On Miracles and Easter

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable.

It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from a circularity. He seems to base the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident.

They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that it's possible that there are an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist.

The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it's not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well?

If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead.

After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

Stupefying Complexity

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each.

Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence.

The only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be. But why decide that? What reason can be adduced upon which such a decision might be based? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is that they have a strong preference that no such being exist and they allow their preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Gauger doesn't address that question, but her article is still very good.

How Much Different Could Our Universe Be?

I've frequently referred on VP to the phenomenon of cosmic fine-tuning as a powerful argument in support of the claim that the universe was intelligently engineered by a transcendent mind, but have often felt the difficulty of conveying how amazing this phenomenon is.

However, back in 2015 Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes wrote an article for the New Atlantis in which he gives an excellent explanation of what scientists mean when they talk about fine-tuning and what the implications and possible explanations for it are.

His column is a little long, but it does a wonderful job of making the ideas comprehensible to readers with a modest understanding of physics. If this is a topic that interests you I urge you to read Barnes' entire column, since I can only give you a slight taste of it here.

He talks about how the universe consists of numerous physical constants which are numbers which must be plugged into equations in order for the equations to accurately describe phenomena. For example, the gravitational attraction between the earth and the moon can only be calculated if we insert into the equation which describes this attraction a number called the gravitational constant.

There are dozens of such constants that comprise the fabric of the universe. Barnes writes:

Since physicists have not discovered a deep underlying reason for why these constants are what they are, we might well ask the seemingly simple question: What if they were different? What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?

There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life. Or even the complexity upon which life relies to store information, gather nutrients, and reproduce.

A universe that has just small tweaks in the fundamental constants might not have any of the chemical bonds that give us molecules, so say farewell to DNA, and also to rocks, water, and planets.

Other tweaks could make the formation of stars or even atoms impossible. And with some values for the physical constants, the universe would have flickered out of existence in a fraction of a second.

That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.

He goes on to give us some examples:

Let’s consider a few examples of the many and varied consequences of messing with the fundamental constants of nature, the initial conditions of the universe, and the mathematical form of the laws themselves.

You are made of cells; cells are made of molecules; molecules of atoms; and atoms of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, are made of quarks. We have not seen any evidence that electrons and quarks are made of anything more fundamental.

The results of all our investigations into the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy are summarized in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is essentially one long, imposing equation. Within this equation, there are twenty-six constants, describing the masses of the fifteen fundamental particles, along with values needed for calculating the forces between them, and a few others.

We have measured the mass of an electron to be about 9.1 x 10-28 grams, which is really very small — if each electron in an apple weighed as much as a grain of sand, the apple would weigh more than Mount Everest. The other two fundamental constituents of atoms, the up and down quarks, are a bit bigger, coming in at 4.1 x 10-27 and 8.6 x 10-27 grams, respectively.

These numbers, relative to each other and to the other constants of the Standard Model, are a mystery to physics....we don’t know why they are what they are.

However, we can calculate all the ways the universe could be disastrously ill-suited for life if the masses of these particles were different. For example, if the down quark’s mass were 2.6 x 10-26 grams or more, then adios, periodic table! There would be just one chemical element and no chemical compounds, in stark contrast to the approximately 60 million known chemical compounds in our universe.

With even smaller adjustments to these masses, we can make universes in which the only stable element is hydrogen-like. Once again, kiss your chemistry textbook goodbye, as we would be left with one type of atom and one chemical reaction. If the up quark weighed 2.4 x 10-26 grams, things would be even worse — a universe of only neutrons, with no elements, no atoms, and no chemistry whatsoever.

Considering that we know of no reason why the masses of these particles couldn't have had a broad range of values these are incomprehensibly tiny differences - on the order of a decimal point followed by 25 zeroes and a 1. To give us an idea of how narrow the range of masses these particles must reside in if they're to build a universe that would have chemistry, Barnes invites us to,

Imagine a huge chalkboard, with each point on the board representing a possible value for the up and down quark masses. If we wanted to color the parts of the board that support the chemistry that underpins life, and have our handiwork visible to the human eye, the chalkboard would have to be about ten light years (a hundred trillion kilometers) high.

And that's for the masses of just two fundamental particles. Add a third parameter and the life-permitting zone becomes vanishingly small:

There are also the fundamental forces that account for the interactions between the particles. The strong nuclear force, for example, is the glue that holds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms. If, in a hypothetical universe, this force is too weak, then nuclei are not stable and the periodic table disappears again.

If it is too strong, then the intense heat of the early universe could convert all hydrogen into helium — meaning that there could be no water, and that 99.97 percent of the 24 million carbon compounds we have discovered would be impossible, too.

And... these forces, like the masses, must be in the right balance. If the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for the attraction and repulsion of charged particles, is too strong or too weak compared to the strong nuclear force, anything from stars to chemical compounds would be impossible.

Stars are particularly finicky when it comes to fundamental constants. If the masses of the fundamental particles are not extremely small, then stars burn out very quickly. Stars in our universe also have the remarkable ability to produce both carbon and oxygen, two of the most important elements to biology. But, a change of just a few percent in the up and down quarks’ masses, or in the forces that hold atoms together, is enough to upset this ability — stars would make either carbon or oxygen, but not both.

Here's a chart that shows the delicate balance that must exist between just two fundamental forces in order for carbon-based life to exist.

Barnes is himself persuaded that cosmic fine-tuning points to the conclusion that our universe has been designed by an intelligent agent, although many other physicists resist that conclusion. They hold out hope that some other explanation for this amazingly precise calibration of constants and forces will emerge.

Maybe so, but what we know right now about the universe does not engender optimism that their hope will ever be justified.

The Wood-Wide Web

Hidden from view beneath the soil in a forest lies an incredible communications network whose engineering and functioning is simply breathtaking. Some ecologists refer to it as the "wood-wide web," and Illustra Media's beautifully filmed ten minute video gives a basic explanation of what it is and how it works.

If you appreciate nature you'll enjoy this:

Does the DA Have a Case?

A prosecutor with a reputation for being soft on crime in New York City has convinced a Grand Jury to bring an indictment against Donald Trump, ostensibly for misusing campaign funds in 2016 to buy the silence of a woman with whom he had had a sexual tryst years earlier.

Trump is charged with using $30,000 to purchase the woman's silence and designating the money as a legal expense. This sort of thing is generally a misdemeanor that's rarely prosecuted, but the District Attorney managing the case sees the chance to realize the dream of Democrats everywhere to ruin Trump so he's doing all he can to have Trump hauled into the dock.

The statute of limitations for the sort of malfeasance with which Trump has been charged is five years which would've elapsed in 2021, but somehow the DA has convinced the Grand Jury that the former president should still stand trial. It could be that the DA has much more on Trump than people think and that his case is much stronger than even his fellow Democrats think it is, but if not, he has set a terrible precedent by indicting for the first time in our history a former president and current presidential candidate for seemingly partisan political reasons.

Trump is doubtless an odious man, and as Jim Geraghty notes, he's a demagogue. Geraghty writes:

Merriam-Webster defines a demagogue as “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.” I would expand that a bit to define it as a leader who presses the emotional buttons of fear and anger in an excessive or unjustifiable manner, appealing to those base, irrational emotions to stir up the public into a frenzy, getting people to choose a path they would otherwise never choose and act in manners they otherwise never would embrace.

Trump certainly fits this description, but even so, every person delighting in Trump's troubles should ask themselves whether they would support prosecuting Bill or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama had any of them misused campaign funds (Hillary actually did).

If the answer they give to themselves is "no," which, if they're honest with themselves, it probably would be, then neither should they want Donald Trump prosecuted. A country that has two standards of justice, one for Republicans and one for Democrats, is essentially a banana republic. We need to be better than that.

The particulars of the charges against Trump will be revealed at his arraignment which is scheduled for Tuesday. We'll know then whether Trump is being charged with something serious or whether the DA is just trying to smear him in the eyes of the American people.

For the sake of the country, he better have something more against the former president than the criminal equivalent of jaywalking.

The Killers' Commonalities

Kylee Griswold has a piece titled Fixed it for You: Here’s What The Vilest Headlines About The Nashville School Shooting Should Have Said in which she lists some of the most awful media headlines in the wake of the recent tragedy in Nashville, Tennessee and offers corrections that make them more objective and less tendentious.

Here's an example:

Reuters: ‘Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.’

The headline gives the misleading impression that the killer was a Christian rather than that the victims were.

Griswold suggests this more factual revision: “Transgender Killer Murders 3 Christian School Children, 3 Staff In Possible Hate Crime.”

This emendation would not sit well, however, with those on the left who wish to shape public opinion in favor of the current fashion in gender fluidity, so it's not likely that anything so blatantly factual would ever be considered.

Meanwhile, some in the media have been lucubrating, as they always do after these horrid massacres, over what those who perpetrate such crimes all have in common in order that their motivations might be better understood and such terrors more effectively forestalled in the future.

In the past all sorts of possibilities have been adduced: the shooters heretofore were usually male, often white, loners, disaffected, traumatized, alienated, and, of course, had easy access to weapons.

Some or all of this may be true, but there are two possible commonalities among mass killers I'd like to see researched but which I have little confidence the progressive media would be interested in pursuing.

I suspect, but don't claim to know, that almost all of the mass shooters, especially the younger ones, have, or had, either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship with him at all.

I also suspect, but don't claim to have statistical evidence, that these deranged individuals have or had a terrible relationship, or no relationship at all, with God.

For someone embittered toward their father, either earthly or heavenly, or both, it's easy to devalue human life. They see no objective reason to think that a life is precious nor to think that there's any ultimate accountability for what they do.

With no hope that their spiritually empty lives have a meaningful future, in this life or the next, and seething with resentment and anger, they vent their hatreds on others, often those who are most vulnerable. Children, after all, make easy targets, and their violent deaths are guaranteed to maximize pain in their families and communities.

I'd love to read the statistics on these commonalities if anyone has done the digging, but I rather doubt anyone has. It's not the sort of thing that most of our betters in elite circles care to think about, much less investigate. The results might be too unsettling for a secular society that has come to accept, and even celebrate, the disintegration of the family and religious faith.

Nevertheless, we reap what we sow.

Coming Apart

A recent Wall Street Journal poll had some very distressing news concerning Americans' attitudes toward family, patriotism, religion, etc.

According to the poll only 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and only 39% said religion was very important. In 1998, those figures were 70% and 62% respectively.

The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Moreover, tolerance for others, which was ranked as very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58%.

Some 21% in the survey said that America stands above all other countries in the world, a view that some call American exceptionalism. Half said that America is one of the greatest countries, along with some others. The share who said other countries are better than the U.S. rose to 27%, up from 19% when the same question was asked in 2016.

The biggest gap is between old and young. Only 23% of adults under age 30 said in the new survey that patriotism was very important to them personally, while 59% of seniors ages 65 or older said it was, and only 31% of younger respondents said that religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors.

Furthermore, only 23% of adults under age 30 said that having children was very important.

Respondents were also split along political lines:

The poll asked whether society had gone far enough—or had gone too far—when it comes to businesses taking steps to promote racial and ethnic diversity. Just over half of Republicans said society had gone too far, compared with 7% of Democrats. Some 61% of Democrats said diversity efforts hadn’t gone far enough, compared with 14% of Republicans.

Three quarters of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting people who are transgender, while 56% of Democrats said society hadn’t gone far enough.

Overall, 63% of people in the survey said that companies shouldn’t take public stands on social and political issues, while 36% of people said companies should take such stands. Among Republicans, 80% opposed companies doing so, while 56% of Democrats favored the idea.

Half of people in the survey said they didn’t like the practice of being asked to use gender-neutral pronouns, such as “they’’ or “them,’’ when addressing another person, compared with 18% who viewed it favorably. Some 30% of respondents under age 35 viewed the practice favorably, compared with 9% of seniors.

So, what accounts for the precipitous decline in how many Americans consider these matters to be important? Some possibilities suggested in the WSJ article were political division, the pandemic and a faltering economy, but none of these seem able to explain why people today wouldn't value family, religion and patriotism.

Whatever the reason, it appears that the United States will be a much different country twenty years from now than it is today and certainly very different from what it was in 1998.

I doubt that it will be better.

The Conflict Between Naturalism and Reason

One of the interesting epistemological developments of the 20th century was the increasingly widespread recognition among philosophers and other thinkers that metaphysical naturalism actually saws off the epistemic branch upon which it had been comfortably perched 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 believing falsehoods as by believing 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 throughout 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 affairs for naturalists to find themselves in, but, even so, there are lots of examples of naturalists admitting that natural selection, at least naturalistic natural selection, entails precisely the conclusion that reason has evolved to aid our survival, not to discover truth, and especially not metaphysical truth.

Arrington offers a sampling of such quotes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Enough Evidence

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably plead a special exemption for this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity.

This evidentialism, or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 19th century and into the 20th among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink.

The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. Rather, our beliefs are based on an intuition of probability. The more intuitively probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it.

Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world.

When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult, if not impossible, standard for an inconclusive argument to live up to.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise.

Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in what was later collated into his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

Where Does Abstract Thinking Come From?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that among the things that a material brain cannot accomplish just by itself is abstract thought. Egnor concludes that this is evidence for mind/brain dualism because certainly human beings are capable of abstract thinking.

Why does he say that the material brain is incapable of generating abstract thoughts? He makes his case in a short essay at Evolution News, excerpts from which follow:

Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy.

He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.

His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.

Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.

During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:

There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mind-action"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind....If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact.

The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way.

But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[emphasis mine]

The brain was necessary for abstract thought, normally, but it was not sufficient for it. Abstract thought was something more than merely a process of the brain.

Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer, apparently, is that the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.

Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.

There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this: If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience, and since stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.

This is not proof that there's a mind, of course, but it is certainly consistent with the dualist hypothesis that we are a composite of mind and brain and it's certainly puzzling on the materialist hypothesis that the material brain is solely responsible for all of our mental experience.

The One

I recently read a book by theoretical physicist Heinrich Päs titled The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics.

In the book Päs argues that the findings of quantum mechanics entail the conclusion that everything in the world is entangled with everything else so that physical reality is actually just one thing. This is the ancient idea, Päs points out, called substance monism.

The book is interesting despite aspects of his discussion of quantum theory being over my head, but I had some philosophical reservations about a couple of things in his narrative.

Päs seems to claim at some points that physical reality is all One and at other places that all reality is One, and he seems to assume they are the same claim. In fact, though, these are two separate assertions. He apparently assumes without argument that physical reality is the only reality, but this is a metaphysical assumption for which a reader would like to see some reason for accepting.

It might well be that Päs is right in asserting that the physical universe is somehow an entangled unity, but it could still be the case that there's a transcendent realm, or God, that's distinct from the physical cosmos.

In other words, monism might prevail in the physical universe, but reality as a whole could be dualistic, but Päs ignores this possibility. It makes a difference, though, since if there is no God, or if, as Päs sometimes suggests, God just is the universe (pantheism) there are some serious moral conclusions which follow. Päs alludes to these in his concluding chapter. On pages 286 and 287, for instance, he writes that, "monism, just like science or nature in general, won't provide us with a moral compass," and then adds,

monistic ideas and the appeal to nature have also been abused to justify racism and social Darwinism. To avoid such perversions, we have to rely on moral values that have emerged and stood the test of orchestrating our social relationships over the course of history.

But why think that racism or social Darwinism are "perversions"? If the natural world is ultimate and if it's just a cold, impersonal cosmos that cares nothing for anything in it, if it provides us with no moral compass, upon what does he base his judgments as to what's perverse or morally wrong?

He leaves himself no basis for moral judgment other than his own subjective whims, and how he can say that his whims are "right" and someone else's are "wrong"?

Päs repeats this puzzling line of thought further down the page when he states that this, "doesn't imply that it is entirely hopeless to think that monism may make us less selfish and more open and tolerant."

Once again he's dragging in a moral judgment from who knows where when he implies that being selfish and intolerant are grave moral faults. Yet unless the standard he's basing his judgment on is personal, morally good, and able to hold us to account for our moral choices - a standard that only theism can provide - there's no reason to think that selfishness and intolerance are in any way wrong.

He appears to be piggy-backing on traditional Judeo-Christian moral thinking while dismissing the truth of Judeo-Christianity. Nevertheless, if Päs is right, if the only god that might exist is the pantheistic deity (i.e. the universe itself) then in the words of English essayist Alexander Pope, whatever is is right.

Modern man, of which Päs is representative, is in a pickle. He doesn't want to accept Pope's dictum and at the same time he resists accepting the only circumstance - the existence of the classical Judeo-Christian God - which would confute Pope.

So, like Päs, modern man lives as if the classical God exists, he poaches his moral sentiments from the Judeo-Christian tradition while insisting that that tradition is bogus.

He's like a man who wants to borrow money from a bank, but the whole way to the bank he scoffs at the belief that banks actually exist.

Our (Nearly) Unique Galaxy

Astronomer Hugh Ross discusses some fascinating facts about our Milky Way galaxy in an article at Salvo. In the article he points out that the age of our galaxy, it's uncommonly low luminosity for a galaxy its size, and its very unusual proximity to several smaller galaxies, all conspire to make the Milky Way habitable.

It's pretty interesting stuff. Here's why the age of the galaxy is important:

We must first explain how galaxies are categorized by color. Though it may seem counter to the colors we usually associate with hot and cold, young stars, which tend to be hot, are blue-colored, while old stars, which tend to be cooler, are red-colored.

So galaxies in which star formation proceeds aggressively shine with a blue color, while galaxies in which star formation has ceased appear red.... Astronomers have typically categorized galaxies as belonging to either the red population or the blue population.

The Milky Way (MWG), however, fits into neither the red nor the blue category. It has taken on a green hue. This is because, while star formation in the MWG has subsided some, it has not yet ceased. Thus, our galaxy contains a combination of blue stars and stars that aren't yet old enough to be red but have aged enough to be yellow. Blended together, these stars give the galaxy a green appearance.

Diagram of the Milky Way Galaxy showing the location of our sun

Green galaxies are rare, but they are exactly what advanced life requires. A galaxy dominated by blue stars will bathe its planets with many flares—flares too abundant and intense, and with too much ultraviolet and x-ray radiation, to permit life to exist on any of the planets.

A galaxy dominated by red stars will also bathe its planets with many flares—again, flares of deadly intensity. A red galaxy also exposes its planets to more supernova and nova events (stellar explosions) than advanced life can possibly handle.

Another problem for galaxies dominated by red stars is that they lack the necessary level of ongoing star formation to sustain their spiral structure. But galaxies dominated by blue stars, where star formation is advancing aggressively, experience major disturbances (warps, bends, spurs, and feathers) in their spiral structure, so they cannot maintain a stable spiral form either.

But the green Milky Way, in addition to being of appropriate size and mass to contain the elements that life requires, has another characteristic that allows for the existence of advanced life within it: its spiral arms are stable, well-separated, highly symmetrical, free of any significant warps or bends, and relatively free of spurs and feathers.

In part, these spiral-arm features are possible because the galaxy is dominated by yellow stars which are complemented by a significant population of blue stars.

[O]ur galaxy....is transitioning from a star-forming site to a no-longer-star-forming site. And this midlife period appears to be the "best of times" for the sustainment of living things....[T]he Milky Way has transitioned from its role in building the required ingredients for advanced life (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, calcium, iron, etc.) to one in which it can now, for a relatively brief time period, sustain advanced life.

There's more on why our galaxy is a suitable habitation for living things at the link. The sorts of things Ross says about the Milky Way can also be said about the solar system and the earth/moon complex. When all the unique factors which have to be pretty much just as they are for higher life forms to be sustained anywhere in the cosmos are tallied up the improbability of it all has led some scientists to conclude that it's very unlikely that there's any other place in the universe where life like ours could exist.

One could perhaps say that the existence of another habitable galaxy somewhere out there, with a solar system and a planet capable of sustaining life, would almost be miraculous.

Believing 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.

Greed

On his Substack page my friend Mike Mitchell gives one good reason why corporations are so often despised by the common people.

Citing a PBS documentary titled Age of Easy Money he explains that the "easy money" being referred to is a result of the Federal Reserve's attempt to stimulate economic expansion by lowering the interest rate businesses have to pay when they borrow money.

At low interest rates, the hope is, businesses will be incentivized to borrow money to expand operations, provide more and better goods and services and in the process create jobs.

Unfortunately, that's not quite how it has worked out. Mike writes:

According to the documentary....Large corporations definitely took advantage of the opportunities to borrow large sums of money with little cost, but instead of using it to create jobs and build better infrastructure (that is, for the sake of their country and fellow citizens), many used the money to buy back large portions of their own stock to raise their companies’ net worth.

He goes on to quote a number of reporters and other experts in support of this claim and interested readers are urged to go to the link and read the quotes for themselves, but I'll share one quote from a Wall Street Journal reporter named Dion Rabouin:

As a corporation you realize all that matters is the stock price. So what do we have to do to increase the stock price? And more often that is buying back the stock.

So it used to be the Fed would lower interest rates. Businesses would then take on more debt. They would use that debt to hire more workers, build more machines and more factories.

Now what happens is the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, businesses use that to go out and borrow more money, but they use that money to buy back stock and invest in technology that will eliminate workers and reduce employee headcounts.

They use that money to give the CEO and other corporate officers big bonuses and then eventually issue more debt and buy back more stock. So it's this endless cycle of things that are designed to increase the stock price rather than improve the actual company.

One reporter Mike cites says she “can’t fault the companies much,” but Mike says that she should. He comments:

She also says, “this [low] interest rate environment creates very strong economic incentives to do exactly what [businesses are] doing.” Yes, but only if “what they’re doing” is driven by the principle of profit maximization as the priority around which all business operations are oriented.

The more common word for profit maximization as the top priority is “greed.” I know that claim will evoke some eye rolling and accusations of naïveté from hard-nosed business types, but that’s probably just greed in self-defense mode.

There is a sense of inevitability in saying we can’t fault the corporate executives in such an “interest rate environment” for spending on themselves and forgetting about the millions of their fellow citizens whose financial priorities are rent and food rather than second homes and diversified portfolios. But this is not inevitable.

Mike closes with a quote from our second president, John Adams, in 1798. Here's part of it:

Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by…morality and Religion. Avarice [and] Ambition…would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Indeed, a society untethered to a moral sensibility anchored in the will of a transcendent God who will hold us accountable for how we treat our fellow man and how we use the blessings that we've been given, is a society in which anything goes.

Any policy is right as long as it works, and in this case "works" means "makes me wealthy."

A culture marinated in 165 years of Darwinian evolution can't help but learn the lesson that it's all about survival of the fittest. It's all about amassing wealth for oneself and, if there is no God, if we've all evolved up out of the slime with no higher purpose than to survive and pass on our genes, why are the corporate panjandrums wrong to think this way?

What's Woke?

Ever since Bethany Mandel, a conservative and co-author of a book that devotes a chapter to defining "woke," was unable to define it herself during an interview on The Hill’s online program called Rising, the left has been scoffing and conservatives have been coming up with their own definitions.

The problem with defining the word as it's used today is that "woke" is like "pornography." As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964, he may not be able to define it but "I know it when I see it."

One of the criticisms of Mandel is that anyone who writes a book about something ought to be able to define it, but tens of thousands of biology books have been written on the subject of "life" yet no biologist can define what it is. Should they be mocked for writing about something they can't define?

An irony of folks on the left snickering at a conservative who struggled to define "woke" is that progressives like Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, like many progressives, is unable to define what a "woman" is.

It would seem that defining "woman" would be a far easier task than defining a protean concept like "woke," but the left seemed unfazed by Judge Jackson's consternation at being asked to explain in her confirmation hearing what is meant by the word.

The word "woke" gained currency among African Americans during the Civil Rights era when it was used in reference to the need for people to "wake up" to racial injustice. Those who were alert to the social and political situation were said to be "woke."

Earlier in this century it took on a broader meaning, encompassing a set of attitudes that combine progressive/left positions on race, climate, LGBTQ+, transgenderism, feminism, diversity, identity politics, etc. Conservatives latched onto the word as a term of derision for both the policies and the people who promoted them.

The conservative critique of "wokeism" focuses not only on the destructive and sometimes ridiculous nature of the policies themselves (e.g. allowing men to compete in women's sports, allowing them to enter private female spaces, insisting that men can become pregnant, paying millions of dollars in "reparations" to people who were never enslaved, and so on), but also on the behavior of those at whom the pejorative "woke" is directed.

For example, those who are so labeled are often closed-minded to arguments with which they disagree. They're often intolerant of dissent, preferring to shut down discussion by calling the dissenter a racist or homophobe, or just shouting the hapless dissenter into silence. Indeed, the "woke" often see every political statement with which they disagree as "code" for racism or a "dog-whistle" for racists.

Moreover, a lot of dissenters have lost their jobs because they disagree with the positions held by their "woke" colleagues or employers. "Cancel culture," the attempt to destroy a person's livelihood and/or their reputation because the person refuses to conform to progressive orthodoxy, is a phenomenon associated with the "woke."

When progressive orthodoxies are transgressed there's usually no forgiveness, no grace, but sometimes if the offenders are obsequious enough, if they debase themselves and grovel at the feet of their "woke" superiors in abject repentance they may be granted a tentative absolution.

Finally, "wokeness" is often characterized by embarrassing efforts at virtue-signaling - attempts to demonstrate to the wider public that the wokester is a morally superior human being and eager to flaunt his moral superiority at every opportunity so that everyone will stand in awe and admiration of the wokester's sheer goodness.

This moral preening manifests itself in universities and government institutions which trip over each other in their zeal to demonstrate that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is part of their institutional lifeblood.

Nor is our military exempt from "woke" virtue-signaling. While China is building a military to fight successful wars against us, our military is funding seminars to train recruits in proper pronoun usage.

Corporations are investing enormous amounts of money promoting "stakeholder" interests in causes like climate change that have nothing to do with giving shareholders a return on their investment.

Professional sports teams sanctimoniously signal their racial righteousness with messages in their stadiums, on the playing field and on their uniforms that display their piety for all the world to see and esteem.

Television shows and commercials take extraordinary pains to feature representatives of every racial and LGBTQ+ group - even featuring plus-size women in exercise clothing - in order to ensure that the viewer not miss the point that the advertisers are on the cutting edge of "woke" moral excellence. They don't though, seem to feel the need to feature positive portrayals of diversity in either religion or political ideology.

The super woke, in order to demonstrate that they are Olympian caliber moral athletes, are going beyond the concerns of their more pedestrian brethren and are throwing themselves into the struggle to secure legal rights for fish, insects and even rivers. It's remarkably noble of them, but one can't help wonder why their concern for rights usually stops short of rights for unborn humans.

I guess even the most virtuous of the "woke" saints have to draw the line somewhere.

Genuine Inclusivity

Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, makes an appeal in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) for genuine inclusiveness in our society rather than the ersatz variety promoted by those whose idea of inclusivity seems to be more about excluding than including.

Here's what Cardinal Dolan writes:

I am proud that my country and my church are both committed to the noble ideal of inclusion. Everyone should feel loved and respected. All people must share in all rights. We couldn’t dare to claim to be “one nation under God” if it were otherwise.

Yet society and the church are falling short of this noble ideal. By accepting one dominant cultural narrative that presumes to define those who are “excluded,” we are ignoring those who don’t tidily fit into the prevailing cultural story line. Want some examples?

• Moms and dads in lifelong, life-giving marriage, cherishing a large number of children, who are routinely ridiculed and regularly stereotyped as threatening to the planet.

• Fragile unborn babies, who have no legal protection in most states, with all of us forced to pay for the taking of their lives.

• Parents, especially struggling ones, who must pay constantly increasing taxes to support monopoly government schools and who are denied the right to use tax dollars to send their children to the schools of their choice.

• Citizens who for ethical reasons can’t obey the tidal wave of bureaucratic decrees on healthcare and are forced to choose between their consciences and their jobs.

• A gay person trying his best, with God’s grace, to live according to biblical teaching, who hears church leaders call that morality unjust and oppressive.

• Immigrants who came to this country eager to work in the belief that America was a sanctuary but who can’t get a labor permit and are treated with scorn.

• A woman who chooses to give birth to a baby while worried by hints and even outright threats that she’ll lose her job.

• Young people who are spiritually thirsty for a sense of awe, reverence and transcendence but who have difficulty finding a church to satisfy their needs.

• Relief agencies labeled as lawbreakers by members of Congress for welcoming, feeding and housing refugees.

• Our beloved elders near the end of life, who are coaxed into feeling useless, a burden, with euthanasia the answer.

• Folks who want only inspiration, encouragement and clear teaching from their pastors and religious leaders, but who instead must listen to dissent every Sabbath.

• Cops who face danger daily, who see their colleagues killed and wounded, their resources shrinking, and the criminals they apprehend released in an hour.

• Elderly people who are scared to take the bus or subway, or to walk down the block for milk and bread.

• Parents who worked two jobs and saved for decades to send their children to college, and struggled to pay back the loans they had to take, only to see their neighbors with weekend homes have their loans forgiven.

These good people tell us they are also marginalized and excluded. