The late atheist astronomer Carl Sagan was famous for his declaration in the opening line of his 1980 book Cosmos (on which the television series was based) that "The Cosmos is all there is, all there ever was and all there ever will be."
That Sagan was presenting a creed for a substitute religion is apparent from his capitalization of Cosmos. The cosmos is Sagan's ersatz God. It's the ultimate reality in his ontology, the source of all else that exists. He regarded the universe as the only self-existing, eternal being, one which required no transcendent Creator to account for its existence.
This is a remarkable thing for an astronomer to say since he was writing some fifteen years after the discovery of the cosmic background radiation that pretty much proved, to the extent that scientific theories can be proven, the reality of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang was the event in which the universe came into being so it had a beginning and is not eternal. Nor is it uncaused since whatever begins to exist must have a cause that pre-exists the effect and which therefore transcends the effect.
The universe, then, did not cause itself and therefore must have been caused by something that transcends space, time and matter which means that the cause itself must be spaceless, timeless and immaterial. Moreover, it must be enormously powerful and intelligent to have created the exquisitely fine-tuned universe in which we find ourselves.
This sounds a lot like the theistic concept of God, but Sagan had little time for the Judeo-Christian God whom he mockingly described as "an outsized, light-skinned male, with a long white beard." Perhaps he gleaned this childish concept from viewing Michelangelo's depiction of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but, in any case, it's astonishingly naive.
Sagan believed, furthermore, that we have a moral duty to the cosmos from which we sprang. He believed, oddly, that we have an obligation to the universe to survive.
This is silly, and it calls to mind Chesterton's aphorism that when men cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.
It's nonsense to speak of an obligation to an impersonal entity. One may as well speak of a duty one has to gravity or to friction. If we have obligations of any sort they can only be to other personal beings. Impersonal objects like trees or universes have no duties to personal beings and personal beings can have no duties to impersonal objects.
Sagan's Cosmos was enormously influential to at least two generations of young people. The series was shown in middle school and high school science classrooms by science teachers all across the country for three decades, and may still be.
Yet the metaphysical message Sagan tried to inculcate in the minds of young students, the message that belief in the traditional God can no longer be sustained in a scientific age and that instead our worship should be directed to the "Sun and stars" is philosophically absurd.
Friday, July 12, 2019
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Wittgenstein's Poker
Almost seventy three years ago, in October of 1946, a group of highly accomplished philosophers and intellectuals gathered in a room at King's College, Cambridge to hear two of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century engage in a rather odd colloquy.
The two principals were Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Popper had prepared a paper critical of Wittgenstein's view that there were no genuine philosophical problems, only linguistic puzzles.
According to journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow who wrote a 2001 book about the encounter titled Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, as Popper was reading his paper, Wittgenstein, who had a reputation for not listening to papers all the way through, as well as for rudeness and arrogance, interrupted Popper, and an acrimonious exchange ensued.
As the back and forth grew increasingly heated Wittgenstein picked up a fireplace poker and began waving it around. Shortly afterward he threw down the poker and exited the room.
On these major points there was unanimity among eye-witnesses, but on the details there were discrepancies. Some claimed the poker was red hot, others that it was cool. Some say Wittgenstein only used it to make his point, others, including Popper, allege that he threatened Popper with it.
Some say he left after angry words with Bertrand Russell who was serving as a moderator, others, including Popper, asserted that he stormed out after Popper gave as an example of an obvious moral principle that one shouldn't "threaten visiting speakers with pokers." Some claim that Popper only said this after Wittgenstein had left the room.
Some insist that he slammed the door, others that he left quietly.
I find this episode interesting because even though the details diverge among the witnesses, the main facts are not in dispute. No one, not even the most skeptical reader of Edmonds and Eidinow's book, would ever dream of concluding that because there are discrepancies in the telling of the tale that therefore it's all fiction.
Yet this is exactly how some scholars react to the accounts in the New Testament of the Bible, particularly the accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus. We're told that because the reports we have of this event seem to disagree in this or that detail, because there seems to be some confusion among the alleged eye-witnesses as to what, exactly, they saw, therefore the whole thing is rubbish.
It's like saying that because there are discrepancies among the eye-witness reports of the Wittgenstein/ Popper contretemps that therefore there was no disagreement, that Wittgenstein didn't really wave a poker about or leave early, or that there was, in fact, no meeting at all between these two worthies.
The witnesses were somehow hallucinating or otherwise mistaken.
In other words, even if it's true that there are minor discrepancies in a historical account that does nothing to impugn the reliability of the overall narrative, particularly when there's overwhelming evidence that the major events described in that narrative actually happened.
No historical record is 100% accurate in every detail, and to require that degree of accuracy from historical documents is to relegate all history to the realm of fiction.
The two principals were Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Popper had prepared a paper critical of Wittgenstein's view that there were no genuine philosophical problems, only linguistic puzzles.
According to journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow who wrote a 2001 book about the encounter titled Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, as Popper was reading his paper, Wittgenstein, who had a reputation for not listening to papers all the way through, as well as for rudeness and arrogance, interrupted Popper, and an acrimonious exchange ensued.
As the back and forth grew increasingly heated Wittgenstein picked up a fireplace poker and began waving it around. Shortly afterward he threw down the poker and exited the room.
On these major points there was unanimity among eye-witnesses, but on the details there were discrepancies. Some claimed the poker was red hot, others that it was cool. Some say Wittgenstein only used it to make his point, others, including Popper, allege that he threatened Popper with it.
Some say he left after angry words with Bertrand Russell who was serving as a moderator, others, including Popper, asserted that he stormed out after Popper gave as an example of an obvious moral principle that one shouldn't "threaten visiting speakers with pokers." Some claim that Popper only said this after Wittgenstein had left the room.
Some insist that he slammed the door, others that he left quietly.
I find this episode interesting because even though the details diverge among the witnesses, the main facts are not in dispute. No one, not even the most skeptical reader of Edmonds and Eidinow's book, would ever dream of concluding that because there are discrepancies in the telling of the tale that therefore it's all fiction.
Yet this is exactly how some scholars react to the accounts in the New Testament of the Bible, particularly the accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus. We're told that because the reports we have of this event seem to disagree in this or that detail, because there seems to be some confusion among the alleged eye-witnesses as to what, exactly, they saw, therefore the whole thing is rubbish.
It's like saying that because there are discrepancies among the eye-witness reports of the Wittgenstein/ Popper contretemps that therefore there was no disagreement, that Wittgenstein didn't really wave a poker about or leave early, or that there was, in fact, no meeting at all between these two worthies.
The witnesses were somehow hallucinating or otherwise mistaken.
In other words, even if it's true that there are minor discrepancies in a historical account that does nothing to impugn the reliability of the overall narrative, particularly when there's overwhelming evidence that the major events described in that narrative actually happened.
No historical record is 100% accurate in every detail, and to require that degree of accuracy from historical documents is to relegate all history to the realm of fiction.
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Our Amazing Eyes
For about the last century or so Darwinian naturalists have cited the eye's design as evidence against the existence of an intelligent designer. This is surprising because the eye is an exquisitely engineered organ, but the argument of the Darwinians has been that there are several design flaws in the eye's structure that any competent engineer would have avoided.
One of the alleged flaws is that the rod and cone cells in the retina face backward rather than forward which would seem to minimize the amount of light that reaches them.
As such, the eye seems to be sub-optimally engineered, and, the argument goes, since sub-optimal structures are what we would expect given that naturalistic evolution is a blind, rather haphazard, process, they're the very opposite of what we would expect were the structure intelligently constructed by a competent designer.
As the short video below illustrates, however, the backward facing cells are actually an ingenious way to optimize vision and not a defective design at all.
The video also makes short work of the claim that complex eyes evolved over very long periods of evolutionary time by numerous successive short steps. In fact, the very earliest eyes found in the fossil record are just as complex as are the eyes found in organisms today. If eyes did evolve the process must have been very rapid and thus, it's reasonable to suspect, somehow intelligently directed.
Indeed, the only basis there can be for ruling out an intelligent agent guiding the process is an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, but why privilege naturalism in such a way if there's evidence to suggest it may be wrong? Yet people do it all the time as this famous quote from geneticist Richard Lewontin reveals:
Lewontin is acknowledging that his choice to embrace naturalism is a subjective philosophical preference, a preference akin to a personal taste and not based on any empirical evidence at all.
He embraces naturalism for no reason other than that he has a deep metaphysical, and perhaps psychological, aversion to theism.
Anyway, give the video a look:
One of the alleged flaws is that the rod and cone cells in the retina face backward rather than forward which would seem to minimize the amount of light that reaches them.
As such, the eye seems to be sub-optimally engineered, and, the argument goes, since sub-optimal structures are what we would expect given that naturalistic evolution is a blind, rather haphazard, process, they're the very opposite of what we would expect were the structure intelligently constructed by a competent designer.
As the short video below illustrates, however, the backward facing cells are actually an ingenious way to optimize vision and not a defective design at all.
The video also makes short work of the claim that complex eyes evolved over very long periods of evolutionary time by numerous successive short steps. In fact, the very earliest eyes found in the fossil record are just as complex as are the eyes found in organisms today. If eyes did evolve the process must have been very rapid and thus, it's reasonable to suspect, somehow intelligently directed.
Indeed, the only basis there can be for ruling out an intelligent agent guiding the process is an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, but why privilege naturalism in such a way if there's evidence to suggest it may be wrong? Yet people do it all the time as this famous quote from geneticist Richard Lewontin reveals:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism [i.e. naturalism].As Lewontin's declaration of fealty to naturalism illustrates, it's not science as such that conflicts with the notion of intelligent agency at work in biology. The conflict is between two metaphysical worldviews, naturalism and theism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
Lewontin is acknowledging that his choice to embrace naturalism is a subjective philosophical preference, a preference akin to a personal taste and not based on any empirical evidence at all.
He embraces naturalism for no reason other than that he has a deep metaphysical, and perhaps psychological, aversion to theism.
Anyway, give the video a look:
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
The Knife-Edge
In the 1991 movie City Slickers Billy Crystal played a bored-with-life salesman whose son's school was hosting a day in which fathers came in to talk about their jobs.
When Crystal's turn came up he launched into the following description of modern life notable for the way in which it illustrates the emptiness so many experience:
Physicist Steven Weinberg described the human predicament like this:
When man is reduced to little more than the product of physical, economic or social forces one of the first things that must be given up is the notion that our lives have some purpose, that there's some compelling reason why we're here.
Unfortunately, if the only reason we're here is that the unfeeling universe somehow belched us up and will soon swallow us back up again then our lives are, in Shakespeare's words, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
But man can't live without meaning, which is why, even though he may insist that naturalism is true, he can't live consistently with it. Naturalism is a worldview completely incompatible with our deepest longings and with the way our psychology is constructed.
Yet people prefer it to the theistic alternative which offers a basis for meaning and for hope. They'd rather live in a state of despair and spiritual inanition than concede that theism offers a more liveable alternative.
And make no mistake, it's not that there are better arguments for the truth of naturalism and so we should have the intellectual honesty to bite the bullet and accept it. There are, in fact, no good arguments for it. It's simply a metaphysical preference.
As Friedrich Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science, what decides against belief in God now is one's taste, not his reasons.
When Crystal's turn came up he launched into the following description of modern life notable for the way in which it illustrates the emptiness so many experience:
Value this time in your life, kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices. It goes by so fast. When you're a teenager, you think you can do anything and you do. Your twenties are a blur.This is a parody, of course, but the life it parodies is very real for millions of people. What's the point of it? Amidst unprecedented affluence moderns are spiritually empty.
Thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money, and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?"
Forties, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud, one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.
Fifties, you have a minor surgery - you'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery.
Sixties, you'll have a major surgery, the music is still loud, but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway.
Seventies, you and your wife retire to Fort Lauderdale. You start eating dinner at 2:00 in the afternoon, you have lunch around 10:00, breakfast the night before, spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt and muttering, "How come the kids don't call? How come the kids don't call?"
The eighties, you'll have a major stroke, and you end up babbling with some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand, but who you call mama.
Any questions?
Physicist Steven Weinberg described the human predicament like this:
The worldview of science [naturalism] is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson.And there's not much room for meaning on that knife-edge between wishful thinking and despair.
We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions.
At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
When man is reduced to little more than the product of physical, economic or social forces one of the first things that must be given up is the notion that our lives have some purpose, that there's some compelling reason why we're here.
Unfortunately, if the only reason we're here is that the unfeeling universe somehow belched us up and will soon swallow us back up again then our lives are, in Shakespeare's words, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
But man can't live without meaning, which is why, even though he may insist that naturalism is true, he can't live consistently with it. Naturalism is a worldview completely incompatible with our deepest longings and with the way our psychology is constructed.
Yet people prefer it to the theistic alternative which offers a basis for meaning and for hope. They'd rather live in a state of despair and spiritual inanition than concede that theism offers a more liveable alternative.
And make no mistake, it's not that there are better arguments for the truth of naturalism and so we should have the intellectual honesty to bite the bullet and accept it. There are, in fact, no good arguments for it. It's simply a metaphysical preference.
As Friedrich Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science, what decides against belief in God now is one's taste, not his reasons.
Monday, July 8, 2019
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Here are a couple of questions for anyone who embraces a naturalistic worldview and also believes that there's an objective right and wrong independent of any transcendent moral authority (i.e. God):
In Woody Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, successful opthamologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is cheating on his wife with a woman named Delores (Angelica Huston). Delores wants Judah to leave his wife, Miriam (Claire Bloom), for her, but Judah is unwilling, so Delores threatens to tell his wife all about their affair.
This would essentially ruin Judah's life, but Delores follows through with a letter to Miriam explaining the relationship she's had with Judah. Judah, however, discovers the letter before Miriam sees it, and it throws him into a panic. His life is about to come crashing down, and he doesn't know what to do to stop it.
He confides in his brother, Jack, who has underworld connections, and Jack suggests having Delores murdered. Judah is reluctant at first, but he eventually can see no other way out. Delores, who has no family, is killed, and although Judah is terrified that he'll be implicated, he eventually realizes to his great relief that he has gotten away with the crime. Nothing ties him or anyone else to the homicide.
No one knows what has actually happened except his brother and him, and he's able to live "happily ever after."
My questions are these: Is what Judah Rosenthal did morally wrong (as opposed to illegal)? If so, why is it wrong? Assuming a Godless universe in which Judah gets away with the crime, what does it mean to say that murder is wrong?
No one can be consistent who says on the one hand that there is no God and on the other that it was a moral outrage to murder that woman. Yet almost everyone but a psychopath has a visceral certainty that what was done to Delores was wrong which means that to be a consistent atheist most people have to somehow deny what they're certain is true.
This is an untenable predicament. To be rational an atheist has to either give up her atheism or give up what she's certain is true. It's astonishing, to me, at least, that so many would prefer the latter course of action to the former.
In Woody Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, successful opthamologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is cheating on his wife with a woman named Delores (Angelica Huston). Delores wants Judah to leave his wife, Miriam (Claire Bloom), for her, but Judah is unwilling, so Delores threatens to tell his wife all about their affair.
This would essentially ruin Judah's life, but Delores follows through with a letter to Miriam explaining the relationship she's had with Judah. Judah, however, discovers the letter before Miriam sees it, and it throws him into a panic. His life is about to come crashing down, and he doesn't know what to do to stop it.
He confides in his brother, Jack, who has underworld connections, and Jack suggests having Delores murdered. Judah is reluctant at first, but he eventually can see no other way out. Delores, who has no family, is killed, and although Judah is terrified that he'll be implicated, he eventually realizes to his great relief that he has gotten away with the crime. Nothing ties him or anyone else to the homicide.
No one knows what has actually happened except his brother and him, and he's able to live "happily ever after."
My questions are these: Is what Judah Rosenthal did morally wrong (as opposed to illegal)? If so, why is it wrong? Assuming a Godless universe in which Judah gets away with the crime, what does it mean to say that murder is wrong?
No one can be consistent who says on the one hand that there is no God and on the other that it was a moral outrage to murder that woman. Yet almost everyone but a psychopath has a visceral certainty that what was done to Delores was wrong which means that to be a consistent atheist most people have to somehow deny what they're certain is true.
This is an untenable predicament. To be rational an atheist has to either give up her atheism or give up what she's certain is true. It's astonishing, to me, at least, that so many would prefer the latter course of action to the former.
Saturday, July 6, 2019
The Singularity Is a Supernatural Being
Mathematician, physicist and cosmologist Frank Tipler is one of the most accomplished scientists in his field. Together with John Barrow he co-authored a definitive treatise on the anthropic principle, titled The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, and has been outspoken in his criticism of attempts to avoid the theological implications of the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the universe.
In the video below he discusses cosmic fine-tuning, the multiverse and some related topics, but the most striking issue he takes up is the nature of the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang and to the space-time universe we inhabit. According to what's called the standard model the universe arose from an infinitely dense point called a singularity, and Tipler claims that the singularity must be, by definition, a supernatural being.
What's more, although he doesn't develop this as much in this short segment as I would've liked, he insists that the singularity must also be rational.
A rational being which transcends space, time and matter and from which the entire universe emerges sounds an awful lot like the theist's conception of the God of creation.
This conclusion makes naturalist physicists very uncomfortable which is why, Tipler maintains, there have been so many attempts to explain the origin of the universe without invoking a singularity at its beginning. It's Tipler's contention, however, that every one of these attempts lacks empirical support. They're not good science, but are, rather, little more than speculative products of physicists' imaginations.
The video is eleven or so minutes long, but if you're interested in the theological implications of the origin and fine-tuning of the universe, you'll find it a very interesting eleven minutes:
In the video below he discusses cosmic fine-tuning, the multiverse and some related topics, but the most striking issue he takes up is the nature of the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang and to the space-time universe we inhabit. According to what's called the standard model the universe arose from an infinitely dense point called a singularity, and Tipler claims that the singularity must be, by definition, a supernatural being.
What's more, although he doesn't develop this as much in this short segment as I would've liked, he insists that the singularity must also be rational.
A rational being which transcends space, time and matter and from which the entire universe emerges sounds an awful lot like the theist's conception of the God of creation.
This conclusion makes naturalist physicists very uncomfortable which is why, Tipler maintains, there have been so many attempts to explain the origin of the universe without invoking a singularity at its beginning. It's Tipler's contention, however, that every one of these attempts lacks empirical support. They're not good science, but are, rather, little more than speculative products of physicists' imaginations.
The video is eleven or so minutes long, but if you're interested in the theological implications of the origin and fine-tuning of the universe, you'll find it a very interesting eleven minutes:
Friday, July 5, 2019
The Moral Landscape
A former student and VP reader wrote to ask me my opinion of a TED Talk given by philosopher Sam Harris around his book titled The Moral Landscape. The talk is a bit shy of twenty minutes, but I've posted it here so anyone interested can watch it for the context of my reply to my student:
Hi K--,
Thanks for linking me to Sam Harris' interesting TED talk. You asked my opinion on Harris' moral views. I think, first of all, that he's correct in rejecting relativism - In fact, he's one of the few atheists who does. He's correct in affirming that there are facts about human flourishing that obtain across cultures.
Where I disagree with him is in his belief that morality needs no supernatural sanction, that it can be derived solely from science. Here I think he misses several important facts and leaves unanswered some crucial questions:
1. He starts off by saying that he wants to base morality on science but then he defines morality as concern for human flourishing, This, however, is not a scientific claim, so in order to get his project going he has to build it on a non-scientific foundation.
2. Moreover, he never answers the question why we should privilege human flourishing over that of other species. Often the flourishing of humans comes at the expense of the flourishing of other animals so on what grounds does he elevate humans over other mammals?
3. More seriously, even if human flourishing is an appropriate criterion for morality, he doesn't address the metaethical question of why I should care about the well-being of other human beings. Why would it be wrong to just care about my own flourishing? Why should I help people I don't even know who are starving in Africa or sacrifice my comfort today to preserve the planet for people not yet born? Why would it be wrong to be an egoist who puts his own well-being ahead of that of all others? Science cannot answer that question and he doesn't answer it either.
4. Nor can science answer the question of what it even means to say that something is morally wrong in the first place. What does it mean to say that the Taliban are wrong to cover their women in burkas? What does "wrong" mean if we're all just the product of impersonal evolutionary forces that have shaped us to survive in the world? What does it mean to say that "X is wrong" if we're just machines made of meat doomed to die forever and there's no ultimate accountability for what we do? At most "X is wrong" can mean merely that some group of people doesn't like it.
The Judeo-Christian worldview offers the only satisfactory alternative to these shortcomings in Harris' Moral Landscape book. In Christianity (and Judaism) human flourishing is indeed paramount, which is why we're commanded by God to be compassionate and just in our dealings with others. Humans are privileged by the Creator of the universe because He purposefully creates them in His image and loves them specially.
God further commands us to care about others, even if it means sacrificing some of our own well-being to do so. In other words, He prohibits egoism and selfishness, and that's the only thing that could make these behaviors morally wrong.
Finally, on the Christian worldview we are told that we will ultimately be held accountable for our behavior by an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good moral authority. To violate His command to love is to violate the very fabric of creation and such violations will not go unnoticed. On Harris' view there's no reckoning for anyone who does anything that diminishes another person's flourishing, and with no accountability the word "wrong" is emptied of any significant meaning.
To say it differently, Harris is trying to hold on to Christian morality while yanking the foundation out from underneath it. He's piggy-backing on the will of God while insisting that God doesn't exist or is irrelevant. His is an interesting project, but like all such attempts to derive morality from a universe without God, it doesn't succeed.
Here's my response (slightly edited):
Hi K--,
Thanks for linking me to Sam Harris' interesting TED talk. You asked my opinion on Harris' moral views. I think, first of all, that he's correct in rejecting relativism - In fact, he's one of the few atheists who does. He's correct in affirming that there are facts about human flourishing that obtain across cultures.
Where I disagree with him is in his belief that morality needs no supernatural sanction, that it can be derived solely from science. Here I think he misses several important facts and leaves unanswered some crucial questions:
1. He starts off by saying that he wants to base morality on science but then he defines morality as concern for human flourishing, This, however, is not a scientific claim, so in order to get his project going he has to build it on a non-scientific foundation.
2. Moreover, he never answers the question why we should privilege human flourishing over that of other species. Often the flourishing of humans comes at the expense of the flourishing of other animals so on what grounds does he elevate humans over other mammals?
3. More seriously, even if human flourishing is an appropriate criterion for morality, he doesn't address the metaethical question of why I should care about the well-being of other human beings. Why would it be wrong to just care about my own flourishing? Why should I help people I don't even know who are starving in Africa or sacrifice my comfort today to preserve the planet for people not yet born? Why would it be wrong to be an egoist who puts his own well-being ahead of that of all others? Science cannot answer that question and he doesn't answer it either.
4. Nor can science answer the question of what it even means to say that something is morally wrong in the first place. What does it mean to say that the Taliban are wrong to cover their women in burkas? What does "wrong" mean if we're all just the product of impersonal evolutionary forces that have shaped us to survive in the world? What does it mean to say that "X is wrong" if we're just machines made of meat doomed to die forever and there's no ultimate accountability for what we do? At most "X is wrong" can mean merely that some group of people doesn't like it.
The Judeo-Christian worldview offers the only satisfactory alternative to these shortcomings in Harris' Moral Landscape book. In Christianity (and Judaism) human flourishing is indeed paramount, which is why we're commanded by God to be compassionate and just in our dealings with others. Humans are privileged by the Creator of the universe because He purposefully creates them in His image and loves them specially.
God further commands us to care about others, even if it means sacrificing some of our own well-being to do so. In other words, He prohibits egoism and selfishness, and that's the only thing that could make these behaviors morally wrong.
Finally, on the Christian worldview we are told that we will ultimately be held accountable for our behavior by an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good moral authority. To violate His command to love is to violate the very fabric of creation and such violations will not go unnoticed. On Harris' view there's no reckoning for anyone who does anything that diminishes another person's flourishing, and with no accountability the word "wrong" is emptied of any significant meaning.
To say it differently, Harris is trying to hold on to Christian morality while yanking the foundation out from underneath it. He's piggy-backing on the will of God while insisting that God doesn't exist or is irrelevant. His is an interesting project, but like all such attempts to derive morality from a universe without God, it doesn't succeed.
Thursday, July 4, 2019
Celebrating the Fourth of July
Today many Americans will celebrate their Independence Day, the day set aside to commemorate the signing of our Declaration of Independence from the Mother Country and the commencement of our nearly two hundred and thirty year experiment as a constitutional republic.
Citizens of most of the world's nations can point to aspects of their history of which they're justly proud and other aspects which they could wish never happened. Americans are no different. There's much to be proud of and some things we could wish were not part of our history. Even so, the cavils of malcontents, primarily in our universities, notwithstanding, we have much to celebrate.
America was founded on certain principles which are rarely enough observed, even in this modern era, despite the lip-service often paid to them. Our Founders declared that all men are created equal, a claim that made the eventual emancipation of slaves and full citizenship of women inevitable.
They forged a nation based on the principles that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and that human beings are endowed by God with inherent rights that can't be taken away without due process.
These two principles were alien to the communist and socialist totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a circumstance which resulted in two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, and over 100 million corpses. Our Founders also guaranteed that we'd have the right to free speech and the freedom to practice our religion, two essential rights without which no society can be truly free.
Yes, there are black marks. We treated the Indians horribly, practiced chattel slavery for seventy years after becoming a nation, and contemporary urban crime and dysfunction is as distressing as it is undeniable, but though it may sound like boastfulness or chauvinism (I truly don't mean it to be), it's hard to think of any nation or empire in history that has been more powerful, brought greater prosperity to its people and those of the world, and has at the same time exceeded America in terms of sheer moral goodness.
The point has been made by others that America is one of the few countries where one can immigrate from anywhere in the world and become an American. What's meant by that is this: Moving to Japan doesn't make you Japanese. Moving to China doesn't make you Chinese. Moving to Mexico doesn't make you Mexican and moving to France doesn't make you French, at least not in the sense that moving to America makes you American.
The very fact that so many people want to come here, that the free world looks to America for leadership - moral, political, and military - is compelling evidence for the conviction that America is indispensable. Indeed, the fact that so many want to come here gives the lie to the left's portrayal of America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and corrupt.
New York's governor, retorting to President Trump's call to make America great again, opined that America was never that great. Only someone clueless about American history could make such a fatuous assertion.
Where would Europe be today were it not for the United States? Not just our involvement in WWII but also our reconstruction of it in the aftermath. The Marshall Plan cost the United States $103 billion in today's dollars. What other nation would've done that? What other nation would've rebuilt Japan and return to them their national sovereignty after Pearl Harbor and a brutal war that cost almost 65,000 servicemen dead and over 200,000 wounded?
What would Eastern Europe be today had the U.S. washed its hands of European involvement after WWII and chose not to engage in the Cold War with the former Soviet Union?
What nation would have sacrificed over a million people in a civil war fought largely to abolish the institution of black slavery?
Where would Africa and much of the rest of the third world be today were it not for economic aid and health care, both public and private, donated by Americans?
If America ceased to exist in 2020 what would be the likely consequence? Europe would soon become a vassal to an expansionist Russia; North Korea would undoubtedly swallow up South Korea and perhaps Japan; China would certainly grab Taiwan and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines; India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, would seek to settle old scores; Radical Muslim groups would turn much of the world into an abattoir; and Israel would be in a fight for its existence against much of the Muslim world, a fight that'd probably result in nuclear war.
It's not unrealistic to fear that America is the only nation preventing much of the world from spiralling into a state of darkness and violent chaos, with freedom flickering out almost everywhere.
On this Fourth of July let's humbly and gratefully celebrate the fact that America is still the hope of freedom-loving people everywhere. Let's all work, those of us who are Americans (and even those who aren't), to keep it that way and to strive continuously to be worthy citizens of this great nation.
Citizens of most of the world's nations can point to aspects of their history of which they're justly proud and other aspects which they could wish never happened. Americans are no different. There's much to be proud of and some things we could wish were not part of our history. Even so, the cavils of malcontents, primarily in our universities, notwithstanding, we have much to celebrate.
America was founded on certain principles which are rarely enough observed, even in this modern era, despite the lip-service often paid to them. Our Founders declared that all men are created equal, a claim that made the eventual emancipation of slaves and full citizenship of women inevitable.
They forged a nation based on the principles that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and that human beings are endowed by God with inherent rights that can't be taken away without due process.
These two principles were alien to the communist and socialist totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a circumstance which resulted in two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, and over 100 million corpses. Our Founders also guaranteed that we'd have the right to free speech and the freedom to practice our religion, two essential rights without which no society can be truly free.
Yes, there are black marks. We treated the Indians horribly, practiced chattel slavery for seventy years after becoming a nation, and contemporary urban crime and dysfunction is as distressing as it is undeniable, but though it may sound like boastfulness or chauvinism (I truly don't mean it to be), it's hard to think of any nation or empire in history that has been more powerful, brought greater prosperity to its people and those of the world, and has at the same time exceeded America in terms of sheer moral goodness.
The point has been made by others that America is one of the few countries where one can immigrate from anywhere in the world and become an American. What's meant by that is this: Moving to Japan doesn't make you Japanese. Moving to China doesn't make you Chinese. Moving to Mexico doesn't make you Mexican and moving to France doesn't make you French, at least not in the sense that moving to America makes you American.
The very fact that so many people want to come here, that the free world looks to America for leadership - moral, political, and military - is compelling evidence for the conviction that America is indispensable. Indeed, the fact that so many want to come here gives the lie to the left's portrayal of America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and corrupt.
New York's governor, retorting to President Trump's call to make America great again, opined that America was never that great. Only someone clueless about American history could make such a fatuous assertion.
Where would Europe be today were it not for the United States? Not just our involvement in WWII but also our reconstruction of it in the aftermath. The Marshall Plan cost the United States $103 billion in today's dollars. What other nation would've done that? What other nation would've rebuilt Japan and return to them their national sovereignty after Pearl Harbor and a brutal war that cost almost 65,000 servicemen dead and over 200,000 wounded?
What would Eastern Europe be today had the U.S. washed its hands of European involvement after WWII and chose not to engage in the Cold War with the former Soviet Union?
What nation would have sacrificed over a million people in a civil war fought largely to abolish the institution of black slavery?
Where would Africa and much of the rest of the third world be today were it not for economic aid and health care, both public and private, donated by Americans?
If America ceased to exist in 2020 what would be the likely consequence? Europe would soon become a vassal to an expansionist Russia; North Korea would undoubtedly swallow up South Korea and perhaps Japan; China would certainly grab Taiwan and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines; India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, would seek to settle old scores; Radical Muslim groups would turn much of the world into an abattoir; and Israel would be in a fight for its existence against much of the Muslim world, a fight that'd probably result in nuclear war.
It's not unrealistic to fear that America is the only nation preventing much of the world from spiralling into a state of darkness and violent chaos, with freedom flickering out almost everywhere.
On this Fourth of July let's humbly and gratefully celebrate the fact that America is still the hope of freedom-loving people everywhere. Let's all work, those of us who are Americans (and even those who aren't), to keep it that way and to strive continuously to be worthy citizens of this great nation.
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
Science Uprising, Episode 5
One of the biggest science stories we rarely hear about is how with almost every discovery the Darwinian model of evolution looks weaker rather than stronger.
Even worse for any naturalistic model of origins is the problem of explaining how living things originated in the first place.
Despite occasional news releases promising that breakthroughs have been made in the field of abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-life) the problem remains unsolved and intractable. No one has come up with a plausible account of how blind, purposeless processes could accomplish the equivalent of constructing a fully functional computer in some primordial environment.
Episode 5 in the Discovery Institute's Science Uprising series highlights this problem of the origin of life. It features one of the premier organic chemists in the world, James Tour, along with protein chemist Douglas Axe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer.
Tour is withering in his rejection of all claims that scientists have built a living cell in the lab. Claims that researchers have created “proto-cells,” he says, are like claims that someone has created a “proto-turkey” by mixing some cold cuts together with broth and a few feathers in a cooking pot.
Even more absurd, according to Tour, are claims that blind, mechanical processes could've created a cell by chance: “All of these little pictures of molecules coming together to form the first cell are fallacious, are ridiculous. The origin of life community has not been honest.”
Strong words, but given that the information necessary for a functional cell is encyclopedic, and given that encyclopedias are, to say the least, not easy to manufacture by means of random word generators, the problem of accounting for the origin of the information necessary to build even the simplest fully functional biological cell, while excluding any intelligent input, seems insurmountable.
Here's episode 5:
Even worse for any naturalistic model of origins is the problem of explaining how living things originated in the first place.
Despite occasional news releases promising that breakthroughs have been made in the field of abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-life) the problem remains unsolved and intractable. No one has come up with a plausible account of how blind, purposeless processes could accomplish the equivalent of constructing a fully functional computer in some primordial environment.
Episode 5 in the Discovery Institute's Science Uprising series highlights this problem of the origin of life. It features one of the premier organic chemists in the world, James Tour, along with protein chemist Douglas Axe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer.
Tour is withering in his rejection of all claims that scientists have built a living cell in the lab. Claims that researchers have created “proto-cells,” he says, are like claims that someone has created a “proto-turkey” by mixing some cold cuts together with broth and a few feathers in a cooking pot.
Even more absurd, according to Tour, are claims that blind, mechanical processes could've created a cell by chance: “All of these little pictures of molecules coming together to form the first cell are fallacious, are ridiculous. The origin of life community has not been honest.”
Strong words, but given that the information necessary for a functional cell is encyclopedic, and given that encyclopedias are, to say the least, not easy to manufacture by means of random word generators, the problem of accounting for the origin of the information necessary to build even the simplest fully functional biological cell, while excluding any intelligent input, seems insurmountable.
Here's episode 5:
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
Just Talking Nonsense
There's an odd and contradictory juxtaposition of opinions currently manifesting itself among contemporary progressives. On one hand, progressives have been insisting for decades that religious belief has no place in public affairs, that matters of policy should be free of any religious justification.
Yet, on the other hand, we're also being told by progressives in the media, who are largely secular folk, that the conditions of migrants on the border are inexcusable, unjustifiable and a moral stain on the country.
The reason this is odd is because secularists generally adopt a worldview, either tacitly or explicitly, of metaphysical naturalism, and, given naturalism, deploring the treatment of an unfortunate group of people is merely an expression of one's subjective preference. There's nothing objectively wrong with mistreating others, yet, just as most secular progressives would blanch at the treatment received by Untouchables in Indian society, and declare that treatment to be highly immoral, they contend that the miserable conditions on the border are immoral as well.
But when naturalists make a moral judgment, which they're implicitly doing when they express their outrage over the conditions in which migrants are held on the border, they're actually committing ethical plagiarism on theism.
Nothing in the naturalistic worldview gives its adherents a basis for making moral pronouncements. They feel strongly that what's happening is profoundly wrong, yet it can only be wrong if theism is true, so they surreptitiously free-load off of theism to proclaim their moral judgments while at the same time paying lip-service to the principle that religious views have no place in deciding political matters.
What basis is there, after all, for umbrage that migrants are being shorn of their dignity, if, as naturalism presupposes, human beings have no dignity in the first place.
Steven Pinker at Yale calls dignity a "stupid concept." Bioethicist Ruth Macklin calls it "useless," and, on naturalism, they're both right.
Human dignity exists only because men and women are created in the image of God and loved by God. If that's not true then as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared:
So, either we scrub the public square of anything that carries the scent of religious belief and shut up about the horrible conditions of the migrants in the detention camps, or we allow denunciations of those conditions to be piggy-backed into the public square on the shoulders of theistic assumptions about the dignity and worth of human beings.
Otherwise, we're just talking nonsense every time we make a moral judgment about how other people are being treated.
Yet, on the other hand, we're also being told by progressives in the media, who are largely secular folk, that the conditions of migrants on the border are inexcusable, unjustifiable and a moral stain on the country.
The reason this is odd is because secularists generally adopt a worldview, either tacitly or explicitly, of metaphysical naturalism, and, given naturalism, deploring the treatment of an unfortunate group of people is merely an expression of one's subjective preference. There's nothing objectively wrong with mistreating others, yet, just as most secular progressives would blanch at the treatment received by Untouchables in Indian society, and declare that treatment to be highly immoral, they contend that the miserable conditions on the border are immoral as well.
But when naturalists make a moral judgment, which they're implicitly doing when they express their outrage over the conditions in which migrants are held on the border, they're actually committing ethical plagiarism on theism.
Nothing in the naturalistic worldview gives its adherents a basis for making moral pronouncements. They feel strongly that what's happening is profoundly wrong, yet it can only be wrong if theism is true, so they surreptitiously free-load off of theism to proclaim their moral judgments while at the same time paying lip-service to the principle that religious views have no place in deciding political matters.
What basis is there, after all, for umbrage that migrants are being shorn of their dignity, if, as naturalism presupposes, human beings have no dignity in the first place.
Steven Pinker at Yale calls dignity a "stupid concept." Bioethicist Ruth Macklin calls it "useless," and, on naturalism, they're both right.
Human dignity exists only because men and women are created in the image of God and loved by God. If that's not true then as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared:
When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.Or as the great cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote:
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.Of course, some of the progressive talking heads and scribblers may in fact be devout Christians or pious Jews who are basing their moral assessment on the obligation imposed upon us by God to love our neighbors as we love ourselves and to treat them justly, i.e. with dignity, but, if so, they're tacitly importing their religion into the public arena, an act of smuggling which they and their colleagues insist must be prohibited, at least when attempted by conservatives.
So, either we scrub the public square of anything that carries the scent of religious belief and shut up about the horrible conditions of the migrants in the detention camps, or we allow denunciations of those conditions to be piggy-backed into the public square on the shoulders of theistic assumptions about the dignity and worth of human beings.
Otherwise, we're just talking nonsense every time we make a moral judgment about how other people are being treated.
Monday, July 1, 2019
Gratuitous Beauty
One characteristic of living things that has thrilled everyone who has ever considered it is the astonishing level of beauty they exhibit. Consider, as an example, this bird of paradise:
or this blue dachnis:
Why are living things like birds and butterflies so beautiful? Darwin thought that females selected mates based on their fitness and that this sex selection caused beauty to evolve as a by-product. This is still the reigning explanation today (although it doesn't explain the beauty of flowers), but as an article by Adrian Barnett at New Scientist explains, not everyone is on board with this explanation, maybe not even Darwin himself. Here's an excerpt:
Could it be that animals, or at least some of them, are intelligently designed to just delight in beauty?
Why are living things like birds and butterflies so beautiful? Darwin thought that females selected mates based on their fitness and that this sex selection caused beauty to evolve as a by-product. This is still the reigning explanation today (although it doesn't explain the beauty of flowers), but as an article by Adrian Barnett at New Scientist explains, not everyone is on board with this explanation, maybe not even Darwin himself. Here's an excerpt:
“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.The difficulty here, at least for me, is that it doesn't explain why animals would have developed a sense of beauty in the first place. Pair-bonding and reproduction certainly don't require it, obviously, since many organisms, including humans it must be said, successfully reproduce without benefit of physical attractiveness. So why would some organisms evolve a dependence upon it, and what is it in the organism's genotype that governs this aesthetic sense?
In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).
But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.
What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.
And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests.
Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.(emphasis mine)
As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone. Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin.
In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.
Could it be that animals, or at least some of them, are intelligently designed to just delight in beauty?
Saturday, June 29, 2019
How Is it That We Exist?
A brief but provocative piece at Aeon raises a perplexing question about the structure of the universe and our existence in it:
At what point does it become no longer plausible to attribute these coincidences to blind, undirected processes? At what point does the intuition that the universe is intentionally engineered become too overwhelming to deny?
In 1928, the UK physicist Paul Dirac stumbled on an equation that seemed to show that, for every particle, there’s another, nearly identical particle with an opposite electric charge. Just four years later, the US physicist Carl David Anderson proved Dirac’s prediction correct by capturing a picture of a ‘positron’ – a particle with the same size and mass as an electron, but with a positive charge rather than a negative one.This video explains the problem in very easy-to-understand terms: Could it be that this is yet another of the amazing "cosmic coincidences" that have produced a universe in which conscious observers such as ourselves are possible?
This rapid series of developments unlocked one of the most momentous and enduring conundrums of physics: if particles with opposite electric charges annihilate one another when they meet, why is there any matter left?
And if there’s no more matter than antimatter in existence, then the Universe should have annihilated itself soon after the Big Bang – yet, here we are.
At what point does it become no longer plausible to attribute these coincidences to blind, undirected processes? At what point does the intuition that the universe is intentionally engineered become too overwhelming to deny?
Friday, June 28, 2019
Socialism Didn't Work in Sweden
According to an article at The Federalist the conventional wisdom, which holds that Sweden is a socialist success story, is simply false.
The author of the article, Susanna Hoffman, cites Swedish economist Johan Norberg who writes that, “Free markets and small government made Sweden rich. The experiment with socialism crashed us.”
Hoffman writes,
A line from Norberg nicely summarizes Ms. Hoffman's article: “Swedish Socialism is the longest way from Swedish capitalism to Swedish capitalism.”
The author of the article, Susanna Hoffman, cites Swedish economist Johan Norberg who writes that, “Free markets and small government made Sweden rich. The experiment with socialism crashed us.”
Hoffman writes,
Sweden stood as the world’s fourth wealthiest country nearly five decades ago. Its taxes were lower than most western countries, including the United States. The economy was deregulated, and public spending was hardly above 10 percent gross domestic product (GDP).Then Sweden began its experiment with socialism and was soon teetering on the brink of collapse:
No one guessed the system would crash. The country was ripe for a socialist experiment in the early 1970s. The Swedes were hardworking, optimistic, wealthy, and trusting of their politicians. As programs were implemented in the ’70s and ’80s, public spending almost doubled and labor markets became regulated. The new welfare state, however, appeared to enhance Sweden’s already strong economy with large-scale redistribution and high taxes.So how did Sweden avoid disaster?
This brief period when socialism seemed to work is the model promoted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Norberg said at a The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) event last week. Today, 36 percent of Americans are sympathetic to socialism compared to only 9 percent of Swedes.
Reversing Sweden’s traditions of small government and an open economy disintegrated its successful business climate. Big companies like IKEA either evaded taxes or left the country. Athletes like Björn Borg and entrepreneurs fled the country. High inflation raged and not a single net job was created in the private sector.
The new generation raised in socialism had no incentives to work. The once healthy population began calling in sick because of the generous benefits for sick days. They shamelessly accepted the public benefits that their hardworking parents once despised.
Sweden not only fell from being the 4th richest country to the 14th richest country, but its very nature as a country changed. An authoritarian-like government was necessary to ensure the population did not abuse its welfare system. Sweden’s democracy was sliding into a dictatorship, and the Swedish people were not pleased.
The system began crashing after debt-fueled inflation in the ’80s. The ’90s were stained with a massive economic crisis. Banks were on the brink of collapse and, for a brief moment, the Central Bank had 500 percent interest rates to defend the Swedish currency.
The 30-year experiment “was a brief interlude of failure,” Norberg said. To reform and save its economy, Sweden reverted back to its capitalist structure. It reduced public spending by a third, demolished taxes on property and inheritance, and reduced taxes in other areas. Defined benefits were cut and only defined contributions were permitted.Put simply, the Swedes reverted to free market remedies. When Bernie Sanders and other Democrats call for Swedish-style socialism they're calling for something that Swedes themselves have rejected, and only 9% of them want back.
The system became partially privatized with privately-owned accounts. The markets became opened to private providers and private companies who contributed to institutions like healthcare and schools. Sweden also deregulated markets to cause a surge in entrepreneurship.
Swedish healthcare became regionally run and funded by local state tax. Overconsumption had created long hospital lines depriving those with urgent needs of immediate attention. These kinds of inefficiencies of the universal programs caused Sweden to open to more private companies.
A line from Norberg nicely summarizes Ms. Hoffman's article: “Swedish Socialism is the longest way from Swedish capitalism to Swedish capitalism.”
Thursday, June 27, 2019
It's Even Happening at Science
It's pretty clear that big social media platforms are making a concerted effort to stifle conservative opinion. The recent news about Google's intent to influence the 2020 election is just the latest in a string of revelations of the deplatforming and demonetizing of conservative users.
David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a short piece that shows how political bias is also corrupting at least one major scientific journal.
In 2008 the journal Science published research co-authored by John Hibbing and Douglas Oxley that purported to show that persons with strong political beliefs and less sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support the liberal position on a number of issues whereas people who demonstrated more visceral reactions to those same factors were more likely to favor conservative positions.
The article became widely cited as demonstrating that conservatism is largely determined by properties in the brain associated with primitive fears and sundry other neanderthalish traits.
It fit the narrative, so to speak, of conservatives as brutish, non-rational yokels, but recently another group of researchers tried to duplicate the study's results and found that they could not.
Here's Klinghoffer:
The rebuffed team wrote this at Slate:
David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a short piece that shows how political bias is also corrupting at least one major scientific journal.
In 2008 the journal Science published research co-authored by John Hibbing and Douglas Oxley that purported to show that persons with strong political beliefs and less sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support the liberal position on a number of issues whereas people who demonstrated more visceral reactions to those same factors were more likely to favor conservative positions.
The article became widely cited as demonstrating that conservatism is largely determined by properties in the brain associated with primitive fears and sundry other neanderthalish traits.
It fit the narrative, so to speak, of conservatives as brutish, non-rational yokels, but recently another group of researchers tried to duplicate the study's results and found that they could not.
Here's Klinghoffer:
Some other researchers decided to test the Science results — to confirm, not disconfirm, them. They tell their story in an article for Slate that is an eye-opener.The most prestigious science journal perhaps in the world was perfectly willing to publish a paper that has been used to disparage about half or more of the country's population, but they were unwilling to publish a more thoroughly researched paper that would've helped correct the misimpression.
They used a larger field of subjects, 202 instead of just 46. Guess what? The results of the study by Hibbing and his colleagues were not reproducible.
And guess what again? Science preferred not to publish this finding. There was no implication that Oxley et al. had committed any errors. There was no “train wreck” in this case. It was just that, as often happens, their results did not repeat themselves, at all, when a more extensive study was attempted.
The rebuffed team wrote this at Slate:
Our first thought was that we were doing something wrong. So, we asked the original researchers for their images, which they generously provided to us, and we added a few more. We took the step of “pre-registering” a more direct replication of the Science study, meaning that we detailed exactly what we were going to do before we did it and made that public.The authors of the more recent study describe their failure to persuade the editors at Science to consider their paper:
The direct replication took place in Philadelphia, where we recruited 202 participants (more than four times the original sample size of 46 used in the Science study). Again, we found no correlation between physiological reactions to threatening images (the original ones or the ones we added) and political conservatism — no matter how we looked at the data.
We drafted a paper that reported the failed replication studies along with a more nuanced discussion about the ways in which physiology might matter for politics and sent it to Science. We did not expect Science to immediately publish the paper, but because our findings cast doubt on an influential study published in its pages, we thought the editorial team would at least send it out for peer review.Our cultural credibility crisis must be very far advanced when one of the most trusted journals - in a field that has traditionally stood for the objective pursuit of the truth - seems to have adopted a policy of declining papers that transgress their own ideological predilections.
It did not. About a week later, we received a summary rejection with the explanation that the Science advisory board of academics and editorial team felt that since the publication of this article the field has moved on and that, while they concluded that we had offered a conclusive replication of the original study, it would be better suited for a less visible subfield journal.
We wrote back asking them to consider at least sending our work out for review. (They could still reject it if the reviewers found fatal flaws in our replications.) We argued that the original article continues to be highly influential and is often featured in popular science pieces in the lay media (for instance, here, here, here, and here), where the research is translated into a claim that physiology allows one to predict liberals and conservatives with a high degree of accuracy.
We believe that Science has a responsibility to set the record straight in the same way that a newspaper does when it publishes something that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We were rebuffed without a reason....
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Materialists and Madmen
G.K. Chesterton, observes in his book Orthodoxy, that "The materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of a madman. Both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable." Nor, he says elsewhere, do either of them ever seem to have doubts.
I was reminded of this comparison while watching episode 4 of the Discovery Institute's series titled Science Uprising. Early on in this episode there's tape of Bill Nye - whom generations of middle school students came to know as the "Science Guy" - declaring with all the fervor and certainty of a madman that he's just "a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.”
Well, what Mr. Nye claims about himself may be true of Mr. Nye, I'm not in a position to disagree with him, but it's very likely not true of humanity in general.
As the brief video below points out, the universe has all the appearance of having been intentionally designed to permit life-forms like us to inhabit it. In fact, the only way to avoid this conclusion, other than to not think about it at all, is to invoke the existence of a multiverse, for which there's no empirical evidence and only scanty theoretical evidence.
The multiverse hypothesis is indeed unanswerable. There's no way to test it, and, given its extravagance (an infinity of universes!), it's scientifically intolerable and thus not fit to be entertained by serious scientists. Metaphysicians, perhaps, but not scientists.
I suspect that Chesterton might opine that invoking the existence of entities (an infinity of universes) for which there's no empirical evidence merely to escape an otherwise uncomfortable conclusion (a single Creator-Mind) - the empirical evidence for which is presented to our senses no matter the part of the universe to which we apply our microscopes and telescopes - is itself a form of madness, or at least neurosis.
Anyway, here's episode 4 of Science Uprising: Very smart people are like very fast cars. If they start out heading in the wrong direction they just get further down the wrong road more quickly than others would.
I was reminded of this comparison while watching episode 4 of the Discovery Institute's series titled Science Uprising. Early on in this episode there's tape of Bill Nye - whom generations of middle school students came to know as the "Science Guy" - declaring with all the fervor and certainty of a madman that he's just "a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.”
Well, what Mr. Nye claims about himself may be true of Mr. Nye, I'm not in a position to disagree with him, but it's very likely not true of humanity in general.
As the brief video below points out, the universe has all the appearance of having been intentionally designed to permit life-forms like us to inhabit it. In fact, the only way to avoid this conclusion, other than to not think about it at all, is to invoke the existence of a multiverse, for which there's no empirical evidence and only scanty theoretical evidence.
The multiverse hypothesis is indeed unanswerable. There's no way to test it, and, given its extravagance (an infinity of universes!), it's scientifically intolerable and thus not fit to be entertained by serious scientists. Metaphysicians, perhaps, but not scientists.
I suspect that Chesterton might opine that invoking the existence of entities (an infinity of universes) for which there's no empirical evidence merely to escape an otherwise uncomfortable conclusion (a single Creator-Mind) - the empirical evidence for which is presented to our senses no matter the part of the universe to which we apply our microscopes and telescopes - is itself a form of madness, or at least neurosis.
Anyway, here's episode 4 of Science Uprising: Very smart people are like very fast cars. If they start out heading in the wrong direction they just get further down the wrong road more quickly than others would.
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Double Standard
Liberals in the state of Oregon, Washington and Colorado are seeking to ruin family-run businesses which "deny service" to people who solicit them to participate in gay wedding services to which they have religious objections.
The details of how cruel some of these plaintiffs can be are deeply disappointing. Barronelle Stutzman's ordeal is especially so since suit was brought against her and her floral shop by a long-time customer she thought was a friend.
The Oregon case was brought before the Supreme Court which on Monday vacated a lower court decision against the bakers, Melissa and Aaron Klein.
A Colorado baker has been sued three times even though each time the courts have ultimately ruled in his favor. Nevertheless, the progressives persist in harassing all of these people and seem determined to drive them into financial ruin.
Meanwhile, a number of social media platforms are giving the boot to conservatives whose views those who manage these platforms don't like.
Columnist Michelle Malkin wrote last summer:
So here's the question. If, in the progressive way of seeing things, it's a wrong worth destroying people's lives over for private business owners to abide by their religious convictions and "deny service" to gays wishing to make them complicit in their wedding, why is it not also wrong for a private business like Facebook, Google or Twitter to deny service to conservatives wishing to use their service?
Is there an answer to this question, or is this an example of hypocrisy on the part of the progressives who condemn bakers and florists but not their fellow lefties at Big Social Media?
The details of how cruel some of these plaintiffs can be are deeply disappointing. Barronelle Stutzman's ordeal is especially so since suit was brought against her and her floral shop by a long-time customer she thought was a friend.
The Oregon case was brought before the Supreme Court which on Monday vacated a lower court decision against the bakers, Melissa and Aaron Klein.
A Colorado baker has been sued three times even though each time the courts have ultimately ruled in his favor. Nevertheless, the progressives persist in harassing all of these people and seem determined to drive them into financial ruin.
Meanwhile, a number of social media platforms are giving the boot to conservatives whose views those who manage these platforms don't like.
Columnist Michelle Malkin wrote last summer:
Pro-life, pro-border security and anti-jihadist journalists and activists have all been selectively gagged on Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter..... in the unhinged era of the anti-Trump resistance, intermittent purges, "accidental" suspensions and suspicious deletions of conservative content have spiked to a level of systemic censorship.She then listed the fate, as of last summer, of a number of conservative users of social media:
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey ... admitted his company's left-wing bias and dismissed revelations from his own engineers, who confided to undercover Project Veritas journalists that they were creating algorithms to "ban a way of talking," "down rank" users based on politics and employ "machine learning" to create special triggers and keywords -- "the majority of (which) are for Republicans."
In April, the brilliant anti-leftist street artist Sabo disappeared from Twitter without warning or explanation. My friend and CRTV.com colleague Gavin McInnes was silenced on Twitter recently for absolutely no good reason and remains suspended.In the past year, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager (again) have all been deplatformed or demonetized.
Prager University .. has been suppressed on Facebook and it's clear it was no accidental glitch. One of the videos yanked was conservative millennial vlogger and CRTV.com host Allie Stuckey's piece called "Make Men Masculine Again."
Author and philosopher Stefan Molyneux, whose video podcasts have 250 million views, was also silenced by speech suppressors on YouTube, which arbitrarily issued community guideline violation strikes against him for videos including an interview with British journalist Katie Hopkins and a discussion on the Death of White Males.
My friend and conservative social media guru Nick Short, of the Security Studies Group, was one of thousands of conservative activists who discovered they've been throttled by Twitter's use of a "complex and opaque Quality Filter algorithm that has the effect of disproportionately restricting the voices of conservatives under the guise of limiting harmful or abusive users."
Is there an answer to this question, or is this an example of hypocrisy on the part of the progressives who condemn bakers and florists but not their fellow lefties at Big Social Media?
Monday, June 24, 2019
Is Elvis Still Alive?
J. Warner Wallace is a former detective who brings his forensic experience to bear on questions surrounding the existence of God. In the following four minute video he addresses the problem posed to naturalism by the fine-tuning of the cosmos.
As we've discussed at this site on numerous occasions, dozens of the forces, constants and parameters that comprise the universe in which we live, are so exquisitely calibrated that had any of them deviated from its actual value by the most unimaginably infinitesimal amount either the universe wouldn't exist at all or, if it did, life would be impossible in it.
The most popular naturalistic response to the fine-tuning problem is to propose that there are an infinite array of universes, with every possible set of values for these forces and constants existing somewhere in the array. Thus, a universe like ours, as improbable as it is, must exist.
This is called the multiverse hypothesis and Wallace asks some interesting questions concerning it, including the one in the title of this post. Take a look: Thanks to Evolution News for bringing the video to my attention.
As we've discussed at this site on numerous occasions, dozens of the forces, constants and parameters that comprise the universe in which we live, are so exquisitely calibrated that had any of them deviated from its actual value by the most unimaginably infinitesimal amount either the universe wouldn't exist at all or, if it did, life would be impossible in it.
The most popular naturalistic response to the fine-tuning problem is to propose that there are an infinite array of universes, with every possible set of values for these forces and constants existing somewhere in the array. Thus, a universe like ours, as improbable as it is, must exist.
This is called the multiverse hypothesis and Wallace asks some interesting questions concerning it, including the one in the title of this post. Take a look: Thanks to Evolution News for bringing the video to my attention.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Mind-Boggling
Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.
Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.
The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.
Enjoy:
Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.
The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.
Enjoy:
Friday, June 21, 2019
A Quixotic Task
Philosopher Patricia Churchland has a new book out titled Conscience which is reviewed by Andrew Stark at The Wall Street Journal (Paywall).
Ms. Churchland is an eliminative materialist who believes that nothing exists that's not reducible to its material components. Thus, for her, mind is simply a word we use to describe how the function of the material brain, just as we use "digestion" to describe the function of the stomach. There are no mental substances as such, in her world, only chemical reactions occurring in the brain.
In Conscience, according to Stark, she undertakes to analyze the origins of human morality and to explain it in terms of these neurobiological brain processes. Here's Stark:
If one's behavior is a result of chemical reactions in the brain in what sense is any behavior morally wrong? If Joe gets pleasure from acting selfishly why is his selfishness wrong? If Frank gets pleasure from molesting children or raping women why is he morally wrong to engage in these behaviors?
Stark adverts briefly to the problem when he writes that,
Only a transcendent moral authority can do that, and Ms. Churchland doesn't believe there are any such entities.
Thus, she seems to be stuck trying to explain morality while bereft of any sound basis for right and wrong or good and bad. Hers is, I think, a quixotic task.
Any attempt to derive an ethics based on naturalistic, materialistic presuppositions is doomed to fail. It leads to moral subjectivism which leads ultimately to moral nihilism, the view that there's actually nothing that's morally wrong. There are just things that people do.
The nihilist simply takes materialism to its logical conclusion which is that the set of behaviors labeled "moral wrongs" is a null set.
Ms. Churchland is an eliminative materialist who believes that nothing exists that's not reducible to its material components. Thus, for her, mind is simply a word we use to describe how the function of the material brain, just as we use "digestion" to describe the function of the stomach. There are no mental substances as such, in her world, only chemical reactions occurring in the brain.
In Conscience, according to Stark, she undertakes to analyze the origins of human morality and to explain it in terms of these neurobiological brain processes. Here's Stark:
At the core of her argument is the claim that morality is rooted in neurobiology. Pleasure-causing brain chemicals, among them oxytocin and dopamine, get released by evolutionarily adaptable activities such as mother-child bonding, in-group caring and the praise earned by cooperating with others. Such conduct, she says, comprises the common building blocks of moral behavior....Set aside the breezy, magical, wave-of-the-wand view of the evolutionary deus ex machina that's always available to materialists to solve every survival difficulty and need. The deeper problem with Ms. Churchland's view of morality is that although it may explain why we have moral feelings or sentiments, it completely empties the notion of right and wrong of any substantive meaning.
A tribal culture will define in-group caring differently from a cosmopolitan one, but in either case the moral codes developed will take root because they activate the pleasurable brain chemicals that have evolved to be stimulated by concern for others....
In Ms. Churchland's view, morality ... is the scaffold of rules that, if we observe them, elicit the pleasurable brain chemicals that evolved to encourage behavior suited to the survival of the species.
If one's behavior is a result of chemical reactions in the brain in what sense is any behavior morally wrong? If Joe gets pleasure from acting selfishly why is his selfishness wrong? If Frank gets pleasure from molesting children or raping women why is he morally wrong to engage in these behaviors?
Stark adverts briefly to the problem when he writes that,
If what distinguishes moral from immoral behavior is that the one activates pleasure-causing chemicals and the other pain-inducing chemicals... there would no longer be anything that distinguished good from bad.The behavior that brings pleasure to one person may bring pain to another. All we can say about what Joe and Frank are doing is that they're engaging in behavior that others don't like, but we can't say that their behavior is immoral. Society may make it illegal, but it can't make it immoral.
Only a transcendent moral authority can do that, and Ms. Churchland doesn't believe there are any such entities.
Thus, she seems to be stuck trying to explain morality while bereft of any sound basis for right and wrong or good and bad. Hers is, I think, a quixotic task.
Any attempt to derive an ethics based on naturalistic, materialistic presuppositions is doomed to fail. It leads to moral subjectivism which leads ultimately to moral nihilism, the view that there's actually nothing that's morally wrong. There are just things that people do.
The nihilist simply takes materialism to its logical conclusion which is that the set of behaviors labeled "moral wrongs" is a null set.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Science Uprising, Episode 3
The great theoretical physicist John Wheeler once said that when he first started studying physics he believed the world was composed of particles. Looking more deeply, he discovered that it was really composed of waves. But then, after a lifetime of study, he concluded that, "it appears that all existence is the expression of information."
Wheeler's conclusion that information is the fundamental component of all of physical reality is slowly spreading throughout the scientific world, and it's generating an intellectual revolution. In many quarters the revolution is exceedingly reluctant, but it seems to be ineluctable nonetheless.
Consider, for example, that the DNA in our cells is a library of information, a kind of computer program, that directs the construction of a body. DNA itself is not information, of course, but is rather the vehicle or medium which carries the massive quantity of information necessary to build and maintain each individual organism.
This has interesting metaphysical implications since in our experience, information, at least complex information such as we find in a book or computer program, is always the product of a mind. Whenever we encounter it we always infer that a mind has generated it because we know that blind, mechanical processes cannot by themselves write books or software.
We might say that information always lies downstream of mind, so the question is, what is the provenience of the information that is expressed in the nucleic acids and proteins in every cell of our body?
To emphasize this point the Discovery Institute has released the third episode of their series titled Science Uprising. The series is designed to demonstrate how the knowledge gained by scientists over the last couple of decades is sparking the aforementioned revolution, especially among younger thinkers, a revolution that rejects the suffocating materialist orthodoxy that has reigned in our culture for a century and a half.
Materialism, while enjoying hegemony in the media and the academy, has refused to permit acknowledgement that the universe and life appear to be the intentional product of a Mind, or, if such an acknowledgement is allowed it's usually so that it can be subjected to ridicule.
But that hegemony is eroding.
The philosopher William James once wrote that, "Any rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."
James was, of course, correct. The methodological rule that prohibits all but material explanations in science is not only irrational, it's arbitrary and inconsistently applied, and a lot of people are beginning to notice.
In any case, here's Episode 3 of Science Uprising:
Wheeler's conclusion that information is the fundamental component of all of physical reality is slowly spreading throughout the scientific world, and it's generating an intellectual revolution. In many quarters the revolution is exceedingly reluctant, but it seems to be ineluctable nonetheless.
Consider, for example, that the DNA in our cells is a library of information, a kind of computer program, that directs the construction of a body. DNA itself is not information, of course, but is rather the vehicle or medium which carries the massive quantity of information necessary to build and maintain each individual organism.
This has interesting metaphysical implications since in our experience, information, at least complex information such as we find in a book or computer program, is always the product of a mind. Whenever we encounter it we always infer that a mind has generated it because we know that blind, mechanical processes cannot by themselves write books or software.
We might say that information always lies downstream of mind, so the question is, what is the provenience of the information that is expressed in the nucleic acids and proteins in every cell of our body?
To emphasize this point the Discovery Institute has released the third episode of their series titled Science Uprising. The series is designed to demonstrate how the knowledge gained by scientists over the last couple of decades is sparking the aforementioned revolution, especially among younger thinkers, a revolution that rejects the suffocating materialist orthodoxy that has reigned in our culture for a century and a half.
Materialism, while enjoying hegemony in the media and the academy, has refused to permit acknowledgement that the universe and life appear to be the intentional product of a Mind, or, if such an acknowledgement is allowed it's usually so that it can be subjected to ridicule.
But that hegemony is eroding.
The philosopher William James once wrote that, "Any rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."
James was, of course, correct. The methodological rule that prohibits all but material explanations in science is not only irrational, it's arbitrary and inconsistently applied, and a lot of people are beginning to notice.
In any case, here's Episode 3 of Science Uprising:
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Can't Have Both (Pt. II)
Yesterday I wrote that naturalists, i.e. those who deny that the ultimate reality is a personal intelligent being, are in an intellectually untenable position. They want to maintain a belief in moral responsibility, objective moral duties, human equality, objective human rights, free will, consciousness, and so on even though their fundamental assumption, that material nature is all there is, reduces all of these to illusions.
Here are some quotes, all from philosophical naturalists, to illustrate the point:
If truth is subjective, if beliefs aren't true in an objective sense, then the belief that naturalism is true is simply an expression of a subjective preference. It can't be objectively true.
Naturalists (i.e. atheists) have to live in two contradictory worlds. In their everyday lives with family and friends they live like everyone else, behaving as if the common sense view is obviously correct, but in their professional or intellectual lives they live as if human beings are machines with no free will, consciousness or dignity.
In other words, in their daily lives they live as if theism is true while in their intellectual lives they adamantly deny it.
They oscillate back and forth between these two irreconcilable worlds, unable to give up the common sense entailments of theism yet unable to live consistently with what the logic of naturalism, the philosophical worldview they embrace, tells them is the case.
It makes one wonder if perhaps naturalism is a mental illness.
Here are some quotes, all from philosophical naturalists, to illustrate the point:
- "Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused...[yet] the world as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events."
- "The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe ...[but] when those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."
- "A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion." Steven Pinker MIT in How the Mind Works.
- "The physical world provides no room for freedom of the will...[yet] that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. {So] We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false." Marvin Minsky MIT in The Society of Mind.
- "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom even though there's no ground for it." John Searle
- "We cannot live adequately with ...a complete awareness of the absence of free will ...[thus] we ought to hold on to those central but incoherent or contradictory beliefs in the free will case." Philosopher Paul Smilansky
- "Free will is a very persistent illusion. It keeps coming back." Harvard Psychologist Daniel Wegner
- "Consciousness has to be an illusion." Cambridge Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
- "Common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist." Philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland
- "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." Philosopher John Gray
If truth is subjective, if beliefs aren't true in an objective sense, then the belief that naturalism is true is simply an expression of a subjective preference. It can't be objectively true.
Naturalists (i.e. atheists) have to live in two contradictory worlds. In their everyday lives with family and friends they live like everyone else, behaving as if the common sense view is obviously correct, but in their professional or intellectual lives they live as if human beings are machines with no free will, consciousness or dignity.
In other words, in their daily lives they live as if theism is true while in their intellectual lives they adamantly deny it.
They oscillate back and forth between these two irreconcilable worlds, unable to give up the common sense entailments of theism yet unable to live consistently with what the logic of naturalism, the philosophical worldview they embrace, tells them is the case.
It makes one wonder if perhaps naturalism is a mental illness.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Can't Have Both
There's a fascinating struggle going on today for the hearts and minds of American youth, a struggle between two very different philosophical views of reality.
It's a struggle being waged primarily in our institutions of higher education and in our entertainment media.
Currently, the prevailing view in those institutions is naturalistic materialism - the idea that nature and matter are all there is and that there's no supernatural nor immaterial substance.
This view stands in diametric opposition to its rival, theism, which predominates, of course, among Christians, Jews and Muslims. In its broad outlines this view of the world (worldview) holds that human beings are the intentional product of a personal, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient Mind which both created, and thus transcends, space, time and mass/energy.
One of the criticisms that philosophical naturalists level at theists is that theism, they claim, is irrational - it's irrational to believe in the existence of entities that are undetectable by the human senses.
There's much that could be said in response to this particular criticism, but in this post I want to ask which of the two views is really most at odds with reason and which conforms best to our own personal experience of the world.
Here's the problem for the naturalist: In order to embrace it one must, if one is to be rational, either give up believing in a host of things that most naturalists don't want to give up believing in, or come up with some secondary or ad hoc explanation for them.
For instance, on naturalism there's no basis for believing in human equality, objective human rights, or human dignity. Nor is there any basis for believing in objective moral obligation, moral responsibility, free will, the existence of the self, human consciousness or the trustworthiness of our reason.
None of these can be accommodated by a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, except by forcing them, Procrustus-like, into it. Yet they all fit quite comfortably in theism.
Moreover, on naturalism one must hold that human beings are simply machines made of meat, that the universe came into being uncaused and out of nothing, that the fine-tuning of the parameters and constants of the universe which permit life are just a fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, that the origin of life is another fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, and that the amazing ability of mathematics to describe the world and the ability of humans to not only comprehend it but to articulate it in language are even more fortuitous accidents.
Either one believes all that or one must believe, despite the lack of any evidence, that there's an infinity of different universes and/or that we're really living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix.
If one claims to be a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) and yet believes that there are some things that are wrong for anyone to do (like torture children), if they believe that people are responsible for their actions, that we all have a conscious mind, that our beliefs and sense experiences are not illusions, that our reason can be generally trusted and that the notion that we're living in a multiverse or a computer simulation is extremely far-fetched, then one is simply not thinking consistently with one's worldview, and is therefore being irrational and they're certainly not a very good naturalist.
Naturalists, to be consistent, must confront this choice: Either give up all (or most) of the beliefs enumerated above or give up naturalism. One simply can't hold on to both and be rational.
It's an interesting fact that when facing this choice many people would rather cling to naturalism than hold on to the belief in moral responsibility or in the existence of conscious minds. They know that abandoning naturalism means accepting the unpleasant fact that theism is true, and they'd apparently prefer to continue to live irrationally than accept that they've been wrong about God.
Why that is would make for an interesting psychological study.
It's a struggle being waged primarily in our institutions of higher education and in our entertainment media.
Currently, the prevailing view in those institutions is naturalistic materialism - the idea that nature and matter are all there is and that there's no supernatural nor immaterial substance.
This view stands in diametric opposition to its rival, theism, which predominates, of course, among Christians, Jews and Muslims. In its broad outlines this view of the world (worldview) holds that human beings are the intentional product of a personal, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient Mind which both created, and thus transcends, space, time and mass/energy.
One of the criticisms that philosophical naturalists level at theists is that theism, they claim, is irrational - it's irrational to believe in the existence of entities that are undetectable by the human senses.
There's much that could be said in response to this particular criticism, but in this post I want to ask which of the two views is really most at odds with reason and which conforms best to our own personal experience of the world.
Here's the problem for the naturalist: In order to embrace it one must, if one is to be rational, either give up believing in a host of things that most naturalists don't want to give up believing in, or come up with some secondary or ad hoc explanation for them.
For instance, on naturalism there's no basis for believing in human equality, objective human rights, or human dignity. Nor is there any basis for believing in objective moral obligation, moral responsibility, free will, the existence of the self, human consciousness or the trustworthiness of our reason.
None of these can be accommodated by a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, except by forcing them, Procrustus-like, into it. Yet they all fit quite comfortably in theism.
Moreover, on naturalism one must hold that human beings are simply machines made of meat, that the universe came into being uncaused and out of nothing, that the fine-tuning of the parameters and constants of the universe which permit life are just a fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, that the origin of life is another fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, and that the amazing ability of mathematics to describe the world and the ability of humans to not only comprehend it but to articulate it in language are even more fortuitous accidents.
Either one believes all that or one must believe, despite the lack of any evidence, that there's an infinity of different universes and/or that we're really living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix.
If one claims to be a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) and yet believes that there are some things that are wrong for anyone to do (like torture children), if they believe that people are responsible for their actions, that we all have a conscious mind, that our beliefs and sense experiences are not illusions, that our reason can be generally trusted and that the notion that we're living in a multiverse or a computer simulation is extremely far-fetched, then one is simply not thinking consistently with one's worldview, and is therefore being irrational and they're certainly not a very good naturalist.
Naturalists, to be consistent, must confront this choice: Either give up all (or most) of the beliefs enumerated above or give up naturalism. One simply can't hold on to both and be rational.
It's an interesting fact that when facing this choice many people would rather cling to naturalism than hold on to the belief in moral responsibility or in the existence of conscious minds. They know that abandoning naturalism means accepting the unpleasant fact that theism is true, and they'd apparently prefer to continue to live irrationally than accept that they've been wrong about God.
Why that is would make for an interesting psychological study.
Monday, June 17, 2019
Political Psychosis
The definition of a psychotic is one who is delusional or has an impaired grip on reality. I fear that Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden may well fit that definition. Either that or he's simply mendacious.
For instance, how can anyone who has a grip on reality make the claim that under Obama there was never "a hint of scandal or a lie"? Yet that's the claim that Biden made at a recent campaign rally.
Now, I know this is Uncle Joe Biden we're talking about, and that everyone takes Joe's remarks with a chunk of salt, but still. Hasn't he heard of Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, the VA scandal, the Benghazi scandal or any of the scandals surrounding the 2016 election involving illegalities perpetrated by members of the FBI and perhaps others in which his administration is at least hinted at having been implicated?
Hasn't Mr. Biden heard of Mr. Obama's promises that if you like your doctor you'll be able to keep your doctor or that Obamacare will bring the cost of insurance coverage down?
Politifact awarded Obama the “Lie of the Year” in 2013 for that howler, and former Attorney General Eric Holder received a contempt citation from the House Oversight Committee for the botched gun-running Operation Fast and Furious.
And what about the scandal surrounding President Obama's deal to trade five hardened terrorists detained at Guantanamo for Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier held by the Taliban for five years after deserting his post and defecting to the Taliban?
And what about the lies told by Obama administration officials about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that took the lives of four Americans? Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in an email to her daughter that, contrary to the administration's public statements, the September 11, 2012 attack on the consulate was a “planned attack” by al-Qaeda and “not a protest.”
And maybe Mr. Biden has simply forgotten about the scandal surrounding the $400 million in cash secretly bestowed upon the Iranian mullahs on the same day the Iran nuclear deal was formally adopted by the Islamic Republic and four American prisoners released, or the reporting by Politico’s Josh Meyer which revealed the Obama administration’s simultaneous efforts to undermine investigations into a drug-trafficking ring in the United States run by Iran's proxy Hezbollah.
Maybe his memory has failed him, too, regarding the scandal which attached to the Obama administration's illegal surveillance of the press. Back in 2012, the Obama’s Department of Justice spied on the Associated Press, tapping around 20 different phone lines — including cell phone and home lines — that captured the private conversations of at least 100 staffers who worked for the organization.
Moreover, the Obama administration kept records of all outgoing calls “for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters” and the main line used by reporters in the House of Representatives, all of which was an egregious abuse of power.
The Justice Department had already spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails, and tracking his movements. Holder, by the way, shopped the case to three separate judges, until he found one who let him name Rosen as a co-conspirator in the crime of reporting news the administration didn't want publicized.
If Trump had done something like this the howls of media outrage would be deafening. As it was, the media meekly acquiesced since, after all, to protest too loudly would make the man they had apotheosized look tawdry and corrupt.
The reason Biden can say that there were no scandals or lies during his time on the Obama team is that scandals and lies only become such if the media keeps them relentlessly in the public eye.
But when the media works with an administration to keep the public in the dark about the corruption and shenanigans, as they did throughout the Obama years, then the stench of scandal quickly dissipates, and it becomes easy for someone like Uncle Joe, who seems to believe that the truth is whatever he says it is, to deny that things ever smelled bad at all.
For instance, how can anyone who has a grip on reality make the claim that under Obama there was never "a hint of scandal or a lie"? Yet that's the claim that Biden made at a recent campaign rally.
Now, I know this is Uncle Joe Biden we're talking about, and that everyone takes Joe's remarks with a chunk of salt, but still. Hasn't he heard of Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, the VA scandal, the Benghazi scandal or any of the scandals surrounding the 2016 election involving illegalities perpetrated by members of the FBI and perhaps others in which his administration is at least hinted at having been implicated?
Hasn't Mr. Biden heard of Mr. Obama's promises that if you like your doctor you'll be able to keep your doctor or that Obamacare will bring the cost of insurance coverage down?
Politifact awarded Obama the “Lie of the Year” in 2013 for that howler, and former Attorney General Eric Holder received a contempt citation from the House Oversight Committee for the botched gun-running Operation Fast and Furious.
And what about the scandal surrounding President Obama's deal to trade five hardened terrorists detained at Guantanamo for Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier held by the Taliban for five years after deserting his post and defecting to the Taliban?
And what about the lies told by Obama administration officials about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that took the lives of four Americans? Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in an email to her daughter that, contrary to the administration's public statements, the September 11, 2012 attack on the consulate was a “planned attack” by al-Qaeda and “not a protest.”
And maybe Mr. Biden has simply forgotten about the scandal surrounding the $400 million in cash secretly bestowed upon the Iranian mullahs on the same day the Iran nuclear deal was formally adopted by the Islamic Republic and four American prisoners released, or the reporting by Politico’s Josh Meyer which revealed the Obama administration’s simultaneous efforts to undermine investigations into a drug-trafficking ring in the United States run by Iran's proxy Hezbollah.
Maybe his memory has failed him, too, regarding the scandal which attached to the Obama administration's illegal surveillance of the press. Back in 2012, the Obama’s Department of Justice spied on the Associated Press, tapping around 20 different phone lines — including cell phone and home lines — that captured the private conversations of at least 100 staffers who worked for the organization.
Moreover, the Obama administration kept records of all outgoing calls “for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters” and the main line used by reporters in the House of Representatives, all of which was an egregious abuse of power.
The Justice Department had already spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails, and tracking his movements. Holder, by the way, shopped the case to three separate judges, until he found one who let him name Rosen as a co-conspirator in the crime of reporting news the administration didn't want publicized.
If Trump had done something like this the howls of media outrage would be deafening. As it was, the media meekly acquiesced since, after all, to protest too loudly would make the man they had apotheosized look tawdry and corrupt.
The reason Biden can say that there were no scandals or lies during his time on the Obama team is that scandals and lies only become such if the media keeps them relentlessly in the public eye.
But when the media works with an administration to keep the public in the dark about the corruption and shenanigans, as they did throughout the Obama years, then the stench of scandal quickly dissipates, and it becomes easy for someone like Uncle Joe, who seems to believe that the truth is whatever he says it is, to deny that things ever smelled bad at all.
Saturday, June 15, 2019
Lenin and Lennon
Is it unfair to allege, as has others have often noted, that today's Left seems largely to be comprised of disciples of both Lenin and Lennon? What's meant by this is that there certainly seem to be those on the left who are hard-core ideologues in the mold of Vladimir Lenin. For these folks politics is about power, and whatever works to achieve it is justified.
They agree with Lenin's clever aphorism that "in order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs." They also agree with Lenin when he said that he "repudiates all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order..."
For the Leninists violence, censorship, intimidation, dissimulation, and judicial prejudice are all morally legitimate means to be employed in the struggle to bring about the rule of the people.
Their aim is to do away with all laws, customs and institutions, such as the church, which have traditionally served as bulwarks against moral chaos. They wish to overwhelm these institutions, both legal and religious, until they collapse under the strain, and they expect to be able to exploit the ensuing disorder to assert their own power and impose a socialist utopia.
If we picture the Left as a series of concentric circles, like a target, the Leninists might occupy the center ring. They're not particularly numerous, but they're extremely dedicated and have an outsized influence on our politics and culture.
The next ring out from the center are the Lennonists who aspire to a world similar to that of their Leninist brethren but who are of a rather different psychological timber. The Lennonists also want to do away with traditional institutions like the church and anything else, such as national borders, that stands in the way of individual autonomy and the "brotherhood of man," but they're much more mellow about their aspirations.
Whereas the Leninists bring to mind Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, Lennonists are more like Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry, Be Happy.
The Lennonist creed is captured in the lyrics of John Lennon's Imagine:
The third and outer ring of the Left is the largest in terms of numbers and is comprised of neither Leninists nor Lennonists, but of folks only tangentially engaged in our day to day politics. Their understanding of what's going on consists of vague impressions picked up as scraps of information overheard here and there, or snippets gleaned from social media.
Their worldview is simple: Conservatives are bad. Progressives are good, and anything which would upset that settled understanding is ignored and dismissed. They haven't the time or interest to study or think about the affairs of state and thus exert no real influence on those affairs.
There are others, of course, bright people and good, who, though they'd call themselves liberals or progressives, fall into none of these rings, but, they're not wielding many of the levers of influence either. The steering wheel of the Left of 2019 is firmly in the grip, it seems, of the Leninists and the Lennonists.
They agree with Lenin's clever aphorism that "in order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs." They also agree with Lenin when he said that he "repudiates all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order..."
For the Leninists violence, censorship, intimidation, dissimulation, and judicial prejudice are all morally legitimate means to be employed in the struggle to bring about the rule of the people.
Their aim is to do away with all laws, customs and institutions, such as the church, which have traditionally served as bulwarks against moral chaos. They wish to overwhelm these institutions, both legal and religious, until they collapse under the strain, and they expect to be able to exploit the ensuing disorder to assert their own power and impose a socialist utopia.
If we picture the Left as a series of concentric circles, like a target, the Leninists might occupy the center ring. They're not particularly numerous, but they're extremely dedicated and have an outsized influence on our politics and culture.
The next ring out from the center are the Lennonists who aspire to a world similar to that of their Leninist brethren but who are of a rather different psychological timber. The Lennonists also want to do away with traditional institutions like the church and anything else, such as national borders, that stands in the way of individual autonomy and the "brotherhood of man," but they're much more mellow about their aspirations.
Whereas the Leninists bring to mind Survivor's Eye of the Tiger, Lennonists are more like Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry, Be Happy.
The Lennonist creed is captured in the lyrics of John Lennon's Imagine:
Imagine there's no heavenYes, yes, it's incredibly naive and, well, unimaginable, but it's precisely the dream of those secular progressives who wish to impose a socialist economy while doing away with national borders and religion. The proponents of the Green New Deal, for example, are at least sympathetic to Lennonism.
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today ...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
The third and outer ring of the Left is the largest in terms of numbers and is comprised of neither Leninists nor Lennonists, but of folks only tangentially engaged in our day to day politics. Their understanding of what's going on consists of vague impressions picked up as scraps of information overheard here and there, or snippets gleaned from social media.
Their worldview is simple: Conservatives are bad. Progressives are good, and anything which would upset that settled understanding is ignored and dismissed. They haven't the time or interest to study or think about the affairs of state and thus exert no real influence on those affairs.
There are others, of course, bright people and good, who, though they'd call themselves liberals or progressives, fall into none of these rings, but, they're not wielding many of the levers of influence either. The steering wheel of the Left of 2019 is firmly in the grip, it seems, of the Leninists and the Lennonists.
Friday, June 14, 2019
Senator Gillibrand's Peculiar Reasoning
It's hard to take someone seriously who makes claims such as the one made by New York senator and Democratic presidential aspirant Kirsten Gillibrand the other day. In an interview with the Des Moines Register in Iowa Senator Gillibrand opined that being pro-life was not much different than being racist.
Three claims in particular highlight simultaneously Ms. Gillibrand's marvelous ability to pander to her audience while also demonstrating an unfortunate inability to think through what she's saying.
Let's begin with this one:
Moreover, in what sense is telling a mother that she cannot end the life of her child comparable to racism or anti-semitism? Indeed, isn't it more accurate to say that the worst episode of anti-semitism in the history of the world was predicated upon the assumption that millions of people were less than fully human. Isn't that exactly the assumption that Senator Gillibrand is advocating?
The senator next declared that she respects “the rights of every American to hold their religious beliefs true to themselves,” whatever that means, but went on to suggest that the principle of “separation of church and state” demands that “ultra-radical conservative judges and justices” not “impose their faith on Americans.”
Evidently, Ms. Gillibrand fails to recognize that opposition to abortion is not opposed solely for religious reasons. Indeed, someone should inform the senator that there are atheists who are pro-life. Opposition to abortion is motivated by humanitarian reasons which, to be sure, are themselves often motivated by religious convictions.
I wonder if Ms. Gillibrand would've raised an objection to judges "imposing their faith on Americans" when, for reasons of religious principle, many politicos and jurists supported civil rights legislation, welfare laws and sanctuary cities.
But, set that aside. If we take these two passages together an even more peculiar aspect of the senator's thinking emerges. She asserts in the first quote that pro-lifers wish to deny a basic human right to women and in the second quote that pro-lifers should keep their religion out of matters like this.
So, the question presents itself, where does Ms. Gillibrand think human rights come from if not from a fundamentally religious understanding of persons? If she wants to talk about human rights she has to allow for the discussion of religion since religion, or at least theism, is the only ultimate foundation for non-arbitrary human rights that there can be.
Surely secularism offers no sound basis for them. On any non-theistic worldview human beings are simply machines, computers made of meat, as MIT professor Marvin Minsky once put it. Machines have no free will, no dignity, no responsibility and no rights of any kind.
So, either we speak of human rights and allow religious views to be brought to bear on the matter or we banish both religious motivations along with all talk of human rights. We can't have one without the other.
The third passage is equally disappointing for anyone who expects a modicum of philosophical sophistication from a United States senator. Having just declared that religion has no place in the public square she delivers herself of this:
Thus, Ms. Gillibrand has plopped us right back into the realm of religious belief.
It's an inescapable fact that only those people who believe that there's a transcendent moral authority to whom we are all accountable can talk coherently or meaningfully about either human rights or morality. If Ms. Gillibrand wants to expel such people from the public square she should at least have the good sense to also refrain from talking about human rights and morality and just admit that her views on abortion have nothing to do with either.
Put differently, her pronouncements in the Des Moines Register, if we grant that they were heartfelt and not just an instance of Bidenesque political expediency, reflect views rooted in emotion, not logic or reason.
Ms. Gillibrand's comments are vulnerable to other criticisms as well, and Chrissy Clark at The Federalist does a fine job of illuminating some of these.
Three claims in particular highlight simultaneously Ms. Gillibrand's marvelous ability to pander to her audience while also demonstrating an unfortunate inability to think through what she's saying.
Let's begin with this one:
I think there’s some issues that have such moral clarity that we have as a society decided that the other side is not acceptable. Imagine saying that it’s okay to appoint a judge who’s racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic. Telling– asking someone to appoint someone who takes away basic human rights of any group of people in America, I don’t think that those are political issues anymore.Has it occured to Ms Gillibrand that appointing pro-choice judges would deprive the weakest, most vulnerable group of people in America of their basic human rights? Or does Ms. Gillibrand think, like southern plantation owners did, that only some human beings have human rights?
Moreover, in what sense is telling a mother that she cannot end the life of her child comparable to racism or anti-semitism? Indeed, isn't it more accurate to say that the worst episode of anti-semitism in the history of the world was predicated upon the assumption that millions of people were less than fully human. Isn't that exactly the assumption that Senator Gillibrand is advocating?
The senator next declared that she respects “the rights of every American to hold their religious beliefs true to themselves,” whatever that means, but went on to suggest that the principle of “separation of church and state” demands that “ultra-radical conservative judges and justices” not “impose their faith on Americans.”
Evidently, Ms. Gillibrand fails to recognize that opposition to abortion is not opposed solely for religious reasons. Indeed, someone should inform the senator that there are atheists who are pro-life. Opposition to abortion is motivated by humanitarian reasons which, to be sure, are themselves often motivated by religious convictions.
I wonder if Ms. Gillibrand would've raised an objection to judges "imposing their faith on Americans" when, for reasons of religious principle, many politicos and jurists supported civil rights legislation, welfare laws and sanctuary cities.
But, set that aside. If we take these two passages together an even more peculiar aspect of the senator's thinking emerges. She asserts in the first quote that pro-lifers wish to deny a basic human right to women and in the second quote that pro-lifers should keep their religion out of matters like this.
So, the question presents itself, where does Ms. Gillibrand think human rights come from if not from a fundamentally religious understanding of persons? If she wants to talk about human rights she has to allow for the discussion of religion since religion, or at least theism, is the only ultimate foundation for non-arbitrary human rights that there can be.
Surely secularism offers no sound basis for them. On any non-theistic worldview human beings are simply machines, computers made of meat, as MIT professor Marvin Minsky once put it. Machines have no free will, no dignity, no responsibility and no rights of any kind.
So, either we speak of human rights and allow religious views to be brought to bear on the matter or we banish both religious motivations along with all talk of human rights. We can't have one without the other.
The third passage is equally disappointing for anyone who expects a modicum of philosophical sophistication from a United States senator. Having just declared that religion has no place in the public square she delivers herself of this:
There’s no moral equivalency when it comes to racism. And I do not think there’s a moral equivalency when it comes to changing laws that deny women reproductive freedom.Now she's talking about morality, and the same principle that we invoked with regard to human rights applies equally to morality. Moral talk is empty nonsense apart from some objective basis for it, and the only objective basis for morality is a transcendent moral authority. Everything else leads to subjectivism of one form or another.
Thus, Ms. Gillibrand has plopped us right back into the realm of religious belief.
It's an inescapable fact that only those people who believe that there's a transcendent moral authority to whom we are all accountable can talk coherently or meaningfully about either human rights or morality. If Ms. Gillibrand wants to expel such people from the public square she should at least have the good sense to also refrain from talking about human rights and morality and just admit that her views on abortion have nothing to do with either.
Put differently, her pronouncements in the Des Moines Register, if we grant that they were heartfelt and not just an instance of Bidenesque political expediency, reflect views rooted in emotion, not logic or reason.
Ms. Gillibrand's comments are vulnerable to other criticisms as well, and Chrissy Clark at The Federalist does a fine job of illuminating some of these.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Abandoning the Mind
In his recently-released book Darwin Devolves biochemist Michael Behe argues that the genome of living things is the product not of material or physical forces, but of a mind. Mind is the ultimate reality and underlies both the cosmos and life.
This is, of course, anathema to materialists who deny there is any such thing as an immaterial mind, whether cosmic or human. Mind, materialists allege, is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain like we use the word digestion to describe the function of the stomach.
On this view, the brain is like an advanced computer that takes electrochemical inputs and converts them into outputs, but this analogy to a computer surely fails to fully capture what's going on in our cognitive experience.
For example, there are a host of cognitive capabilities and experiences of which humans are capable but computers are not. Human beings are aware, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, fragrance and warmth.
In addition, they appreciate beauty, humor, meaning and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math. They have a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas.
Computers have none of this. There's a vast chasm separating matter and conscious human experience. The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel.
Some materialist philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland have concluded that since it's difficult to see how these capabilities and experiences can be produced by the mere exchange of electrons amongst atoms arrayed along a neuron it must be the case that these phenomena are actually just illusions of some sort.
The Churchlands write, that "common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist," but even an illusion is a mental state that's hard to explain in terms of chemical reactions. How does a molecular interaction give rise to an illusion?
Moreover, there's something very odd about philosophers saying that the beliefs they hold, write books about, and teach their students - beliefs about materialism, for example - don't really exist. It's equally peculiar that philosophers would insist that their understanding of materialism is nothing more than chemical reactions in their brains. If that's so, why should anyone think it's true? Chemical reactions are not the sort of thing that can be either true or false.
Philosopher Paul Feyerabend noted once that, "Practically any version of materialism would severely undermine common-sense psychology," and indeed he was right.
As neuroscientist Michael Egnor drolly observes in the video below, materialists "...understand that materialism cannot explain the mind [but] rather than abandoning materialism, they abandon the mind.”
The video is courtesy of Evolution News and is the second in the series titled Science Uprising.
This is, of course, anathema to materialists who deny there is any such thing as an immaterial mind, whether cosmic or human. Mind, materialists allege, is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain like we use the word digestion to describe the function of the stomach.
On this view, the brain is like an advanced computer that takes electrochemical inputs and converts them into outputs, but this analogy to a computer surely fails to fully capture what's going on in our cognitive experience.
For example, there are a host of cognitive capabilities and experiences of which humans are capable but computers are not. Human beings are aware, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, fragrance and warmth.
In addition, they appreciate beauty, humor, meaning and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math. They have a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas.
Computers have none of this. There's a vast chasm separating matter and conscious human experience. The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel.
Some materialist philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland have concluded that since it's difficult to see how these capabilities and experiences can be produced by the mere exchange of electrons amongst atoms arrayed along a neuron it must be the case that these phenomena are actually just illusions of some sort.
The Churchlands write, that "common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist," but even an illusion is a mental state that's hard to explain in terms of chemical reactions. How does a molecular interaction give rise to an illusion?
Moreover, there's something very odd about philosophers saying that the beliefs they hold, write books about, and teach their students - beliefs about materialism, for example - don't really exist. It's equally peculiar that philosophers would insist that their understanding of materialism is nothing more than chemical reactions in their brains. If that's so, why should anyone think it's true? Chemical reactions are not the sort of thing that can be either true or false.
Philosopher Paul Feyerabend noted once that, "Practically any version of materialism would severely undermine common-sense psychology," and indeed he was right.
As neuroscientist Michael Egnor drolly observes in the video below, materialists "...understand that materialism cannot explain the mind [but] rather than abandoning materialism, they abandon the mind.”
The video is courtesy of Evolution News and is the second in the series titled Science Uprising.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Three-Headed Monster
Melissa Langsam Braunstein writing at The Federalist wonders whether America is beginning to suffer the same growing anti-semitism that afflicts our European friends:
Braunstein quotes a non-Jewish woman who was a lifelong member of the (presumably British) Labour Party who quit the party because of its overt anti-Semitism. Paraphrasing Martin Niemöller, the Lutheran pastor who lived through the Nazi era in Germany, she declared that, "It all started on the campuses, and we did nothing because they were students. We did nothing when they joined the party because it was just the left-wing fringe, and now they’ve taken over my party, and it’s not mine anymore."
Could this be happening here? Many Americans, eager to avoid the appearance of anti-Muslim bias, seem reluctant to speak out against Muslim hatred of Jews. Progressives, not wanting to alienate useful allies on the left, are reluctant to speak out against the haters among their own number. The only anti-Semites who are not being ignored or given a pass are those on the far-right who are generally condemned by both liberals and conservatives.
The insidiousness of race or ethnic hatred must not be tolerated by anyone, however, and to the extent that it is, whether on campus or in the halls of Congress, it's a sign that we are slipping back toward the darkness of another Kristallnacht and 1938.
It’s an unavoidable, even urgent question. After deadly attacks in Pittsburgh and Poway, along with openly anti-Semitic rhetoric in the U.S. Congress and anti-Semitic imagery in The New York Times, the climate has clearly changed.Braunstein portrays anti-Semitism in the U.S. as a beast with three heads:
The world’s oldest hatred, which began a resurgence in Europe at the turn of the century... is a three-headed monster: it exists on the far-left, the far-right, and among Islamists.Actually, I don't think it's confined to just the far left. It seems to be mainstream among progressive students and faculty on many university campuses and becoming increasingly so among the Democratic caucus in Congress.
Braunstein quotes a non-Jewish woman who was a lifelong member of the (presumably British) Labour Party who quit the party because of its overt anti-Semitism. Paraphrasing Martin Niemöller, the Lutheran pastor who lived through the Nazi era in Germany, she declared that, "It all started on the campuses, and we did nothing because they were students. We did nothing when they joined the party because it was just the left-wing fringe, and now they’ve taken over my party, and it’s not mine anymore."
Could this be happening here? Many Americans, eager to avoid the appearance of anti-Muslim bias, seem reluctant to speak out against Muslim hatred of Jews. Progressives, not wanting to alienate useful allies on the left, are reluctant to speak out against the haters among their own number. The only anti-Semites who are not being ignored or given a pass are those on the far-right who are generally condemned by both liberals and conservatives.
The insidiousness of race or ethnic hatred must not be tolerated by anyone, however, and to the extent that it is, whether on campus or in the halls of Congress, it's a sign that we are slipping back toward the darkness of another Kristallnacht and 1938.
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Three Metaethical Tests
A young friend recently published a paper (You can find it via the Table of Contents here) in the journal Tolle Lege in which he offered a critique of the late Philippa Foot's attempt to derive ethical norms in the context of a naturalistic (atheistic) worldview.
His paper is well-conceived, and in writing to commend him for his work I added some thoughts of my own on the subject. I opined that it seems to me that any ethic, naturalistic or otherwise, has to accomplish three things in order to be credible:
1. It has to avoid David Hume's Is/Ought fallacy (sometimes called, appropriately enough, the naturalistic fallacy). In other words, as the great Scottish skeptic taught us, we cannot say that because things are a certain way that therefore they ought to be that way. Human beings have certain moral feelings, but we cannot argue that those sentiments are right just because we have them.
After all, we also have feelings of hatred, selfishness, avarice, violence, etc., but most of us don't think that behaving in accord with those feelings would be morally proper.
2. It has to explain the sense in which the idea of a moral wrong can be meaningful if there's no ultimate accountability for one's behavior. In other words, if a tyrant is rewarded with great wealth and power and dies old and content in his bed, in what sense was the suffering he caused others wrong? It seems to me that "wrong" as an ontic entity can only exist if there also exists ultimate justice and inevitable accountability in the cosmos, and those can only exist if God exists and naturalism is false.
3. Related to #2 is the problem of explaining what we mean when we say that "X is wrong." Is X wrong merely because other people don't like it, as Hume suggested, or is it wrong because it somehow violates the moral order of the cosmos? If it's the former then "X is wrong" is merely a subjective expression of personal preference or an emotive reaction to something that's personally repugnant, like exclaiming "ugh!"
On the other hand, if X is wrong because it offends against the moral order of the cosmos, an order that somehow mysteriously imposes obligations upon us, then the naturalist has to explain how an impersonal, purely material world can levy such obligations or possess any kind of "moral order" in the first place.
It's hard to see how a naturalistic ethic, based as it is on the assumption that the physical universe is all there is and that human beings are just an ephemeral collection of atoms and molecules, can muster the metaphysical resources to meet any of these tests.
That being so, it follows that when naturalists make moral judgments or use moral language, they're doing nothing more than expressing their own approbation or revulsion, like saying "yummy" at being presented with a dish of one's favorite ice cream, or shuddering at the suggestion of mixing it with tuna fish.
That so few naturalists realize the utter subjectivity, arbitrariness and vacuity of their moral views, whatever those views happen to be, is an interesting sociological phenomenon, as is the fact that so few others ever seem to call them on it.
His paper is well-conceived, and in writing to commend him for his work I added some thoughts of my own on the subject. I opined that it seems to me that any ethic, naturalistic or otherwise, has to accomplish three things in order to be credible:
1. It has to avoid David Hume's Is/Ought fallacy (sometimes called, appropriately enough, the naturalistic fallacy). In other words, as the great Scottish skeptic taught us, we cannot say that because things are a certain way that therefore they ought to be that way. Human beings have certain moral feelings, but we cannot argue that those sentiments are right just because we have them.
After all, we also have feelings of hatred, selfishness, avarice, violence, etc., but most of us don't think that behaving in accord with those feelings would be morally proper.
2. It has to explain the sense in which the idea of a moral wrong can be meaningful if there's no ultimate accountability for one's behavior. In other words, if a tyrant is rewarded with great wealth and power and dies old and content in his bed, in what sense was the suffering he caused others wrong? It seems to me that "wrong" as an ontic entity can only exist if there also exists ultimate justice and inevitable accountability in the cosmos, and those can only exist if God exists and naturalism is false.
3. Related to #2 is the problem of explaining what we mean when we say that "X is wrong." Is X wrong merely because other people don't like it, as Hume suggested, or is it wrong because it somehow violates the moral order of the cosmos? If it's the former then "X is wrong" is merely a subjective expression of personal preference or an emotive reaction to something that's personally repugnant, like exclaiming "ugh!"
On the other hand, if X is wrong because it offends against the moral order of the cosmos, an order that somehow mysteriously imposes obligations upon us, then the naturalist has to explain how an impersonal, purely material world can levy such obligations or possess any kind of "moral order" in the first place.
It's hard to see how a naturalistic ethic, based as it is on the assumption that the physical universe is all there is and that human beings are just an ephemeral collection of atoms and molecules, can muster the metaphysical resources to meet any of these tests.
That being so, it follows that when naturalists make moral judgments or use moral language, they're doing nothing more than expressing their own approbation or revulsion, like saying "yummy" at being presented with a dish of one's favorite ice cream, or shuddering at the suggestion of mixing it with tuna fish.
That so few naturalists realize the utter subjectivity, arbitrariness and vacuity of their moral views, whatever those views happen to be, is an interesting sociological phenomenon, as is the fact that so few others ever seem to call them on it.
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