Socrates

Socrates (470–399 BC) was one of the most influential philosophers in all of human history. He himself never wrote anything but his unique mode of discourse, which came to be known as the “Socratic method,” remains as one of the great teaching styles and modes of inquiry still in use today.

Dr. Paul Herrick writes a good overview of Socrates' style as well as the details of his trial and death at Philosophy News. Here are some excerpts from his discussion of the Socratic Method:

At some point around the middle of his life...Socrates became convinced that many people think they know what they are talking about when in reality they do not have a clue. He came to believe that many people, including smug experts, are in the grips of illusion. Their alleged knowledge is a mirage.

Similarly, he also saw that many believe they are doing the morally right thing when they are really only fooling themselves—their actions cannot be rationally justified.

As this realization sank in, Socrates found his life’s purpose: he would help people discover their own ignorance as a first step to attaining more realistic beliefs and values. But how to proceed?

Some people, when convinced that others are deluded, want to grab them by their collars and yell at them. Others try to force people to change their minds. Many people today believe violence is the only solution. None of this was for Socrates. He felt so much respect for each individual—even those in the grips of illusion and moral error—that violence and intimidation were out of the question. His would be a completely different approach: he asked people questions. Not just any questions, though.

He asked questions designed to cause others to look in the mirror and challenge their own assumptions on the basis of rational and realistic standards of evidence. Questions like these: Why do I believe this? What is my evidence? Are my assumptions on this matter really true? Or am I overlooking something? Are my actions morally right? Or am I only rationalizing bad behavior?

This may not seem like such a big deal but it is. Most of us have no desire to question our beliefs about important matters like religion or politics, and when someone does question us our response is often to get defensive and to just shout louder than the other person until the exchange ends in anger. We see a form of this when college students shout down speakers with whom they disagree and refuse to let them speak (for a couple of recent examples see here and here).

Such behavior is not just rude and intellectually immature, it's a signal that the shouters have no good reasons for believing what they do and deep down realize that their beliefs can only prevail if the other side is denied a hearing. The cause of truth is ill-served by such tactics, but then the thugs who engage in this behavior aren't really interested in truth in the first place.

Herrick continues:

Looking in the mirror in a Socratic way can be painful. For reasons perhaps best left to psychologists, it is easy to criticize others but it is hard to question and challenge yourself. There are intellectual hurdles as well. Which standards or criteria should we apply when we test our beliefs and values?

Socrates, by his example, stimulated a great deal of research into this question. Over the years, many criteria have been proposed, tested, and accepted as reliable guides to truth, with truth understood as correspondence with reality.

These standards are collected in one place and studied in the field of philosophy known as “logic”—the study of the principles of correct reasoning. Today we call someone whose thinking is guided by rational, realistic criteria a “critical thinker.” Our current notion of criterial, or critical, thinking grew out of the philosophy of Socrates.

So, moved by the pervasiveness of human ignorance, bias, egocentrism, and the way these shortcomings diminish the human condition, Socrates spent the rest of his life urging people to look in the mirror and examine their assumptions in the light of rational, realistic criteria as the first step to attaining real wisdom. Knowledge of your own ignorance and faults, he now believed, is a prerequisite for moral and intellectual growth.

Just as a builder must clear away brush before building a house, he would say, you must clear away ignorance before building knowledge. As this reality sank in, his conversations in the marketplace shifted from the big questions of cosmology to questions about the human condition and to that which he now believed to be the most important question of all: What is the best way to live, all things considered?

Socrates’s mission—to help others discover their own ignorance as a first step on the path to wisdom--explains why he expected honesty on the part of his interlocutors. If the other person does not answer honestly, he won’t be led to examine his own beliefs and values. And if he does not look in the mirror, he will not advance. For Socrates, honest self-examination was one of life’s most important tasks.

When our most deeply-held beliefs are at risk, when we're confronted by compelling challenges to those beliefs, honesty is often difficult. Not only are our convictions at stake but so is our pride. It's humbling to have to acknowledge that we've been wrong about a belief we've held. We resort to all manner of diversion, obfuscation and fallacy in order to escape the conclusion our interlocutor's argument may be leading us toward. We resist it, we refuse to believe it, regardless of the price we must pay for that refusal in terms of our intellectual integrity.

There's an old ditty that captures the psychology of this well: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

Socrates himself encountered this resistance to having one's beliefs challenged and paid with his life for having discredited the certainties of very proud and vain men. You can read about what happened to him in Herrick's column at the link.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning Made Easy

Philosopher of science Robin Collins is one of the world's foremost authorities on cosmic fine-tuning, a topic that has popped up on Viewpoint pretty often. Back in 1998, an essay by Collins titled The Fine-Tuning Design Argument: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God, appeared in a collection of essays edited by philosopher Michael Murray titled Reason for the Hope Within. His essay begins with this:

Suppose we went on a mission to Mars, and found a domed structure in which everything was set up just right for life to exist. The temperature, for example, was set around 70 °F and the humidity was at 50%; moreover, there was an oxygen recycling system, an energy gathering system, and a whole system for the production of food. Put simply, the domed structure appeared to be a fully functioning biosphere. What conclusion would we draw from finding this structure? Would we draw the conclusion that it just happened to form by chance? Certainly not.

Instead, we would unanimously conclude that it was designed by some intelligent being. Why would we draw this conclusion? Because an intelligent designer appears to be the only plausible explanation for the existence of the structure. That is, the only alternative explanation we can think of–that the structure was formed by some natural process–seems extremely unlikely. Of course, it is possible that, for example, through some volcanic eruption various metals and other compounds could have formed, and then separated out in just the right way to produce the “biosphere,” but such a scenario strikes us as extraordinarily unlikely, thus making this alternative explanation unbelievable.

The universe is analogous to such a “biosphere,” according to recent findings in physics . . . . Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the “fine-tuning of the cosmos” . . . For example, theoretical physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies–whose early writings were not particularly sympathetic to theism–claims that with regard to basic structure of the universe, “the impression of design is overwhelming” (Davies, 1988, p. 203) . . . .

As the eminent Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson notes, "There are many . . . lucky accidents in physics. Without such accidents, water could not exist as liquid, chains of carbon atoms could not form complex organic molecules, and hydrogen atoms could not form breakable bridges between molecules" (p. 251)--in short, life as we know it would be impossible.

Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the "fine-tuning of the cosmos." It has been extensively discussed by philosophers, theologians, and scientists, especially since the early 1970s, with hundreds of articles and dozens of books written on the topic. Today, it is widely regarded as offering by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God. For example, theoretical physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies--whose early writings were not particularly sympathetic to theism--claims that with regard to basic structure of the universe, "the impression of design is overwhelming" (Davies, 1988, p. 203).

Similarly, in response to the life-permitting fine-tuning of the nuclear resonances responsible for the oxygen and carbon synthesis in stars, the famous astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle declares that:

I do not believe that any scientists who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars. If this is so, then my apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme. If not then we are back again at a monstrous sequence of accidents. [Fred Hoyle, in Religion and the Scientists, 1959; quoted in Barrow and Tipler, p. 22]

Collins then goes on in his essay to give five examples of cosmic fine-tuning. In each case had a particular parameter, such as the initial expansion rate of the universe or the strength of gravity, varied by incomprehensibly minute amounts the universe would never have formed.

It's all absolutely breath-taking if the universe is designed by an intelligent agent, but it's literally incredible, at least for me, to think that it's all just a "lucky accident."

What's the Alternative?

In the course of a recent column Rod Dreher gives an excellent explication of why Donald Trump is today the President of the United States. Dreher is no fan of Trump, but he argues cogently that the progressive left has placed us on a trajectory to social and cultural tyranny and that it was public recoil from that trajectory which has landed Trump in office.

