The Right Side of History

I've lately been reading Ben Shapiro's On the Right Side of History in which he traces the ideas that have shaped the contemporary Western world. He doesn't go into the kind of elaborate detail that Charles Taylor does in his magisterial Our Secular Age, which addresses the same theme, but Shapiro's book has the advantage of being a much less tedious read.

He begins with the ideas of the ancient Greeks ("Athens" serves as a synecdoche for the Greek rational tradition) and the Judeo-Christian ideas (represented by "Jerusalem"). The fusion of the two produced the Western world and ultimately the United States. Correlatively, it produced unprecedented progress, well-being and human flourishing.

There's nothing new in this analysis, of course, but unfortunately each generation, especially today's millennials, needs to be reminded of this history and the source of the manifold blessings they enjoy as beneficiaries of this tradition.

Shapiro's main thesis is that Western culture went off the rails when the Enlightenment thinkers split Athens off from Jerusalem, clinging to the former and rejecting the latter. This was especially so in the case of the French Enlightenment which subsequently spawned the horrors of the French terror and contributed to the evolution of modern leftism and its postmodern variants, together with its totalitarian predilections.

As Shapiro states, "Lasting happiness can only be achieved through the cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose."

Enlightenment thinkers, in their hubris, believed they could dispense with the moral and epistemological foundations provided by Jerusalem's God and still harvest all the fruits of Athenian reason, but this project has culminated in the postmodern scuttling of both Jerusalem and Athens. Here's Shapiro explaining the postmodern disdain for reason:

Reason, in fact, is insulting. Reason suggests that one person can know better than another, that one person's perspective can be more correct than someone else's. Reason is intolerant. Reason demands standards. Better to destroy reason than to abide by its dictates.

Tragically, the postmodern rejection of both Jerusalem and Athens has left contemporary Westerners metaphysically empty and void of the kinds of resources needed to satisfy their deepest psycho-emotional yearnings and appetites.

The Greeks thought that men had a purpose, a telos, the striving for which gave their lives meaning, but in a world bereft of God there is no "moral purpose." The Enlightenment, and later Darwinism, made God superfluous and consequently made the idea of a telos untenable. There can be no purpose for humanity if man and the cosmos are all simply freak accidents, and if there is no God then everything is nothing more than a meaningless, ephemeral flux of atoms.

The New Left emerged from the social thought of philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) who rejected toleration of speech and ideas promoted by those who oppose the New Left's agenda. He held that freedom as it had been traditionally understood simply served the cause of oppression, that speech could be labelled violence, and that minority groups should be given special privileges including the right to shut down their opposition.

These ideas paved the way for the sexual revolution, victim politics, political correctness, and eventually, intersectionality.

Shapiro crams all this into about 250 pages, and, if you like reading about ideas and their real-world consequences, it's all really quite interesting.

The Incompatibility Between Naturalism and Reason

One of the interesting epistemological developments of the 20th century was the increasingly widespread recognition among philosophers and other thinkers that metaphysical naturalism actually saws off the epistemological branch upon which it had been perched comfortably for the previous three centuries.

Ever since the Enlightenment philosophers inclined toward a naturalistic worldview had touted their devotion to reason and derided those whose beliefs seemed to them to be irrational. They were convinced that they were occupying the intellectual high ground, but in the latter part of the 20th century many thinkers, both naturalists and theists, noting that a naturalistic view of the world entailed a Darwinian account of the origin of human reason, recognized that on Darwinism there's no good basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth.

According to naturalism, evolution, unguided by any intelligent agent, has selected for cognitive faculties in human beings that lead to survival, but survival doesn't necessarily require truth. Indeed, survival could just as easily be enhanced by falsehoods as by truths.

Consider, for instance, a prehistoric society in which a gene mutation causes some people to believe that the more children they produce the greater will be their reward in the afterlife. Those who carry the mutation would tend, on average, to generate more children than those who don't, and since the mutant gene would be passed on to offspring the belief would spread through the population. It would have very high survival value despite its being completely false.

As Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent notes, this is an awkward state of epistemic affairs for naturalists to find themselves in, but, even so, there are lots of examples of naturalists admitting that natural selection, at least naturalistic natural selection, entails precisely the conclusion that reason has evolved to aid our survival not to discover truth, and especially not metaphysical truth.

Arrington offers a sampling of such quotes:

“[Our] brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” Steven Pinker

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman

"We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin

“[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich

“Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Patricia Churchland

“We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins

Of course, a further irony in all this is that if the naturalist cannot trust her reason to lead her to truths about her deepest metaphysical beliefs then she has no good grounds for believing that naturalism itself is true in the first place.

Anyone interested in reading more about the problem of reconciling naturalism with a belief in the trustworthiness of human reason might check out a book by Alvin Plantinga, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. The book is titled Knowledge and Christian Belief, and it's a more accessible version of his earlier, more technical treatment of the same subject titled Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

A "Disproof" of God's Existence

Skeptic magazine features a piece by philosopher Colin McGinn which they title A Disproof of God's Existence. It's an eye-catching title, but it's very misleading. The article which follows is not at all a disproof of God's existence but rather a critique of the layman's definition of the term "omnipotent."

Even at that the column is something of a straw man since no serious theologian or philosopher subscribes to the definition McGinn critiques.

After arguing that God cannot have certain powers, like the power to digest food (because He has no digestive system), McGinn concludes that God is not all-powerful. He lacks powers that other beings (e.g. animals) have, and if He had those powers then He would be an embodied being and thus not God. Therefore, either He's not all-powerful or not really God. The concept of an all-powerful God, he surmises, is incoherent.

McGinn finishes his essay with this:

The difficulty for God is to specify what kind of omnipotence he is supposed to possess. (Actually, McGinn must mean here that this is a difficulty for the theist, not for God. God has no obligation to specify anything of the sort.)

And the dilemma is obvious: either he has powers that do not properly belong to his nature as divine, or he lacks powers that other things possess, thus being less than all-powerful.

The concept of an all-powerful being is actually, when you think about it, incoherent. To be a thing of a certain type is necessarily to have a limited range of powers, because powers and natures go hand in hand.

It's hard to tell what McGinn's point is here. He's a world-class philosopher. Surely he knows that no one, at least no theistic philosopher, believes that God has the power to do just anything at all. By "omnipotence" theists mean that God can do whatever is not inherently absurd, is logically possible to do, and consistent with His nature.

He cannot, for example, make a dog that's a better rhetorician than a cat or make one color sound better than another. Nor can He create a world in which He doesn't exist, nor take pleasure in evil.

Given the foregoing definition, then, what God can do is create any logically possible universe, a feat or capability that requires unimaginable power. This power further entails that He has the power to create capacities that He Himself does not exhibit because they would be inappropriate to, or incompatible with, the kind of being He is.

Nevertheless, even though He doesn't "possess" these "powers" Himself, His power to create them is itself an enormous potency. For instance, He creates green plants which have the "power" to photosynthesize and creates as well the process of photosynthesis itself. That He Himself can't photosynthesize is hardly a limitation on His power.

In fact, it's beyond ridiculous to claim, as the title of McGinn's article does, that God's "lack" of such powers is somehow a proof that God doesn't exist.

Amazing Spectacle

Right now, in mid-May, in North America, we're in the midst of one of nature's most marvelous feats. Every year, twice a year, millions of birds set out on an amazing and arduous journey, but since it happens largely at night most people aren't very much aware of the awesome spectacle that's occurring all around them in the spring and fall each year.

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

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

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How did migration ever evolve through random mutation and natural selection? How do these birds know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it? Maybe it's all a breath-taking accident of natural selection and random genetic mutations. On the other hand, perhaps the whole process is intelligently designed. Assuming no apriori commitment to either view, which would be the best explanation for this phenomenon?

Darwin Doubter

Yale computer science professor David Gelernter has done some homework and, in an article at The Claremont Review of Books, acknowledges that he has joined the burgeoning number of academics in the sciences who have serious doubts about Darwinian evolution.

He writes:

Like so many others, I grew up with Darwin’s theory, and had always believed it was true. I had heard doubts over the years from well-informed, sometimes brilliant people, but I had my hands full cultivating my garden, and it was easier to let biology take care of itself. But in recent years, reading and discussion have shut that road down for good....

There’s no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances: changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape. Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture—not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones.

The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.

Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt (2013) convinced me that Darwin has failed. He cannot answer the big question.

Two other books are also essential: The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays (2009), by David Berlinski, and Debating Darwin’s Doubt (2015), an anthology edited by David Klinghoffer, which collects some of the arguments Meyer’s book stirred up.

These three form a fateful battle group that most people would rather ignore. Bringing to bear the work of many dozen scientists over many decades, Meyer, who after a stint as a geophysicist in Dallas earned a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge and now directs the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, disassembles the theory of evolution piece by piece.

Darwin’s Doubt is one of the most important books in a generation. Few open-minded people will finish it with their faith in Darwin intact.

Meyer doesn’t only demolish Darwin; he defends a replacement theory, intelligent design (I.D.). Although I can’t accept intelligent design as Meyer presents it, he does show that it is a plain case of the emperor’s new clothes: it says aloud what anyone who ponders biology must think, at some point, while sifting possible answers to hard questions.

Intelligent design as Meyer explains it never uses religious arguments, draws religious conclusions, or refers to religion in any way. It does underline an obvious but important truth: Darwin’s mission was exactly to explain the flagrant appearance of design in nature.

The religion is all on the other side. Meyer and other proponents of I.D. are the dispassionate intellectuals making orderly scientific arguments. Some I.D.-haters have shown themselves willing to use any argument—fair or not, true or not, ad hominem or not—to keep this dangerous idea locked in a box forever.

They remind us of the extent to which Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory but the basis of a worldview, and an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one.

Gerlernter then elaborates on precisely how Meyer's arguments have persuaded him that modern iterations of Darwinism are all inadequate to the task of explaining nature's design without invoking an intelligent designer.

Nevertheless, he's not entirely convinced that Meyer has the answer either although I don't think an intelligent design proponent like Meyer would find Gerlernter's reservations to be as formidable as Gerlernter thinks they are.

In any case, though the article is lengthy, it's accessible to anyone who has taken a good high school biology class and very informative as well.

I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the contemporary debate between naturalistic, materialistic Darwinians and intelligent design advocates.

Capitalism's (Near) Miraculous Achievement

A number of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president have expressed their antipathy for capitalism, opting instead for some variation of socialism.

Polls show that socialism is popular, too, among college students and many of their professors, but this growing support for socialistic nostrums among so many Americans is very difficult to understand given the enormous success of capitalism in increasing the well-being of so many people around the globe.

Here are a few statistics adapted from a site called Human Progress via the Glenn Beck radio show of May 13. The recitation of these statistics begins at about the 1:37:15 mark of the podcast:

• In 1870 the average European life expectancy was 36 years. Globally, the figure was 30 years. Today, the numbers are 81 and 72 years respectively.
• In 1820 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today it's only 10%.
• In 1800 43% of the world's children died before their fifth birthday. Today it's 4%.
• In 1816 only 0.87% of the world's people lived in a democratic society. Today it's 56%.
• In 1800 people living in France, at the time one of the world's richest countries, lived on 1846 calories per day. In Africa, the contemporary world's poorest continent, people now live on an average of 2624 calories per day.
• In 1800 88% of the world's population was illiterate. Today only 13% are illiterate.

Since the turn of the century the numbers are equally remarkable:

• GDP per person has risen globally by 52% since 2001, while infant mortality dropped 38% worldwide.
• Since 2001 life expectancy around the world has risen 6% and people in sub-Saharan Africa are living a full decade longer than they did prior to 2001.
• At the same time hunger has declined 33% globally since 2001, and undernourishment has decreased 27%.

These are astonishing statistics. Despite the fact that some people today live in horrendous circumstances the number who do is far less than it was a century ago and many of those who do live in penury exist in socialist dystopias like North Korea, Venezuela and Chad.

It's free markets, not centralized economic control, that have wrought this wonderful advance in human well-being, yet many people will vote in 2020 for politicians who want to kill the goose that's laying the golden eggs.

Here's a graph from Human Progress that shows the stunning explosion in GDP growth that the world has made since capitalism became more widespread in the 19th century:

According to the folks at Human Progress humanity has produced more economic output over the last two centuries than in all of the previous centuries combined. And this burst of wealth-creation led to a massive decrease in the rate of poverty.

In 1820, more than 90 per cent of the world population lived on less than $2 a day and more than 80 per cent lived on less than $1 a day (adjusted for inflation and differences in purchasing power).

By 2015, less than 10 percent of people lived on less than $1.90 a day, the World Bank’s current official definition of extreme poverty.

Why would anyone advocate undoing this modern near-miracle for human well-being in favor of policies that have consistently thrust people who live under them into abject misery? Hopefully, someone will ask Bernie Sanders that question in one of the upcoming debates.

What Is a Person?

Recently on VP I examined some arguments frequently employed in defense of a woman's right to abort a pregnancy and gave some reasons why I felt those arguments were inadequate.

As a young man I myself was pro-choice for a time, but was persuaded that there were no very good arguments for that position, or, more precisely, the arguments adduced on behalf of the right to choose were, when placed on the scales of reason, outweighed by the arguments made by pro-lifers on behalf of the "weakest among us."

In fact, I couldn't understand why liberals, who always took the side of the weak and defenseless, nevertheless abandoned the weakest and most defenseless when it came to this issue. It seemed both odd and hypocritical.

Anyway, I want to examine one more argument today.

It's often conceded that although the unborn fetus is indeed a human being (a claim that was the topic of the previous post) it's nevertheless not a person until it's born, and since it's a person which has rights, including the right to life, an individual's right to life does not outweigh the mother's right to bodily autonomy until the moment of birth when the individual then becomes, somehow, a person.

This may seem at first hearing to be a sensible argument, but it's fraught with pitfalls. The argument hinges, obviously, upon what we mean by a "person." We cannot simply define "person" as a human being who has been born since that begs the question. It assumes as settled the very matter that's under debate.

A better definition sometimes embraced by philosophers goes something like this: A person is a living human being which has the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will.

This seems to capture what we normally think of when we think of persons, but there are cases which are troubling. Does a newborn infant possess these capacities? If not, does the infant's lack of personhood provide a basis for legalizing infanticide?

What of human beings who are in a reversible coma? They lack the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will. Do they cease to be persons as long as they're disabled? Would someone not still be guilty of murder if they killed a reversibly comatose human being?

Of course they would, so perhaps we need to amend our definition to say something like: A person is a living human being who has the capacity, or potential capacity, to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will. This definition would confer personhood on both newborns and the reversibly comatose, but it would also confer personhood on the individual at every stage of her development all the way back to when she was a tiny conceptus.

Adopting this definition would therefore pose a perplexing difficulty for the pro-choice advocate who seeks to base his position on reason rather than emotion.

I argued in the last post that the contention that the unborn fetus is not a living human being is biological nonsense, and if the foregoing definition of "person" is reasonable, the claim that the unborn are not persons is simply false. That is, unless one can come up with a more plausible definition of person which doesn't beg the question.

But what of those tragic individuals who are irreversibly comatose? It could be argued, although I don't make the case here, that the definition of person could be amended one more time as follows: A person is a living human being who has the capacity, potential capacity or former capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will.

If that is a reasonable definition of a person, and I would suggest that it's incumbent upon the one who denies that it's reasonable to explain why they think so, then it follows that a person just is a living human being and has a presumptive right to life from the time of conception.

This is not to say that no circumstances could ever supercede that right, but it is to say that whatever such circumstances might be, they should certainly be more compelling than that the child just isn't wanted.

So, Impeach Him Already

The Democratic opponents of President Trump are unmollified by the Mueller report exonerating the president of colluding with Russia and failing to find sufficient evidence to indict him for obstruction of justice.

Rather than rejoice that our president did not commit treason, the Democrats in both Congress and the media seem more determined than ever to find something, anything they can use to drive him from office.

We're now told that we find ourselves immersed in a "constitutional crisis" a claim made by, inter alia, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and CNN's Don Lemon. Here's Lemon:

Ever wonder what a constitutional crisis looks like? Well, open your eyes. The president of the United States is just blowing right through our system of checks and balances, the very thing that is supposed to keep our Congress, the judiciary, and the executive branch working, which means our country working.

He is engaging in an ongoing cover-up by defying at every turn the representatives of you, the American people, the very people who are supposed to be investigating fact-finding on our behalf.

As the Federalist's David Harsanyi responds, however, Lemon's claim is a pile of horsepucky:

None of this is remotely true. Our checks and balances are working exactly as they should. Congress is free to make perpetual demands for information and testimony, and threaten the White House with contempt charges and impeachment when it doesn’t get its way. The White House, in turn, is free to assert executive privilege and decline to hand over that information or give testimony.

Both the legislature and the executive branches have the option of asking the judiciary to weigh in on the matter. It’s not as if Donald Trump is blatantly ignoring the courts, as his predecessor often did. If voters disagree, they have the option of punishing elected officials by voting against them. If the legislature disagrees, it has an even more forceful solution available, and that’s impeachment.

Which raises the question, why doesn't the House, which is controlled by Democrats who claim that there's already enough evidence to prove the president guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, stop playing around with interminable investigations and get on with entering articles of impeachment?

Why don't they get this over with? Why drag it out? Why claim that there's a cover-up when the Mueller report is available for every Democrat congressperson to read (though none have), when the administration submitted reams of requested documents to House investigators, and supplied every witness requested by Congress?

Harsanyi again:

If Trump is a criminal who flirts with treason and threatens the very existence of the Constitution, don’t Democrats have a duty to impeach the president? When Lemon asked Nadler about this, the congressman answered, “[i]t may come to that if the president keeps up with this conduct, but we’ll see.” Why wait?

The intelligence committee’s Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) has maintained for years that he has incontrovertible evidence of the administration colluding with Russia. Pelosi has claimed on numerous occasions that Trump engaged in criminal behavior. It’s so bad, she recently argued, that the president is “self-impeachable,” whatever that means.

Democrats run the House. They have the votes to get it done. According to their own rhetoric, they have duty to impeach no matter what the Senate does. An impeachment proceeding that compels Democrats to lay out their case would be far preferable to this show trial—what the Wall Street Journal editorial page dubbed “The Pseudo-Impeachment.”

So why not do it whether or not the Senate will vote to convict? If Trump is such a bad guy every day the Democrats delay is bringing more harm to the country. If they have the evidence they claim to have, let's see it, let's get on with it.

As Harsanyi concludes, "Let’s do it already." Otherwise, it seems the Democrats simply hate Trump more than they care about the country.

Of course, if they don't have any evidence, if their claims to the contrary are all bluster and octopus ink, if they hate Trump more than they care about the country, well, then maybe they'll continue their endless, Kafkaesque investigations no matter what the cost.

The Differences Between Them

The political campaign season is getting underway again (so soon?!) and we're about to be treated to our quadrennial clash between the ideas and convictions held by liberals and those held by conservatives. That being so, it might be useful to talk a little bit about the philosophical differences between these two groups.

One way to understand that difference, at least as the terms apply to American politics, is to focus on their respective anthropologies. That is, to examine their respective views on what it is to be human - what it is, in the metaphysical sense, to be man and woman.

What follows, of course, is not true of all conservatives nor of all liberals, but I think it's fair to say that it's true of a great many, maybe even the majority, of both.

Perhaps the most fundamental distinction found in the anthropology of conservatives and that of liberals is that many conservatives tend to see man as bearing the image of God, possessing immortal souls, and as loved by God. This is significant because so much else follows from it. For example, from this starting point conservatives then:

• See human rights as divinely ordained and grounded in the will of God, and thus objective and inalienable.
• See man as fallen from his original estate and prone to sin. Thus follows the conservative skepticism of governmental power and the need for institutional checks and balances.
• See history as both meaningful, because it is the outworking of a Divine plan, and replete with lessons for the present because human nature doesn't change much.
• See science as a fruitful means of making sense of the world because the world was created by a rational being and yields its secrets to rational inquiry.
• See morality as rooted in a personal, transcendent moral authority who promulgates an unchanging moral law to which each of us is held accountable.

On the other hand, many liberals tend to see man as the product of the blind, impersonal, random process of evolution. For many liberals, particularly secular liberals, which perhaps comprise the majority, God plays little or no role in either the creation of the world or in human affairs. From this starting point, then, these liberals often:

• See human rights as the product of a consensus of enlightened thinkers.
• See man as basically good and malleable, and evolving toward ever greater capacities and perfections.
• See history as an indecipherable, meaningless flux of events about which we can know little and learn less, since humanity is constantly evolving and changing.
• See science as the only trustworthy source of knowledge and the pronouncements of scientists as authoritative, if not infallible.
• See morality as an arbitrary, relativistic set of conventions which have evolved to help us get along with each other. There are no objective moral absolutes and probably no accountability for how we live in this life.

These disparate worldviews have profound consequences. One's starting point largely determines where one winds up.

If, for instance, human rights are simply a human invention then they're grounded in little more than the will and whims of those in power. They're just words on paper. They have no objective existence and can be discarded or changed whenever someone has the power and desire to do so. Indeed, to accuse a government of violating the human rights of its citizens makes no sense if those rights are simply whatever the government decides they are.

Likewise, if human nature can be altered and molded then the temptation to use government to compel people to conform to the image decided upon by the elites becomes irresistible.

Since there is no objective right to liberty the government can and should do whatever's necessary to create the utopian society. That, of course, leads to Orwellian dystopias.

Ideas have consequences and the bigger the idea the more far-reaching the consequences.

Not Human

There are several deeply flawed arguments frequently adduced whenever the topic of abortion is discussed, and several of them popped up the other day on CNN's Primetime with Chris Cuomo show.

CNN contributor and former New York City politician Christine Quinn argued, for instance, that “When a women is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her. It is part of her body."

This is a stunning assertion. What, exactly, does Ms Quinn think that it is that resides in the mother's womb if not a human being?

The embryo or fetus is most certainly a "being" of some sort, and it is most certainly human. It's surely not a frog or cow embryo that's growing inside the mother's body, nor is it a cyst or tumor.

It has the genetic composition of a human being even if it's not as big as an adult human nor look exactly like an adult human. After all, size and looks are not what makes a human being human. If they were then neither dwarfs nor toddlers would be human beings.

Nor is it part of her body like, say, an appendix is. The developing human being has its own DNA signature, it's own blood type, sex and race, all of which may be different from that of the mother.

If it were just a part of the mother's body why is it, as Chris Cuomo observes, that mothers who abort often agonize over their decision? Do people agonize over whether to destroy a tumor or excise an appendix?

The argument that the unborn child is not human and can therefore be disposed of however the mother wishes is pretty much the same argument that was used to enslave blacks and to exterminate Jews. Once a particular group is dehumanized it's easy to rationalize killing them.

Another claim that often arises in discussions about abortion (though not in the present one) is the contention that "No one knows when life begins." This statement reflects an utter ignorance of biology. Life is a continuum going back to the first living cell, and there's no stage in the procreation process from that first cell to the most recently born child in which there's any doubt about the organisms and cells involved being alive.

Two living adults produce living gametes which fuse to form a living conceptus, which in turn differentiates into a living child. At no point are any of these entities not biologically alive.

Moreover, to insist, as many often do, that a child becomes human at birth is absurd. It's a delusion to think that something magical happens to the fetus as it's being birthed that somehow transforms it from subhuman one moment into a fully human being the very next moment. What, precisely, occurs during the voyage down the birth canal that effectuates this transformation?

Anyway, here's video of the exchange (Well, "exchange" is a bit euphemistic as a description of what follows) between Cuomo, Quinn and their pro-life antagonist, former senator Rick Santorum:

Bobolinks

Long time readers of Viewpoint know that one of my enjoyments is admiring the birdlife in whatever part of the country or the world I happen to be in. Birds are beautiful and fascinating creatures, but they're not always easy to see. Good optics are helpful and, to really see them properly, essential.

Today, with the aid of a powerful scope I was able to observe a flock (not counting the females which look much different and more plain) of over forty of these beauties in a field not far from my home.

This bird is called a Bobolink because its song is alleged by some to sound like bob-o-link, although I must say, I don't hear that at all when I listen to them.

Anyway, Bobolinks are a grassland species which nests in the northern U.S. and Canada and are right now passing through my region on their spring trek to their breeding grounds. The Bobolink is one of the world’s most impressive songbird migrants, traveling some 12,500 miles (20,000 kilometers) to and from southern South America every year. Throughout its lifetime, it may travel the equivalent of 4 or 5 times around the circumference of the earth.

A migrating Bobolink can orient itself with the earth’s magnetic field, thanks to iron oxide in bristles in its nasal cavity and in tissues around the olfactory bulb and nerve. Bobolinks also use the stars to help them navigate.

Bobolink males are not only handsome, but their breeding plumage pattern is unique among North American songbirds. No other songbird species has a white back and a black front - a "reverse tuxedo."

Unfortunately, Bobolinks are declining because the hay fields in which they nest are being mowed earlier in the season and more often during the season, an agricultural practice which is fatal to young birds still in the nest.

Here's an interesting four minute video on the bobolink and some of the efforts being made to conserve them in their nesting range.

Which Came First?

One of the numerous thorny problems with naturalistic explanations of biological origins is what's called the chicken and egg problem: In order to get a chicken there must be an egg, but in order to get an egg there must be a chicken, so which came first, the chicken or the egg?

This may sound at first like a silly question, but biology is rife with similar examples of this circularity, and it's a perplexing problem for those who believe that the development of biological novelty in nature proceeded through purely naturalistic processes.

Brazilian biochemist Marcos Eberlin, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and author of over 800 scientific articles as well as the new book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, talks about several examples of this problem in an article at Stream.

Here are some excerpts:

A chick embryo’s development is a wonder to behold. So too is the egg in which it develops. The egg yolk and egg white contain just the right food the chick will need before it hatches. The eggshell also has microscopic pores that let air in so the chick can breathe. The developing bird then generates a network of capillaries to absorb oxygen from the air and release carbon dioxide.

Just before hatching, special membranes in the egg trap enough air so the chick can take its first breath before it leaves the shell.

The eggshell is hard enough to protect the developing chick, yet fragile enough for the full-grown chick to peck its way out. The shell and its contents are masterpieces of engineering that both nourish and protect the baby bird.

But there would be no egg without a chicken to produce it. Without an egg there can be no chicken, but without a chicken there can be no egg. How could the system have evolved one small functional step at a time? It’s an old question, one that Darwinists would like you to think they have answered satisfactorily, and long ago. They haven’t.

The chicken-and-egg problem is the archetypal example of causal circularity. To get A we need B, but to get B we first need A. We can’t have one without the other. To get both together, we need foresight — an engineer capable of planning for the future.

Eberlin argues that there are numerous examples of this kind of circularity in nature. Another example is the cell membrane which requires specialized proteins made only in the cell. Yet before the membranes existed to encase the cell there would have been no cells, but until there were cells there were no specialized proteins out of which to construct the membranes. So how did the cell ever come about?

Another example is the nucleic acid/protein complex. DNA and RNA manufacture proteins but in order for these nucleic acids to function they need a suite of proteins to assist them in their work, but the proteins are made by the nucleic acids. So how did the nucleic acids make proteins before there were proteins?

Eberlin argues that these circularities in nature can only be resolved by foresight and that foresight requires a mind:

First, we see many instances of causal circularity in biology. These pose engineering challenges whose solutions require on-time delivery of multiple, essential, and well-orchestrated parts.

Second, we know from our uniform experience that the ability to anticipate and solve such problems before they happen is a unique characteristic of intelligent minds.

Third, there are no demonstrated examples of unguided, mindless processes anticipating and solving problems that require a sophisticated orchestration of fine-tuned parts, all brought together for an origin event. Hand-waving references to cases that are assumed rather than demonstrated do not count.

He concludes, therefore, that the evidence points to the existence of an intelligent mind:

Our uniform experience provides us with only one type of cause with the demonstrated capacity to anticipate and solve such problems .... The evidence in biology for a designer with foresight is not merely apparent. It is insistently real.

Eberlin gives much more fascinating detail about the cell membrane and the nucleic acid/protein complex in the article, which is neither long nor technical. Check it out.

Nature's Designs

The BBC has a couple of short one to two minute videos that point, each in a different way, to intelligent design in nature.

The first video explains how the morphology and effectiveness of the beak of a bird called the kingfisher attracted the attention of Japanese engineers trying to solve a problem with their bullet trains. The fact that nature's designs solve human engineering problems is at least suggestive of something more than random chance and blind forces behind those designs.

Kingfisher

The second video illustrates what might be called supererogatory design, i.e. designed systems in nature that certainly give the appearance of being both unnecessarily elaborate and intentional. The video shows the amazing underground communication system employed by trees that allows them to assist as well as wage "war" on each other.

It's fascinating to be sure, but the question that comes to mind is how such a system would arise simply through undirected, mechanistic processes.

This is not to say that it couldn't have, of course. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, but it seems that very nearly every new discovery in the biological and cosmological sciences is more compatible with the hypothesis that the mind of an intelligent engineer is behind the phenomena we see than that these phenomena are all, in their billions and perhaps trillions of examples, just a lucky coincidence.

In fact, the conclusion that there's a mind responsible for it all would seem to be almost psychologically inescapable unless that conclusion were rejected a priori, but what rational grounds are there for ruling out an explanation just because one doesn't like its metaphysical implications?

Thanks to Evolution News for the tip and photo.

A Baker's Dozen Mysteries

If you're into science you might find this article by Michael Brooks at New Scientist interesting. Brooks lists thirteen mysteries that have (mostly) cosmologists and physicists baffled. To give you a sample here's #9:

It's one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short.

It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

I suspect that cosmologists are much more confident that dark energy is the culprit behind the accelerating expansion of the universe than what this article suggests. Nevertheless, the most fascinating thing about dark energy, if it exists, is this:

Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeros after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an incomprehensibly precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing it is that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky coincidence, especially when there are a couple dozen other forces and parameters of the cosmos which must also be set with similar precision in order for the universe to be life-sustaining.

The biggest mystery about dark energy, it seems to me, is not what it is but rather how it came to be so exquisitely calibrated. Or maybe that's only a mystery for materialists.

The Root of Our Modern Malaise

As a postscript to the series of posts on Judeo-Christian ethics I'd like to quote from a 1948 article in The Atlantic Monthly by philosopher W.T. Stace. Stace gives a concise summary of how we came to be where we are in the modern world, i.e. adrift in a sea of moral subjectivism and anomie. He asserts that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think, though, that if our moral rules derive from the universe they're no more binding or authoritative than if they are our own inventions. The only thing that can impose a moral duty is a personal being, one that has both moral authority and the power to hold us accountable for our actions.

A personal being which would possess that kind of authority and power, the power to impose an objective moral duty, would be one which transcends human finitude. Neither the universe nor any entity comprised of other humans qualifies.

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

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

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

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

Judeo-Christian Ethics (Pt. III)

In the previous two posts we looked at some problems with any ethics based on a naturalistic worldview and the advantages and disadvantages of an ethics based on a theistic worldview, particularly what might be called the Judeo-Christian view.

But what specifically does the Judeo-Christian tradition have to say about ethics? How does someone who adheres to this tradition decide what is right and what is wrong? The very basic primer that follows represents my own opinion on this matter, and though I might be incorrect in this or that detail I think the general picture is accurate enough.

Simply put Jews and Christians both believe that there are two overriding commandments given us by God. The first bears upon our relationship to God and the second bears upon our relationship to others. The two are in some ways interdependent, but for simplicity's sake we'll focus on the commandment that bears upon our relationship to others since that puts us in the realm of ethics.

That command is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Love, of course, expresses itself in a number of different ways, two of which are that we act justly toward others and that we demonstrate compassion to them. This, I would argue, sums up the entire ethical teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Indeed, Jesus himself states that the whole of the Hebrew scriptures' ethical teaching is summed up in the command to love one another (Matt. 22:36-40)

Everything else that is ethically proscribed, at least in the Christian scriptures, is forbidden because it is either unjust or uncompassionate. That is to say, people are harmed by it.

In fact, the word sin can be defined as that which harms, would harm or could harm oneself or another. It is a sin, for example, to irresponsibly place another person's life in jeopardy even if no harm actually comes to that person. A man who drives while intoxicated is irresponsibly placing others at risk and is therefore guilty of a sin. He's acting both unjustly and uncompassionately.

Something that would always be unjust or uncompassionate in any realistic circumstances is absolutely wrong, that is it's wrong always. For instance, it's always wrong to beat an infant with one's fists. Such an atrocity is, in any realistic circumstance, never just nor compassionate.

On the other hand, although lying is almost always unjust, the F.B.I. agent who must lie to infiltrate a terrorist cell to prevent a mass murder is acting both justly and compassionately. His deception is not wrong.

It is love - justice and compassion - which is the absolute imperative which governs our behavior in Judeo-Christian ethics, and all other moral rules, such as the last six of the Ten Commandments, are lampposts which illumine how a just and compassionate people live.

As a general rule we can tell whether we're acting in love by applying the Golden Rule to our action. If we would be willing to have it done to us, whatever it is, then it's probably just or compassionate, or both. The Golden Rule is not an absolute, but it is a handy litmus test of whether our behavior is loving.

Generally speaking, it's wrong to do anything to anyone else that we wouldn't want done to us. It's wrong to use another person as a means to our pleasure or our social advancement, or put another way, it's wrong to take advantage of others. We wouldn't want to be taken advantage of and doing so to others is neither just nor compassionate.

Moreover, our motives for our actions play a major role in determining the moral quality of the act. Two people may both perform some act of kindness, but the one who does the act in hopes that he'll derive some material benefit from it cannot claim to be doing a morally good act. It's not a wrong act, certainly; we can be glad he did it, but there's no moral goodness or credit in it.

Contrarily, the man who does the act simply out of a desire to help another person even if he gets no more benefit from it than the warm feeling of having done the right thing has done a morally good act.

The above is just a very brief overview of Judeo-Christian ethics, or at least my reading of it. There's much more that could be said, but two more points may suffice.

First, of all the ethical systems and views that philosophers have concocted over the last two thousand or so years, this is the only one that's directly based on actually loving other people.

Second, all the values that we cherish in the modern world - gender and racial equality, individual freedom, human rights, compassion for the poor and many others are all derived from the tradition we've just outlined.

Naturalism offers no basis for any of them. Rather than reexamine and question her naturalism, though, the naturalist simply poaches the values she likes from the Judeo-Christian tradition while simultaneously rejecting the legitimacy of that tradition. It's peculiar behavior, to say the least.

Judeo-Christian Ethics (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post summarized some of the shortcomings of any system of ethics or morality based on a naturalistic worldview. It would be a mistake to conclude from this discussion, however, that a person who embraces that worldview can't be a morally "good" person. That's demonstrably false.

Rather, the problem for the naturalist (one who believes that only nature exists - that there's no supernatural) is that the values they choose to live by are purely arbitrary and subjective. The naturalist may choose to be a kind, generous, honest individual, but had she chosen instead to be cruel, selfish or dishonest her choices wouldn't be wrong in any objective moral sense, they'd just be different.

So, if naturalistic ethics are unsatisfactory in the ways mentioned yesterday what's the alternative? What advantages, and disadvantages, does a theistic ethics offer?

Here are some advantages of theism-based ethics or what are usually called Divine Command ethics. I'll have particularly in mind the Judeo-Christian version of Divine Command ethics in what follows:

First, Judeo-Christian ethics supply us with a non-arbitrary source of objective principles of right and wrong grounded in a transcendent, personal moral authority. They provide a basis for both objective moral duties and moral absolutes. Right and wrong are not merely the subjective preferences of individual humans or of any society of humans, but are expressions of the nature and will of a perfectly good, omnipotent Being.

Secondly, Judeo-Christian ethics offer an answer to the egoist's challenge to anyone who advocates some ethical system to state a reason as to why and how it would be wrong to always place one's own interests ahead of the interests of others. It also provides a ground for rejecting the ethic of "might makes right."

Moreover, Judeo-Christian ethics tells us that we're accountable to God for how we live, that our lives will be judged. Only if such is the case can there really be any moral obligation to live one way rather than another. If death is the end of our existence, as it is on naturalism, then the choices we make in this life have no ultimate moral significance.

Judeo-Christian ethics also affords a basis for believing that human worth, dignity, and rights are not mere illusions or fictions but actually exist. Judeo-Christian ethics are predicated on the doctrine that we are created by God in His image and that we are loved by Him. Our rights and worth flow from this relationship, a relationship affirmed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence where he wrote that, "all men are created equal," and that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights..."

Of course, despite these advantages there are difficulties with Judeo-Christian ethics as well.

For instance, they would have no purchase with someone who rejects the idea that there exists a perfectly qualified source of moral truth and obligation, a personal Deity who has the power to hold us accountable. If someone is skeptical of the existence of a Divine Commander Divine Command ethics will not appear to be a compelling option.

Another problem with Judeo-Christian ethics is that they're based on the assumption that God has revealed moral truth to us and has told us how we are to live. One could, perhaps, believe that God exists but be dubious that God has revealed moral truth to us.

Even if we accept that there is such a revelation from God - scripture or conscience, for example - we have to assume that we're interpreting correctly what that revelation tells us about morality.

Finally, the most popular objection to Divine Command ethics, whether Christian or any other sort, is something called the Euthyphro Dilemma. I've written about this argument elsewhere and explained there why I (in the company of many philosophers of religion) think it fails, so I won't go into an analysis of it here. Readers who may be interested in the topic can find my three part discussion here, here and here.

It must be kept in mind in all this that even if someone believes that there is a God it doesn't follow that he or she will know what's right, and even if one does know what's right it doesn't follow that he or she will do what's right.

But the point that needs to be stressed is that there can be objective moral right only if there is a God. If there is no God then philosopher our moral judgments are merely expressions of our own personal taste or, as philosopher A.J. Ayer said, “[S]entences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.”

Tomorrow I'll share some cursory thoughts on what I think we can infer about the nature of moral right and wrong from Judeo-Christian ethics.

Judeo-Christian Ethics (Pt. I)

It's been a major theme at Viewpoint over the years that metaphysical naturalism has serious weaknesses when it comes to the matter of ethics.

We've argued, for instance, that no naturalistic ethics can give a satisfactory answer to the egoist who asks why he should care about the interests or well-being of other people, and why it would be wrong to put his own interests ahead of the interests of others.

A corollary of this is that the naturalist cannot gainsay the man who believes that might makes right. On naturalism there's no answer to the question why anyone who has the power to do whatever he wants would be morally wrong to do so.

Naturalists will claim that reason gives us answers to these questions but there are at least three reasons for doubting this: First, human reason is just the product of chemical reactions in the brain causing some neurons to fire which causes other neurons to fire, producing, somehow, a moral principle. But if reason is simply the result of impersonal chemical reactions, the whizzing about of electrons in the brain, then why should we grant it any authority in our lives.

Secondly, even if reason is to be trusted, reason tells us to look out for #1, to place the greatest importance on our own welfare, far more emphatically than it tells us to care about the interests of others.

Thirdly, on naturalism reason is a product of blind evolutionary forces that have given rise to faculties that suit us for survival. If so, there's no basis for thinking that reason leads to truth, especially metaphysical or moral truth. Survival can as easily depend on self-deception as it can on objective truth. As MIT philosopher Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth."

We've also argued that no naturalistic account of morality can explain why human beings have dignity, rights and worth. If we are simply the products of chance evolutionary forces, if we are, as Francis Crick put it, ultimately "just a pack of neurons," or as Stephen Hawking put it, just "a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet" all alone in the cosmos, then where do human rights and dignity come from?

We've also pointed out that no naturalistic ethics, which by its nature excludes ultimate accountability, can have any binding force. It cannot impose objective duties or obligations. An objective duty can only be imposed by an authority beyond oneself, and a moral duty can only be imposed by a moral authority that is itself both morally good and which has the power to hold all people accountable.

On naturalism there is no such authority. Neither society nor humanity in general qualify. If they did then whatever society condones would be good and right, which means that slavery, infant sacrifice, female genital mutilation, rape, honor killings, genocide and a number of other horrors perpetrated by societies throughout history would be morally right and even obligatory.

Finally, we've argued that no naturalistic ethics can give a plausible explanation of what it means to say that a particular behavior is morally wrong. If there is no moral authority higher than the human individual then the term moral wrong is empty of any content. The most it can mean is that some people don't like it and would rather it not occur.

Thus, for the naturalist moral talk is simply so much hand waving and obfuscation. To be consistent a naturalist should simply adopt Wittgenstein's dictum that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent" and refuse to engage in any moral discussion or use any moral language.

This, however, is intolerably stifling so, in a form of moral plagiarism, what they often do is poach ethical values from the Judeo-Christian moral tradition with one hand while scoffing at the validity of that tradition with the other.

We'll talk about that tradition a bit more tomorrow.

Materialism, Theism and Universals

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems fairly clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It seems, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be.

For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed? In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God.

If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems to be the case that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would or could exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me.

If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing.

Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left.

Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

Metaxas on Meaning

A one minute excerpt from a discussion between Tucker Carlson and author Eric Metaxas dovetails so nicely with what my students and I had been talking about in class last week that I thought I'd share it.

The topic of their conversation was why Americans aren't having more children, and the whole six minute segment is worth watching, but at the 1:50 mark Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life [if people don't want to have children and families]? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?”

Metaxas' answer is, I think, exactly right:

Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it.

But what we do is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”

In other words, given the lurch toward metaphysical naturalism in the Western world, there's really no reason to think it's wrong to just live for oneself, to put one's own interests first, to seek to squeeze as much personal enjoyment out of this otherwise pointless existence as possible before we die.

Carlson responds to Metaxas' analysis with this,

But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it to Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.

True enough, but when they're alive and in the full bloom of life people often do think that the more things they can accumulate, the more sights they can see, the more pleasure they can experience the more meaningful their life will be. Carlson says that they're believing a lie.

Here's the video of the exchange:

Metaxas is, of course, not the first person to say what he says here. Philosophers have been making this same observation about the emptiness of modern life for decades. Two twentieth century French thinkers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, serve as examples.

Sartre wrote that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal," and Camus declared that, "...for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

If that's the way things are, multitudes of moderns have concluded, then why not just live for oneself and make the best of a bad situation. What sense does it make, they reason, to sacrifice the only life we have for other people, for kids and a family.

Their conviction is that matters is personal prosperity, power and pleasure and anything that interferes with the acquisition of those is best avoided.

The Eroding Consensus

One of the numerous developments that our mainstream media finds it convenient to ignore is the eroding confidence among scientists and philosophers of the explanatory adequacy of the standard evolutionary model, i.e. the model that seeks to account for the amazing diversity of living things in terms of descent from a common primordial ancestor via natural selection, genetic mutation and genetic drift.

What used to be an overwhelming consensus in favor of the Neo-Darwinian view has shrunk to the point where it seems the only thing holding it up is the lack of any plausible naturalistic alternative.

There has always been dissent from the standard neo-Darwinian model among creationists of various stripes, of course, as well as intelligent design theorists (Some ID theorists are creationists, but many are not. ID is not the same thing as creationism), but, as Dierker notes, "...the growing discontent in academia is from secular naturalists."

Benjamin Dierker writes about this eroding consensus in a piece at The Federalist. Here's an excerpt of the heart of his essay:

While Christians have long challenged Charles Darwin’s theory of undirected evolution, few appreciate the true extent of the challenge beyond the church. Current estimates are that approximately one-third of professional academic biologists who do not believe in intelligent design find Darwin’s theory is inadequate to describe all of the complexity in biology.

A controversial letter to Nature in 2014 signaled the mounting concern, however slow and cautious, among thoughtful professional biologists. Other works by atheist authors like “What Darwin Got Wrong” and “Mind and Cosmos” find “fatal flaws” in the theory and assert it is “almost certainly false.”

The important note is that these are not ideologues or religious zealots, nor do they propose a god or biblical solution. Rather, they find problems with the explanatory value of Darwin’s theory in light of modern understanding of mutation, variation, DNA sequencing, and more. These expressions of doubt do not reject naturalism or evolution per se, but the rigor of the Neo-Darwinian model for explaining the development of life.

In fact, they want to help Darwin, not tear him down. That he needs help is news to the academy.

The leading critics have been intelligent design supporters, who are looked down on by naturalists. But as each group adds to the scientific literature, certain critiques and findings inevitably bolster or redirect the research of the other.

The effects go at least one way. Following work and theories of Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Denton helped shape a generation of skeptics with his 1985 book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.” An evolutionist and agnostic, Denton has continued his criticism.

In the past decade, the works of professor Michael Behe, Steven Meyer, and others have given more life to the debate on the national stage. In “Darwin Devolves,” Behe points to the process of mutations to describe the inadequacy of an unguided materialist process to add information. Meyer explores the Cambrian explosion and the complexity of the cell to show the biodiversity and complexity we observe, and notes that natural processes have never been observed to produce such results.

Importantly, these two men, and many others, believe in the standard multibillion-year timeline for the Earth and make their findings based on deduction of natural evidence rather than starting from authority in scripture or elsewhere. The growth of the intelligent design community is noteworthy, but not as interesting as those who are apart from it, secular, and nonetheless find Darwinian evolution to contain serious flaws.

Behe explained that, “Based on conversations with my own colleagues at Lehigh [University], dozens of other biologists, and news stories in journals I would guesstimate that a third or more of biologists are quite skeptical that Darwin’s theory explains all of biology.” The growing literature speaks for itself.

There's more at the link. When students hear that there's no doubt among biologists that the Darwinian explanation of life is at least a close approximation of the truth, when their teachers or the media tell them that there's no controversy among scientists about the basic truth of Darwinian paradigm, students should be more than a little skeptical.

What most commenters mean when they give these sorts of assurances today is that some naturalistic explanation, whether Darwinism or something else, must be true. The discerning student, however, will recognize this as an assertion of metaphysical faith, not a scientific claim. It simply reflects the speaker's philosophical commitment to naturalism.

Unfortunately, too many people who make such pronouncements dress them up in a white lab coat and give the impression that naturalism has been scientifically proven - a feat, were it possible, would be the most spectacular accomplishment in the history of science.

Our Fascinating Universe

Have you ever wondered how big the universe is or how small the smallest things are? Actor Morgan Freeman takes us on a journey in this eight and a half minute video to plumb both the vastness of space and its incredible minuteness.

Take a look:

Some insist that our universe is all a grand fluke, an accident, others insist it's intentionally designed. Some believe that there are a near infinite number of universes (the multiverse), others argue that ours is the only one for which we have any evidence.

Most scientists agree, though, that the universe described in this video started out as a point-like object which contained within its tiny circumference all the mass-energy the universe now possesses.

This miniscule point, called a singularity, expanded with unimaginable rapidity at the moment of the universe's origin in an event that has come to be known as the Big Bang, and it's still expanding today.

It's all very fascinating.

The Continuing Holocaust

The recent massacre of over 250 worshipping Christians by Muslim terrorists in Sri Lanka is a reminder that the slaughter of Christians is by far the greatest human rights atrocity of our time, and strangely, one about which much of the American media is silent.

About five years ago I posted a piece about this on VP based around a column by Kirsten Powers that, in the wake of last weekend's horror in Sri Lanka, is worth posting again. Here it is:

Kirsten Powers, writing at The Daily Beast, reminds us of the slow-burning holocaust occurring today around the world but particularly in Muslim and atheistic countries. It's the oppression, torture and murder of tens of thousands of Christians whose only crime, like the Christians in ancient Rome, is that they refuse to accept the religion of those in power.

The details are horrifying. It's perhaps the greatest human rights crisis of the last sixty years, but the Obama administration seems to have little to say about it.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from Powers' essay:

Some of the most harrowing stories about how Christians are persecuted have come from the African country of Eritrea, which Open Doors lists as the twelfth worst country in the world for Christian persecution. In his 2013 book, The Global War on Christians, reporter John L. Allen Jr., writes that in Eritrea, Christians are sent to the Me’eter military camp and prison, which he describes as a “concentration camp for Christians.”

It is believed to house thousands being punished for their religious beliefs.

Prisoners are packed into 40’x38’ metal shipping containers, normally used for transporting cargo. It is so cramped that it’s impossible to lie down and difficult even to find a place to sit. “The metal exacerbates the desert temperatures, which means bone chilling cold at night and wilting heat during the day....believed to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit or higher,” Allen writes. One former inmate...described [it] as “giant ovens baking people alive.” Prisoners are given next to nothing to drink so “they sometimes end up drinking their own scant sweat and urine to stay alive.”

The prisoners are tortured, sexually abused, and have no contact with the outside world. One survivor of the prison described witnessing a fellow female inmate “who had been beaten so badly her uterus was actually hanging outside her body. The survivor desperately tried to push the uterus back in” but couldn’t prevent the inmate’s excruciating death.

The situation is different but no less horrific in North Korea and Syria. Read about it at the link. Powers closes her piece with this:

At a December 2013 speech to a conference organized by Georgetown’s Religious Freedom Project, Allen told the audience, “I always ask Christians in countries [where persecution occurs], what can we do for you? The number one thing they say is, “Don’t forget about us.”

It would certainly be welcome if our leaders in Washington would show the world that they haven't forgotten these wretched martyrs and that they care as deeply for them and their circumstances as they do for, say, immigrants seeking to enter our country illegally.

No Culture Is Better Than Another

Are all cultures equal or are some cultures superior to others? The question is difficult to answer without clarifying what is meant by "equal." Usually what's referred to are the values of a particular society, and the assertion that all cultures are equal is equivalent to saying that all values are equal.

This would seem to be a very difficult claim to defend, but it's popular today among those who call themselves "multiculturalists."

Multiculturalists are generally ethical relativists who believe that moral right and wrong, good and bad values, are determined by the time and the culture in which people live and that no culture's views on these matters is superior or "better" than any other culture's views. They're just different.

It follows, then, that a culture that produces hospitals, charitable organizations, modern science and technology, women's rights, Bach and the Chartres Cathedral is no "better" or "worse" than a hunter-gatherer culture that produces nothing at all or a culture that condones and practices slavery, wife-beating, female genital mutilation, honor killing and infant sacrifice.

This is certainly counterintuitive, but it follows from the postmodern denial that there exists any objective moral standard. If right and wrong are simply arbitrary cultural conventions, like a preference in food or dress, then how can one group claim their conventions to be superior to another group's?

Dinesh D'Souza argues against the multicultural view in this short video from Prager University. See what you think:

Intellectual Honesty

Anyone who engages in public commentary and debate is often tempted to color facts to better fit his position, to overstate his case, or to do something which might be intellectually not-quite-honest.

Some ten years ago a blogger who called himself Mike Gene did a post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty in which he listed ten good rules to follow when participating with others in dialogue.

Since the link to his post no longer works I'll take the liberty to list his ten rules along with his explanations (slightly edited). They're very much worth heeding for anyone who wishes to participate in the debates occurring in our contemporary public square.

Here they are:

1. Do not overstate the power of your argument. One's sense of conviction should be in proportion to the level of clear evidence assessable by most. If someone portrays his opponents as being stupid or dishonest for disagreeing, intellectual dishonesty is probably in play. Intellectual honesty is most often associated with humility, not arrogance.

2. Show a willingness to publicly acknowledge that reasonable alternative viewpoints exist. The alternative views do not have to be treated as equally valid or powerful, but rarely is it the case that one and only one viewpoint has a complete monopoly on reason and evidence.

3. Be willing to publicly acknowledge and question one's own assumptions and biases. All of us rely on assumptions when applying our worldview to make sense of the data about the world, and all of us bring various biases to the table.

4. Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points.

5.Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Those selling an ideology often have great difficulty admitting to being wrong as this undercuts the rhetoric and image that is being sold. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

6. Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

7. Address the argument instead of the person making the argument. Ad hominem arguments are a clear sign of intellectual dishonesty. When resorts to insulting their opponent, often by relying on stereotypes, guilt-by-association, and superficially innocent-sounding "gotcha" questions they're revealing the inadequacy of their own arguments and trying to deflect attention away from that inadequacy.

8. When addressing your opponent's argument, do not misrepresent it. Misrepresenting an argument in order to make it look weaker and easier to defeat is called the "straw man" fallacy. Straw man often occurs when people are quoted out-of-context or are paraphrased incorrectly. When critiquing an argument one should show that one has made a good faith effort to both understand it and to represent it in its strongest form.

9. Demonstrate a commitment to critical thinking. This seems self-explanatory.

10. Be willing to publicly acknowledge when one's opponent has made a good point or criticism. If someone is unwilling to admit that his opponent has made a telling point or an incisive criticism it demonstrates an unwillingness to honestly engage in the give-and-take of dialogue.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules Mike describes I sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary nonetheless. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed.

Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. I've printed out Mike's Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty and have them posted over my computer.

Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

Despicability Sweepstakes

It's not news that people today on both left and right have little confidence in the trustworthiness of what they hear in our news media. For some their lack of confidence stems from little else than the fact that media personalities on the other side of the ideological divide from themselves present ideas and arguments which lie at variance with their own beliefs.

This is in itself warrant enough for some to consider the personalities unreliable and even dishonest.

For others their lack of confidence stems from the inveterate sloppiness with both facts and reasoning on the part of some in the media that seems at times to border on the intentional.

One of the most common shortcomings among those who serve up opinion on television, radio and print, perhaps, is the failure to be see how their criticisms of those with whom they disagree are often just as applicable to those whom they support. Donald Trump, to give one example, is frequently criticized for his paleolithic attitudes toward women by folks in the media who nevertheless loved Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy.

One wonders how those who deplore Trump's boorishness and Trump himself for being boorish reconcile their disdain for the president with the fawning admiration they had for men who were at least as bad and possibly worse. After all, Donald Trump, as far as we know, was never responsible for a girl's death.

While not of the same species as this sort of blindness Stephanie Ruhle at MSNBC offers us a good recent illustration of the intellectual sloppiness and silliness that induce suspicion and contempt among the viewing public.

In one segment in a show last week (see the clip below) she made the startling asseveration that Russia's meddling affected our election.

“What are people on the ground telling you there,” Ruhle asked a correspondent, “and are they mentioning Russia at all? Because,” she continued, “they have a chance to vote for a Democrat or a Republican, but we need to remind our audience of the first thing in the findings — that Russia interfered, foreign interference affected the election and could affect the next one.” (emphasis mine)

Well, where she got this from is unclear but the context of the exchange was the Mueller report, and nothing in Mueller's findings substantiates the claim that "foreign interference affected" the 2016 election. This is more than just a minor faux pas. If the election was affected by foreign actors then the results would be illegitimate and the current president would be politically crippled.

This state of affairs would precipitate a constitutional crisis and would not be at all good for the country.

Then Ruhle follows up with a bit of rhetorical snark: "Are the Republicans capable," she wonders, "of nominating someone who's not a despicable human being who will still do good things for the country?"

Ms. Ruhle is evidently burdened with an attenuated political memory. She forgets 1992 (G.H.W. Bush), 2008 (John McCain), and 2012 (Mitt Romney) - and she forgets that, as Ed Morrissey points out at Hot Air, the Democrats cast every one of these gentlemen as despicable human beings.

A minority of Republican voters finally decided in the 2016 primaries that if the Democrats are going to treat virtuous Republican candidates as despicable persons they might as well nominate the genuine article, especially since the Democratic candidate herself is a rather strong competitor in the despicability sweepstakes.

Here's the video clip:

As long as folks like Ruhle fail to get their facts straight and fail to see the obvious inconsistencies in their rhetoric they can hardly expect to attract a viewership that consists of anyone other than those already ideologically committed to her point of view and indifferent to the actual truth and reasonableness of what they're hearing.