Speaking Biologically

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, let us for a moment assume that naturalism, the view that nature is all there is, is correct and that humanity is the product of a long process of blind evolutionary development. If so, let's further consider the question of what men and women are for.

That is, given that we're just evolutionarily advanced mammals what "purpose" do we fulfill? Of course, I put "purpose" in quotes because on the view we're considering there actually is, nor can there be, no genuine purpose for humanity, but let's play along with the idea anyway.

Well, speaking purely biologically, male humans have evolved to serve two primary purposes: First, to spread their genes as far and wide as they can and second, to fight for territory and resources. Any reading of history will confirm that these have always been, and still are, the two main drivers of male behavior.

In modern times, in what we call the civilized world, these behaviors have been sublimated somewhat by sports and other competitive endeavors, but they still underlie most of male behavior.

What about females? Speaking purely biologically - and on naturalism that's pretty much all there is - women have evolved to attract males for mating and to bear and raise the young that result.

This is, of course, a horrid claim in today's PC climate in which any suggestion that the sexual subordination and even oppression of women is natural is guaranteed to provoke howls of outrage, but it's nevertheless correct all the same. That is, it's correct if naturalism is true, and there's a piquant irony in this.

Many of those who would be most repulsed by this description of male and female roles hold to a naturalistic worldview even so. They reject the only metaphysical position which could grant a greater dignity and purpose for both men and women. They reject the traditional theistic view that we are created not solely by natural forces, but by a God in whose image we are.

Having rejected this view they're left with naturalism and are therefore left with the evolutionary view whose consequences they ironically deplore.

Moreover, on naturalism, there's no basis for charging any behavior with being immoral since there's no moral law to be violated. Thus no matter how distastefully men may behave toward women, the most we can say about that behavior is that it offends certain social conventions. We can't say that it's morally wrong.

So, if naturalism is true men who sexually exploit women are simply following an unpleasant evolutionary imperative. Modern women may not like it, but it's hard to see what grounds they have for complaint as long as they themselves continue to adhere to the naturalistic, evolutionary paradigm.

Objectifying Women

Opening the newspaper we're often confronted with what seems to be an epidemic of mistreatment of women in our culture. Stories of a campus rape culture, spousal abuse, and other examples of terrible violence perpetrated against women seem to abound, but the question this all raises is "why?". Why do more men today, more than in previous generations, seem to hold women in such low esteem? Why are women so much more likely to be objectified today than in our grandparents day?

I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the problem is a result of the moral revolution that took place in the 1960s and 70s concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.

During those decades pornography was mainstreamed and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Three generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images. This has likely had several undesirable effects. First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's so much more to be seen just about anywhere one looks than merely a shapely ankle.

Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who's not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images. Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be more like the women they see portrayed in salacious movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women. A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role, and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships. The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened and trouble results.

At the same time that pornography exploded in the 60s and 70s, the advent of birth control pills allowed sex to become disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding of them any kind of permanent obligation. This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was no sense in buying a cow as long as the milk was free.

People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they're not respected. Respect may be feigned, of course, as long as the benefit is imminent but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting respect often ebbs and the woman often finds herself treated accordingly.

Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to subordinate their natural impulses and to value hearth and family, but our entire culture has conspired in the last forty years to minimize and deride that lesson. So, when many a modern man, unfettered by any profound commitment to a particular woman and children, grows accustomed to the woman he's "dating" she'll begin to bore him, and it won't be long before his eye is cast elsewhere in search of another potential source of sexual excitement.

Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality in the 60s and 70s was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint, even insulting, for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her. Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and nurture them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

The more vocal feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible.

Some women, oddly, have seemed eager to reinforce this corrosive image of themselves as being just as coarse and vulgar as men - a phenomenon we witnessed in the Women's March on Washington after Donald Trump's election. This, too, dehumanized women by continuing the erosion of the esteem in which their gender had once upon a time been held among men.

As with sex so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a Bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent. Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it.

When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling many more men onto the other side of the line than would have been there otherwise.

This affects women as much as men, if not moreso, because women are often the victims of male violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger and aggression.

It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him if she does.

Hitting the Wall

Science writer John Horgan at Scientific American explores the topic of whether scientific discovery has finally "hit a wall". Horgan wrote a book on this question several years ago titled The End of Science, and he observes that important discoveries are diminishing even as research efforts are multiplying.

It's as if science is approaching an asymptote.

Perhaps mankind has indeed come to the end of what can be learned, but historically the belief that something couldn't be known was often overturned in surprising was soon thereafter. In the 19th century French philosopher August Comte wrote that the chemical composition of the sun would be forever unknowable to us.

A few years later the development of spectroscopic analysis enabled researchers to discover that the sun was mostly hydrogen. This was followed by the discovery of a completely new element on the sun, helium, which led to the realization that the process of nuclear fusion was the source of the enormous energy the sun was producing.

Examples like this and others should make us cautious about predicting the end of discovery.

Perhaps a better way to think of the diminution of scientific progress is not in terms of hitting a wall but in terms of having taken the wrong exit off the interstate and winding up in a cul-de-sac.

Think of the interstate as the metaphysical highway which facilitated so much of the progress of the last five hundred years. Science prospered for centuries because it was nourished by the assumptions of a theistic worldview – that the universe was intelligible because it was created by an intelligent Being and therefore might yield its secrets to reason, that it was not itself sacred and was therefore a fit object of study, and that being a gift of God it was worth studying.

Rodney Stark has written that of the fifty two most productive scientists at the start of the scientific revolution fifty of them were Christians and the majority of these were devout. I doubt that the same could be said today and perhaps the difference in worldview makes a significant difference in one's approach to science.

These theistic assumptions and others were the metaphysical drivers of the work of those who sought to “think God’s thoughts after Him”, and even after Christianity fell into disfavor in the West in the 19th and 20th century the intellectual momentum it had created carried scientific discovery well into the present era.

But as people like Horgan tell us, that momentum seems to be dissipating, and it could well be because naturalism lacks the metaphysical resources to sustain the scientific enterprise, largely because it rules out apriori the possibility that the world is intelligently, intentionally designed. It rules out the possibility that mind, not matter, is the fundamental reality.

Sometimes in science a shift in the way one looks at problems or looks at the evidence can be exceedingly fruitful. Perhaps a shift in our assumption that materialism is the correct metaphysical foundation for science would be like backing out of the cul-de-sac and getting back out on the highway of scientific progress.

Creepy Infiltration

Progressives are all aflutter at the idea of racially or ethnically diverse neighborhoods. They love the idea of Arabs and Asians, blacks, Hispanics and whites all living harmoniously together, grooving to the varied rhythms of the multicultural mosaic and basking in the glow of their own broad-mindedness and self-righteous virtue.

Well, that is until the mosaic includes a business that's associated with those "distasteful" Christians. Then it's, "There goes the neighborhood".

A recent essay in the very upscale glossy The New Yorker sets a new standard for supercilious bigotry and hypocrisy among elitist progressives. The piece is written by Dan Piepenbring who bemoans the "creepy infiltration" into Manhattan by Chick-fil-a restaurants.

What Piepenbring finds intolerable about Chick-fil-a is that its late founder S. Truett Cathy was explicitly Christian and the Christian ethos filters down through, and permeates, the entire corporation. This insufferable fact makes Piepenbring forget all about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism and all those other admirable progressive virtues. Piepenbring writes:

[T]here’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety.

So why is "suburban piety" a bad thing? Evidently because it consists of a set of values at variance with those of the aristocrats at The New Yorker who, under any other circumstances, would declaim on their love for diversity.

Piepenbring spends time, for instance, criticizing Cathy's opposition to gay marriage, Chick-fil-a's emphasis on community, and, believe it or not, their unconscionable exploitation of cows in their ads, but his and his magazine's ultimate disdain seems directed at the fact that all of this has Christian overtones. Piepenbring and his editors are, when all else has been said, repelled by the notion of a Christian business in Manhattan.

A tweet from the New Yorker makes this pretty clear:

Chick-fil-A’s arrival in New York City feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism.

Yikes! "Infiltration". And "creepy" infiltration, no less, according to the title of the article. And "Pervasive Christian traditionalism", too. Is this a reference to the "distasteful" values of the sort found in every community in this country for the last two hundred years? Why is "pervasive Christian traditionalism" so alarming to the snobbish elites at the magazine?

They don't clearly say, and perhaps I'm making too much of their banal article, but on the other hand ask yourself this question:

If a restaurant chain run by Muslims, Jews, African Americans or Hispanics moved into Manhattan would The New Yorker ever dream of headlining an article on this development by calling it a "creepy infiltration"?

I don't think so either. The business would doubtless be hailed as a wonderful addition to the community mosaic and anyone who thought otherwise would be assumed guilty of bigotry.

Perhaps the same could be said, then, of the attitudes expressed in Piepenbring's silly column.

Aristotle and Nietzsche

Most ethical systems in our contemporary world can probably be subsumed under the names of either Aristotle or Nietzsche. Aristotle thought that human beings had a telos. There was something that man was for, a purpose or an end, for which he was on the earth. Virtuous acts were those which help men achieve their telos. The good life was a life which conformed to the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice - which were objectively right to live by.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, denied that there was any overarching purpose to being human and thus there was no objective moral right or wrong. Morality was all a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how we see things, a matter of individual subjective preference. Thus the ubermensch or overman creates his own values. He rejects the "slave moralities" of theism and embraces the "master morality" of the Promethean man. This is what makes men great, and great men define their own good.

Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche believed in the existence of a personal moral law-giver which fact makes for an odd state of affairs. Aristotle's telos makes no sense unless the purpose or end of mankind is somehow conferred upon man by a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, where would such a purpose come from? But if there's no personal law-giver or telos-giver then neither humanity nor individual men have any purpose, and the "virtues" are just arbitrary conventions.

Nietzsche is right that in the absence of a transcendent, personal law-giver what constitutes a virtue is just a subjective choice. On Nietzsche's subjectivism the virtues extolled by the Nazis are no more wrong nor right than those embraced by St. Francis of Assisi. They're just different.

If theism is correct, however, if there actually is a God who creates man and endows him with a telos then the moral law and the classical virtues, really are objective and obligatory.

So, the way the theist sees it, Aristotle, by denying a transcendent, personal God, was inconsistent but nevertheless right about there being objective moral duties, and the atheist Nietzsche was consistent but wrong in his denial of objective moral right and wrong.

Father of Modern Progressivism

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English thinker who wrote during the turbulent period of civil strife and struggle for power between King Charles I and Parliament. His thoughts on the best political system for avoiding the calamitous consequences of war were put down in a book titled Leviathan (1651).

Leviathan is one of the first books of modern political philosophy. Hobbes' central concern was peace, more specifically how to avoid the calamities of civil war. He began with two principles or axioms from which all else follows:

1. Men are all engaged in a constant struggle for power over others.
2. Men try to avoid death with all their might.

The word "leviathan" means great beast and is used to describe the state or commonwealth as Hobbes saw it. Hobbes' book, historian Peter Ackroyd observes, has been called "the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language."

Be that as it may, Hobbes wrote that the worst calamity to befall men is war. In one famous passage he wrote these lapidary words:

In such condition [i.e. civil war], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In a primitive state of nature, He argues, in which there is no government, the condition of man ...

...is a condition of war of everyone against everyone, in which case everyone is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.

And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.

Men in a state of nature are in a constant struggle each with every other for power and each lives in constant fear of violent death. Hobbes' solution is for all men to yield their own individual sovereignty and rights to that of one sovereign (or a committee) of rulers, whose will would govern all.

Once yielded that sovereignty can never be rescinded. There would be in Hobbes' state no such thing as liberty of conscience, which only leads to conflict and violence. The state will determine what religion people will follow. Justice and truth are whatever the sovereign determines them to be. Nothing the sovereign does can be said to be unjust.

This, of course, is big government on steroids. It's the blueprint for the totalitarianisms of the Nazis and communists of the 20th century, and it's the logical endpoint of liberal progressivism, even if many progressives would balk at going so far.

Progressivism is a faith that a government run by highly educated elites will naturally be the best way to prevent conflicts and protect individual rights. The bigger, more massive the bureaucratic state the more power it has over individual lives, the better able it will be to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens.

Government is the progressive's religion, and its book of Genesis is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

Peter Singer's Utilitarianism

Peter Wicks reviews in First Things a book by Charles C. Camosy titled Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization. Singer, you probably know, is the enfante terrible of ethicists, insisting on a remorselessly consistent application of the utilitarian calculus, particularly in the matter of abortion and infanticide. For example, as Wicks writes:

Singer not only holds that abortion is permissible at all stages of pregnancy, but also notoriously defends the view that there are circumstances in which it would be moral to kill a newborn child.

Singer arrives at this position by running a familiar anti-abortion argument in reverse. The anti-abortion argument is that because a child does not undergo any transformation in the course of being born that could plausibly be supposed to give it a right not to be killed, the unborn have such a right, since to deny this would lead to the absurd conclusion that there is nothing inherently wrong in killing the newly born.

Singer reasons in the other direction and denies that both the unborn and the newly born have a right not to be killed.

In other words, pro-lifers argue that since there's no qualitative difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since killing the born infant is a moral wrong so, too, is killing the unborn. Singer, however, argues that since there's no difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since the unborn has no right to life, neither should the infant. Wick notes that:

Singer believes newborn infants are not yet persons because they lack the rationality and self-awareness required to possess a desire to go on living. It is the thwarting of that desire, rather than the taking of life as such, that he believes accounts for the wrongness of killing in those cases in which killing is wrong.

In the most recent edition of Singer’s Practical Ethics, he writes that strict conditions should be placed on the circumstances in which infanticide is permitted, but “these restrictions should owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.”

This view shocks many, including many who admire Singer for his work on our duties to animals and the world’s poor. But his position is exactly the one that his utilitarian theory implies, and the way that he arrives at that position can serve to illustrate features of the utilitarian approach to ethics that make it attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions that it implies.

There's much more on Singer's utilitarianism at the link and I recommend reading it. Wick is correct when he adds that:

One reason utilitarian ethical thinking proves so persistently attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions it implies is that many of us have difficulty imagining what else ethical thinking could be.

Of course, Singer is an atheist, and if he's right about there being no God then it's hard to imagine how anyone could argue that he's wrong about infanticide in particular and utilitarianism in general. The former follows from the latter, and in a godless world one ethical system is just as useful and defensible as another since they're all matters of arbitrary personal preference.

If a society spurns the notion of a transcendent moral authority which establishes right and wrong and to whom we are accountable then there's no reason to prefer utilitarianism over egoism. Utilitarianism says, after all, that we should maximize human well-being and happiness which means that when I act I should take into consideration how my act will affect the happiness of others, but, given atheism, why should I? Why should I care about the well-being of people I don't even know? Why should I not just care about my own happiness and well-being?

Moreover, once we realize that in a godless world egoism (the belief that my well-being is all that matters) is the default position there's no reason not to adopt an ethic of might-makes-right. There's certainly no reason to think that anyone who does adopt such an ethic is wrong to do so. If promoting my well-being is right then whatever I have the power to do is right to do as long as it makes me happy.

When God is banished from ethics, when the divine commands to love God and love our neighbor are deemed obsolete, then society will ultimately devolve to the ethics of the Roman Coliseum or Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games.

That's why it sounds so foolish when atheists like Singer make moral judgments about the treatment of animals or people. When an atheist asserts that X is wrong or immoral all he's saying is that he doesn't like X, but why should anyone care about what he likes?

To that question the atheist can give no answer.

Where Did They Come From?

Syria's military under President Bashar Assad has been once again accused of launching a sarin gas attack on civilians, killing dozens of women and children.

This is not the first time Assad (or someone in Syria) has perpetrated such an attack and the media is rife with moral condemnations of the malignant demon of Damascus, but there are two questions that have received little attention, as far as I can tell, from folks on the left. Whoever is gassing people with chemicals, whether it's Assad's military, ISIS, or some other group (Since the sarin was dropped from a helicopter via barrel bomb it's doubtful that it was anyone outside of Syrian military), why do they still have these poisons and where did they get them in the first place?

The first question is prompted by the fact that back in 2014, President Obama assured us that the Syrians had disposed of almost all of their chemical weapons and would soon be completely rid of them.

“Eighty-seven percent of Syria’s chemical weapons have already been removed, ” Obama said. “That is a consequence of U.S. leadership. The fact that we didn’t have to fire a missile to get that accomplished is not a failure to uphold international norms, it’s a success,” [but] “it's not a complete success until we have the last 13% out.”

The last of the chemicals was expected to be removed within a couple of months, but if that was so, why is the toxic gas that keeps killing people in Syria still there? It seems that someone in Syria has pretty substantial supplies of poison gas and it also seems that, like his repeated promises that Americans would be able to keep their doctors under Obamacare, Mr. Obama's assurance that Syria had emptied their arsenals of WMD was little more than an expedient falsehood.

The second question arises from the fact that when President Bush, relying on intelligence from every intelligence service in the free world, claimed that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons and that this justified invading and deposing Hussein, his opponents on the left were adamant that Mr. Bush had fabricated the evidence and that there were no such weapons in Iraq.

"Bush lied, people died" became the chant (Why, one wonders, did we never hear "Obama lied, people died" over Syria, or Benghazi? Perhaps the chanters cared less about the deaths and more about scoring points against a Republican president.), and, indeed, those chemical stockpiles were never found. Nevertheless, there were numerous reports at the time that Hussein had secretly shipped his weapons to Syria so as to remove the pretext for an American invasion.

Here's an excerpt from a piece in The Atlantic in 2012:

Although the story [of a secret transfer of chemical weapons to Syria] was met with general neglect or scorn from the U.S. media, the present director of national intelligence, James Clapper, long ago asserted his belief in such a weapons transfer," he writes. That's true. As director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Clapper said in 2003 that satellite images showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq to Syria "unquestionably" show that illicit weapons were moved out of Iraq.

Another frequently cited believer in a Saddam smuggling effort is former Iraqi general George Sada, an adviser to the late dictator. "They were moved by air and by ground, 56 sorties by jumbo, 747, and 27 were moved, after they were converted to cargo aircraft, they were moved to Syria," he told Fox News in 2006.

If this is indeed what happened, it would account for the strong consensus among the world's intelligence agencies that Hussein did in fact possess such weapons as well as why they were never found. It would also explain how Syria came to have the caustic chemicals that are today being rained down upon women and children in Syrian cities and towns.

Of course, don't except the leftists and media progressives who were so dogmatically certain that Bush was a liar to reconsider their judgment, and don't expect them to blame Obama for misleading the world about the fate of these weapons in Syria. Those would be naive expectations.

When the left has ideological enemies to punish and friends to support whatever must be said to accomplish their goals, whether it's objectively true or false, is in their minds completely justified.

Closed Minds

When I was working my way through my undergraduate years universities were considered the one place you could go in our society where you could be sure debate was free and open and all ideas were appropriate topics for consideration. That, however, was then and this is now and today's universities are rapidly earning a reputation as the most closed-minded citadels of bigotry in our culture.

Harvard professor Ruth Wisse elaborates in a column in the Wall Street Journal:

There was a time when people looking for intellectual debate turned away from politics to the university. Political backrooms bred slogans and bagmen; universities fostered educated discussion. But when students in the 1960s began occupying university property like the thugs of regimes America was fighting abroad, the venues gradually reversed. Open debate is now protected only in the polity: In universities, muggers prevail.

Assaults on intellectual and political freedom have been making headlines. Pressure from faculty egged on by Muslim groups induced Brandeis University last month not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women's rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation. This was a replay of 1994, when Brandeis faculty demanded that trustees rescind their decision to award an honorary degree to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In each case, a faculty cabal joined by (let us charitably say) ignorant students promoted the value of repression over the values of America's liberal democracy.

Opponents of free speech have lately chalked up many such victories: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly prevented from speaking at Brown University in November; a lecture by Charles Murray canceled by Azusa Pacific University in April; Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national-security adviser under the George W. Bush administration, harassed earlier this month into declining the invitation by Rutgers University to address this year's convocation.

Most painful to me was the Harvard scene several years ago when the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, celebrating its 50th anniversary, accepted a donation in honor of its former head tutor Martin Peretz, whose contributions to the university include the chair in Yiddish I have been privileged to hold. His enemies on campus generated a "party against Marty" that forced him to walk a gauntlet of jeering students for having allegedly offended Islam, while putting others on notice that they had best not be perceived guilty of association with him.

Universities have not only failed to stand up to those who limit debate, they have played a part in encouraging them. The modish commitment to so-called diversity replaces the ideal of guaranteed equal treatment of individuals with guaranteed group preferences in hiring and curricular offerings.

There's much more at the link. The left uses the American commitment to free speech and the first amendment like the Greeks used the wooden horse at Troy. Free speech is nothing more than a tool to be used as long as it's useful, but as soon as the left has acquired sufficient power they discard the tool and deny it to everyone else. It's a classically fascist tactic and it's rampant on the left.

It'll strike some as strange, perhaps, that one place you can go today and advance almost any idea, as long as it's done respectfully and tastefully, is almost any Christian church. Generally speaking churches are among the most open venues for the free exchange of ideas in our culture, and the reason is not hard to discern. When one believes that those with whom one disagrees are nevertheless people loved and created by God in his image, one is duty-bound to treat them and their ideas with respect.

Moreover, when one has been inculcated with the ideals of humility and kindness, when one believes that God expects this of them in their dealings with others, one is less likely to be arrogant and insulting.

As the modern university drifts further and further from these ideals we might expect that it will become more and more intolerant while, ironically enough, defending its intolerance in the name of tolerance.

Why We Need Philosophy

Robert Tracinski has written some wise words on the topic of the importance of philosophy in these times.

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not each of us adopts a particular philosophical view of life and the world. We do this as individuals and we do it corporately as a society. To study philosophy is to consciously examine the views we're adopting and to ask ourselves and others whether they make sense.

Here's a portion of what Tracinski writes:

The primary purpose of philosophy is to offer guidance for one’s life. It asks questions like: How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? How do we know what is right or wrong? What is the moral purpose of our lives? Do we have a choice over our personality and control over our destiny? When we say philosophy talks about “the meaning of life,” that’s not an understatement. These are the kinds of questions that, depending on the answers, can give meaning and coherence to the course of our lives.

They also make a tangible difference in how we live it. If you don’t think you have control over your life—if you think everything is determined by your genes, upbringing, God or “the system, man”—then you’re not likely to take much action to improve your life. So the questions philosophy deals with are the kind of questions that really matter.

What philosophy does for a single person’s life, it also does for the political life of a nation. If we want to make America great again, for example, we need to know what “greatness” is and how to achieve it. We need to know what government can do, ought to do, and shouldn’t do. All of these questions have huge, life-and-death consequences.

Politics is about ideas and power. Philosophy asks us to follow our ideas to their logical conclusion to see whether those endpoints are really best for ourselves and our nation. It helps us to consider how power should be exercised in a society that aspires to justice.

In that regard, there are whole schools of philosophy—including the ones dominant today—that undermine the role of philosophy itself. They are helping to turn us into an unphilosophical country with an unphilosophical political culture.

The dominant schools today are essentially subjectivist. They encourage you, Oprah-style, to assert “your truth,” which is valid because you feel it, so there’s no need to listen to anyone else. The subjectivists have cultivated a reputation for being “open-minded” and freewheeling, but this actually shuts down discussion. ... this is how we get the peculiar dogmatism of political correctness [according to which]...[t]here is no universal truth, just your ‘perspective,’ as a trans person of color or a left-handed lesbian tugboat worker, or whatever.

And no one else is entitled to question your perspective. It’s true because it’s true for you. If you are aggrieved, the very fact of your grievance validates itself.

If that’s the case, what’s the point of discussing any of it? It’s not for others to question or for you to explain. You just scream out your rage and frustration, and they have to cave.

In other words, so much of what passes for "dialogue" today is merely emotive venting (see the video here, for example). People often are unable or unwilling to give a rational defense of what they believe so they substitute yelling, name-calling, intimidation, censorship, and/or violence, all of which are tacit admissions that they have no good reasons for their beliefs and cannot persuade others to accept them but can only impose them on others by refusing others the opportunity to analyze, debate and promote an alternative point of view.

We see this often whenever matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, evolution, climate change, or politics arise in the classroom or in informal discussions. As soon as an opinion is raised which clashes with conventional orthodoxy, especially the orthodoxy of the left, the dissenter is treated like a heretic or a social leper.

In some cases on university campuses where the heretics have been grad students they've been expelled from their degree programs, when they've been faculty members they've sometimes been denied tenure or their classes have been disrupted. In cases where the dissenters from the approved opinion have been invited speakers they've often been disinvited or shouted down or even assaulted.

Tracinski continues:

When we disregard philosophy, when we don’t used reasoned debate to examine our moral and political assumptions, then all that’s left is some kind of appeal to emotion. When you appeal to emotion, as most people do these days, then the only people you can gather to your side are those already inclined to feel the same emotions you do. You end up appealing only to people like you, to those with the same background and upbringing.

College-educated blue staters will agree with college-educated blue-staters. Blue-collar red-staters agree with blue-collar red-staters.

Actually, in today’s politics, the responses are even narrower, because so much of the political debate is based on an appeal to our emotions about a particular person. Do you love or hate Hillary Clinton? Do you love or hate Donald Trump? That’s all you need to know to determine where you stand in a partisan fight, and even on public policy.

The end of the road for the appeal to emotion is the kind of tribalism and cult of personality we see in today’s politics.

The only cure for it is philosophy.

Dads Make a Difference

One of the chief concerns of many Americans, including those who are socially liberal, is domestic violence and abuse. The irony of this concern is that the high rates of domestic turmoil we've witnessed over the last several decades may largely be the result of successful attempts by liberals to weaken the traditional family structure.

W. Bradford Wilcox at The Federalist has a column in which he in effect makes the politically incorrect claim that the safest place in our society for women and children is in a home in which the biological father is present. He writes:

[V]iolence against women (not to mention their intimates and children) is markedly rarer in families headed by married parents regardless of how well-off or well-educated mom is.

We can speculate about the precise mechanisms—is it the commitment, the stability, the mutual support, the kinship ties, or the sexual fidelity marriage fosters more than its alternatives?—that accounts for this empirical link. But what should be clear to analysts willing to follow the data wherever it leads is this: a healthy marriage seems to matter more than money when it comes to minimizing the scourge of domestic violence in American families.

Wilcox develops his argument by citing a study that includes this graph:

The disparity depicted in this chart is rather startling. Wilcox adds:

[H]omes headed by never-married, separated, or divorced mothers are about five times more likely to expose children to domestic violence, compared to homes headed by married, biological parents. What’s more: family structure outweighs education, income, and race in predicting the odds that children witness domestic violence in the home.

Women and children are in much greater jeopardy when the male in the household is not married to the woman than when the male is the woman's husband and the father of her children.

The left has been telling us since the sixties that the traditional family is an oppressive, patriarchal social structure that women and children are often better off without and that other arrangements are at least as conducive to their flourishing as is the traditional structure. Well, we've largely abandoned the traditional structure, the data are in, and the results are not anything the left is likely to boast about.

Historical Smoking

This past weekend my wife and I thought about going to go see Chappaquiddick, the new release that documents Ted Kennedy's responsibility for the death of a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969. Kopechne was a passenger in a car Kennedy drove off a bridge into a shallow pond near the town of Chappaquiddick.

He escaped and could have rescued her but chose not to. She was trapped in the car for several hours until all the air was used up and she asphyxiated. It must've been a horrible, terrifying death and Kennedy did nothing to help her.

I changed my mind about going, however, when I heard a promo for the movie on the radio that warned viewers that the film had "disturbing images, strong language, and ... historical smoking." Historical smoking?

Well, I was completely triggered by the thought of seeing people smoking, even historical people, and fearing that I might freak out in the movie theater when somebody lit up a cigarette on screen, I thought I better not go. Watching someone from 1969 smoke would be an emotionally wrenching experience, and the very thought of it induced something of a panic attack. I wanted to retreat to a safe space somewhere with my emotional support parrot to soothe my anxieties.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how much historical drinking there is in the film - and historical dope-smoking. Being that the movie's about the Kennedys I'll bet it's a lot, but apparently the people who wrote the promo weren't worried that drinking and dope-smoking, even historical drinking and dope-smoking, would freak anybody out since the promo doesn't mention it.

So we didn't go. Besides, I know how the story ends. The creep who lets a girl drown because he's either a coward or worried about his political career, or both, goes on to become the "Lion of the Senate" and one of the Democratic party's all-time most beloved heroes. Pretty nauseating.

I wonder how the media, which did all they could to cover up for Kennedy after the death of Kopechne, would've reacted had Donald Trump run Stormy Daniels off a bridge after having downed a few historical drinks. Do you think they'd do their best to ignore the story? Me neither, especially if they found out that he'd been smoking tobacco while driving the car.

Pixels Made of Mind

A couple of months ago I did several posts (2/15, 2/16, 2/19) on panpsychism, the view that every particle of matter in the universe possesses at least a rudimentary consciousness. I recently unearthed an older post based on a New York Times article on panpsychism, and thought I'd share it:

Philosophers and scientists have been perplexed for centuries by the phenomenon of human consciousness. There seems to be no plausible explanation for how it could have arisen in the evolutionary scheme of things and no explanation for how conscious experience - our sensations, beliefs, doubts, hopes, etc. - could be produced by a brain made of nothing but unthinking atoms.

The quandary has led some philosophers back to a view that has actually been around for a long time, the view that somehow every particle of matter contains a tiny bit of consciousness or mind. Mind, in this view, pervades the entire cosmos. This is called panpsychism.

I came across an article on panpsychism written in 2007 by Jim Holt for the New York Times in which Holt lays out the basic problem:

Most of us have no doubt that our fellow humans are conscious. We are also pretty sure that many animals have consciousness. Some, like the great ape species, even seem to possess self-consciousness, like us. Others, like dogs and cats and pigs, may lack a sense of self, but they certainly appear to experience inner states of pain and pleasure.

About smaller creatures, like mosquitoes, we are not so sure; certainly we have few compunctions about killing them. As for plants, they obviously do not have minds, except in fairy tales. Nor do nonliving things like tables and rocks.

All that is common sense. But common sense has not always proved to be such a good guide in understanding the world. And the part of our world that is most recalcitrant to our understanding at the moment is consciousness itself. How could the electrochemical processes in the lump of gray matter that is our brain give rise to — or, even more mysteriously, be — the dazzling technicolor play of consciousness, with its transports of joy, its stabs of anguish and its stretches of mild contentment alternating with boredom?

This has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences” and even “the last frontier of science.” It engrosses the intellectual energies of a worldwide community of brain scientists, psychologists, philosophers, physicists, computer scientists and even, from time to time, the Dalai Lama.

Imagine that, like the images on a computer screen, the physical world consists of pixels embedded in a material substrate. But these are not pixels made of chemicals like those on your monitor, but rather they're pixels made of mind. If you can imagine this you are on your way to grasping the panpsychist hypothesis:

So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy. Perhaps, they say, mind is not limited to the brains of some animals. Perhaps it is ubiquitous, present in every bit of matter, all the way up to galaxies, all the way down to electrons and neutrinos, not excluding medium-size things like a glass of water or a potted plant.

Moreover, it did not suddenly arise when some physical particles on a certain planet chanced to come into the right configuration; rather, there has been consciousness in the cosmos from the very beginning of time.

This view is not popular among those who hold to a naturalistic metaphysics for the simple reason that naturalists are leery of anything that sounds suspiciously like an attempt to reinsert God back into the universe from which he was banished by modernity, and the panpsychist view certainly swings the theistic gate wide open. Moreover, naturalists are often materialists - i.e. they believe that matter (and energy) are all there is, there's no room for an immaterial substance such as mind in the materialist's world-picture.

Yet the problem of how to explain consciousness haunts the discussion. It's like the elephant in the middle of the room that can't be ignored. Whether the solution turns out to be panpsychism or some version of mind/body dualism, it seems clear that materialism is gently being shoved in the direction of the boneyard of obsolete ideas.

There's more on Holt's article on panpsychism at the link.

Inequality Is Wrong

New Scientist recently ran a story (paywall) that was titled Inequality: How Our Brains Evolved to Love it, Even Though We Know it's Wrong. Because the article requires a subscription I didn't read it so it'd be unfair to assume too much about it, but the title itself is puzzling.

Even though I don't want to assume too much, I am going to assume that the editors of New Scientist, or at least many of their readers, lean metaphysically in the direction of naturalistic materialism. That is, I'm going to assume they hold to the view that nature is all there is and that all of nature is ultimately explicable solely in terms of matter and the laws which govern its behavior.

If I'm wrong in my assumption, I apologize at the outset.

But assuming that I'm correct I have a couple of questions for New Scientists' editors.

Doubtless they explain in the article what they mean by inequality, but whatever is meant by it, how do we know it's wrong? In order to know that X is wrong there must be some objective moral frame of reference to which we can compare X to see if it conforms to that standard. On naturalistic materialism, however, there are no objective moral reference frames, there are only subjective preferences and biases.

On naturalism when someone says, for example, that racism, murder, or political corruption are wrong all they're doing is emoting. They're saying something like, "I really don't like racism, murder or political corruption."

Moreover, inequality is the natural, expected outcome of the evolutionary process. Evolution by its very nature generates inequalities of all sorts. Why should anyone think that one evolutionary by-product, inequality among humans, is any more or less wrong than any other unless those by-products are being compared to some higher moral standard? How can we say that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong if both are simply the products of impersonal processes like random mutation and natural selection?

If our fondness for inequality is merely a product of evolution then to declare that it's wrong is a lot like declaring that our fondness for sweet tasting foods is wrong. Nothing that has resulted from a blind, impersonal process like evolution can be either right or wrong. It just is.

We like to think that the evolution of sympathy or kindness is good and the evolution of greed, racism and aggressiveness is bad, but how can we justify such an assessment if there's no higher standard to which we can compare these things? And on naturalism, of course, there is no higher moral standard. All there are, ultimately, are atoms jiggling in the void.

Rescuing the Humanities

It's become something of a pastime among members of humanities faculties to bemoan the decline of the humanities in our institutions of higher learning, and it certainly is ironic that although most universities were founded to instill in students a love for literature, an appreciation of history, a facility with philosophy and so on, they have over the last few decades evolved into factories for turning out students with skills in the STEM disciplines.

Meanwhile, humanities enrollments have shrunk, and administrators are dropping humanities majors because they can't afford to keep idle faculty on the payroll.

Part of the reason for this unfortunate state of affairs, of course, is that a humanities degree doesn't reward a student up to her ears in student loan debt and trying to start a family (Joke: What's the difference between a history major and a large pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four.), but there are other reasons why the humanities have lost their way in our colleges and universities.

Notre Dame Sociologist Christian Smith unleashes a passionate rant against what he says is the BS (it means what you think it does) that's drowning higher education and includes in his indictment a number of reasons which apply specifically to the humanities.

BS, Smith declares, is, inter alia:

• the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.
• the farce of what are actually "fragmentversities" claiming to be universities, of hyperspecialization and academic disciplines unable to talk with each other about obvious shared concerns.
• the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games.
• a tenure system that provides guaranteed lifetime employment to faculty who are lousy teachers and inactive scholars, not because they espouse unpopular viewpoints that need the protection of "academic freedom," but only because years ago they somehow were granted tenure.
• the shifting of the "burden" of teaching undergraduate courses from traditional tenure-track faculty to miscellaneous, often-underpaid adjunct faculty and graduate students.
• the fantasy that education worthy of the name can be accomplished online through "distance learning."
• the institutional reward system that coerces graduate students and faculty to "get published" as soon and as much as possible, rather than to take the time to mature intellectually and produce scholarship of real importance — leading to a raft of books and articles that contribute little to our knowledge about human concerns that matter.
• the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance.
• the ascendant "culture of offense" that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university leaders’ confused and fearful capitulation to that secular neo-fundamentalist speech-policing.
• the invisible self-censorship that results among some students and faculty, and the subtle corrective training aimed at those who occasionally do not self-censor.
• the anxiety that haunts some faculty at public universities in very conservative states about expressing their well-considered but unorthodox beliefs, for fear of being hounded by closed-minded students and parents or targeted by grandstanding politicians.
• the standard undergraduate student mentality, fostered by our entire culture, that sees college as essentially about credentials and careers (money), on the one hand, and partying oneself into stupefaction on the other.
• the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the "practical" enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy.

Mark Bauerlein at First Things also laments the decline of the humanities, but from a somewhat different angle:

This (the declining interest among students in humanities courses) puts humanities professors in an uncomfortable position. They must become entrepreneurs, and they don’t know how.

You know that’s true because of the directions the humanities have taken over the years. Does anybody who isn’t a true believer think that intersectionality theory is going to increase enrollments? How many nineteen-year-olds will be drawn to Queer Theory? When a student who loved Jane Austen in high school enters English 200 with great expectations, only to be hectored about imperialism and sexism in Victorian England, she likely won’t come back. Or, to take another popular claim among the humanists, how many students will say in earnest, “Hey, they teach critical thinking over there—that’s exciting—I’m in!”?

Bauerlein's right, of course. The proliferation of boutique courses that appeal mainly to disaffected students and which are "taught" by radical professors who actually despise the traditional humanities disciplines are like bad money that drives out good. More than that, the better students don't want to take classes which will do nothing to make them more marketable and will often only embitter them toward that - values, country, race, gender, or religion - which they're hectored into believing is oppressive and unjust.

Bauerlein goes on to say this:

Humanities professors have forgotten the first principle of undergraduate study in the humanities: inspiration. Students come because the material compels them. They may love modern novels, or a high school teacher may have turned them on to Renaissance art or the Civil War. They want greatness and beauty and sublimity. Professors should tell students that they have on their syllabi the works of the ages.

Why not play up the classics? Forget critical thinking, workplace readiness, and verbal skills. Highlight Hamlet, Elizabeth Bennet, and the Invisible Man. Reach out to freshmen with an invitation to the Pantheon of genius and talent. March in to college curriculum meetings and announce that everyone must take a course in Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Mozart. Take students to dinner and pass along your enthusiasm in a non-class setting....

That’s what it will take to reverse the slide, and I hope my colleagues realize it.

I hope so, too. Nothing enriches a student's mind and stirs the soul like good literature, history and philosophy taught by someone who deeply loves his or her discipline.

Evolution and Ethics

VJ Torley at Uncommon Descent comments on a passage from Thomas Huxley's essay Evolution and Ethics (1893) in which Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for ethics.

One popular candidate for such a ground is the evolution of our species, but Huxley, his arrant fealty to Darwinian evolution notwithstanding, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

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

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

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

----------------

The world, according to this new picture [i.e. the picture produced by a scientific outlook], is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too.

Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….

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

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

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

Imaginary Friends

Since I spend a big chunk of my novel, In the Absence of God and, to a lesser extent, Bridging the Abyss (see links at top of this page), arguing that genuine meaning in life is impossible if our death is the end of our existence, I was interested in Richard Weikert's thoughts on this topic in a recent column at The Federalist.

After quoting a number of atheists who acknowledge that in a Godless world there's no ultimate meaning to anything we do, he turns his attention to other non-theists who disagree with their fellow unbelievers' bleak assessment. He cites a recent study that seems to suggest that meaning, on atheism, is not as elusive as some have thought. Here are a few highlights:

This study found that atheists and non-religious people are not nihilistic, because they claimed that they did have a purpose in life. This is an interesting finding that seems to refute the oft-repeated charge (levied by religious folks) that atheists are nihilistic.

However, there is a problem with this finding. The survey admitted the meaning that atheists and non-religious people found in their lives is entirely self-invented. According to the survey, they embraced the position: “Life is only meaningful if you provide the meaning yourself.”

Thus, when religious people say non-religious people have no basis for finding meaning in life, and when non-religious people object, saying they do indeed find meaning in life, they are not talking about the same thing. If one can find meaning in life by creating one’s own meaning, then one is only “finding” the product of one’s own imagination. One has complete freedom to invent whatever meaning one wants.

This makes “meaning” on par with myths and fairy tales. It may make the non-religious person feel good, but it has no objective existence.

This is ironic since belief in fairy tales is a charge often leveled by atheists against theists. Atheists also accuse theists of having "imaginary friends" but what is an imaginary meaning if not something similar to an imaginary friend?

If death is the end of existence, then it erases meaning from life. If the universe is purposeless, if we're here as a result of a chain of freak accidents of nature, if life is a matter of passing the time until we die, then our individual lives are ultimately pointless. We have no more significance, as famous Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it, than a baboon or a grain of sand.

Philosopher Luc Ferry, in his book A Brief History of Thought, observes that the meaning of meaning - that is, the meaning of all the particular meanings in life - is lacking.

Weikert continues:

In 2015 the online periodical BuzzFeed interviewed atheists about how they found meaning. While they uniformly denied that there was any overarching meaning to life or the universe, they insisted that they find meaning and significance in their own personal lives. Many also implied that certain moral positions are objectively better than others, even though they presumably do not believe in objective morality. One example was the response of the atheistic scientist and journalist Kat Arney.

She said her rejection of religion “was an incredibly liberating moment, and made me realize that the true meaning of life is what I make with the people around me – my family, friends, colleagues, and strangers. People tell religious fairy stories to create meaning, but I’d rather face up to what all the evidence suggests is the scientific truth – all we really have is our own humanity. So let’s be gentle to each other and share the joy of simply being alive, here and now. Let’s give it our best shot.”

There's much more by Weikert at the link, but I'd like to focus on what I think is a serious problem with the notion that meaning is just something we make up. Look at it this way. We fill our hours and days with activities that give us a reason to get out of bed in the morning, they give us what we might call proximal or particular meaning, but none of it ultimately amounts to anything. We're like a man who collects butterflies, who spends his time and resources traveling the world to find as many exotic species for his collection as he can. The pursuit of these beautiful insects is thrilling, perhaps, but when the collector dies what does it really matter how many species he's collected?

Even if someone spends her life in the service of others, when she dies and all those she has helped die, what's left? What did her work matter in the vast scope of geophysical history?

Only if what one does matters forever does it matter at all, a fact which, one might think, should cause atheists to hope that they're wrong about their atheism.

In an interview for Newsweek (8/20/08) filmmaker Woody Allen discussed his outlook on life. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless … I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker." If anything, there's something refreshing in his resistance to the platitudes about simple things making life worthwhile that so often pass for philosophy. It's not that Allen is unable to enjoy himself; it's that he's convinced the moments don't add up to redemption.

"You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing," he says. "But it doesn't accrue to anything."

Sigmund Freud said pretty much the same thing though more emphatically when he wrote that, "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence."

Those who say that we can find our own meaning, that we can just make it up, are playing make-believe. They're whistling past the graveyard. More perceptive, I think, was the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy who posed this series of questions to himself:

What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?

All this may be depressing to contemplate, but we need to remember that ideas have consequences, and one's ideas about life after death have some very profound consequences indeed.

A Pack of Neurons

I noted in an earlier post that there are two kinds of materialists, those who believe that consciousness can be explained in purely physical terms as a brain function and those who believe that it can't be reduced to a material or brain process and who conclude that conscious experiences must therefore be an illusion.

Biologist Jerry Coyne is an example of the latter sort. Coyne once wrote that “many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” By "us" he meant atheistic materialists (A-Mats, for short).

For Coyne materialism entails that if something cannot be explained in terms of physical matter - atoms and molecules, energy and forces - then it doesn't really exist. Matter is the only substance. Mind is not a substance at all but is rather just a word we use to describe what the brain does, just like we use the word digestion to describe what the stomach does. Since consciousness has resisted all attempts to explain it in terms of material substance, it must, A-Mats of Coyne's stripe conclude, be an illusion.

In this belief Coyne follows in the steps of Nobel Laureate Francis Crick who once wrote that,

‘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.’

But if Crick and Coyne are correct and we're just a pack of neurons with their associated chemical reactions why should we believe that what they're telling us is itself anything other than a neuronal illusion? Why should we think that the neuronal illusions they're communicating to us about the human self are true? After all, chemical reactions are not true or false. Electrons whizzing along neurons are neither true nor false. Where does truth come from if all we are experiencing is an illusion generated by our brain.

It has been said that there's no idea so nonsensical that some philosopher somewhere doesn't believe it. The idea that when you experience pain you're really not having an experience at all but are, in fact, having the illusion of pain is an excellent example. The illusion of pain, if that's what it is, is still an experience of pain.

The award for the most amusing and succinct criticism of Coyne's version of materialism, perhaps, should go to a commenter at Uncommon Descent who submitted this ditty:

There once was an A-Mat named Deal,
Who said, “Although pain isn’t real,
When I sit on a pin,
And it goes all the way in,
I dislike what I imagine I feel.”

It seems obvious, at least to many philosophers, that in order to deny that one is having conscious experience one must be having conscious experience. Yet some wish to deny it, largely, I think, because they fear that to acknowledge the existence of a non-material substance in their ontology is to take several steps out onto the slippery slope that leads them to theism. It's astonishing the lengths to which one will go to avoid that conclusion.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga illustrates this sort of adamantine recalcitrance with a story about a man who had become convinced that he was actually dead. He went to the doctor and told the doctor that he was a dead man. Nothing the doctor said could persuade him otherwise.

Finally, the doctor asked him if he knew that when one was dead they no longer bleed. The man agreed that this was so, and the doctor promptly stuck a needle in the man's finger and pointed to the drop of blood that began to ooze from the puncture. "See," the doctor exclaimed, "you're bleeding!" To which the man replied, "Gosh, I guess dead men do bleed after all."

John Updike on the Resurrection

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively or Christianity is a fraud.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Have a meaningful Resurrection Day.

A Parable for Good Friday

Some time ago I did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya at another blog. I thought that Good Friday might be a good time to run the post again, slightly edited.

Tanya's comment was provoked by an atheist at the other blog who had issued a mild rebuke to his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christian holidays to deride Christian belief. In so doing, he exemplified the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees that one might wish all people, atheists and Christians alike, would adopt. Unfortunately, Tanya spoiled the mellow, can't-we-all-just-get-along, mood by manifesting a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the traditional Christian understanding of the atonement.

She wrote:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life." Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the shallowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the wonderful city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow.

Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was all to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that should be good enough to satisfy the king's demands.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, Orc-like creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to be rid of him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They snuck into her village, kidnapped Tanya, and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange her for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would kill Tanya.

The king, distraught beyond words, related the horrible news to the prince.

Despite all the rejections the prince had experienced from Tanya, he still loved her deeply, and his heart broke at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved that he would do the Orcs' bidding. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that his father try his best to persuade Tanya to live safely in the beautiful city once she was ransomed.

And so the day came for the exchange, and the prince rode bravely and proudly bestride his mount out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward the camp of his mortal enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she was out of the camp, fleeing toward the safety of the king's city, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she was running past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange, and the ugly people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding him, they pulled him from his steed, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and determination to endure whatever agonies to which he was subjected were strengthened by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe.

Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body onto a garbage heap.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart melting like ice within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his son's heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to remain with him within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore.

Tanya considered the offer, but decided that she liked life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and besides, she really didn't want to be in too close proximity to the prince. "By the way," she wondered to herself, "where is that pissy little whiner son of his anyway?"

Have a meaningful Good Friday. You, too, Tanya.

Orwell and Huxley

In 1985 Neil Postman wrote a book titled Amusing Ourselves to Death which has become something of a classic of cultural criticism. Its message seems to be just as timely today as it was thirty years ago. Here's the introduction:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Of course it's possible that they were both right, that they were each "seeing" one side of the totalitarian coin.

In an age when we suffer separation anxiety if we're unable to access our devices for more than a few minutes, an age filled with the trivialities of an entertainment culture which distract us from thinking about what really matters in life, an age when only half the population cares enough to vote and only half of voters care enough to educate themselves on who the candidates are and what they'll do if elected, an age when the centuries long Islamic war against the West has been resuscitated while the West deludes itself into thinking that the current crisis is just an aberration, an age when families and faith are alike disintegrating, an age when too many schools don't teach anything worth learning and too many students don't read anything worth reading, an age when our society is increasingly balkanized along racial, ideological, and ethnic lines - in such an age we are more than at any time in our history a society dazed on Huxleyian soma and vulnerable to Orwellian tyranny.

On the Possibility of Miracles

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false. Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from the circularity of basing the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible. But we can only know they're impossible if we know that all reports of miracles are unreliable.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if molecules of hot water are added to a pot of molecules of cold water the molecules will tend to eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules on one occasion to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident. They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that there could be an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. There's no evidence of other worlds, unfortunately, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist. The skeptic clings to this conviction because if these things aren't so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to his psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well? If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead. After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.