The Nature of the Soul

Usually when people talk about the soul and life beyond the death of the physical body they draw looks of incredulity and even scorn from fashionably skeptical materialists, but when a scientist as prominent as physicist Roger Penrose talks about it, well, then the skeptics should at least listen.

Penrose's theory is that the soul consists of information stored at the sub-atomic level in microtubules in the body's cells. At death this information somehow escapes the confines of the microtubules and drifts off into the universe. He claims to have evidence to support this hypothesis, and perhaps he does.

I haven't seen the evidence, but I'd like to know how the information "knows" that the body has died and what mechanism controls it. I'd also like to know what the information is about, how it functions without a physical body, and what disembodied information leaking out into the universe "looks" like.

Anyway, I'm not altogether skeptical of Penrose's theory. I've long advocated the view that, if we do have a soul (as a substance that's neither physical nor mental - neither body nor mind), that it consists of information. In this I'm in agreement with Penrose.

Where I differ from him is that in my view the soul is the totality of true propositions about a person - an exhaustive description of the person at every moment of his or her existence. It's the essence of the person. But whereas Penrose locates the information in cellular microtubules I posit that the information is located in a vast database, i.e. the mind of God. In God's mind there is, so to speak, a "file" containing a complete description of every person who has ever lived.

Since the information is located in the mind of God it's indestructible - immortal - unless God chooses to destroy it. Each of us is therefore potentially eternal.

To take this line of thinking one more step, perhaps when our physical bodies die our "file" is "downloaded," in whole or in part, into another body situated in a different world, or at least in a different set of dimensions than what we experience in this world. It would be a different kind of body, perhaps, but a body all the same.

On this view, the soul is not something wraith-like that's contained in us, but rather it's "in" God. As with a computer file, he could choose to delete it altogether or to express it in any "format" he sees fit.

In any case, if this hypothesis is at all close to describing the way things are, the death of our bodies is not the death of us, and, if physical death is not the end of our existence, we're each confronted with some pretty serious implications.

In-Group Preference, Out-Group Hostility

Here's a theoretical question: Is it ever okay for a business to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity? No, you say? Then you're not up on the theory of in-group preference/out-group hostility. A piece by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air last spring gives us a nice introduction.

A letter-writer to the New York Times Magazine (paywall) recounts an interesting experience he had in a Chinese restaurant with this bit of Orwellian new-think.

Here's the situation as recounted by Jazz Shaw:

A Chinese restaurant the writer frequents has two menus. There’s a less expensive lunch menu with a lot of specials on it and their more expensive, fancy dinner menu. The writer (who is white) noticed that when Chinese customers showed up, the wait staff (also Chinese) almost always immediately gave them the cheaper lunch menu. But white customers were uniformly given the more expensive dinner menu.

When the writer asked for a lunch menu instead they happily gave it to them, but he’s concerned that other white customers might not know about the cheaper lunch menu and were getting overcharged. The writer wonders if he should intervene by telling other white patrons about the lunch menu.

The letter was answered by a columnist for the Times named Kwame Anthony Appiah, a British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher. Appiah responds:

In the scenario you describe, the restaurant’s Chinese staff members are partial to their Chinese neighbors. They give them special treatment. They don’t have anything against non-Chinese, as they show by happily giving you the lunch menu when you ask for it. So they’re motivated by in-group preference, not by out-group hostility.

Some people think that giving preferential treatment to members of your own ethnic kind is as bad as hostility to outsiders. Others even deny that such a distinction can be drawn. I think that’s wrong.... Partiality needn’t be prejudicial.

Granted, we’d feel very different about white servers favoring white customers. But that’s for two reasons. One is a suspicion that, in our society, behavior of that sort would in fact be motivated by negative feelings toward nonwhites — that is, by racism. Another is that whites are a majority in this country.

According to Appiah there's nothing wrong with a member of a minority giving preferential treatment to a fellow minority, that's simply "in-group preference." The problem arises when whites do it because then it's obviously not in-group preference but rather "out-group hostility."

Jazz Shaw follows up:

What’s the difference you might ask? Well, as the author goes on to explain in the next paragraph, it’s based on your skin color. It’s perfectly fine to treat white customers differently than Asian diners if you are Asian because you simply have a preference for your “in-group.”

But if you’re a white person behaving in the same fashion, you’re exhibiting “out-group hostility” which is racist. But if you’re not white, as Appiah writes, “partiality needn’t be prejudicial.”

So, once again we see that racism - whatever that very malleable word might mean nowadays - is a disease only white people are afflicted with. This is the sort of fatuous double standard that has soured so many folks on the whole subject of race in America.

If the word "racism" has come to mean "anything white people do" then the word is a tendentious absurdity, reminiscent of Alice's discussion with Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."

Democrat Macho Men

There was a time, it seems so long ago now, when folks on the left flattered themselves to think that they were kind, gentle and non-violent and that it was those "right-wingers" who were mean-spirited and violent.

But history has a way of reversing such things and turning them all topsy-turvey. The violence and mean-spiritedness now, especially of the rhetorical sort, but also actual physical violence, emanates far more often from the left than from the right. Just ask Rep. Steve Scalise or almost anyone who has the chutzpah to wear a MAGA hat in most urban, and many suburban, precincts.

Take, for example, just one form of this violence, the expressions of desire among prominent people in our politics and culture to do physical harm to President Trump. It really is an unprecedented phenomenon, and it's as frightening as it is repugnant.

Victor Davis Hanson mentions a number of instances of this in a recent article at National Review. He writes that the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president will haunt the country long after Trump is gone, and claims, rightly, I think, that such rhetoric is not only ugly in itself, but diminishes the psychological inhibitions that would ordinarily prevent deranged souls from acting on such fantasies.

For example, former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he'd like to punch Mr. Trump. As Hanson describes it:

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.’”

More recently the aging Mr. Biden boasted that,

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? . . . He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

What a man! If we were electing Mr. Testosterone instead of Mr. President who could not vote for Joe Biden?

Hanson asks us to imagine the media response had Dick Cheney ever said such a thing about Barack Obama. Yet Biden says it about Trump, and all we hear are the sounds of silence.

Speaking of testosterone, Senator Corey Booker (D., N.J.), another presidential candidate, felt it necessary to let us know that he's every bit as macho as Mr. Biden:

Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.

Booker should hope, should he live long enough to reach his seventies, that he has even half the stamina Mr. Trump apparently has.

These odious asseverations of one's machismo - from representatives of a party, no less, many members of which bewail "toxic masculinity" - are actually just a political version of what we've been hearing from our Hollywood celebrities.

Hanson mentions another septuagenarian on Ageless Male, actor Robert De Niro, who has repeatedly expressed a desire to physically assault Trump. A month before Trump was elected, De Niro said of him, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Since then, and presumably because De Niro has been thwarted in carrying out his fantasies only by the diligence of the Secret Service, he has settled for a series of “F*** Trump” outbursts.

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), just hours after she was sworn in, claimed at a rally that she had promised her young son that “we’re going to impeach the motherf***er.” I hope the rally wasn't for mothers seeking tips on how to be good role models for their children. Her willingness to employ such vulgar language with her son tells us much more about the sort of person Ms. Tlaib is than the sort of person Mr. Trump is.

Hanson goes on to write:

On the day Trump was inaugurated, the pop music star Madonna told a large crowd outside the White House that she had thought of blowing it up.

A few months later, comedian Kathy Griffin issued a video where she held up a bloody facsimile of a decapitated Trump head.

Since then, Hollywood and the entertainment industry have been in constant competition to imagine the most gruesome way of killing off Trump: stabbing, blowing up, burning, shooting, suffocating, decapitating, or beating.

Celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O’Donnell, Mickey Rourke, and Larry Wilmore seem to relish the media attention as they discuss or demonstrate what they seem to think are creative ways to kill the president.

This didn't start with Trump's election, though, as Hanson reminds us:

We saw something similar to the current climate of threatened violence during the reelection campaign and second presidential term of George W. Bush.

A few columnists, documentary filmmakers, and novelists went well beyond the boilerplate invective of calling Bush a fascist, racist, Nazi, and war criminal, and imagined his assassination in a variety of ways.

Whenever attempts have been made on the life of a politician over the last twenty years or so, Democrats have been quick to blame (absurdly) rhetoric coming from conservative talk radio and other venues for creating a climate of hate, fear and division. Yet no prominent conservative figure ever spoke about any Democrat, much less a president, with the rhetorical violence many Democrats are employing against President Trump. Where are the liberal newspaper editorials condemning the hate speech that's practically gushing from the left nowadays? As Hanson says,

[T]he current climate is becoming scary. Those who brag of wanting to violently attack the president should worry about where their boasts will finally lead if any of the thousands of James Hodgkinsons in America take such threats seriously and act on them.

Donald Trump is a controversial president, no doubt. He replies to his critics with strong, often inflammatory invective. Yet the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president is lowering the bar of assassination, and it will haunt the country long after Trump is gone.

The juvenile chest thumping of such as Messers. Biden, Booker and De Niro is certainly deplorable and disgusting but most of all it's dangerously irresponsible.

Langdon Gilkey's Disillusionment

Langdon Gilkey was a theologian and philosopher who, as a young man with a degree from Harvard, went to China to teach English and philosophy. While he was there WWII broke out and the Japanese invaded China. Gilkey was detained and held in a facility with 2000 others under very trying conditions.

He writes about his experience in his 1966 memoir titled Shantung Compound. In the book he describes himself at the time as holding the belief that human reason would enable him and his fellow prisoners to transcend their conditions and build a community based on their common humanity and solidarity. He also believed that religion was a "frill" that wasn't necessary for people to seek to advance the common good, a goal that "any unbelieving naturalist (atheist) can easily avow."

For a while his optimistic humanism was affirmed, but as time wore on he began to experience disillusionment. His worldview, his view of his fellow man, suffered a series of blows, but one in particular was especially jarring.

Gilkey was chosen by his fellows to head up the committee in charge of housing. Conditions were extremely cramped and the closeness led to a lot of friction. One particular housing unit had eleven inmates in a room that could comfortably accommodate only half that number, and Gilkey learned that an adjacent unit of exactly the same size had only nine inmates. The unit with nine was crowded but not as badly as the unit with eleven.

Gilkey thought that there was an obvious and rational solution: Send one of the inmates from the more crowded unit to the less crowded unit and both would have ten inmates and be on equal terms. This was a just and moral solution, he thought, that any reasonable person would accept.

But he was disappointed to find that the less crowded unit refused to accept a tenth inmate. They told Gilkey in so many words that it was not in their self-interest to make their quarters more crowded than they already were. Gilkey argued passionately that they were being irrational and unfair, but his appeals fell on deaf ears. They even threatened Gilkey with physical violence if he persisted.

He concluded from this that if rationality conflicts with self-interest men will often choose self-interest. Rationality and logic were insufficient to move men to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.

In other words, although Gilkey doesn't put it in these terms, he was confronted with a conflict between utilitarianism and egoism, and he found to his dismay that egoism frequently prevailed, even among otherwise rational men.

I disagree, though, with his conclusion that these men were being irrational. I think they were acting perfectly rationally. Gilkey simply assumed that utilitarianism is the rational ethical stance, that we should always seek to promote the greatest good for all, but why should we? Why should anyone care about the well-being of others? Why is it not rational to promote the greatest good for oneself? This is indeed the default position in a secular society. In the absence of any transcendent source of moral imperatives the rational course is to look out for #1, to put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others.

This could only be wrong if there actually is a transcendent moral authority with the power to hold us accountable for our choices and who demands that we care about others at least as much as we care about ourselves. If no such authority exists then egoism makes perfect sense.

People who are repelled by this conclusion and who are convinced that we have a moral obligation to do what is fair for all are tacitly making a case, whether they realize it or not, for the existence of God because such an obligation can only exist if God imposes it upon us.

This is not to say that those who do not believe that God exists will necessarily be egoists. People can certainly choose arbitrarily to live any way they wish. What it means, though, is that there's nothing in atheism that requires one to care about the welfare of others. On atheism egoism is perfectly rational, and any other ethical outlook is purely a matter of subjective preference.

Atheists who think this repugnant should probably rethink their atheism.

Indulging in Make-Believe

Joseph P. Carter is a philosopher and materialist who believes that matter and energy is all there is. On the materialist view there's nothing that cannot be reduced to material stuff - there's no immaterial mind, no soul and, usually, no God.