There's much worth highlighting in Dreher's essay, but mentioning just a few of his points will serve to illustrate his main theme.

After describing an awful incident in which two cafeteria workers at NYU were fired because they innocently "offended" a student with their menu offerings he writes this:

[T]his is what the media don’t get. They accuse Trump of fomenting white tribalism, and they’re not entirely wrong to say so. But here’s the thing: events like the firing of the cafeteria workers do all of Trump’s work for him. They signal to ordinary working people that the elites (college presidents, for example) will happily throw them to the wolves to appease progressives.

He then quotes an eloquent email he received from a middle class man who's trying to resist the seductions of the alt-right:

I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

I am very lower middle class. I’ve never owned a new car, and do my own home repairs as much as I can to save money. I cut my own grass, wash my own dishes, buy my clothes from Walmart. I have no clue how I will ever be able to retire. But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.

Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull.

And yet I still follow this stuff, not really accepting it, but following it just because it’s one of the only places I can go where people are not always telling me I’m the seed of all evil in the world. If it’s a struggle for someone like me to resist the pull, I imagine it’s probably impossible for someone with less education or cultural exposure.

It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza.

Why are they unable to put themselves into the shoes of disaffected white guys and see how something similar might appeal to them? Or if they can make this mental leap, why are they so caustically dismissive of it — an attitude they’d never do with, say, a black kid who has joined the Nation of Islam?

I’m sorry, but there are two alternatives here. You can push for some kind of universalist vision bringing everybody together, or you can have tribes. There’s not a third option. If you don’t want universalism, then you just have to accept that various forms of open white nationalism are eventually going to become a permanent feature of politics. You don’t have to LIKE it. But you have to accept it and learn to live with it — including the inevitable violence and strife that will flow from it.

If the Left can’t let go of identity politics, then let me be clear: What comes next is on THEM. A lot of us don’t want to live in a world of tribes, and we never asked for it. But people will like those young dudes attracted to white nationalism are going to play the game according to the rules as they find them, and they will play to win. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Dreher then observes that as progressives continue their purge of the culture and their attempt to homogenize all thought and speech, such sentiments will proliferate:

You know what’s going to happen? Middle-class white people who find Donald Trump vulgar and beyond the pale, but who keep their mouths shut about what they really think so they will keep their jobs, understanding that the only thing standing between them and ruin is the goodwill of people from the culturally privileged tribes.

They will correctly figure that there is no way to tell from one day to the next which of their words or deeds might cost them their careers. They won’t tell anybody what they’re thinking, but quietly, they will reconcile themselves to voting for Donald Trump, or whoever his successor is — not because they love Trump, but because they fear progressives in power.

This is, of course, precisely what happened in 2016. Donald Trump wasn't elected because of who he is, but rather because of who his opponent was. Many voters, rightly or wrongly, looked at Hillary and saw in her a continuation of the slide toward an Orwellian future initiated by the Obama administration and saw Trump as the only realistic hope for staving that off.

Whether you are of the left or the right read the entire original. If you're a progressive it'll help you understand why 2016 happened. If you're a conservative it'll feel like he's saying what you wished you could say every time your liberal friends ask you how you could stomach Donald Trump.

The short answer to their question is, "What's the alternative?"

Do We Have Free Will?

In this five minute video from Prager U. Frank Pastore gives us an introduction to the question of whether we actually have free will and how the question bears on the further question of whether we also have a mind rather than just a material brain.

If we don't have free will it's hard to imagine how we could be held responsible for our actions, how praise or blame could be deserved, how we could have a duty to act in one way rather than another, and why we should pay any attention to our feelings of guilt or regret.

If all of our choices are determined then we really couldn't have chosen otherwise than we did, our choice was a product of factors outside our control - the environment in which we grew up or the genes we inherited from our forebears.

It's also very hard to see how, on materialism, we could have free will. If our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain then where does the freedom fit in? It would seem that our choices would have to be determined by the laws of chemistry and physics and those laws admit of no freedom.

Thus, materialists are often determinists, but they're also often inconsistent determinists because they often give praise or blame to others, they often hold people responsible for their behavior, and they speak of moral duties that we have toward each other. Yet were they to be asked for an account of how these things could exist in a deterministic, materialistic world the response they'd give would be something along the lines of "They just do!", which, of course, is not very helpful.

A materialist, it seems to me, either has to be a determinist or, if not, they have to reassess their commitment to materialism. Otherwise they'll often find themselves living as if the materialism they advocate is actually false.

Hard Lesson

Early last month several hundred Syrian troops accompanied by hundreds of Russian mercenaries, about 500 attackers in all, launched a ground attack on a Syrian militia base where American advisors were embedded. It's not clear why they attacked, but the speculation is that they were either seeking to occupy a nearby oil refinery and/or they were testing America's resolve in the region, probing the Americans to see how they would respond to provocation.

They paid a high price to find out.

As soon as the attack began American troops answered with artillery strikes and followed up with AC-130 gunships, fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters. The attackers had tanks, artillery, multiple-launch rockets and armored personnel carriers but no air cover. Their armor was destroyed in the first few minutes and they suffered grievous casualties. Some reports listed the number of dead Russian mercenaries at over 100 with another 200 wounded.

Intercepted audio transmissions (Transcripts here) reveal the extent of the devastation and carnage visited upon the attackers by the American forces who seem to have suffered no casualties themselves.

Although the Russian troops are said to have been independent contractors and not active military personnel this distinction is sometimes a fig leaf, as it has been in the Ukraine, that allows the Russian government to deny that it's their policy to engage in hostilities with non-belligerent forces. It also allows them to deny that their policies are getting Russian boys killed in acts of military aggression.

If Putin and the Russian government were behind the February assault it'd be most alarming that they'd be willing to use Russian troops to directly attack American forces. Why would they do this? Are they trying to precipitate a wider conflict with the U.S. in the Middle East? What would they have to gain? Yet it seems, if this WaPo report is correct, that somebody in the Kremlin gave the green light for some sort of undertaking in Syria:

A Russian oligarch believed to control the Russian mercenaries who attacked U.S. troops and their allies in Syria this month was in close touch with Kremlin and ­Syrian officials in the days and weeks before and after the assault, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

In intercepted communications in late January, the oligarch, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, told a senior Syrian official that he had “secured permission” from an unspecified Russian minister to move forward with a “fast and strong” initiative that would take place in early February.

Moreover, if this were a deliberate attack sanctioned by the Kremlin, having suffered a humiliating defeat will they be inclined to strike again at some point to try to vindicate Russian honor? It's hard to believe that the Russians would just accept this bloody nose without seeking some sort of revenge.

On the other hand, there's some reason to doubt that the Russian leadership was directly responsible for this episode:

Not only is it difficult to see what the Russians would've hoped to gain by attacking a base where Americans could be expected to be engaged in combat, American officers were apparently in radio contact with their Russian counterparts before, during and after the battle. Perhaps the Russian military knew what was in the offing and was at pains to insure that the Americans didn't think that they were in any way responsible for the attack.

It may be that whoever gave the orders for the Russians to launch the raid may have been acting on his own and may have incurred the displeasure of the Russian authorities, but at this point that's just a guess.

As of the present neither the Russians nor the Americans have had much to say about the matter, which is, of course, a positive sign that may point to a desire on both sides to avoid escalation.

In any case, conflict between Russia and the U.S. is both highly unnecessary and highly undesirable. Hopefully, Mr. Putin sees it the same way.

UPDATE: As more is learned about what happened in this fight it may be that Russian casualties weren't nearly as high as originally reported. See here for details.

Lawrence Krauss and the Moral Problem

Buzzfeed has an article which recounts accusations of sexual improprieties toward women by celebrity atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss has been active over the last ten years or so promoting atheism and debating theistic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. Whether Krauss is actually guilty of behaving boorishly or not I can't say, but I was interested in some of the readers' remarks in the article's combox, particularly one from an atheist named Jim MacIver who wrote this:

This [Krauss' alleged conduct] is disgusting. It is the sort of behavior I expect from god-worshippers but not Atheists. We are supposed to be the ones who lead for truth and justice, logic and reason. Harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do but especially if an Athieist [sic] does it. The religioniists [sic] will use this against us. This hurts us as a movement. This will hurt all Atheists, everywhere. Even more important, it hurts women who are victimized by men they thought they could trust.

You may think that Mr. MacIver sounds a bit like a teenager here, but a link accompanying his comment takes you to his Facebook page, and it turns out that he really is an adult. Given what he has said above, another claim he makes on his page sounds weirdly paradoxical:

I have no morality myself. Morality is arbitrary rules made up by old men to control the sex lives of human beings, particularly women. I have ethics, which tells you whats [sic] right.

Set aside his inapt distinction between morality and ethics, and set aside, too, the fact that on atheism, truth, justice and reason are all highly problematic notions. What I wonder about is how a man who claims to have no morals can say that "harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do".

I also wonder why it's especially indecent if the behavior is perpetrated by someone (i.e. an atheist like Krauss) whose worldview offers no basis for objective moral, or ethical, values and no reason to think that there's any ultimate accountability for anything one does in life.

On atheism, as Mr. MacIver acknowledges, there's no morally right or wrong conduct. The only criterion for assessing whether one should do something that one desires to do, if one is an atheist, is whether one can get away with it.

If someone's behavior hurts women, victimizes women, why, given atheism, should Mr. MacIver be upset about that? All he's doing is emoting, expressing his subjective dislike for behavior that he finds personally unpleasant, but that hardly makes it wrong for others to do.

To make a moral judgment of another person's conduct the atheist must piggy-back on a theistic worldview and hope that no one will notice that he's deriving his moral sustenance from a source that he in fact believes has no actual validity.

Whenever an atheist makes the sort of judgments Mr. MacIver does he's engaging in a kind of moral parasitism, drawing nourishment from the host of theism because his own metaphysical assumptions lack the resources to support those judgments.

This is dreadfully inconsistent, although it occurs with surprising frequency among atheists. If Mr. MacIver truly believes that sexual misconduct toward women is objectively wrong, and if he truly prizes reason and logic he might want to reassess his atheism. He might also reflect on these words from a few fellow atheists whose understanding of the implications of their atheism manifests a bit more clarity than does Mr. MacIver's:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…. Cornell University biologist Will Provine

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ Nobel laureate biologist Francis Crick

...Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature....We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg

If these luminaries, atheists all, are correct then it's very hard to see how anyone could say that Lawrence Krauss, if he really did that of which he's accused, was acting in any way inconsistently with his atheism. Nor can one say how what he is accused of doing is in any way objectively "wrong."

NORKs Get an Eye-Opener

Strategy Page suggests a possible (probable?) reason for the sudden apparent thawing on the part of the North Koreans toward the South. Ironically, if their analysis is correct, the reason Kim Jong Un is toning down his bellicose rhetoric and sounding like he wants to make nice is due to an intelligence coup on their part.

Here's the crux of the story:

The recent change of attitude by North Korea towards South Korea could be attributed to a number of obvious factors like the continued collapse of the North Korean economy along with morale and effectiveness of the North Korean military and security forces in general. Recent defectors from North Korea report that conditions inside the military are bad and getting worse. Physical exams of these defectors confirms those reports.

But there is another reason for the change of attitude that was not commented on much because of the sensitive nature of the information. In short, at the end of 2017 North Korea got a look at South Korean and American war plans and were alarmed at what they found. The northerners had every reason to believe this information was accurate because in late 2017 South Korean military networks were hacked and a large quantity of secret documents appear to have been copied.

This apparently included several OPLANs (Operational Plan, a plan for a single or series of connected operations to be carried out simultaneously or in succession by specified military units).

The article goes on to give details as to what OPLANS are and what they do and then says this:

What was scary about all this from the North Korean viewpoint was that the OPLANs detailed capabilities many North Korean generals believed were enemy propaganda. But OPLAN documents are top secret and only for internal use. No need for propaganda there, and that made it clear the North Korean military was a lot more vulnerable than North Koreans realized. The South Korean and American intelligence knew a lot more about the location and status of North Korean weapons than the North Korean generals had believed.

Not only that but the OPLANS described in detail how the many modern weapons the South Koreans had, like smart bombs and guided missiles, would be able to do a lot more damage to the North Korean military and do it faster than the North Koreans had believed possible.

The OPLANS described how the North Korean air defense system would be quickly destroyed and South Korean and American commando teams would hit key targets. OPLANS made reference to messages broadcast to North Korean civilians emphasizing help (food, medical care, elimination of the police state) was on the way.

While many North Koreans would fight to defend the Kim dynasty the North Korean secret police (that monitored public attitudes) knew that a growing number of North Koreans would welcome the southerners as liberators.

Once the North Korean hackers delivered the stolen OPLANs documents in September 2017 it took a few months for the military and other security agencies up north to digest all this information and conclude that the north was screwed.

Supreme leader Kim Jong Un was briefed, followed by him firing another few senior advisors who were apparently on the wrong side of this new reality. Kim then told South Korea that he wanted to improve relations, send a delegation to the Winter Olympics and get together with South Korea leaders to have friendly discussions about matters of mutual interest.

Much of the bluster coming from Pyongyang was rooted in a belief that they were largely invulnerable to military action by South Korea and the U.S. The purloined OPLANs showed them otherwise and has made their barbaric leadership markedly more amenable to "talks".

This is what Ronald Reagan meant when he talked about "peace through strength". Had the Norks not realized the danger their bombast and provocations were placing them, had they not discovered that they were going to pay a terrible cost, we might well be hurtling toward war today.

As it is we still might be, but it seems that the danger is less now than it was six months ago.

Augustine on Friendship

A couple of weeks ago I posted some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on the topic of friendship. Lewis spoke of how friendship was rooted in shared loves and interests. Lewis writes, for instance, that,

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).

He also says this:

The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends.

In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.

I recently came across some thoughts from St. Augustine on the same subject. Augustine reflects on the desire to share a common love, particularly a love for the life of the mind (although that's not what he calls it) has on him. He writes wistfully about it:

...I do love wisdom alone and for its own sake, and it is on account of wisdom that I want to have, or fear to be without, other things such as life, tranquility and my friends. What limit can their be to my love of that Beauty, in which I do not only not begrudge it to others, but I even look for many who will long for it with me, sigh for it with me, possess it with me, enjoy it with me. They will be all the dearer to me the more we share that love in common.

Lewis and Augustine have something important to teach us about friendship. Two people can be companions for awhile even if they don't share much in common, but they'll only develop a true friendship if they both love some of the same things. For Augustine the chief of these loves is the love of wisdom, and surely the love of wisdom encompasses the love of truth.

That love has been largely lost in our post-modern age during which a lot of people seem to believe whatever suits their political or religious preferences. So far from loving truth (and wisdom) many seem almost to despise it as irrelevant if it gets in the way of their appetites and prejudices.

I wonder how many modern friendships are grounded in the same love that Augustine muses upon, or even could be.

Why Naturalism Is Self-Refuting

Among the live options for worldviews on offer in modern times certainly one of the most popular among scientists, philosophers, and other academics is the view called naturalism. This view states that all that exists is ultimately explicable in terms of the sorts of explanations employed by scientists. In other words, nature and nature's laws are all there is, there's nothing else.

Most worldviews offer a Grand Story for how we got here. In naturalism the Story is some iteration of Darwinian evolution. Blind, natural processes generated life which evolved through genetic mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift to produce the grand diversity of life including man and his marvelous powers of reason. The problem with this Story, though, is that according to philosopher John Gray (who is himself a naturalist) it's self-refuting.

In a piece in The New Republic critical of his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins Gray writes:

[T]he ideas and the arguments that [Dawkins] presents are in no sense novel or original, and he seems unaware of the critiques of positivism that appeared in its Victorian heyday.

Some of them bear re-reading today. One of the subtlest and most penetrating came from the pen of Arthur Balfour, the Conservative statesman, British foreign secretary, and sometime prime minister. Well over a century ago, Balfour identified a problem with the evolutionary thinking that was gaining ascendancy at the time. If the human mind has evolved in obedience to the imperatives of survival, what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of reality, when all that is required in order to reproduce the species is that its errors and illusions are not fatal?

A purely naturalistic philosophy cannot account for the knowledge that we believe we possess. As he framed the problem in The Foundations of Belief in 1895, “We have not merely stumbled on truth in spite of error and illusion, which is odd, but because of error and illusion, which is even odder.”

Balfour’s solution was that naturalism is self-defeating: humans can gain access to the truth only because the human mind has been shaped by a divine mind. Similar arguments can be found in a number of contemporary philosophers, most notably Alvin Plantinga. Again, one does not need to accept Balfour’s theistic solution to see the force of his argument. A rigorously naturalistic account of the human mind entails a much more skeptical view of human knowledge than is commonly acknowledged.

Balfour's argument is sometimes a bit difficult to understand when encountered for the first time, but it says essentially that any trait selected for survival by natural selection can only coincidentally be a trait that is useful in discovering truth. If human reason is the product of naturalistic evolution it would have been selected for because it somehow conferred survival value, not because it was reliable in finding truth. There's no necessary connection between knowing truth and survival of a species.

In her recent book titled Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism Secularism, and Other God Substitutes Nancy Pearcy quotes a number of naturalist thinkers who make this point but who don't seem to realize that it undercuts their own naturalism (The following draws upon an excerpt of Pearcy's book at Evolution News and Views). Pearcy writes:

Of course, the sheer pressure to survive is likely to produce some correct ideas. A zebra that thinks lions are friendly will not live long. But false ideas may be useful for survival. Evolutionists admit as much: Eric Baum says, "Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth." Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not." The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false.

An example comes from Francis Crick. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, he writes, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive."

But, Pearcy tells us, that means Crick's own theory cannot be relied upon to be true.

To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value.

The same thing is often said about morality. "It's an illusion," philosopher Michael Ruse wrote, "fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." But if all of these things are the illusory products of evolution how do we know that the theory of evolution and the naturalistic worldview it supports are not also illusions? Why should we think these things true if our thinking is as likely to lead us to falsehood as it is to lead us to truth? Pearcy continues:

A few thinkers, to their credit, recognize the problem. Literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, "If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? ... Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it."

On a similar note, philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, "Is the [evolutionary] hypothesis really compatible with the continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge?" His answer is no: "I have to be able to believe ... that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct -- not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so." Hence, "insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining."

Pearcy goes on to show that Darwin himself, and many of his followers, argued that man's mind leads him to belief in God but that our minds, being the product of blind chance and selection, are too untrustworthy to credit that conclusion. Yet they never applied that same skepticism to the theory of evolution itself.

People are sometimes under the impression that Darwin himself recognized the problem. They typically cite Darwin's famous "horrid doubt" passage where he questions whether the human mind can be trustworthy if it is a product of evolution: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy."

But, of course, Darwin's theory itself was a "conviction of man's mind." So why should it be "at all trustworthy"?

Surprisingly, however, Darwin never confronted this internal contradiction in his theory. Why not? Because he expressed his "horrid doubt" selectively -- only when considering the case for a Creator.

In another passage Darwin admitted, "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man." Again, however, he immediately veered off into skepticism: "But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" That is, can it be trusted when it draws "grand conclusions" about a First Cause? Perhaps the concept of God is merely an instinct programmed into us by natural selection, Darwin added, like a monkey's "instinctive fear and hatred of a snake."

In short, it was on occasions when Darwin's mind led him to a theistic conclusion that he dismissed the mind as untrustworthy. He failed to recognize, though, that to be logically consistent he needed to apply the same skepticism to his own theory.

Pearcy concludes the excerpt with a quote from Oxford mathematician John Lennox who wrote that according to atheism "the mind that does science ... is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn't trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science."

One way to summarize all this is to say that you can believe your reason is trustworthy or you can believe in naturalistic evolution, but you can't believe in both.

The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without this tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known paper from 1996:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function....

By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves the perhaps unintentional purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this pathway and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (though some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature had no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow conserved and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it takes a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input than to believe that it arose through the agency of a biochemical genius.

Scientific Heretic

One of the most interesting intellectual developments of the last couple of decades has been the trend among scientists and other thinkers who've thought seriously about the explanatory power of the Darwinian paradigm, who have considered the enormous difficulties facing any naturalistic account of evolution, and who have judged that paradigm to be both scientifically and philosophically untenable.

One such scientist is a professor of bioengineering and former research director of an international biotech company named Matt Leisola. He documents his apostasy from naturalistic Darwinism in a new book titled Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design.

The book has created a considerable stir which is understandable given reviews like one by Ola Hössjer, Professor of Mathematical Statistics at Stockholm University. According to Evolution News Hössjer wrote this about Leisola's book:

In Heretic, Matti Leisola and Jonathan Witt tell the fascinating life story of Leisola, a well known professor of bioengineering and former research director of an international biotech company. The book describes in an informed yet personal way how Leisola early on in his scientific career started to doubt the theories of chemical and Darwinian evolution.

These theories are taught as well established truths throughout European and American universities. They hold that life originated and diversified through purely blind and random mechanisms. But Leisola had the courage and persistence to do what every scientist is supposed to — he carefully followed the evidence and let all possible explanations compete on an equal footing.

The book can actually be read in parallel at three different levels. First, it gives a personal account of Leisola’s own scientific life journey, starting as a supporter of Darwinian evolution, then gradually increasing his skepticism towards the theory and finally becoming an advocate of intelligent design.

Second, the book unfolds the dramatic revolution in genomics and molecular biology that took place during the last forty years. Leisola explains with great expertise, and from his own working experience as a researcher, that the power of mutations, natural selection, and other blind mechanisms is very limited — they can only modify existing structures in modest ways. He argues convincingly that all such materialistic processes have failed to account for the great diversity we see in life. In particular, they cannot explain how information expressed in irreducibly complex structures arose in the first place. It has rather become increasingly clear that an intelligent mind is needed in order to account for the diversity of life.

Third, the book gives many examples of how the resistance towards a design explanation has increased over the years, against the direction of the data itself. This animosity towards intelligent design is seen not only within the scientific community, but increasingly within the church as well.

After reading Leisola and Witt’s book, it is clear that a paradigm shift is needed in order to explain the origin and diversity of life, from chemical and Darwinian evolution towards a design explanation. This raises the question of whether the research community is willing to follow the evidence and allow such a shift to take place. If not, there is a great risk that the judgement of future generations will be hard. However, such a change will not come easily, since ultimately our worldview is at stake.

Should materialism be enforced, or are we, as scientists, willing to allow an intelligent designer through the door?

Materialism, the belief that everything that exists can be explained in terms of matter and energy and that nothing exists which can't be so explained, is a metaphysical strait-jacket on the scientific search for truth. The commitment among many scientists to materialism disallows all non-material explanations in science, but if the ultimate explanation for how we got here is not a material explanation then a lot of scientific careers have been, and are going to be, spent looking in vain for something that's not there.

American philosopher William James once wrote that "any rule of thinking which would prevent me from finding a truth, if that truth were really there, is an irrational rule." The requirement that all scientific explanations must be material explanations is just such a rule.

Pinker on Ideological Intolerance

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker was interviewed by Adam Rubenstein of the Weekly Standard recently and had some very interesting things to say on a couple of topics. The interview touches on Pinker's views on identity politics, ideological intolerance in the modern university, humanism and a few others.

I commented on his thoughts on identity politics here and would like today to consider what he has to say about the alarming level of ideological intolerance in our contemporary schools of higher learning.

Here is the exchange between Rubenstein and Pinker on intolerance:

Adam Rubenstein: There is, as you recognize a “liberal tilt” in academia. And you write about it: “Non-leftist speakers are frequently disinvited after protests or drowned out by jeering mobs,” and “anyone who disagrees with the assumption that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist.” How high are the stakes in universities? Should we worry?

Steven Pinker: Yes, for three reasons. One is that scholars can’t hope to understand the world (particularly the social world) if some hypotheses are given a free pass and others are unmentionable. As John Stuart Mill noted, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

In The Blank Slate I argued that leftist politics had distorted the study of human nature, including sex, violence, gender, childrearing, personality, and intelligence.

The second is that people who suddenly discover forbidden facts outside the crucible of reasoned debate (which is what universities should be) can take them to dangerous conclusions, such as that differences between the sexes imply that we should discriminate against women (this kind of fallacy has fueled the alt-right movement).

The third problem is that illiberal antics of the hard left are discrediting the rest of academia, including the large swaths of moderates and open-minded scholars who keep their politics out of their research. (Despite the highly publicized follies of academia, it’s still a more disinterested forum than alternatives like the Twittersphere, Congress, or ideologically branded think tanks.)

In particular, many right-wingers tell each other that the near-consensus among scientists on human-caused climate change is a conspiracy among politically correct academics who are committed to a government takeover of the economy. This is sheer nonsense, but it can gain traction when the noisiest voices in the academy are the repressive fanatics.

Pinker could've mentioned a fourth problem: When students censor speech, when they shout down speakers or threaten violence, they're sending the message that the fundamental liberties of democracy are held in contempt by the very people and institutions which should understand and value them most.

This attitude eventually trickles down to the masses and accustoms them to thinking that the basic assumptions and values of a free society - open-mindedness, the free exchange of ideas, the willingness to pursue the truth even if it undermines or contradicts one's own preferences and prejudices - are obsolete. It accustoms the "average" citizen to the notion that these democratic virtues are nowadays just anachronisms out of place in the modern world.

When masses of people begin taking it for granted, however, that unwanted speech and ideas should, as a matter of course, be suppressed, tyranny, of either the left or the right, is lurking around the corner.

It's literally frightening to witness how quickly and glibly the values that undergird our liberties are being discarded by so many of tomorrow's leaders.

A Basket of Hypocrisies

In the wake of the Charlottesville demonstrations President Trump rather inartfully and without some needed clarifications declared that there were good people on both sides. This faux pas has been seized upon as all the proof one needs that Donald Trump is a racist and he has been been beaten over the head with this quote ever since.

Imagine, then, that Mr. Trump hired a portraitist to paint Melania's portrait and that the artist turned out to be someone who did several paintings showing a white woman holding the decapitated head of a black woman in one hand and the knife in the other. The media would justly be beside itself with outrage and would surely present this as even more damning proof of his racism than his "good people on both sides" asseveration.

And what would be said of the artist? Anyone so full of race hatred as to paint such a repellant picture would doubtless never find work again in this country.

Well, this scenario happened, actually, although some of the details were otherwise. It wasn't Donald Trump who hired the artist, it was Barack Obama, and it wasn't a white woman who decapitated a black woman in the painting. It was vice-versa, and that, judging by the media silence about the episode, presumably makes everything okay.

Painted by Kehinde Wiley

This painting is all the more jarring because the artist's entire oeuvre consists almost exclusively of paintings of black subjects, except for a few scenes taken from the Bible and this beheaded white woman. Why did the artist, Kehinde Wiley, make her white, and why did the Obamas commission Ms. Wiley to do their own portraits?

Perhaps there's a sufficient explanation. I'm certainly willing to give the Obamas (and Ms Wiley) the benefit of the doubt in this, but that's, I guess, the point. Why are President Trump's critics so loath to give him the benefit of the doubt?

In any case, the shameful one-sidedness of the media's treatment of political leaders, particularly by liberal cable outlets like CNN and MSNBC, the hostility they show toward those they oppose and the refuge they afford those they favor, brought to mind a few other examples of hypocrisy among our progressive politicos and media. For example:

• The Democrats have been demanding something be done about protecting the "Dreamers", people who were brought here illegally when they were children. President Trump offered the Democrats not only to protect the Dreamers, he offered them and a million other illegals a path to citizenship. It was more than the Democrats would have ever asked for, but they turned the offer down, ostensibly because the president asked that he be given in return the border wall and an end to chain migration. Their refusal gave the lie to their claim to deeply care about the Dreamers' plight and looked suspiciously as if they don't really want a solution for the Dreamers if Mr. Trump would get the credit for it.
• The media and Mr. Trump's political opponents have been condemning him and the GOP for months for undermining public confidence in the FBI by raising questions about corrupt political intrigues among the Bureau's hierarchy. Yet ever since it was revealed that the FBI had mishandled information they'd received about Nikolas Cruz, the Florida school shooter, the progressive media has been chattering incessantly about FBI incompetence. Evidently, when the Republicans are critical of the FBI liberals don their FBI ball caps and rush to the defense of law enforcement, but when it suits their own purposes for themselves to be critical they drop the hammer, and if public confidence in the venerable institution suffers that's too bad.
• For weeks the media has been running stories about how White House advisor Rob Porter had access to classified information even though he was denied a security clearance because of allegations of domestic abuse. Giving someone without a security clearance access to classified information has been cited as a serious breach of security and evidence of a careless, reckless, incompetent White House. Yet many of these same critics doubtless promoted the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton who as Secretary of State grossly, and arguably criminally, mishandled classified information by putting it on her personal server and making it accessible to every intelligence agency and amateur hacker in the world.
• There's been ongoing criticism of President Trump in the wake of the Florida school murders for not doing something serious about gun control, yet President Obama had a Democratic House and Senate in the first two years of his administration and could have pushed through any legislation he wanted but did nothing about gun control. In fact, it was during these two years that the Democrats passed the highly unpopular Affordable Care act, and the administration enacted numerous executive orders and bureaucratic regulations. The Democrats surely could have passed gun control legislation had they wished to, but they did nothing and received little to no media criticism for their negligence.
• Recently, the media has been titillated over the prospect that details of an illicit affair a decade ago between Donald Trump and a porn film performer might be forthcoming. This, we're told, is further evidence, if any were needed, that Mr. Trump is unsuited for the dignity of the office he holds. Perhaps so, but these claims would be far more persuasive were they not coming from some of the same people who idolized President Clinton who not only carried on numerous extra-marital affairs, but did so while he was president, and did so in the Oval Office of the White House.

There are many more instances of this sort of thing, but I leave it to readers to come up with their own examples. I'll just note that it's very difficult to give any weight to any claims made by people who criticize and condemn the behavior of representatives of the party they disdain while ignoring or winking at the same behavior by members of their own party.

They certainly give the impression that it's not racism, or Dreamers, or public confidence in the FBI, or national security, or gun control, or the dignity of the office they care about. Rather, what matters to them is not the issue itself but whether the issue provides them a cudgel with which to pummel their political adversaries.

Pinker on Identity Politics

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker was interviewed recently by Adam Rubenstein of the Weekly Standard and had some interesting things to say on a couple of topics. The interview touches on Pinker's views on identity politics, ideological intolerance in the modern university, humanism and a few others.

Here's the opening exchange between Rubenstein and Pinker on the matter of identity politics:

Adam Rubenstein: If “reason” is to be “the currency of our discourse,” what’s the future of identity politics? Is identity politics based in reason? Your new book touches on the issue, but cursorily. Could you provide more of an explanation of identity politics, where it comes from, where it’s going, and how we should think about it?

Steven Pinker: Identity politics is the syndrome in which people’s beliefs and interests are assumed to be determined by their membership in groups, particularly their sex, race, sexual orientation, and disability status. Its signature is the tic of preceding a statement with “As a,” as if that bore on the cogency of what was to follow. Identity politics originated with the fact that members of certain groups really were disadvantaged by their group membership, which forged them into a coalition with common interests: Jews really did have a reason to form the Anti-Defamation League.

Pinker touches on something in this that has been a pet peeve of mine for many years. It's annoying to hear people say something like, "As a gay man I believe X is true", or "As a woman I believe Y is true". The implication is that were one not gay or a woman they wouldn't believe X or Y, or the implication may be that the individual has several identities but only when speaking from the gay or female identity do they believe X or Y. This is nonsensical. If a proposition is true it's true regardless of one's "identity".

Let X stand for "gays should be allowed to marry". If X is true everyone should think it true regardless of whether they're gay or not. For someone to say, "as a gay man, I think gays should be allowed to marry" implies that were he not gay he might not think this, which is at best self-defeating since it excuses non-gays from believing that gays should be allowed to marry.

Anyway, Pinker continues:

But when it spreads beyond the target of combatting discrimination and oppression, it [identity politics] is an enemy of reason and Enlightenment values, including, ironically, the pursuit of justice for oppressed groups. For one thing, reason depends on there being an objective reality and universal standards of logic. As Chekhov said, there is no national multiplication table, and there is no racial or LGBT one either.

This isn’t just a matter of keeping our science and politics in touch with reality; it gives force to the very movements for moral improvement that originally inspired identity politics. The slave trade and the Holocaust are not group-bonding myths; they objectively happened, and their evil is something that all people, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, must acknowledge and work to prevent in the future.

Even the aspect of identity politics with a grain of justification—that a man cannot truly experience what it is like to be a woman, or a white person an African American—can subvert the cause of equality and harmony if it is taken too far, because it undermines one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them. In this regard nothing could be more asinine than outrage against “cultural appropriation”—as if it’s a bad thing, rather than a good thing, for a white writer to try to convey the experiences of a black person, or vice versa.

Here again Pinker touches on an irritant in our common life. When others say that because you are not like them (in terms of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.) therefore you can't understand what it's like to be them they're building a wall between themselves and you.

Such walls short-circuit sympathy and isolate us from each other. They Balkanize us into different us/them groups in which sympathy for, and empathy with, outsiders diminishes and resentments and hostility are fostered.

Identity politics is based partly on the postmodern notion that truth is perspectival, that because different identity groups have different perspectives on the world therefore they have different truths.

This can't be correct, though. Southern slave-owners had a different perspective than did their slaves on the morality of slavery, but slavery is objectively wrong regardless of the perspective one has on it.

The Jewish victims of the Holocaust had a different perspective on the morality of the Final Solution than did the Nazis, but regardless of those different perspectives genocide is a moral abomination.

Pinker concludes his thoughts on the folly of identity politics with this: "Any hopes for human improvement are better served by encouraging a recognition of universal human interests than by pitting group against group in zero-sum competition."

In other words, we'd do far better as a society to emphasize those things which make us alike rather than stressing those things which make us different. I often find myself in disagreement with Pinker, but with what he has said on this topic I couldn't agree more.

Panpsychism (Pt. III)

In an article at Aeon philosopher Philip Goff gives several examples of cosmic fine-tuning and asserts that these properties of the universe, and the dozens of others he could have cited, are so extraordinary that they demand an explanation. He offers three possible reasons for this phenomenon: Theism, the multiverse, and his own view, panpsychism, which is the view that the universe is itself a conscious entity and managed to organize itself so that it would have the properties it does.

Goff, rightly, I think, rejects the multiverse explanation and, wrongly, I think, also rejects theism.

I argued Friday that Goff's argument against accepting theism as an explanation for cosmic fine-tuning doesn't succeed because it's based on an unwarranted assumption, namely that a perfectly good and loving Creator would have perforce created a universe without suffering in it. This can only be assumed, however, if we know apriori that there are no good reasons for allowing suffering and this is something we simply do not, nor cannot, know.

His argument against the multiverse - the hypothesis that there are an infinity of different universes of which ours is one - is a criticism that has been in circulation among philosophers for quite a while and is widely employed:

Assuming there is a multiverse, you would expect our Universe to be a fairly typical member of the universe ensemble, or at least a fairly typical member of the universes containing observers (since we couldn’t find ourselves in a universe in which observers are impossible).

However, in The Road to Reality (2004), the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated that in the kind of multiverse most favoured by contemporary physicists – based on inflationary cosmology and string theory – for every observer who observes a smooth, orderly universe as big as ours, there are 10 to the power of 10123 who observe a smooth, orderly universe that is just 10 times smaller. And by far the most common kind of observer would be a ‘Boltzmann’s brain’: a functioning brain that has by sheer fluke emerged from a disordered universe for a brief period of time.

If Penrose is right, then the odds of an observer in the multiverse theory finding itself in a large, ordered universe are astronomically small. And hence the fact that we are ourselves such observers is powerful evidence against the multiverse theory.

Very well. So, what's his alternative? Goff proposes that we accept the hypothesis that the universe is itself a conscious being. His argument is a bit long but these paragraphs capture its essence:

Ockham’s razor is the principle that, all things being equal, more parsimonious theories – that is to say, theories with relatively few postulations – are to be preferred. Is it not a great cost in terms of parsimony to ascribe fundamental consciousness to the Universe? Not at all. The physical world must have some nature, and physics leaves us completely in the dark as to what it is. It is no less parsimonious to suppose that the Universe has a consciousness-involving nature than that it has some non-consciousness-involving nature. If anything, the former proposal is more parsimonious insofar as it is continuous with the only thing we really know about the nature of matter: that brains have consciousness.

Having said that....If the Universe, way back in the Planck epoch, fine-tuned the laws to bring about life billions of years in its future, then the Universe must in some sense be aware of the consequences of its actions.....I suggest that the agentive cosmopsychist [i.e. one who holds the view that the universe is a conscious mind] postulate a basic disposition of the Universe to represent the complete potential consequences of each of its possible actions.

In a sense, this is a simple postulation, but it cannot be denied that the complexity involved in these mental representations detracts from the parsimony of the view. However, this commitment is arguably less profligate than the postulations of the theist or the multiverse theorist. The theist postulates a supernatural agent while the agentive cosmopsychist postulates a natural agent. The multiverse theorist postulates an enormous number of distinct, unobservable entities: the many universes. The agentive cosmopsychist merely adds to an entity that we already believe in: the physical Universe. And most importantly, agentive cosmopsychism avoids the false predictions of its two rivals.

I've argued in the past that it's not unreasonable to believe that the universe is fundamentally mental rather than material, so in a sense I agree with Goff, but he's going beyond this to essentially make the pantheistic claim that the universe is itself God, rather than a product of God's mind. For Goff the universe creates itself and is aware of itself. It somehow brings itself into being and then structures itself by fixing the laws of physics, all the while foreseeing the goal of producing intelligent life.

He believes that this view is more parsimonious than theism, but I'm not so sure. He bases his claim in part on the fact that we know that matter, in the form of brains, is conscious, but he seems to assume that it therefore follows that consciousness is a universal property of matter.

Perhaps, but perhaps instead consciousness is a property of a particular level of complexity or configuration of matter or a property of matter plus soul or mind. Dead brains, after all, still possess all of the matter they possessed before they died, but they're not conscious.

In other words, we have no reason to think that it's matter simpliciter which possesses consciousness.

In any case, the Law of Parsimony states that it's not just the simplest explanation that's to be preferred but rather the simplest explanation with the greatest explanatory power, and it's just not clear to me how Goff's theory explains how brute matter could have created both itself and the laws which govern itself, become conscious, be able to pursue goals, and consciously and deliberately organize itself into living beings.

This is a lot to have to accept in order to avoid the conclusion that the God of theism exists and fine-tuned the universe for life, especially if one's only reason for rejecting the theistic hypothesis is Goff's argument from suffering.

Like the argument that the universe is a simulation created by a computer programmer in some other world, the notion that the universe is itself God is an attempt to account for the intelligence needed to adequately explain the astonishing level of precision in the parameters of the cosmos necessary for life to exist without invoking the God of theism.

I sincerely wonder why theism is thought to be so odious that intelligent men will resort to such strange hypotheses in order to avoid it.

How We Can Save Our Kids

In the wake of the terrible tragedy in Florida on Wednesday there's been another round of talk about why these shootings happen and what can be done to stop them. I've talked in the past about what I think is wrong with our culture that these things happen, most recently here, so I want to focus in this post on one thing that can be done to stop them.

Among the steps that have been proposed by commenters, three focus on guns:

1. We can make it illegal to manufacture, sell or own guns, and try to eliminate guns from society.
   
2. We can pass more laws restricting gun ownership.
   
3. We can loosen gun regulations so that school officials and some staff can have access to firearms.
   

Number one would be the ideal, of course, but it's virtually impossible. If gun manufacture was banned in the U.S. manufacturers would simply move off-shore, and guns, like drugs, would still be available to those who wanted them, which would be primarily thugs and other criminals.

Number two is pointless as long as criminals still have guns. Although I would certainly support laws that make it illegal for anyone under 21 to purchase a large magazine semi-automatic rifle, it's foolish to prevent responsible adult gun owners from protecting themselves as long as criminals still have the means to terrorize the innocent. People have a right to defend themselves and their families, and any government that takes that right away and leaves people defenseless against armed criminals makes itself ipso facto an illegitimate government.

Number three may not be ideal, but in my mind it's certainly the most practical of the three options. I once noted on Viewpoint that:

[Researchers have found] that greater efforts to restrict guns leads, counter, perhaps, to conventional opinion, to more gun crime. [These researchers] make a good case that the "gun-free zones" set up around schools are a farce. Such feel-good nostrums accomplish nothing more than to assure the psychopaths who roam the halls of every large public school in the nation that if they decide to go on a killing rampage there'll be no one able to hinder them.

The allure of exerting total, unstoppable power over others is irresistable to certain twisted minds, and "gun-free zones" don't do anything to keep them from bringing weapons into schools to carry out their horrific fantasies. They only prevent school staff from being in a position to stop them once the carnage begins.

Anyone who smuggles a gun into a school can massacre students for a long time before police arrive, and despite all the precautions that schools take to prevent such tragedies there's really no practical way an unarmed staff can prevent a student who wishes to murder his fellow students from actually doing it.

As a parent of a high school student I know I would feel better if I knew that at least some appropriate school personnel had been thoroughly trained in the use of firearms, particularly in a school environment, and were allowed to keep weapons, under lock but easily accessible, in the building. If they were, the chances that someone would attempt, or succeed in an attempt, to perpetrate mass murder in the halls and lobbies of a school would be greatly diminished.

Some people will understandably blanche at the idea of having guns in school, but the fact is they're already there. Some schools have armed guards roaming their hallways and some have armed kids roaming the hallways. A lot of schools probably have both. The question is not whether we will have guns in our schools - we already do. The question is who in the school do we want to have access to them.

Public school administrators, provided they are trained and licensed, should be allowed to keep firearms under lock and key in their office and properly trained classroom teachers should be allowed to do likewise. Had anyone in any of the schools that have been targeted by the deranged nihilists among us been armed many young lives could have been saved. In almost every school shooting the shooter was confronted by unarmed teachers or administrators who died trying to protect their students. Had they been trained and armed the outcome may have been much different.

Guns are probably here to stay in our culture, and as long as they are criminals and psychopaths will be able to get them. The answer is not to declare schools off-limits to guns, but to let those who would commit mayhem in a school know that they would probably not get far before they were challenged by someone who could shoot back.

Not only would armed faculty be more likely to stop the carnage once it starts, the knowledge that faculty, or at least some of them, are armed would have a substantial deterrent effect on at least some who may be inclined to carry out their odious crimes. It's only because most school killers know that they'll be able to have their way for at least fifteen minutes before the police arrive to stop them that they even try it. If they knew that they'd have only a minute or two they might not think those few seconds worth the cost.

It's very sad that we've sunk as a society to the point where we need armed and trained adults in our schools (and churches) but that's where we are. If someone had been allowed to confront Nikolas Cruz with a weapon in the halls of that Florida school building on Wednesday it may have saved many young lives and prevented untold grief. That, it seems to me, is the direction in which we should move until the day comes when we need no longer fear to send our children to school.

Panpsychism (Pt. II)

As we discussed in yesterday's post philosopher Philip Goff argues that the exquisite fine-tuning of cosmic parameters, constants and forces demands an explanation.

He states that there are three live options, theism, the multiverse, and panpsychism. Goff dismisses the first two because, he claims, they make false predictions.

He writes:

Both of these theories are able to explain the fine-tuning. The problem is that, on the face of it, they also make false predictions. For the theist, the false prediction arises from the problem of evil. If one were told that a given universe was created by an all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful being, one would not expect that universe to contain enormous amounts of gratuitous suffering.

One might not be surprised to find it contained intelligent life, but one would be surprised to learn that life had come about through the gruesome process of natural selection. Why would a loving God who could do absolutely anything choose to create life that way? Prima facie theism predicts a universe that is much better than our own and, because of this, the flaws of our Universe count strongly against the existence of God.

Goff's reason for rejecting the theistic explanation for cosmic fine-tuning is that were God the creator of the universe we would expect Him to have created a different universe than what we find. But there are several things wrong with this. Here are three:

First, no philosopher that I've read maintains that God, assuming He exists, can do "absolutely anything." He can't, for example, violate His own nature. He can't cause it to happen that He never existed, and so on. But I'm willing to grant for the sake of discussion that it'd be within God's power to create a world with less suffering than this one possesses (although some philosophers dispute this). Second, Goff's argument can be stated in the following syllogism:

1. If a perfectly loving God created the universe there'd be no suffering.
2. There is suffering.
3. Therefore, a perfectly loving God didn't create the universe.

This may seem sound, but it's not because there's no reason to accept the first premise. Goff's syllogism might better be modified to read:

1'. If a perfectly loving God created the universe there'd be no suffering unless God had a good reason for allowing it.
2'. God had no good reason for allowing suffering.
3'. Suffering exists.
4'. Therefore, a perfectly loving God did not create the universe.

The problem with this, of course, is premise 2'. Why should anyone believe it to be true? We're hardly in a position to know all the reasons a God might have for doing whatever He does, thus this argument fails to establish its conclusion.

Goff acknowledges that his brief against the theistic explanation is not a "knockdown" argument, he concedes that the theist could always come up with reasons why God might permit evil, but he avers that this need to come up with reasons is not predicted by theism and makes the theist argument a bit ad hoc. This is all true, but it's somewhat beside the point. The problem with his original argument against the theistic hypothesis is that it contains an unwarranted premise which causes his argument to unravel.

The third problem with Goff's argument is that the claim that God created the universe entails that the universe was created by an extremely powerful, extremely intelligent, purposeful (i.e. personal), and transcendent being. Any being which creates a universe must have at least those properties.

Since Goff's argument from suffering fails to offer compelling reasons to reject this claim, it remains reasonable to maintain that, in lieu of a better explanation, the universe is the product of such a being while holding in abeyance the matter of whether and to what extent the Creator is good since, unlike the aforementioned attributes, goodness is not a trait of the Creator that's deducible from the facts of nature.

In other words, the fine-tuning of the universe may not permit us to draw conclusions about the Creator's goodness, but it still points to an intelligent engineer whose attributes certainly describe a being very much like the God of theism.

The most we can infer from the suffering we find in the world is that the Creator may have reasons of which we are ignorant and/or that His goodness is not something we can deduce from the creation but must be derived from other resources (e.g. scripture, theology or philosophy).

There's no compelling ground, however, for the conclusion that the universe was not created by a very powerful, very intelligent, transcendent, and personal being, and given Goff's two alternatives, it seems - in my opinion at least - that theism is much the best of the options.

I'll explain why I think the others fall short on Monday. Tomorrow I want to post on what I think is the best way to diminish the number and slaughter of school shootings.

Panpsychism (Pt. I)

Philosopher Philip Goff has an interesting article at Aeon in which he considers three possible explanations for the remarkable fine-tuning of cosmic parameters and constants. The three he discusses are that the universe was designed by God (Theism), that the universe is one of an infinity of different worlds (multiverse), and that the universe is itself conscious and designed itself (panpsychism).

He rejects the first two and embraces the third for reasons he discusses in his article, but more about that later. First, let's review his description of the problem:

In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be possible, the numbers in basic physics – for example, the strength of gravity, or the mass of the electron – must have values falling in a certain range. And that range is an incredibly narrow slice of all the possible values those numbers can have. It is therefore incredibly unlikely that a universe like ours would have the kind of numbers compatible with the existence of life. But, against all the odds, our Universe does.

Here are a few of examples of this fine-tuning for life:

• The strong nuclear force (the force that binds together the elements in the nucleus of an atom) has a value of 0.007. If that value had been 0.006 or less, the Universe would have contained nothing but hydrogen. If it had been 0.008 or higher, the hydrogen would have fused to make heavier elements. In either case, any kind of chemical complexity would have been physically impossible. And without chemical complexity there can be no life.
• The physical possibility of chemical complexity is also dependent on the masses of the basic components of matter: electrons and quarks. If the mass of a down quark had been greater by a factor of 3, the Universe would have contained only hydrogen. If the mass of an electron had been greater by a factor of 2.5, the Universe would have contained only neutrons: no atoms at all, and certainly no chemical reactions.
• Gravity seems a momentous force but it is actually much weaker than the other forces that affect atoms, by about 1036. If gravity had been only slightly stronger, stars would have formed from smaller amounts of material, and consequently would have been smaller, with much shorter lives. A typical sun would have lasted around 10,000 years rather than 10 billion years, not allowing enough time for the evolutionary processes that produce complex life. Conversely, if gravity had been only slightly weaker, stars would have been much colder and hence would not have exploded into supernovae. This also would have rendered life impossible, as supernovae are the main source of many of the heavy elements that form the ingredients of life.

Some take the fine-tuning to be simply a basic fact about our Universe: fortunate perhaps, but not something requiring explanation. But like many scientists and philosophers, I find this implausible. In The Life of the Cosmos (1999), the physicist Lee Smolin has estimated that, taking into account all of the fine-tuning examples considered, the chance of life existing in the Universe is 1 in 10229, from which he concludes:

In my opinion, a probability this tiny is not something we can let go unexplained. Luck will certainly not do here; we need some rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case.

So far, I think Goff is correct. To just write the fine-tuning off as a brute fact, a given that requires no further inquiry is a science-stopper. It's an attempt to minimize the significance of facts that may lead some to draw very uncomfortable conclusions.

Goff then writes this:

The two standard explanations of the fine-tuning are theism and the multiverse hypothesis. Theists postulate an all-powerful and perfectly good supernatural creator of the Universe, and then explain the fine-tuning in terms of the good intentions of this creator. Life is something of great objective value; God in Her goodness wanted to bring about this great value, and hence created laws with constants compatible with its physical possibility.

The multiverse hypothesis postulates an enormous, perhaps infinite, number of physical universes other than our own, in which many different values of the constants are realised. Given a sufficient number of universes realising a sufficient range of the constants, it is not so improbable that there will be at least one universe with fine-tuned laws.

He proceeds to offer his critique of these two explanations before explaining why he opts for panpsychism (the view that the universe itself possesses consciousness). His argument against the multiverse is compelling, but his reasons for rejecting theism are not, and his alternative that the universe somehow designed itself in the first 10^-43 second of its existence is very difficult to credit.

We'll look at some of his arguments against theism and the multiverse and for panpsychism over the next couple of days.

For Valentine's Day

A number of years ago I wrote a post on C.S. Lewis' book titled Four Loves because I enjoyed especially his treatment of friendship. He said so many interesting things on the topic that I thought it might be appropriate to once again share some of them with Viewpoint readers on this Valentine's Day. Here are some of his thoughts:

• "Nothing is less like a friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to each other about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best."
• "Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)."
• "The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends.
  
  In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer."
• "That is why those pathetic people who simply "want friends" can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be 'I see nothing and I don't care about the truth; I only want a Friend,' no Friendship can arise - though Affection, of course, may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and friendship must be about something."
• "A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally when alliance becomes necessary; will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies, do what he can for our widows and orphans. But such good offices are not the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost interruptions. They are in one way relevant to it, in another not. Relevant, because you would be a false friend if you would not do them when the need arose; irrelevant, because the role of benefactor always remains accidental, even a little alien to that of Friend.
  
  It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection's need to be needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have been necessary - and now, for heaven's sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude is no enrichment to this love. The stereotyped 'Don't mention it' here expresses what we really feel.
  
  The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it had to be devoted to affairs!"
• "In most societies at most periods Friendships will be between men and men and women and women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship. Where men are educated and women are not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about."
• "When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass - may pass in the first half hour - into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other, or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later."

This last is particularly interesting. If Lewis is correct then the common notion that men and women can be "just friends" is something of a delusion. If a man and a woman really are friends, in the sense of the word that Lewis explicates, then it's almost inevitable that they'll wind up being more than friends.

Lewis is famous for his trenchant insights into human nature. His insights into friendship do nothing to diminish that reputation.

Naturalism and Reason

Human reason poses an interesting problem for metaphysical naturalists of both a modern and a postmodern inclination. Metaphysical naturalists hold that only nature exists and that human beings are simply the product of impersonal forces. Naturalists who embrace a modern or Enlightenment worldview argue that reason is our most trustworthy guide to truth while postmoderns assert that reason is an inadequate guide to truth.

Yet both must employ reason in order to make their respective cases. The modern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it's trustworthy, which is surely question-begging, and the postmodern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to conclude that it's not trustworthy at all, which is surely self-refuting.

In neither case can it be said that the modern or the postmodern is thinking rationally. We can have confidence that our reason generally leads us to truth, especially metaphysical truth, only on the assumption that God exists, is Himself rational, and has created us in his image.

If we join the naturalist in assuming God does not exist then we must conclude that our rational faculties are the product of processes which have evolved those faculties to suit us for survival, not for the attainment of true beliefs. As Harvard's Steven Pinker puts it, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not."

Here's philosopher Patricia Churchland on the same subject: "Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

And philosopher John Gray: "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth."

Each of these thinkers embraces metaphysical naturalism, but on that view there's no basis for thinking that their reason is a trustworthy guide to truth which makes their claim that reason isn't a trustworthy guide to truth itself untrustworthy. What a muddle.

Anyway, a trio of philosophers discuss the conundrum in which naturalists finds themselves in this video:

The same argument is an integral part of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism which he discusses in this video: