White Guilt

I once received a poignant e-mail from a student who expressed her desire to give back to those who have so little something of the abundance with which she was blessed. Her wish to help others is wonderful, and I was deeply impressed with this young woman's commitment to the poor and the marginalized.

There was one thing she said in her missive, however, which is evidently a common sentiment on her campus and one which I asked her to reconsider. She felt, or at least seemed to have felt, that part of her obligation to help the poor arose from the fact that she's "a white, middle class, educated female with a tremendous amount of undeserved privilege."

I know students are sometimes encouraged by their professors to think that one's race or gender confer upon one a large measure of unmerited advantage, but to tell the truth I think they're just wrong about this. The idea of white privilege is a shibboleth that is too often used to evoke in whites a sense of racial guilt. In my response to this young woman I tried to explain why I think the guilt she seemed to feel is actually a derogation of the choices and sacrifices made by her grandparents, parents, and herself.

Here's what I wrote to her:

Dear S_,

Yours is a lovely e-mail, and I think it's wonderful that you want to give of yourself to those who subsist on the margins of society. I wish you well and pray God's richest blessing on your efforts.

I do want to urge you, though, to consider something. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into what you say, but you seem to suggest that your status in society is somehow an undeserved privilege. If that is what you're saying I don't think you should see it that way.

You are what you are and have what you have for a couple of reasons, neither of which you should feel guilty about. First, your parents and/or your grandparents worked very hard, sometimes twelve or more hours a day, I'll bet, to provide you with an opportunity to get an education.

Your status is largely the fruit of their toil, as well as dozens of other important and wise choices they made in life, and it's not something you should feel guilty about. Indeed, I think it diminishes their efforts to think of your status as a consequence of your race. So far from feeling that your privilege is undeserved I think you should be proud of the people who made it possible and grateful for their sacrifices and the choices they made.

The second reason you enjoy the status you do is because, once given the opportunities your parents and grandparents worked so hard for, you had the moral character to make the most of them. You took advantage of the opportunity to get an education, you held yourself to high standards through your teen years, and you had the wisdom to not squander the opportunities you were given.

None of this is a result of your race. I know that some of your instructors think that being white somehow confers an unfair advantage over others in society, but I think that's mistaken. It was doubtless true historically, but it hasn't been the case in the U.S. for a long time. No one has been legally denied opportunity in this country simply by virtue of his or her race for well over fifty years. If people in this country - white, black or brown - languish in poverty it's often because of the choices both they and their parents have made, not the color of their skin.

The fact is that there are lots of African and Asian-Americans who are successful in this society, but no one talks about their "privilege." Instead they talk, as they should, about how hard their parents worked and the ordeals their parents endured in order to give their children a chance to make it in the world. Contrarily, there are whites, blacks and Asians who enjoy historically unprecedented opportunities to make a positive mark in life but fail to do so because they lack the character it takes to make something of themselves.

In other words, you enjoy the status you do, S_, not because you're privileged by your race but because you're privileged to have the parents and virtues you do. It's wonderful to want to "give back," but don't let anyone imply that you should do so out of guilt over your race or class. Your motivation should be your love for God and the conviction that he wants you to be an instrument to help others become what you are.

Perhaps you disagree with what I wrote to this student, but if so, what specifically do you disagree with?

C.S. Lewis on Naturalistic Ethics

A student linked me to a post by historian Alan Snyder who highlights some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on metaphysical naturalism in his famous book On Miracles. Snyder writes:

In his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis takes aim at “naturalists” who say that there is no “outside” reference [i.e., God] for calling anything good or evil.

When men use the words, “I ought,” Lewis notes, they are saying something about the essence of right and wrong that is built into the universe. In fact, naturalists should never use such terminology: “But if Naturalism is true,” he writes, “‘I ought’ is the same sort of statement as ‘I itch’ or ‘I’m going to be sick.'”

On naturalism there are no moral obligations and thus the word "ought" has no moral significance. If there are no moral duties then there's nothing anyone "ought" to do, at least not in the moral sense of the word "ought."

Lewis explains,

The Naturalist can, if he chooses, brazen it out. He can say . . . “all ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer world by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this.

There’s a slight problem, though, for those who attempt to explain good and evil in this way:

But then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though inconsistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusions, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. . . . They write with indignation like men proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like men recording that they personally like mild beer but some people prefer bitter.

Of course, if good and evil are illusions then there's certainly no reason why we should be concerned with either the illusion of good or the illusion of evil.

To use such terms when the user knows they don't refer to anything is a form of social coercion. Naturalists who employ the rhetoric of good and evil are simply attempting to compel, or trick, others into behaving in ways the naturalists prefer by calling their actions good or evil when in fact they're neither good nor evil - no more than are the actions of a wolf or falcon or any other predator.

When one gull steals a morsel of food from another we don't call the gull or its behavior evil. Likewise, if we're just animals, if there's no transcendent moral order, why do we call an act like robbing an elderly lady evil?

Lewis adds:

Do they remember while they [naturalists] are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better world” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn?

Yet, as Snyder points out, the naturalist, unless he's also a nihilist, doesn't live consistently with his own professed ideology. Snyder concludes with another quote from Lewis:

My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like men.

Yes, they do, but when they do they admit the failure of their naturalism. A worldview that people can't live with consistently is seriously flawed.

On the Kavanaugh Allegations

The woman who wrote the letter accusing Brett Kavanaugh of behaving badly at a high school party some 35 years ago has come forward to give details. Christine Blasey Ford is accusing Judge Kavanaugh of a clumsy, drunken assault when he was a high school junior.

There are many reasons to think her allegations dubious, but even if we grant her the benefit of the doubt, this whole episode has about it more than a whiff of hypocrisy.

Not only is it despicable to trot out at the last minute, after the hearings are over, a letter from a woman who accuses a 17 year-old Brett Kavanaugh of acting much like many other 17 year-old males act before they grow up, but worse, those Democrats who are seeking to destroy a man's reputation, personally and professionally, on the basis of one woman's allegation that Kavanaugh behaved contemptibly and dishonorably as a teenager, are people who worshipped Bill Clinton and the Kennedy brothers - John and Ted.

Now we're to believe they're appalled that a judicial nominee got intoxicated and behaved as an adolescent somewhat like - but perhaps not nearly as bad as - Bill Clinton and the Kennedy brothers behaved as adults. It's surreal.

These folks are so shameless one is tempted to laugh at their audacity even though character assassination is scarcely a laughing matter. The left has turned hypocrisy into a virtue and they practice it with a virtuosity that you almost can't help but admire.

If Kavanaugh did do what he's accused of it certainly shouldn't be minimized, but how many Democrats have done much worse than that during their adult years? Democrats will turn out in Texas in November to vote for Beto O'Rourke for the U.S. Senate, but O'Rourke has not only been convicted of DUI he tried to flee from the scene. Driving while intoxicated is at least as dangerous, and to far more people, than what Kavanaugh is accused of doing, but that doesn't seem to bother the left.

If Kavanaugh is unfit to serve on the Supreme Court because of his choices as a 17 year old, every U.S. Senator who has ever driven a car while over the blood alcohol limit for intoxication, whether they were caught or not, should resign forthwith. But of course they won't.

Ms Ford claims to have been traumatized by the event - she thought Kavanaugh might inadvertently kill her - but it would be instructive to know for whom she voted in 1992 and 1996. Was it Bill Clinton, a sexual predator? Did she vote for Hillary in 2016, a woman who sought to minimize and discredit other women who accused her husband of much worse behavior than that of which Ms Ford is accusing Brett Kavanaugh? If so, how genuine can her abhorrence of those who commit sexual assault be?

The Democrats' politics of personal destruction - ruining people's careers and lives for their own political gain - is reprehensible and extremely damaging to our Republic. It's one thing to hold people accountable for crimes they committed as adults, but if every candidate for a public service position is going to have his or her teenage years scoured by the media and laid open to public scrutiny, it will, in the long run, insure that very few qualified people will want to enter public service.

Personal humiliation in the eyes of one's family and friends is, after all, a very high price to pay for seeking to offer one's services to one's country, but it's a price the left has exacted whenever they could, from Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas and now Brett Kavanaugh.

The Faith of the Naturalist

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conscious beings only seem to arise from other conscious beings. Information, such as is found in books or in computer operating systems, is only generated by minds. It may be that someday scientists will produce life from non-living matter in the laboratory, but if so, they will have only demonstrated that life, too, can be produced by the effort of conscious minds.

The problem of how the first life can be accounted for in a naturalistic ontology will still remain, and it will still require an heroic exertion of blind faith to believe that against incomprehensible odds, somehow, in ways we can't even as yet imagine, life appeared.

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

On Recommending Books

I've always found it difficult to recommend books to people, not because there aren't dozens, maybe hundreds, of books I'd like to recommend, but because I know that what interests me is unlikely to interest someone else with a different personality and background.

I was gratified, therefore, when I read an article sent me by a friend (taken together with the first sentence that may sound ironic, I know) about the reading habits of Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919). In the essay, which is excerpted from Roosevelt's autobiography, the 26th president is quoted as saying this:

I could not name any principle upon which the books [in his library] have been gathered. Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls “the mad pride of intellectuality,” taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.

Roosevelt was a speed reader who could breeze through three books in a day! Many of us can't read three comic books in a day, but TR was reputed to have read tens of thousands of books in his lifetime, many in a foreign language. He goes on to say:

A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time. But there are tens of thousands of interesting books, and some of them are sealed to some men and some are sealed to others; and some stir the soul at some given point of a man’s life and yet convey no message at other times. The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like. Yet at the same time he must avoid that most unpleasant of all the indications of puffed-up vanity which consists in treating mere individual, and perhaps unfortunate, idiosyncrasy as a matter of pride.

This is certainly true, at least for me personally. Books that I read years ago with little profit were much more meaningful to me when reread years later. It's one reason why C.S. Lewis' advice that before you read a new book you should reread an old one has so much merit. As our minds grow and mature so, too, do our tastes and understanding.

It's deeply lamentable that Roosevelt's love of books is not more widely shared today. Books make life much richer than it would otherwise be, but it's hard to convince people of that in a day when television and cyberspace are so easily accessible and require so much less effort than does reading a book. In TR's day books were one of the few sources of entertainment so reading was a pastime much more widely engaged in than today.

In any case, having mentioned above that I find it difficult to recommend books, I'm going to do it anyway. I'm told that the two novels linked to at the top of this page, In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss, are exciting reads that provoke a great deal of thought. I encourage you to try them and let me know if you concur with that humble assessment.

Meanwhile, here are three quotes book lovers will appreciate:

"When I get a little money I buy books. If I have any left over I buy food and clothing." Erasmus

"If you have a garden and a library you have everything you need." Cicero

"Always read stuff that'll make you look good if you die in the middle of it." P.J. O'Rourke

Why the Universe Is So Big

Astronomer Hugh Ross has an article at Salvo that should fascinate anyone interested in chemistry, biology or the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe that makes life on earth possible.

It begins with a challenge frequently levelled at those who believe the universe is intentionally engineered by an intelligent agent to permit life to exist. If so, some who dissent from this view ask, why is the universe so vast? Why are there so many galaxies? Isn't such a huge universe wasteful when a much smaller universe would suffice?

Ross explains that a smaller universe would not have sufficed, and that the universe has to be as large as it is and as massive as it is in order for carbon-based life to exist anywhere in it. The article can be summarized as follows:

In order for life to exist, at least life as we know it, there has to be carbon and oxygen, and in order for these elements to exist there had to be a very precise amount of mass to the universe in its early stages of development. Here's why:

At the beginning of the universe, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was rapidly expanding. Since mass exerts gravitational pull, the rate at which the universe expanded was determined by how much gravity there was acting as a drag on the expansion and this was determined by the amount of mass.

As the universe expanded it cooled. At one point the cooling reached the temperature range in which hydrogen atoms, the only atoms that existed in the early universe, began to fuse together to form other elements. This temperature range is between 15 million and 150 million degrees Celsius.

How long the expanding universe remained in this temperature range depended on how much matter there was to slow down the expansion. Too little matter and the universe would have passed through this range too quickly to form much else besides helium. Too slowly, and all the hydrogen would have fused into elements heavier than iron. Carbon and oxygen would have been very scarce.

In other words, to get the elements necessary for life, specifically carbon and oxygen, the expansion rate had to be just right, which means that the gravitational pull slowing the expansion had to be just right, which means that the amount of matter in the universe had to be just right. That amount of matter happens to be precisely the amount of matter bound up in the stars and galaxies we see in our telescopes.

In order to allow time for the production of carbon and oxygen, but not too much time, the expansion rate had to be calibrated to the astonishing value of one part in 10^55.

To get an idea of how precise this is imagine a dial face with 10^55 calibrations (one with 55 zeros). Now imagine that the dial has to point to exactly one of those calibrations for the universe to have carbon and oxygen. If the dial deviated by just one increment no carbon and oxygen would form. That's breathtaking, but in order to achieve that degree of precision of the expansion rate the universe had to have just the amount of matter that is today bound up in stars and galaxies that it in fact does have.

Indeed, the total amount of matter in the universe had to itself be fine-tuned to an astonishing precision of one part in 10^59.

So, the universe has to be as big as it is and as massive as it is in order for us to be here in this little corner of a galaxy located in an even smaller corner of the universe. Little wonder that many people conclude that it can't all just be a cosmic accident, that there must be an intelligent mind behind it all.

Ross goes on to explain how the amount of carbon we find on earth is also fine-tuned. Just a bit more or a bit less carbon and life on earth would not exist, at least not life forms higher than bacteria. The article is not long and it's very much worth reading in its entirety.

Meanwhile, check out this video to get an idea of how big the universe actually is and how small we are. Each circle represents 10x the diameter of the previous circle:

Understanding Naturalism (Pt. III)

This is the third and final installment in our series of reflections on Alex Rosenberg's essay entitled The Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. Parts I and II can be read below.

In this section Rosenberg argues that naturalism (actually materialism) entails that there is no need to posit the existence of a mind distinct from the brain. Mind is simply a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain, just as we use the word digestion to describe the functioning of the stomach.

This claim has some interesting consequences. If all we are is matter and the matter that makes us up is constantly changing, it follows that there is nothing about us that stays the same over time. In the final analysis human beings are reducible to little more than a constantly shifting and changing bundle of perceptions. Here's Rosenberg:

Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking ourselves seriously too.

We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time.

There seems to be only one way we make sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change. This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads.

Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but non-spatial, and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion consciousness foists on us.

What are the consequences of denying that there is an enduring self? One is surely the bizarre conclusion that we cannot be said to be the same person today that we were ten years ago. If we are in constant flux then we are different from the individual who went by our name in the past.

Now, if this is true it would be unjust to be held responsible for anything that other person did. In the same way that it would be unjust to expect you to keep the promises made by another person, it would be unjust to expect me to keep promises made years ago by a person who had my same name. Marriage vows, for one example, would become worthless once people realized that it wasn't they who made them.

Furthermore, it would be unjust to punish criminals for a crime committed years ago because the person we're punishing is not the same person who committed the crime. For those of you familiar with the movie Bourne Identity, we might ask this question: Is Jason Bourne responsible for the murder of that couple he killed in the movie if he has no memory of having killed them? Was it really he who killed them? Rosenberg would be hard pressed to explain how it would have been.

T.S. Eliot puts it like this: "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

This seems absurd, to be sure, but it is another of the consequences of naturalism that Rosenberg wants his fellow atheists to recognize and acknowledge. Little wonder that so many atheists are unwilling to stay with him on that metaphysical train all the way to it's logical endpoint. They can see that the tracks terminate at a precipice and that the train is going to plunge over a cliff into the abyss of nihilism, and so, still clutching their naturalism, they jump off Rosenberg's train before it arrives at the cliff.

This is, of course, irrational, but perhaps the most irrational thing they do after having jumped off the train, after having made a completely arbitrary, unwarranted, and irrational leap in order to avoid hurtling over the cliff to which their logic leads them, they turn and point to the theists, particularly the Christian theists, whose worldview entails none of these problems, and tell them that it is they who have abandoned reason because they chose not to take the train at all.

One can only smile and shake one's head.

Understanding Naturalism (Pt. II)

This post is Part II (See Part I below) of our look at Alex Rosenberg's paper titled A Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. In this section Rosenberg considers whether the universe and life reflect a purposeful design. In other words, is there any purpose to either the cosmos or to human existence? Rosenberg's answer is, no:

[A]ll of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of [atomic particles] producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.

He goes on to tackle the question whether morality can exist in a naturalistic world. He titles the section, Nice Nihilism: The Bad News About Morality and The Good News. I quote from it at length because it's unusual to find such an explicit statement of the consequences for morality entailed by atheistic naturalism:

If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours).

Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism [the belief that science can answer all life's important questions] must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.

There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon.

So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem. The only way all, or most, normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population.

If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldn’t be a coincidence. Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right, but only feels right to us.

It’s easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right. Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right.

All this should be pretty disturbing to those atheists who want to hold on to moral obligation while denying any transcendent ground for it. It's also precisely correct given Rosenberg's atheistic starting point.

Thus far Rosenberg has drawn the proper conclusions from his naturalism, but then he says something odd. Having denied any ground for distinguishing between right and wrong, he says this:

This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbears in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions.

We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.

What does Rosenberg mean here by imposing a value on niceness, cooperation, and altruism? Would someone who was not nice or cooperative be wrong? A naturalist like Rosenberg cannot say he would, nor do I think he would try to say that given that he has just asserted above that, "Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right." Such judgments of moral value are completely unwarranted on naturalism except as expressions of personal taste.

Even more problematic is his claim that evolution has selected "in the main" for niceness, etc. I doubt that this is at all correct. Certainly this claim runs counter to human experience. There's just as much meanness and cruelty in the world as there is niceness.

That being the case, evolution must have selected at least as much for meanness as for niceness, and an atheistic naturalist simply has no grounds for saying that one is right and the other is wrong. The most he can say is that he likes one more than he likes the other, but right and wrong are not established by our likes and dislikes.

More tomorrow.

Understanding Naturalism (Pt. I)

Alex Rosenberg is an atheistic naturalist - one who holds that nature is all there is, there is no supernature - who seeks in this essay to provide an overview of what it is that naturalists believe. He begins with this preface:

This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.

Rosenberg wishes to draw "the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position," as Sartre put it in describing existentialism. He will have none of the namby-pamby naturalism of those atheists, like Hitchens and Dawkins, who think they can reject God and still cling to belief that life is meaningful, that morality exists, and that truth can be known.

Rosenberg's is a full-blooded naturalism that recognizes that all of those things are contingent upon the existence of a transcendent moral authority. His essay is a call to his fellow atheists to "man-up" and disabuse themselves of their comfortable illusions. No God, he avers, means no genuine meaning to life, no non-arbitrary morality, and no objective truth.

He divides his essay into eight topics, some of which will be addressed here at Viewpoint over the next couple of days. His first topic is headed, Why Leave Life’s Persistent Questions to Guy Noir? and is an explication of "scientism," a term that is in some disrepute but which Rosenberg wants to resuscitate. Here's an excerpt:

We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address.

But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science....Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality. You don’t have to be a scientist to be scientistic.

Scientism is the view that answers to all important questions can be provided through scientific investigation. This is because everything that exists is simply some combination of matter and energy [This is a view called materialism]. Since science investigates matter and energy it will eventually find the answers to all our questions.

If one embraces naturalism [the belief that nature is all there is] then one is likely also to embrace scientism.

Rosenberg's claim here that science can answer all the important questions is surely wrong. It can't, for example, answer, or even address, the question whether we have a soul, whether there's life after death, whether altruism is morally superior to selfishness, whether God exists, what truth is, or a host of other very important matters about which human beings frequently wonder.

In the next topic, titled The Nature Of Reality? Just Ask Physics Rosenberg gives a pretty clear statement of what materialists believe about the world:

What is the world really like? It’s fermions and bosons [subatomic particles], and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if ... there are other ones.

Ideas have consequences. If Rosenberg is right in saying that all that exists is matter, energy and the forces between them then several conclusions inevitably follow. Those conclusions are the topic of the remaining sections of his paper. We'll reflect upon them over the next several days.

A Dictator in the Making?

It's not uncommon to hear political commentators refer to President Trump as a "dictator", or marginally more temperately, an "authoritarian".

Here's an example from MSNBC's Morning Joe cited in the Washington Free Beacon:

MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski and analyst Steve Schmidt had strong language Tuesday for President Donald Trump and his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, calling the former a "dictator in the making" and the latter "illegitimate" before he's even been confirmed.

Schmidt sarcastically complimented Trump as being "absolutely indefatigable" in his "vileness, his illiberalism, his fetish for autocracy."

"It exhausts everybody," Schmidt said. "The problem with it is that when you are in a fight, there's only two ways to win a fight. You either have to bring your opponent to submission … or you wear them out. Trump wears people out. He exhausts them. He numbs them, He completely—"

"That sounds like a dictator in the making, actually," Brzezinski said.

Maybe I'm simply lacking the acuity to see what these people see, but I just don't see much evidence that President Trump is either a dictator or an authoritarian. On the contrary, the evidence we have seems to lead to the opposite conclusion. Mr. Trump, to the extent that he has any ideology at all, seems to be very much a libertarian.

Here are three considerations which I think lead us away from the "dictator" designation:

• A dictator seeks to arrogate power to himself and to centralize government, but President Trump, by removing onerous regulations on business, attempting to reduce government involvement in our lives, e.g. by eliminating the individual mandate under Obamacare, and cutting taxes has done precisely the opposite. By improving the economy and putting money in the hands of individuals he is empowering citizens rather than empowering government.
• A dictator would seek to appoint judges and Supreme Court Justices who would disregard the Constitution and base their rulings on ideological fashion and political expediency. President Trump has consistently appointed jurists who revere the Constitution and who are loyal to the rule of law.
• A dictator would be secretive and uncommunicative, hiding his agenda to fundamentally transform the country from the citizenry until it's too late for them to do anything about it. President Trump, on the other hand, has been without a doubt one of the most transparent presidents ever to hold the office. He makes his agenda abundantly clear virtually every day. Anyone who's paying attention knows precisely what he wants to do and what he's thinking.

To be sure, Mr. Trump is unconventional and, regrettably, often unable to articulate what he means. It's unfortunate that a man who speaks the same language as the rest of us nevertheless still often requires an interpreter.

Even so, a dictator he's not, and if the good folks on the left want us to believe them when they accuse him of tyrannical tendencies they're going to have to adduce a lot more hard evidence than they have heretofore.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

People who don't pay much attention to politics, and even some who do, are often confused about the difference between conservatives and progressives. If, for example, you polled folks on the question "Who are the most staunch advocates of individual liberty, conservatives or progressives," many would reply that it's the liberal progressive and would look at you incredulously if you told them they were mistaken.

Yet, they would be mistaken all the same.

As the progressive wing of the Democratic party continues its embrace of socialism and socialist candidates I was reminded of one of the earliest illustrations of the difference between the two political views - an illustration presented in the famous fable by Aesop titled The Ant and the Grasshopper. It goes like this:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

The moral, of course, is that we should all work hard and be responsible for ourselves. That's the conservative view.

A more contemporary version of the venerable tale, however, goes something like this:

The ant works hard in the withering heat and rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The ant worked hard in school as well, earned an education, waited until he was married before having children, and remained faithful to his ant-wife.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. The grasshopper couldn't care less about school, sleeps with whichever other grasshopper will have him, and lives life in a haze of drugs, alcohol, cheese curls and television reality shows.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well-fed while he's cold, hungry and without health insurance.

The major networks all show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant snug in his comfortable home with a refrigerator filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Labor unions and activist groups stage demonstrations in front of the ant's house where news stations film them loudly condemning the ant for his lack of compassion.

Progressive politicians publicly chastise the ant and blame his Republican sympathies for the grasshopper's plight. They exclaim on the Sunday morning talk shows that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and they call for a tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share and "spread the wealth around."

No longer able to pay his employees or his mortgage because of the tax burdens that have been imposed on him, the ant has to sell both his business and his home which the government buys and gives to the grasshopper because a job and a home are human rights.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his friends, sleeping till noon, and then finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the business fails and the house crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.

The ant has dropped out of sight, never to be seen again. The grasshopper is eventually found dead in a drug-related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful neighborhood.

The moral of the story, of course, is that we get what we vote for.

Progressives are determined to make the ants, which comprise about 25% of the population and which pays about 87% of the nation's income taxes, pull the wagon full of grasshoppers, many of whom are among the almost 50% of our population who pay almost no income tax.

On top of that the top 25% will now have to pay the health insurance costs for 30 million people (50 million if they pass amnesty for illegal aliens). Ants are strong. They can carry loads a hundred times their own weight, but they can't carry all those grasshoppers.

Not a few people labor under the misapprehension that conservatives are cold, heartless, stingy and lack compassion for the poor. This, too, is manifestly untrue. Indeed, studies have shown that conservatives give more to charity than do liberals.

What conservatives do believe, though, is that until the grasshopper changes his grasshopper ways, no amount of charity will help him rise up out of his poverty.

The classic 1934 Walt Disney version of Aesop's fable does a nice job of depicting this truth:

Civility: It All Depends

Throughout the week-long tribute to the late Senator John McCain we found ourselves instructed in the need for a more respectful dialogue in our politics, and President Trump was often tacitly chastised for setting an uncivil tone in his speeches and tweets.

The president deserves to be criticized (though not, for heaven's sake, during a memorial service) for frequently adulterating the quality of our public discourse, but the irony here is that the lectures on civility during the McCain memorials were often delivered by members of the same party which has given us the chaotic, disgraceful circus that has accompanied the Kavanaugh hearings.

It's hard to take seriously calls for courtesy and civility from people who have so far refused to condemn the deplorable behavior of their colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee or of the rank and file activists in the gallery.

David French at NRO describes the clown show that the Democrats put on Tuesday. Here's an excerpt:

[Y]esterday, from the top down, from senators to protesters to online trolls, the Democrats offered a preview of how they’d react to any Republican nominee, and it was a shining example of how and why conservatives don’t believe for one moment that Donald Trump is the sole source of American dysfunction.

Consider first the utterly frivolous behavior of multiple Democratic senators. Within seconds of the hearing’s start they interrupted Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley with demands that he adjourn the hearing.

The pretext was one of those eye-glazing Washington debates over document production, in which senators who’d already vowed weeks ago to vote against Kavanaugh claimed they couldn’t possibly evaluate him properly based on the hundreds of thousands of pages they already had (including more than a decade of judicial opinions).

They instead absolutely needed every scrap of paper he ever touched, so . . . what? They could cast a more emphatic no vote?

By one count the proceedings were interrupted 76 times in two hours, and to what end? So that the senators could show their extremist base that they're determined to resist the inevitable appointment of an eminently qualified jurist?

No one disputes that Brett Kavanaugh is supremely qualified to serve on the Supreme Court, but he's tainted by being the nominee of the hated and terrifying Trumpenstein monster and so must be opposed by whatever means necessary, no matter how rude, vulgar and unseemly.

The Democratic senators at least tried to camouflage their rudeness with a patina of polite language, but the activists who somehow managed to insinuate themselves into the room flavored their buffoonery with angry, screeching insults.

French adds,

Let’s be clear, had angry Tea Party protesters caused the same scale of disruption at a Democratic hearing, news outlets would be shaking their heads at the dangerous lack of respect for a dignified nominee. Instead, all too many folks think this is what democracy looks like: serial attempts to exercise an incoherent, screaming heckler’s veto.

Indeed. Here's a clip of some of the goings-on:

The behavior of these folks was even more absurdly comical than the clip reveals. Apparently, denizens of the twitterverse went berserk at the secret white supremacy hand signals they espied being flashed by a young woman, a lawyer of Mexican and Jewish descent, mind you, sitting behind Judge Kavanaugh.

The Twitterites' outrage meters were also registering in the red after Judge Kavanaugh's unconscionable snub, which turns out to have been no snub at all, of a man who turned out to be the father of a student slain at Parkland High School, apparently set on embarrassing the judge.

You can read about these faux enormities in French's column. Sadly, when people are desperate to find something, anything, to be scandalized about they'll cling to any straw which presents itself, real or imagined, and no matter how foolish it makes them look.

The Odd Couple

I like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but he has certainly been a puzzlement. He has by all appearances, and with no plausible explanation, in the face of massive evidence of wrongdoing and corruption on the part of members of the previous administration and the previous Democratic candidate for president, declined to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue a serious investigation of the apparent malefactors.

If the president chose to relieve Mr. Sessions of his duties, it'd be hard for those of us on the outside of the DOJ (Department of Justice) to think of a reason why he'd be wrong to do so. If he chooses not to cashier him then he should stop humiliating the man in his public pronouncements.

Indeed, the manner in which President Trump is treating AG Sessions is deplorable. The constant tweets maligning Sessions are childish, cruel and often belie a desire on the part of the president to have an AG, as FOX News contributor Brit Hume put it, who'd be "a goalie for the president".

The Odd Couple

Trump's latest tweet criticized Sessions for bringing charges against two Republican congressmen against whom there's considerable evidence of malfeasance. Trump objected in his tweet to the timing of the indictments, since the scandal will almost certainly guarantee that the Republicans will lose those two seats in November, a loss they can ill-afford to sustain.

Here's the content of the president's tweet:

"Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the midterms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff."

". . . The Democrats, none of whom voted for Jeff Sessions, must love him now. Same thing with Lyin' James Comey. The Dems all hated him, wanted him out, thought he was disgusting – UNTIL I FIRED HIM! Immediately, he became a wonderful man, a saint-like figure, in fact. Really sick!"

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the president's intent (it's easy to do), but it seems as though President Trump wants his AG to be something of an advocate and a defender, like a personal lawyer, a legal bug bra, as it were, to protect the president from being sullied by the offal the left relentlessly seeks to splatter him with.

Indeed, that's essentially what President Obama had in Eric Holder and perhaps in Loretta Lynch, but the partisan nature of the Obama AG (and the Obama IRS) made his administration ethically repellant. A political hack is not what the AG is supposed to be regardless of who the president is.

Sessions is right to eschew political considerations in his decision to bring charges against those congressmen. Now, if he would just apply that same principle to the derelictions of Hillary Clinton and her associates the temptation to think that he's out of his depth as Attorney General might subside.

Evolutionarily Superfluous

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't. But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

Some while ago Evolution News did an essay that discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain. Here's what they said about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid. The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients.

The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey. The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volken­burgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival. The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food. The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's a video that shows the Venus Flytrap in action:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture and digest prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

Regarding the capabilities of the brain, a topic also discussed in the Evolution News article, I'm reminded of a quip by philosopher Alvin Plantinga who was discussing the brain's extraordinary ability to do higher math and reflecting on the implausibility of such an ability being adequately explained by a process that merely shaped human brains for reproductive success. Plantinga observed dryly that, after all, it's only the rare graduate student whose prospects for reproductive success are enhanced by his ability to solve differential equations.

The Catholic Scandal

The Federalist has an excellent piece by Paul Rahe, a historian at Hillsdale, on the pederastic corruption at the Vatican.

It's reminiscent of what Luther found when he first visited Rome as a young monk in 1510. Luther was so appalled at the flagrant sexual licentiousness of the priests and bishops that he (or someone close to him) commented that they (the clerics) think they're being virtuous if they limit their debaucheries to sex with women. Luther afterwards would occasionally recite the Italian proverb, "If there is a hell Rome is built on top of it."

The ensuing Protestant Reformation precipitated a corresponding reformation in the Catholic Church that restored a measure of piety and virtue to the clergy, at least in some parts of Europe and North America. Now, however, it appears that another reformation is badly needed.

Rahe says that pederasty, the sexual exploitation of adolescent boys by grown men, is so rampant among priests and higher ups that unless Pope Francis resigns and the Vatican bishops clean house there'll be an ecclesiastical "civil war" in the Roman Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, the scandal is giving the Church not merely a black eye but a serious concussion, and I suspect that a lot of church officials find themselves too paralyzed by political correctness to insist that the offenders be purged.

Since the problem seems bound up inextricably with the so-called Lavender Mafia that permeates the higher echelons of the church's seminaries and other institutions, and which uses its power to block the advancement of young clerics who don't see human sexuality quite the way they do, an attempt to rid the church of its homosexual subculture would surely initiate a worldwide media firestorm.

Indeed, an attempted purge could tear the church apart since according to one authority cited by Rahe, somewhere between 20% and 60% of the church's prelates are homosexual. Even at the low end of that range it's one in five, despite the incidence of homosexuality in the general population hovering somewhere around 3%.

Defenders of the cultural normalization of homosexuality will offer the argument that just because one is a homosexual it doesn't follow that one is also a pederast, any more than one's heterosexuality makes one a heterosexual pedophile, so how is the church to separate the gay sheep from the pederastic goats?

Of course, if one starts from the assumption that homosexuality is in some sense normative then that's a tough argument to rebut. What would be needed for rebuttal would be statistics that support the intuition that pederasty is significantly more tolerated, approved and practiced among homosexuals than opposite sex abuse of minors is tolerated, approved and practiced by heterosexuals.

Nevertheless, whether that intuition is correct or not, any Catholic cleric who has any sort of sexual encounter, whether homo- or heterosexual, whether with a minor or consenting adult, is betraying both his calling and his vow of celibacy and should be sanctioned for that if for nothing else.

And regardless of one's position on homosexuality, everyone can, and should, agree that pederasts, and those who've covered up for them, should be defrocked and prosecuted.

It will be interesting to see how the Catholic Church survives this, especially if the scandal extends, as Rahe alleges, all the way to Il Papa himself. Too bad there's no modern Dante Alighieri around to craft a literary portrayal of the destiny of such as employ their power and influence over adolescent boys to sate their own selfish, depraved appetites by sexually abusing and often traumatizing those boys for the rest of their lives.

Fighting for $15

On Labor Day it might be appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law a bit over two years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of those on the left, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.

The President's Most Significant Legacy

President Trump's most enduring and significant legacy will almost surely be the judges he has appointed and will appoint during the remainder of his term. These are lifetime positions, and the president's selections will reshape the direction of the courts for at least the next two generations.

There's been a lot of attention focused on the upcoming hearings for SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but almost as important as the Supreme Court are the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals.

The Circuit Court consists of 13 appellate courts distributed throughout the country and staffed by 179 judges. The role of these courts is to reexamine cases appealed from district courts, and their decisions become binding precedent across their jurisdiction.

Cases can be appealed from the Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, but since the Supreme Court accepts only about one percent of the cases filed with them, the Court of Appeals has the final say in 99 percent of cases which come before it. This amounts to thousands of decisions each year.

President Trump has made a total of 26 appointments to the appellate courts since taking office. No other president in the history of the United States has appointed so many circuit court judges at this point in his presidency, and his achievement is all the more impressive given that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has tried his best to stall the judicial appointment process, insisting on a full 30 hours of floor debate for all nominees.

So, why do President Trump's judges matter?

During the 2016 campaign, liberal journalist and Hillary Clinton supporter Matthew Yglesias observed that a President Hillary Clinton would appoint “judges who’ll be systematically more sympathetic to criminal defendants, labor and environmental plaintiffs, and government regulators.” This would, he wrote, turn “the federal judiciary back into a powerful prop of progressive governance.”

In other words, Mrs. Clinton would've appointed jurists who would see it as their task to usurp the role of the legislature and make law rather than interpret it.

But the judges President Trump has appointed have a conservative legal philosophy that makes them inclined to limit government power and respect the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.

This means that we'll gradually see a shift in judicial philosophy from judges basing their decisions on whatever might be the reigning political fashion of the day to a deeper regard for the rights enshrined in the Constitution. We should become once more a nation of laws rather than of ideological judges imposing their arbitrary convictions on the rest of us.

And because the average age of Mr. Trump’s circuit court nominees last year was 49, and since they have lifetime appointments, their influence should last for a very long time.

There are still 12 more vacancies on the U.S. Court of Appeals to be filled and doubtless more to come, but meanwhile, the president is enjoying similar success in the next lower level court, the District Courts, where he has already appointed dozens of judges.

The District Courts have 677 judges and are currently beset by 119 vacancies. Those numbers provide ample opportunity to reshape those courts for a long time to come as well.

Firemaker

In a post a couple of days ago on the amazing properties of water it was noted how easy it is to take some very extraordinary things for granted as we go through our everyday lives. Yet when we stop to contemplate the astounding nature of some of those things, like water, it can just take our breath away.

Consider another example - fire.

When we reflect upon all the characteristics of our planet that have to be just so for fire to even exist and then consider all the physical traits of an animal such as human beings that have to be just right for that animal to be able to use fire, and then contemplate what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed, it just leaves one shaking his/her head in amazement.

In this 21 minute video Australian geneticist Michael Denton walks us through the astonishing series of properties and characteristics of the earth, fire, and mankind that have to be precisely calibrated in order for humans to have developed the culture that we have today. Had any of those properties been other than what they are humans might never have survived at all, much less developed an advanced culture.

Someone hearing all this for the first time might well be stunned by how astonishingly fortuitous it all seems.

The book on which the video is based is available here.

What's the Next Election About?

A lot of people are predicting a "blue wave" of Democrat victories this November, especially in Congressional elections, and they may be correct. Historically, the party out of power does well in midterm elections, so it may be that voters will return the Democrats to power in the House of Representatives, but it probably won't be as easy as some seem to think, and it may not happen at all.

Consider some of the obstacles the Democrats must overcome in order to convince voters to return them to the majority in the House.

Love him or loathe him, President Trump has done more for the workers and families of this country than any president in living memory. We're just a year and a half into his first term and have already experienced some of the lowest black and Hispanic unemployment numbers in history and one of the strongest economies the world has ever seen.

Our GDP growth is beyond the dreams of almost all economists prognosticating during the flaccid years of President Obama's tenure, and over-all unemployment is at near record levels for a peacetime economy.

Like the GDP and employment, the stock market is currently bouncing around in record territory. This might be shrugged off by those who think they have no money in the market, but in fact just about everyone who pays into a retirement system is invested in the stock market since that's where those retirement funds are resting. The better the market does the safer their retirement, including social security and medicare, is going to be.

Moreover, Trump's appointments to the federal bench and Supreme Court have consisted of jurists who boast a record of honoring the Constitution and protecting the freedoms guaranteed in the first and second amendments, a fact which makes him extremely popular with a large swath of the American electorate.

His national security team and U.N. ambassador are perhaps the best any president has ever surrounded himself with. As Victor Davis Hanson puts it,

His [Trump's] national-security team at Defense, State, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the UN is better than any seen in prior postwar administrations. Mike Pompeo is not Hillary Clinton, H. R. McMaster and John Bolton have not been Susan Rice, and Jim Mattis is not Chuck Hagel. Nor is Nikki Haley playing the role of Samantha Power at the U.N., or sending in countless requests to unmask the names of those swept in FISA warrants.

Despite the cavils of critics his actions abroad have strengthened American influence and brought common sense to our foreign policy. He has gotten us out of two very bad Obama-era international agreements - the Paris Climate Accords and the Iranian Nuclear deal.

Reimposing economic sanctions on Iran appears to be bringing that state sponsor of terrorism to its knees, and Trump is putting more pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear missile program than has any president in the last two decades.

His recent trade deal with Mexico is a boon to American workers and is likely to be followed by similar deals with the Canadians, and possibly the Chinese and Europeans.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are handicapped by an almost complete lack of any agenda for the country beyond repealing the Trump tax cuts and reissuing the executive orders rescinded by Trump. The tax cuts which the Democrats have characterized as "crumbs" and the deregulation of businesses are what have produced our amazing economic growth and unemployment, but the Democrats insist on doing away with them anyway.

They also want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), open the borders to whomever wishes to come in, provide "free" health care to anyone who wants it, and impeach President Trump.

None of this (except impeachment) will be doable unless the Democrats can also take control of the Senate, which is unlikely, but their agenda will appeal to a pretty narrow sliver of the American electorate in any case. Yet, it's all the Democrats have put forward so far.

In fact, one of their biggest advantages is that President Trump will not be on the ballot in November, so Republican turnout might be perilously (for Republicans) low.

The Democrats have to flip only 24 seats in the House of Representatives out of a total of 435, 48 of which are deemed competitive and 25 of which are in districts Hillary Clinton carried in 2016, in order to take control of that chamber.

If they succeed they've promised to begin the work of undoing what Trump has wrought, but it would be astonishing if the Democrats, running on almost no agenda at all, can win those seats and begin the work of thwarting a president who in a year and a half has probably done more for the people of this country, including the poor, than has any other president, Democrat or Republican, since at least WWII.

The Most Amazing Substance in the Universe

We take so much of what's going on all around us, both in our bodies and in the natural world, for granted. In the course of our busy days we rarely stop to think how marvelous the processes necessary for sustaining life are - processes like photosynthesis, cognition, metabolism, DNA replication, the functioning of our immune system and hundreds of thousands more.

Perhaps just as marvelous are the physical properties of substances like carbon, oxygen and other elements necessary for life as well as the physical properties of the sun, moon and earth. Were not all of these countless properties precisely as they are life would not be possible, certainly not higher life forms like human beings.

One of the substances whose properties are so necessary and astonishingly suited for life is water. This seven minute video, based on a book by geneticist Michael Denton, gives us just a glimpse of how amazing a substance water is. The video is as beautiful as it is informative:

Either our planet and the living things it hosts are the result of an unimaginable number of extraordinarily improbable coincidences or they were all specially designed by a transcendent super-intellect. These two alternatives seem to exhaust all the possible options and believing either requires faith. The question is, which alternative requires the greatest leap of faith?

Thinking Critically

Mary Tillotson at The Federalist presents a good lesson in critical thinking. Her immediate context is the application of a critical eye toward news reports and op-eds, but what she says is sound advice for any aspect of life.

She in fact says so many good things about each of the eight points she makes that I've only space enough to consider a couple of them.

Tillotson begins with an anecdote about a grad class she was taking that was engaged in a discussion of thinking critically about issues like "diversity, racism, and fear-mongering." She writes:

I had a hard time believing lack of critical thinking was a big problem until another student said we live in a time when race relations are worse than they ever have been, and everyone just nodded. Having grown up seeing old photographs of drinking fountains labeled “white” and “colored” and learning about the horrors of the antebellum South, I was stunned. There is a huge difference between “needs improvement” and “never been worse.”

When someone says something like what that student said they're probably not really thinking at all, much less thinking critically. In this case the students are likely just agreeing with the rest of the class in order to be congenial, polite or to be recognized by others as holding the right opinions.

Anyway, here's Tillotson's first point:

Know Your Narrative

Everyone has a worldview. Objectivity is a real thing and truth does in fact exist, but the existence of truth doesn’t mean we’re all good at seeing it. If you want to think critically, the first step is to know where you’re coming from.

Indeed, it's also good to know where the other person is coming from. Knowing a writer or speaker's own worldview helps immensely in "reading between the lines" of what they're saying.

Think of something evil that happened recently and consider these questions in that context. How do you explain good and evil behavior in people? Did the perpetrator act because he was a bad person or was he just a person who made a bad choice? Are there “good people” and “bad people,” or are we all prone to evil?

She elaborates on these questions, but one she doesn't mention that I think is helpful is to ask whether one even believes that "evil" exists. If so, what makes an act evil and what are some examples of it in our day?

Our answers to these questions will go far in helping us to understand both ourselves and others.

Predict, But Don’t Trust, Your Emotional Response

My high school psychology teacher passed out slips of paper to our class one day and asked us to raise our hands if we thought the sentence on our slip was true. We read, shrugged, agreed, and all raised our hands. It turned out we didn’t all have the same sentence: half of us had “People who are more cautious than average make better firefighters” and the other half had “People who are less cautious than average make better firefighters.” So we discussed various cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases also exist outside psychology classrooms. When you hear something bad about someone you already don’t like, you’re much more inclined to believe it. Likewise, when you hear something bad about someone you like, you’re more inclined to disbelieve, dismiss, or downplay it. This is called confirmation bias....You can’t eradicate it, but you can be aware of it.

Confirmation bias occurs everywhere and we all fall victim to it, unfortunately. Not only are we more likely to believe something bad about someone we don't like and something good about people we do like, but we're also more likely to believe a claim is true if it supports a political, scientific, philosophical or religious position we already hold than if it doesn't.

Tillotson makes an excellent suggestion about this:

When you hear a fact (or a “fact”) about someone, consider how you would react if that exact same thing were said about someone else. Put the opponent’s name in the sentence and observe your emotions.

At this point, you may become aware that your emotions are holding different people to different standards. This is an important step toward thinking with your brain and not with your emotions.

We certainly saw this happen a lot in the last election cycle, and it's still happening two months later. Critics of the president-elect, for example, are engaging in discourse that, had similar discourse occurred in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election, would have elicited howls of indignation from the same people.

One of the best intellectual disciplines we can develop is the ability to give people and positions we don't favor the benefit of the doubt and to ask, as Tillotson suggests, whether we would be saying or thinking or doing what we are if the person or position at issue were the person or position we favored.

For example, would those who excused Donald Trump's dishonesty or name-calling during the campaign excused them had it been Hillary Clinton instead of Trump caught in the lie or name-calling? We know in fact that they did not. People on both sides of the electoral divide were far too willing to excuse in their candidate what they saw as reprehensible in the other candidate.

Tillotson has more good advice on how to be a critical thinker, and I urge you to read the rest of her essay at the link.

Evolutionary Ethics Pt. II

In Saturday's post on VP we looked at an essay (paywall) by philosopher of science David Anderson who outlines three views of ethics based on naturalistic evolution.

Anderson considers Larry Arnhart's theory that we have evolved objective moral values to which we should adhere, Michael Ruse's supposition that moral values are an illusion, and Will Provine's view that given naturalistic evolution, there can be no free will, no genuine choices, and therefore no genuine morality.

For Ruse and Provine, moral values are simply matters of subjective preference, like our preference for one flavor of ice cream over another. There's no real right or wrong about the matter.

In the present post I'd like to briefly critique each of these views.

Recall that on Arnhart's theory human beings have evolved twenty core desires which form the basis for objective moral values, but human beings have also evolved many traits that we do not consider "moral" at all. For example, humans have evolved a penchant for violence, aggression, selfishness, promiscuity, cruelty, dishonesty, power, etc., so what are we to make of these? Are these behaviors moral? If not, why not?

If human beings have evolved both kindness and cruelty, what makes us think that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong unless we're subliminally comparing the two to some higher standard, an objective standard, which allows us to discern between them which is right? And if there is a higher objective standard where does it come from? What obligates us to obey that standard? Naturalism has no answer to these questions.

The naturalist just has to assume that we'll all agree that it's better to be kind than to be cruel, but if morality is to be based on the consensus of popular feeling then there are no objective moral values at all. They're all subjective, and no one can be obligated to live according to someone else's subjective values.

In other words, a robust morality imposes duties upon us to live a certain way, but a mindless, natural process cannot impose a duty or hold us responsible for the moral choices we make. Evolution cannot, then, be the source of genuine moral value. It can only be the source of desires and impulses, some of which we like and some of which we don't.

If naturalism is true, then Michael Ruse's position that morality is simply an illusion that we've evolved in order to get us to cooperate with each other, is doubtless correct. But if that's so then there really is no right or wrong, for what could it mean to say that someone who does not cooperate with others is "wrong"? How can it be wrong to refuse to be deluded, or to spurn an illusion? How can anything be wrong to do if there's no real standard of right and wrong nor any ultimate accountability for how we behave?

The naturalist, as Ruse tacitly admits, has no answers to these questions, either.

Will Provine also acknowledges that on naturalism there are is objective moral right and wrong, but his view is equally unsatisfactory. He wants to argue that we are biological machines whose choices are all determined by causal influences over which we have no control. In such machines there's no room for free will, but if we're not in some sense free to choose how we'll behave then there's no way we can be responsible for what we do.

It follows that a man who molests or tortures children, as horrible as that sounds to us, is not responsible, and therefore not accountable, for what he's doing. He's not doing anything wrong, he's only doing things most people don't like, but why should he care what others like and don't like? Why should he not just do what he likes? Naturalism again has no answer.

When people make a commitment to naturalism, a commitment usually motivated by a desire to reject the God of traditional theism, they often do so before they've thought through the implications. It doesn't occur to most people that naturalism, consistently applied, entails moral nihilism, i.e. the belief that there's no real accountability for our behavior, no moral duties, no genuine moral right or wrong.

If they do come to realize this they often just ignore it and go on living as before, not realizing that they've adopted a metaphysical worldview with which they can't live consistently. It's intellectually dishonest but then on naturalism there's nothing wrong with being intellectually dishonest because there's nothing morally wrong with anything.

Evolutionary Ethics Pt. I

It's an interesting fact that when the consensus worldview of a society is unable to explain a crucial aspect of human experience, that failure is often just papered over and ignored rather than allow the basic assumptions that lead to the failure to be challenged.

Such is the case with naturalism (the belief that physical nature is all there is) and morality. Naturalism simply cannot give a plausible account of the kind of robust morality that obligates people to behave in one way rather than another.

Many philosophers recognize this and have concluded that moral claims are either all false (error theorists), neither true nor false (emotivists), or simply the subjective expression of one's own biases, prejudices and preferences (subjectivists).

A worldview that cannot explain morality, however, is quite unsatisfactory since not only does it conflict with our deepest intuitions about the way the world is, but it leads almost inevitably to nihilism. Since naturalists are perforce evolutionists many have tried to rescue their naturalism by grounding morality in evolution, but those attempts are unconvincing.

Philosopher David Anderson discusses three of these attempts in an article at Salvo magazine (subscription required).

The first attempt is to posit the theory that morality arises from our natural desires, and was formed in us by natural selection and random mutation over millions of years. These natural desires serve as the objective standard of morality — the plumb line of right and wrong, as Anderson puts it.

He cites political scientist Larry Arnhart's theory which elaborates on these "universal human desires". These core desires have been possessed by human beings in every culture. They include, "parental care, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social ranking, justice, political rule, war, health, beauty, and ten others." Anderson comments:

In Arnhart's view, an objectively good person is one who satisfies these natural desires insofar as he is able. For example, a man who cultivates friendships, cares for his kids, maintains his physical health, appreciates art, and so on, is a morally good person.

By contrast, a man who alienates his friends, neglects his kids, abuses his body, cares nothing for art or beauty, and so on, is an objectively bad person.

In sum, morality is anchored in universal human desires, and these desires were formed in humans over eons, through descent with modification. Our evolutionary heritage is the wellspring of right and wrong.

A second version of evolutionary ethics, one held by philosopher Michael Ruse, contends that, as a direct consequence of the evolutionary process, humans have developed subjective moral standards that have the appearance of being objective but really are not. They are illusions fobbed off on us by evolution. Here's Anderson again:

That is, evolution has given humans a disposition to believe that there are objective moral values and duties, but in reality there are none; right and wrong are simply matters of personal preference or feeling. This means, for example, that breaking the golden rule is not actually wrong, even though most human beings believe that it is.

Ruse explains: "The evolutionist's claim . . . is that morality is subjective—it is all a question of human feelings or sentiments—but he/she admits that we 'objectify' morality. . . . We think morality has objective reference even though it does not."

According to Ruse, natural selection fooled us into believing in objective morality because such beliefs ultimately help us to survive and reproduce. If we believe we ought to love our neighbor as ourselves, for example, then we cooperate more with others. And the more cooperative a society is, the more successful its members are at surviving and reproducing.

But in reality, morality is ultimately a matter of personal preference and feeling. Since there is no purpose, plan, or goal to evolution, humans are nothing more than the accidental results of a mindless process. We were not designed by God (or anything else) to live in a certain way.

All that's left, then, to build a sense of morality upon is each individual's subjective feelings. Objective moral values and duties are no more real than the tooth fairy.

A third evolution-based view comes to us from the late Cornell biologist William Provine who held that evolutionary theory (and science more generally) supports subjectivism. Anderson remarks that Provine,

...agrees with Ruse that there is no objective standard of morality; rather, each person should do what's in his own best interest.

But Provine adds a twist. He believes modern science has shown that human beings are physical objects—made entirely of things like electrons, quarks, fermions, bosons, and so on. Physical objects obey the laws of physics: electrons do not "decide" what to do, they just mindlessly interact with other phenomena.

Similarly, human beings don't actually make any decisions at all. We think we do, but we are mistaken. We have no more free will than toasters. As Provine says, "What modern science tells us . . . is that human beings are very complex machines.

There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make choices."

Consider a long line of falling dominoes. A given domino can't choose whether to fall or to jump out of the way when struck by another domino; its action is entirely dictated by that of the domino immediately before it (and of the other dominoes before that).

Likewise, no human being has ever made a free decision. Instead, all his "decisions" were really determined by particles and forces set in motion in the distant past. As Provine says bluntly, "free will as it is traditionally conceived . . . simply does not exist."

In summary, the first view holds that we've evolved desires which fit us for survival and therefore we're obligated to live in accord with them.

The second holds that moral values are illusory and don't exist in any objective sense, but we should nevertheless submit to them because things work out better if we do.

The third holds that we're just evolved machines, that free will is an illusion and that since we cannot make genuine choices, there's really no genuine moral responsibility.

We'll take a further look at each of these in our next post.

Discrimination and Disparities

A common assumption on the left today is that any disparity in outcomes or demographic distribution between races is prima facie evidence of racism.

In a short book of only 127 pages the celebrated economist Thomas Sowell explodes this assumption and exposes it as an ideologically-driven myth.

His book is titled Discriminations and Disparities and early on Sowell outlines three different meanings of the word discrimination:

• Discrimination Ia: Basing decisions on evidence about individuals
• Discrimination Ib: Basing decisions on evidence about groups
• Discrimination II: Basing decisions on unsubstantiated notions or animosities

Throughout the book Sowell makes the case that many if not most of the disparities that are almost reflexively imputed to D-II are really rational decisions based on D-Ia or Ib. Moreover, D-I discrimination often works to the advantage of minorities.

Consider this example from a study cited in the book:

...despite the reluctance of many employers to hire young black males, because a significant proportion of them have criminal records (D-Ib), those employers who did criminal background checks on all their employees (D-Ia) tended to hire more young black males than did other employers.

This is because employers knew from the background check that particular young black male applicants had no criminal background and were thus more employable. Had the background check not been given the suitability of these young men would not have been known and employers would've shied away from taking a chance on them.

Nevertheless, there are those who advocate doing away with background checks altogether because they prevent many young blacks with criminal records from being hired. The EEOC has sued employers who use background checks on the grounds that it constitutes racial discrimination even when the background check was given to all applicants regardless of race.

This governmental pressure has the counterproductive effect of actually reducing the number of young black males employers are willing to risk investing in.

Sowell talks about the phenomenon of taxi drivers making a decision not to take customers into or out of certain high-crime neighborhoods at night (D-1b) and the decision of supermarket executives not to open stores in those neighborhoods (D-1b). These decisions are based on risks and costs, yet they're often attributed to racism (D-II) on the part of those who make them, even when the cab drivers are themselves black.

The people hurt by these decisions, of course, are law-abiding residents of these neighborhoods, but the blame should not fall on the decision-makers, it should fall on the criminals who make the risks and costs too high to be acceptable.

Another, related, point he makes on this is that stores and other businesses in these neighborhoods often charge more for their products than do similar stores in more affluent neighborhoods. This, too, is often interpreted as D-II, but stores in high-crime neighborhoods suffer more from vandalism and theft than do stores in other areas. If they don't raise their prices to cover the costs of these liabilities they'll go out of business. If they do raise their prices they're threatened with lawsuits by agencies on the lookout for "racially disparate impacts".

What are these stores and shopkeepers, many of whom are minorities and many of whom operate on tight margins as it is, to do?

Sowell goes on to discuss racial segregation, redlining, the effects of mandated minimum wage, gaps in educational achievement, income inequality and much more that can't be outlined here. Most of the positions, policies and practices he addresses, although the media often sniffs the odor of racism about them, are actually the result of causes that are not at all sinister.

Sowell doesn't deny that there's discrimination (D-II), but in his telling it's largely historical, and so much of what remains today has almost no causal connection to the racial disparities we find in our society.

Discrimination and Disparities is a well-documented, easy book to read and should be de rigueur for everyone who wishes to understand the sociological situation we find ourselves in today and who yearns for greater racial comity in our society.