Premoderns and Postmoderns Pt. II

I'd like to continue our look at the First Things essay (Christians and Postmoderns) by Joseph Bottum that I began yesterday.

Bottum writes that:

[T]he massive scientific advance of modernity reveals how easy it is to discover facts, and modernity's collapse reveals how hard it is to hold knowledge. We have an apparatus for discovery unrivaled by the ages, yet every new fact means less than the previously discovered one, for we lack what turns facts to knowledge: the information of what the facts are for.

Precisely so. Modernity offers us no satisfying interpretive framework for assigning meaning to the facts discovered by science. It attempts to supply the need for such a framework by interpreting everything in terms of evolutionary development, but the view that each of us is just a meaningless cipher in the grand flow of time and evolution fails somehow to quench our deepest longings. According to the modern worldview there really is no purpose for the existence of anything. The facts discovered by science, as important as they may be for the furtherance of our technology, don't really have any metaphysical significance. Like everything else, they're just there.

Bottum continues:

And so "we must learn to live after truth," as a group of European academics wrote in After Truth: A Postmodern Manifesto. "Nothing is certain, not even this . . . The modern age opened with the destruction of God and religion. It is ending with the threatened destruction of all coherent thought." Nietzsche may have been the first to see this clearly .... But, even in the fundamental thinkers of high modernity, hints can be found that knowledge requires God: Descartes uses God in the Meditations in order to escape from the interiority where the cogito has stranded him; Kant uses God as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to hold on to the possibility of morality.

What [theistic] believers have in common with postmoderns is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge. To be a believer, however, is to be subject to an attack that postmoderns, holding truthlessness to themselves like a lover, never have to face. The history of modernity in the West is in many ways nothing more than the effort to destroy medieval faith. It is a three-hundred-year attempt to demolish medieval (especially Catholic) claims to authority, and to substitute a structure of science and ethics based solely on human rationality.

But with the failure to discover any such rational structure - seen by the postmoderns - the only portion of the modern project still available to a modern is the destruction of faith. It should not surprise us that, in very recent times, attacks on what little is left of medieval belief have become more outrageous: resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic broadsides, vicious mockery of evangelical preaching, desecrations of the Host in Catholic masses. For modern men and women, nothing else remains of the high moral project of modernity: these attacks are the only good thing left to do. The attackers are convinced of the morality of their attack not by the certainty of their aims - who's to say what's right or wrong? - but by opposition from believers.

I take Bottum to be saying here that modernity, in its death throes, wishes only to finish the business of killing off God, or at least belief in God. Modernity has nothing else to offer. It cannot give answers to any of life's most gripping existential questions. Nowhere in the writings of the anti-theists at large today do we find an answer to any of the following: Why is the universe here? How did life come about? Why is the universe so magnificently fine-tuned for life? Where did human consciousness come from? Why do we feel joy when we encounter beauty? How can we prove that our reason is reliable without using reason to prove it? How can we account for our conviction that we have free will? What obligates us to care about others? Why do we feel guilt? Who do I refer to when I refer to myself? What gives human beings worth, dignity, and rights? If death is the end justice is unattainable, so why do we yearn for it? Why do we need meaning and purpose? What is our purpose?

Ask the Richard Dawkins of the world those questions and all you'll get in reply is a shrug of the shoulders or a recitation of the alleged historical crimes of the Church. They dodge the question because they have no answer. This is a bit ironic: Neither modern nor postmodern naturalism has an answer to the most profound questions we can ask. The only possible answer lies in the God of the "premodern," and this is the one solution to man's existential emptiness that the modern and postmodern naturalist simply cannot abide.

Premoderns and Postmoderns Pt. I

Having just this week finished talking about the philosophical distinctions between premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews in my classes I thought it might be useful to rerun some posts on the subject from a couple of years ago. This one is the first in a three-part series:

There are in the West three basic ways to look at the world, three worldviews which serve as lenses through which we interpret the experiences of our lives. Those three worldviews are essentially distinguished by their view of God, truth, and the era in which they were dominant among the cultural elite. We may, with some license, label these the premodern, modern, and postmodern. The premodern, lasting from ancient times until the Enlightenment (17th century), was essentially Christian.

The modern, which lasted until roughly WWII, was essentially naturalistic and secular, and the postmodern, which has been with us now for a couple of generations, is hostile to the Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and objective truth.

I recently came across a wonderful treatment of the tension between these three "metanarratives" in an essay written by medieval scholar Joseph Bottum for First Things back in 1994. FT reprinted his article in an anniversary issue, and I thought it would be useful to touch on some of the highlights.

Bear in mind that although the terms premodern, modern and postmodern refer to historical eras there are people who exemplify the qualities of each of these in every era, including our own. Thus though we live in a postmodern age due to the dominance of postmodern assumptions among the shapers of contemporary thought, especially in the academy, there are lots of premoderns and moderns around. Indeed, outside our universities I suspect most people are either premodern or modern in their outlook.

About a quarter of the way into his essay Bottum, writing on behalf of the Christian worldview, says this:

We cannot revert to the premodern, we cannot return to the age of faith, for we were all of us raised as moderns.

And yet, though we cannot revert, we nonetheless have resources that may help us to advance beyond these late times. The modern project that attacked the Middle Ages has itself been under attack for some time. For some time, hyper-modern writers have brought to bear against their modern past the same sort of scarifying analysis that earlier modern writers brought against the premodern past. These later writers, supposing the modern destruction of God to be complete, have turned their postmodern attacks upon the modern project of Enlightenment rationality.

The postmodern project is, as Francois Lyotard put it, a suspicion of all metanarratives based on reason. It rejects the Enlightenment confidence that human reason can lead us to truth about the world, particularly truth about the important matters of meaning, religion and morality. Indeed, postmodern thinkers are skeptical of any claims to a "truth" beyond simple empirical facts.

Bottum continues:

In some sense, of course, these words premodern, modern, and postmodern are too slippery to mean much. Taken to refer to the history of ideas, they seem to name the periods before, during, and after the Enlightenment, but taken to refer to the history of events, they seem to name the period from creation to the rise of science, the period from the rise of science until World War II, and the period since the war.

It is tempting to define the categories philosophically, rather than historically, around the recognition that knowledge depends upon the existence of God. But the better modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes and Kant, as opposed to, say, Voltaire) recognize that dependence in some way or another.

Perhaps, though definitions based on intent are always weak, the best definition nonetheless involves intent: it is premodern to seek beyond rational knowledge for God; it is modern to desire to hold knowledge in the structures of human rationality (with or without God); it is postmodern to see the impossibility of such knowledge.

In other words, premoderns believe we can have knowledge of God through direct experience apart from reason. As Pascal put it, "The heart has reasons that reason can never know." Moderns believe that knowledge can only come through the exercise of our reason. Postmoderns hold that moderns are deluding themselves. None of us can separate our reason from our biases, prejudices, experiences and so on, all of which shape our perspective and color the lenses through which we view the world. For the postmodern there is no such thing as objective reason or truth.

Bottum again:

The premoderns said that without God, there would be no knowledge, and the postmoderns say we have no God and have no knowledge. The premoderns said that without the purposefulness of final causation, all things would be equally valueless, and the postmoderns say there is no purpose and no value. The premoderns said that without an identity of reality and the Good, there would be no right and wrong, and the postmoderns say there is neither Good nor right and wrong.

Though they may disagree on whether God exists, premoderns and postmoderns share the major premise that knowing requires His existence. Only for a brief period in the history of the West-the period of modern times-did anyone seriously suppose that human beings could hold knowledge without God.

Here is an interesting insight. Christians hold in common with modern atheistic naturalists that there is objective truth, that there is meaning to life, and that there is moral right and wrong. At the same time they hold in common with postmodern atheists (not all postmoderns are atheists, it should be stressed) that none of those beliefs can be sustained unless there is a God. Does this, as Bottum alleges, put Christians closer to postmoderns than to moderns?

More tomorrow.

A Couple of Thoughts on the SOTU

Here are a couple of thoughts I had watching President Trump's State of the Union speech Tuesday night:

President Trump announced his plan to give the Dreamers, immigrants that were brought to this country illegally as children, as well as other illegal immigrants amnesty and a path to citizenship - not just legal residency status but a path to full citizenship - in exchange for the border wall, an end to chain migration, and an end to the visa lottery system. I suspect that millions of Hispanics consider this an offer they'd be foolish to refuse, but it maneuvers the Democrats into a very awkward position vis a vis a significant segment of their base.

The Democrats' predicament is this: If they support his DACA proposal to give 1.8 million Dreamers and other illegal aliens a path to citizenship Mr. Trump will almost certainly get the credit for it, and many grateful Hispanics may see him as their political "savior", rewarding him with their allegiance in future elections.

If, though, the Democrats oppose the president on DACA, and their obstruction causes these immigrants to lose their temporary legal status, Hispanics will see the Democrats as having stood in the schoolhouse door, so to speak, preventing those Dreamers from eventually becoming citizens. This could potentially result in the alienation of a sizable fraction of Hispanic voters who had heretofore been a reliably loyal Democratic voting bloc.

The Democrats thus seem to find themselves politically between a rock and a hard place. They often accuse President Trump of being an idiot, but he has certainly outfoxed them on this one. It's no wonder they looked so grumpy during the SOTU.

On another issue, the president has also received sharp criticism for his scolding of certain FBI officials who have allegedly abused their power in an attempt to promote a personal political agenda, i.e. securing the election of Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump should be ashamed, the critics say, for demeaning a great and venerable institution like the FBI.

That this chastisement is coming from liberal progressives who, going back as far as the Bureau's surveillance of Martin Luther King in the 1960s, have scarcely ever had anything kind to say about the FBI, is at the very least peculiar. Suddenly now they're very concerned that the Bureau's reputation is being sullied?

The argument that the FBI should be beyond criticism and that taking it to task will only cause the public to lose confidence in it, is just silly. Consider an analogy: The Catholic church is comprised of many good and virtuous priests who do much good work among the poor and disadvantaged around the world.

Does this fact exempt the church from criticism when some priests abuse their station by abusing young boys and other prelates cover up for them? Should we refrain from insisting that the church purge itself of the miscreants just because it's a great and venerable institution in the world and that to expose clerical abuses will only precipitate a loss of confidence in it?

Of course not. Neither should we exempt the FBI from criticism if it's merited, and besides, the left, whose solicitousness of the FBI's reputation is very touching, will be eager to excoriate it as soon as it suits their political purposes to do so.

Various Views

Yesterday's post addressed the topic of what kind of theory intelligent design is and whether it's guilty of the "god of the gaps" fallacy. Those who don't closely follow the problem of the origin of life and related matters are often confused by the welter of conflicting views on the subject so I thought it might be helpful to offer thumbnail sketches of the major options in this very perplexing and very important debate.

Darwinian Evolution (DE): The Darwinian version of evolution is based upon a naturalistic worldview. It holds that all of life arose through natural processes like natural selection, genetic mutation, and genetic drift acting in accord with the laws of nature and that there was no non-natural intervention or activity of any kind involved. This view doesn't necessarily rule out God's existence but it does leave Him with very little to do and thus quite irrelevant.

Special Creation (SC): The view that God created the major taxa (classes and/or phyla) of living things de novo. On young earth special creation God accomplished this in six days approximately ten thousand years ago. On the old earth creationist view His creative activity was spread out over billions of years. SC is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the physical evidence of life with the Genesis account of the Bible.

Theistic Evolution (TE): This is similar to Darwinian evolution except that on TE God initially created the laws of nature (and perhaps initiated the Big Bang) that led to the development of living things. Some versions of TE hold that God guided the evolutionary process while others hold that once God created the world He left the evolutionary process to unfold on its own. Both versions agree that belief in God's existence and creative activity is a matter of faith, that there's no evidence of God to be found in the natural world and that all apparent design can be explained in terms of the action of natural forces and processes.

Intelligent Design (ID): This view maintains, contrary to both DE and TE, that both living things and the finely-tuned physical world display the signs of having been engineered by an intelligent agent. Unlike SC, ID takes no official stance on how long ago this happened, or how it was done, or even who the intelligent agent was. It does not attempt to reconcile the empirical evidence with Genesis but rather to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Nor, as was argued in yesterday's post, does ID commit the "god of the gaps" fallacy but is instead an example of a common form of scientific reasoning called inference to the best explanation. Some ID theorists in their personal lives are special creationists, some are evolutionists (though not naturalistic evolutionists), and, surprisingly, there are even one or two who are atheists.

Although most proponents of ID are theists those who are atheists leave open the possibility that the intelligent agent who designed the universe and living things could be a denizen of some other world in the multiverse and not the God of traditional theism. The notion that our universe is a computer simulation designed by an intelligent being in some other universe is compatible with this view. Even so, in practice almost all atheists are Darwinian evolutionists and most theists fall somewhere among the other three options.

The debate is important because if it could be shown that Darwinian (or naturalistic) evolution is an unsatisfactory explanation of the appearance of information-rich biological systems or the fine-tuning of the cosmos it would seriously undermine naturalism and make it a much less tenable philosophical position, at least until some other naturalistic theory of origins could be found.

God of the Gaps

In debates over how best to account for the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of life's major taxa and the origin of consciousness one often hears the claim that those who are skeptical of the power of natural processes to account for these phenomena, and who maintain that an intelligent designer is a better explanation of their provenience, are guilty of the "god of the gaps" fallacy.

This fallacy occurs when someone argues that because natural causes can't explain a phenomenon P, that therefore P must be the result of supernatural causes. In other words, it's alleged that the guilty party is unnecessarily filling the gap in our knowledge with a supernatural entity, i.e. God.

People often accuse Intelligent Design (ID) theorists of committing this fallacy, but that's a mistake as philosopher Stephen Meyer explains in an article at PJ Media.

Meyer explained that "god of the gaps" arguments fail to convince because they are arguments from ignorance. Such arguments "occur when evidence against a proposition is offered as the sole grounds for accepting an alternative position."

For instance: Evolution cannot explain this part of life, ergo there must be a designer.

Intelligent design does not work like this, the author argued. "Proponents of intelligent design infer design because we know that intelligent agents can and do produce specified information-rich systems," Meyer wrote. "Indeed, we have positive, experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause sufficient to have produced the effect in question — and that cause is intelligence or mind."

In other words, ID does not commit the god of the gaps fallacy because ID is not based on what we don't know about information but rather upon what we do know. There's good reason for supposing that information-rich systems can be generated de novo by intelligent agents and cannot be produced by random processes and forces.

Put differently, we have no experience of blind, undirected processes producing complex information like computer programs or libraries full of books, so we're at a loss as to how to explain how such processes could have produced the even more complex information that runs a living cell.

We do, however, have daily experience of such information systems being produced by intelligent agents, therefore it's not fallacious to hypothesize that the very complex information contained on DNA sequences and the information which choreographs the functions that occur within the cell are themselves a result of intelligent agency.

Thus, so far from commiting the god of the gaps fallacy positing intelligent agency is an example of a perfectly ordinary process in science called inference to the best explanation.

Here's a two and a half minute video of Stephen Meyer explaining why ID is innocent of the fallacy of which it's often accused:

Why People Don't Trust Them

Here are two examples - out of the many which could be cited - of the sort of media bias that has caused a lot of folks today to distrust, and even in some cases to loathe, the news media:

1. Imagine for a moment that journalists had in their possession a photo of Donald Trump, before he was president, schmoozing with a man who was perhaps the most notorious racist, anti-semitic bigot in the U.S. Suppose this man had said things like:

• Jews are Satan
• Jews caused the Holocaust
• Black people deserve to die
• Black people are devils and are subhuman
• The Jews were behind 9/11
• Interracial marriage is evil
• Hitler was a very great man

Do you think there's any journalist in the country that would conceal that photo from the public? Not only would they publish it for all to see, they should publish it for all to see, don't you agree? And what would you think of Donald Trump were he seen in that pic smiling warmly in the bigot's company and having his picture taken with him?

Well, it happened. Except it wasn't Trump who was in the photo, it was Barack Obama, and the statements above weren't said about blacks they were said about whites by one of the most odious racists and anti-semites alive today, Louis Farrakhan. The photo has been around since 2005, but the people in whose possession it was sat on it until recently for fear that it would harm Mr. Obama's career.

Can you imagine a journalist withholding such a photo of Mr. Trump out of concern for his career?

Journalist Askia Muhammed said he took the photo but decided to suppress its publication in order to protect Obama’s presidential ambitions. Now that Obama’s political career is over, Muhammad is going public with the picture and publishing it in a new book called “The Autobiography of Charles 67X.”

The photo was first published last week by the Trice Edney News Wire....The veteran journalist told the news service that he “gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy” to protect Obama.

2. As readers are probably aware, our economy has been booming as a consequence of President Trump's dismantling of the stifling regulations placed on businesses by the Obama administration and also as a result of the tax reform bill passed last December.

Millions of people have received bonuses of $1000 to $2500 and millions more, indeed 95% of all workers, will see more money in their paychecks in 2018 as a result. Moreover, many businesses, like Apple and Disney, plan to reinvest billions in the economy which will create an explosion of new jobs.

But the Democrats are horrified that the Republicans will be seen as the benefactors of workers across the country and are desperately trying to minimize the perception that Trump's policies have been responsible for the burgeoning economy. Attempting to downplay the economic benefits average folks have been enjoying and will continue to enjoy they're making themselves sound foolish.

Nevertheless, rather than exposing the truth both about the policies and the absurd response to them, the media are essentially covering up the Democrats' risible remarks because they know they'll only discredit Democrats with the voters.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats predicted the tax bill would be a disaster for the working class — “Armageddon” is how Pelosi described it — only to see more than three million American workers receive bonuses and pay raises as a result of the GOP tax cuts. Additionally, 90 percent of workers are expected to see an increase in take-home pay in 2018. Pelosi, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, has consistently dismissed the bonuses that workers are receiving as “pathetic” and “crumbs.”

Democratic Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), similarly struggled to explain the bonuses when confronted about them at a town hall. Wasserman first claimed that she hadn’t “heard of any bonuses over $1,000,” even though tens of thousands of workers have received bigger bonuses than that. (Apple, for example, gave employees $2,500 bonuses.) After establishing that misleading premise, Wasserman Schultz then claimed that $1,000 doesn’t go “very far for anyone.”

But the establishment media have ignored the entire Democratic debacle. As of this article, the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN have combined for zero articles about Pelosi’s “crumbs” comments, even as she has doubled– and tripled-down on them.

As has been noted by numerous observers, had the Democrats produced such a boon to average Americans and the Republicans derided it as mere "crumbs", the media would be excoriating them and mocking them for their elitism, insensitivity and for being so out of touch with average Americans.

As it is, though, since it's Democrats who are out of touch and insensitive, the mainstream media has uttered hardly a peep. This disregard for professional ethics on the part of the media, and the resentments it engenders among consumers of news, is one of the main reasons why so many voters pulled the lever for Donald Trump in 2016.

What the Crusades Were Not

It's common to hear people cite the Crusades as a terrible debacle and a stain on the history of Christian Europe, and while there definitely were horrible atrocities committed by some undisciplined mobs, especially against the Jews in the Rhine valley of Germany, the history of the Crusades is much more complex than some history textbooks would have us believe. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Crusades, and the belief that they were unprovoked attacks against innocent Muslims who were minding their own business in the faraway Middle East is one of them.

Steve Weidenkopf had an article at Crisis Magazine a few years back titled Crash Course on the Crusades in which he lamented the historical distortions and fabrications about the Crusades in the popular culture. He began his essay with this lede:

The Crusades are one of the most misunderstood events in Western and Church history. The very word “crusades” conjures negative images in our modern world of bloodthirsty and greedy European nobles embarked on a conquest of peaceful Muslims. The Crusades are considered by many to be one of the “sins” the Christian Faith has committed against humanity and with the Inquisition are the go-to cudgels for bashing the Church.

While the mocking and generally nasty portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders on the big screen ranges from Monty Python farce to the cringe worthy big budget spectacles like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), it is the biased and bad scholarship such as Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones (of Monty Python acclaim) that does real damage. From academia to pop-culture, the message is reinforced and driven home with resounding force: the Crusades were bad and obviously so. The real story is of course far more complicated and far more interesting.

It is worth our time to be versed in the facts and especially to recall the tremendous faith, sacrifice, and courage that inspired the vast majority of the Crusaders to act in defense of Christendom.

Weidenkopf then sought to set the record straight by debunking the following five myths:

• The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression.
• The Crusades were about European greed for booty, plunder and the establishment of colonies.
• When Jerusalem was captured in 1099 the crusaders killed all the inhabitants – so many were killed that the blood flowed ankle deep through the city.
• The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be considered the first Holocaust.
• The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West.

None of these beliefs, despite being widely held, is true, or at least not the whole truth. I encourage readers to go to Weidenkopf's article and read what he says about each of them. As you might expect, the actual history is much more complex and far less damning of the Crusaders than it has been portrayed by those who wish to grind anti-Catholic axes.

For those looking for an excellent and very readable book on this topic I highly recommend God's Battalions by Rodney Stark.

The Spectre of Meaninglessness

Las Vegas police have declared that the motives of Stephen Paddock, the man who slaughtered 58 people and wounded hundreds of others at a country music festival in Las Vegas last October 1st, are still unknown. It is indeed strange, I suppose, that a wealthy man in his sixties would commit such a horrible crime.

I thought of Paddock and Devin Kelley, the man who killed twenty six people in a Texas church in November, and a number of other mass killers while reading Charles Taylor's highly acclaimed book, A Secular Age.

Taylor writes that the spectre of meaninglessness is haunting Western culture as a consequence of modernity's denial of transcendence. One result of that denial is that secular man is left with a view of human life "which is empty, cannot inspire commitment, offers nothing worthwhile, and cannot answer the craving for goals we can dedicate ourselves to."

This "flatness", the emptiness so many feel since the banishment of God from the public square, has been called the "malaise of modernity". Perhaps this malaise, the desire to rise above the ordinary humdrum of existence, the desire to break through the stifling ennui of daily life, the wish to give some meaning to a meaningless life by performing great feats, the yearning for significance in a universe that reminds all who think about it that we are just dust in the wind, maybe this is what impelled these men to commit their horrible crimes.

Paddock was said to be a man without convictions. He was indifferent to religion and politics. He seemed very much like Camus' antihero in The Stranger, a man named Meursault who murders someone for no particular reason. For Meursault the deed amounted to little more than something to do to rise above the tedium of an otherwise pointless and empty life.

Kelley, on the other hand, was an outspoken atheist. His life was devoid of any ultimate meaning because for him death is the end of existence and thus negates all proximal meanings in life. He was also, apparently, consumed with hatred for Christians.

Both men were nihilists in that neither believed that anything had any real meaning or value. Nothing really mattered for either man, certainly not the lives they took, nor even their own. They saw both their own lives and those of their victims as utterly worthless.

So perhaps in searching for a motive for these awful crimes we should bear in mind that in a life so flattened, so meaningless and empty, there's sometimes a deep yearning to do something significant, something memorable, to be recognized, and even, like Meursault in The Stranger, to revel in being execrated by the crowd.

Join all this together with the fact that in their world there's no ultimate accountability for anything they do and thus no real guilt of any kind, and we have all the ingredients necessary for a deed that shocks people who don't see the world the way these men did.

In a world without God nothing really matters. Living, in the words of the Smashing Pumpkins' song Jellybelly, "makes me sick, so sick I want to die". In the throes of such a sickness suicide makes sense, but why do it anonymously? Why not go out in a blaze of public horror while venting your hatreds and your frustrations on as many others as you can?

If that's the sort of psychology that lies behind what Paddock, Kelley, and numerous others have done in schools, churches and movie theaters across the country then we might well fear that in a culture whose fundamental premises inevitably spawn such twisted, dessicated souls, it's going to happen a lot more in the future.

Two Intellectual Virtues

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, abortion, gay marriage, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that it's reasonable to hold?

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions. It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among those participating in debates on the issues of our day.

Multiverse Metaphysics

Mention of the multiverse hypothesis came up in some of my classes this week in the course of a discussion of the difference between metaphysics and science, and I thought it might be helpful to run a post on the topic from a couple of years ago:

Physicist Adam Frank is impressed, as most scientists are, with the degree of fine-tuning scientists are finding in the cosmos. He writes:

As cosmologists poked around Big Bang theory on ever-finer levels of detail, it soon became clear that getting this universe, the one we happily inhabit, seemed to be more and more unlikely. In his article, Scharf gives us the famous example of carbon-12 and its special resonances. If this minor detail of nuclear physics were just a wee bit different, our existence would never be possible. It’s as if the structure of the carbon atom was fine-tuned to allow life.

But this issue of fine-tuning goes way beyond carbon nuclei. It's ubiquitous in cosmology.

Change almost anything associated with the fundamental laws of physics by one part in a zillion and you end up with a sterile universe where life could never have formed. Not only that, but make tiny changes in even the initial conditions of the Big Bang and you end up with a sterile universe. Cosmologically speaking, it’s like we won every lottery ever held. From that vantage point we are special — crazy special.

Indeed, the figure of one part in a zillion hardly begins to capture the incomprehensible precision with which these cosmic constants and forces are set, but lest one conclude that perhaps it's all purposefully engineered, Frank quickly waves the reader away from that unthinkable heresy:

Fine-tuning sticks in the craw of most physicists, and rightfully so. It’s that old Copernican principle again. What set the laws and the initial conditions for the universe to be “just so,” just so we could be here? It smells too much like intelligent design. The whole point of science has been to find natural, rational reasons for why the world looks like it does. “Because a miracle happened,” just doesn’t cut it.

This is a bit too flippant. Intelligent design doesn't say "a miracle happened" as though that were all that's needed to account for our world. ID says simply that natural processes are inadequate by themselves to explain what scientists are finding in their equations. Even so, it's ironic that every naturalistic theory of cosmogensis does say that the origin of the universe was miraculous if we define a miracle as an extraordinarily improbable event that does not conform to the known laws of physics.

In any case, how do scientists who wish to avoid the idea of purposeful design manage to do so? Well, they conjure a near infinite number of universes, the multiverse, of which ours is just one:

In response to the dilemma of fine-tuning, some cosmologists turned to the multiverse. Various theories cosmologists and physicists were already pursuing — ideas like inflation and string theory — seemed to point to multiple universes.

Actually, these theories merely allow for the existence of other universes, they don't require them, but be that as it may, the advantage of positing a multiplicity of different worlds is that the more different worlds you have the more likely even a very improbable world will become, just as the more times you deal a deck of cards the more likely it will be that you'll deal a royal flush. Frank, though, issues a caveat:

There is, however, a small problem. Well, maybe it’s not a small problem, because the problem is really a very big bet these cosmologists are taking. The multiverse is a wildly extreme extrapolation of what constitutes reality. Adding an almost infinite number of possible universes to your theory of reality is no small move.

Even more important, as of yet there is not one single, itty-bitty smackeral of evidence that even one other universe exists (emphasis mine)....

Finding evidence of a multiverse would, of course, represent one of the greatest triumphs of science in history. It is a very cool idea and is worth pursuing. In the meantime, however, we need to be mindful of the metaphysics it brings with it. For that reason, the heavy investment in the multiverse may be over-enthusiastic.

The multiverse meme seems to be everywhere these days, and one question to ask is how long can the idea be supported without data (emphasis mine). Recall that relativity was confirmed after just a few years. The first evidence for the expanding universe, as predicted by general relativity, also came just a few years after theorists proposed it. String theory [upon which the multiverse idea is based], in contrast, has been around for 30 years now, and has no physical evidence to support it.

I'm surprised Frank doesn't mention the irony in this. Scientists feel impelled to shun ID because, they aver, it's not scientific to posit intelligences for which there's no physical evidence (set aside the fact that the existence of a finely-tuned universe is itself pretty compelling evidence). Yet, in its stead they embrace a theory, the multiverse, for which, as Frank readily admits, there's no physical evidence and yet they think this is somehow more reasonable than embracing ID.

When you're determined to escape the conclusion that the universe is intentionally engineered, it seems, you'll embrace any logic and any theory, no matter how extraordinary, that permits you to maintain the pretense of having refuted the offending view.

The Wager

Imagine that you're a contestant on a game show and that the game consists of placing a sealed box in front of you and being told that the box contains either $1,000,000 or $1. There's a 50/50 chance of either. You have to guess which it is, and if you choose correctly you get to keep whatever it is that you guessed. Suppose further that refusing to guess at all is the same as guessing $1.

Those are the terms of the game. What would you do? Would you play? Which option would you choose?

Suppose you were told that the odds were not 50/50 but rather 100 to 1 that there was $1 in the box. Which option would you choose then?

The reasonable thing to do, of course, is to guess that there's a fortune in the box regardless of the odds. If you're right you gain $1,000,000, and if you're wrong you lose almost nothing. If, on the other hand, you bet that there's $1 in the box and you're right you gain very little, but if you're wrong you lose out on a fortune. To bet on the $1 seems irrational and foolish.

This is, broadly, the argument proposed by the brilliant French physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century that's come to be known as Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's version the choice is between believing God exists and committing one's life to Him or declining to believe He exists. As with the box and the fortune, Pascal says that if you believe and you're wrong you lose relatively little, but if you believe and you're right you gain an immeasurable benefit.

By "believe" Pascal doesn't intend a simple intellectual assent but rather he means a placing of one's trust in the one in whom he believes. Nor is Pascal offering this argument as a "proof" that God exists. Nor does he assume that one can simply choose to believe or even should choose to believe as a result of a calculation of the benefits and liabilities. What he's saying is that belief, if one has it, makes perfect sense.

In other words, the skeptic who declares theistic belief to be irrational is simply wrong. The theist has everything to gain and relatively little to lose. The skeptic has relatively little to gain and everything to lose, so whose position, Pascal might ask, is the more rational?

This argument has triggered a lot of reaction, much of it negative. There are a number of objections to it, and although most of them are pretty weak, some of them are not. Susan Rinnard a philosopher at Harvard, did a video on Pascal's argument which does a pretty good job in just a few minutes of explaining the Wager and which offers a version of the argument that avoids some of the pitfalls of the original:

For those interested in reading an excellent treatment of the Wager with responses to the major objections Michael Rota's book Taking Pascal's Wager is one of the best resources out there. It's certainly much better than most of the stuff one finds on Pascal's Wager on YouTube.

Understanding and Believing

Keith Blanchard (who apparently has no particular expertise in biology) wrote a column for The Week a few years ago that gained some attention at the time and which perpetuates some common misunderstandings.

The ostensible purpose of his article was to exhort people to embrace evolution as science and not as a matter of faith. As Blanchard says, we should understand evolution, not believe in it. If his point is simply that we can grasp the basic points of evolutionary theory without making a doxastic commitment to them ourselves, well, then that seems a little banal, but if his point is that if you understand those points you will presumably believe them then his point is manifestly, glaringly false.

There are many people who understand the main idea of Darwinian evolution perfectly well, but who reject it nonetheless. Many of those who reject evolution are not so much hostile to the idea of some kind of universal relationship among living things, but rather the way naturalistic metaphysics is smuggled in with the less innocuous aspects of the evolutionary package.

I might add that I have no quarrel with evolution. It may be in some sense true for all I know. My quarrel is with naturalism and naturalistic views of evolution which tell us that evolution is a blind, unguided, completely natural process. That's a claim that goes well beyond the empirical evidence. In other words, human beings may have arrived here through some sort of descent through modification, but if so, there's much reason to believe that there was more to our developmental journey as a species than purely unintentional, unintelligent, physical processes like mutation and natural selection.

At any rate, Blanchard offers a summary of the basic claims of evolutionary theory which, were they correct, could apply to any kind of biological evolution, naturalistic or intelligently directed. The problem is, Blanchard's summary describes evolutionary theory as it stood about fifty years ago. Few evolutionists accept Blanchard's view today as anything more than a heuristic for elementary school children.

Here's his summary with a few comments. For a much more extensive critique of Blanchard's essay go here.

Blanchard writes:

• Genes, stored in every cell, are the body's blueprints; they code for traits like eye color, disease susceptibility, and a bazillion other things that make you you.

No doubt our genes code for many aspects of our physical body, but Blanchard does not say that they code for everything that makes us us and for good reason. There's no genetic explanation for some our most important traits. It's a mystery, for example, how genes could possibly produce human consciousness, or many behaviors in the animal kingdom. How, after all, does something like an immaterial mind arise from material interactions of chemical compounds? Not only do we have no explanation for how conscious experience arises in individual persons, we have no explanation for how such a thing could ever have evolved by physical processes.

The same is true of behaviors. All birds of any particular species behave similarly, but how do genes, which code for proteins which in turn form structures or catalyze chemical reactions, produce a behavior? It's no more clear how molecules of DNA can produce behavior than it is how molecules of sucrose can produce the sensation of sweet.

• Reproduction involves copying and recombining these blueprints, which is complicated, and errors happen.

Yes, they do and those errors are almost always dysgenic. They detract from fitness not enhance it. Just as an error in copying computer code is much more likely to cause a system to crash than it is to cause it to work better.

• Errors are passed along in the code to future generations, the way a smudge on a photocopy will exist on all subsequent copies.

As I said above, a smudge is a flaw. As similar "smudges" accumulate the result is not a new and different picture of high quality, it's an increasingly weaker and useless representation of the old.

• This modified code can (but doesn't always) produce new traits in successive generations: an extra finger, sickle-celled blood, increased tolerance for Miley Cyrus shenanigans.

These examples, particularly the last, are dysgenic to human beings. Polydactyly may not be dysgenic but neither does it confer a survival advantage. If it did it would spread through the population, but it hasn't.

• When these new traits are advantageous (longer legs in gazelles), organisms survive and replicate at a higher rate than average, and when disadvantageous (brittle skulls in woodpeckers), they survive and replicate at a lower rate.

This is the selectionist theory of evolution, i.e. that natural selection, acting on genetic mutations, drives evolution. It is held today by few biologists because it's fraught with empirical difficulties. In order to finesse these difficulties biologists have adduced other mechanisms such as genetic drift to do the heavy lifting in evolution.

In fact, as Michael Behe pointed out in his book The Edge of Evolution, any theory based on fortuitous mutations defies probability. Many traits require more than one specific mutation occurring fairly rapidly in an organism, and the chances of this happening are astronomically poor.

I repeat, this might have happened through a long evolutionary process, but to say that the process was completely natural (a claim Blanchard doesn't make, by the way) is to go beyond empirical science and enter the realm of faith and metaphysics, and even the belief that it happened at all requires a considerable amount of blind faith.

We can understand the basic hypothesized lineaments of the process, but that doesn't mean that it's appropriate to believe that the process actually happened. To believe in it is to have faith that the theory is the true explanation for how we got to be here. There are people who understand the theory and who believe it's true. There are people who understand the theory and don't believe it, and there are many who understand it and are agnostic, believing that the scientific evidence often conflicts with the theory, as Stephen Meyer has so powerfully shown in his two books Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt.

In my opinion, a humble agnosticism with respect to the means by which life originated and diversified is the most intellectually prudent course. I'm far more confident, however, in the truth of the claim that however we came to exist as a species it's far more probable that it was the result of the purposeful agency of an engineering genius than that blind chance accomplished the equivalent of producing a library of information entirely unintentionally.

North Korea's Endgame

An article in The Atlantic by James Jeffrey reveals National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster's take on what North Korea is up to, and it's not good. The article isn't overlong, and I recommend that anyone concerned about the possibility of conflict with North Korea read it in its entirety. Here are a few excerpts:

McMaster explained to Chris Wallace on Fox in December that Kim Jong Un’s quest to hold the U.S. mainland at nuclear risk with his ICBM program could well be to advance his goal of conquering South Korea. North Korea’s intentions, he said, “are to use that weapon for nuclear blackmail, and then, to, quote … ‘reunify’ the peninsula under the red banner … and to drive the States and our allies away from this peninsula that he would then try to dominate.”

The problem is that conventional wisdom on North Korea contradicts McMaster, holding that North Korea seeks nuclear weapons primarily to deter an American attack, nuclear or otherwise. (As John Nagl tells Friedman: “I see North Korea pursuing a defensive mechanism to preserve its regime.”) One reason for the popularity of this point of view—that, in a common formula, Kim “doesn’t want to be the next Saddam”—is that it is reassuring. And if it is accurate, then absent an invasion of North Korea, Kim will have no reason to use his nuclear (or impressive conventional) arsenal against anyone.

But if his goal is [instead] to conquer the South, holding the U.S. as nuclear hostage gives him a strategic advantage that threatening Seoul with conventional artillery would not.

Once North Korea can strike the U.S., the willingness of Washington to come to Seoul’s defense would be called into question as during the Cold War. [After all,] would the U.S. risk Seattle to defend Seoul? The prospect would force the U.S. to choose one of three unpalatable options: fail to come to South Korea’s defense, thereby abandoning 80 years of global collective security; come to its defense and risk killing a huge number of Americans if Kim isn’t bluffing; or watch China intervene to “check” Pyongyang, thereby pulling South Korea (and Japan) into China’s security orbit and ending the security regime the U.S. has maintained in the Pacific since 1945.

Given these alternatives, a preemptive strike (or generating a credible threat of one to frighten China to act against Pyongyang), however awful, could be the least risky choice.

McMaster could be wrong about Kim’s motives, even if they arguably best explain his ICBMs and fit the regime’s history and ideology. But it’s not surprising that he considers this possibility; what is surprising is how much of the American security community dismisses out of hand this explanation for Kim’s risky, costly missile program to target the U.S.

The refusal of Americans to believe the worst of our foes is certainly not without historical precedent. Jeffrey gives a couple of examples:

The failure to countenance this possibility could well reflect the historic tendency of liberal societies to discount existential threats simply because they are terrible: The arguments before 1914 that global integration ruled out an extended world war; the appeasement of the Axis powers in the 1930s; and the blinders toward Soviet aggression immediately after World War II.

So what should we do? If McMaster is right and it is indeed Kim Jung Un's plan to conquer South Korea then there are a couple of options to letting both South Korea and Japan fall into either the hands of the NORKs or to become vassals of the Chinese:

Taking this possibility into account, as McMaster has, does not necessarily mean embracing preventive war. But it would justify far more risky Cold War-style military preparations, including redeployment of battlefield nukes in or near Korea, and encouraging the development of Japanese and South Korean long-range conventional strike capabilities or, in extremis, their own nuclear capabilities. The aim would be to affect both North Korean and Chinese calculations and introduce automaticity—an almost unstoppable escalation toward a nuclear exchange once any conflict begins—and thus [deter the initiation of conflict].

Furthermore, such risky military preparations would allow Washington to balance them, without appearing to appease Pyongyang, with more realistic, compromise political goals that give North Korea (and China) diplomatic “outs.” These could include a “temporary” diplomatic solution that stops North Korean development of systems that can strike the U.S., but accepts in practice some nuclear capability, rather than the unrealistic maximalist U.S. position of no nuclear weapons. If McMaster can spark such a discussion, the shiver down our spines is worth it.

It's a fact of history that often there simply are no good options. Decades of concessions and appeasement of North Korea by presidents of both parties, a reluctance to accept that tyrants simply cannot be appeased and will only use the space they're given to make themselves stronger and less vulnerable, have left us in the position we're in today.

In any case, we can be thankful that we have clear-eyed people in this administration who resist the delusion of believing that we live in the world as we'd like it to be rather than the world as it is.

Do Dems Really Want DACA?

Political Science professor Ed Zipperer doesn't think so. He has a piece at the Daily Caller which he begins this way:

Last September, President Donald Trump rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, and the Democratic Party went into full hyperventilation mode — as if Trump had rescinded oxygen.

The Democrats fired out an all-caps email blast saying: “ON TUESDAY, DONALD TRUMP SECURED HIS LEGACY AS A CHAMPION OF CRUELTY.” Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez emailed that the decision was “morally repugnant” and “rooted in prejudice.” And Deputy Chair Keith Ellison—not to be outdone with hyperbole — compared it to handing over Jews to the Nazis.

Now, however, it seems that the Dreamers are expendable pawns, to be sacrificed in pursuit of a bigger prize. What might that prize be? Why do Democrats who insisted up until last week that it'd be immoral to deport Dreamers and that they wanted border security as much as anyone, now refuse to give Trump the border security he wants in order to protect the Dreamers?

According to Zipperer the answer is simple. Compromising with Trump on DACA by giving him what he wants for border security would cost the Democrats dearly. Zipperer gives six reasons how the political cost would be high, the last of which is probably the worst of the lot from a Democratic point of view:

Democrats see illegal immigrants entering the country as a great bloc of potential, someday voters; we need no ghost come from the grave to tell us that. But many people don’t know that every 711,000 illegal immigrants who cross the border create a new congressional district that, due to the Permanent Apportionment Act which limits the House of Representatives to 435 seats, is taken away from another state.

As an unintended effect of the 14th amendment, each person — whether they’re here legally or illegally — must be counted as a whole person. “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state…” That includes illegal immigrants and nothing short of a Constitutional amendment can change it.

Before the Civil War, southern states were overrepresented because they counted slaves (who were denied the right to vote) as three-fifths of a person toward congressional representation. Today, California is overrepresented because millions of illegal immigrants who cannot vote are counted toward their population. Trump’s border security measures would slow down a process that essentially allows a state like California with an ever-growing population of illegal immigrants to steal House seats (and consequently electoral votes) from other states.

Democrats are going to fight for a “clean” DACA bill sans border security measures — even if it means shutting down the government instead of compromising — because of the political calculus. Why else would the minority party refuse a compromise which gives them everything they’ve been screaming for? For Democrats, the DACA compromise is not about immigration, morality, or Dreamers.

It is about the political costs of real border security which far outweigh the political benefits of helping President Trump pass DACA legislation.

If there's a government shutdown this weekend the reason will be that the Democrats will be refusing to grant the president the funds he demands for border security in exchange for granting Dreamers permanent status. Apparently, it's more important to the Democrats that illegal immigration continue than that the Dreamers be protected.

Zipperer's other five reasons why Democrats are balking at a compromise can be read at the link. Given the animus Democrats feel toward Trump each of the reasons makes a lot of sense.

There's a two minute video here that explains what'll happen if the government shuts down. Most people will hardly notice.

Trump's Latest Imbroglio

Dennis Prager offers some thoughts on the president’s alleged, and unfortunate, choice of adjectives in a private conversation describing Haiti and certain African countries. Prager makes a number of very good points. Here are a few:

1. There are few filters between President Donald Trump’s mind and mouth. That is his appeal and his weakness. It is very common that a person’s strengths are also weaknesses. I wish Trump’s tweets and comments were as forthright — as un-PC — as they are now but stated in a sophisticated way. I also wish that cheesecake were not fattening. But just as cheesecake comes with sugar, Donald Trump comes with unsophisticated rhetoric. People are packages, not a la carte menus.

2. As a rule, a president of the United States should not label countries, let alone continents, “sh**holes.” I don’t know what word the president actually used, but had he used the word “dysfunctional” instead of “sh**hole,” that actually might have been a service to the people of many of these countries. I have been to 20 African countries. Corruption is Africa’s greatest single problem. That’s why those who truly care about Africans, many of whom are terrific people, need to honestly describe the moral state of many or most African countries. What benefit is it to honest, hardworking Africans or Latin Americans or others to deny the endemic corruption of these societies?

As Guatemalan columnist Claudia Nunez wrote on Trump in the Guatemalan newspaper Siglio 21: “The epithets he uses to describe certain groups are unfortunate and exemplify the decadence of the current political scene. But he has also said things that are true, for example, that it is we citizens of migration countries who have accommodated ourselves to the need to export people, as we have calmly allowed excessive levels of corruption to grow for decades.”

3. Though many wonderful immigrants come from the world’s worst places, there is some connection between the moral state of an immigrant’s country and the immigrant’s contribution to America. According to data from the Center for Immigration Studies, 73 percent of households headed by Central American and Mexican immigrants use one or more welfare programs, as do 51 percent of Caribbean immigrants and 48 percent of African immigrants. Contrast that with 32 percent of East Asians and 26 percent of Europeans.

4. The press’s constant description of Trump as a racist, a white supremacist, a fascist, and an anti-Semite has been a Big Lie. It is meant to hurt the president, but it mostly damages the country and the media. To cite the most often provided “evidence” for the president’s racism, the president never said or implied that the neo-Nazis at the infamous Charlottesville, Va, demonstrations were “fine people.” The “fine people” he referred to were the pro- and anti-statue removal demonstrators.

The notion that Trump is a racist can be credibly sustained only if one believes that anything remotely critical of anyone with a swarthy complexion is ipso facto racist. Otherwise, the evidence for Trump's alleged racism is gossamer thin, but when you're in the opposition party, and you see everything you've worked for over the past decades being systematically undone, and the country appear to be thriving as a result, I guess you reach for your most trusty weapon, which for some forty years has been the allegation of racism. The trouble is, that tactic is getting increasingly threadbare, and the people who invoke it at every opportunity are looking increasingly foolish.

In any case, it's hard to square the imputation of racism to Trump with what Senator Rand Paul describes here:

I suspect that a lot of the criticism that has befallen the president over this latest episode has little to do with his scatological description of these countries, which is surely accurate in its general sense. After all, the chief argument for expanded immigration from the countries to which Mr. Trump was inartfully referring is that the people residing in them are living amidst hellish conditions and that compassion demands we give those poor wretches a chance to escape the horrors to which they're daily subjected.

Indeed, many of those who come here from those lands are willing to risk everything they have, including their lives, to escape them. Why would they do this unless they felt they were escaping a country that offers its people nothing but hopelessness and misery?

Nor does the controversy seem to have much to do with whether we should be admitting so many immigrants from countries wracked with poverty, dysfunction and lack of education. It surely is not in our national interest to open our doors to millions of the world's poor any more than it would be in a family's interest to permanently and indiscriminately open their home to the poor and homeless on their community's streets.

No, the outrage expressed over Trump's choice of words is more about laying hold of one more cudgel with which to beat him over the head than it is about his inveterate poor taste, or racism or whatever.

Here's a thought experiment one can apply to the immigration issue that'll serve as a kind of hypocrisy detector. Imagine that it were believed that all immigrants from third-world countries, whether legal or illegal, were granted citizenship and could reasonably be expected to vote Republican while any immigrants from first-world European countries were likely to vote Democrat. If so, how much enthusiasm would there be right now among Democrats for DACA, for open borders, amnesty and mass immigration from those blighted nations?

I can't prove it, of course, but I suspect that were this the case many Democrats would be clamoring for a border wall, demanding that we expand immigration from Europe and that we impose strict quotas on the immigration of people from the third world who lack skills and education. In other words, if I'm right, much of the outrage over Trump's comment is really about leveraging dissatisfaction and dislike for the president into votes and political power for themselves.

Check out the rest of Prager's comments on this matter at the link. They're very good.

Willful Blindness

The Washington Examiner has an annotated list of about 165 companies that have given their employees substantial bonuses, and/or have raised their minimum wage and/or have otherwise pledged to invest more in their communities all because of the newly enacted tax reform law.

Nevertheless, liberal opponents, particularly on MSNBC, continue to insist that the tax reform law will only help the rich and that workers will, in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's words, get only "crumbs". $1000 bonuses may be "crumbs" for wealthy people like Pelosi, but it's a godsend to a lot of ordinary people.

Here's a video that interpolates some opponents' criticisms of the bill with what workers are actually receiving from it. After a while you have to wonder at what point are people so blinded by their anachronistic ideology and their contempt for the president that they become oblivious to reality and consequently make themselves foolish:

As I skimmed through the list of companies at the Examiner I noticed that companies run by liberals, tech companies like Apple and Google or banks associated with Tom Steyer, were not represented. Maybe I missed them or maybe their employee bonuses are still in the works. Or maybe they're just going to take their tax cuts and keep them for themselves. UPDATE: Apple just announced that it'll be investing 350 billion in the U.S. economy over the next five years as a result of the tax reform bill and has plans to create 20,000 new jobs. The benefits to Americans keep on coming. The Democrats are going to have a hard time defending the fact that not a single one of them voted for this reform.

Top Ten Military Developments of 2017

An article at Strategy Page discusses the ten most noteworthy developments in 2017 that had military implications. I was a bit surprised that North Korea wasn't on their list, but in any case here are the ten with just a brief excerpt from SP's discussion. There's much more of interest said about each of these at the link for anyone who'd like to follow up.

ISIL

The most extreme Islamic terror group on the planet, hated by all other Islamic terrorists, was defeated but not destroyed in 2017. It was driven underground where, if tradition holds, it will fester for a generation or so and then revive and repeat. In effect this is a chronic problem. It is an unending Moslem civil war between those (mainly Islamic terrorists) who want a worldwide religious dictatorship run by themselves, versus those representing the majority of Moslems who are getting tired of being threatened and murdered by Moslem religious fanatics.

Syria

The defeat of ISIL changed the outcome of the rebellion, or did it? Until late 2017 everyone more (the West and their Arab allies) or less (Assads, Russia, Iran, Turkey) concentrated on fighting ISIL. This effort appeared to have destroyed the rebel advantage because early on most Syrian rebels embraced Islamic radicalism. This was because most of the population was Sunni Moslems who the Shia Assads suppressed and exploited for decades. That meant that after 2012 Islamic radical rebels spent most of their time fighting other rebels. With the defeat of ISIL the rebels are much weakened but more willing to cooperate with each other. Meanwhile the coalition that saved the Assads is falling apart.

Colombia

Colombia has finally ended over 70 years of fighting and general misery. In 2017 the main leftist rebel force (FARC) made peace and the much smaller ELN is negotiating a similar deal. The death rate is way down as is crime in general. The drug cartels are moving their operations out of the country and the economy is one of the healthiest in Latin America.

China

China has been building modern warships at a record rate, something rarely seen in peacetime. China has been building world class warships faster and cheaper than anyone else. There is nothing magical about this, the Chinese simply were practical and ruthless in catching up. Practical in the sense that they managed to merge a market economy with a communist police state. That rather unnatural act may yet come apart but since the 1980s China has been learning from what Russia did wrong during the Cold War and putting their more effective methods into practice.

U.S.

The American F-35 has entered service and mass production is under way and on schedule. F-35s are entering service in large numbers (a hundred plus a year) over the next few years and will be used operationally. Some are already operating near combat zones, like the ones Israel has put into service. Israeli pilots, and all others who have flown the F-35 agree that the software and the degree of automation built in is spectacular.... The F-35 has a large number of sensors (receivers for electronic signals, six cameras and a very capable radar) and the fusion of all that data and presentation to the pilot based on the current situation is impressive and makes the F-35 much easier to fly, despite all the additional capabilities it has.

Israel

In 2017 it finally happened. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait went public in support of an Arab-Israeli alliance to oppose Iran.... The Israelis know that the anti-Semitic attitudes in the Arab world go back to before the emergence of Islam in the 7th century and have waxed and waned ever since. Anti-Semitism is again widely tolerated in Europe. But the United States has a new president who grew up in and around New York City, built a fortune there, has a Jewish son-in-law, Jewish grandchildren and a pro-Israel attitude that is more decisive and imaginative than that of the last few American presidents.

Palestinians

It’s been a long time coming but the Palestinians are losing all their primary sources of income and special status with the UN. The Americans, long the largest contributor, are withdrawing support as are a growing number of European donors. The Arab oil states are also cutting way back because of Palestinian corruption, inability to unite and the Palestinian refusal to make some kind of peace deal with Israel. The Arab oil states are also mad at the Palestinians for supporting Saddam Hussein’s plans to conquer all of Arabia (starting with Kuwait in 1990) and now working with Iran.

Pakistan

Pakistan fears the United States and India will carry out more air strikes and commando operations in Pakistan against Islamic terrorist targets. Pakistan is particularly concerned with protecting the Haqqani Network, an Afghan led group that has prospered under Pakistani protection and is now believed to control the leadership of the Afghan Taliban, Pakistan has long denied any connection with Haqqani, much less control of the group, but there is much evidence that ISI (Pakistani Intelligence) works closely with Haqqani. Growing American (and international) pressure has forced Pakistan to say it is acting against Haqqani. There is little evidence of that.

Philippines

After decades of effort the Philippines has finally made decisive progress in dealing with its endemic corruption, communist rebels and violence by Moslem separatists and bandits.

Iran

For the second time since 2009 Iran is undergoing a nationwide protest against the religious dictatorship. It’s not an armed revolution. The protestors have been loud but not violent unless attacked. Nearly all the deaths have been protestors attacked by the security forces. The government has called out its supporters (or simply those with a government job) to stage pro-government rallies. These are well guarded and thoroughly covered by state controlled media. The goal of the protests is to, at the very least, get the clerical dictatorship to openly discuss the mess they have made of the economy and much else in Iran.

An American Hero

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday and it would be well to focus on why we do. King was a man of great courage who was resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America. His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's sad that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his dream of racial harmony has not.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to identity politics.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Sadly, people are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history, but that's precisely contrary to Martin Luther King's dream.

Nor do I think he would have been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it were somehow separate from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of American history. The civil rights movement was not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded. It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely upheld these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to realize that racism is a sin to which all races are prone and is not exclusive to the majority race.

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and of our minds and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.

Insufficient Evidence

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably plead a special exemption for this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity.

This evidentialism or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 19th century and into the 20th among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink.

The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. They're based rather on an intuition of probability. The more intuitively probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it.

Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world.

When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult, if not impossible, standard for an inconclusive argument to live up to.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise.

Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in what was later collated into his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

Peacock Spiders

There's a fascinating article at Evolution News about a taxon of spiders endemic to Australia called the Peacock spider. There are some 60 species of Peacock spider, and they're gorgeously patterned.

The colors are produced not by pigments but by tiny scales with microscopic curves and gratings that refract and diffract light to separate and reflect various wavelengths. This works somewhat in the same way that a film of oil on a surface produces an array of iridescent hues.

Studying the color-producing structures in these arachnids has given scientists ideas for new color technologies.

Here's a video of the mating displays of several species of these spiders set to music. It's astonishing to consider that these spiders are less than 5 millimeters in size and that the information that directs their displays plus all the other behaviors in which the spider engages as well as the production of the vari-colored abdomens is all packed into a brain that's the size of a pinhead:

Here are a few more interesting questions and points raised in the article:

The artistic patterns on the males’ abdomens seem gratuitously beyond anything necessary for mating. Drab animals get by just fine; why the excessive color and beauty? And why the dozens of variations among different species? We could be forgiven for imagining a designing intelligence with an artist’s eye.

Aesthetic considerations, furthermore, lead us to ask why human beings are the only ones who get excited about the mating dances of an unrelated species. Does that speak to human exceptionalism? We don’t see any other animals, except the female spider, watching the performances, but people by the millions are fascinated by these tiny animals that have nothing to do with their own “fitness.”

What is the evolutionary explanation for the quality of charm? Of humor? Or enchantment? We don’t eat them or train them to do our work. How did our curiosity, sense of humor, and love for beauty “evolve”?

“Who knew that such a small critter would create such an intense iridescence using extremely sophisticated mechanisms that will inspire optical engineers,” said Dimitri Deheyn, Hsuing’s advisor at Scripps Oceanography and a coauthor of the study.

“As an engineer, what I found fascinating about these spider structural colors is how these long evolved complex structures can still outperform human engineering,” said Radwanul Hasan Siddique, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and study coauthor. “Even with high-end fabrication techniques, we could not replicate the exact structures. I wonder how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place!”

We might all wonder this as well. Especially might we wonder "how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place" if we limit ourselves to thinking that this amazing creature must have evolved these gaudy patterns and complex behaviors through an unguided, random process like Darwinism.

The Faith of the Naturalist

One of the most serious scientific threats to the belief of many moderns that the natural world is all there is (i.e. Naturalism) is the problem posed by trying to explain how life could have arisen on this planet through purely natural, unguided, random processes. The problem is daunting as the video below illustrates.

Once living cells appeared on the earth, the naturalist can argue, reproduction and natural selection can be invoked to account for the diversification of life into all the forms of living things we see in our world today, but how did those initial cells arise in the first place? Genetic mutation and natural selection, the traditional mechanisms of evolution, can only operate on reproducing populations of organisms, but until you have reproducing cells with something like genes that can mutate you can't have evolution.

Trying to explain how those original cells arose is like trying to explain how the laws of chemistry and physics could have organized a pile of atoms into a functioning computer complete with an operating system without any input from an intelligent engineer.

A living cell consists of hundreds of different proteins all serving different functions in the cell. The video explains the difficulties involved in the chance production of just a single functional protein.

Even if somehow those odds were overcome an unimaginable number of times and all the requisite proteins were somehow available to form a cell, how did they manage to randomly integrate themselves into an organized, functioning entity? Where did the information come from that directed these proteins to work together to perform specific tasks? How did the information arise that choreographed the proteins' ability to reproduce themselves and that choreographed the cell's ability to reproduce itself?

Despite assurances in the 20th century that scientists were on the cusp of elucidating how all this came about on the primeval earth, the problem has proven intractable. The origin of life is perhaps one of the three most perplexing problems in biological science today, along with the puzzle of how consciousness could have evolved out of inanimate matter and the problem of explaining the provenience of the biological information which programs cellular structures to perform the myriad functions and activities they carry out twenty four hours a day.

Conscious beings only seem to arise from other conscious beings. Information, such as is found in books or in computer operating systems, is only generated by minds. It may be that someday scientists will produce life from non-living matter in the laboratory, but if so, they will have only demonstrated that life, too, can be produced by the effort of conscious minds. The problem of how the first life can be accounted for in a naturalistic ontology will still remain, and it will still require an heroic exertion of blind faith to believe that against incomprehensible odds, somehow, in ways we can't even as yet imagine, life appeared.

It requires more faith to believe this, actually, than it does to believe in miracles. With miracles, after all, there's an intelligent, conscious Agent responsible for the miracle. On Naturalism there's nothing but blind, unguided accident.