Responsibility

Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest lays responsibility for the Syrian refugee crisis at the feet of three people: Syrian president Bashar Assad, ISIS leader al-Baghdadi, and President Obama. Why President Obama, you ask?

This paragraph from the conclusion of the essay sums up Mead's indictment of the president's culpability and the rest of the article fills in the facts supporting his allegations:

For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.

What exactly were the president's omissions, in Mead's estimation?

Obama’s own policy decisions — allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones — were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn.

Many Americans who now oppose the President’s ill-considered refugee program have long supported the use of American power to create “safe zones” in Syria so the refugees could be sheltered and fed in their own country. If President Obama seriously cared about the fate of Syria’s millions of displaced people, he would have started to organize those safe havens years ago. And if he understood the nature of America’s role in Europe, he would have known that working with the Europeans to prevent a mass refugee and humanitarian disaster was something that had to be done.

Not even President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq has been as destructive for Europe or as damaging to the Transatlantic alliance as President Obama’s hard-hearted and short-sighted Syria policy. The flood of refugees is shaking the European Union to its core, and Obama’s policy has cemented perceptions among many around the world that the United States is no longer the kind of useful ally that it once was. France didn’t even bother to invoke NATO’s Article 5 after the Paris attacks; nobody really thinks of President Obama as the man you want at your side when the chips are down.

Mr. Obama prefers to "lead from behind" which implies that he prefers to cede leadership to others, but this is an abdication of his responsibility. The American president, whoever he is, is ipso facto the leader of the free world. If America declines to lead Western civilization will be rudderless, disunited, and vulnerable to the savage barbarians howling for blood just outside the gates.

The collapse of President Obama’s Syria policy is hardly a partisan issue. He has repeatedly overruled his own national security officials, top diplomats, and advisors, many of whom have been horrified by the President’s passivity in the face of onrushing disaster. His abrupt policy switch on airstrikes left many senior Democrats who had supported his apparent determination to enforce his “red line” against Assad twisting in the wind.

Mead also points to an astonishing irony in the president's policy:

The Obama Administration’s extreme caution about engagement in Syria led it to insist on such a thorough process of vetting potential Syrian allies that years of effort and tens of millions of dollars resulted in only a paltry handful of people being found acceptable to receive American weapons and training. The refugee vetting process won’t be nearly this thorough; it’s almost certain that the President’s program will result in settling people in the United States who could not be certified to fight for the United States in Syria. Given our gun laws, uncertified Syrians living in the United States will soon have the opportunity to get weapons that the United States government would refuse to give them in Syria.

Being largely responsible for the refugee mess it ill-suits Mr. Obama to mock those who urge a cautious approach to allowing thousands of refugees, refugees his policies have contributed to creating, into this country. Nor is the crisis over:

The Syria war has not finished creating refugees, undermining regional and even global security, putting WMD in terrorist hands, or spreading the poisons of radicalism and sectarian war across the Middle East and among vulnerable Muslims in Europe and beyond. Things can and will get worse as long as American policy continues to flounder; instead of arguing about how to shelter a few thousand refugees we need to look hard at how we are failing to address the disaster that has created millions, and that continues to grow.

Mr. Obama came into office thinking, or at least giving the impression that he thought, that all he had to do was convince the world that he wasn't anything like George Bush and peace and love would break out all over. Unfortunately, the world is comprised of billions of people who care little about "goodness" and who are restrained by only two things: Power and the willingness to use it. The Obama administration has sounded an uncertain trumpet and refused to back up its own threats in Syria. The evil-doers in ISIS know that this administration is not really serious about stopping them, so, unintimidated by our weak hand and the lack of leadership from this administration, the world is merrily tearing itself apart.

Is Islam Violent?

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently claimed that "Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Secretary of State John Kerry recently assured us that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.

Over and over we're told that Islam is a religion of peace. Well, the religion of peace is racking up quite a body count lately, not just the 3000 victims of the 9/11 attack, not just the more recent 600 plus victims of the Ankara, Beirut, and Russian airliner bombings, the 130 victims of the Paris slaughter, and the 30 or so victims of the Mali hotel attack, but uncountable lesser crimes throughout the world all done in the name of Islam.

To say that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism is like saying Christendom had nothing to do with the Inquisition. As Jonah Goldberg puts it:

The jihadists say they are motivated by Islam. They shout “Allahu akbar!” whenever they kill people. “Moderate Muslims” in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have been funding Islamic radicals around the world for nearly a century. This morning in Mali, terrorist gunmen reportedly released those hostages who could quote the Koran. The leader of ISIS has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and openly talks about restoring the Caliphate.

Oh, one other thing: The Islamic State is called the Islamic State. I used to eat at a restaurant called “Burrito Brothers.” Saying the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam is like telling someone eating a burrito they bought at Burrito Brothers that Burrito Brothers has “nothing whatsoever” to do with burritos.

It is inexplicable that so many of our politicians and opinion-molders seem unable to grasp this. If Republicans had rung up as many casualties as Muslim terrorists have you can bet there'd be no reticence about drawing the connection between Republican thinking and murderous barbarism. Indeed, some who can't bring themselves to put the words terrorist and Muslim together in the same sentence had no trouble putting the words Tea-party and terrorist together just a few years ago.

But set all that aside. The test of whether people are true Muslims or Christians is how closely their behavior, either theoretical or actual, comports to that of the founder of their religion - the one whose example and teaching they aspire to emulate.

When this test is applied to Islam it turns out, unfortunately, that the ISIS savages who enslave and behead are far more like their founder than are those Muslims who simply want to live in peace.

Mohammad himself practiced slavery, he condoned it for Muslims, and encouraged his followers to have sex with their female slaves. Yet all of these the world professes to be appalled at when practiced by ISIS.

Mohammad also cut off the heads of those he had taken prisoner. He had 500-900 Qurayza Jews, men and boys, decapitated after the battle of Trench and gave their wives, mothers, and sisters to his soldiers. When ISIS cuts the heads off their enemies they're following the example of the Prophet all Muslims revere and whose life they look to as their example. Indeed, Islamic literature, including the Qu'ran, is replete with passages enjoining Muslims to kill infidels.

This is why, perhaps, significant minorities of Muslims in eleven countries polled by the Pew Foundation condone the horrors that ISIS perpetrates. The numbers of supporters, though small in terms of percentage of the population, are huge in absolute terms. As many as 63 million people in eleven countries actually support ISIS, and that number rises to as many as 287 million if those who aren't sure are factored in. In Israel alone, for example, only 4% of the Muslim population supports ISIS but that translates to 66,000 individuals.

In any case, the claims of Clinton and Kerry that ISIS does not represent Islam and that Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism seem to be instances of burying one's head in the sand to avoid having to face a very unpleasant reality. We can be very grateful that millions of Muslims deplore the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS and other Islamic groups, but in order to do so they have to tacitly distance themselves from the behavior of Mohammad himself.

Unhelpful Rhetoric

President Obama has been strongly criticized, even by members of his own party, for his rhetorical lassitude in the wake of the Paris atrocity and for his refusal to see anything in the reluctance of many Americans to admit tens of thousands of Syrians into the country except unalloyed bigotry.

He recently couched a petulant response to his critics in the form of his favorite rhetorical device, the straw man, accusing opponents of his refugee policy of being frightened of "widows and orphans." This is an astonishingly silly characterization from the man who is supposed to be president of all Americans. Instead of explaining in a dignified manner befitting a world leader how his administration is making sure that no terrorists and terrorist sympathizers are sneaking in among the genuine refugees, he resorts to ridicule, a tactic more befitting a community agitator.

Mr. Obama insists that the refugees are being properly vetted, but until he explains exactly what that vetting process consists of it's hard to believe him. For most refugees there is no database, no records, against which to vet them. The vetting process consists essentially of asking them if they are who they say they are.

Over 70% of the refugees flooding Europe are young men of military age with no families. Many putative Syrian refugees are not Syrians at all but men from other nations carrying fake passports, and some Syrians are trying to sneak into the country illegally with fake Greek passports.

President Obama and others have chastised those who are calling for a cautious approach to letting in tens of thousands of people, some of whom may be murderous monsters, by declaring that such would be a denial of American values and that calls for caution only make it easier for ISIS to recruit. Both of these assertions are nonsense. There was no legal immigration into this country from 1924 to 1965. Moreover, according to current law, Cuban migrants seeking to come to the U.S. but intercepted at sea are returned to Cuba.

It might also be added that the attempt by some to compare the current refugee situation to that of Jews fleeing Nazi Europe in 1939 aboard the SS St. Louis, only to be turned away at American ports, is a red herring. Turning away a boatload of over 900 refugees from the Nazis was unconscionable, but the situation today is not analogous. There was no danger in 1939 that any of the Jews on board the St. Louis were plotting to commit mass murder of Americans, but ISIS boasts that they've heavily infiltrated the refugees and our FBI and Homeland Security leaders tell us there's no reason to doubt them.

Finally, if Mr. Obama really thinks that a cautious approach to the refugee problem gives ISIS a powerful recruiting tool then the president needs to get more rest. ISIS has successfully recruited young men and women because it offers them the promise of being in on the ground floor of the final victory of the forces of Allah over the hated infidels and Jews, not because of American immigration policies which are, it should be noted, far more liberal than those of any middle eastern Muslim country.

Luv Gov

A young woman named Alexis falls in love with a guy named Govinsky who turns out to be an overbearing, controlling lout who, despite his assurances of wanting only what's best for Alexis, gradually smothers her freedom.

Her friend Libby (Liberty) tries to warn her that "Gov" isn't what he appears to be, but Alexis allows herself, over a series of five short (5 minutes) videos, to become more and more deeply dependent until finally she has an epiphany and realizes that her dependence on Gov has wrecked her life.

Each of the videos in the series is an amusing parable for our times. Here's the first:

Evolution and Consciousness

Sal Cordova at Uncommon Descent talks about how reflecting on the phenomenon of human consciousness as a high school student led him to doubt the Darwinian story:

I remember sitting in class and the biology teacher gave the standard talking points. But for some reason, the fact I was conscious did not seem reducible to evolutionary explanations. Strange that I would even be perplexed about it as a high school student, but I was. That was the beginning of my doubts about Darwin…

Years later, when I related the story to Walter ReMine, he explained to me that consciousness poses a serious problem for evolution.

He said something to the effect, “Say an animal has to flee a predator — all it has to do is run away. Why does it have to evolve consciousness in order to flee predators?” Mechanically speaking the animal can be programmed to flee, or even hunt, without having to be self-aware. Why does it have to evolve consciousness to do anything for survival?

Why would selection favor the evolution of consciousness? How does natural selection select for the pre-cursors of consciousness? I don’t think it can. Ergo, consciousness didn’t evolve, or it’s just a maladaptation, or an illusion — or maybe it is created by God. Materialists can say consciousness is an illusion all they want, but once upon a time, when my arm was broken in a hang gliding crash, I felt real pain. It would have been nice if consciousness were an illusion back then, but it wasn’t.

Somehow, at some point in our embryonic development consciousness arises, but how does a particular configuration of material stuff generate it? Dead people have the same configuration of matter in their brains (unless they suffered a head injury) that they had before dying and yet before death they were conscious and after death they are not. Why? What's missing after death?

How do physical processes like electrochemical reactions in the brain produce a belief, or a doubt, or understanding? How do atoms whirling about in our neuronal matrix give rise to our sense that the distant past is different from the recent past? How do chemical reactions translate a pattern of ink on paper into a meaning and how do firing synapses translate electrical pulses into the sensation of red? Not only does no one know the answers to these questions, it's very hard to see how they even could have an answer if our material brain is the only entity responsible for them.

Consciousness is an incredibly intriguing phenomenon. Not only is there no explanation in a materialist ontology of how it works, there's also no explanation for how it could ever have evolved through purely random, physical, material processes.

Cordova has more at the link.

A Problem With Teaching Ethics

Ray Penning at Cardus Blog asks the question, "Can ethics be taught?" The answer, of course, is yes and no. Ethics, as the study of the rules that philosophers have prescribed to govern our moral behavior, can certainly be taught, but, although thousands of books have been written about this, I doubt that any of them have changed anyone's actual behavior. Part of the reason is that, as Penning observes:

Ethics courses that leave students with a bunch of “you shoulds” or “you should nots” are not effective. There are deeper questions that proceed from our understanding of what human nature is about and what we see as the purpose of our life together.

This is true as far as it goes, but the reason teaching such rules is not effective is that focusing on the rules fails to address the metaethical question of why we should follow any of those rules in the first place. What answer can be given to the question why one should not just be selfish, or adopt a might-makes-right ethic? At bottom secular philosophy has no convincing answer. Philosophers simply utter platitudes like "we wouldn't want others to treat us selfishly, so we shouldn't treat them selfishly," which, of course, is completely unhelpful unless one is talking to children.

The reply is unhelpful when aimed at adult students because students will discern that the reply simply asserts that we shouldn't be selfish because it's selfish to be selfish. The question, though, is why, exactly, is it wrong to do to others something we wouldn't done to us? What is it about selfishness that makes selfishness wrong?

Moreover, this sort of answer simply glosses over the problem of what it means to say that something is in fact "wrong" in the first place. Does "wrong" merely mean something one shouldn't do? If so, we might ask why one shouldn't do it, which likely elicits the reply that one shouldn't do it because it's wrong. The circularity of this is obvious.

The only way to break out of the circle, the only way we can make sense of propositions like "X is wrong," is to posit the existence of a transcendent moral authority, a personal being, who serves as the objective foundation for all our moral judgments. If there is no such being then neither are there any objective moral values or duties to which we must, or even should, adhere. This lack of any real meaning to the word "wrong" is a major consequence of the secularization of our culture, and it's one of the major themes of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (see links at the top of this page), both of which I heartily recommend to readers of Viewpoint.

What Should We Do?

President Obama insists that the slaughter in Paris by Muslim terrorists, at least one of which was a refugee from Syria, will not deter him from bringing 10,000 Syrian refugees into this country each year for the next several years.

It's strange that some of the same people in this country who demand that climate change skeptics be jailed, and who have nothing but hatred for Christians who doubt evolution and oppose gay marriage, are all in favor of bringing 10,000 people, many of whom would abolish science and hang gays, into our communities.

Those who think this is a bad idea, especially in light of the experience of France which has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews emigrate from the country because of violent Muslim antisemitism, are called bigots. They're lectured about how most Muslims are good people and only a small percentage of them are radical sociopaths. Of course, it's also true that most Germans were good people during WWII, but the few who had the power were sociopaths and we should reflect upon the damage those few inflicted upon the world.

Suppose only 1% of the 10,000 or so the president wants to bring in are terrorists or potential terrorists. If so, we would be bringing into the country every year 100 people, or ten cells like the one which wreaked such carnage last Friday night on Paris. Do we really think that's compassionate and wise? Are the families of the Paris dead glad today that their country was so compassionate as to let in so many people who hate the French and all that France stands for?

The desire to be compassionate doesn't mean we should be stupid. If there was any chance at all that a blood transfusion you needed contained a few bits of HIV would you let that blood into your body if you had an alternative?

The administration scoffs at these concerns and assures us that the refugees will be "vetted", but how? There are no records in Syria that we can check to see if these people are innocent victims or ISIS operatives. All we have to go by is their word that they have no terrorist sympathies. The claim that we'll be vetting them is simply absurd.

So what should be done? We should do two things: First, demand that temporary refugee camps be set up in Saudi Arabia, southern Iraq, and other Arab countries, paid for by the oil-rich Arabs who should be shamed, if need be, into showing some compassion for their Muslim brothers and sisters. Second, we, together with European and Arab allies, should purge Syria of the elements whose terror has set this refugee crisis in motion in the first place so that these people can return to their homes. That purgation would include not only ISIS but Assad. This may bring us into conflict with the Russians and the Iranians, and it would have been less dangerous had this been done a year ago, but as long as they're there supporting Assad the suffering of the Syrian people won't improve.

Unfortunately, President Obama doesn't seem inclined to take either of these measures. I hope I'm not being unfair to him but he doesn't seem interested in actually leading. Instead, we bide our time, dropping a few bombs here and there (parenthetical question: France retaliated against ISIS yesterday by bombing a training camp, communications center, and munitions dump. Why, after all the bombs we've supposedly dropped on ISIS over the last year, was this target still available to the French? Why wasn't it destroyed long ago?) until ISIS makes good on its threat to attack Washington, D.C.

Inconsistencies

A few ruminations on some current domestic issues:

Open Borders - Some think it's immoral to prevent people from coming into this country whenever they wish to use the resources Americans have built and bought. Very well. Perhaps those folks might tell us whether they lock their doors when they leave home? If so, why do they? Why not share what they have - the contents of their refrigerator, the contents of their wallet, their bathroom and bedroom - with those who are in need of it? What's the significant difference between locking the border and locking one's house or car? What's a person called who condemns people who want to do the former while that person does the latter?

Tax Hikes - Here are a couple of questions to ask of anyone who insists that we should all be willing to pay higher taxes: "Do you take any deductions on your own taxes? If so, are you not saying that you yourself don't really want to pay what you're already assessed, let alone pay more? You just want everyone else to pay more." The person who calls for higher taxes while taking whatever deductions to which he's entitled is, to put it charitably, confused.

Minimum Wage Hike - Suppose you hire a lawn outfit to mow your grass. They charge just about what you can afford to pay so you give them the work. Soon, however, they inform you that they're now going to pay their employees twice as much to ride a mower around your property so they have to charge you twice as much to cover their expense. What do you do? Quite likely, you inform them that you'll mow your own grass. Now the lawn guys have less business and have to lay off some workers. A lot of good getting that raise is doing those workers now.

Campus Protests - Many college students demand to be treated as adults while acting like fragile children afraid to be exposed to speech and ideas that may hurt their feelings. How adult is it to demand "safe spaces" on campus to which you can flee to avoid hearing mean words or anything with which you might disagree? How adult is it to demand that there be "trigger warnings" given before a professor says something that might make the student feel uncomfortable? The need for "safe spaces" is understandable when children are eight years old, but we expect well-adjusted people to outgrow their need for such refuges as they leave elementary school behind. In any case, walking around with the equivalent of a security blanket is hardly something one associates with being a mature adult.

Poor Timing

Even as word of the horror perpetrated by Islamists in Paris spreads there's this report out of Vanderbilt:

At Vanderbilt, many minority students have in recent days renewed a push for the university to take action against Carol Swain (see photo below), a tenured professor of political science and law, over a column she wrote in January after the terrorist attacks in Paris against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

In the January column, Swain asked, "What would it take to make us admit we were wrong about Islam? What horrendous attack would finally convince us that Islam is not like other religions in the United States, that it poses an absolute danger to us and our children unless it is monitored better than it has been under the Obama administration?"

Many students and others said that the column stereotyped all Muslims in a way that was profoundly biased, but the university defended Swain's right to free speech.

                                                          Carol Swain

Why is pointing out that Muslims have been responsible for almost all of the terrorism around the world in the last two decades offensive? If it's a fact, if it's true, then why are those who bring it to our attention libeled as bigots? Are we to pretend that somehow the evil carried out in France tonight could just as easily have been done by Amishmen?

We can bury our heads in the sand and keep telling ourselves that most Muslims are not violent, and that may be true, but it's irrelevant. Tens of thousands are violent, and if Mr. Obama has his way tens of thousands more of them will soon be living among us.

Professor Swain is correct. The world does have a problem with Islamic radicals, and we delude ourselves to our peril if we insist that we don't, and, like the Vanderbilt students, insist instead on punishing those who say we do.

Why Are Middle-Aged Men Dying?

R.R.Reno notes that there has been a marked increase in the death rates of middle-aged white American men and claims that though observers have expressed surprise and bafflement at this, it's really neither surprising nor baffling. He writes:

We’re in the midst of a crisis. The New York Times reports that Angus Deaton and Ann Case, two Princeton economists, have identified increases in suicide and drug and alcohol related deaths among high school educated white Americas as the cause for a remarkable spike in the overall death rate for middle-aged white Americans. Various experts express surprise, shock, and sadness. I can understand the sadness, but not the surprise.

Over a fifteen-year period (1999-2014), the death rate for whites age 45 to 54 with a high school education or less increased by 25 percent, while death rates for the same age range in other groups in America and other rich countries declined. That is indeed shocking. It’s the sort of rise that only occurs during periods of social crisis or collapse. Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union is one instance. Europe during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II is another.

Reno goes on to discuss why he's not surprised at the statistics. I don't disagree with anything he says, but I'd place more stress on a factor that he mentions only obliquely:

I don’t find myself baffled. For the last few decades, cultural leaders have been waging a war on the weak. Their goal is to dismantle traditional norms and rules for family life. They push to dismantle gender roles and other foundational categories that ordinary people use to orient themselves and make sense out of their lives. They advocate for drug legalization and doctor-assisted suicide as well. The upshot: reliable guides toward a normal life are removed, and potentially destructive behaviors that rich people either avoid or discretely manage are normalized. The most vulnerable pay the cost.

The salient factor in the rise in death rates among middle-aged white men, I suspect, is that so many of them are either divorced or never-married. It's been known by sociologists for a long time that married men live longer, on average, than unmarried men. They engage in fewer of the self-destructive behaviors that unmarried men are prone to, they take better care of their health, and are more satisfied with their lives. On the other hand, as the number of unmarried men grows in the population so, too, does the incidence of harmful behaviors like alcoholism, drug use, etc. and the truncated life-spans these behaviors entail.

As an article published by the Harvard Medical School points out, marriage is good for men's health:

A major survey of 127,545 American adults found that married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. Men who have marital partners also live longer than men without spouses; men who marry after age 25 get more protection than those who tie the knot at a younger age, and the longer a man stays married, the greater his survival advantage over his unmarried peers.

The article goes on to discuss why this is so, but there seems no doubt that marriage is a major factor in male longevity. Nevertheless, for a host of reasons, relatively fewer men are married today than in previous generations, and by the time these unaffiliated males reach middle-age a lot of health problems, apparently, catch up with them.

Modern Educayshun

No doubt that in some precincts of some universities the best that has been thought and written, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, is still being taught by scholars who love the life of the mind and love teaching the great ideas and works of western civilization. In some campus alcoves the free exchange of ideas is still encouraged and vigorous debate and disagreement is relished, but one wonders how long these archipelagos of learning can survive, especially in the humanities, given the current climate in many of our institutions of higher learning.

Gone are the days when students could expect to be immersed in Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Kant and other dead white males. Nowadays they can expect to be taught all about trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, transgender, cisgender, their "right" not to be exposed to speech they find hurtful or insulting, their "right" not to be offended or made uncomfortable, their "right" not to be confronted with ideas that challenge their own fervently, if often inchoately, held orthodoxies, their "right" not to be disagreed with, the need to intimidate and suppress those who dissent, and the evils of privilege, patriarchy, and other horrors of our corrupt and evil society.

This video, via Hot Air, takes a humorous, satirical look at the state of affairs that prevails, perhaps, in too many university classrooms.

The Doctor and the President

As anyone who watches anything on television besides Dancing With the Stars knows, the media has been having a field day making up stories about Ben Carson's alleged mendacity. Joe Scarborough at MSNBC has recently called Carson a liar. Politico has tacitly admitted to fabricating a story about Carson's having lied in his autobiography. Much of the rest of the media can't get enough of the sheer pleasure to be derived from casting aspersions on Carson's memories of his violent youth or of his poorly phrased reminiscence of an alleged "scholarship" offer to West Point.

The media stories over the last week range from ridiculous to libelous and amount to asseverations that because they have searched diligently and can't find any eye-witnesses to events Carson claims happened fifty years ago therefore Carson's claims are false.

Okay. Character assassination is what the media does, especially to Republicans, but as low as their professional standards are, they'd be somewhat less contemptible were they not so obviously one-sided about their hit pieces. A microscopic examination of the candidate's past, undertaken for the sole purpose of discrediting the candidate, was certainly nowhere to be found in 2008 and 2012 when the candidate was Barack Obama. Instead what the media gave us during Mr. Obama's campaigns was idolatrous hagiography. Yet, while evidence is turning up to vindicate Dr. Carson, Mr. Obama's track record for honesty remains pathetic.

For example, Kyle Becker at Independent Journal discusses nine falsehoods that Barack Obama promotes in his autobiographies and elsewhere that are demonstrably untrue, yet scarcely any of those journalists currently taking to their fainting couches over Dr. Carson's alleged unreliability raised any objection to Sen. Obama's dissimulations seven years ago and certainly did not call him a liar.

Here are a five of the nine that Becker summons to our recollection. You can find links to the sources at Independent Journal:

Mr. Obama claimed that his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz in WWII:

In response to a question at a Memorial Day appearance in New Mexico, Mr. Obama said an uncle helped liberate the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz during World War II. However Auschwitz, evidently unbeknownst to Mr. Obama, was liberated by Soviet forces.

Mr. Obama claimed that the civil rights march in Selma served somehow as the inspiration for his conception:

[W]hen the president spoke before an audience in Selma back in 2007, Mr. Obama credited the civil rights march as the inspiration for his conception. Remarkably, however, the president was already three years old when the march occurred in 1965.

Mr. Obama claimed that his grandfather was tortured by the British in Kenya:

David Maraniss, the author of Mr Obama’s most comprehensive biography so far, claims that while “incidents of that sort certainly happened”, it “seems unlikely” that Mr Obama’s grandfather was one such victim. “Five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango [Mr. Obama's grandfather] said they doubted the story or were certain it did not happen.”

Mr. Obama claimed that his step-grandfather died while fighting Dutch troops in Indonesia:

Mr. Maraniss notes that the story about the death of Mr. Obama’s step-grandfather was “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” Mr. Maraniss writes that the man died trying to hang drapes.

Mr. Obama claimed that his mother, while suffering from cancer, was denied insurance coverage:

However, a new book by New York Times reporter Janny Scott has revealed this story appears to be a fabrication ... and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.

There are more such tarradiddles by the president at the link, and these, of course, don't include his claims that his health care plan would make insurance cheaper and allow everyone to keep their plan and their doctor, none of which is true.

Becker goes on to say that,

At least 38 false accounts of President Obama’s life story were documented in just the Maraniss biography, as counted by Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith.

Additional falsehoods have been detected in Obama’s biographies, many of them apparently designed to further a narrative of overcoming racial adversity and an underprivileged life.

Despite this record of factual errancy afflicting the president, the media snores. If, though, Dr. Carson, or any other Republican had told these whoppers, you can bet that the media would be all over it.

Metaphysical Chasm

What, exactly, is the significant difference between human beings and non-human animals such as other primates? Neuroscientist Michael Egnor offers some interesting thoughts on the question at Evolution News and Views:

It is important to understand the fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite....

Nonhuman animals are purely material beings. They have no concepts. They experience hunger and pain. They don't contemplate the injustice of suffering.

A human being is material and immaterial -- a composite being. We have material bodies, and our perceptions and imaginations and appetites are material powers, instantiated in our brains. But our intellect -- our ability to think abstractly -- is a wholly immaterial power, and our will that acts in accordance with our intellect is an immaterial power. Our intellect and our will depend on matter for their ordinary function, in the sense that they depend upon perception and imagination and memory, but they are not themselves made of matter. It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes.

It is a radical difference -- an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference.

To put it differently, both animals and humans are sentient, but only humans are sapient. The difference is enormous. As Egnor says, "We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm."

If this is so we might wonder how such a chasm came to exist. How did a purely physical, material process like evolution ever give rise to the abilities Egnor mentions. Indeed, how does the material brain of any animal convert physical stimuli, the firing of synapses and the flux of molecules in neurons, into immaterial sensations like pain or pleasure, and experiences of sound, color, fragrance or flavor? We take it all for granted, but it really is an astonishing mystery how a material brain could produce not only these sensations but also conceptualize abstractions and give meaning to words on paper.

indeed, Egnor believes that these phenomena are beyond the capabilities of matter alone which is why he believes that we also possess an immaterial mind.

The Chinese Room

One major controversy in the philosophy of mind is driven by the claim that computers can think, or will soon be able to. If that claim is true then it makes it a lot easier to assume that the brain is a kind of computer and that what we call mind is simply a word we use to describe the way the brain functions.

Or put another way, mind is to brain what computer software is to the computer's hardware. This view is called "functionalism." In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to our cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and neuroscientist Michael Egnor has a helpful discussion of it at Evolution News and Views. Egnor describes the argument as follows:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You've moved to China and you get a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth with you is a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to the algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to and from the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing. As Egnor says: "Thought is about understanding the process, not merely about mechanically carrying out the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm."

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and do understand, either our brains are not computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

What's it Like to be a Bat?

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.

Fictionalism

At the New York Times' Opinionator column, philosopher William Irwin discusses "fictionalism", an idea promoted by another philosopher, Richard Joyce, that belief in God, free will, and objective morality are useful fictions that we believe even though we know they're not true. Joyce thinks that believing what one "knows" not to be true is, in this case at least, a good thing. Reading this gives the impression that philosophers must twist themselves into intellectual pretzels in order to accommodate a naturalistic worldview.

In the following excerpt Irwin describes Joyce's argument:

The philosopher Michael Ruse has argued that “morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.” If that’s true, why have our genes played such a trick on us? One possible answer can be found in the work of another philosopher Richard Joyce, who has argued that this “illusion” — the belief in objective morality — evolved to provide a bulwark against weakness of the human will. So a claim like “stealing is morally wrong” is not true, because such beliefs have an evolutionary basis but no metaphysical basis.

But let’s assume we want to avoid the consequences of weakness of will that would cause us to act imprudently. In that case, Joyce makes an ingenious proposal: moral fictionalism.

Following a fictionalist account of morality, would mean that we would accept moral statements like “stealing is wrong” while not believing they are true. As a result, we would act as if it were true that “stealing is wrong,” but when pushed to give our answer to the theoretical, philosophical question of whether “stealing is wrong,” we would say no.

The appeal of moral fictionalism is clear. It is supposed to help us overcome weakness of will and even take away the anxiety of choice, making decisions easier.

This is a kind of philosophical make-believe, an attempt to live "as-if" there were objective moral duties because it's very hard to live without them. Even so, if one didn't believe stealing is wrong why act as if it is? What's the point of trying to conform to what you "know" isn't true? Irwin wonders about this, too:

There is, though, a practical objection to moral fictionalism. Once we become aware that moral judgments have no objective basis in metaphysical reality, how can they function effectively? We are likely to recall that morality is a fiction whenever we are in a situation in which we would prefer not to follow what morality dictates. If I am a moral fictionalist who really wants to steal your pen, the only thing that will stop me is prudence, not a fictional moral belief.

It is not clear that this practical objection can be overcome, but even if it could, moral fictionalism would still be disingenuous, encouraging us to turn a blind eye to what we really believe. It may not be the most pernicious kind of self-deception, but it is self-deception nonetheless, a fact that will bother anyone who places value on truth.

But if a philosopher is willing to consign God, freedom, and morality to the realm of fiction, why place a value on truth? Why not go all the way and just say that all "truth" is really just fiction? The fictionalist can give no answer to this question.

Irwin goes on to describe how Joyce defends his moral fictionalist account and how he applies it to God and free will. I encourage you to check out the article at the link.

One of the tests of the soundness of one's view of the world is whether or not it's actually possible to live consistently with it. If a worldview entails that one must live as if fictions are true or as if truth is fiction perhaps there's something wrong with the worldview. Evidently, Joyce has adopted a worldview that requires him to embrace "fictions" like the existence of God, free will, and morality even though he believes these things don't really exist. He holds to a worldview, in other words, with which he can't really live. Indeed, he finds himself living as if his worldview is false. That's a good sign that it probably is.

Transgenders in the Shower

If you're a high school female you might soon be faced with having anatomical males sharing your shower and rest rooms with you, but you shouldn't mind because these anatomical males identify themselves as females so in the eyes of the Obama administration that makes it alright. Perhaps you yourself won't mind this peculiar state of affairs, but I'm pretty sure millions of others would, and if the Obama administration has their way in court none of them are going to have any say in the matter either way.

Boys who identify as girls, the Obama Department of Education has decreed, must be allowed access to girls' facilities as well as girls' athletic teams. This is liberal egalitarianism on steroids. The New York Times reports:

Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions.

Education officials said the decision was the first of its kind on the rights of transgender students, which are emerging as a new cultural battleground in public schools across the country. In previous cases, federal officials had been able to reach settlements giving access to transgender students in similar situations. But in this instance, the school district in Palatine, Ill., has not yet come to an agreement, prompting the federal government to threaten sanctions. The district, northwest of Chicago, has indicated a willingness to fight for its policy in court.

In a letter sent Monday, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education told the Palatine district that requiring a transgender student to use private changing and showering facilities was a violation of that student’s rights under Title IX, a federal law that bans sex discrimination. The student, who identifies as female but was born male, should be given unfettered access to girls’ facilities, the letter said. The Education Department gave 30 days to the officials of Township High School District 211 to reach a solution or face enforcement, which could include administrative law proceedings or a Justice Department court action. The district could lose some or all of its Title IX funding.

The rest of the article sheds more light on the matter. For example:

Officials in the Palatine district, which serves more than 12,000 students, have framed their position as a middle ground. The transgender student in question plays on a girls’ sports team, is called “she” by school staff and is referred to by a female name. But the district, citing privacy concerns, had required her to change clothes and shower separately.

The district said she was allowed to change inside the girls’ locker room, but only behind a curtain. The student, who has not been publicly identified, has said she would probably use that curtain to change. But she and the federal government have insisted that she be allowed to make that decision voluntarily, and not because of requirements by the district.

“What our client wants is not hard to understand: She wants to be accepted for who she is and to be treated with dignity and respect — like any other student,” said John Knight, the director of the L.G.B.T. and H.I.V. Project of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, who is representing the student. “The district’s insistence on separating my client from other students is blatant discrimination. Rather than approaching this issue with sensitivity and dignity, the district has attempted to justify its conduct by challenging my client’s identity as a girl.”

The Obama administration and the ACLU are saying that the rights of this one transgender student to express "her" identity as a female trumps the rights of privacy of the hundreds of other female students. That may strike you as jaw-droppingly moronic, but we're on a sexual slippery slope in this country and there's no place on the slope where we can arrest the slide and say this is enough.

Once we grant the premise that no form of sexual expression or identity is any better or worse than any other we have to accept the conclusion that your daughters and sisters should feel no awkwardness showering with someone who looks for all the world as if he was your son or brother.

In any case, I'd like to propose a solution that should satisfy everyone but won't. Have the student in question change and shower behind a curtain in the boys' locker room. That seems like a fair compromise, but it would doubtless be seen as an infringement on the transgendered student's "rights." Yet when rights must be balanced it seems to me that the rights of hundreds of female students to their privacy should outweigh the rights of one transgender student to his/hers.

But this is all common sense, and the left long ago passed the point where common sense has anything much to do with how they handle matters when they're in charge, so I'm not optimistic that the Obama administration will show concern for the interests and rights of those hundreds of other female students.

Income Inequality

An article at CNS News offers some dismal statistics about the state of education in America's cities. In Detroit for example,

Ninety six percent of eighth graders are not proficient in mathematics and 93 percent are not proficient in reading. Only 4 percent of Detroit public school eighth graders are proficient or better in math and only 7 percent in reading.

Why is this? Is it because not enough money is being spent on education? Evidently not:

This is despite the fact that in the 2011-2012 school year—the latest for which the Department of Education has reported the financial data—the Detroit public schools had “total expenditures” of $18,361 per student and “current expenditures” of $13,330 per student.

According to data published by the Detroit Public Schools, the school district’s operating expenses in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2014 amounted to approximately $14,743 per student.

The depressing statistics are only marginally better nationwide, but they're especially bad in urban districts. Less than fifty percent of eighth grade students in twenty one major cities are proficient in reading:

In reading, the Cleveland public schools were next to last among the large urban school districts with only 11 percent scoring proficient or better. Baltimore and Fresno were tied for third worst with only 13 percent scoring proficient or better; and Philadelphia ranked fifth worst with only 16 percent scoring proficient or better.

The Cleveland public schools also ranked next to last in math, with only 9 percent of eight graders scoring proficient or better. Baltimore and Fresno were also tied for third worst in math, with only 12 percent scoring proficient or better; and Los Angeles ranked fifth worst with 15 percent scoring proficient or better in math.

When so few young people are able to do basic math and read well those youngsters face a very bleak future. They're poorly prepared to enter a workforce that requires basic intellectual skills in order to succeed economically. It's simply common-sense that those with reading and math competency are going to command higher incomes than those whose education suits them for little more than manual labor, and that the gap between the educated and the uneducated is going to grow wider as society becomes less dependent upon manual labor and more dependent upon technical skill. This education gap is the proximal cause of the income gap that distresses so many observers.

But why are so many of these kids failing? Are their schools terrible? Are their families and neighborhoods chaotic? Are they unmotivated and uneducable? Or is it some combination of these? Whatever the case, when Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton complain about income inequality they should be asked why their party, which runs every one of these cities, and has controlled them for fifty years, hasn't been able to fix the problem, and why we should think that electing them would make things any better.

Review of Bridging the Abyss

There's a very favorable review of my new novel Bridging the Abyss at Booknotes, a column written by the owner of Hearts and Minds Bookstore, Byron Borger. I encourage you to read it by going here and scrolling down to the picture of my previous book In the Absence of God. Here's an excerpt from Byron's review:

Bridging the Abyss ... is really full of action and pathos and page-turning thrills which makes for a better read. Of course it keeps coming back to this central insistence -- if modern people dispense with God and believe life can go on as before, valuing goodness and beauty and meaning and human dignity - they are living a conceit. There is no sturdy reason or basis for acting as if this or that is truer or better. Dostoevsky was right. We are staring at a huge abyss if we are only honest enough to admit it. The title comes from a realization that one of the characters in the story voices in his own struggles with this very question. The cover photo aptly shows an abyss.

Unless, unless. Unless there is an older truth - deeper magic, in Lewis terms - that tells us that there is indeed more to life than meets the eye. There is more. There is a God and God has spoken and we can deduce right and wrong, or at least notions of the good, the true, the beautiful. There is an order to the givenness. The abyss is real, but it can be bridged, and the gospel of Christ is the most reliable answer to our existential quandary.

The dialogues between the main characters in this new story are realistic enough, but they do circle back to these tough religious questions. In Bridging the Abyss, though, these are not college teachers in the faculty lounge. These lively characters in Bridging include frantic, grief-stricken Baltimore parents whose daughter has suddenly disappeared - we learn that she has been abducted by a deadly serious cell of sexual traffickers and she is most likely bound for a perverse Saudi sheikh. Their questions are more urgent then most of us can imagine.

Unknown to the parents, or their caring inner-city pastor, whose own story is wonderfully told, there is an under-the-radar group of former Navy SEALs doing a vigilante-style rescue of the captured and trafficked children. (Does the FBI know about these guys? Are they complicit, at odds, in some sort of "look the other way" cooperation? Who are the good guys and who is to be trusted? Why are they doing this undercover work?)

If you choose to purchase a copy of Bridging - and of course I hope you do - I hope also that you'll order it from Hearts and Minds. H&M is an independent mom and pop bookshop, probably among the best such bookstores on the east coast, and the folks there are top-notch in terms of their knowledge of books and the service they provide their customers.

Unfortunately, it's not easy carving out market share when you're competing with big box stores like Borders and online giants like Amazon. Byron and his wife Beth, have worked very hard over the last thirty or so years to build a wonderful bookstore and an outstanding reputation, and they deserve the support of all of us who buy, read, and love books.

Libet's Experiment

As a followup to last Monday's (10/26) post on the free will/ determinism question here's a post from the archives on the work of Benjamin Libet who conducted some experiments that seemed at first glance to support, even prove, that determinism is true:

Students of psychology, philosophy and other disciplines which touch upon the operations of the mind and the question of free will have probably heard mention of the experiments of Benjamin Libet, a University of California at San Francisco neurobiologist who conducted some remarkable research into the brain and human consciousness in the last decades of the 20th century.

One of Libet's most famous discoveries was that the brain "decides" on a particular choice milliseconds before we ourselves are conscious of deciding. The brain creates an electrochemical "Readiness Potential" (RP) that precedes by milliseconds the conscious decision to do something. This has been seized upon by materialists who use it as proof that our decisions are not really chosen by us but are rather the unconscious product of our brain's neurochemistry. The decision is made before we're even aware of what's going on, they claim, and this fact undermines the notion that we have free will as this video explains:

Michael Egnor, writing at ENV, points out, however, that so far from supporting determinism, Libet himself believed in free will, his research supported that belief, and, what's more, his research also reinforced, in Libet's own words, classical religious views of sin.

Libet discovered that the decision to do X is indeed pre-conscious, but he also found that the decision to do X can be consciously vetoed by us and that no RP precedes that veto. In other words, the decision of the brain to act in a particular way is determined by unconscious factors, but we retain the ability to consciously choose not to follow through with that decision. Our freedom lies in our ability to refuse any or all of the choices our brain presents to us.

Egnor's article is a fascinating piece if you're interested in the question of free will and Libet's contribution to our understanding of it.

Debate Fireworks

When Senator Marco Rubio said in last night's debate that the mainstream media was in fact a Democratic Party Super Pac he was expressing an opinion that was amply reinforced by the panel of CNBC moderators who subjected the GOP candidates to what was surely the most tendentious, irresponsibly partisan line of questioning in the history of presidential debates.

The Federalist staff summarizes the CNBC team's blatant and unprofessional bias this way:

The debate was barely 30 minutes in, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) stole the show when he went directly after CNBC’s Republican primary debate moderators, who had spent a good portion of the debate using their questions as an excuse to attack the Republican candidates on stage.

Cruz specifically called out CNBC moderators John Harwood, Becky Quick, and Carl Quintanilla for repeatedly asking loaded, partisan questions of the Republican candidates. Harwood’s first question to Donald Trump was whether Trump felt like a comic book villain. Becky Quick asked Carly Fiorina why she was so bad at her job. Carl Quintanilla asked Marco Rubio why he hadn’t resigned from the Senate already.

Harwood followed up his idiotic and universally panned Trump question by inviting liberal Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio), who’s polling at 1 percent in multiple polls, to criticize every candidate to his right. When he finally got the opportunity to answer a question, Cruz went straight at the moderators, pointing out that they were proving with their slanted questions why American trust in media is at record lows.

Here's Cruz:

and Rubio:

Too many contemporary journalists see themselves as extensions of the candidates they support and see their jobs as vehicles for promoting those candidates and destroying the opposition. They sacrifice professional objectivity to political partisanship and diminish themselves in the process.

Here's a montage of the candidates' responses to some of the more egregious questions they were asked:

What Was He Supposed to Do?

I've watched the video of a police officer tossing a disruptive high school student to the floor that has a lot of people outraged, and I have to say I don't think the police officer had many alternatives. I also suggest that unless critics can state specifically what plausible tactic the officer should have employed they don't have much ground for condemning him for what he did do.

The facts, according to David French at NRO, are apparently these:

According to cell-phone video – apparently shot by students at Columbia, S.C.’s Spring Valley High School – a “student resource officer,” Senior Deputy Ben Fields, approaches an unidentified female student. After she refuses to move from her desk, he grabs her, yanks the desk over, and appears to drag, then throw her to the front of the classroom, where he apparently places her in handcuffs.

The relevant portion of the video is below: According to local reporting, Fields was called to the classroom after the student had refused to leave the room, first at the request of the teacher and then at the request of an administrator. A longer video shows Fields asking the student if she’ll leave, she refuses, he reaches down and says, “I’m going to get you up,” she appears to resist, [it has subsequently come to light that the girl punched the officer] then the officer escalates his use of force.

No one was injured in the fracas, but the media immediately identified it as an example of a white police officer brutalizing a black youth. Vox breathlessly said the video “shows what happens when you put cops in schools” and called it an example of the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Within a day, local officials had requested an FBI and Department of Justice investigation, and the media feeding frenzy was fully underway.

So, a student is disrupting the classroom and refuses the demand of the teacher, a principal, and a policeman to leave. Should they all turn around and just walk out? Unless students should be allowed to dictate what happens in the classroom and to ignore those in authority this student has to be made to leave, and if she refuses to go peacefully then the proper personnel are obligated to forcibly remove her.

The use of force, however, is rarely pretty. It can be very disturbing to those who have lived their lives insulated from those upon whom its exercise is sometimes necessary. When the resort to force is required the force applied should be adequate to accomplish what it's intended to accomplish.

The officer in the video was forceful, his actions may appear excessive, but the student was not hurt, so it's odd to call this a "brutal assault," as some have. Perhaps the officer could have dragged the girl, chair and all, out of the room, but at some point he would have had to remove her from the chair, and at that point he would've had to do pretty much what he did. Maybe he should have sat down beside her and tried to talk her into leaving peacefully, but presumably the school officials had already tried that. The police are usually only called in when all else has already failed.

Maybe the worst part of this episode is the attempt by some to turn it into another racial issue because the student was black and the officer was white. The FBI is getting involved to investigate potential "civil rights violations," but that seems ludicrous. It amounts to saying that only black cops can use force against blacks and only white cops can use force against whites.

When a teacher, a principal, or a police officer tells a student to leave the room, the student should leave the room. She doesn't get to refuse because of her race or gender. If, nevertheless, she does refuse then she, not they, have made the use of force necessary.

You might disagree, and I might be incorrect in my assessment of this situation. I'm certainly not confident that I'm right about it, but please don't tell me I'm wrong unless you can point to a realistic, less ugly option that the officer could have employed to make the girl comply. UPDATE: Evidently, the officer's superiors do disagree with me. The officer's been fired on what seems to be a bit of a technicality. The sheriff said that the officer did not follow proper procedures and shouldn't have thrown the student, but he never said what the officer should have done. I wonder if the firing wasn't just an attempt by the police department to forestall a lot of bad publicity and legal action.

Is Evolution Random?

One argument that Intelligent Design theorists make against naturalistic versions of evolution is that undirected, random processes cannot produce the amount of information we find in every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies. Naturalists respond, often, by arguing that evolution is not random, that natural selection is essentially directed toward producing fitness.

Biologist Ann Gauger finds this reply wanting because it reduces evolution to the process of natural selection, but, as she argues in a piece at Evolution News and Views, there is more to evolution than just natural selection:

Evolutionists often challenge us for referring to Darwinian evolution as "random." They point to the fact that natural selection, the force that supposedly drives the train, always selects more "fit" organisms, and so is not random. That is only part of the story, though, and to understand why evolution can indeed be called random, the rest needs to be told.

Evolution can be considered to be composed of four parts. The first part, the grist for the mill, is the process by which mutations are generated. Generally this is thought to be a random process, with some qualifications. Single base changes occur more or less randomly, but there is some skewing as to which bases are substituted for which. Other kinds of mutations, like deletions or rearrangements or recombinations (where DNA is exchanged between chromosomes), often occur in hotspots, but not always. The net effect is that mutations occur without regard for what the organism requires, but higgledy-piggledy. In that sense mutation is random.

The next part, random drift, is like a roll of the dice that decides which changes are preserved and which are lost. As the name implies, this process is also random, the result of accidental events, and without regard for the benefit of the organism. Most mutations get lost in the mix, especially when newly emerging, just because their host organisms fail to reproduce, or die from causes unrelated to genetics. It can also happen that new mutations are combined with other mutations that are harmful, and so get eliminated.

The random effects of drift are large enough to overwhelm natural selection in organisms with small breeding populations, less than a million, say. New mutations are not born fast enough to escape loss due to drift. There is a fractional threshold in the population that must be crossed before a new mutation can become "fixed," that is, universally present in every individual. A new mutation generally is lost to drift before that population threshold is crossed.

The last two aspects of evolution are natural selection, which Gauger acknowledges is not random, and environmental change, which is. Thus, she concludes:

The sum of all these factors is what is responsible for evolution, or change over time. Mutation, drift, selection, and environmental change all play a role. Three out of these four forces are random, without regard for the needs of the organism. Even selection can be random in its direction, depending on the environment.

So tell me. Is evolution random? Most of the processes at work definitely are. Certainly evolution won't make steady progress in one direction without some other factor at work. What that factor might be remains to be seen. I personally do not think a material explanation will be found, because any process to guide evolution in a purposeful way will require a purposeful designer to create it

. The challenge for the proponent of naturalistic evolution, as opposed to proponents of some form of guided, or telic, evolution, is to explain how, against all odds, something as complex and specific as protein synthesis or DNA replication could have ever arisen purely by chance in the earliest cells. Any explanation that just assumes that it could have is ipso facto disqualified. There are no fairies waving magic wands allowed in scientific explanations.

Libertarianism, Determinism, and Compatibilism

In class discussions of free will and determinism, a number of students have asked if there isn't a middle way. One student even dug a post out of the archives that I did on such a via media back in 2008 (12/24/08). The post starts out by addressing the notion of a kind of compromise position between libertarian free will and determinism, usually referred to as "compatibilism," and ends up summarizing the discussions we've had in class on these different philosophical positions. Here it is:

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct rebuttal of compatibilism, i.e. the view that our choices are fully determined and yet at the same time free. As Arrington points out, this certainly sounds like a contradiction.

The compatibilist defines freedom, however, as the lack of coercion, so as long as nothing or no one is compelling your behavior it's completely free even though at the moment you make your decision there's in fact only one possible choice you could make. Your choice is determined by the influence of your past experiences, your environment and your genetic make-up. The feeling you have that you could have chosen something other than what you did choose is simply an illusion, a trick played on us by our brains.

Compatibilism, however, doesn't solve the controversy between determinism and libertarianism (the belief we have free-will). It simply uses a philosophical sleight-of-hand to define it away. As long as it is the case that at any given moment there's just one possible future then our choices are determined by factors beyond our control, and if they're determined it's very difficult to see how we could be responsible for them. Whether we are being compelled by external forces to make a particular choice or not, we are still being compelled by internal factors that make our choice inevitable.

The temptation for the materialist (i.e. one who allows no non-material entities in his ontology) is to simply accept determinism, but not only does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

On the other hand, it's also difficult to pin down exactly what a free choice is. It can't be a choice that's completely uncaused because then it wouldn't be a consequence of our character and in what sense would we be responsible for it? But if the choice is a product of our character, and our character is the result of our past experiences, environment, and our genetic make-up, then ultimately our choice is determined by factors over which we have no control and we're back to determinism.

It seems to me that if materialism is true and all we are is a material, physical being, and all of our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain, then determinism must be true as well, and moral responsibility and human dignity are illusions, and no punishment or reward could ever be justified on grounds of desert.

This all seems completely counter-intuitive so most people hold on to libertarianism even if they can't explain what a free choice actually is. However, they can only hold on to a belief in free will if they give up their belief materialism. Only if we have a non-physical, immaterial mind that somehow functions in human volition can there be free will and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

Shrugging at Lies

One of the most distressing things about the Benghazi hearings this past week was the almost complete indifference in the liberal media to the fact that Hillary Clinton was shown to have lied to the nation about what happened at Benghazi in Libya. The attack on our embassy that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, was a coordinated terrorist attack. Mrs. Clinton has maintained ever since that it was a spontaneous riot precipitated by an obscure video that painted an unflattering picture of Islam and the Prophet. This was false and the hearings have shown that she knew it was false at the time.

Jonah Goldberg at National Review summarizes:

Yesterday’s hearings confirmed that Hillary Clinton deliberately and knowingly lied when she blamed it [the attack] all on that video. This really isn’t a debatable point now. We can argue about why she lied and we can debate whether that lie matters. But that she lied is incontrovertible.

First of all, we know that the video story wasn’t, in fact, true.

Second, we know that the Obama administration knew it wasn’t true.

Third, we know that Hillary knew it wasn’t true. (You could claim that she was lying to the Egyptian prime minister when she said, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.” But it seems less likely that she would have lied to her own daughter on the night of the attack.)

After reading many of Clinton’s e-mails -- never mind her bizarre claim in the Democratic debate that the Libyan intervention was a success story -- it seems pretty clear that one of her motivations was to shift blame away from what she -- and Sid Blumenthal -- had wrought. They had schemed for a long time to find a way to spin the Libyan adventure as her triumph in anticipation of a presidential run. The Benghazi debacle threatened to shed light on the underlying policy failure -- not just of failing to provide security, but of the whole intervention. Better to blame the video.

In the wake of the hearings I heard commenter after commenter enthusing about how Mrs. Clinton was poised and graceful, how the Republicans failed to goad her into "screech mode," how she now has a clear path to the presidential nomination, assuming the FBI uncovers no wrongdoing, or, if they do, assuming the Justice Department chooses not to indict Democratic wrong-doing.

Scarcely anyone seemed repelled by the acknowledgement that she had lied to the nation in order to save President Obama's bacon (Recall that he had assured us that al Qaeda was on the run. It wouldn't do to admit that al Qaeda was actually running through our embassy killing our diplomats) and to deflect questions about her own failure as Secretary of State (No one, for example, has been held accountable for not granting Ambassador Stevens' many requests for more security).

We bemoan the fact that politicians are corrupt, yet as long as they're on our side, so far from punishing them for their corruption, we applaud it.

Perhaps the left is willing to shrug at Mrs. Clinton's lies because they believe that everyone does it. The idea of integrity and character is foreign to so many of us that confirmation that the woman who could be the next president of the United States has lied persistently makes as little impression on them as a bb shot at the side of a battleship.

Now if the liar were a Republican, well, that would be different. Democrat lies are peccadilloes, at worst. Republican lies are evil at best.

The moral fiber of our nation has deteriorated to the point where it's hard to believe anything anyone tells us, and a big part of the reason is that too many of us don't see anything wrong with lying. Indeed, too many of us don't see much wrong with almost anything short of murder, child abuse, and opposition to gay marriage.

Evolution and Ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

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

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

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

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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.

Human Flourishing

Philosopher Sam Harris is often identified as a "New Atheist," one of a number of prominent thinkers who have undertaken to discredit religion in all its manifestations. Harris gave a TED Talk in 2010 which he based on his book The Moral Landscape and in which he sought to rebut the common view that science, being the study of that which can be observed and measured, really has nothing to say about the aesthetic life - the realm of values, including moral values. In his TED Talk Harris says this:

So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

In other words, Harris claims that right and wrong are about what promotes the flourishing of human beings and that science can speak to this question. There are, however, at least three things wrong with using human flourishing as a criterion for ethics:

1. On what grounds do we privilege human beings over other animals? What works against human flourishing (e.g. mass slaughters) might be a boon to the flourishing of animals, particularly carrion-eaters. On atheism, then, what grounds are there for the specieist promotion of human flourishing over that of the flourishing of other animals in general and other mammals in particular?

2. Whose idea of flourishing do we promote? What promotes human flourishing in the mind of a member of ISIS who thinks the human race would be better off if everyone were forcibly converted to Islam or killed might be distinctly immoral to say, Sam Harris. Whose conception of human flourishing should we privilege and how do we decide that?

3. On what grounds does an atheist conclude that I should be concerned with the flourishing of others as opposed to simply my own flourishing? If I can flourish at the expense of others why would that be wrong? Why is it wrong for me to flourish by exploiting the earth's resources and letting future generations yet unborn to fend for themselves?

Perhaps Harris can answer these questions, but I have serious doubts. Atheism simply does not supply the philosophical resources necessary to support a belief in objective moral obligation. If atheism is true morality devolves to subjectivism, i.e. the view that what's right is whatever I feel is right or whatever I feel I should do, and subjectivism offers no rational justification for stopping short of a "might-makes-right" view of ethics.

On atheism, whoever has the power to make the rules gets to make them, whatever they are, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Bernie Sanders: Moralist

As Democrat voters grow increasingly wary of, and disenchanted with, Hillary Clinton and come to view her as representative of all that's wrong with politics and politicians, Bernie Sanders looks better and better by comparison. Whatever one thinks of Sanders' socialism, he certainly seems like an honest man, and indeed he likes to couch his policy proposals in moral rhetoric, describing them as "the moral thing to do."

It may seem naive in this Machiavellian age, but I agree that policy should be first and foremost moral. Nevertheless, my question for Sanders is what does he ground his moral judgments in? He says, for example, that income inequality is immoral, but why is it immoral? Why is it wrong for some people to have more than others? What makes that wrong? Perhaps the answer is that it's not fair, but then the question is why is unfairness wrong?

Perhaps someone might reply that I wouldn't want to be treated unfairly and therefore shouldn't treat others unfairly, but the conclusion in that reply just doesn't follow. It's true that I wouldn't want to be treated unfairly, but why's that a reason that I shouldn't treat others that way, especially if I can get away with it? Where does this notion come from that we should treat others the way we want to be treated? Why is it wrong to treat others however we wish?

Unless, Sanders is a theist (I know nothing of his views on the matter) all his talk about morality is literal nonsense. It's empty rhetoric. Unless moral judgments are grounded in the will of a transcendent, personal, and perfectly good Creator who has the power to hold people accountable for what they do, there simply is no such thing as moral right and wrong. How could there be?

We may have strong intuitions that there are such things, but those intuitions are simply illusions which evolved eons ago as a result of impersonal forces shaping us for life in the stone age. They certainly have no power to impose obligations or duties upon us. The claims that lying, income inequality, or exploiting others or the environment are all wrong is really to claim nothing more than that we don't like these things, but of course our personal likes and dislikes are hardly the standard of right and wrong.

The next time you hear Senator Sanders use a word like "immoral" ask yourself what, in our secular age, he could possibly mean by the term if he's not implying that the behavior he's talking about violates the will of God. If he's not implying that, if he, in fact, is a non-theist, then all he's doing is venting his own subjective feelings and there's no reason anyone should be duty-bound by his feelings.