Our Existential Predicament

My classes recently spent some time talking about the view of life called existentialism, so I thought it might not be out of place to offer a little mood music here on VP to perhaps nudge us toward reflection upon what's sometimes referred to as our "existential predicament."

The question this song by the group Kansas raises is, if it's true that all we are is dust in the wind what meaning or point is there to our lives?

The great 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer perceived the problem more clearly than most when he noted that, "Unless the point of life is to suffer there is no point," and this depressingly droll observation: "Life is bad today, tomorrow will be worse, until we die," and, "Life is a task, the task of staying alive and staving off boredom." The world, for Schopenhauer, is a "penal colony" in which "happiness is measured by the absence of suffering." He titled the book from which these quotes are taken, Studies in Pessimism.

It's not hard to see why.

Alex Rosenberg, the philosophy department chair at Duke University, frames the problem of our predicament succinctly when he writes: "What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto."

Bertrand Russell put the same dispiriting thought this way:

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

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

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

What these thinkers are urging us to recognize is that death annihilates all, it's the big eraser, obliterating everything we do and rendering our existence on the planet a pointless exercise in absurdity.

Those who insist on the one hand that death is the end of our existence and on the other that there can nevertheless be some purpose to our lives are a bit like a prisoner who insists on making his bed and brushing his teeth before accompanying the executioner to the scaffold.

At least that's how many who hold to a naturalistic worldview, as do all three of the philosophers quoted above, see life, and they're probably correct to do so if indeed death really is a personal annihilation. Unless what we do matters forever it's hard to see how it matters at all.

Maybe, though, naturalism is wrong and what we do in this life does matter forever. If so, that would change everything.

Guaranteed Health Care Is Not a Human Right

Some of the candidates seeking the presidency in 2020 are making the claim that health care (or health insurance) is a basic human right. I think this is not only demagogic but utterly wrong. Here's why:

If everyone has a right to have health care provided for them then why do we not also have a right to have a home, food, transportation, clothing, etc. provided for us? All of these are just as important as health care to our well-being, but if we maintain that people have a right to these things that implies that others have an obligation to provide them.

We may, as compassionate people, choose to provide such necessities for others, but if so, it's an act of personal or corporate charity, not an obligation imposed on us by others.

If we do think of it as an obligation then the recipient need feel no gratitude, nor is the donor being virtuous or compassionate if all he's doing is meeting a state-imposed requirement.

I have a friend who made a truly wonderful choice a few years ago to donate a kidney to enable someone to live, and what made that decision so marvelous is precisely that he didn't have a duty or an obligation to do it. It was completely gratuitous.

If, however, he had been coerced by the state to provide the organ then compassion would've been no part of his act. There would've been no more virtue in it than there is in paying one's taxes. Likewise, though I'm sure the recipient of the kidney was extremely grateful for my friend's sacrifice, if the recipient believed that the donor had a duty to make that sacrifice, gratitude would've been out of place.

Parenthetically, that's a major problem with our welfare system, it stifles both compassion and gratitude by making support of the needy something to which they feel entitled.

In any case, if people have a right to health care, do people who are in need of an organ have a right to be given that organ? If so, doesn't that mean that others have an obligation to provide their organs to them, at least if, like kidneys, they have more than they need? If others have a right to our money to subsidize their health care why would they not have a right to our organs, especially those organs of which we have a surplus?

Another difficulty is that a "right" to health care is not like other rights that are intrinsic to our being human - rights like the right to life, liberty, etc. Those rights impose no duties upon others beyond obligating them to refrain from impeding us in our exercise of the right (within reasonable limits, of course). A right to health care, however, imposes an obligation on other people to provide it.

Suppose I live an irresponsible lifestyle that causes me to develop diabetes with all its concomitant health complications. Then others, essentially, have a duty to subsidize my irresponsible lifestyle by providing insurance for me against those complications.

In my opinion, my fellow citizens should be no more required to pay for my irresponsible lifestyle choices than they should be required to pay my grocery bill or mortgage. They may choose to do so, of course, but it would be an act of grace, not of duty.

Suppose, too, that society can't afford to pay for health care for everyone and can no longer insure it without bankrupting itself. What then are the reasonable limits on one's right to health care? If no money was available to fund it we wouldn't claim that individuals' rights were being denied because their health care was no longer being subsidized, but then health care would be a basic human right only if our nation could afford it.

At what point, then, do we decide that providing health care for others is no longer affordable? Surely, at some point the right to keep one's property overrides another person's right to have health care. If we deny that then we're saying that we must provide health care coverage even if it means confiscating everyone else's property in order to pay for it, or if it means forcing medical professionals to provide care for free.

Health care or insurance is like owning a house. We all have the right to own a house - no one can legally prevent us from purchasing one - but we don't have the right to demand that others buy the house for us no matter how badly we might need it. If we can't afford housing then people may wish to provide shelter for us, but we don't have the right to demand it of them.

Understand, this is not an argument against single-payer or any of the health care plans that'll eventually be discussed if and when the Democrats ever get over their infatuation with impeachment. We may as a society comprised of good and generous people decide we want to provide health coverage for everyone, to the extent that a wise, affordable program can be crafted.

What I've written above is an argument, however, against the assertion that anyone has an inherent human right to such coverage and a right to demand that we pay for that coverage.

What Americans Believe about Evolution

A fairly recent Gallup poll reveals that the number of people who hold to the strict creationist view that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so has declined and the number of people who believe in some form of evolution, whether naturalistic or directed by God has increased:

The percentage of U.S. adults who believe that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so -- the strict creationist view -- has reached a new low. Thirty-eight percent of U.S. adults now accept creationism, while 57% believe in some form of evolution -- either God-guided or not -- saying man developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

Allahpundit, a commentator at HotAir.com, looked at the data and wrote:

The pure creationist position was trending downward, then made a big comeback in 2011 for no obvious reason. It’s tempting to call that result an outlier or statistical noise, but the hybrid position of guided evolution polled poorly in the low 30s in 2011 and remained flat in 2014, suggesting a real trend. Now suddenly it’s come surging back. Why? You tell me.

Here's the graph he refers to:

Maybe the answer to Allahpundit's question is that many people who formerly embraced a literal seven-day creation have been persuaded by intelligent design theorists that ID offers a more satisfactory explanation of origins.

Many people who may have formerly thought that there was a conflict between evolution and theism might now, after almost three decades of work by intelligent design theorists, believe that the two are compatible. In other words, the survey is stuck with a format of questions that are no longer very illuminating.

David Klinghoffer, commenting on Gallup's questions, correctly observes that,

Since 1982 [Gallup] has been asking:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings — 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

What I wish they would ask is:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of living creatures – 1) Animal and human life arose and developed over billions of years, guided by a designing intelligence, whether God or otherwise, 2) Animal and human life arose and developed over billions of years, by strictly blind, natural processes, unguided by any intelligent agent, 3) God created all animal and human life at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?

Now that would tell you a lot about the state of the evolution debate. But the modern intelligent design movement didn’t exist 35 years ago, so Gallup is stuck in 1982.

The Gallup poll also shows that fewer than one in five Americans holds a secular view of evolution, but that proportion has almost doubled from about 10% in 2000 to about 19% today. Allahpundit makes a compelling argument that this number is a pretty good measure of the percentage of atheists in the U.S. Here's Allahpundit:

The 19 percent figure for evolution without God is interesting in light of [a] recent [study] suggesting there may be many more atheists in the U.S. than everyone believes. Ask people if they think of themselves as “atheist” and chances are no more than three percent will say yes. Ask them if they believe in God without using the A-word and maybe 10 percent will say no.

How many people secretly believe there is no God, though, and are simply reluctant to say so, even to a pollster? [The] study ... divided people into two groups and gave them identical questionnaires filled with innocuous statements (e.g., “I own a dog”) — with one exception. One group had the statement “I do not believe in God” added to their questionnaire.

People in each group were asked to identify how many of the statements were true of them without specifying which ones were true. Then the numbers from the control group were compared to the numbers from the “I do not believe in God” group. Result: As best as researchers can tell from the numerical disparity, 26 percent don’t believe in God, way, way more than most surveys show.

I’m skeptical that the number runs quite that high, but the fact that 19 percent told Gallup they believe in evolution without God may mean the number of atheists is higher than the 3-10 percent range usually cited.

After all, how many religious believers are likely to also believe that God played no role in man’s development? Per Gallup, just one percent of weekly churchgoers signed on to that proposition and just six percent of nearly weekly or monthly observers did. “Evolution without God” may be a reasonably good proxy for atheism.

If so, the ratio of theists to atheists in this country is about 4 to 1. Of course, a lot of people can believe or disbelieve in God without acting or thinking consistently with that belief, and many respondents to the study may not have answered the questionnaire in a manner consistent with their true convictions.

For instance, a similar poll several years ago found that 9% of those who claimed to be atheists prayed at least once a week. One wonders how carefully those folks thought about their responses. Or their beliefs.

Forcing Others to Be Like You

I noted this morning that Kamala Harris has urged Twitter to suspend Donald Trump's account, ostensibly because she doesn't like what he says on Twitter about the people who are trying to destroy him. It also came to my notice that New York City has made it "illegal" to use the term "illegal alien."

Attempts to control speech are essentially attempts to control thought and anyone who values the freedom of either speech or thought should be appalled by the measures Harris proposes and New York has adopted.

As it happens I've been re-reading Louis Menand's 2002 best-seller titled The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual history of 19th century America, and an excerpt from the chapter on Civil War veteran and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is fresh in my mind.

Menand wrote:

The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies - people who think their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion of turf.

If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.

Those who seek to punish those with whom they disagree, either economically, or through social media or through the courts, are precisely the sort of people Menand has in view in this passage. Later in life Holmes wrote that he detests a man who "knows that he knows," and, Menand continues,

[Holmes] had a knee-jerk suspicion of causes. He regarded them as attempts to compel one group of human beings to conform to some other group's idea of the good, and he could see no authority for such attempts greater than the other group's certainty that it knew what was best. "Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of seeking for change," he wrote in a letter...

By this Holmes meant seeking to compel others to change, to compel others to accept one's own point of view and certainties. Menand quotes Holmes:

I don't care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different than what they do - even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.

There's much here for people like Kamala Harris and the bright lights who govern New York City, as well as others like the folks who run the social media giants Google, Facebook and Twitter - and who censor political figures they dislike and ban political or religious speech and ideas of which they disapprove - to take to heart.

Do the Dems Really Want Trump Thrown Out?

A lawyer named Kyle Sammin gives four reasons at The Federalist why he thinks Trump's phone call to Ukraine will probably not result in the president's impeachment.

I'm not as confident as Sammin that impeachment will fail, but I do think the Democrats are not really trying to remove the president from office. I think they have a different strategy. In any case, here are the four reasons Sammin gives:

1. Unlike Watergate and the Clinton impeachment there's no cover-up. The administration has released all the relevant documents for everyone to see.
2. Nor was there any conspiracy.
3. The public suffers from impeachment fatigue after two years of breathless assurances that the Mueller probe was certain to result in an impeachment.
4. The public is also weary of the Democrats' persistence in "crying wolf" every time the president sneezes.

You can read Sammin's explanations of each of these at the link. He concludes by saying this:

The radicalism of the House Democrats and their media allies has made it hard to take them seriously without more conclusive evidence of presidential wrongdoing. Resistance folk on the internet are energized by this latest incident, and Trump’s more fervent partisans are too, but most people are dead tired of all of the lawfare and 24-hour news cycle argle-bargle.

They’ll watch—we all should—but for now the Zelensky affair looks unlikely to be the knockout blow the left has been seeking.

As I said, I doubt that there'll be a serious effort to remove the president from the White House. I don't think any but the most rabid progressive Trump haters really want to give Mike Pence a year as an incumbent to win over the loyalty of Trump's base. An incumbent would be much more difficult for Democrats to unseat in 2020.

What the Democrats are apparently trying to do is not remove Trump from office, but rather through their relentless investigations and resistance, they're trying to erode his support among Independents and wear him down physically and mentally to the point that he loses the 2020 election to an Elizabeth Warren or someone of similar ideological pedigree. Impeachment, though it would not remove Mr. Trump from office, would aid them in their effort to discredit, demoralize and weaken him.

In fact, were I a paranoid conspiracy theorist (which I'm not) I might even go so far as to say that the constant attacks on Trump are being orchestrated by Clinton allies not only to cripple him, but, with this latest attack over the Ukraine business involving Joe Biden's abuse of power, also cripple Democratic front-runner Biden.

The hope among the Clinton operatives would be that with Biden out of the way and no satisfactory Democratic candidate emerging from the primaries, Hillary could be drafted at the convention to run against and beat a severely weakened Trump in a rematch of 2016.

You heard it here first.

Could the Universe be Infinitely Old?

A post at Uncommon Descent has a graphic that illustrates quite nicely why many philosophers believe that the answer to the question in the title of this post is "No."

If one were to start at the present moment and start counting to infinity one would never get there (Scenario A). Likewise, if we take the mirror image of A, and start counting from an infinite past we could never arrive at the present moment (Scenario B). Since we are in fact at the present moment, the universe must not be infinitely old. There must have been a first moment of time.

The primary reason for thinking the earth is infinitely old is a metaphysical one, not a scientific one. It's the desire to avoid a beginning to the universe.

Indeed, many scientists initially opposed the theory of the "Big Bang" for just this reason. The theory entailed that the universe came into being out of nothing (ex nihilo) at some point in the finite past.

But why would scientists object to a cosmic beginning? The answer is that once we start talking about an origin of space-time the next step is to posit a cause of that origin and that soon starts to sound a lot like Genesis 1:1, which is a horrifying prospect to naturalist scientists and philosophers.

There's a principle most philosophers accept called the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). This principle states that every event must have a cause adequate to account for the event. If this is so then a universe that had a beginning must have had a cause adequate to account for the universe we see.

A cause of the universe would have to be extraordinarily powerful and intelligent. It would have to transcend space and time (which are part of the fabric of the cosmos), and, since the universe has generated personal beings like ourselves, it's reasonable to assume that the cause of personal beings is itself personal.

Of course one could deny all this by denying the PSR, but that seems a pretty steep intellectual price to pay to avoid having to acknowledge that there is a Creator.

It would, in effect, seriously cripple, if not altogether destroy, science, which is an enterprise largely based upon the PSR.

Molecular Machines

Here's a post I've run several times in the past but that I thought worth running again since Viewpoint is always picking up new readers:

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

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

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

Philosopher and skeptic David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness reporting the miracle was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely.

Applying Hume's principle to the present case, when confronted with a structure like ATP synthase we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that such an astonishing thing came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

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

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

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

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it the product of intelligent agency?

Setting aside our metaphysical preconceptions, what does our experience tell us about the comparative abilities of chance and minds to produce high information content machines?

Basic Epistemology

Professor Laurence A. Moran, a biochemist at the University of Toronto and evangelistic atheist, found himself a couple of years ago in conversation with a theologian named Denis Alexander. He subsequently posted a critique of their conversation on his blog Sandwalk. Whatever the merits of Moran's overall criticism of Alexander may be he certainly takes a misstep at the start when he says this:

If you believe in such a being [as God] then that conflicts with science as a way of knowing because you are believing in something without reliable evidence to support your belief. Scientists shouldn't do that and neither should any others who practice the scientific way of knowing. Denis Alexander thinks there are other, equally valid, ways of knowing but he wasn't able to offer any evidence that those other ways produce true knowledge.

There are several problems with what Prof. Moran says in this paragraph.

1. He conflates knowing and believing. He oscillates between talking about beliefs and talking about knowledge, but knowledge and belief are not the same thing. One must believe something in order to know it, but merely believing something isn't the same as knowing it. You can believe something and not know it, but you can't know it and not believe it.

To be knowledge the belief must be warranted somehow, and it must have a high probability of being true.

2. He assumes evidence is required to justify a belief. That is something he himself apparently believes, but what evidence could he offer to justify believing it? He simply believes this claim without any evidence at all.

Presumably, he means that our beliefs must be supported by sensory evidence, but this is surely false. Scientists as well as laymen hold all sorts of beliefs for which there's no sensory evidence whatsoever.

Many believe, for instance, that life originated purely naturalistically although there's not a shred of evidence that it did or that such an origin is even physically possible. They often seek to avoid the implications of cosmic fine-tuning by promoting the existence of a multiverse for which there's no empirical evidence. They believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and spend their careers searching for it, despite the utter lack of any evidence for such life. They believe that it's wrong to falsify data on a scientific paper, but cannot explain scientifically why anything at all is wrong.

Put another way, I can know that I'm experiencing pain even if I have no way to prove it to you; I can know that, despite much evidence against me, I'm innocent of a crime of which I've been accused; I can know that as a young boy I found a dollar bill, though I'd be helpless if asked to present evidence of the fact.

These are all things that I can know despite my inability to produce evidence that I could offer to anyone else, especially to someone predisposed to doubt me.

If Prof. Moran were to reply that I have the evidence of my own internal states, the subjective experience of pain, the assurance of my innocence, the memory of finding the money, and that these states count as evidence, he'd be putting himself in an awkward position. He'd have to explain why these states warrant the relevant beliefs, but the internal assurance one might have of experiencing God does not warrant believing that God exists.

3. He's simply mistaken to assert that there's no reliable evidence to support theism. It's been argued on this site for the past fifteen years that as Pascal said, there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not dead set against it.

Alvin Plantinga gives a couple dozen arguments for theism among which, in my opinion, the best are certain forms of the cosmological, moral, and cosmic fine-tuning arguments as well as the argument from the contingency of the universe.

I'm sure Professor Moran is a fine biochemist, but perhaps he'd do well to stick to his field and avoid dogmatic philosophical pronouncements.

For a more extended critique of Prof. Moran's argument against Alexander see philosopher V.J.Torley's discussion here.

Silence of the Scientists

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor wonders how it could be that thousands of scientists who knew Jeffrey Epstein and who must've had serious questions about his "lifestyle" with young girls, nevertheless continued to cash his checks and keep their mouths shut.

Egnor concludes that it was because there's enormous pressure in the scientific community not to do anything to cut off the financial spigot and to speak out would be to risk one's career. Maybe that's part of it, but I think there's a deeper reason.

First some excerpts from Egnor:

What didn’t happen is this: there was no dissent in the scientific profession about taking guidance and money from a convicted pedophile who was obviously trafficking children for sex. Not a word.

At every stage of this repellant saga, from Epstein’s early forays into scientific patronage twenty years ago through his conviction for child prostitution in 2008 to his largesse as a patron of elite Darwinists and computer scientists at MIT, Harvard, the Santa Fe Institute, the transhumanist project Humanity Plus, and many others in the decade that followed, there was, from the scientific community, abject silence.

Thousands of elite and pedestrian scientists benefitted from Epstein’s philanthropy and camaraderie. Thousands more knew of Epstein’s courtship rituals — with scientists and with children — and said absolutely nothing.

What happened on the Lolita Express and Pedophile Island, while probably known to many of Epstein’s elite science pals, were known as well (at least in outline) to the thousands of ordinary scientists and administrators who cashed his checks and worked in his labs.

There were whispered questions, undeniably. Obvious questions. There must have been daily whispers in labs and hallways and coffee rooms. ‘Why is Dr. So-and-So taking trips with this guy?” “What do you think is happening with all of those little girls?” “Where does the money come from?”

The answers were in broad daylight. Epstein’s life was an open Internet page. Thousands of scientists and administrators — even those not directly involved with Epstein and the children he trafficked— asked these questions and knew the answers.

No one said a word. Why?

Fear of risking one's career may well be part of the answer, but I think another part can be illustrated with a question: Why should anyone think that what Jeffrey Epstein did in pimping out and sexually exploiting underage girls was wrong? For moderns steeped in a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, as many scientists are, there's really no answer to that question.

On materialistic atheism all moral judgments are merely expressions of one's own subjective and arbitrary feelings. They express a personal preference like a preference for rock rather than classical music. There's no standard by which one can say that any act is morally wrong and no one to hold anyone ultimately accountable for what they do.

"If God is dead," Dostoevsky says several times in The Brothers Karamazov, "everything is permitted."

Philosopher of biology Michael Ruse and biologist E.O. Wilson wrote:

As evolutionists, we see that no justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.

Elsewhere, Ruse has written that,

Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothaches and marking student papers… Now that you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what’s to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman [raping and pillaging]? Well, nothing in an objective sense.

In short, if one believes that all of us are here solely as the end product of blind physical processes and forces no behavior is moral or immoral. Thus, naturalists, whether scientists or laymen, simply lack the moral resources to condemn what Epstein was doing with those girls.

It's perplexing to read the expressions of moral outrage around the Epstein case, or, for that matter around any of the cases involving sexual improprieties perpetrated by celebrities and others, when it's clear that many of those expressing that outrage have no objective basis whatsoever for doing so.

They are like people trying to stand on a cloud.

Inverting Morality at the Post

Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist, illustrates why today's media is held in such low esteem by fair-minded people. The Washington Post recently did a column written by Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Rachel Bade in which this paragraph appeared:

Trump's sense of himself as above the law has been reinforced throughout his time in office. As detailed in the Mueller report, he received help from a foreign adversary in 2016 without legal consequence. He sought to thwart the Russia investigation and possibly obstruct justice without consequence. Through the government, he has earned profits for his businesses without consequence. He has blocked Congress's ability to conduct oversight without consequence.

As Hemingway writes, each sentence in this paragraph is simply false and some are the exact opposite of the truth.

For instance, consider this claim:

As detailed in the Mueller report, he received help from a foreign adversary in 2016 without legal consequence.

Hemingway is incredulous that any honest person whose profession it is to report and comment upon the news would make such a ludicrous assertion:

What in the world? What are Philip Rucker, Bob Costa, and Rachel Bade smoking? This was not “detailed” in the Mueller report. This is not even a remotely accurate summation of that report, even while acknowledging how partisan of a report it was.

In fact, the report found that the entire basis for the investigation — supposed treasonous collusion with Russia to steal the 2016 election — had no evidence in support of it. Not only did Trump not conspire with Russia to steal the 2016 election, not a single American was found to have done so....

It is unclear what “legal consequence” Rucker, Costa, and Bade are fantasizing about, particularly considering it’s a fantasy that even Andrew Weissman’s politically motivated special counsel team couldn’t dream of suggesting.

Each of the other statements in the paragraph is also deeply flawed. Read Hemingway's analysis at the link to see why.

She closes with this:

In other words, every sentence in the Washington Post paragraph is well past the point of bias, or slant, or not being even-handed. These sentences are outright and blatant and unabashed falsehoods in the service of a particular political party and agenda.

The Washington Post is singularly and relentlessly devoted to taking down the Republican president. This paragraph shows what so many other paragraphs in so many other articles show, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year: some reporters are willing to express false statements in service to one political party and in opposition to another.

This is not journalism, but propaganda.

She's right, of course. Large sectors of our media have decided to forfeit their role as reliable sources of information and are waging an all-out struggle to discredit the Trump administration. It's a struggle in which traditional ethical constraints have been turned on their head, the only rule is to win and whatever works to accomplish that end is acceptable.

Falsehood and truth have been transformed into moral equals. If lies work to unseat Mr. Trump and the truth impedes that result, then lies are right and good and reporting the truth is wrong and bad.

Little wonder that Mr. Trump has persuaded so much of the American public that the mainstream media is "Fake News." Their frenzied hatred of the president, their refusal to report on him objectively and their lack of a moral compass have brought this disrepute upon themselves.

Alinsky's Awful Rules

There's been lots of talk about restoring civility to our political discourse over the last two decades, but the talk has had little effect, unfortunately.

The President is probably not going to stop calling his opponents "bad people," nor are folks like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton likely to cease referring to their opponents as bitter clingers and "deplorables." Others appear to be so addicted to vile, violent, and hate-filled rhetoric that pleas directed to them for civility are probably futile.

Even so, one step that may go some distance toward a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible, mature people on the left to repudiate and renounce the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) has had on left-wing political activism. They don't have to renounce the whole book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salubrious development if more of them would separate themselves from Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here are the rules I have in mind:

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the almost fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ Alinsky's methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity. Indeed, Alinsky promotes polarization in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies. Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy.

Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but their opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed.

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malignant effect upon our nation. Division is what the book advocates, and it's what its disciples want, but anyone who's serious about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, would do well to unambiguously renounce Alinsky and his book.

Avian Population Collapse

A column by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times bears the alarming news that scientists studying the populations of over 500 species of birds in North America reported last week that the number of individual birds has fallen by 29% since 1970. There are almost 3 billion fewer birds in North America today than there were fifty years ago.

If this is correct it's deeply disturbing. I don't doubt that habitat loss, both in the birds' breeding grounds and in their wintering grounds in Central and South America have taken a toll. It's interesting that among the species hardest hit were grassland species in the midwest (717 million fewer birds) where vast tracts of grassland acreage have been sacrificed to development and agricultural production.

I do have a concern about the methodology of the study, however. It relies heavily on estimates of numbers by amateur observers and among the species showing severe declines are blackbirds (440 million fewer since 1970) which are so numerous and which in the non-breeding season flock together in such huge numbers, that accurate estimates of their numbers are very difficult to assess.

More distressing, than the drop in numbers of abundant species like blackbirds, though, is the decline in woodland species like warblers which breed in the boreal north. The warbler population has shrunk, according to the study, by some 617 million birds.

Cape May Warbler

Oddly, however, vireos, which are similar to warblers and which share similar habitat, have shown a jump of 53% in their population. Why that should be is apparently a mystery.

Whatever the explanation of this mystery, it seems obvious that habitat loss, and perhaps diseases like West Nile virus and even feral house cats are taking a toll. Every new shopping center and housing development eliminates acres of habitat, and every new highway is a killing field for birds and other wildlife.

But if these stressors really are what's causing the collapse it's very hard to imagine a solution.

More Beautiful Than it Has to Be

One characteristic of living things that has thrilled everyone who has ever considered it is the astonishing level of beauty they exhibit. Consider, as an example, this bird of paradise:

or this blue dachnis:

Why are living things like birds and butterflies so beautiful? Darwin thought that females selected mates based on their fitness and that this sex selection caused beauty to evolve as a by-product. This is still the reigning explanation today (although it doesn't explain the beauty of flowers), but as an article by Adrian Barnett at New Scientist explains, not everyone is on board with this explanation, maybe not even Darwin himself. Here's an excerpt:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.

In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).

But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.

What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.

And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests.

Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.(emphasis mine)

As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone. Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin.

In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.

The difficulty here, at least for me, is that it doesn't explain why animals would have developed a sense of beauty in the first place. Pair-bonding and reproduction certainly don't require it, obviously, since many organisms, including humans it must be said, successfully reproduce without benefit of physical attractiveness.

So why would some organisms evolve a dependence upon it, and what is it in the organism's genotype that governs this aesthetic sense?

Could it be that animals, or at least some of them, are intelligently designed to just delight in beauty?

Letter to a Young Woman

Several readers have dug into the archives and retrieved a letter I had written to my youngest daughter when she was a junior in high school over a decade ago. I had posted the letter on Viewpoint at the time, and after perusing the emails from those readers I thought I'd repost it in hope that someone finds it helpful.

I originally titled it "A Letter to a Young Girl", but some readers, never having been a father with daughters, thought "young girl" was not a particularly apt description of a high school junior, so I've retitled it to avoid further criticism.

Here it is:

Hi Honey,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, and by smiling a lot. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,
Dad

Crying Wolf

Everyone is familiar with the story of the little boy who so often cried out that a wolf was attacking the sheep when no such threat existed that eventually everyone just ignored him.

We're not yet to the point of ignoring people who are crying out that the wolf of climate catastrophe is stalking the planet, but given the track record of the last fifty years it would be understandable if we were.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has compiled a list of over a dozen forecasts by prominent figures which failed to materialize. The CEI article introduces the list with these words:

Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.

The predictions from the 1960s often promised massive food shortages, those from the 70s predicted an impending ice age. In the 80s the apocalyptic prognostications switched from global cooling to global warming with forecasts of entire islands and coastlines inundated by the sea by the year 2000.

None of these prophecies have come to pass, but that doesn't deter the doomsayers who are still plying their trade today perhaps even more fervently than ever. Scaring people with prophecies of imminent disaster is, after all, a lucrative business as Al Gore, one of its foremost practitioners, could attest.

Here's a partial list of some of those predictions from the 60s and 70s:

• 1967: Dire famine by 1975.
• 1969: Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989
• 1970: Ice age by 2000
• 1970: America will be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980
• 1974: New Ice Age Coming Fast
• 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’
• 1978: ‘No End in Sight’ to 30-Year Cooling Trend
• 1988: Maldives completely under water in 30 years
• 1989: Rising seas to ‘obliterate’ nations by 2000
• 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019
• 2002: Famine in 10 years
• 2004: Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020
• 2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013

Each of these and many others are documented in the CEI piece. Check it out and ask whether, after all this, you can blame people for being skeptical when they hear similar pronouncements of incipient doom today.

Naturalism and Reason in Tension

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

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

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

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

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

Arrington offers a sampling of such quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Dog in the Fight

Assuming, as is likely, that the Iranians were responsible for the crippling drone attack on Saudi oil production over the weekend, the question on all the talk shows yesterday has been what should the American response be?

I think a more fundamental question is why the United States should respond, at least militarily, at all. It seems to be assumed that it's incumbent upon the U.S. to punish the Iranians, but why?

We are energy independent thanks to fracking (which many Democrats want to do away with) and are a net exporter of petroleum. It seems to me that the people who should punch back against the Iranians are the people hurt by the reduction of Saudi oil production, i.e. the Saudis, Asians and Europeans. It's their fight, not ours.

We certainly should lend logistical and intelligence support to allies and we should keep up the sanctions pressure that's apparently causing a lot of pain in Iran, but, unless there's something I'm overlooking, it would be foolish for us to get involved in a shooting war with the Iranians when their aggressions have mainly affected other countries.

The Iranians seem to be trying to goad us into a war, but until they attack American interests or take American lives, our response should not involve military force. It would be a big mistake to spend American blood and treasure to protect the interests of countries which would be essentially getting a free ride. Until the Iranians try to harm us, we have no dog in the fight.

President Trump is walking a tightrope between insufficient and excessive reaction. His instinct has in the past been to favor caution. Let's hope that that remains his instinct after this latest provocation.

No Facts, Only Interpretations

Of late we've been hearing that we live today in a post-fact, post-truth world. Milo Yiannopolis, the gay bad boy loathed by campus liberals and many conservatives as well, once observed that “We live in a post-fact era and that is wonderful.” I must politely disagree, not with the first part of his assertion which is, I say it with irony, factual, but with the second. It's not so wonderful at all, in my opinion.

Facts matter because truth matters, but the subjectivization of truth, most obvious in the frequently heard claim that "What's true for you isn't true for me," has made it difficult to hold onto the concept that there actually is any objective truth about most things that really matter. The conviction that there is is so 20th century.

One manifestation of the loss of a belief that truth is objective, and that it matters, is the apparent eruption in recent months and years of "fake news" stories.

Daniel Payne at The Federalist lists sixteen "Fake News" stories in the major media just since Trump's election, all of which were false or misleading, but which were repeated thousands of times on social media before the truth came out.

Of course, if we're living in a post-truth era, it may largely be due to the fact that our media and our politicians, most notably Mr. Obama and even more egregiously, Mr. Trump, seem to live in a world where facts don't matter at all. As Peter Pomerantsev, in an essay at Granta, pungently observes, what's different today is not merely that we're living in "a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not."

Pomerantsev places much of the blame on the postmodern mindset:

How did we get here? Is it due to technology? Economic globalisation? The culmination of the history of philosophy? There is some sort of teenage joy in throwing off the weight of facts – those heavy symbols of education and authority, reminders of our place and limitations – but why is this rebellion happening right now?

This equaling out of truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else.

This school of thought has taken Nietzsche’s maxim - that there are no facts, only interpretations - to mean that every version of events is just another narrative, where lies can be excused as ‘an alternative point of view’ or ‘an opinion’, because ‘it’s all relative’ and ‘everyone has their own truth’ (and on the internet they really do).

Maurizio Ferraris, one of the founders of the New Realism movement and one of postmodernism’s most persuasive critics, argues that we are seeing the culmination of over two centuries of thinking. The Enlightenment’s original motive was to make analysis of the world possible by tearing the right to define reality away from divine authority to individual reason.

Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ moved the seat of knowledge into the human mind. But if the only thing you can know is your mind, then, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘the world is my representation’.

In the late twentieth century postmodernists went further, claiming that there is ‘nothing outside the text’, and that all our ideas about the world are inferred from the power models enforced upon us. This has led to a syllogism which Ferraris sums up as: ‘all reality is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is constructed by power, and ergo all reality is constructed by power.

Post-modernism first positioned itself as emancipatory, a way to free people from the oppressive narratives they had been subjected to. But, as Ferraris points out, ‘the advent of media populism provided the example of a farewell to reality that was not at all emancipatory’. If reality is endlessly malleable, then Berlusconi... could justifiably argue, ‘Don’t you realize that something doesn’t exist – not an idea, a politician, or a product – unless it is on television?’

To make matters worse, by saying that all knowledge is (oppressive) power, postmodernism took away the ground on which one could argue against power. Instead it posited that ‘because reason and intellect are forms of domination . . . liberation must be looked for through feelings and the body, which are revolutionary per se.’

Rejecting fact-based arguments in favour of emotions becomes a good in itself.

This sounds about right to me. The postmodern view of objective truth - that it's an outdated holdover from the failed Enlightenment habit of placing too much epistemological confidence in Reason - leads us to the place where a postmodern philosopher like the late Richard Rorty can assert that "Truth is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying."

If one's peer group is the media then there's a pretty broad spectrum of things one can get away with saying, no matter how fantastical, as long as those things are critical of political opponents. Unfortunately for Rorty and his definition of truth, though, his own peer group, philosophers, didn't let him get away with defining truth that way.

Innocent Until the Evidence Says Otherwise

If a man's daughter was sexually assaulted by another man how likely would it be that the victim's father would tell the perpetrator's father that he supports the perpetrator's nomination to the highest court in the land? If such a conversation took place it would suggest, would it not, that the victim's father didn't really believe his daughter's allegations against the perpetrator?

This is precisely what apparently transpired in the case of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.

Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino writing for The Federalist tell us this:

[I]t appears the Blasey family had significant doubts about what Ford was trying to accomplish by coming forward and making unsubstantiated allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Within days of Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, a fascinating encounter took place. Brett Kavanaugh’s father was approached by Ford’s father at the golf club where they are both members.

Ralph Blasey, Ford’s father, went out of his way to offer to Ed Kavanaugh his support of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, according to multiple people familiar with the conversation that took place at Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, Maryland. “I’m glad Brett was confirmed,” Ralph Blasey told Ed Kavanaugh, shaking his hand. Blasey added that the ordeal had been tough for both families.

The encounter immediately caused a stir at the close-knit private golf club as staff and members shared the news. The conversation between the two men echoed a letter that Blasey had previously sent to the elder Kavanaugh. Neither man returned requests for comment about the exchanges.

Blasey never explicitly addressed the credibility of his daughter’s allegations, but he presumably wouldn’t have supported the nomination of a man he believed tried to rape his daughter.

Indeed. So why did Blasey Ford try to ruin a man's life and that of his family by making allegations she could not prove, which none of her closest friends could substantiate and which even her family evidently disbelieved? The answer lies, perhaps, at the end of the Hemingway/Severino column:

So what was the point of the cavalcade of unsubstantiated allegations? Ford’s attorney Debra Katz offered not so much a hint as a confession. Ford testified that she had no political motivation. But in remarks captured on video, Katz admitted that Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh were at least in part driven by fear he might not sufficiently support unregulated abortion on the court.

“We were going to have a conservative” justice, she said, “but he will always have an asterisk next to his name” that will discredit any decision he makes regarding abortion. What’s more, she added, “that is part of what motivated Christine.”

For these people, evidently, anything is justified, even destroying a man's reputation, if it'll promote a political victory.

There's a lesson here for everyone who accepted Blasey Ford's account despite her lack of evidence. Before you put your reputation for reliable judgment at risk, before you jump to conclusions about guilt or innocence, before you accept an allegation on someone else's say-so, wait for the evidence. Demand to see the evidence.

Until the evidence is presented one should refuse to form a judgment of guilt, and if none is forthcoming then no matter how tempted you may be to believe the allegation, refuse to allow yourself to think the worst of someone until you have good reason to do so.

It would have spared a lot of people who ended up embarrassed by their rush to judgment over the Covington Catholic brouhaha had they followed this simple rule of intellectual and moral responsibility, and it would've spared a lot of others the disgrace of being complicit in the character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh for whom there's much more reason to support a judgment of innocence and no good reason to support a judgment of guilty.

To see more of the reasons for thinking Kavanaugh innocent read the Hemingway/Severino column at The Federalist.

Amazing Spectacle

An amazing spectacle is unfolding across the northeastern United States this month, but it's going largely unnoticed by most people. Millions of green darner dragonflies are heading south in an annual migration the details of which are stunningly similar to those of the monarch butterfly.

Green Darner

From the website of the British Royal Society:

Darners undertake complex long-distance annual migrations governed largely by temperature that involve at least three generations.

In spring, the first generation makes a long-distance northbound movement (further than 650 km) from southern to northern range limits, lays eggs and dies.

A second generation emerges and returns south (further than 680 km), where they lay eggs and die. (This is the movement that's occurring now).

Finally, a third resident generation emerges, reproducing locally and giving rise to the cohort that migrates north the following spring.

In other words, three generations of dragonflies are involved in the cycle and each generation "knows" both to migrate and the direction in which to migrate, either north or south, even though no individual dragonflies ever made the trek before.

One generation knows to migrate north and the next generation knows to migrate south. The third generation knows not to migrate at all. How do they know this?

Researchers have discovered that the migratory behavior is triggered by temperature, but how, exactly, does temperature trigger behavior and where does the information come from that tells each generation of these beautiful insects which direction to fly? No one seems to know.

Moreover, genes code for proteins. Proteins form tissues and catalyze reactions in the cell, so what is the connection between genes and behavior? How does a protein(s) produce a particular behavior in an animal like an insect? Is there something else in the organism in addition to protein that generates, regulates and choreographs behaviors like migration or mating or myriad other activities that animals engage in?

One more question. Why would such a behavior evolve in the first place? Lots of insects, including other dragonfly species, do perfectly well without migrating. What combination of genetic mutations and environmental selection pressures acted in the history of this particular species to produce this particular behavior if it didn't really have pronounced survival value?

Maybe someone knows the answers to these questions, but I don't. They are among nature's most profound mysteries.

Indeed, it seems that the more we learn about living things the deeper the mysteries surrounding them grow and the harder it is, for me, at least, to accept the conventional narrative that what we're observing is merely the result of a long series of fortuitous accidents and coincidences.

Good Intentions Minus Wisdom

A recent column by Dennis Prager contains a lot that's worth pondering.

For instance in the column he offers the reader six rules of life that would be we'd all do well to memorize:

• Ingratitude makes happiness impossible.
• Corrupt people think everyone else is as corrupt as they are.
• Human nature is not basically good.
• Feelings are far less important than actions.
• Most men need a woman to mature.
• Most women need a man to mature.

Each of these deserves a column of its own, but Prager has other fish to fry. He writes that there's another rule that accounts for many of the horrors of the 20th century. Here it is:

GI - W = E (Good Intentions minus Wisdom leads to Evil).

Prager explains what he's getting at as follows:

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity. They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity -- eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens "free" education and "free" health care.

They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

Convinced of their own goodness such folk often have nothing but contempt for those who oppose them. After all, to oppose the good requires that the opponent must be bad ab defino.

That's why Hillary Clinton could condemn those who could not bring themselves to vote for her as "deplorables," and it is, Prager makes bold to assert, the position of virtually every editor and columnist at The New York Times.

He goes on:

The problem with communists and with leftists who don't consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It's that they lack wisdom. There are wise and foolish liberals, wise and foolish conservatives; but all leftists are fools.

Every one of the Democrats running for president is a fool. This is not, however, a description of their totality as a human being. Fools may be personally kind and generous, may be loyal friends and devoted spouses, and of course, they may be well-intentioned. But in terms of making the world worse, there is little difference between a well-meaning fool and an evil human being.

Why does he call them "fools"? That language seems unnecessarily strong and insulting, and causes those of us who wish for a more civil public discourse to cringe, but Prager explains his meaning:

Tens of millions of well-intentioned Westerners supported Stalin. The Westerners who supplied Stalin the secrets to the atom bomb were not motivated by evil. They were simply fools. But few evil people did as much to hurt the world as they did.

They are fools partly because they believe good intentions are all that matter. Therefore, they never ask perhaps the most important moral question one can ask: What will happen if my policy is enacted? Leftist supporters of communism never asked.

I'd prefer he had said that they were "foolish" rather than call them "fools," but admittedly that will probably seem to most readers to be a distinction without a difference. In any case, Prager elaborates:

Democrats who push the country-bankrupting Green New Deal provide a contemporary example. They not only deny the economy and society-crushing consequences of the Green New Deal, they deny any price will be paid. Every home, office, hospital, school and business will be forced to stop using fossil fuels, yet only good [they say] will come from that.

Giving that amount of coercive power to the state is of no consequence to leftists. In their make-believe world, no one will suffer. On the contrary, America will become richer, and millions of jobs will be created while we destroy our economy. Poor Africans trying to electrify their countries will be told not to -- yet they, too, will somehow become rich using only wind and sun.

If the Green New Deal is enacted, the American economy will tank -- and with it, much of the rest of the world. Tyrannies like China and Iran will be emboldened, as will dictatorships like Russia.

About all of this he's surely correct. The Green New Deal would be a disaster which is why even Democrats who said they supported it withheld their support when it came up for a vote in the Senate.

Prager concludes with this:

The left pushes for a Palestinian state although even Israelis on the left know this would mean a Hamas-Hezbollah state on the Israeli border. But they know they mean well.

They routinely label the beacon of freedom on Earth racist, misogynistic, homophobic, imperialistic, genocidal; cheapen the label "Nazi"; promote all-black dorms and graduations; promote preteen boys' performing drag shows; tell young women career is more important to happiness than marriage; believe a country can remain a distinct nation with open borders; condemn parents who try to reassure their 3-year-old son that he is a boy; and ruin the university, the arts, late-night comedy, pro football and religion.

But they mean well.

That's quite an indictment. Is he right or does he overstate his case?

A Fitting Observance

On this date eighteen years ago, a group of savage fanatics launched the worst attack on the American mainland ever to befall this country.

As a counter to the foolish assumptions about Western civilization that motivated those terrorists and those who cheered them on I'd like as a kind of observance to rerun an older post based on sociologist Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won.

Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in it that all of the progress the world has enjoyed since the medieval period has had its genesis in the West.

His theory, to my mind convincingly defended, is that progress originated in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were.

He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic among progressive intellectuals but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored in remote lands a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they imposed "modernity" on much of the non-Western world. It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anti-colonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, never having made anything better for anyone, blithely and foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

Yes, and what of those who sought on 9/11/2001 to cripple and perhaps destroy one major fount of all this blessing? What might be said not only of them but also those who still today believe as they believed that the West has been, and is, thoroughly evil and deserves ruination?

Woodberry's paper can be read in pdf here.

Engineering Brilliance

Drew Berry creates computer generated animations of cellular processes and this particular video (below) is especially artful. The processes he depicts are occurring 24/7 in each of the trillions of cells in our bodies. As you watch the video keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals, and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

Notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations in the cell where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did this behavior evolve in the first place?

There may indeed be naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions which we'll someday discover, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible and remote such explanations sound to all but the most inveterately committed and the more it looks like the living cell has in fact been engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

Great News!

Here's some wonderful economic news that you may not have heard from a media not fond of reporting news that makes the current president look good.

The unemployment rate for African Americans fell to the lowest level ever recorded in August, dropping from 6 percent to 5.5 percent. Not only has black unemployment reached a record low under Trump, the gap between white and black unemployment also narrowed to the smallest on record.

The unemployment ratio between blacks and whites has averaged roughly 2 to 1 or so for decades, meaning the black unemployment rate is typically twice the white unemployment rate. The ratio has remained roughly constant whether the economy is doing well or not.

As Breitbart reports:

A year ago, the black unemployment rate stood at 6.6 percent while the white unemployment rate was 3.4 percent, meaning black unemployment was 185 percent of white unemployment.

In August, the gap narrowed so that black unemployment was under 162 percent of white unemployment. That is the smallest gap ever in records going back to January 1972.

This is particularly remarkable because it comes at a time of remarkably low unemployment. Prior to the Trump era, the last time the gap fell below 170 percent was in August of 2009, when the black unemployment rate was 14.8 percent and the white unemployment rate was 8.9 percent. Back then the gap declined because white unemployment was increasing at a faster clip than the already sky-high black unemployment.

In other words, the decline in employment inequality now is undeniably the best on record because it comes in the context of falling unemployment.

The news is equally good for Hispanics. Hispanic unemployment fell to 4.2%, which matches the lowest level ever, a record set in April of this year. The unemployment rate for Hispanics first set new record lows in 2018, falling to 4.6% in June and another 0.1% to 4.5% in July.

These statistics are probably very alarming to Democrats heading into 2020. Here's why:

In 2016 Donald Trump received 8% of the black vote and 29% of the Hispanic vote. If these unemployment numbers continue through the 2020 election he'll doubtless receive much higher percentages from both of these groups and that would be fatal to Democrats' hopes of unseating him fourteen months from now.

In 2016 Trump received 58% of the white votes while 37% of whites backed Clinton. Thus, a Democrat opponent has to be able to count on massive support from minority voters to win in 2020, but if minority groups are finding their economic circumstances far better under Trump than they were under Obama those massive majorities might not materialize.

Astonishingly, this prospect has led some progressives to actually hope for a recession. They're perfectly willing to see minority families, particularly children, suffer economic and social misery rather than see Trump re-elected.

One wonders how they can look at themselves in the mirror.