A Warning from Ancient Rome

Here are words of a man who lived over two thousand years ago in circumstances not too dissimilar from those we find ourselves in today. His words might cause us to pause and reflect. The man is Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the chief citizens of Rome in the first century B.C. and one of the most famous of all Romans. He writes:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

I hope Cicero was right that a nation can survive fools and the ambitious. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he's right that a nation cannot survive corruption that starts and spreads from within. When the pillars of society, the institutions that bind us together and strengthen us as a people, are undermined we become like a massive tree that's hollowed out by years of internal decay and which crashes to the ground in the next strong wind.

When people are conditioned by those who want to see us fall to lose trust in their government, their courts, the news organizations and the free market, when our citizens are encouraged to no longer value family, church, school and the Constitution, when everyone is propagandized to believe that all that matters is their own personal happiness and that the way to achieve that is through accumulating consumer goods, entertainment and pleasure, then we, like that tree, like ancient Rome, will be too corrupt to withstand stresses imposed from outside.

When a people abandons the principles that made it free - the principle, for example, that a conclusion of guilt must be supported by evidence and that a simple accusation of guilt is insufficient to warrant that conclusion - then the rot is very far along, indeed.

One way to avoid that fate is to recognize that there are many voices out there whose rhetoric is designed to erode our confidence and faith in the institutions that made America great (I apologize if that sounds Trumpian. I don't mean it to.). The second thing is to stand up to those voices or stop listening to them altogether. The third thing is to get about the business of repairing the damage that has been done to those "pillars of the city."

If enough people commit themselves to this project then perhaps we can avoid the fate that Rome suffered. If not, if we lose the will to resist, as Cicero puts it, then how will we keep the human wolves at bay?

Reason vs. Emotion

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist observes that the Kavanaugh hearings were largely about appeals to feelings rather than appeals to reason. He writes:

But evidence and logic are not what we heard about in most of the reactions to the hearings. What we heard about is how the testimony made people feel.

The attack on logic began before the hearings, with commenters pointing to quotes saying the case against Kavanaugh is “plausible” and “believable”—but providing no actual evidence that it actually did happen—then describing this as “compelling.” But “plausible” is the opposite of compelling.

Direct evidence compels belief, logically speaking. Someone’s speculations about what might have happened have no logical standing and compel nothing.

Or consider the phrase you probably heard a thousand times today: that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because he is “credibly accused.” What does that mean? What makes the accusation “credible,” and what evidentiary status does that give it?

A vague accusation with no independent corroboration from the very people the accuser herself described as witnesses doesn’t sound all that credible to me.

But you will look in vain for any clear standard of what is “credible.” It is not an evidentiary term but an emotional one. All it means is “this is something I feel like believing.”

People are not judging credibility based on evidence. They are judging based on how the two witnesses made them feel, which is to say that they base it on a purely emotional reaction—a reaction heavily influenced by partisan loyalties that prejudice you for or against the two witnesses.

So we get pure appeals to emotion like this one: “I can’t imagine how many thousands of women, around the world, are in tears as they listen to Christine Blasey Ford’s voice cracking.” Kavanaugh’s voice cracked, too. Does that mean we should also embrace his side of the story?

Judge Kavanaugh was in a no-win situation on Thursday. If his accuser choked up it was said to be because she was reliving her trauma. If he choked up it was said to be "scripted." If he got angry it showed he lacks a calm judicial temperament or that his anger showed him to be just the sort of person who would've assaulted a girl when he was 17.

No matter what Judge Kavanaugh said or did the minds of many people were made up apriori, based upon nothing more than his and his accuser's respective genders. The whole affair is reminiscent of the 2006 Duke lacrosse team case (see here and here) in which several white lacrosse players were accused by a black "exotic dancer", who offered no corroborating evidence, of having assaulted her at a party.

The boys' lives were ruined until it turned out that they were innocent after all. They were privileged white males accused by a relatively poor, black female, and that was enough to establish the boys' guilt in the mind of the prosecutor, the Duke administration and much of the liberal faculty, as well as leftist progressives everywhere.

For those who wish to block Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court evidence doesn't matter. His accuser presented no evidence to corroborate her allegations, but she doesn't need to. In our postmodern, post-fact environment the accusation itself is all the evidence one needs.

Some women were citing their own personal experience with sexual assault as proof that Kavanaugh was guilty. Their reasoning seems to be that they were assaulted by a man, Kavanaugh is a man, therefore Kavanaugh is guilty of assault.

There's more from Tracinski about the irrational nature of these proceedings at the link, but the most a reasonable person can conclude is that in the absence of evidence he is entitled to the presumption of innocence and that it's an execrable act of moral depravity to destroy him and his family the way the Democrats are seeking to do.

When the mere allegation, unsupported by any evidence, is enough to destroy a man's reputation and career and devastate his family, then we're no longer the America most of us grew up in. We are the Soviet Union of the 1920s to the 1980s. We are the France of 1793-1794.

We are every tyranny which has ever blighted the face of the earth.

Wishful Thinking

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

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

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair. The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism is wrong. Why that belief should be thought to be "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are very good reasons for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true. Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

Political Taxonomy

The election season is once again heating up so to help readers understand some of the terminology that's being thrown around, I thought it might be helpful to rerun the following post. It's one that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and it explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean. This post will try to correct that omission so that as we roll deeper into the campaign season readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed in the previous paragraph denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quarrel, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is perhaps the most well-known libertarian writer.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to be libertarians, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the central, federal government and giving it back to the states and localities.

They're reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. They also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is perhaps the most well-known contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley is the most well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Bill Clinton was an example of a liberal politician.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives tend to see the Constitution as often an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the last presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, but the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics. Paradoxically, so is Antifa.

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it doesn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation. Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading in the runup to the election this November.

Journey into the Cell

A video titled Journey Inside the Cell narrated by Dr. Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, gives a glimpse of a small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell.

As Meyer's Signature in the Cell makes clear the process is much more complex than what the video shows, but even so, the video does a nice job of illustrating why so many people today have trouble believing the materialist story that the astonishing complexity of the cell is all a product of blind chance and natural selection.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be the result of intelligent minds. To think that it could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that so many bright people are convinced that that's what happened.

Nevertheless, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this: Only material, physical processes can be considered in science. Enormously complex structures like cells exist. Therefore these structures must have been produced solely by physical processes.

The error here, of course, is confusing what science has limited itself to considering with what the best explanation for biological entities might be. Just because some people think that science should be restricted to allowing only physical causes to play a role in their explanations it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

Nor does any scientist who insists on dealing exclusively with physical causes - and not all scientists think this is wise - have any right to rule out intelligent causes.

The most a scientist can say is that he chooses not to theorize about causes that can't be observed or measured. He cannot say that such causes don't exist or haven't operated in the world or can't be inferred from what we are able to observe and measure.

Yet many scientists do say this, but when they do they're not speaking as scientists, they're speaking as philosophers making metaphysical pronouncements.

Kavanaugh's Predicament

Today is media feeding frenzy day. President Trump's Supreme Court nominee will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee once again, this time to answer allegations that he tried to force himself upon a girl when he was a 17 year-old high school student.

His accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, now a university professor, is seeking to derail Mr. Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court by dredging up from some 35 years ago an event for which she has as yet presented no evidence and no corroborating witnesses.

Whether Judge Kavanaugh actually did what he's accused of or not I, unlike so many others who have commented on this sordid affair, have no idea, but I do have a few thoughts in addition to those I shared in this space last week.

We live in a culture that has largely bought into the postmodern notion that there's no such thing as objective truth. Truth is whatever wins the approbation of one's community or peer group. Objective facts don't matter, for indeed, there are no objective facts. There are only subjective feelings which are themselves self-validating.

In a post-fact world a mere accusation from a member of an "oppressed" group (women) against a member of an oppressor group (wealthy, white male Republicans) is sufficient to establish guilt because the accusation resonates with and reinforces the suspicions and resentments of the "oppressed" group.

This is why so many are claiming to believe Ms. Ford without having heard any evidence. She claims that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party, therefore that's her truth, and, since she's a victim, in a postmodern world she deserves to be believed.

Moreover, since her accusation advances the destruction of Mr. Kavanaugh's candidacy, a desideratum among many postmodern progressives, that's all the more reason to embrace it. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a perhaps charming but obsolete anachronism from a bygone era.

This is, of course, no way for a society to practice justice. When justice is no longer about objective, demonstrable facts, but is instead a power game between one group playing by the rules of evidence and rationality and another group for whom truth is whatever works to secure the ends they seek, a group willing to spurn the demand for evidence, shout down opponents and threaten them with violence if they don't get their way, then our democracy is teetering on the brink of chaos.

This is, in fact, the choice we are faced with in November's election. We can vote for the party which still believes in rules, process and judicial fairness or we can vote for the party which harbors and enables those whose behavior would bring the entire system of justice crashing down upon our heads.

It's an immensely serious choice.

Hanging Baubles on Skyhooks

Steven Pinker is an exemplary modern thinker. A naturalist enamored of reason's power to lead us to truth about the grand metaphysical questions concerning life's meaning, moral conduct and human rights, Pinker lays out his views on these critical questions in his recent work, Enlightenment Now. I'm afraid, however, that his faith in enlightenment reason and, even more, his faith in it's hold on the thinking of moderns, is seriously misplaced.

For example, Pinker claims that "liberal values are on a long term escalator" with each generation "more tolerant and liberal" than its predecessor.

I wonder what Bret Weinstein, an erstwhile biology professor at Evergreen College or Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, would think of that, given that both of these academics have had very unpleasant encounters with the "more tolerant and liberal" current generation. Nor have their experiences been outliers.

Tolerance and a respect for liberal values has died in many precincts of our culture and is on life support in many others. For many progressives today tolerance means agreeing with them about race, gender, abortion and sexual issues. If we agree with progressive orthodoxy on these matters, well, then, we're "tolerated." But those who disagree find themselves shouted off the stage, fired from their jobs, smeared in the media and refused service in restaurants. Such is the nature of tolerance in much of 21st century America.

Even odder is Pinker's claim that "humans are sentient, possessing of dignity and rights and infinitely precious." [emphasis mine] We are? Pinker's a metaphysical naturalist. How does human dignity derive from a metaphysics that tells us that we're just globs of protoplasm? How does naturalistic evolution, a theory predicated on survival of the fittest, ground human rights? And what on earth could possibly make us "infinitely precious"? To whom, exactly, are we precious? The State?

Pinker's just hanging these rhetorical baubles on skyhooks. Given his naturalism there's no basis for thinking we have any special dignity, no reason to think that human rights are anything more substantial than words on paper, and certainly no warrant for thinking of ourselves as infinitely precious (infinite, no less).

On the contrary, reason leads us to recognize that human beings are simply one kind of animal among others, that we have no free will, that morality reduces to egoism, or even nihilism, and that our only value is whatever value is placed on us by the collective, i.e. those in power.

What Pinker is doing, in these passages, at least, is what moderns have often done. He's deftly pilfering from a traditionally theistic worldview, plagiarizing the notions of dignity and rights - which we possess solely because we're creatures created in the image of God and loved by Him - and the notion that we're infinitely precious, which can only be true if we're precious to an infinite being. And he's pulling all these rabbits out of his hat while insisting that there is no such being.

It's a remarkable piece of philosophical legerdemain he has performed for us, but to anyone paying attention to what he's saying it's the purest flummery.

Nietzsche's Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a man before his time. He was an atheist who saw clearly that atheism entailed far more than just the "death of God." Nietzsche saw that when modern men pushed God out of their lives they created a vacuum, an emptiness from which meaning, morality, and hope had all been swept out.

The "murder" of God meant that man was left to create his own meaning, his own morality, and to learn to live without hope. Man's existential predicament would inevitably lead him to despair.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, but most men of his age did not. In their exuberance and rejoicing over their "assassination of God" and the liberation they were sure their deed had brought them, they failed to grasp that when God "died" with Him died any hope of transcendent purpose and any solid ground for right and wrong.

Nietzsche expressed this failure in a parable he included in his book The Gay Science. It's called the Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?

Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

The madman carried a lantern in the daylight because darkness was imminent. Man has become unmoored, like the earth unchained from the sun. Cold despair settles upon us as we plunge in all directions, adrift in nothingness. We are haunted by the sense that all is becoming colder.

Nietzsche's lantern-carrying madman is an interesting and perhaps intentional counterpoint to another lantern-carrier depicted c. 1854 by the artist Holman Hunt. Hunt's lantern-carrier, unlike Nietzsche's, did not bring despair, but hope. He did not wipe out the horizon we use to navigate through life but rather gave life direction and meaning. Nor did he set us adrift in an infinite nothingness, but set our feet on the solid ground of objective, transcendent reality:

We might suppose that Nietzsche's lantern-carrier was driven mad by the consequences that he foresaw following from the murder of Hunt's lantern-carrier.

In Hunt's portrayal the lantern-carrier stands at the door and knocks, but significantly the door has no latch. It can only be opened from the inside.

How We Got Here

Philosopher W.T. Stace writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1948 gives a concise summary of how we came to be where we are in the modern world, i.e. adrift in a sea of moral subjectivism and anomie. He asserts that:

The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes"...[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century....They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

....The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world....

The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws....[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man....Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values....If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative.

On one point I would wish to quibble with Stace's summary. He writes in the penultimate paragraph above that, "If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions."

I think, however, that if our moral rules derive from the universe they're no more binding or authoritative than if they are our own inventions. The only thing that can impose a moral duty is a personal being, one that has both moral authority and the power to hold us accountable for our actions. A being which would possess that kind of authority and power, the power to impose an objective moral duty, would be one which transcends human finitude. Neither the universe nor any entity comprised of other humans qualifies.

In other words, unless God exists there simply are no objective moral duties. Thus, if one believes we all have a duty to be kind rather than cruel, to refrain from, say, rape or child abuse or other forms of violence, then one must either accept that God exists or explain how such obligations can exist in a world where man is simply the product of blind impersonal forces plus chance plus time.

Put simply, in the world of Darwinian naturalism, no grounds exist for saying that hurting people is wrong. Indeed, no grounds exist for saying anything is wrong.

It's not just that modernity and the erosion of theistic belief in the West has led to moral relativism. It's that modernity and the concomitant loss of any genuine moral authority in the world leads ineluctably to moral nihilism.

This is one of the themes I discuss in my novel In the Absence of God which you can read about by clicking on the link at the top right of this page.

The Marvel of Migration

Bird migration is one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature, but since it happens largely at night most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring all around them in the spring and fall each year.

To help give a sense of the movements of many species of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales and numerous other creatures, ever evolve through random mutation and natural selection? How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it?

It truly is a marvel.

Harmful Rhetoric

In yesterday's post on "White Guilt" I discussed a few reasons why I think it's a mistake for young people today to think that they have what they have, only, or primarily, because of white privilege. Today I'd like to explain why I think the rhetoric of white privilege is actually harmful both to minorities and to society as a whole.

One problem with the emphasis on white privilege in the academy is that it's divisive and breeds resentment and bitterness among both blacks and whites. When people are taught that one group, of which they're not a member, has advantages that they'll never have simply because of their race it fosters bitterness among the "disadvantaged" group and generates resentment toward those who are perceived to have the unfair advantage.

This causes us as a society to be further divided into us/them categories which I think is exactly what we don't need.

It also breeds resentment and bitterness among those in the "privileged" group because they bristle at being made to feel guilty simply because of their skin color.

Not only does talk of "white privilege" encourage these undesirable effects, I think it's psychologically harmful to blacks and other minorities in that it's dispiriting for people to believe that no matter how hard they work they'll always be at a relative disadvantage. Furthermore, the belief is not just dispiriting, but it's also manifestly false. Too many minorities have done well in this country to think that being a member of a minority group ipso facto puts success out of one's reach. Those who promote the white privilege meme are, whether they realize it or not, handing those who never succeed because they never try a convenient rationalization for their failure both to succeed and to try. As such, it's insidious.

It's insidious, moreover, because it's so divisive. When people who've worked hard to achieve are told that they succeeded largely because of their race it can cause them to feel either enormous guilt or enormous resentment. The first is socially and psychologically crippling while the second creates a lot of social animosity. Indeed, one reason Donald Trump is president today is because many people resent having to apologize for things for which they bear no personal responsibility.

Some might say that if white privilege exists then we should talk about it regardless of the consequences, but I don't think those who'd say this really mean it. If they did then they'd have to apply across the board the principle that no racial issues should be quarantined because of their consequences, and that would mean that the question of relative intelligences among the races would be open for discussion, but it clearly is not.

Anyway, it's past time to relegate talk of "white privilege" to the trash bin of "very unhelpful ideas." Talking about it does no good and does much harm.

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.