Suicide of the West

I'm currently very much enjoying Jonah Goldberg's excellent new release Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy. It's certainly one of the best written, most incisive and well-researched analyses of the causes of the current condition of our politics that I've come across.

There are a couple of things I'd want to quibble with if pressed, but these are so minor as to not be worth dwelling upon. Instead, I'd like to give you a sample of Goldberg's argument:

Here are some excerpts from his chapter titled Tribalism Today. In describing how progressivism is corroding the institutions of our culture he writes:

The failure of ubiquitous and total equality to materialize overnight was seen as proof that classically liberal, color-blind policies were not enough, particularly among a whole class of activists who made a career of exaggerating the nature of the problems so as to justify their own status and power....Progressivism now lacks a limiting principle for governmental and social action. There's always more work to be done, more injustice to be identified - or imagined - and then rectified.

This is certainly true. Once a progressive is satisfied that he has eliminated every smidgeon of injustice in the world he will no longer be a progressive but will have morphed into a conservative, which for any progressive would be an insufferable state of affairs. Thus, progressives are impelled by the logic of their ideology to always and forever push the envelope of social change.

Goldberg compares the institutions of our culture, things like family, churches, schools, scouts, little league, myriad voluntary associations, etc., to strong, old oaks and argues that these have provided people with shelter for generations, or even millennia, but that progressives are busily sawing them all down. This, Goldberg, who is himself a Never-Trumper, says is a major reason why so many people voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

[W]hen you destroy existing cultural habitats, you do not instantly convert the people who live in them to your worldview. You radicalize them. This is the point many on the left understand very well when it comes to American foreign policy...but when it comes to domestic [policy], many of the same people have a blind spot.

They see nothing wrong with forcing Catholic institutions to embrace gay marriage or abortion. They think the state should force small business owners to celebrate views they do not hold. They brand any parent or institution that resists allowing men to use our women's bathrooms as bigots. They constantly change the rules of our language to root out disbelievers so they can hold them up to mockery.

In June of 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders voted against the confirmation of Russell Vought, President Trump's nominee for Deputy Director of OMB. Vought had written that Muslims were not "saved" because they do not accept Jesus Christ. This is not a radical interpretation of Christianity. It is Christianity. "I would simply say, Mr. Chairman, that this nominee is really not someone who is what this country is supposed to be about," Sanders said. "I will vote no." In other words, a faithful Christian cannot serve in government, according to Sanders. He has no such policy for Muslims who hold a very similar view toward Christians."

Sanders' office attempted to clarify the senator's bigotry with this:

"...racism and bigotry - condemning an entire group of people because of their faith - cannot be part of any public policy."

Goldberg goes on to show the hypocrisy of this "clarification" and shines a light on why so many voters were so estranged from the progressives of the Democratic Party - progressives like Hillary Clinton - that they elected Donald Trump:

This is correct on its face. No public policy can discriminate against someone on the basis of faith. But there was no evidence whatsoever that Vought would discriminate against Muslims at the OMB. Meanwhile, Sanders own policy is that no one who actually believes in Christian doctrine has a right to make policy.

As Goldberg goes on to note, Sanders' foolishness would've excluded every president we've ever had from office, to the extent that they were being truthful when they acknowledged their faith.

Almost every one of the 350 pages in this book features Goldberg's penetrating analysis. If you'd really like to know why we are where we are in our politics today, why we're so divided, why a man with as much baggage as Donald Trump was carrying could nevertheless attract so many voters to his side, Suicide of the West offers as penetrating an explanation as you'll find.

You can order a copy from my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds or from any other seller of good books.

Scolding Evangelicals

David French has written a rather scathing open letter at NRO, chastizing evangelical Christians who support or defend President Trump. He makes some good points, at least regarding those Christians who've actually excused or rationalized Trump's pre-presidency licentiousness, and to the extent that that's who the letter's targeted toward, I fully agree with him, but I think he's casting a wider net than just those who've winked at Mr. Trump's boorish and adulterous behavior.

As I read Mr. French he seems to be upset, not just with those who seek to justify Mr. Trump's earlier behavior, but with anyone who calls him or herself a Christian and who also supports Donald Trump. If that's a fair assessment of Mr. French's intent then I think his missive raises certain questions that I wish he had addressed more thoroughly. Here are some:

Is it possible to support - even be enthusiastic about - the policies of the man while still deploring his past personal conduct? If a president's economic policies are of great benefit to the poor and middle class, if he's bringing peace to the world and common sense to the judiciary, should we ignore all that because there are extra-marital affairs in his past?

Would Mr. French have applied the same standard to JFK, RR or WJC? Would he have insisted that those Christians, and there were many, who supported Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton were shredding their moral credibility in the eyes of the world by so doing? Reagan was a bit of a rake in his early years, and Kennedy and Clinton carried their rakishness all the way into the Oval Office. How does Trump differ significantly from these men?

Nor does French ever tell us what the alternative is for Christians who take Christian morality seriously. Does he think they should support the campaign to remove Trump from office on the basis of past sins? Should they support impeachment simply because the man is, to them, distasteful or boorish? Should they withdraw from the political sphere like the Amish and refuse to risk sullying their reputations and moral credibility by unsavory associations with flawed men? What, exactly, does he think conservative Christians should actually do, aside from refusing to excuse sinful behavior?

Is it possible, moreover, that Trump has repented of his former life and is currently a spiritual and moral work in progress? Has he shown, since being elected to office, any signs of infidelity to his wife? It may be that he's an impulsive prevaricator of Clintonian dimensions, but has he corrupted his office with venal or illegal activity? Aside from some of his earlier tweets, how, exactly, has he demeaned, much less disgraced, the presidency since taking office, any more than did many of his predecessors? Shouldn't Christians always hold out the possibility of repentance and redemption?

Furthermore, is it possible that God has raised up Trump like He raised up Abraham (a liar), Jacob (a cheat) or David (an adulterer and murderer but who was nevertheless declared to be a man after God's own heart) onto whose lineage it even pleased God to graft His only Son? Is it possible that for all his unfortunate personal blemishes he is in fact the man whose strengths God has chosen to utilize at this point in our history?

French may have good answers to some of these questions, but, if so, I wish he had included them in his angry epistle. Otherwise, it just sounds as if the difference between a Christian supporting Clinton or Obama, both of whom were radically pro-abortion in addition to being mendacious, and a Christian supporting Trump is, for French, that the former were loved by the elites and thus supporting them won elite favor, whereas Trump is despised by the elites, so supporting him, or at least his policies, is an unacceptable compromise of principle.

It would be helpful if conservative Never-Trumpers would stop scolding those who feel caught in a difficult moral situation by insisting that Trump is irredeemably bad and that Christians are betraying their calling by supporting him, even if what they support is what he's doing for the country and the world. It would also be helpful if those same Never-Trumpers would clearly explain what they think the proper course for Christian citizens should be vis a vis the president.

Engineering Genius

I've shown this video to some of my classes in the past because it's so well done. Drew Berry is an animator who creates computer generated animations of cellular processes. The processes he depicts here are occurring all the time in each of the trillions of cells in your body. As you watch it keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals, and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

And notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did they evolve in the first place?

Perhaps we'll eventually discover naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible naturalistic explanations sound to all but the irrevocably committed and the more it looks like the living cell has been intelligently engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

Obama's Disastrous Deal

President Trump has until May 12th to decide whether to renew the Iranian nuclear deal worked out by Secretary of State John Kerry and signed by President Barack Obama. David Harsanyi at The Federalist explains why this deal has been an enormous mistake. It has surely been one of the worst international agreements an American president has been party to since Yalta and Potsdam in 1945.

In return for saving the Iranian economy and providing the wherewithal for Iran to refurbish its military, in return for providing the funds used to subsidize terrorists in Syria and elsewhere who are killing American soldiers, in return for approximately $1.7 billion in cash secretly airlifted to Tehran, in return for the release of fourteen Iranian spies and for declining to investigate or prosecute others, we received a total of four hostages and promises from the Iranian mullahs that they would abide by their nuclear non-proliferation commitments, which they were already obligated to keep, and halt work on their nuclear weapons program for about a decade.

Critics who complained that this was a crazy deal were smeared by the Obama administration. They were said to be choosing war over peace, as if those were the only choices, as if continued sanctions would not have eventually brought Iran to its knees.

Advocates of the deal may have been justified in their optimism had there been a means of insuring that the iranians would hold to the terms of the agreement, but under those terms no inspectors were allowed on site to confirm that Iran was indeed keeping their promises. The world just had to take the Iranians' word for it.

Last week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed to the world what every person of good will and common sense already knew. Netanyahu revealed that Israeli intelligence had filched a thousand pounds of documents from the Iranian government, a trove which proved that the Iranians had been lying about, and cheating on, the agreement all along. The documents reveal that Iran has...

...clandestine plans, despite years of denials, to develop five 10-kiloton nuclear warheads. Iranians continue to develop a ballistic missile program, an issue the Obama administration caved on at the behest of Russia during negotiations. Now we know they have the plans to finish the job whenever they want.

Harsanyi adds that,

Iran broke the spirit of the deal long ago. The deal was contingent on the nation coming clean regarding its past efforts. It didn’t. Though the idea that the Islamic State would ever be found in violation of the nuclear agreement by International Atomic Energy Agency was, from the start, laughable. There are no inspections. International inspectors aren’t even allow on undeclared sites without permission.

So far from buying peace this foolish deal, wrought by an administration blinded by liberal naiveté about the goodness of bad men (and the badness of good men), has made war with Iran much more likely than it would've been had Iran been crippled by continuing economic sanctions. Unfortunately, President Obama had those sanctions lifted to appease the Iranians.

The question then is what President Trump will do on May 12th. Harsanyi closes with this:

So will President Trump nix the deal? We don’t know. Now that the framework for sanctions has been destroyed, there are few good options left. But the agreement, as it stands, is worse than worthless. Rather than setting firm limits, the deal gave Iran cover and time to continue its efforts, making war with Israel more of an inevitability.

Read the whole piece. It's not long and it'll explain, if Trump does in fact walk away from Obama's "signature foreign policy achievement", why he chose to do so.

51%

A couple of politically relevant records were tied or set this week. First, President Trump's approval ranking in the Rasmussen Reports Daily Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 51% of likely U.S. voters approve of the President's performance in office.

Given the constant bashing he's been taking from the media for the last year and a half - the constant drumbeat of allegations of criminal activity, none of which have ever been substantiated - his poll numbers are remarkable. If the media were merely neutral in their treatment of his administration his numbers would probably be in the 60s.

One reason he's doing so well among average Americans is because the economy is doing well. Unemployment set another record this week dropping to 3.9%, the lowest it's been since 2000, and black unemployment, at 6.6%, was lower than it's ever been. Hispanic unemployment was also as low as it's ever been at 4.8%, a mark that it achieved last year as well.

Clinton aide James Carville famously adjured the Bill Clinton campaign team to keep everyone's focus on the economy during the 1992 election. He put up a sign in the campaign headquarters which said, "It's the Economy, Stupid!". The message was clear: elections are won or lost because of the economy, and Carville was shown to be correct, at least back then. If what he said in 1992 still holds true today, things look bleak for the Democrats in 2018, all the happy talk of an impending "blue wave" notwithstanding.

Voters are also giving Trump credit for the apparent sea-change among North Korean leaders and for revisiting the Obama Iranian nuclear deal, which may have been the worst agreement ever signed by an American president, at least since 1950.

Of course, these things could all change overnight, but if the good economic numbers persist and if Kim Jung Un and the Ayatollahs are frustrated in their desire to achieve a credible nuclear capability, and if the Democrats fail to come up with a coherent, positive message for voters, something other than "Trump's bad and we loathe him", the Republicans could well hold on to the House in 2018 and add to their majority in the Senate.

We'll see.

The Cause of All Contingent Entities

I recently featured a post on Viewpoint on cosmic fine-tuning and the multiverse hypothesis (here and here) and was reminded of a book I read a year or so ago by cosmologists Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Universe which describes the amazingly delicate settings of the constants, parameters and forces that comprise the structure of our cosmos.

Having enjoyed the book I was pleased to come across an article by Lewis in Cosmos Magazine which serves as a pretty good summary of A Fortunate Universe. One statement in the article, however, was problematic, and I'd like to address it. Before I do, though, here's the lede from the article:

For more than 400 years, physicists treated the universe like a machine, taking it apart to see how it ticks. The surprise is it turns out to have remarkably few parts: just leptons and quarks and four fundamental forces to glue them together.

But those few parts are exquisitely machined. If we tinker with their settings, even slightly, the universe as we know it would cease to exist. Science now faces the question of why the universe appears to have been “fine-tuned” to allow the appearance of complex life, a question that has some potentially uncomfortable answers.

Lewis then goes on to discuss several interesting ways in which this fine-tuning manifests itself and follows up with this:

Examining the huge number of potential universes, each with their own unique laws of physics, leads to a startling conclusion: most of the universes that result from fiddling with the fundamental constants would lack physical properties needed to support complex life.

While this is a scientific article, we cannot ignore the fact that to many, the fact that the universe is finely tuned for intelligent life shows the hand of the creator who set the dials. But this answer, of course, leads to another question: who created the creator? Let’s see what alternatives science can offer.

But then he dashes off to talk about multiverses and grand simulations without even trying to answer the query he has raised, as if the designer hypothesis has been disposed of simply by posing the question. In fact, there are a number of ways to answer it as well as answering Lewis' apparent assumption that merely raising the question itself is an adequate refutation of the design hypothesis.

One response is to note that the universe can be thought of as the sum of all contingent entities (a contingent entity is anything which could possibly not exist and whose existence depends upon something else. You and I are contingent, as is the earth and, indeed, the cosmos itself). That being so there must be a cause of the universe that is non-contingent otherwise the cause would be dependent upon something else and would itself be contingent and thus part of the universe. This would mean that the universe would be the cause of itself which is metaphysically absurd.

Now a cause that is non-contingent is necessary. It doesn't depend upon anything else for its existence. Thus Lewis' question, what caused the creator, is philosophically ill-conceived. The creator of all contingent things must itself be uncaused.

Moreover, the design hypothesis asserts that the universe has a sufficient cause. Once the skeptic grants that the universe has a cause, even if, in defiance of Occam's razor, he wants to suggest the possibility of an infinite series of such causes, he has pretty much conceded that the design hypothesis is correct.

Anyway, here's a short video on the contingency argument as developed by 18th century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz:

P.S. There's a typo in Lewis' article that those who read it should be aware of. The article says that string theory allows for the existence of 10,500 different universes. The number should be 10^500 universes (i.e. a one with 500 zeros after it). It makes a big difference. Those interested in the fine-tuning of the universe should read the whole article as Lewis provides a good overview of the contemporary issues involved.

Four (Relatively) Short Questions

1. Why does the left think that rivers and animals should have rights but unborn human beings don't?

2. If (and it's a big "if") North Korea actually rids itself of its nuclear weapons does the Nobel committee give the Peace Prize to a. China b. President Trump c. Barack Obama d. Kim Jung Un? My guess is that they find a way to justify giving it to Obama, or even to Kim Jung Un. They simply couldn't bear to give it to Trump no matter how much he might deserve it, and they'll contort themselves into a spaghetti-like tangle of rationalizations to find a reason to credit Obama or Kim in order to avoid bestowing it upon Trump. Heck, they may even abolish the prize rather than award it to the odious Donald.

3. The caravan of hundreds of Central Americans who claim to be seeking asylum from gang violence in their home countries has reached our southern border. Why, if what they really wanted was just to escape their homeland, did they not request asylum as soon as they crossed into Mexico?

4. Why is it an act of dastardly imperialistic cultural appropriation when someone of a majority race, ethnicity or subculture uses or wears something original to a minority race, ethnicity, or subculture like a Chinese prom dress or hoop earrings, but it's not cultural appropriation when anyone other than those of European descent use or wear, say, smart phones, computers, photocopiers, televisions, air conditioning, banks, credit cards, motor vehicles, airplanes, printed books, orchestral instruments, facebook, twitter, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, jeans, petroleum products, eye glasses, hospitals, magnetic resonance machines, x-ray machines, compact discs, hearing aids, fast food, basketballs, footballs, supermarkets and virtually everything else they use during the course of a day?

There's almost nothing that those who complain about cultural appropriation utilize which wasn't developed by white descendants of Europeans, including the megaphones they use to amplify their protests about cultural appropriation. Wouldn't you think they'd realize this?

Modern Moralizing

In a recent article at The Federalist John Daniel Davidson draws a pertinent distinction between moralizing and being moral.

The essay begins with this:

....[T]here’s a big difference between being moral and moralizing. Being moral is about changing the way you act and actually helping others. It requires humility and tolerance because it arises from an awareness of one’s own moral failings.

Moralizing, by contrast, is about changing the way other people act—by force if necessary. Moralizing breeds intolerance and even tyranny because it springs from a belief that...not only do you know the truth but you also have a solemn duty to impose it on others.

In America today, being moral is out and moralizing is in. Just witness the nonstop spectacle of moralizing everywhere you turn—from The New Yorker’s panicked denunciation of Chick-fil-A’s “infiltration” of New York, to gun control activist David Hogg’s boycotts, to the protestor with a megaphone shouting in a Starbucks clerk’s face.

Being moral in America is no longer "in", as Davidson puts it, largely because many folks no longer believe there is any such thing as an objective moral duty, but nevertheless when people have dispensed with objective morality for themselves they still find that there are lots of things that others do that they don't like.

So, having left themselves no grounds for trying to persuade those with whom they disagree that they're objectively wrong, they seek to impose their preferences on others through force, intimidation, shouting louder than the other person, etc.

We live in a society that claims to value equality, individual freedom, justice for all, tolerance, human worth, human rights and so on, but these are all virtues that are based upon a Judeo-Christian worldview. They're unsustainable on any other. Individuals who discard the foundational belief system but still seek to retain the values to which that system gives birth can do so only by forcibly imposing them. attempts at persuasion through rational, logical argumentation are futile since the values are untethered from any solid and firm metaphysical foundation.

How, after all, can our elites insist on one hand that we're just highly evolved animals filled with genetic dispositions toward selfishness, tribalism, aggression, violence, prejudice and lust and then try to persuade us that, even so, it's wrong to hate and kill each other?

Most people, if they think about it, will see that as nonsensical. Most people will say that if it's all true that there are no objective moral obligations, if there's no afterlife in which I'll be accountable for how I live on earth, if neither my life nor the lives of others have any intrinsic value, if no one is made in the image of God and loved by God, then I might just as well look out for #1 and let everyone else fend for themselves.

And why would anyone who came to that conclusion be wrong to have done so?

If you're a Simpsons fan, by the way, you might want to read Davidson's whole article. He includes a funny excerpt from the show to help make his point.

Here's how he concludes his essay:

In the most recent edition of National Review I have a review of a new biography of Woodrow Wilson by Patricia O’Toole. The book — aptly titled “The Moralist” — is a withering chronicle of Wilson’s moralizing, from his days as a college professor to his ignominious departure from the White House.

Throughout his academic and political career, Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister and the father of American progressivism, was incessantly preaching at people. Once he wielded real power he was willing to use it to silence his opponents and detractors, as he did during World War One. His belligerent sanctimoniousness was a direct consequence of an unshakable belief that he was right and if you didn’t see things his way you were either a fool or traitor.

After the war, at the Paris Peace Conference, Wilson’s arrogance and moralizing became untethered from reality. O’Toole recounts one instance when Wilson “startled Lloyd George by observing that organized religion had yet to devise practical solutions to the problems of the world. Christ had articulated the ideal, he said, but He had offered no instruction on how to attain it. ‘That is the reason why I am proposing a practical scheme to carry out His aims,’ he told his fellow statesmen.”

George later wrote that, “Clemenceau slowly opened his dark eyes to their widest dimensions and swept them round the assembly to see how the Christians gathered round the table enjoyed this exposure of the futility of their master.” Imagine being so possessed of your own self-righteousness that you think you should propose “a practical scheme” to carry out the aims of Jesus Christ.

That, in a nutshell, is progressivism. It is hubris and conceit mixed with a tyrannical impulse, and it is one of the reasons we have so much moralizing in America today, yet so little morality.

The description of Woodrow Wilson reads as if it were lifted directly from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In the novel one of the brothers is relating to another a parable about Christ coming back to earth at Seville in Spain during the height of the Inquisition. A Cardinal of the Church has Christ arrested and imprisoned and goes to his cell to confront him. The Inquisitor, convinced that Christ had botched the job during his first coming, angrily condemns him for returning and assures him that the Church would make right Christ's failure.

The Inquisitor was a blend of hubris, conceit and tyranny. We might say that his attitude had something of the Wilsonian about it. He certainly has many spiritual descendants in America today, especially in our universities.

For those who might be interested, here's a dramatization of Dostoyevsky's memorable parable by famed British actor the late John Gielgud:

How Scientific Discovery Points to a Cosmic Designer

Writer Eric Metaxas presents a brief but cogent version of the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God in a Prager University video. In the video Metaxas discusses how the number of astrophysical parameters that must be met by any planet in order for that planet to be suitable for sustaining life is so high as to make it quite possible that, despite the optimism often expressed in the popular science media, it's quite possible that there are no other planets in our galaxy capable of supporting living things.

He also argues that the exquisitely fine-tuned parameters, constants and forces which comprise the fabric of the universe and which make our universe capable of sustaining life also make it astronomically improbable that a universe like ours would exist solely by chance.

Here's the video:

Actually, the video doesn't even begin to capture the unimaginable precision with which these parameters are set.

If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10^60, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible.

An accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.

Calculations have shown that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by just one part in 10^40, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. Life would thus be all but impossible.

To give an idea of the magnitude of this improbability I'll borrow an illustration given by astronomer Hugh Ross in talking about a parameter that's fine-tuned to one part in 10^37. This is such an incredibly sensitive precision, Ross says, that it's hard to visualize.

Here's an analogy: Cover the entire North American continent in dimes all the way up to the moon, a height of about 239,000 miles (In comparison, the money to pay for the U.S. federal government debt would cover one square mile less than two feet deep with dimes.). Next, pile dimes from here to the moon on a billion other continents the same size as North America. Paint one dime red and mix it into the billions of piles of dimes. Blindfold a friend and ask him to pick out one dime. The odds that he will pick the red dime are one in 10^37.

Other parameters are set with an exactitude even more breath-taking. Dark energy, for example, is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120, and the initial distribution of mass/energy at the birth of the universe could not have deviated from its actual value by more than one part in 10^10^123.

And these examples make up only a fraction of the examples that scientists have discovered over the last couple of decades.

So how does one escape the conclusion that this universe had to have been intentionally engineered? We'll discuss it tomorrow.

Death Panels

For a frightening glimpse of what socialized medical care, such as that which the Obama administration and the Democratic party imposed upon us under the Affordable Care Act, would look like in practice read the sad account of little Alfie Evans of England and his parents.

Alfie is an almost three year-old British child who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Here's part of his story:

In January 2016, the eight-month-old baby developed a chest infection and was hospitalized. The prognosis his parents were given at that time was that he would not survive, and they had him christened. He was placed on life support, then recovered from the first infection.

Alfie quickly got sick again, however, and began a cycle of repetitive illnesses and setbacks in Alder Hey, the hospital his parents took him to in order to save his life. Despite numerous requests for transfers to other hospitals, his parents have not been allowed to move his care to a hospital that might be able to better care for or diagnose him. Instead, Alder Hey has sought legal representation with the goal of turning off Alfie’s life support, and giving him medications to help end his life.

His parents are understandably frantic. They believe their son has been misdiagnosed, and they want to move him to another hospital. They certainly don't want life-support turned off. Nevertheless, he was removed from the ventilator, but to the surprise of the medical staff, Alfie kept breathing which has given his parents renewed motivation to return to court to work out another solution.

Meanwhile the Bambino Gesu hospital at the Vatican has offered to treat Alfie for free and even pay for his transportation to Vatican City, but British authorities have declared that Alfie is terminally ill and will die soon, and they'll not allow him to be taken out of the British hospital.

Since the British taxpayers are paying for his treatment the National Health Service and the courts have complete control over Alfie's life. In their system of single-payer socialized medicine the parents have no say over what happens to their child. The courts have ruled that Alfie must be allowed to die.

This is the health care model the Obama administration tried to create here in the U.S., and the model that would almost certainly be imposed upon us when the Democrats next regain control of the White House and Congress.

The fundamental question raised by this case is not whether the medical personnel at Alder Hey are correct in concluding that Alfie will eventually die from his condition, nor is it even whether life support should be withdrawn in cases such as this, although that is an important question.

The most crucial question is whether parents have the right to determine whether or not to maintain that support and remove their child from the hospital to find care for him elsewhere.

In other words, the question is, whose child is this? Does he belong to the parents or to the state? Under the socialist British system the child belongs to the state.

Under Obamacare, or any single-payer system, you, your elderly grandparents, and your children would all belong to the state. Bureaucrats, not you, would decide what kind of care you and your loved ones receive as well as whether you will receive it.

Whoever pays the bills makes the rules and makes life and death decisions for everyone else. That should be unacceptable for free people in a putatively free society.

UPDATE: Alfie passed away this morning.

A Problem with Positivism

A commenter at another blog expresses the basic tenet of the materialist philosophy called positivism. By way of dismissing a biological theory with which he disagrees the commenter remarks that "If you can’t measure it and can’t define it clearly and straightforwardly, it’s not worth thinking about."

Although a lot of thinkers formerly adhered to the commenter's view in the last century, it has some serious, even fatal, difficulties. If it were widely adopted it’d certainly empty life of just about everything that makes human existence endurable. We’d have to acknowledge that thinking about things like love, beauty, justice, meaning, truth, good, God and a host of other matters, is just a waste of time, but it's a desiccated and shriveled view of life that renders topics like these meaningless.

A second problem with this claim is that it's self-refuting, for if it's true then it itself is not worth thinking about since there's no way to subject it to measurement or a clear, straightforward definition.

To be fair, perhaps the commenter meant to offer a criterion for legitimate scientific topics with his claim. Perhaps he was rather sloppy and really meant to say that unless a scientific theory or postulate is measurable and clearly definable it doesn't count as genuine science. Perhaps, but this would then exclude from science a host of assertions that scientists spend a lot of their time thinking about.

It would exclude, for example, every assertion about the origin of life (and even perhaps thinking about life itself), the origin of the cosmos, the evolutionary rise and transmission of behavior, the multiverse hypothesis, as well as axiomatic assumptions universally adopted by scientists like the principle of causality and the principle of uniformity (the idea that the universe is essentially homogenous throughout its extent). It would also make thinking about metaphysical naturalism a "waste of time" since metaphysical naturalism is itself difficult to define "clearly and straightforwardly".

In any case, it doesn't seem as if the positivist's claim that nothing which can't be "measured or clearly and straightforwardly defined is worth thinking about" has much practical value.

Euthyphro's Dilemma Pt. III

Yesterday we took a look at the challenge posed by the Euthyphro Dilemma to those who believe that God's existence is a necessary condition for any meaningful, non-subjective, non-arbitrary ethics. We began by considering the second horn of Plato's famous dilemma which we stated this way:

Is an act morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

In this post I'd like to reflect on the first of the dilemma's two horns: Is good simply whatever God commands such that cruelty or hatred would be good if God commanded it? If so, it seems that good is just the arbitrary choice of the deity which strikes most people as an unacceptable option.

The problem with this part of the dilemma, though, is that if we stipulate that God is omnibenevolent, and that "good" is that which conduces to human happiness, then the suggestion that God could command cruelty or hatred is an incoherent act description. Here's why:

The question of God commanding cruelty presupposes a state of affairs in which a perfectly good being, i.e. one whose essence it is to always do that which ultimately conduces to human well-being and happiness, nevertheless commands us to do something which produces gratuitous suffering and pain. There appears to be a logical conflict in that.

In other words, if goodness is as we've defined it, and if God is perfectly good, then it's logically impossible for cruelty to be part of his nature or for him to command cruelty or anything else which would conflict with ultimate human well-being and happiness. It would require of God that he issue a command that is opposed to his own nature. It'd be like asking whether there is something which a being who knows everything nevertheless doesn't know.

So, the proper answer to the question of whether God commands us to love because love is good or whether love is good because God commands it, seems to me to be: "neither." God commands us to love because it is his desire to have the world conformed to his own essential nature which is love.

If what's been said in this and the previous posts is correct then the Euthyphro Dilemma fails as an objection to the moral argument outlined in the first post in this series. It certainly doesn't succeed in putting the theist in the kind of bind some have thought it does.

Euthyphro's Dilemma Pt. II

Many philosophy students find themselves confronted with the Euthyphro dilemma, a problem often posed to convince them that God's existence is superfluous for our moral lives. The dilemma gets its name from the fact that it first appears in Plato's dialogue titled The Euthyphro and has popped up frequently in the philosophical literature ever since.

I'd like to share some thoughts on it over the course of the next two posts with the caveat that much of what I say is not original with me and that whatever might be original I offer with the humble recognition that it could well be nonsense.

With that caution in mind let's look at the dilemma. It's often put in the form of the following question:

Is something - love, for instance - morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

The question seeks to offer theists, at least those who hold to a divine command theory of ethics, two unpalatable choices. If the theist chooses the first option then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

I think, though, that the choices with which the dilemma confronts us are unable to carry the weight placed upon their shoulders. To see why let's start with a definition for "moral good." Let's stipulate that moral good is that which conduces to human happiness and well-being.

It may be argued that we don't need God to know what conduces to human well-being and thus we can know what is good without having to believe in God. This may be true, but it misses the point in at least two ways.

First, our problem is not with recognizing good so much as it is with explaining why God is still necessary for good to exist. Just because we can recognize good without believing in God doesn't mean that God is not necessary for anything to be good. What is good is contingent upon the kind of beings we are, and the way we are is contingent upon God. We have the nature we do because God created us this way. Thus, what conduces to our well-being is a function of God's design. We can no more say that God is irrelevant to our well-being than we could say that just because we know that clean oil is conducive to our car's well-being that therefore the engineers who designed the car are irrelevant to our knowing that we should change the oil periodically. Oil is "good" for the car because that's how the engineers designed the car.

Secondly, even if belief in God is not necessary for one to know or recognize what conduces to well-being it is nevertheless necessary that there be a God, or something like God, in order for us to think we have a non-arbitrary duty to care about the well-being of others. If there is no God there is no moral obligation to concern ourselves with the good of others or to do anything else, for that matter. We may want to help others flourish, of course, but the belief that we should is completely arbitrary. If we didn't care about others, or if we acted against the good of others, we wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense.

Just because something is good for others doesn't mean we have a duty to do it, at least not unless we're assuming that we're obligated always to do what conduces to other people's happiness and well-being. But why should we assume such a thing? Where does this obligation come from? Purposeless, mindless natural processes and forces cannot impose moral duties upon us, so why should I not just promote my own well-being and let others fend for themselves? If God is off the table there's no real answer to these questions.

Thus, God's existence is crucial, not so that we can recognize good, perhaps, but rather as a ground for both the existence of good and for whatever duty we have to do good to others.

So, let's return to the dilemma. Consider again the second horn. Does God command love because love is good? Is the good of love independent of God? Does it exist apart from God?

I don't think so. Goodness is an essential element of God's being. Goodness is no more separable from God than the property of having just three angles is separable from triangles. Goodness is ontologically dependent upon God's existence much as sunlight is ontologically dependent upon the sun. If there were no sun, sunlight would not exist. If there were no God then moral goodness as a quality of our actions would not exist. Actions which lead to human well-being would have no moral value any more than a cat nursing her young has moral value even though her act conduces to their well-being. We would not consider the cat evil if it refused to nurse its young, nor, if there is no God, would we be able to judge a man objectively evil if he practiced cruelty.

God commands love because he has made us to be the sort of beings which flourish, generally, when nurtured in love, and he has made us this way because it is his essential nature to be loving. Love is not one thing and God another. God is love.

But what of the first horn of the dilemma? What if instead of God being love, suppose he were hateful and cruel? Would hatred and cruelty then be good? We'll consider those questions next time.

Euthyphro's Dilemma Pt. I

There's a strong case to be made for the claim that if theism is false there are no objective moral duties. If there are no objective moral duties then ethics reduces to the subjective feelings and prejudices of each autonomous individual and the language of right and wrong is meaningless.

Divine Command ethics, particularly of the Judeo-Christian sort, affords a ground for thinking that objective moral duties do exist and that therefore moral discourse makes sense.

Perhaps the strongest criticism of Divine Command ethics, however, is what's called the Euthyphro Dilemma. I wrote about this a few years ago and thought it'd be appropriate to revisit that discussion over the next couple of days.

Here's Part I:

One family of arguments among the dozen or so which, taken together, make a strong case for the claim that theism is a better explanation for our experience of the world than is naturalism or, alternatively, that it's more probable that theism is true than that naturalism is true, are the arguments lumped under the heading of The Moral Argument. One version of this argument goes like this:

1. If there is no God then there are no objective moral duties.
2. There are objective moral duties.
3. Therefore, there is a God.

In this argument God is taken to be a transcendent, perfectly good moral authority who is able to hold us accountable. The argument is not a proof since when faced with it the skeptic has a couple of options:

A. He can reject the first premise and argue that even though there's no God there could still be objective moral duties.
B. He could accept the first premise but deny the second premise and thus embrace ethical subjectivism or nihilism.

Of course, if he accepts both premises he's logically bound to accept the conclusion.

The problem is that, as I argue in my novel In the Absence of God (see link at upper right of this page), either option he selects to avoid having to accept the conclusion creates difficulties. If he chooses A then it's incumbent upon him to show where objective moral duties could come from if not from a divine law-giver. Neither society at large nor the cosmos itself is a suitable source of moral value, and any moral duties the skeptic embraces are arbitrary choices.

If he therefore chooses B and embraces some form of subjectivism he has to recognize that his moral choices are simply an arbitrary preference or taste and that he must forfeit the ability to make judgments of anyone else's behavior which are also based on their own preferences which are no more right nor wrong than his are.

This suspension of moral judgment may sound good to someone of a post-modern inclination, but only until one gets down to cases. If our moral duties are all subjectively imposed we can't say that a child molester or rapist, or even the torture of children is "wrong." The most we can say is that these things certainly seem wrong to us, but if they don't seem wrong to the person doing them then in what sense are they really wrong? The idea that these things are not really wrong for the person doing them is extremely difficult to live with consistently.

The subjectivist option leads at best to moral egoism, i.e. the view that the right thing for me to do is whatever increases my pleasure and contentment in life, and at worst to moral nihilism, i.e. the view that nothing is really right or wrong in a moral sense.

But, the skeptic will reply, relying on God creates problems for the theist as well. One famous attempt to show that the theist is in no better position than is the skeptic with regard to a foundation for morality first appeared in one of Plato's dialogues (The Euthyphro) in which Plato has Socrates pose the following question to an interlocutor named Euthyphro: "Is something morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?" This is called the Euthyphro Dilemma because it seeks to confront the advocate of the moral argument with two unpalatable choices between which he must choose.

If the theist chooses the first option, that good is whatever God commands, then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems to be at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen, that God commands us to do what is good, then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

Over the next couple of days I'd like to explain why I think the The Euthyphro Dilemma, for all it's popularity, doesn't do the work that some skeptics think it does. More tomorrow.

Aspiring to the Life of the Mind

In an interesting - and rather unusual - piece in First Things Paul Griffiths gives advice to young people aspiring to the intellectual life. He lists and discusses four requirements of such a life. The first three are these:

1. The aspiring intellectual must choose a topic to which he or she can devote his or her life. Just as one might fall in love with another, so, too, does one often fall in love with an idea or question.

2. An intellectual must have time to think. Three hours a day of uninterrupted time. No phone calls, no texts, no visits. Just thinking and whatever serves as a support for thinking (reading, writing, experimenting, etc).

3. Anyone taking on the life of an intellectual needs proper training. This may involve university study, but it may not.

What Griffith has to say about each of these is interesting, but the most interesting part of his essay to me is what he says about the fourth requirement. One who aspires to the life of the mind must have interlocutors, i.e. people with whom one can share ideas. He writes:

You can’t develop the needed skills or appropriate the needed body of knowledge without them. You can’t do it by yourself. Solitude and loneliness, yes, very well; but that solitude must grow out of and continually be nourished by conversation with others who’ve thought and are thinking about what you’re thinking about. Those are your interlocutors.

They may be dead, in which case they’ll be available to you in their postmortem traces: written texts, recordings, reports by others, and so on. Or they may be living, in which case you may benefit from face-to-face interactions, whether public or private. But in either case, you need them.

You can neither decide what to think about nor learn to think about it well without getting the right training, and the best training is to be had by apprenticeship: Observe the work—or the traces of the work—of those who’ve done what you’d like to do; try to discriminate good instances of such work from less good; and then be formed by imitation.

Very well, but such people are not easy to find. Most people don't care at all about the things that fascinate and animate an intellectual. Most people are too preoccupied with the exigencies of making a living and raising a family to care overmuch about ideas or the life of the mind.

Where are such interlocutors to be found? The answer these days, as you must already know, is: mostly in the universities of the West and their imitators and progeny elsewhere. That, disproportionately, is where those with an intellectual life are provided the resources to live it, and that, notionally, is the institutional form we’ve developed for nurturing such lives.

I write “notionally” because in fact much about universities (I’ve been in and around them since 1975) is antipathetic to the intellectual life, and most people in universities, faculty and students included, have never had and never wanted an intellectual life. They’re there for other reasons. Nevertheless, on the faculty of every university I’ve worked at, there are real intellectuals: people whose lives are dedicated to thinking in the way I’ve described here....If you want living interlocutors, the university is where you’re most likely to find them.

Griffiths adds this:

You shouldn’t, however, assume that this means you must follow the usual routes into professional academia: undergraduate degree, graduate degrees, a faculty position, tenure. That’s a possibility, but if you follow it, you should take care to keep your eyes on the prize, which in this case is an intellectual life.

The university will, if you let it, distract you from that by professionalizing you, which is to say, by offering you a series of rewards not for being an intellectual, but for being an academic, which is not at all the same thing. What you want is time and space to think, the skills and knowledge to think well, and interlocutors to think with. If the university provides you with these, well and good; if it doesn’t, or doesn’t look as though it will, leave it alone.

The university’s importance as a place of face-to-face interlocution about intellectual matters is diminishing in any case. Universities are moving, increasingly, toward interlocution at a distance, via the Internet. This fact, coupled with the possibility of good conversation with the dead by way of their texts, suggests that for those whose intellectual vocation doesn’t require expensive ancillaries (laboratories, telescopes, hadron colliders, powerful computers, cadres of research subjects, and the like), they should be one place among many to look for interlocutors.

You should, in any case, not assume that what you need in order to have an intellectual life is a graduate degree. You might be better served by assuming that you don’t, and getting one only if it seems the sole route by which you can get the interlocution and other training you need. That is rarely the case....

Here's his conclusion:

And lastly: Don’t do any of the things I’ve recommended unless it seems to you that you must. The world doesn’t need many intellectuals. Most people have neither the talent nor the taste for intellectual work, and most that is admirable and good about human life (love, self-sacrifice, justice, passion, martyrdom, hope) has little or nothing to do with what intellectuals do.

Intellectual skill, and even intellectual greatness, is as likely to be accompanied by moral vice as moral virtue. And the world—certainly the American world—has little interest in and few rewards for intellectuals.

The life of an intellectual is lonely, hard, and usually penurious; don’t undertake it if you hope for better than that. Don’t undertake it if you think the intellectual vocation the most important there is: It isn’t. Don’t undertake it if you have the least tincture in you of contempt or pity for those without intellectual talents: You shouldn’t. Don’t undertake it if you think it will make you a better person: It won’t.

Undertake it if, and only if, nothing else seems possible.

There's a lot of wisdom in all of this.

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.