Carter once wrote about human purpose from a materialist perspective at the NYT's The Stone, and his conclusions, though somewhat subtly stated, are pretty bleak. Here are some excerpts which will help illustrate why:

Purpose is a universal human need. Without it, we feel bereft of meaning and happiness....

But, where does purpose come from? What is it? For over two millenniums, discerning our purpose in the universe has been a primary task of philosophers....

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that our purpose is happiness or eudaemonia, “well-spiritedness.” Happiness is an ordered and prudent life.

I’m certainly no Aristotelian. Not because I reject happiness. Rather, as a materialist, I think there’s nothing intrinsic about the goals and purposes we seek to achieve it. Modern science explicitly jettisons this sort of teleological thinking from our knowledge of the universe. From particle physics to cosmology, we see that the universe operates well without purpose....

What follows from this, whether Carter intends it or not, is the conclusion that whatever means we employ to achieve happiness are justified if they enable us to successfully attain our goal.

In other words, on materialism there are no intrinsically right or wrong means, only those that work and those that don't. If it brings happiness to someone to rape, pillage and murder, such behaviors aren't wrong because the universe knows nothing about value judgments.

Just as the temperature of the coffee and air equalizes, the Earth, our solar system, galaxies and even supermassive black holes will break down to the quantum level, where everything cools to a uniform state.... Eventually everything ends in heat death....

What’s the purpose in that, though?

There isn’t one. At least not fundamentally.... [T]he universe as we understand it tells us nothing about the goal or meaning of existence, let alone our own. In the grand scheme of things, you and I are enormously insignificant.

But, Carter stresses, we're not completely insignificant. We can invent pretend purposes and meanings that occupy and divert our attention enough to enable us to stave off nihilism and existential despair.

We can be important to each other, he insists, we can do things that give us the incentive to get out of bed in the morning, we can even pretend there's real purpose to our lives even though we know there isn't because evolutionary benefits accrue to those who make themselves believe it.

This is depressing, but it's really all that materialism can offer. A materialist can either accept that his life is nothing more than a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", or he can reject materialism. What he can't do is remain a consistent materialist while pretending that somehow life matters.

Jean Paul Sartre observed that "Life ceases to have any meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Or, to put the same thought differently, unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all.

Carter, as one would expect, disagrees with this assessment:

An indifferent universe also offers us a powerful and compelling case for living justly and contentedly because it allows us to anchor our attention here. It teaches us that this life matters and that we alone are responsible for it. Love, friendship and forgiveness are for our benefit. Oppression, war and conflict are self-inflicted.

This seems to me to be a case of whistling past the graveyard. What an indifferent universe does is impress upon us the fact, contrary to Carter's assertion, that there's no compelling case for living justly if living unjustly confers upon us the pleasures and other desiderata of life that we seek. It tells us that we are just dust in the wind and nothing we do will last or matter ultimately. It tells us that love and the rest are merely chemical reactions in our brains and that though they may benefit some people, others may benefit just as much from oppression, war and conflict.

Atheist materialist Richard Dawkins famously wrote that the universe exhibits no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Just blind pitiless indifference. In such a universe right and wrong, good and bad, are entirely subjective. What's right and good for one person may be wrong and bad for another.

When we ask what’s the purpose of the recent gassing of Syrian children in the Idlib Province or the torture and killings of Chechnyan homosexual men, we ought not simply look to God or the universe for explanations but to ourselves, to the entrenched mythologies that drive such actions — then reject them when the institutions they inform amount to acts of horror.

Notice Carter doesn't say we should judge these acts to be evil. On the materialist's view there is no genuine moral evil. Carter avers instead that we can "reject" such deeds, but why, on materialism, should we reject them if they bring us happiness? Why is it wrong for men to treat other men cruelly if they believe it advances their well-being and flourishing? It's hard to see how a materialist would answer that question.

He concludes his article with these words:

One day I will die. So will you. [Everything in the universe] will decay ... as the fundamental particles we’re made of return to the inert state in which everything began.

Perhaps so, but if that's true then nothing we do on this tiny speck of a planet in the extraordinarily brief moment of time we spend here really matters.

Materialism offers no hope, no meaning, no basis for moral action, no reason for enduring the pain and suffering of life. To insist otherwise, as Carter does, is simply to indulge in make-believe.

Defining Racism Down

President Trump has been getting hammered by his progressive opponents for a series of tweets he sent out last weekend criticizing Rep. Elijah Cummings for allowing his congressional district to become "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess."

Here's what the president tweeted in response to Cummings' criticisms of some of his policies:

Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA......

....As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place

Well, this sent the left into orbit. Somehow, these words were perceived, either sincerely or disingenuously, as a racist attack, presumably because the neighborhood Trump referred to is predominately African American or because Cummings is.

It has sadly come to pass in our society that any criticism, regardless of its veracity, levelled at anything or anyone even remotely associated with an African American is ipso facto racist in the minds of today's progressives. How else could what Mr. Trump tweeted be construed as racist unless racism is now to be defined as any negative or disparaging action or remark made about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood?

You didn't vote for Barack Obama? That's interpreted as a sure sign of your racism. You wonder why our jails are filled with young black males? It's because our police and courts are racist. You worry about single motherhood in black communities? You wouldn't if you weren't racist, etc.

The Baltimore Sun printed one of the most vile editorials published by a major newspaper in the modern era in response to Trump's remarks. MSNBC and other progressive outlets repeatedly and with no explanation referred to Trump's tweets as self-evidently racist.

It didn't take long, though, for folks to do a little a digging and discover that Trump's comments were essentially identical to those of Baltimore's previous mayor, Catherine Pugh, herself a black woman:

Is Pugh a racist? Perhaps the definition of racism might be amended to describe racism as any negative or disparaging action or remark made by a white person about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood. That way racism is only a character taint that white people possess. How convenient.

This is apparently the definition accepted by Joy Behar who stated the other day that it's "outrageous and stupid to call a black man a racist":

What's "outrageous and stupid," of course, is the notion that only white people hate others because of the color of their skin.

Well, then it turned out that Trump's characterization of the Baltimore neighborhood in Cummings' district was also essentially identical to how presidential candidate Bernie Sanders described it in 2016 when he compared it to a third world country. Is one of the leftmost Democratic candidates for the presidency in 2020 also a racist?

Perhaps the definition should go through one more iteration and be amended to read that racism is any negative or disparaging action or remark made by a white Republican about a black person and/or his or her neighborhood.

Once we realize that this is in fact the working definition adopted by progressives like Behar and the folks at MSNBC and CNN then their response to Trump's transgressions will begin to make sense, even if their definition doesn't.

Benny Johnson of Turning Point USA did a walking tour of the worst part of the district and interviewed a number of residents. They all pretty much agreed with Trump's assessment. The neighborhood is a disaster.

Some of the residents were white, some black. Were the white residents racists and the black residents not?

The Sun's editorial mentioned above was largely as irrelevant as it was venomous.

The claims it made about Baltimore's attractions (Inner Harbor, Johns Hopkins) are completely beside Mr. Trump's point about the worst parts of Cummings' district, and the language it used to describe the president was far worse than anything Mr. Trump has employed against any of his political adversaries, and certainly worse than anything he said about Cummings.

But the Sun is a left-wing paper and unfortunately the left seems to have found a home in the polemical sewer. They wrote this:

Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.

All because President Trump said about one Baltimore neighborhood what everybody who lives there or has visited there has said about it. When it comes to Trump and/or race the left shows more than a little evidence of having completely lost its collective mind.

Godel, Escher, Bach

Philosopher Walter Myers notes that August will mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. In the preface to the 1999 edition Hofstadter clarifies his purpose in writing the book. Myers writes:

The three luminaries [mathematician Kurt Godel, artist M.C. Escher, composer Johann Sebastian Bach] are not the central figures of the book. The book was intended to ask the fundamental question of how the animate can emerge from the inanimate, or more specifically, how does consciousness arise from inanimate, physical material?

As philosopher and cognitivist scientist David Chalmers has eloquently asked, “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?”

Hofstadter believes he has the answer: the conscious “self” of the human mind emerges from a system of specific, hierarchical patterns of sufficient complexity within the physical substrate of the brain. The self is a phenomenon that rides on top of this complexity to a large degree but is not entirely determined by its underlying physical layers.

In other words, Hofstadter argued that human consciousness is what philosophers call an emergent property. Just as wetness emerges when hydrogen and oxygen combine in a certain way, so, too, does consciousness emerge whenever brain matter reaches a certain level of complexity.

Myers explains that Hofstadter believes this happens in both humans and in the artificial intelligence of computers although he has no theory as to how it does so. Nevertheless, his conviction is that if computers could be designed to model the neural networks of the brain then consciousness will arise.

The models he suggests are very complicated, and, as Myers points out, we're a long way away from generating an artificial analogue to consciousness. Computers still lack the capacity, for example, to understand what they're doing.

Not only do computers not understand in the sense that humans understand a concept or idea, there is a host of cognitive capacities and experiences of which humans are capable that computers would have to achieve in order to be conscious.

Computers would have to be capable, for example, of holding beliefs, of having doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions.

They would have to somehow be programmed to actually experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, guilt, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, fragrance and warmth - not just detect some sort of stimulus but to actually experience these phenomena.

Are those working in the field of AI confident that within the foreseeable future they'll build a machine capable of appreciating beauty, humor, meaning and significance? Will machines ever be able to distinguish between moral good and evil, right and wrong, or apprehend abstract ideas like universals or mathematics (as opposed to just doing computations)?

Unlike machines, human beings have a sense of self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either recent or remote. Indeed, they have a sense of past, present and future. Will the machines of the future be capable of any of this?

To be conscious in the human sense a machine would have to be able to do all of this, it would have to be able to feel. The robot Sonny from the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, machines don't feel. A computer can be programmed to say "I love you," it can be programmed to act as if it does love you, but do AI proponents believe that they'll ever be able to design a computer that actually feels love for you?

Another problem arises in reading Myers' account of Hofstadter's ideas. The complexity of the neuronal systems that give rise to consciousness in human beings is so profound that one wonders how it could ever be accounted for in terms of blind, random evolutionary processes like genetic mutation and natural selection. How did an undirected, random reshuffling and mutation of genes over millions of years produce an organ capable of doing all of the things mentioned above?

As Myers observes, human consciousness is unique among animals. "There is," he writes, "quite simply, no mechanical explanation of how the human mind has emerged from brawling chimpanzees over the course of millions of years of evolution."

The common response that, "Well, regardless whether we can explain how such a prodigy could've happened, it must have done so because, after all, here we are" is really an admission that there's no answer at all.

Why Do Tyrants Ban the Bible?

Eric Metaxas, wrote a column at USA Today several years back in which he suggested some answers to a couple of interesting questions: Why do tyrants almost always ban the Bible, and why do so many secular folks fear it?

Whether one believes that the Bible is the authoritative word of God or is convinced that it's merely a compilation of the literary and historical musings from a long dead civilization, the questions should have resonance, in fact they should have special piquancy for those who hold the latter view.

After all, why would a book of ancient fables and superstitions be feared by those who seek to exercise mind-control over the people? Why not treat it like they would treat Aesop's Fables?

Anyway, here are some excerpts from what Metaxas says:

Every single year the Bible is the world’s best-selling book. In fact, it’s the number one best-selling book in history. But recently it made another, less-coveted list: the American Library Association’s “top 10 most-challenged books of 2015.” This means the Bible is among the most frequently requested to be removed from public libraries.

But what’s so threatening about it? Why could owning one in Stalin’s Russia get you sent to the Gulag, and why is owning one today in North Korea punishable by death? What makes it scarier to some people than anything by Stephen King?

We could start with the radical notion that all human beings are created by God in His image, and are equal in His eyes. This means every human being should be accorded equal dignity and respect. If the wrong people read that, trouble will be sure to follow. And some real troublemakers have read it.

One of them was George Whitefield, who discovered the Bible as a teenager and began preaching the ideas in it all across England. Then he crossed the Atlantic and preached it up and down the thirteen colonies until 80 percent of Americans had heard him in person. They came to see that all authority comes from God, not from any King, and saw it was their right and duty to resist being governed by a tyrant, which led to something we call the American Revolution.

Another historical troublemaker was the British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce. When he read the Bible, he saw that the African slave trade — which was a great boon to the British economy — was nonetheless evil. He spent decades trying to stop it. Slave traders threatened to have him killed, but in 1807, he won his battle and the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire. In 1833, slavery itself was abolished.

In the 20th century, an Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi picked up some ideas from the Bible about non-violent resistance that influenced his views as he led the Indian people to independence. And who could deny the Bible’s impact on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said the Bible led him to choose love and peaceful protest over hatred and violence?

He cited the Sermon on the Mount as his inspiration for the Civil Rights movement, and his concept of the "creative suffering," endured by activists who withstood persecution and police brutality, came from his knowledge of Jesus’ trials and tribulations.

It could be added to these examples that a book that teaches that no earthly authority is ultimate, that men must obey God's law when it conflicts with man's law, that tyrants who abuse their power, which they all do, will answer for their evil, a book that says all that is not going to find favor with dictators.

But why is it often banned from public libraries in countries which ostensibly have freedom of speech? Perhaps one reason is that the Bible defies the secularist orthodoxy that "the cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be" to quote Carl Sagan.

Any book that says otherwise, any book which claims that the physical world is just a shadow of the really real, is simply not to be tolerated, even by those who claim to make a virtue of tolerance. These folks may not be tyrants of the sort who rule North Korea, but they share some aspects of the tyrannical spirit all the same.

To paraphrase Pascal, they despise the Bible, they hate it and fear it may be true.

The Marvelous Hummingbird

If you live in the Western hemisphere, perhaps you've seen hummingbirds flitting about in a garden or at a feeder this summer. You have to be in the Western hemisphere to see these tiny marvels, at least in the wild, because they only occur in this part of the world.

Hummingbirds are among the most beautiful and amazing creatures on earth. They're the smallest birds and the only birds which can fly backwards.

Another fascinating thing about these tiny creatures is how they feed. You can't really see it with the naked eye because it happens so fast and their beaks are buried deep in a flower when they feed, but their tongues are amazingly engineered to take up nectar.

This short video clip illustrates how they do it:

If you see a hummingbird feeding this spring or summer remember what's going on inside that little bird's beak and tongue. You'll likely come away with a much deeper appreciation for these diminutive gems.

This BBC clip gives lovely close-ups of the amazing phenomenon of hummingbird flight. Note how the hummingbird can fly both backwards and sideways. They can also fly upside down, and are the only kind of bird in the world that can do all this. Their wings beat an astonishing 70 times a second in normal flight and they weigh about as much as a penny.

Some additional interesting facts about these birds include the following:

• The bright radiant color on hummingbirds comes from iridescent coloring like on a soap bubble or prism.
• They're very smart and they can remember every flower they've visited and how long it will take a flower to refill.
• They have little to no sense of smell.
• They have very weak feet and can barely walk. They prefer to fly.
• They do not mate for life.
• They have an average life span of about 5 years but can live for more than 10 years.
• A hummingbird will visit an average of 1,000 flowers per day for nectar.
• They eat small, soft bugs for protein.
• A hummingbird will lap up nectar at a rate of about 13 licks per second.
• There are more than 300 types or species of hummingbirds. Most of which are found in South America.
• There are more than fifteen species of hummingbirds that breed in the United States.
• Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, the only species which breeds in the eastern U.S., have been known to travel 500 miles over the Gulf of Mexico to their breeding grounds, a 20 hour non-stop trip.

If you're interested in learning more, the article at the link gives some additional facts about these incredible birds.

The Genesis of Language

Stephen Barr is a physicist at the University of Delaware who writes on science-related topics. A couple of years ago he composed a review of a book by the famous MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Chomsky's collaborator Robert Berwick.

The book is titled Why Only Us: Language and Evolution and in it Berwick and Chomsky make some claims which are not only interesting but startling.

After noting that rationality has arisen only in man and that attempts to discover animal analogues to human rationality have largely failed, Barr states:

[Why Only Us] is a breathtaking intellectual synthesis. Using an array of sophisticated arguments based on discoveries in linguistics, neuroscience, genetics, computer science, evolutionary theory, and studies of animal communication, [the authors] develop a set of hypotheses about the nature and origins of human language, which will (if they hold up) have far-reaching implications.

As the title of their book implies, Berwick and Chomsky argue that only human beings have language. It is not that there are other animals possessing it in germ or to a slight degree; no other animals, they insist, possess it at all. The language capacity arose very suddenly, they say, likely in a single member of the species Homo sapiens, as a consequence of a very few fortuitous and unlikely genetic mutations.

It is indeed breath-taking that Berwick and Chomsky have concluded that language, the sine qua non of rational beings, appeared first in a single human being. We'll return to this thought in a moment, but first Barr elaborates on the distinctions Berwick and Chomsky draw between human language and animal communication:

Animal communication can be quite intricate. For example, some species of “vocal-learning” songbirds, notably Bengalese finches and European starlings, compose songs that are long and complex. But in every case, animal communication has been found to be based on rules of linear order. Attempts to teach Bengalese finches songs with hierarchical syntax have failed. The same is true of attempts to teach sign language to apes.

Though the famous chimp Nim Chimpsky was able to learn 125 signs of American Sign Language, careful study of the data has shown that his “language” was purely associative and never got beyond memorized two-word combinations with no hierarchical structure.

Having argued that language is unique to the human species, Barr returns to the difficulties inherent in thinking that it evolved gradually over eons of time. The genetic mutations necessary to produce the changes which gave rise to language must have been so sudden and so extensive that Berwick and Chomsky acknowledge they must have occurred in just a single individual. Barr quotes from Why Only Us:

Such a change takes place in an individual — and perhaps, if fortunate, in all of [his or her] siblings too, passed on from one or (less likely) both parents. Individuals so endowed would have advantages, and the capacity might proliferate through a small breeding group over generations.

In other words, a sudden, extensive discontinuity is hypothesized to have occured in a single generation of a species. A unique being was produced with a genetic capacity radically exceeding that of his/her parents.

Even so, what good is being capable of language unless there are lexical precursors ready at hand to be exploited by this novel ability? Here's Barr:

This brings us to a deep puzzle, which Berwick and Chomsky are brave enough to point out. The Merge procedure [a technique for forming language] requires something “to work on,” namely the “word-like atomic elements,” which they also call “conceptual atoms of thought,” “lexical items,” “atoms of computation,” “symbols of human language and thought,” and simply “human concepts.” Where did these originate? They write,

The atomic elements pose deep mysteries. The minimal meaning-bearing elements of human languages — word-like, but not words — are radically different from anything known in animal communication systems. Their origin is entirely obscure, posing a very serious problem for the evolution of human cognitive capacities, language in particular.

So, let's digest this. Human rationality, and the capacity for language that makes rational thought possible, first arose in a single individual which found the constituent elements of language already laying about, as it were. This is far more astounding, I think, than Barr's measured prose would suggest.

Indeed, it sounds very much like modern secular linguistic anthropologists are advancing a theory which is, in some significant respects, very similar to the Biblical account of the origin of the human race.

Barr concludes with this:

Is there an ontological discontinuity between humans and other animals? Berwick and Chomsky arrive, on purely empirical grounds, at the conclusion that there is. All animals communicate, but only humans are rational; and for Berwick and Chomsky, human language is primarily an instrument of rationality.

They present powerful arguments that this astonishing instrument arose just once and quite suddenly in evolutionary history — indeed, most likely in just one member of Homo sapiens, or at most a few. At the biological level, this involved a sudden upgrade of our mental machinery, and Berwick and Chomsky’s theories of this are both more plausible than competing theories and more consistent with data from a variety of disciplines.

But they recognize that more than machinery is involved. The basic contents and meanings, the deep-lying elements of human thought — “word-like but not words” — were somehow there, mysteriously, in the beginning.

Mysterious indeed, and fascinating.

The Left's Great White Whale

In the wake of yesterday's testimony before Congress by Robert Mueller, National Review's David French wrote that there was a moment, early in the testimony,

that stood at least some small chance of altering the inexorable momentum against impeachment. It came in the course of questioning by California Democrat Ted Lieu.

“I’d like to ask you the reason, again, that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct?” Lieu asked Mueller.

Mueller responded simply, “That is correct.”

Combined with Mueller’s testimony that the president could be charged after he left office, this exchange created an implication that only the presidency was saving Donald Trump from a criminal charge that any other American citizen would face. This was an unambiguous, explosive claim.

And then Mueller walked it back. Early in the afternoon, he told the House Intelligence Committee, “I want to go back to one thing that was said this morning by [Representative Ted] Lieu, who said, and I quote, ‘You didn’t charge the President because of the [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion.’

That is not the correct way to say it,” Mueller said. “As we say in the report, and as I said at the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime.”

And just like that, Democratic dreams of impeachment died. Again.

And all across the nation progressive hearts sank and hopes of ridding themselves of this president were dashed once more. Love him or loathe him President Trump has taken on the aspect of the Great White Whale Moby Dick in Herman Melville's classic novel, and all the Trump-haters are, with each day that goes by, looking more and more like Captain Ahab.

Ahab, you'll recall, was in the grip of an obsession to slay Moby Dick, and his irrational obsession, a fixation that would brook no demurral, led to the total ruin of his ship and the deaths of almost his entire crew, as well as himself.

In the climactic scene Moby Dick rams the ship, sinking it. Ahab is entangled in the ropes from the harpoons that have been launched against the huge beast and finds himself hopelessly strapped to the whale's body. As the whale rises from the water, the drowned captain's free arm motions involuntarily, as if beckoning others to follow him to their deaths in the depths of the sea.

The fixation the left, and some on the right, have with Donald Trump's destruction often seems as monomaniacally bizarre as Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick.

Over and over, one hears on MSNBC and CNN how President Trump is destroying the country, how the harm he's doing will take years to repair, yet it's never explained exactly what harm he's actually doing.

Is it economic harm? We're enjoying the best economy in the last sixty years. Is he embroiling us in foreign wars? If anything, he has demonstrated remarkable restraint and patience in the face of provocations. Is it that he's an inarticulate boor? That hardly accounts for the degree of hatred he elicits in his foes. Is it that he's a racist bigot? The entire evidence for that charge is the left's persistent misrepresentation of a single awkward sentence Trump uttered in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy.

No, the reason for the left's deranged rage is none of these, rather the reasons they're frantic to get him out of office distill to two that they rarely mention, except among themselves, because they know that these reasons would not win them much sympathy with the masses.

The first is that Mr. Trump is in the process of undoing all the progress they've made since the sixties in fundamentally changing this country. The left has for over a century had as its goal the destruction or reshaping of many of the institutions, traditions and cherished values that Americans have embraced since before its founding, and they've made substantial progress in achieving this transformation.

Indeed, the end was in sight and they seemed to be pushing against an open door, even when Republicans were in the White House.

Their chief ally has been a compliant judiciary, including the Supreme Court, that could be counted on to circumvent the will of the people and codify the will of the progressive minority. But Trump and senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell have in two short years not only stalled the progressive cause but have begun to unravel its accomplishments through the appointment of jurists who believe in the rule of law and the wisdom of the Constitution.

This is why there was such desperate eagerness to destroy the career and reputation of Brett Kavanaugh and why there'll be even worse to come if another Supreme Court vacancy arises within the next year.

The second reason for their hatred is that by undoing President Obama's executive orders and freeing up the economy Mr. Trump has allowed the markets and average household income to rise, unemployment to drop to historic lows for all ethnic groups, and welfare rolls to shrink.

This not only makes his predecessor look incompetent, it also discredits for all to see the progressive economic nostrums - high taxes and onerous regulations - that had kept our economy in the doldrums for so long.

In other words, the Trump presidency is a standing rebuke and indictment of the left that could be seen as metaphorically similar to the crippling of Ahab by his earlier encounter with Moby Dick, and just as losing his leg to the whale fueled Ahab's dementia so, too, Trump's blow to the left, as well as his imperviousness to their assaults against him, have stoked the fires of a white hot, irrational rage against him.

And, like Ahab, nothing will stop those driven by their hatred until either they destroy, politically, their Great White Whale or they destroy, politically, themselves.

A Throw of the Dice

From time to time we've talked about the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time").

Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of religious faith. The discussions are almost always pleasant, informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually what such conversations should be like, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here.

For those readers who might prefer a slightly more elaborate explication of the argument for Intelligent Design try this post and the debate it links to.

What's Good for the Goose

For those who enjoy reading about instances of political schadenfreude there's a particularly amusing instance unfolding in the presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, who owns three homes and has made himself wealthy on a senator's salary despite being an arrant socialist and claiming to champion the poor and downtrodden, has demanded that employers pay workers at least $15 an hour.

Now his own campaign workers have publicly complained that they themselves were being paid less than $15 an hour by the senator.

The Washington Post provides us the details:

Unionized campaign organizers working for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential effort are battling with its management, arguing that the compensation and treatment they are receiving does not meet the standards Sanders espouses in his rhetoric, according to internal communications.

Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers and other employees supporting them have invoked the senator’s words and principles in making their case to campaign manager Faiz Shakir, the documents reviewed by The Washington Post show.

Sanders has made standing up for workers a central theme of his presidential campaigns — this year marching with McDonald’s employees seeking higher wages, pressing Walmart shareholders to pay workers more and showing solidarity with university personnel on strike.

The independent from Vermont has proudly touted his campaign as the first presidential effort to unionize its employees, and his defense of the working class has been a signature element of his brand of democratic socialism and a rallying cry for the populist movement he claims to lead.

There's much more on the story at the link.

The campaign organizers are actually making about $13/hour while working 60 hour weeks. So what has the Sanders campaign done to rectify this injustice?

As Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media writes:

Forcing companies to pay a higher wage leads employers to seek out less expensive automation, fire increasingly expensive workers, or cut the hours employees can work. Sanders opted for the third choice.

Rather than pay his workers more Sanders opted to cut back on their hours. How this helps minimum wage workers achieve sustainability is not clear, but if you're a progressive you don't have to be consistent or able to give a rational defense for your actions.

You just have to have your heart in the "right place."

Racial Privilege

A recent Rasmussen poll found that one-in-three Democrats actually believe it’s racism any time a white politician criticizes a politician of color. This is both stunning and depressing.

To be sure, this is not as high as the percentage of Democrats (51%) who believed George W. Bush was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers, but it does reflect the same curious deficiency in common sense.

Commenting on the Rasmussen poll, Matt Margolis at PJ Media writes:

Let’s put this another way: A third of Democrats believe that minority politicians should be immune from criticism by white politicians. Their policies can’t be challenged without there being an inherent racist motive. This is what a third of Democrats actually believe.

If you’re a white politician and oppose raising taxes, you can debate higher taxes with another white politician, but if you have the same debate with a minority politician, you’re racist.

Just so. The term "racist" has been used so promiscuously by folks on the left that it no longer carries the opprobrium it once did. If it's racist for white politicians to criticize the words and policies of minority politicians then the concept of racism has been debased to the point of being little more than a joke.

Moreover, we're evidently abandoning the ideal of racial equality, an ideal that has been tacitly rendered obsolete, at least in the minds of a third of Democrats. After all, if minority politicians have to be protected from criticism by granting them some sort of race-based privilege or immunity then the implication is that they're not really mature, intelligent adults, but are rather like children with such fragile self-esteem that they must not be held responsible by members of another race for anything they say or do, no matter how silly.

It's fatuous nonsense, of course, but that's the world the intersectional left is creating for the rest of us to live in. In that world skin color is a totem to be venerated, an idol to be worshipped.

If we want to realize the dream of those who fought and died for the cause of racial equality in this country we need to reject any notion that anyone of any color is immune to criticism, and reaffirm the idea that all men and women of whatever race or ethnicity should be held to the same standards of reason, logic, behavior and treatment from others.

Otherwise, we will continue to generate ever increasing resentments among ever more isolated racial groups in this nation, but then that may be precisely what some on the left (and right) would very much like to see happen.

Is Morality Just Neurochemistry?

Philosopher Patricia Churchland has a new book out titled Conscience in which she discusses the role of the brain in producing our sense of morality, our sense that some acts are right and others wrong. We might call this a sense of moral oughtness. It's a sense of what we ought and ought not do.

Ms. Churchland is an eliminative materialist which is a fancy way of saying that she believes that everything that exists is either matter or a derivative of matter. There's nothing, she believes, that's independent of matter - no mind, no soul, no God - just atoms and energy and the phenomena comprised of these.

She was interviewed by Sigal Samuel at Vox recently, and in the interview she says a number of things worth noting. Samuel's introduction suffices to give a sense of Ms. Churchland's views, but interested readers should read the transcript of the interview at the link.

Here are Samuel's introductory remarks:

For years, [Ms. Churchland has] been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel empathy and other moral intuitions? What’s the origin of that nagging little voice that we call our conscience?

In her new book, Conscience, Churchland argues that mammals — humans, yes, but also monkeys and rodents and so on — feel moral intuitions because of how our brains developed over the course of evolution. Mothers came to feel deeply attached to their children because that helped the children (and through them, the mother’s genes) survive. This ability to feel attachment was gradually generalized to mates, kin, and friends. “Attachment begets caring,” Churchland writes, “and caring begets conscience.”

Conscience, to her, is not a set of absolute moral truths, but a set of community norms that evolved because they were useful. “Tell the truth” and “keep your promises,” for example, help a social group stick together. Even today, our brains reinforce these norms by releasing pleasurable chemicals when our actions generate social approval (hello, dopamine!) and unpleasurable ones when they generate disapproval.

Rooting morality in biology has made Churchland a controversial figure among philosophers. Some think that approach is itself morally repugnant because it threatens to devalue ethics by reducing it to a bunch of neurochemicals zipping around our brains. A number of philosophers complain that she’s not doing “proper philosophy.” Other critics accuse her of scientism, which is when you overvalue science to the point that you see it as the only real source of knowledge.

There's an important metaethical point to note here. Let's suppose that everything she says about the origin of our moral sense is correct. If so, morality itself is a kind of illusion. Terms like morally right and morally wrong have no real force. They simply refer to what the community approves and disapproves.

Nor can there be any genuine moral obligation. We cannot be morally obligated to adhere to the communal norms otherwise if we lived in Nazi Germany we'd have to approve the persecution of Jews or, if we lived in the Jim Crow South we'd have to favor discrimination against black Americans.

Nor could there ever be social progress since the moral consensus is right ab defino and the dissenter is by definition wrong and should not be heeded or should even be punished.

What Ms. Churchland has shown, if she's right, is nothing more than why we feel certain things to be right or wrong, why we feel that we should do X rather than Y, but how could it be wrong to go against one's feelings? Or how could it be wrong if one's feelings predispose him to be kind and another's feelings incline her to be cruel?

If our moral sense has evolved as a result of genetic mutation and natural selection, if it's simply the product of dopamine levels in our brains, then how can we have genuine obligations to be kind rather than cruel? How can neurochemistry make an act right or wrong?

Moreover, the human species has evolved all sorts of feelings and behaviors, selfishness and selflessness for example. If Ms. Churchland is correct the only way to arbitrate between these is to compare them to the norms of the community, but how can community consensus make something objectively right or wrong? If the community consensus is that slavery or child sacrifice is right then how could anyone insist that the community is wrong?

What gives the community consensus authority over an individual's moral intuitions? If the community consensus is that we should strive to eliminate our neighbors and seize all their resources, would an individual dissenter from this view be morally wrong? And what does it mean to be morally wrong other than that one's brain chemistry isn't congruent with that of his fellow citizens?

Ms. Churchland's thesis that our moral sentiments are simply due to chemical processes in the brain may be of some interest to brain scientists and sociologists, but it's quite irrelevant to moral philosophy and ethics. It may explain why we behave in certain ways, but it has nothing to say about how we ought to behave, which is what moral philosophy is all about.

The Universe Is Math

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. He was prompted to make this remark because it would be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathephobes may wince at a statement like this, but it gets even worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises.

In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and, since information is exclusively the product of mind, that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of a mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

Is Trump a Racist?

There's been a lot of silliness surrounding the infamous tweet storm unleashed by our president in recent days critical of the four Democrat congresswomen who fancy to call themselves "The Squad." The tweets that triggered extreme dudgeon among liberals and anxiety attacks among some conservatives were these:

So interesting to see 'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.

Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

Well, since The Squad is comprised of four "women of color" these words drew from among his detractors, as do almost any words nowadays, the allegation of racism, but why? Have we sunk to the point in our polity where it's now deemed racist to criticize any politician who is a minority? If The Squad consisted of four Caucasian women would his remarks have been construed as proof of racism?

Or is he a racist because he advised the women to go back to fix their home countries when three of the four were born in America. That's clumsy wording, to be sure - he obviously meant to refer to the home country of their parents - but what's racist about it?

A woman on MSNBC's Hardball show last night insisted that not only is Trump a racist but that those who still support Trump are declaring themselves also to be racist. This is ridiculous. It's like saying that if you supported John Kennedy then by implication you supported Roman Catholicism.

There are lots of people who admire Charles Darwin for his theory of natural selection, we even observe Darwin Day on February 12th, but Darwin was a racist. There are lots of Progressives who would have voted for Woodrow Wilson or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but both those men would be considered racists by today's standards.

No one is perfect. Support for what a man is doing in office does not imply total support of everything the man says or believes. This is such an obvious truth that one wonders how the lady on Hardball could've missed it.

One final question. What exactly is racism, anyway. There may be no word in our lexicon used more frequently, the meaning of which everybody assumes they know until they're asked to define it.

Often when people on the left do offer up a definition it distills to something like, "a disease that afflicts white people," but this is a bit too tendentious and banal to be accepted by reasonable folks. So, I invite readers to submit their own definition of racism via our Contact Us feature. It'll be interesting to see what turns up.

Six Impossible Things

In Lewis Carroll's classic Through the Looking Glass Alice is chided by the Queen for her inability to believe that the Queen is over a hundred years old:

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Thinking of the debate between naturalism and theism brought this exchange between Alice and the Queen to mind. If one is a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) one must, like the Queen, believe at least six impossible things before breakfast every day.

For example, to be a consistent naturalist one must believe that:

1. Something (the universe) arose uncaused from nothing.
2. Life emerged by chance despite the fact that as physicist Fred Hoyle put it the odds of just a single functional protein arising by chance are about the same as giving Rubik's Cubes to 10^50 blind people and finding that they all solve it at the same moment.
3. Organisms like the Venus flytrap emerged purely by blind, chance processes.
4. Human consciousness was somehow produced by non-conscious matter.
5. No objective moral duties exist. Moral rights and wrongs are simply fictions.
6. The notions of human equality and objective human rights are likewise fictions.

Technically, a naturalist might not find the last two impossible to believe, but they do find them impossible to live by unless they're nihilists.

Most naturalists, though, prefer to cling to the idea of human equality and the conviction that there really are objective moral obligations - the obligation to treat people fairly, for example - even though, if naturalism is true, there's no reason at all to hold either of these beliefs. They're just arbitrary preferences.

There are other beliefs that many naturalists hold that really are incompatible with naturalism. Belief in free will is one and belief in a mind or soul is another.

A worldview that forces one to believe things that are so unlikely as to be in all practical respects impossible is certainly not rational. It's not much different than a superstition. Or a Lewis Carroll fantasy. Yet many would rather live in this looking glass world of impossible beliefs than believe that theism is correct, even though each of those beliefs is completely compatible with theism.

That seems to be an odd fact about people that one might think would interest sociologists and psychologists more than it apparently does.

The Venus Flytrap

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't.

But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trap mechanism is exceedingly complex and also completely gratuitous, but the digestion of the prey itself requires extensive modifications and genetic changes, all of which would have been unnecessary for the plants' survival and pretty much useless until they were all in place.

This kind of engineering requires foresight, and foresight, as biochemist Marcos Eberlin notes in his book by that title, is not a trait possessed by blind, impersonal Darwinian processes. It requires a mind.

The Multiverse Religion

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, cosmologist and non-theist. This latter point is relevant because in the short video below she criticizes the multiverse hypothesis which has been near and dear to non-theistic hearts for at least a decade now, so her criticisms cannot be dismissed as being based on some sort of religious agenda.

The multiverse hypothesis enjoys the approbation of those eager to squelch any hint of a God behind the universe because it provides a rebuttal of sorts to the theist's argument that the fine-tuning of the universe is powerful evidence of intelligent engineering.

Hossenfelder avers, however, that the multiverse hypothesis is itself religious, largely speculative and outside the bounds of empirical science. This is not to pass judgment on whether or not it's true, but rather to point out that scientists, qua scientists, have no business promoting it. When they do, and they do it often, they're stepping outside their proper domain into the domain of metaphysics and forfeiting whatever scientific authority they may have had.

There are lots of posts in our archives cataloguing the numerous reasons for doubting that the multiverse explanation is correct, but Hossenfelder is here concerned merely with getting it out of the realm of empirical science and into the realm of religious belief where it belongs.

The video is about four and a half minutes long, but she packs a lot into those four and a half minutes. Give it a look:

The Cosmos as God

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.

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.

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:

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].

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

And there's not much room for meaning on that knife-edge between wishful thinking and 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.

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.

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: