The Story of St. Nicholas

This is a post I've put up on VP a few times during the Christmas season that I think you'll find interesting:

Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of five. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.).

Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some, perhaps apocryphal, traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas (Say Saint Nicholas quickly with an Italian accent and you get Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him.

Read the whole thing at the link.

The Problem of Evil (Part III)

In the last couple of posts we discussed one classical response by theists to the problem of evil based upon the assumed existence of human free will. It was pointed out, however, that although human volition might account for some kinds of evil, what's usually called moral evil, the question remains as to why an all-powerful, benevolent God would tolerate evil that resulted not from human free will but from natural causes like storms, accidents, famine, and disease.

Before attempting to address this question, we should be reminded that the understanding of God's power that we're working with holds that God can do anything that is logically possible to do, i.e. God can do anything that does not entail a contradiction or a logically inconceivable state of affairs.

For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it. That's a logical impossibility and not even God can do the logically impossible.

So, the question before us is, wouldn't a perfectly good and omnipotent creator have designed a world in which there was no natural evil?

One way to answer this question, perhaps, is to suggest that it may not be possible, even for God, to create a world governed by physical laws in which there's no potential for harm. Any world governed by gravity, for instance, and the law of momentum is going to contain within it the potential for people to fall and suffer injury.

Thus the laws of gravity and momentum are not compossible with a world free of the potential for injury. Once God decided to create a world governed by laws, those laws entailed the possibility of harm.

At this point it might be objected that theists hold that God creates heaven and that heaven is a world in which there is no natural evil so it must be possible for a world governed by laws of some kind to exist without there being any human suffering. If God could create heaven, why wouldn't he, if he was perfectly good, create this world like that?

Perhaps the answer is that God did create this world like that. Perhaps the reason that there is no evil in heaven is that God's presence suffuses that world, fills every nook and cranny and acts as a governor, an override, on the laws which might otherwise result in harm to beings which exist there.

The skeptic might rejoin that even were he to grant that God's presence in heaven could serve as an override to the laws which govern that world, that doesn't help the theist because there's no reason why God couldn't do that here in this world as well, and, since he doesn't, he must not be perfectly good.

This is, however, exactly what Judeo-Christian theology says that God did, in fact, do. The account goes something like this: God created a world regulated by the laws of physics and indwelt that world with man, his presence negating any harmful effects the expression of those laws may have had. Although the potential for harm existed, there was no disease, suffering, accident, or even death.

At some point, however, man betrayed the idyllic relationship that existed between himself and God. In an act of cosmic infidelity, man chose to use his freedom in a way, the only way, apparently, that God had forbidden. It was as if a good and faithful husband returned home to discover the love of his life in bed with his worst enemy.

If, as the idea of an "open future" suggests, God did not foresee (though he was aware of the possibility) this crushing blow coming, it must have broken his heart, metaphorically speaking. Man had made a choice to treat with contempt the wishes of his creator, and God would not force him to do otherwise.

Grief-stricken at the rejection he suffered at the hands of his beloved, God withdrew his presence from the world, leaving man, in his self-imposed, self-chosen alienation and estrangement, to fend for himself against the laws and forces which govern the universe.

God did not abandon man entirely, but he has given man his autonomy, he has set man free in the world. All subsequent history is the story of God's attempt to woo mankind back to himself, to win back the heart of his unfaithful lover. God's love for us still burns, and he wants us back despite our disloyalty. Indeed, in the Christian account, he desires our love so much that he redeems us himself.

Man's infidelity deserves eternal divorce, eternal separation, from God, but God atones for our unfaithfulness himself on the cross in the person of Jesus the Messiah. The story of God's redemption is a magnificent, beautiful, tragic story, a romance, a story of faithfulness, goodness and perseverance, and it's the reason why Christians celebrate Christmas. It's a story that makes sense of human history.

If God does not exist, if death is the end of our existence, then all of life, all of history, is a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." There is no purpose, there is no significance. It's all absurd. The evil which besets us, the suffering, pain, and grief we experience, are all meaningless. They're all for nothing.

Atheism, carried to its logical conclusion, ends in nihilism, the belief that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters.

In the face of this despair Christianity infuses life with hope, meaning, and dignity. Christianity redeems the absurdity of the world by insisting that nothing in our world is for nothing. There is a reason for our existence and a reason why there is evil. We may not know what it is, but if we were created by God we may assume that God had a purpose for doing so, and that that purpose is our purpose.

If our world is beset by evil we have grounds for hoping that there is a reason why God endures it, and that in some future existence justice will be done and suffering will be no more.

Atheism offers no such hope. In a world without God people are born out of nothingness, they suffer, and eventually sink back into the void from whence they came, and there's no significance or meaning to any of it at all.

Atheism offers no basis for hope that there is any ultimate meaning to life or any ultimate justice in the world. It offers no basis for believing that right and wrong are grounded in anything other than subjective feelings. It offers no basis for granting human beings dignity and significance.

In a world without God there's no point or purpose to life beyond whatever short-term goals we set for ourselves to keep us from reflecting on the fact that everything we do ultimately goes for naught.

The Christian narrative may not be true, but each of us, including the atheist, should certainly want it to be and should certainly hope that it is. Inexplicably, though, most atheists hope for the very opposite. They hope that they are right that there is no God.

The atheist, in fact, finds himself in the awkward position of holding firmly to a view which, one might think, he should hope with all his heart and mind is completely wrong.

The Problem of Evil (Pt. II)

Yesterday we began a three part series on the problem that suffering (or evil) poses to theistic belief. We left off by asserting that the traditional anti-theistic claim that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent Creator fails because it's possible that the Creator is both able to prevent evil and desires to prevent evil but nevertheless has good reasons for permitting evil to exist.

If the theist adopts this line of argument, however, he or she is likely to be challenged to suggest a candidate for a good reason for allowing the awful suffering that has been inflicted upon men, women and children by nature and other men throughout history.

One possible response put forward by Christian theologians and philosophers ever since Augustine in the fourth century goes something like this:

Part of God's essence is that he is perfect love. Love desires an object, something to lavish itself upon, something to live in a relationship with. He could have made man so that man would have no choice but to love God, but this would be about as satisfying as programming the screen saver of your computer to say "I Love You." The most satisfying relationships are those between persons who are free to both receive and give love. Thus God created persons to live in a love relationship with him, and he endowed them with the quality of freedom so that they could genuinely choose to requite his love or to reject it.

This freedom is what makes us human, it makes us more than brutes, it gives us dignity. Without freedom we're little more than sophisticated robots and there's no dignity in that. Freedom is part of the Imago Dei. God gives us the freedom to choose as a marvelous gift, and to the extent that we misuse that gift, to the extent we use our freedom wrongly, moral evil enters the world.

So God could prevent moral evil and wants to eliminate it, but doing so would entail depriving us of the very thing that makes us human and makes our relationship with him meaningful, our free will. This would not only reduce us to automatons and destroy our humanity, it would nullify the whole purpose for which we were created in the first place, which is to live in a freely chosen love relationship with God.

Some might deride the idea that this love between God and man is worth allowing men to inflict such terrible misery upon his fellows. Whether this is so is difficult to ascertain from our vantage. We have to look at the matter sub specie aeternitatis, or from the standpoint of eternity. Surely, if this life is all there is then all human suffering is meaningless and existence is a cruel hoax for hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been filled with it.

On the other hand, if this life is a relatively brief interlude between nothingness and eternity, then our temporal suffering, as horrible as it may be, may ultimately seem a very small price to pay for having lived it.

So, the suggestion that moral evil exists because God gave man free-will as a means of enhancing and elevating our relationship to him seems plausible. It also seems plausible that the reason God does not prevent evil is because he considers it an even greater evil to strip us of our freedom and thus of our humanity.

However, this brings us to the difficulty we mentioned at the beginning of yesterday's post. Let's assume that it's possible to know the future. Let's assume, therefore, that God knows the future and thus knows what would happen in any world, not just this one, that he could create.

Among the worlds God could have created are worlds in which people are free to choose, but in which they always choose to do right.

Imagine God before the creation of the world. He has an image in his mind of every world he could possibly make. Because he knows everything it is possible to know (assuming that it is possible for God to know the future) he knows every choice that every being would make in every one of those worlds if that world were to actually be created.

At least one of those worlds, it would seem, would contain free beings who always chose to do the right thing. They could have chosen to do wrong, but they don't.

Such a world is certainly possible, after all, since Christians believe that heaven will be such a world. So the question is, would not a perfectly good and loving God have created that world instead of the world he did create where people are free but choose to do evil far too often?

Why, in other words, didn't God create the best world he possibly could? For God to have done less is to have deliberately created a world in which some people would suffer terribly, and then, if the traditional Christian view of hell is true, spend eternity in further torment, when he could have created a world in which no one would suffer from moral evil and no one would choose hell.

People would be free to choose in this world and would always choose to love God and each other. So, if that world is a possible world, one which God could have created, why didn't he create that world instead of this one? The fact that he didn't, it is alleged, is powerful reason to conclude that God is not perfectly good.

Faced with this question the theist is put in a difficult spot. He can plead that at this point our ability to understand God's ways simply fades out; or he can resort to something like Alvin Plantinga's concept of trans-world depravity, a flaw that afflicts every human in any possible world in which humans exist, and thus makes it impossible for God to create a world in which free people always choose to do right.

Or he can say that perhaps one of the things that is beyond God's power is to know what free beings will choose in a future which does not yet exist.

In this latter view, the world God fashioned may well be the best possible world he could have created, consonant with the existence of human freedom. Given that God desired to create a world in which humans were free, he had to accept that although he knew all possible outcomes, he didn't know for sure, or deliberately chose not to know, how man would use his gift of freedom.

Would man use it to love or to hate? In order to have creatures to love, God took a tremendous risk. He knew the stakes and deemed the risk to be worth taking.

As was said earlier, despite the advantage of providing an answer to the question why God didn't create a better world than the one he did create, there are serious difficulties with this theory and for that reason many theologians and philosophers think it to be on balance not worth the cost of what has to be given up in order to embrace it.

Some have even called proponents of this "Open Future" idea heretics.

In any case, the argument that evil is a consequence of human freedom, to the extent that it is persuasive, only accounts for why there is moral evil. It doesn't explain the existence of natural evils such as accidents, famines, disease, etc.

We'll talk about that tomorrow.

The Problem of Evil (Pt. I)

The philosophical problem of suffering (or evil) has come up in my classes so I thought it might be useful to reach back to a pair of posts from 2004 (7/27 and 8/8) which offer a few thoughts on the topic. The first post follows and the second will be up tomorrow:

In an earlier post entitled God and Time I mentioned that despite the serious liabilities entailed by the idea that God does not have complete knowledge of the future - that is, he doesn't know what choices free beings will make in their future - it is nevertheless an attractive idea because it provides the theist with an answer to a difficult apologetic question. That question arises in the course of attempts to give a reply to the problem of evil.

Let's look at that problem first and then the problematic question that it raises.

No doubt the most troubling objection to the existence of a God as traditionally construed by theists is the existence of evil in the world. Whether people are persuaded by the presence of evil that the existence of a God is unlikely or whether they employ evil as an a posteriori rationalization for the disbelief they've already embraced, it is a difficult challenge for theists and has been since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.

One thing that needs to be said about the problem is that despite its power to instill and sustain doubt, the reality of evil does not constitute a proof against God's existence. Its philosophical strength, its advocates argue, is that it makes the existence of God unlikely.

The traditional argument takes the form of a dilemma:

1.If God is perfectly good he would want to prevent evil.

2.If God is all-powerful he would be able to prevent evil.

3.However, evil exists.

4.Therefore, either God is not perfectly good or God is not all-powerful.

In either case, God is not the God of traditional theism.

As I said a moment ago, this is not a proof that God doesn't exist or that he's not all-powerful or good because it's possible to slip between the horns of the dilemma and reply that God could be both able to prevent evil and wants to prevent evil but for some reason chooses to permit it to occur.

Most anti-theists grant this as a theoretical possibility, but, they argue, the existence of evil makes the existence of an all-powerful all-loving God improbable. After all, they ask, what kind of God would allow evil to exist if he could prevent it? What loving father would stand by and do nothing as his child suffers if he could do something to stop it?

No reason the theist can come up with, the skeptic argues, can justify the suffering of an innocent child. Thus, it is unlikely that the world is the product of the kind of God theists believe in.

Before we consider the classical theistic response to this challenge we should lay a bit more groundwork.

First, we need to understand that to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he can do anything at all. Rather, it is to say that God can do anything that it is logically possible to do. This means that it is beyond God's power to do anything which entails a contradiction of some sort.

For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it, or, it is not within his power to bring it about that you and I, or God himself, never existed. These are contradictory states of affairs and therefore logical impossibilities.

A theist, though, might object here that God is not constrained by the laws of logic, that God really can make a square circle if he wishes, but if one wants to argue this way he has to recuse himself from arguing at all and retreat into a private mysticism where nothing much can be said about God. To abandon the constraints of logic is to put God beyond the ability of men to reason about him, or to know anything about him, because anything that one could say about God could be both true and false at the same time, which is incoherent.

The second thing we should mention is that there are two basic kinds of evil. There is evil that emerges from human volition, and there is evil which results from natural causes like disasters, disease, famine, etc. The first we may call moral evil and the latter we'll call natural evil.

Having established this, tomorrow we'll look at why God might allow moral evil to exist, given that all sides agree that it's within his power to prevent it. We'll take up the question of natural evil in part III.

The BGV Theorem and the Cosmological Argument

One of the most popular forms of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God (or at least something like God) goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

The argument then goes on to flesh out what sort of attributes a cause of the universe must have, and it turns out that those attributes describe a being that comes pretty close to the God of theism. It must, for example, transcend space, time, and materiality. It must be unimaginably powerful, intelligent, and personal.

Skeptics, however, take issue with the second premise. They argue that the universe could be past eternal, i.e. that it never had a beginning, but this view seems to run counter to the standard Big Bang model of cosmology which states that the universe exploded into being from a single point about 14 billion years ago.

One of the most prominent cosmologists in the field is a physicist named Alexander Vilenkin, who, along with Alan Guth and Arvinde Borde, developed the Borde, Guth, Vilenkin theorem which asserts, among other things, that any universe that has the characteristics that ours does, had a beginning. Vilenkin writes about the implications of this theorem in an interesting piece here.

The passages most relevant to the second premise of the above argument are these:

Inflation [of the universe] cannot be eternal and must have some sort of a beginning.

[T]he universe could not have existed for an infinite amount of time before the onset of inflation.

This leads immediately to the conclusion that a cyclic universe cannot be past-eternal.

The answer to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed.

Nevertheless, Vilenkin sees a problem with the first premise. He asserts that it's possible for a universe to pop into existence out of nothing:

If all the conserved numbers of a closed universe are equal to zero, then there is nothing to prevent such a universe from being spontaneously created out of nothing. And according to quantum mechanics, any process which is not strictly forbidden by the conservation laws will happen with some probability.

...No cause is needed for the quantum creation of the universe.

The theory of quantum creation is no more than a speculative hypothesis. It is unclear how, or whether, it can be tested observationally. It is nonetheless the first attempt to formulate the problem of cosmic origin and to address it in a quantitative way.

Two things: Vilenkin is not saying that the universe actually did begin causelessly out of "nothing," but rather that quantum theory can't rule it out.

Secondly, Vilenkin employs a metaphysically problematic concept of "nothing." He seems to be saying that the pre-creational state could have been a physical system of zero energy out of which the universe could have arisen uncaused. This state he defines as "nothing," but a physical state of any sort is surely not nothing.

It may have no material substance and the positive and negative energies may total zero or there may be no energy at all, but if it's a physical state then it's not nothing. We may have difficulty comprehending it and describing it, but at least we can say that it is something.

Nothing means "not anything," and what Vilenkin describes does not fit that definition.

In any event he closes his paper with these thoughts:

When physicists or theologians ask me about the BGV theorem, I am happy to oblige. But my own view is that the theorem does not tell us anything about the existence of God. A deep mystery remains. The laws of physics that describe the quantum creation of the universe also describe its evolution. This seems to suggest that they have some independent existence.

What exactly this means, we don’t know.

And why are these laws the ones we have? Why not other laws? We have no way to begin to address this mystery.

Well, with due respect to Professor Vilenkin, a good beginning to addressing the mystery can be found in the argument at the top of this post.

The "Hush Money" Bomb

Now that charges have been brought against Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for paying money to silence women with whom Mr. Trump had apparently had illicit relationships, Democrats are giddy at the prospect that the president will be implicated in a campaign finance violation which could lead to criminal charges.

It's not clear, though, whether Mr. Trump actually committed a crime or, if so, how serious a crime it is, but if the Democrats push for prosecution thinking they finally have the "bomb" that'll finish off the Trump presidency they might find themselves in the position of Wile E. Coyote who had the bomb blow up in his face every time he tried to use it to finish off the Roadrunner.

As Elad Hakim reminds us in a piece at The Federalist,

According to the Chicago Tribune, members of Congress have a “taxpayer hush money fund,” where claims for sexual harassment, discrimination and other workplace issues are settled and paid out with money supplied by the U.S. Treasury.

Unlike the payments in Trump’s case, which were seemingly made using personal funds, congressional settlements and payoffs used taxpayer funds. More importantly, if prosecutors take the position that hush-money payments made to protect a person’s reputation and family should be deemed campaign related expenditures (because they might affect an election), the precedent could be very problematic and far-reaching.

Indeed. If Trump is prosecuted how will our august legislators, whose number must rise to many dozens and include many Democrats, avoid similar legal jeopardy? If Trump is somehow legally "exposed" for using campaign funds, which may have been his own money, to pay off his paramours, how much more legal exposure should congresspersons have for using taxpayer money for the same purpose?

Hakim again:

If Trump’s payments are deemed to be campaign-related expenses for the purpose of impacting an election, should each and every House or Senate member who has engaged in such conduct face criminal charges?

According to The Daily Signal, “Last year, it was reported that Congress has secretly paid out over $17 million to settle close to 300 cases by staffers claiming sexual and other forms of harassment and discrimination.”

If prosecutors failed to pursue charges relating to each of these individual claims and payments (normally these are made in secret and the identities of the parties are withheld unless suit is filed), would they be applying the law arbitrarily and unfairly?

Hakim closes with this admonition:

Although some legal scholars have openly stated that the payments in Trump’s case do not appear to have violated campaign finance rules, Mueller, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and congressional Democrats should think long and hard about the precedent they are attempting to set.

While their eyes are set on one particular person, the potential impact could end up netting many others who have engaged in similar (or worse) conduct.

Little wonder that some Democrats are now suggesting that, on second thought, maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to make a big deal out of Trump's hush money payments.

1776 or 1789?

In his recent book Last Call for Liberty, Os Guinness adopts as his theme the idea that our culture is riven between those who walk in the traditions of two historical revolutions: The American revolution of 1776 and the French revolution of 1789.

Borrowing Guinness' motif we might ask which of these traditions informs our own thinking. How do we regard the freedoms vouchsafed in the first two amendments to the United States' Constitution? Indeed, how do we think of freedom itself?

Do we believe, for instance, that individuals have the right to voice whatever they believe to be true as long as they neither inflict nor encourage physical or economic harm to others?

Should individuals who disagree with the consensus on matters of race, science, gender, politics or religion be free to express those views without being sanctioned and compelled to silence? Should people have to risk being assaulted, losing their jobs or being shouted down merely because their views are unpopular?

If you believe that certain unpopular views are offensive and hateful and that no one should have the right to voice them publicly then you stand in what Guinness calls the tradition of 1789.

If you believe that minority views should be granted the same rights as majority views and that minority opinions should be countered not with rudeness, violence or the loss of one's livelihood but with superior arguments respectfully formulated, then you stand in the tradition of 1776.

If you believe that people should be free to practice their religion even if it inconveniences someone else, as long as it does others no physical harm, then you stand in the tradition of 1776.

On the other hand, if you believe that those who hold religious beliefs that run counter to the popular consensus on race, science, gender, etc. should be compelled to conform to the consensus beliefs then you stand in the tradition of 1789.

The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1762, that "Whoever refuses to pay obedience to the general will (i.e. the state) shall be liable to be compelled to it by the force of the whole body. And this is in effect nothing more than that he may be compelled to be free."

Rousseau's disciples have ever since taken him to be condoning state coercion of not only behavior but also of speech.

Liberty encompasses freedom to and freedom from. In the 1776 tradition the freedom to hold and voice opinions, to practice one's religion and to be free from needless government constraint are prized.

Another French philosopher, Voltaire, has been credited with having declared that he may disagree with what you say, but he will fight to the death for your right to say it. If he indeed did say this then he walked in the tradition of 1776.

Those who today impose speech codes on campus, who police politically correct expressions, who shout down speakers with whom they disagree walk arm in arm with those who imposed the French Terror in the wake of 1789.

Moreover, if you believe that the second amendment confers upon individuals the right to defend their families, themselves and their property you're following the path of the American founders. If you believe that no such right accrues to individuals, nor should accrue, then you're following the path of those who rose to power in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution.

The 1776 tradition holds that individual persons are significant because each is endowed by his or her Creator with certain inalienable rights. The 1789 tradition, or at least the mindset that arose in the wake of 1789, holds that the individual is simply a cog in the grand machinery of the state and has only those rights which the state deigns to grant. The state is everything, the individual is nothing.

The thinking of 1789 led quickly to a bloodbath by guillotine from 1792 to 1794 in which as many as 40,000 persons were slaughtered, and that pattern reemerged in the Russian revolution of 1917 which produced Stalin and the deaths of millions, and also in Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s which led to the deaths of millions more.

If you believe that individuals have dignity, worth and certain inalienable rights you will feel a kinship with the American founders. If you believe that individuals are of value only insofar as they're useful to the state then you'll feel a kinship with the French Jacobins, the Stalinists and the Maoists who sought to carry this view to its logical conclusion and who would do so again today in Europe and in the U.S. if ever they're allowed to rise to power.

Why Impeachment Is a Bad Idea

The Democrats at CNN and MSNBC can scarcely restrain their glee at the prospect of impeaching Donald Trump when the new congress convenes in January. Even so, the more realistic among them are probably counselling against impeachment, unless something much more criminally substantial turns up against the president.

Impeachment proceedings against a president whose approval ratings are in the high forties could easily blow up in the Democrats' faces as David Marcus at http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/11/why-democrats-would-be-insane-to-impeach-donald-trump/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=e28d0d6e26-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-e28d0d6e26-83778945 The Federalist explains.

Marcus opines that it would be a grave error on the part of the Democrats to impeach Trump and offers several reasons, chief among which are the similarities with the last impeachment of a president. Here's a summary:

Clinton’s troubles began with having a difficult time keeping his pants on. Also like Trump, lying about and trying to obfuscate an illicit tryst was eventually the high crime or misdemeanor that Republicans in the House in 1998 latched onto.

When the dust settled from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1999, his approval rating sat at an astounding 73 percent. That’s a note of caution to Democrats who believe that, having taken the House of Representatives, they should impeach Donald Trump....

[W]hile the American people did not believe Clinton, they also did not believe he had acted badly enough for Congress to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election....

Let’s think about this for a minute. The thrice-married Trump, who has been known to boast about adultery like a suburban dad who won the best lawn in the neighborhood award, apparently had sex with a porn star and a Playboy playmate. That seems about par for his course.

But wait! He lied about it! Well, yeah, also pretty much behavior we knew about and expected. But there’s more! He might have violated campaign finance law! Okay, but so do a lot of campaigns. Usually they pay a fine and we all move along.

The House can impeach the president, i.e. bring charges against him, but it is the role of the Senate to convict and there's zero chance of that happening, as of now, in the GOP-controlled Senate.

The Democrats know this and even the most otiose voter will learn it eventually. The electorate will thus see the Democrats' efforts as a grand waste of time and money whose only purpose was to hurt Trump politically.

This is precisely why President Clinton gained so much support from the Republicans' attempts to get him out of office. It was seen as a mean-spirited overreach, an effort to destroy a man for political reasons.

Marcus closes with this:

Trump’s eventual and almost certain acquittal in the Senate would be just as much a victory for him as it was for Bill Clinton. The Democrats, including presidential hopefuls, who supported it would be roundly embarrassed by having wasted the nation’s time, money, and attention tilting at an impossible windmill.

This is not a close call. If at some point Robert Mueller, CNN, or the Washington Post discover some crime that even Senate Republicans admit is disqualifying for Trump’s presidency, then by all means, impeach him. Nothing we have seen so far suggests that such a contingency is particularly likely.

For the sake of the country’s sanity, and their own political chances, the Democrats should holster their impeachment pistol and worry about explaining to Americans why one of them, not Trump, should be president of the United States.

Actually, it might be easier to try to get Trump convicted of whatever charges the House Democrats bring against him than to explain to the American people how or why any of them would offer the nation a superior alternative to Donald Trump.

Only Our Closest Relatives?

An article in Science Daily on altruistic behavior in plants, of all things, quotes a Harvard evolutionary biology professor named William Friedman:

"One of the most fundamental laws of nature is that if you are going to be an altruist, give it up to your closest relatives," said Friedman. "Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary."

Either Friedman doesn't consider altruism in humans to be a product of evolution, which would be an odd stance for an evolutionary biologist to take, or he's never heard of Mother Teresa.

Rising Seas

We've all heard the gloomy prophecies that global warming will, by the end of the century, have caused a calamitous rise in sea levels, notwithstanding our previous president's confident bluster that his election ten years ago portended a reversal of the trend.

Last June Penn State climatologist Michael Mann prophesied that the oceans would rise six to eight feet by the year 2100. Climatologist James Hansen, who also predicted in 1988 that New York City's West Side Highway would be flooded within twenty to forty years, warns that such an outcome would cause coastal cities to be inundated and precipitate mass migrations of urban dwellers into the hinterlands.

But not all climate scientists are convinced. One skeptic is Judith Curry who argues that the data simply don't warrant the dire claims of her colleagues.

In an article at The Daily Caller Curry is quoted as saying that, “Projections of extreme, alarming impacts are very weakly justified to borderline impossible.”

The article goes on to say that,

Curry, however, sees estimates of sea level rise above two feet by the end of the century as “weakly justified” even at high levels of warming. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) puts the likely range of sea level rise at 10 to 32 inches.

Alarming sea level rise predictions are based on “a cascade of extremely unlikely-to-impossible events using overly simplistic models of poorly understood processes,” Curry wrote in her report.

Current sea level rise is well-within natural variability of the past few thousand years, according to Curry. Curry said coastal communities should base their future flood plans on likely scenarios, such as one to two feet, rather than high-end scenarios.

“There is not yet any convincing evidence of a human fingerprint on global sea level rise, because of the large changes driven by natural variability,” Curry wrote. “An increase in the rate of global sea level rise since 1995 is being caused by ice loss from Greenland.”

However, the “Greenlandic ice loss was larger during the 1930s, which was also associated with the warm phase of the Atlantic Ocean circulation pattern,” Curry wrote.

In other words, sea level fluctuations are normal and the predictions of her colleagues are hyperbolic. In any case, there's probably at present not much more that the U.S. can do, practically speaking, than it has already done to reduce greenhouse gasses. Surely, there's little appetite for following the French example.

French President Macron apparently thought that the French people would be willing to bite the bullet and pay higher fuel costs in order to reduce their petroleum consumption and fund renewable energy sources, but he seems to have badly misjudged the willingness of the French middle class to impoverish themselves in order to keep the Riviera beaches available for the great, great, great grandchildren of the French elites.

Today Paris is in flames, and so are Macron's hopes of lessening the French carbon footprint.

Barnacle Goose

From time to time I've posted on birds that I've been fortunate to see in my little corner of the world. One bird that makes it into eastern Pennsylvania once or twice each winter is a resident of Greenland but which occasionally wanders south in the winter into the Middle Atlantic states.

The bird is called the Barnacle goose and it's perhaps the most handsome of all the geese seen in the United States. Recently, one of these birds turned up in a park about an hour and a half from my home, so, since I had never seen one before, I decided over the weekend to go see this one.

One thing that makes Barnacle geese especially interesting is the manner in which their young are fledged. They're hatched on ledges high up on cliff faces, but their natural milieu lies in the water hundreds of feet below. Watch this video to see the remarkable manner by which they get from the ledge to the water:

That any of them survive is surely one of the wonders of the animal kingdom.

A Young Woman You Should Know About

Thirty years ago the last place people would've thought free speech was imperilled was North American universities, yet today the pressure on students to conform to politically correct speech codes in some schools is enormous.

Consider the story of a young grad student named Lindsay Shepherd who attended Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada:

On November 1, 2017, during a first-year undergraduate class Shepherd was teaching, she showed two clips from a public Canadian television channel. The first featured [University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson], who has been an outspoken opponent of Canadian laws that mandate the use of transgender pronouns.

A heated discussion among the students followed the videos. Later, a student approached an LGBTQ support group, which then filed a complaint with the university’s Diversity and Equity Office. That office requested a meeting with Shepherd on November 8.

Shepherd secretly recorded the meeting, which turned into an interrogation. During the 40-minute circus, university staff (who acknowledged her “positionality” regarding open inquiry), accused her of having created a “toxic climate for some of the students” by playing the clips and approaching the topic neutrally (emphasis mine).

One professor even compared the pronoun debate to discussing whether a student of color should have rights. He also called Peterson a member of the “alt-right” and compared playing a clip featuring Peterson to “neutrally playing a speech by Hitler or Milo Yiannopoulos.” Peterson’s perspective was also rejected as “not valid,” as, apparently, not all perspectives are up for debate.

Shepherd released the recording to Canadian media. Not long afterward, WLU’s president, Deborah MacLatchy, apologized, as did Nathan Rambukkana, a professor and Shepherd’s academic advisor, who was the main antagonist in the meeting. MacLatchy said the meeting did not “reflect the values and practices to which Laurier aspires.”

Shepherd filed a lawsuit in June 2018 against the university, Rambukkana, and several others, for damages of $3.6 million, claiming “harassment, intentional infliction of nervous shock, negligence, and constructive dismissal.” Peterson also filed a lawsuit against Laurier and several university staff.

It's incredible that adopting a "neutral" standpoint on a controversial issue would get an instructor into trouble with her administration in an institution which is putatively committed to free and open inquiry.

It's also ironic because Shepherd considered herself, until this episode, to be a leftist progressive who supports environmental causes and gay marriage. Since then, however, she has published a video on her website which she titles "Goodbye to the Left" in which she explains why she no longer considers herself a leftist although she still retains the same position on many of the social issues she did previously.

The left, however, is so rife with censorship, victimhood culture and moral righteousness that she no longer feels a part of it. Her video has received almost a million views. You can read more about Shepherd at the link as well as get links to her video and youtube channel.

Her story is a common one. Liberals who value free speech and the free flow of ideas are finding themselves hounded, intimidated and driven from their jobs and careers by an intolerant, Stalinist left that brooks no challenge to, questioning of nor deviation from its dogmas.

The left is fond of purging from its midst anyone who sits just the slightest bit to their right, but by eliminating everyone situated to the right of the progressive mainstream they ensure that the mainstream continually moves leftward toward fascism, communism or some other tyrannical totalitarianism.

The left - not just the extremists in Antifa but also those who populate our college and university faculties and administrations as well as many in the upper echelons of the Democratic party - is a very real threat to the freedoms we take for granted as Americans, freedoms that are today under the greatest assault of any time in our nation's history.

Lindsay Shepherd and many others are unfortunately having to discover this the hard way. Google, for instance, the stories of liberals like Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax, Evergreen College biology professor Brett Weinstein or Google software engineer James Damore to see how liberals who have the temerity to express heterodox opinions are harrassed and even have their careers ruined by the progressive brown shirts.

It's our future unless people who value our traditional freedoms stand up to the bullies and stop voting into office those who are the bullies' political enablers.

Biological Machines

Among the phenomena which support the claim that life is the product of intentional, intelligent design is the sheer number of complex molecular machines that operate in each of the trillions of our body's cells to ensure that these cells carry out the functions that keep us alive.

One of these machines is the system of proteins that synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Here's a short video animation that describes how this machine, called ATP synthase, works:

There are thousands of such machines in the cell, all of which, on the standard Darwinian account, somehow developed - through random, undirected, processes - not only their structure, not only the coordination with other systems in the cell necessary for proper function, but also the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control how and when the machine operates. If it happened, it's a near-miraculous achievement for blind, undirected processes.

David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely. Applying Hume's principle to the present case, we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that an astonishing mechanism like ATP synthase came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

It seems to me that the only way one can assert the former is if they've already, a priori, ruled out the possibility of the existence of the intelligent engineer, but, of course, that begs the question. Whether the intelligent engineer exists is the very matter we're trying to answer by asking whether blind chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the existence in living things of such machines as ATP synthase.

If we allow the evidence to speak for itself rather than allow our prior metaphysical commitments to dictate what the evidence says then I'm pretty sure most people would agree that the kind of specified complexity we see in this video points unequivocally to the existence of a designing mind.

If this video has piqued your interest here's another that pushes us toward the same conclusion. It's an animation of just a few of the structures and processes in a living cell. Note the amazing motor protein that carries the vesicle along the microtubule:

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? What's the source of the information needed to choreograph this phenomenon? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it somehow a product of intelligence? On which of those possible explanations, intelligence or blind, purposeless, random processes, are such mechanisms more likely?

Why People Are Poor

Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute has a book coming out this week titled The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth America’s Poor in which he argues that the primary reasons for poverty in this country are the laws and policies enacted by the government which make it harder for the poor to escape to the middle class.

He talks about his thesis in an article at National Review Online. His article opens with this:

Why are people poor? Conservatives and liberals offer very different explanations.

Conservatives point to a “culture of poverty” and suggest that much deprivation is the result of flawed choices and behavior by the poor themselves. They point to a strong correlation between poverty and a failure to follow the so-called “success sequence”: finish school, get a job, get married, and only then have children. Relatively few people who do those things end up in poverty.

Liberals, on the other hand, say that that is all very well, but choices are always constrained by the circumstances in which people live. Therefore, conservatives are wrong to discount structural factors, such as racism, gender-based discrimination, and economic dislocation, that can help shape people’s choices.

There is truth to both explanations. One can’t strip the poor of agency by treating them as if they were little more than chaff blown by the wind, with no responsibility for their choices. But neither should we ignore the context in which those decisions are made. For all the progress we have made, not everyone starts with an equal opportunity.

Tanner argues that five areas of government policy impede economic and social progress among the poor.

Criminal Justice: Studies show that a criminal record dooms an inmate's children to poverty, and having a criminal record makes it harder to get a job and get married once released, both of which increase out-of-wedlock births.

Tanner cites a 2016 statement from President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers:

Having a criminal record or history of incarceration is a barrier to success in the labor market, and limited employment or depressed wages can stifle an individual’s ability to become self-sufficient. . . . Further, criminal sanctions create financial and emotional stresses that destabilize marriages and have adverse consequences for children.

Education: Poor children generally find themselves stuck in failing schools. These schools are not failing because they don't receive enough money, rather they fail for a host of socio-economic reasons that indeed may be intractable. The problem is that there are lots of motivated kids languishing in these schools who are essentially being taught nothing. The answer is to give parents a choice as to where their children will go to school.

Tanner writes:

An effective anti-poverty program would break up the government education monopoly and limit the power of the teachers’ unions. One can debate the precise merits of charter schools vs. vouchers vs. tuition tax credits, but, in the end, we must give parents more choice and control over their children’s education.

You'd think that people who talk about social justice would be on board with this, but it's the left which has over the years consistently thwarted attempts to give parents more options in their children's schooling.

Housing Policy: According to Tanner, government zoning and land-use policies can add as much as 40 percent to the cost of housing in some cities. In places such as New York City and San Francisco, the zoning cost is even higher, at 50 percent or more, and these regulations don’t merely increase the cost of rent which already consumes a big chunk of a poor family's resources; they effectively lock the poor out of areas with more jobs or better schools.

Savings: Tanner asserts that, "Asset tests for public programs punish the poor for saving. And Social Security squeezes out opportunities for the poor to save for themselves. We need to reconfigure a wide variety of current policies to encourage thrift, saving, and investment."

Inclusive Economic Growth: Tanner urges our leaders "to pursue policies such as low taxes, reduced government debt, and deregulation, policies that spur investment, entrepreneurship, and the economic growth that will increase the wealth of our society."

He goes on to add that,

[I]t’s not enough to encourage economic growth if the poor remain locked out of participation in that growing economy. That means we need to eliminate barriers such as occupational-licensing rules, occupational zoning, and the minimum wage.

For example, it's estimated that more than 1,100 different professions (25 to 30 percent of all job categories) require a license in at least one state, from florists to funeral attendants, from tree trimmers to make-up artists. The removal of licensure barriers not only unlocks employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for the poor in low-skill occupations but also lowers prices.

Similarly, occupational zoning can prevent a poor person from starting a small business in his or her home. And minimum-wage laws can block low-skilled workers from getting that first job, and therefore a start on the economic ladder.

Liberals will cheer Tanner's advocacy of criminal justice reform while conservatives will applaud his remaining four policy recommendations. The larger point, though, is that government bureaucracy, mandates and general officiousness does more to hurt the poor than to help them.

That's another assertion that conservatives will register strong agreement with.

Unfortunately, the poor, generally, keep voting for people who think that the way to eliminate poverty is to enact policies that make it harder for people to overcome it.

He concludes with this:

An anti-poverty agenda built on empowering poor people and allowing them to take greater control of their own lives offers the chance for a new bipartisan consensus that rejects the current paternalism of both Left and Right.

More important, it is an agenda that will do far more than our current failed welfare state to actually lift millions of Americans out of poverty.

It all makes sense to me.

Are Humans Merely Animals?

It's been said that the 20th century abolished the difference between man and animal (via Darwinian materialism) and that the 21st century seeks to abolish the difference between man and machine (via AI, among other things).

Whether the latter effort will be successful remains to be seen, but the conflation of man with other mammals is hard to credit. The differences between human beings and animals are not simply quantitative - humans are not simply more intelligent - they're qualitative as well.

Humans, for example, have a sense of beauty and a desire to be surrounded by it. We possess a sense of humor, a sense of morality, a sense of the transcendent, an ability to create music and an ability to think abstractly, all of which are unique in the animal kingdom.

Paul Gosselin, in his book Flight from the Absolute, adds a few more unique human capacities. He writes that in addition to some of the aforementioned, mankind's abilities include:

...the awareness of his own existence, awareness of his future death (even when not imminent), his ability to develop and perceive his identity, his ability to develop a belief system and build a culture/civilization on this basis.

Perhaps, though, the most amazing ability possessed uniquely by humans is language. Gosselin quotes linguist Noam Chomsky who wrote:

When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the "human essence," the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man ....this creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.

Ideas have consequences. Gosselin observes that if the difference between humans and animals is only quantitative we're led to the conclusion that there's no reason to treat humans differently from animals. He quotes philosopher Mortimer Adler in this regard:

If a difference in degree justifies a difference in treatment, why would not superior men be justified in treating inferior men in whatever way men think they're justified in treating non-human animals....[Men] kill animals for for the enjoyment of the sport; or, ... for the purposes...of medical research.

Now, if these actions can be justified by nothing more than a difference in degree between human and non-human animals, why is not the same justification available for the actions of Nazis or other racists?

Indeed, the superior/inferior distinction has been used throughout human history to justify all manner of slaughter and slavery.

"But," someone might object, "humans have a responsibility to act differently because we're aware of what we're doing." Yes, but then we're not only conceding that humans are indeed unique, we're imputing to them a special responsibility that no other creature has. Where does this responsibility come from? If we're solely a product of blind, purposeless evolutionary forces how can we be burdened with any responsibility other than, perhaps, to insure our own survival?

We humans insist that we have a responsibility to treat others as equals, not as inferiors, and not only this but a responsibility, too, to preserve the earth's resources for future generations. But such responsibilities only exist if they're imposed on us from outside ourselves.

The naturalistic view that tells us that we're just an animal leaves no room for any such outside imposition of responsibility, nor can it it account for it by invoking the evolutionary process. It is, in other words, a totally baseless assumption, an article of blind faith, that the naturalist has no reason for holding other than that it makes him feel good.

Eight Questions

One thing that the last couple of decades of watching the political machinations of the progressive left has taught us is not to expect consistency from them.

At the outset of WWII the left was a strong defender of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party. Their support for Hitler was due entirely to their love for Stalin's communism. Stalin and Hitler were allies so the American left swooned over Hitler. Then Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R. and overnight the left became the mortal enemy of all things German.

Their fickle inconstancy has been the trademark of our progressive friends ever since. Here are a few questions raised by contemporary events that illustrate the point:

Why do progressives swear complete fealty to science when the issue is evolution or climate change but abandon or even reject biological science altogether when the topic is gender identity?

Why do progressives praise former president George H.W. Bush as a man of great accomplishment and decency now that he has passed, despite having slammed and mocked him when he was president and voting for a scandal-plagued serial adulterer instead of Bush in the 1992 election?

I don't wish to sound insensitive, but the question is hard to avoid: Is it the case for the left that the only good Republican is a dead Republican?

Why has the left condemned the Trump administration for using tear gas on migrants who were throwing rocks at the border police and charging the crossing, but said nothing when the Obama administration used tear gas against migrants an average of once a month during the last five years of Obama's presidency?

Why do progressive Democrats denounce as bigots those who hold views on illegal immigration and gay marriage similar to those held by progressive heroes like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama up until the day before yesterday?

Why do liberals tell us repeatedly that we have no right to judge the morals of other cultures and then express outrage when our government refrains from condemning Saudi Arabia for murdering a journalist?

Why do liberals denounce assaults on women but say little about the practice among some immigrant communities in this country of female genital mutilation which has victimized over 500,000 women?

Why would the left call it racist hate if white students were to demand that they be given public spaces on campus from which minority students were excluded, or refuse to allow black students to sit at their lunch table and have the university president actually defend them in a Washington Post editorial, but not if, as was actually the case, blacks were to do exactly the same thing vis a vis whites?

If progressives wish to have more credibility with people of common sense they need to be a lot more consistent in the positions they take. Otherwise, they just look like people who'll say anything in order to gain power and political advantage.

Science and the Good

A new book by sociologist James Davison Hunter and philosopher Paul Nedelisky explores the history of attempts by scientists and philosophers in the West to develop a moral law without invoking any transcendent moral lawgiver or any other theological presuppositions. That project, Hunter and Nedelisky conclude, has failed.

It's apparently beyond the scope of their book (titled Science and the Good) to explore the reasons why this 400 year effort has failed to produce the desired moral code, but those reasons, it seems to me, are fairly obvious.

No non-theistic account of morality can explain why human beings have dignity, rights and worth. No secularized morality, which by its nature excludes ultimate accountability, can have any binding force.

It cannot impose duties or obligations, nor can it give a plausible explanation of what it means to say that a particular behavior is wrong. Nor can secular ethics give a satisfactory answer to the egoist who asks why he would be wrong to care only about his own interests and not bother himself at all with concerns about the well-being of other people.

This is why naturalism, or atheism, leads logically to moral nihilism even if most naturalists don't take the atheistic train all the way to that station.

Judeo-Christian morality, based on God's revelation to man, is the only plausible ground for a morality that does not end up in nihilism.

Only if we're made in the image of God by a Creator who loves us do we have dignity, worth and human rights.

Only if an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal, perfectly good Creator has designed us to be a certain kind of creature and wills that we behave in accord with the Manufacturer's specifications can we say that violating that will is wrong.

Only if the Creator holds us accountable for how we live are we, in fact, accountable in any meaningful sense.

Only if the Creator insists that we love our neighbor, with all that that entails, do we have moral obligations to others.

Take away the Creator, God, and all of the foregoing evanesces, like the body of the Cheshire cat in Alice. To the extent any of it persists at all it's just an arbitrary expression of personal taste or mere illusion.

This goes a long way, I think, toward explaining why our culture is in the inauspicious state it's in today. We're like astronauts floating about in space trying to decide which way is up. Our moral judgments, like the astronaut's, are purely a result of our own subjective feelings and have no purchase on anyone else. As Rousseau put it 250 years ago, "Whatever I feel is good, is good; whatever I feel is bad, is bad."

In his book The Atheist's Guide to Reality Duke philosopher Alex Rosenberg, himself an atheist, puts the matter more plainly than most. He maintains that having abandoned God, atheism leaves us with science as the only reliable source of knowledge.

This faith in the epistemic power of science is called scientism and, Rosenberg argues, it leads straight to nihilism, but most people, unlike him, balk at going that far. He gives three reasons for their hesitancy:

In a world where physics fixes all the facts, it’s hard to see how there could be room for moral facts. In a universe headed for its own heat death, there is no cosmic value to human life, your own or anyone else’s. Why bother to be good? ….

First, nihilism can’t condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or those who fomented the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan one. If there is no such thing as “morally forbidden,” then what Mohamed Atta did on September 11, 2001, was not morally forbidden. Of course, it was not permitted either. But still, don’t we want to have grounds to condemn these monsters? Nihilism seems to cut that ground out from under us.

Second, if we admit to being nihilists, then people won’t trust us. We won’t be left alone when there is loose change around. We won’t be relied on to be sure small children stay out of trouble.

Third, and worst of all, if nihilism gets any traction, society will be destroyed. We will find ourselves back in Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature, where “the life of man is solitary, mean, nasty, brutish and short.” Surely, we don’t want to be nihilists if we can possibly avoid it. (Or at least, we don’t want the other people around us to be nihilists.) ….

Scientism, he avers, can’t avoid nihilism. We need to make the best of it. He writes:

To avoid the aforementioned outcomes, people have been searching for scientifically respectable justification of morality for least a century and a half. The trouble is that over the same 150 years or so, the reasons for nihilism have continued to mount.

Both the failure to find an ethics that everyone can agree on and the scientific explanation of the origin and persistence of moral norms have made nihilism more and more plausible while remaining just as unappetizing.

So, what's an atheist to do? The choice is either give up one's atheism or give up on morality. Rosenberg and others, strangely enough, opt for the latter.

Gender Crisis

There's a gender crisis in America, and it has nothing to do with whether somebody has difficulty deciding which one of the two dozen or so genders they are. The crisis, as Tucker Carlson observes in his recent book Ship of Fools, is that while we are implementing all manner of policies to help women, to secure for them better pay and more opportunities, something awful is happening to men, and relatively few people seem to be talking about it.

For example, relative to girls, boys are failing in high school. More girls than boys graduate, and more girls than boys attend and graduate from college.

Boys are overwhelmingly more likely to be discipline problems in school and to have been diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder (one in five boys, one in eleven girls).

Women outnumber men in grad school and earn more doctoral degrees. They are the majority of new enrollees in both law and medical school.

Between 1979 and 2010, young male high school graduates saw their hourly wages drop 20% while similarly situated women saw theirs rise. When men's wages drop they find it harder to get married and stay married. That's one reason why we find more stable, intact families in affluent neighborhoods than in lower socio-economic areas.

Far fewer men are getting married today than did just a few years ago and fewer stay married. About one in five children live only with their mothers, double the rate in 1970. Young adult males are more likely to live with a parent than with a spouse or partner. That's not the case for young adult women. Much more than women, men need work to bolster their mental health and give them an identity. When they don't work, Carlson says, they fall apart.

The average American man dies five years before the average American woman. One reason is addiction. Men are more than twice as likely as women to become alcoholics and twice as likely to die from a drug overdose. Statistics from New Hampshire showed that 73% of the OD deaths in that state are men.

Another reason is suicide. Suicide among young men rose 43% during the first fifteen years of the current century.

Moreover, over 90% of prison inmates are male.

Half of young men failed the army's entry-level physical fitness test during basic training. Fully 70% of American men are overweight or obese, as compared to 59% of American women.

One of the most bizarre and troubling developments has to do with maleness itself. While academics fret over what they call "toxic masculinity," masculinity, in biological terms, seems to be inexplicably diminishing.

Sperm counts are down almost 60% since the early 1970s, and no one knows why. Testosterone levels have dropped 1% a year every year since 1987. Lower testosterone is associated with depression, lethargy, weight gain, and decreased cognitive ability.

This is an unprecedented state of affairs, and not only does no one know why it's happening, there seems to be little inclination among our politicians or media to find out. Instead, our elites continue to be stuck in the 1970s, fixated on improving opportunities for women while ignoring the much more serious crisis afflicting men.

Only Two Options

Physicist Leonard Susskind has written a book titled, Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design in which he seeks to explain away the fine-tuning of the universe by offering the hope that there are something like ten to the 500th power universes out there, all with different laws and constants, so that one of them just has to be like ours.

He suggests that there really are only two options: The existence of zillions of universes, so many that we cannot comprehend the number (To get an idea of the size of the number there are only 10^80 atoms in the whole of our universe), or there is only one universe and it was intentionally designed by a cosmic intelligence.

Some time ago New Scientist ran an interview with Susskind by Amanda Gefter. Here's an excerpt:

Gefter:So even if you accept the multiverse and the idea that certain local physical laws are anthropically determined, you still need a unique mega-theory to describe the whole multiverse? Surely it just pushes the question [of the source of fine-tuning] back?

Susskind: Yes, absolutely. The bottom line is that we need to describe the whole thing, the whole universe, or multiverse. It's a scientific question: is the universe on the largest scales big and diverse or is it homogeneous [i.e. Is it many universes or just one]? We can hope to get an answer from string theory and we can hope to get some information from cosmology.

There is a philosophical objection called Popperism that people raise against the landscape [multiverse] idea. Popperism [named for philosopher Karl Popper] is the assertion that a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it's just metaphysics.

Other worlds, alternative universes, things we can't see because they are beyond horizons, are in principle unfalsifiable and therefore metaphysical - that's the objection. But the belief that the universe beyond our causal horizon is homogeneous is just as speculative....

Gefter: If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design [ID]?

Susskind: I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world.

But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now, we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.

Nuclear physicist David Heddle responds:

Susskind's answer shows that his book should be subtitled String Theory and the Possible Illusion of Intelligent Design. He has done nothing whatsoever to disprove fine-tuning. Nothing. He has only countered it with a religious speculation in scientific language, a God of the Landscape.

Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, he tells us that we should embrace the String Theory landscape, not in spite of its ugliness, but rather because of it. Physics should change its paradigm and sing praises to inelegance.

Out with Occam's razor, in with Rube Goldberg. Out with reductionism, in with lots of free parameters. Why? Because if we don't (according to Susskind) there really is no way to explain the fine-tuning, except by Intelligent Design.

I think Heddle is correct. A fundamental theory that predicted all the physical constants would be a "win" for ID. It would nullify the only real threat to cosmological intelligent design, the hypothesis that there are an infinitude of universes all with different laws of physics.

The subtext (at times explicit) in Susskind's book is that fine-tuning is real, in the sense that our universe really does exist on a knife's edge, so much so that it demands attention. The only possible way that it is an illusion is if our universe is but one of an unimaginable number of universes.

To save materialism from the spectre of theism, Susskind argues that we must explain this fine-tuning, and his landscape [i.e. that there are zillions of universes] has the best chance of playing the role of a white knight.

Susskind's argument demonstrates the desperation of materialists who wish to escape the conclusion that there is an intelligence behind the cosmos. He's willing to jettison the traditional scientific criteria of testability, falsifiability and Occam's razor and blindly accept on faith, without any empirical evidence, that there exists a nearly infinite number of other worlds.

With so much cosmological variety, he believes, one of those other worlds just has to possess the extraordinary complex of features required to support life, and our universe happens to be that world. Thus, our universe is not so extraordinary after all.

Susskind's interview makes it plain that the battle over intelligent design is not one between science and religion but rather between two different philosophical views of the world: Naturalism and Supernaturalism.

Susskind says that our universe certainly appears to be intricately well-ordered and intelligently planned for living things, but that the appearance of purpose and design are, in fact, simply illusions.

The intelligent design theorist counters that the only evidence to which we have access, or even could have access, tells us that this universe is the only one there is, and that the supposition that our world is the only world is in any event the most parsimonious hypothesis.

Thus, we think we see purpose and intentional engineering in the fabric of the cosmos because these things are really there, and the only reason one would have for failing to accept that conclusion is an a priori metaphysical commitment to atheism. Unfortunately, a priori commitments are not conducive to a scientific approach to the search for truth.

Should anyone question why all parties seem to agree that the universe at the very least appears to be deliberately fine-tuned, I commend either or both of the following: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by physicist Stephen Barr and Nature's Destiny by biologist Michael Denton.

Naturalism and Objective Moral Values

Here's a five minute clip from a discussion twenty some years ago involving two philosophers, one a theist (Dr. William Lane Craig) and one a naturalist (Dr. Bernard Leikind), discussing whether naturalism can provide a ground for objective moral values.

Dr. Leikind is a relativist who apparently believes that some things, like slavery, are indeed objectively bad, but he struggles to give a reason why slavery is bad other than his own subjective aversion to it.

If naturalism is true then all moral values are subjective personal preferences, and if moral values are simply subjective preferences, like a preferred flavor of ice cream, then there is no genuine right and wrong, just as there's no right or wrong preference in ice cream flavors.

Nevertheless, the naturalist can choose to live by certain values, and most do, but the logic of his or her basic worldview should actually lead the naturalist to moral nihilism.

Fortunately, most naturalists are not logically consistent and don't follow their naturalism all the way to its logical endpoint.

If they were consistent not only would they be nihilists (see here), but they would never make moral judgments about any other person's behavior, for no matter how cruel or harmful that behavior might be, it wouldn't be morally wrong.

Is Time Static or Fluid?

Bernardo Kastrup, challenges readers in an article in Scientific American to consider that our apparent experience of the flow of time is really an illusion. He writes,

There can only be experiential flow if there is experience in the past, present and future. But where is the past? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it? Clearly not.

What makes you conceive of the idea of the past is the fact that you have memories. But these memories can only be referenced insofar as they are experienced now, as memories. There has never been a single point in your entire life in which the past has been anything other than memories experienced in the present.

The same applies to the future: where is it? Can you point at it and say “there is the future”? Clearly not. Our conception of the future arises from expectations or imaginings experienced now, always now, as expectations or imaginings.

There has never been a single point in your life in which the future has been anything other than expectations or imaginings experienced in the present.

But if the past and the future are not actually experienced in the, well, past and future, how can there be an experiential flow of time? Where is experiential time flowing from and into?

He goes on to draw an analogy from space: Let’s make an analogy with space. Suppose that you suddenly find yourself sitting on the side of a long, straight desert road. Looking ahead, you see mountains in the distance. Looking behind, you see a dry valley.

The mountains and the valley provide references that allow you to locate yourself in space. But the mountains, the valley, your sitting on the roadside, all exist simultaneously in the present snapshot of your conscious life.

Kastrup argues that just as you wouldn't construe from seeing the mountains ahead and the valley behind while you sit by the roadside, that you are moving on the road. You aren't; you are simply taking account of your relative position on it. You have no more experiential reason to believe that time flows than that space flows while you sit admiring the landscape.

He concludes with this:

The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion. All we ever actually experience is the present snapshot, which entails a timescape of memories and imaginings analogous to the landscape of valley and mountains. Everything else is a story.

The implications of this realization for physics and philosophy are profound. Indeed, the relationship between time, experience and the nature of reality is liable to be very different from what we currently assume....

The article is fairly brief, but Kastrup manages to fit several other interesting insights into it. If the ontology of time interests you, you should check it out.

¡Si, Se Puede!

Here's a small irony. Yesterday Honduran migrants in Mexico tried with scant success to storm the U.S. border at San Ysidro shouting "¡Si, Se Puede!" ("Yes, we can!"). The irony is that this was the slogan which enjoyed wide popularity among Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers back in the 60s and 70s.

Chavez was an icon among liberal progressives. According to Tucker Carlson in his book Ship of Fools there are six libraries, eleven parks, half a dozen major roads and at least twenty five public schools in California all named for him.

Chavez's UFW union was comprised of Latino farm laborers, in this country legally, who saw illegal immigrants as a threat to their economic livelihood, which of course they were. Carlson writes:

Chavez understood that new arrivals from poor countries will always work for less than Americans. Immigration hurt the members of his union, undercutting their wages and weakening their leverage in negotiations with management...When government refused to protect them (from illegal aliens) Chavez did it himself....In 1969 Chavez led a march down the agricultural spine of California to protest the hiring of illegal workers by growers.

Marching alongside him were future presidential candidate Walter Mondale and Rev. Ralph Abernathy...

When the U.S. government failed to secure the border...in 1979, UFW members, almost all of them Hispanic, began intercepting Mexican nationals as they crossed the border and assaulted them in the desert. Their tactics were brutal: Chavez's men beat immigrants with chains, clubs, and whips made of barbed wire. Illegal aliens who dared to work as scabs had their houses bombed and cars burned...

The union set up a "wet line" along the border, a picket line of tents, each tent manned by five or six men whose task it was to catch illegals and beat them to a pulp.

During these years the Democrat party was firmly anti-illegal immigration. In 1975 California governor Jerry Brown (the same Jerry Brown who is again California's governor today, remarkably) opposed the admission of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Vietnam. His reason was that California already had too many unemployed people.

Senator Joe Biden introduced legislation to curb the arrival of the Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, accusing the Gerald Ford administration of not being honest about how many refugees would be coming to our shores.

Senator George McGovern, the leftmost progressive in the Democratic Party, opposed letting them in, saying, "I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam."

In 1994 Barbara Jordan, an African American congresswoman from Texas, demanded that immigrants assimilate into American society, learn English and become "Americanized." Those immigrants who refused she insisted be deported.

In 1995 Democrat President Bill Clinton intoned in his State of the Union address that, "All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by U.S. citizens or immigrants. The public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers."

He went on: "It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that we've seen in recent years. We must do more to stop it." He was given a standing ovation by Democrats and Republicans alike.

As recently as 2006, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and twenty three other senate Democrats voted to build a fence on the Mexican border.

And then suddenly they had an epiphany. They began to ask themselves, "What are we doing? These immigrants will almost certainly vote for us Democrats if we get them citizenship," and overnight their attitude toward illegal immigration flipped.

Once the Democrats realized that a huge influx of Hispanic migrants could turn Texas blue, thereby guaranteeing that Democrats would achieve political hegemony in this country for the next three generations, they quite abruptly forgot all the speeches they had made in the 90s and 2000s, they kicked American workers to the curb and stumbled all over themselves to do everything they could to get as many aliens into the country as possible.

Barack Obama even adopted Cesar Chavez's slogan, "Yes, we can" for his 2008 presidential campaign, oblivious, perhaps, of Chavez's actual attitude toward illegals.

Democrats today are willing to open our borders to almost anyone who wants to come in, they want to abolish ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, and declare every large city in America a sanctuary where illegal immigrants will be safe from enforcement of the laws they themselves fought to enact scarcely more than a decade ago.

This all suggests a thought experiment. Let's imagine that the tens of thousands of migrants wending their way across Mexico and arriving now at American points of entry were all sporting MAGA hats and were reliably expected to vote Republican when perchance they eventually were granted citizenship. Given those circumstances how many of those who are today championing open borders and sanctuary cities would continue to support those policies?

Not very many, I'd bet.

The left's concern for these migrants is largely specious and based almost completely on a political calculation. After all, what has changed for Democrats to cause them to abandon their hostility to mass immigration of a decade or two ago?

Given the history, it seems quite reasonable to assume that very few of those who advocate for the migrants today care much about them as human beings. Rather, they care about them primarily as potential Democrat voters.

They also see themselves in a win/win situation. If the migrants get into the U.S. they'll be here to stay, and a path to citizenship and the right to vote is probably in their future. If, on the other hand, they get discouraged and go home, the Democrats can blame their plight on heartless Republicans in general and that evil President Trump in particular.

In either eventuality, the migrants are pawns, they're a means to an end for the Democrats and their political aspirations.

Where Do Our Notions of Good and Evil Come from?

Philosopher Peter Kreeft at Boston College presents a version of the moral argument for the existence of God in this short video titled "Where do Good and Evil Come from?" His arguments are brief but cogent. The overall argument involves a couple of steps:

First, good and evil are objective realities, they're not simply matters of an individual's subjective feelings.

Second, the source of good and evil is either natural or supernatural.

Third, if the source is natural then it's likely to come from either evolution, conscience, human reason, human nature, or a utilitarian ethic.

He argues that none of these can explain moral duties. It therefore follows that moral duties must derive from a non-natural, or supernatural, source, i.e. God. Watch the video to see how Kreeft develops this and see what you think:

I'd add to his argument that if we posit evolution as the source of moral values then we're saying that since we have evolved a sense that kindness is good it therefore is good, and we thus have a duty to be kind. The problem with this is that a sense that selfishness is good, conquest is good, and power is good have also evolved in the human species. Are we therefore to believe that these things are good and that we thus have a moral duty to be selfish, to conquer, and to seek power?

The only way we can deny that these things, being the product of evolution, are good is if we are holding them up to a higher standard of good in comparison with which they're seen to fall short. But on the assumption that our moral duties are solely the product of evolution there is no higher standard.

The claim that a behavior is good because we have evolved a propensity for it commits what's called the naturalistic fallacy. This fallacy occurs when one concludes from the fact that something is a certain way that therefore it ought to be that way, but philosophers ever since David Hume in the 18th century have pointed out that you simply cannot derive an ought from an is.

Children of Light

Australian geneticist Michael Denton is the author of several excellent books, two of which - Firemaker and The Wonder of Water - I discuss here and here.

In these works Denton explores the amazing properties of both fire and water that most of us take for granted or of which we are completely unaware, but which would, were they only a smidgeon different from what they are, make life, or at least advanced life, impossible.

Denton has now come out with another book titled Children of Light in which he applies the same sort of analysis to light, the atmosphere, the leaf and the eye, and the "coincidences" and design he highlights are breathtaking.

For instance, visible light is an electromagnetic radiation the spectrum of which is exceedingly vast. If a stack of playing cards were placed on the earth and extended all the way beyond the milky way to the next nearest galaxy to represent the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiations, the frequencies that are visible to the human eye would be just a couple of playing cards thick.

This extremely thin sliver of frequencies is not only visible to the human eye, but these are the only frequencies that can be used to drive chemical reactions, they're the only frequencies that can be utilized by plants for photosynthesis, they are the only frequencies that can penetrate the atmosphere and water, and they are the bulk of the frequencies produced by the sun.

If the sun didn't produce these frequencies, or if the atmosphere didn't allow them to reach the surface of the earth, or if they couldn't penetrate water to trigger photosynthesis in algae, or if that sliver of energy didn't have the precise physical properties it does, there'd probably be no life on earth except, perhaps, a few bacteria.

There's more. The sun radiates heat (infrared) which warms the earth, but if the dominant gases in the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, absorbed infrared then that heat would be trapped and the earth would be much too hot to sustain life. These gases make up about 95% of the atmosphere and they allow heat to reach the surface and to escape back into space.

On the other hand, carbon dioxide and water vapor both do absorb heat. They provide a blanket that keeps the earth's surface from getting too hot during the day and keep some heat from escaping the earth at night which prevents the temperature from dropping to intolerably cold levels after sundown.

For various reasons, if the amounts of these atmospheric gases were just slightly different, life on earth would be significantly more difficult and higher life would probably be impossible.

It's this array of "just right" physical and chemical factors which have led scientists like Denton, a former agnostic, to the conclusion that light and the atmosphere are the products of intentional design. His discussion of the astonishing structure of the leaf and the human eye leads one to the same conclusion.

Here's a short video in which Denton himself discusses some of this:

Denton has much, much more in Children of Light that will surely amaze you. Taken together his three books, Firemaker, Wonder of Water and Children of Light, offer a powerful, awe-inducing case for the conclusion that the best explanation for the dozens of properties of fire, water, and light being precisely what are needed for the emergence and sustenance of creatures like us is intelligent agency.