? Some readers invoked the "icky" factor, declaring that polyamory is just icky, forgetting, perhaps, that this was at one time a major objection to gay marriage as well.

But let's grant for the sake of discussion that marriage should be limited to just two people. Then what? Suppose two siblings wished to marry. Should they be permitted to do so? If not, why not? What compelling reason would there be to deny two siblings who loved each other the same rights that non-siblings have? Please don't reply that that would be "icky." Ickiness doesn't count as a compelling reason.

Suppose you say that siblings should not be allowed to marry. What if the two siblings were gay or lesbian? Should they then be permitted to marry if they wish? If not, why not? If so, doesn't it discriminate against heterosexual siblings to prohibit to them a right given to homosexual siblings? And if incest is no longer prohibited, why on earth should any other consensual arrangement be prohibited, regardless of the number of partners?

Indeed, why must marriage be consensual at all? In much of the world it's certainly not, and throughout much of history it hasn't been. What reason is there for legally preventing fathers from giving their pre-pubescent daughters as brides to other men? Is it not merely a Western cultural prejudice that sustains the laws against doing this? How can we justify keeping laws on the books that are based on nothing more substantial than cultural prejudice? And if we're not going to allow cultural prejudices to keep us from betrothing our daughters to other men then, if gay marriage is acceptable, why should we be legally prohibited from giving our sons to other men for the same purpose?

The proponent of gay marriage might object that this would be both icky and wrong, but if we ask them to explain preciselywhy it's wrong it's hard to imagine what answer they could give. They'd simply reply, presumably, that it's offensive to them to subject children to non-consensual marriage, but it's a long way from being personally offensive to being wrong. After all, the fact that many people oppose gay marriage because they find it personally offensive is not considered by gay marriage proponents to be anywhere close to being a good reason to think gay marriage wrong or to keep it illegal.

Once we've started down the slippery slope by removing the requirement that marriage be restricted to one man and one woman, there's no logical way to stop the slide. There's no non-arbitrary place on the slope at which we can say that this is where the line must be drawn. If you think there is you're welcome to explain where that line is and why the slide wouldn't take us all the way to non-consensual child betrothal. Or beyond.

Once Pandora opens the box who knows what's going to come flying out? When we tinker with an institution that's thousands of years old the effects ramify throughout the culture. It's simply naive to think that nothing much would change.

Whether or not gays really yearn to marry their partners or whether they are good people is in fact irrelevant to the argument. The critical question is what effect gay marriage would have on marriage itself and ultimately upon our culture. By undermining the traditional one man, one woman formula I maintain that it'd be a cultural calamity.

Hawking's Hypocrisy

Columnist Mona Charen observes that world famous physicist Stephen Hawking has decided to decline an invitation to speak in Israel after hearing from Palestinian academics that to do so, one supposes, would be to be complicit in Israel's alleged crimes against the Palestinian people.

Charen deftly skewers the hypocrisy, or if not hypocrisy, certainly the mindlessness, of Hawking's decision. She writes:

Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist and celebrity, has canceled a planned trip to Israel, where he was invited to participate in a conference sponsored by Israeli president Shimon Peres. His explanation: “I have received a number of emails from Palestinian academics. They are unanimous that I should respect the boycott. In view of this, I must withdraw from the conference.”

It’s an odd world, isn’t it? By what inverted moral calculus does someone of Hawking’s stature find it morally problematic to set foot on the soil of the region’s only democracy? One wonders: How many other nations has Hawking declined to visit in order to express his disapproval of their policies?

She goes on to note that Hawking did not scruple to visit the old Soviet Union when it was one of the world's chief violators of human rights, nor did he shrink from visiting the Ayatollah's Iran in 2007, a country that not only sponsors terrorism around the world but imprisons Christians, stones women to death for adultery, and hangs both apostates from Islam as well as homosexuals.

Evidently, Mr. Hawking's moral fastidiousness only bothers him when it comes to Israel. Indeed, why is it that of all the nations in the world which treat their own citizens, not to mention those of their neighbors, abysmally, Israel almost exclusively singled out as particularly worthy of what Charen refers to as BDS (boycotts, divestments, and sanctions)?

It is especially peculiar that Israel is deemed uniquely worthy of punishment when it's recalled that Israel has a substantial minority population of Arabs who enjoy all the benefits of citizenship in a free and open democracy, even being permitted to practice their religion and hold political office. I can't think of one Arab country in which Jews are granted anything close to similar status.

In most Arab countries Jews (and Christians) live a tenuous existence where the best policy is to keep one's head down and mouth shut and maybe you won't have your house burned, your children seized and your life forfeit.

Charen also mentions that Arabs, and those like Hawking and other celebrities eager to demonstrate their political hipness and moral grandiosity, often express outrage that the Israelis built a wall between Israel and Palestinian Gaza which works a hardship on some Gazans who find themselves separated from their places of employment by the barrier. This, they say, is an intolerable cruelty.

Indeed, the wall is unfortunate, but why did the Israelis build it? Before the wall was erected Palestinian terrorists were easily crossing into Israel and blowing up Israeli schoolchildren and murdering Israeli families almost weekly. Rather than doing what most of the countries with which Hawking has no moral quarrel would do, which is to simply bomb Gaza into pulverized sand and dust, Israel simply built a fence to keep the terrorists out, and it has worked. But that simple non-violent measure of self-protection is too much for the delicate sensibilities of Hawking, et al., and he refuses to travel to a country which would be so insensitive to the rights of Palestinian Arabs as to protect themselves from their depradations.

Like so many on the left, Hawking seems to believe that Israel has a moral obligation to allow itself to be obliterated by its enemies, and if it refuses to cooperate in its own destruction then it's ipso facto not the sort of place that deserves to be graced by his awesomeness.

Is it All Intentional?

For some time now a number of commentators on the right, most notably Rush Limbaugh, have been insisting that the failures of the Obama administration, which most people, even among Democrats, ascribe to incompetence and a general disdain for the details of governing, are in fact part of a deliberate effort to cripple the United States both economically and militarily to make it easier to impose a socialist economic model on the nation and to diminish the ability of the U.S. to "bully" the rest of the world.

In the wake of the events of the last couple of months proponents of this view seem to be growing more numerous and more vocal. Norman Podhoretz, formerly the editor of Commentary, has made a case for it at the Wall Street Journal.

It ultimately comes down to whether one believes that Mr. Obama and his acolytes are unqualified by either intellect, temperament, or experience for the positions they hold or whether one believes they are diabolically brilliant strategists determined to transform this country, by whatever means necessary, into their vision of a Marxist/socialist dystopia.

Perhaps Podhoretz and Limbaugh are correct. There's certainly much to commend their theory, especially in the wake of revelations about the Obamacare rollout which almost seems to have been deliberately sabotaged by HHS, but I think the most parsimonious explanation for the debacles and scandals we've witnessed in the IRS, the Department of Justice, the Obamacare rollout, the economy, the stimulus, and our actions abroad is that nothing in Mr. Obama's biography prepared him to lead a government, much less this entire country, much less the world. I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt that he really believes that the policies he's ostensibly pursuing, at home and abroad, are best for the nation. I think he's completely and even catastrophically wrong in his judgment, but I'm willing to allow that he really believes he's right.

To accept the Limbaugh/Podhoretz's thesis, after all, one would have to believe that this president, a man with a towering ego, would nevertheless be willing to suffer the humiliation of being considered a disastrous failure and ranked among the worst presidents ever to occupy the office, in order to deviously effect the transformation of the country by deliberately bringing it to its knees. Maybe such treachery is indeed afoot, but I think we need more evidence than what's been adduced so far before embracing such a theory. Even Limbaugh seems unable to make up his mind whether Mr. Obama is a malevolent genius or a complete incompetent.

Of course, there is yet a third, even more disturbing possibility, which is that Mr. Obama is really just a figurehead, a puppet who allows himself to be cleverly used and manipulated by sinister puppet masters behind the scenes. It's possible, but there's no evidence at all that I'm aware of that it's true.

In any case, whether the explanation is gross incompetence, or a brilliantly conceived, convoluted conspiracy, or some combination of the two, there's no comfort in any of them for those concerned about what's happening to the country or who care about the country their children and grandchildren will inherit.

Mind or Matter

One of the many fascinating questions being revived in today's philosophical debates is the question of the ultimate nature of reality. In other words, what is the world fundamentally made of? For the last two hundred years, and still today, the consensus answer among scientists and philosophers is that matter is the fundamental constituent of the world. Everything in the world, it's believed, can be reduced to matter or energy.

This view is called metaphysical materialism, but despite its status as the consensus view there have always been prominent thinkers who've insisted that materialism is quite wrong. There has long been a substantial minority of very brilliant men who believe that the material world is really an expression of mind and that mind is fundamental. This view is usually referred to as metaphysical idealism.

Here are a few examples of quotes from scientists and philosophers who embrace(d) one form or another of metaphysical idealism:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, 1944

Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else. Erwin Schroedinger, quantum physicist

It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality. Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner, 1961

If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. Thomas Nagel, author of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, 2012.

What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving “entanglement” (the phenomenon Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices. To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time. Antoine Suarez, 2013

So what does it matter (no pun intended)? If mind is fundamental then it may follow, psychologically if not logically, that personality is as well, and pretty soon it looks as if fundamental reality is in fact the God of traditional theism.

This is an intolerable conclusion for metaphysical naturalists who thought they had laid God to rest in the 19th century. Now it appears that the matter is far from settled, and as we enter into the second decade of the twenty-first century there's an interesting philosophical donnybrook brewing over whether science and philosophy, so far from having proven there is no God, are actually, even if inadvertently, accumulating increasing evidence that there is.

Polyamory

One of the first posts I ever wrote on Viewpoint back in May of 2004 was on why I think gay marriage is a very bad idea. The post was not motivated by an animus against gay people but rather by a desire to preserve the institution of marriage which I believe would be radically transformed, if not dissolved entirely, by legalizing homosexual marital unions.

The argument is simple. Marriage has traditionally been seen as a union of one man and one woman. Once we decide as a society that the gender of the people in the union no longer matters we will have no grounds for resisting the further step of concluding that neither does the number of people in the union matter. In other words, marriage will inevitably come to be almost anything anyone wants it to be and when marriage is anything at all then it will pretty much cease to exist as anything more than a remnant of what it once was.

The argument is not without its critics. Some have derided it as a mere slippery slope argument, which is a silly objection since there's nothing wrong with slippery slope arguments. Others say that unions of more than two people are just gross, and no one would really want to do it, as if there were not a sizeable number of people who wouldn't do whatever they were legally allowed to do. I'm sure that there are a lot of people who would love even to marry their pets were the law to allow them.

As for marriages involving multiple partners (polyamory) the movement for this particular proclivity already exists and its votaries are biding until gay marriage gains full legal acceptance. When that day arrives polyamorists will begin pushing for their own particular notion of wedded bliss, and what compelling reason could anyone have for denying arrangements in which multiple men enter into matrimonial union with multiple women once we've decided that the gender of the spouses in a marriage no longer matters?

If you doubt that this is the inevitable next step in the marriage debate then read a pair of articles by the pseudonymous polyamorist Michael Carey at Slate here and here. What he says makes pretty clear what challenges will be facing our courts of law in the near future.

Although it's not the point of this post, I'd like to comment on something Mr. Carey says at the outset of the first article. He writes:

In the course of defending their right to treat gay people as second-class citizens, conservatives have frequently deployed slippery-slope arguments: “If we accept same-sex relationships, what will we have to tolerate next? Bestiality? Pederasty? Polygamy?” While these arguments are stupid, the people making them are not, or at least not always. They’re doing their best to trot out a parade of horribles that will shock the sensibilities of most Americans.

Clearly we should be shocked by violations of consent. (Reminder: Children and animals can’t consent!)

In other words, Mr. Carey maintains, gay marriage, plural marriage, and traditional marriage are all based on consent whereas those other "horribles" are not. I wonder, though, how long consent would matter in a society that has lost any objective grounds for moral discrimination.

A society that has no transcendent basis for objective moral duties, a foundation that only theism can provide, will eventually subjectivize morality, and when morality is subjectivized it will inevitably devolve into the simple philosophy of might-makes-right. Those who possess the power to do what they wish will find their behavior sanctioned by a society that lacks the moral resources to disapprove any kind of behavior and which will almost certainly lack the will to pass judgment on the behavior of the powerful.

When we reach that point, which may not be as far off as we might hope, the law will eventually be made to conform to the moral consensus, those "horribles" will no longer seem so horrible, and consent will be treated as a quaint anachronism.

Who's in Charge?

The President doesn't seem to know anything more about what's going on in his own administration than anyone else who watches the evening news, leading some to wonder who's actually running the country:

Let's see. If Mr. Obama isn't really in the loop, so to speak, who is? Who's in charge at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Valerie Jarrett? George Soros? Joe Biden? Nancy Pelosi? Harry Reid? Yikes!

Speaking of being out of the loop, Jon Stewart appears to be mystified by the seeming ineptitude of it all: