Losing Their Minds

Liberal media and politicians seem to be doing all they can to demonstrate that Trump's contempt for them is amply warranted. Let's let Andrew Klavan describe the latest example of media mendacity:

At a sit-down with California officials worried about sanctuary laws, Trump was questioned by Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims. The sheriff complained that the laws kept her from holding the vicious, brutal, murderous members of the MS-13 gang for deportation. "There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it," the sheriff said.

And the president, sympathizing and obviously referring to the gangsters, answered, "You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals."

CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, the New York Times and even C-SPAN rushed to tweet this comment in such a way as to make it sound as if Trump were referring to illegal immigrants in general. "Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country’s borders 'animals.'" Well, yes, except they left out the descriptor: "But only those immigrants who beat children to death with baseball bats and cut their enemies' hearts out and are animals."

This was such an obvious distortion of the President's words that even they realized that their comments made them look either dishonest or stupid so they rushed to change the narrative to something like the following: Well, okay, Trump wasn't talking about all immigrants but still it's simply awful to dehumanize these gang members who rape, murder, and terrorize - who commit acts of unspeakable savagery. Even though their behavior is bestial, it's simply deplorable that Trump would call them animals.

It's obvious to anyone with a scintilla of common sense that Mr. Trump was speaking metaphorically not literally, but metaphor is apparently too subtle for some to grasp.

According to the Daily Caller (See here for additional examples):

CNBC’s John Harwood claimed, “however repugnant their actions, MS-13 gang members are human beings,” and Vox’s Dylan Matthews argued, “What if MS-13 members are still human and it’s bad to call them animals.”

Well, of course they're still human. It's obvious to anyone not consumed by a visceral hatred of the President that he was employing a metaphor. It's obvious to anyone not blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome that he meant that the vicious and inhumane behavior that characterizes MS-13, their view of both life and other human beings, is accurately and fairly described as that of predatory, conscienceless, amoral beasts.

For the left to make an issue of this seems symptomatic of a loss of all perspective, a loss of their collective mind.

Even so,

BBC reporter Anthony Zurcher insisted, “Referring to any humans as ‘animals’ edges toward the language of genocide.”

This is nonsense. In fact, refusing to condemn savage behavior in the strongest possible terms is to edge toward moral paralysis.

CNN personality Ana Navarro ...said the president was dehumanizing these poor MS-13 members, which put him in the same category as Nazis and slave owners.

The President did no such thing. Those MS-13 members have dehumanized themselves. Trump is simply pointing out that these are people who've chosen to diminish and set aside their own humanity.

In a textbook illustration of hypocrisy, Navarro wanted her viewers to know how reprehensible it was for Trump to allegedly dehumanize someone by calling them an animal and yet in a tweet a couple of years ago she herself used the same language to disparage Mr. Trump:

Regular CNN commentator Ana Navarro joined the crowd attacking President Donald Trump for referring to MS-13 gang members as “animals,” apparently forgetting that she had used the same terminology to attack Trump during the 2016 campaign. Just after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, Navarro tweeted her disgust with then candidate Trump.

“Should Donald Trump drop out of the race? Yes,” she tweeted Oct. 10, 2016. “He should drop out of the human race. He is an animal. Apologies to animals.”

Here's another example of a journalist condemning Mr. Trump for doing pretty much the same thing she did not too long ago:

Jennifer Rubin, the self-described “conservative blogger” at the Washington Post, called President Trump’s comments “disgusting,” but in August of 2017, Rubin also compared the president to an “animal” in an opinion piece that appeared in the Chicago Tribune:

“Only 24 hours after he read a serious speech off a teleprompter committing to send more young men and women to fight in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump reverted to form, delivering a rambling, rage-filled, 77-minute harangue that was alternately defensive, angry, accusatory and just plain weird. Like a trapped animal, he lashed out in every direction, trying unsuccessfully to draw blood.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also criticized the President for not recognizing that each of those MS-13 killers, as she put it, holds within himself the "spark of divinity."

These are odd words from a Roman Catholic who is nevertheless staunch in her support of the right to use abortion as birth control. Don't those babies also have the spark of divinity in them? Which is worse, calling someone who has done everything he could to snuff out that spark of divinity within himself an animal or actually snuffing out the spark of divinity in a baby by treating it as just a blob of tissue?

All humans are created in the image of God, but that doesn't mean that they can't become so degraded and cruel as to transmogrify themselves into moral monsters. It's a symptom of how perverse the left has become in their hatred of Trump that they're now reduced to coming to the defense of the humanity of extremely evil men, denying the obvious inhumanity of their behavior, and castigating Trump for clearly articulating it.

Why does MS-13 warrant President Trump's opprobrium? Breitbart offers a list of eleven of their more heinous crimes. It's worth reading and mulling over whether "animals" is really an inappropriate description of these people.

Meanwhile, here's an interesting interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on the criticism of President Trump and his "animals" remark:

An amusing aspect of all this is to consider that had Navarro, Pelosi and the rest ever discovered that MS-13 was a branch of the alt-right they themselves would be happy to declare them savages and animals.

Their indignation is not really that Mr. Trump has called the nation's attention to the depravity of this gang by labeling them what they in fact are. Their indignation is with Mr. Trump himself who has had the temerity to not only win an election they thought they had sewn up but also to keep all the promises he made during the campaign, undoing much of Mr. Obama's legacy in the process.

That's what's causing them to act as if they're losing their minds.

Leaving the Left

Yesterday's post on socialism and the four socialist candidates selected by Democratic voters to run for Congress in Pennsylvania this November highlighted the growing infatuation among progressives for far left ideological solutions to the nation's problems.

To be sure, the growing support for far-left ideology and politicians such as Bernie Sanders, especially among millenials, isn't limited just to economics.

In his new book Suicide of the West Jonah Goldberg cites some disappointing statistics. Support for liberty, Goldberg writes, is dying out:

Among those born in the 1930s, 75% of Americans and 53% of Europeans say living under democratic government is "essential." Among those born in the 1980s, the number drops to the low 40s in Europe and the low 30s in America. Only 32% of millennials consider it "absolutely essential" that "civil rights protect people's liberty."

The younger you are the less likely you are to support free speech rights. Forty percent of 18 to 34 year-olds ... thought that speech offensive to minorities should be banned.

A survey of college students in 2015 found that a majority of students favor speech codes for both students and faculty. More than six in ten want professors to provide students with "trigger warnings" before discussing or presenting material some might find offensive.

This is especially silly, of course. It would mean that we'd end up banning all speech since everyone is a member of some minority group or other - racial, religious, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, political ideology, body morphology, age, socio-economic class, pet owners, whatever - and everyone is offended by something.

Finally, there's this disconcerting stat:

Thirty percent of self-identified liberal students said they believe the First Amendment is outdated.

The silver lining is that the progressive abrogation of liberty is beginning to disillusion a lot of liberals. An example is journalist Dave Rubin of The Rubin Report who formerly identified as a progressive, but who has since realized that progressivism is leading us to totalitarian fascism. Here's his story:

The Democrats Embrace Socialism

In Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary election four socialist candidates running on the Democratic ticket won their party's nomination for Congress, and two of them are guaranteed to win in November since they'll be running unopposed.

It's remarkable that the Democratic party continues to move leftward despite the fact that socialist policies have such a problematic historical track record. Almost every economic basket case in the world is a socialist economy. Venezuela was a rich nation until it embraced socialism and now many of its people who were formerly middle class are starving and/or fleeing to other countries in South and Central America.

Socialists want a guaranteed income, a guaranteed job, and have both free health care and free education. It sounds very appealing on the surface, but these allurements all need to be paid for, and the only way to do that is by raising taxes and imposing mandates and regulations on businesses. This crushes an economy, especially an economy which has to maintain a strong military.

High taxes and regulations stifle business innovation and job creation, raise unemployment, and actually reduce the amount of money the government takes in since fewer people have jobs and pay taxes. When the government runs health care the patient sacrifices the freedom to choose the care they want, wait times for tests increase, and the quality of care erodes just as we saw happen in our government-run veterans' hospitals.

On the other hand, we've recently seen a vivid lesson on how lowering tax rates and reducing regulations produces more benefits for more people. Tax revenues to the federal government have been at record highs since tax reform passed last year and President Trump relaxed many Obama era regulations on business. Moreover, minority unemployment is at record lows, over a million people have left the welfare rolls, personal income has risen, and the economy has boomed.

So why would anyone want to undo and reverse all this? Perhaps it's because socialism sounds compassionate to those who'd rather feel than think. Feeling is easy, thinking is hard. Thinking requires us to examine evidence and set aside prejudices.

Here are a couple of videos which show what socialism has accomplished in two South American countries, Venezuela and Brazil, both of which were prospering until they elected socialist governments:

Despite the chaos and destruction wreaked upon these countries by socialist governments many Democrats in the U.S. still vote for it. Why?

Creating Life

There are fundamentally two possible explanations for the origin of life in the universe. One is that life arose through the fortuitous conflation of natural forces, chemical principles and sheer chance unaided by any intelligent input. The second is that life is somehow the product of intelligent agency.

The problem with the first is that it's so astronomically improbable that unguided processes could somehow produce the information necessary to construct a living, reproducing cell that it seems absurd. It's like believing, in Fred Hoyle's famous metaphor, that a tornado sweeping across a salvage yard could leave in its wake a fully functional 747 jet airliner.

This is an extremely difficult problem for metaphysical naturalism, the view that nature and its laws are all that exists, but all is not lost. Perhaps the probabilistic resources required for such an amazing feat as naturalism posits can be found in the multiverse.

In other words, if there are an infinity of salvage yards and an infinity of tornadoes eventually one will leave a jet plane in its wake, just as if you're dealt enough hands of cards eventually you'll get a royal flush. Or to use a more familiar metaphor, if an infinite number of monkeys are set to hammering away blindly on an infinite number of computers, eventually one of them will churn out the complete works of Shakespeare.

This is the naturalist's conviction, and although it's logically possible, it's so fantastically improbable as to place it beyond the credulity of not only those of common sense but even of most philosophers.

The mere logical possibility of such a prodigy does little to establish confidence in its having happened, so some have cast an envious glance at some form of intelligence as the cause. The problem with this is that it immediately raises the prospect of you know Who, and that's one solution that any dutiful metaphysical naturalist adamantly refuses to consider. Eyes shut, fists clenched, as C.S. Lewis once put it, the metaphysical naturalist would rather be burned at the stake than seriously entertain that possibility.

Even so, the evidence for design is powerful, so maybe intelligent engineering could be invoked in the origin of life without having to allow a divine foot in the door. So, ever resourceful, scientists and philosophers have come up with a pair of possibilities.

One is that life on earth is just a computer simulation designed by some very advanced life form in some other universe. This, however, is just a version of the multiverse gambit, since it assumes the existence of other universes, and in addition to the problems inherent in the multiverse hypothesis - namely the lack of evidence for the hypothesis and the inability to put it to any meaningful test - it simply pushes the problem back a step. If there are other universes with intelligent beings in them, how did those beings arise?

Moreover, it's not at all clear that conscious experience, i.e. the sensations we have of pain, pleasure, sound, color, etc., could be simulated by a computer.

The second possibility is something called panpsychism. It's the belief that the intelligent agent is the universe itself. On this view every particle of matter has at least a rudimentary consciousness and that if matter is aggregated together in just the right pattern and amount it'll reach a critical mass at which point consciousness arises, the universe becomes conscious and intelligent and proceeds to design life somewhere within itself.

As far as I'm aware these possibilities pretty much exhaust the philosophical landscape when it comes to accounting for the origin of life and the presence of the enormous amount of functional information contained in each cell of any living organism. Life originated as a result of either a blind stroke of incredible luck, a computer simulation originating in some other world, universal, panpsychic consciousness, or God.

The only way the last option can be adjudged to be less likely than any of the others is if it's decided apriori that God doesn't exist, but that assumption, of course, begs the question. Whether God exists, or whether His existence is more probable than any of the alternative explanations for life, is precisely what's at issue.

You can read more on the state of origin of life research here or you might be interested in this video which discusses what scientists mean when they talk about functional information in a living organism:

Why Obama's Iran Deal Was Ended

In 2015 the United States and several other nations made a deal with Iran that offered the Iranian government $150 billion and an end to economic sanctions in return for which Iran pledged to postpone its nuclear weapons program for ten years.

It was a terrible deal for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that President Obama didn't even submit it to the Senate for ratification but made the agreement entirely on his own. President Trump has taken some heat for letting the agreement lapse on May 12th, but he really couldn't have done otherwise.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed last week, the Iranians, the world's worst terrorist state, have been lying all along when they've denied having nuclear weapons aspirations. In any case, the agreement would not prevent them from restarting their program in 2025 and developing the capability of mounting nuclear warheads on missiles within a few years or even months.

In other words, the Iran deal allowed the world to sleepwalk toward Armageddon, deluding itself into thinking that peace had been purchased, as if Islamic fanatics could be bought off with money. In fact, if Iran is allowed to continue its nuclear weapons program Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan will all insist on building their own nukes, and it's almost inevitable that those weapons would be used.

Back when the deal was made with Iran Dennis Prager put together a video which explains in just a few minutes why this was such a terrible agreement. It's worth watching so as to better understand why President Trump chose to take the step that he did.

Avoiding a Cosmic Beginning

Ross Pomeroy has a brief column at Real Clear Science in which he argues that the Big Bang theory of cosmogenesis (the origin of the universe) was resisted by many scientists because they harbored an anti-religious bias that rendered any theory of a beginning of the universe apriori repugnant.

A beginning to the universe implies a transcendent act of creation, which sounds too much like Genesis 1:1, and that sort of thing has no place in science, we've been told ad infinitum.

There were problems with the Big Bang to be sure, but as time wore on evidence accumulated that the universe was expanding which meant that if scientists extrapolated back in time they would come to a point at which all the universe was compressed into an infinitely dense point.

In other words, the universe arose out of nothing which is what theologians had been saying for thousands of years. Atheistic scientists were chagrined. After all, science was supposed to debunk religious beliefs, not confirm them.

Then, in the 1960s, two scientists working for Bell laboratories, looking for something else entirely, accidentally confirmed a prediction of the Big Bang theory. They discovered the remnant energy from the initial "Bang". This discovery of what's called the cosmic background radiation rocked the scientific world.

Pomeroy writes:

Today, the Big Bang model of cosmology is pretty much taken for Gospel, and for good reason. For more than fifty years, evidence gathered from all manner of sources has supported the notion that the Universe as we know it expanded from an infinitely dense singularity.

But things didn't always look so certain for the Big Bang. In its most nascent form, the idea was known as the hypothesis of the primeval atom, and it originated from an engineer turned soldier turned mathematician turned Catholic priest turned physicist by the name of Georges Lemaître. When Lemaître published his idea in the eminent journal Nature in 1931, a response to observational data suggesting that space was expanding, he ruffled a lot of feathers.

As UC-San Diego professor of physics Brian Keating wrote in his recent book Losing the Nobel Prize, "Lemaître's model... upset the millennia-old orthodoxy of an eternal, unchanging cosmos. It clearly implied that everything had been smaller and denser in the past, and that the universe must itself have had a birth at a finite time in the past."

Besides questioning the status quo, Lemaître's primeval atom also had some glaring problems. For starters, there were hardly any means of testing it, a must for any would-be scientific theory. Moreover, it essentially suggested that all the matter in the Universe came from nothing, a flabbergasting claim. It also violated an accepted notion known as the perfect cosmological principle, which suggested that the Universe looks the same from any given point in space and time.

For these reasons, English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle gathered with a few colleagues to formulate the Steady State theory of the cosmos. The idea kept the observable universe essentially the same in space and time, and it accounted for evidence suggesting that the universe is expanding by hypothesizing that matter is instead being created out of the fabric of space in between distant galaxies.

Steady State didn't have the problems inherent to the notion of a primeval atom, and, as Keating wrote "it sure as hell didn't look like the creation narrative in Genesis 1:1."

As Keating continued, anti-religious sentiments provided underlying motivation to debunk Lemaître's theory.

Many atheist scientists were repulsed by the Big Bang's creationist overtones. According to Hoyle, it was cosmic chutzpah of the worst kind: "The reason why scientists like the 'big bang' is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis."

When a man is dead set against the evidence that God exists there's not much that can persuade him to believe otherwise. Hoyle remained adamantly opposed to the Big Bang until his death in 2001. Many modern cosmologists are searching for a theory of cosmogenesis today that will allow them to avoid a cosmic beginning.

Maybe they'll find one, but there seems to be something strange about people who insist that religious belief has no place in science being motivated by their own religious belief to spend their lives in search of a way to escape a theory just because that theory has religious implications.

Noble Savages?

A frequently heard claim is that white Europeans stole the land in North and South America from innocent bucolic Indians living peacefully in harmony with man and nature. What's often omitted from this tale is that these Indians, or their ancestors, themselves stole the land from whomever the original inhabitants were. Indian tribes had been at war with each other for millennia before Columbus ever set sail. Control of the land had doubtless passed back and forth from one conquering tribe to another countless times.

Whatever tribe was on the land when Columbus landed was very unlikely to be the descendents of the first humans to inhabit that soil.

Nevertheless, we know from accounts like that handed down to us by 16th century Spanish priest Bartholomew de las Casas who personally witnessed the horrors inflicted upon the tribes of Hispaniola and Central America by the Spaniard colonizers that the Spaniards were capable of unimaginable cruelty. De las Casas' record of their crimes was later incorporated into a book titled The Destruction of the Indies. It makes for very grisly reading.

We know about these awful atrocities because of eyewitnesses like de las Casas, but what tends to get overlooked, because they weren't as well-documented, are the even worse crimes of the native Americans against each other.

Nirmal Dass has an enlightening column at The Daily Caller in which he describes some of the practices of "pre-contact" native Americans, i.e. native American tribes prior to contact with Europeans. Much of what he describes - torture, child sacrifice and cannibalism - is quite gruesome, and it raises some interesting moral and anthropological questions.

Here's a portion of his column:

The recent unearthing of the remains of sacrificed children in Peru highlights the widely known but little discussed topic of human sacrifice and cannibalism — especially of children — among native populations of the Americas.

This latest find is not unique. Evidence shows that humans were butchered and de-fleshed in the Nanchoc Valley, and at the Pyramid of the Moon, in the Moche River Valley, at the Piramide Mayor at Caral and at the Cave of the Owl in the Peruvian Upper Montaña. Human bones, charred and often shattered to extract the marrow, have been found at Los Gavilanes, Huaca Prieta, Asia, and Aspero — to name but a few places.

Further, the curious study of paleofeces, where coprolite (naturally preserved feces) is studied to determine the food available to ancient populations, shows the presence of human proteins, which can only come from consuming human flesh. Fecal samples are taken from various sites throughout the Americas.

Peru also preserves the earliest evidence of headhunting in all the three native cultures (the Paracas, the Nazca and the Huari). Given the dry climate, well-preserved heads have been found which show the process of ritual mutilation (the brain was removed through a hole in the forehead and the lips were sealed shut by two thorns). A similar practice existed among the Jibaro of Puerto Rico.

Nor is Peru unique in the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism, for both were important features in all native cultures, throughout North, Middle and South America. Take for example, the Tiwanaku in Bolivia; the Tupi-Guarani of Brazil; the gathering of Inca children (usually little girls) as tax payment who were then sacrificed.

The Aztec cooked the flesh of victims into a stew, with tomatoes and peppers. We also have the finds at Ecatepec, near Mexico City, at Tula, at Burnt Mesa, New Mexico, at the Mancos Canyon, the Atakapa of Southwestern Louisiana, among the Tupinamba, and the Carib (the very term “cannibal” comes from the name of this tribe, whom Columbus first encountered).

Further North, there are the elaborate torture-slaughter-cannibal rituals of the Iroquois, the Huron, and other people of the Great Lakes, the Westo, the Anasazi, the plains, the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts (such as the Kwakiutl), the Pacific Islands, and even up into the Arctic, as at the Saunuktuk site. I have been privately assured by scholars who study the Pre-Contact period (before contact with Europeans) that “you wouldn’t want to be living in most parts of the Americas back then.”

Dass then makes this interesting remark about how this data is viewed by scholars and students in the grip of multiculturalist assumptions and the moral and cultural relativism that accompanies those assumptions:

This glut of evidence is processed in the mill of relativism, however, and what emerges is the intellectualization of man’s inhumanity to man, which passes for scholarly neutrality. In other words, no one can bring himself to say that one culture can be better than another, especially if that other happens to be the Western one. The exhortation is always the same: We must understand, not judge. But how do you understand children being tortured, slaughtered and then eaten? More importantly, what is there to understand?

He's exactly right. If torturing children in order to eat them isn't an appallingly degenerate moral evil then nothing is, and the relativists who refuse to call it evil, who insist that no culture is any better than any other, that eating children is no different, morally speaking, than eating beef, are themselves complicit, even if only centuries later, in the degeneracy.

The appropriate judgment on these cultures is to declare that one is glad that they died out, that the world is much better off without them, and that they richly deserved to perish.

How Western Missionaries Blessed the World

I not infrequently find myself referring in conversation with friends to Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won. Like all his books, HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had its genesis in the West.

His theory, convincingly defended, to my mind, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were. He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we're often told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they imposed "modernity" on much of the non-Western world. It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anticolonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, never having made anything better for anyone, blithely and foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

Woodberry's paper can be read in pdf here.

A Movie Running Backwards

A student recently found old post in the archive and I thought I'd re-post it:

There is a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views invites us to imagine a scenario which illustrates this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards! The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the simplest explanation for the phenomena in the video, certainly simpler than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell wants to relate this to the problem of undirected Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a professor describing the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class. “Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms was formed by pure chance with the ability to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were also able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors that crept in.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded into a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have reversed the pictures! You did it backwards” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

That's the problem with Darwinian evolution. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as butterfly metamorphosis, or create a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these things were the intentional product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

Of course, if a mind was somehow directing the process that would change everything.

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.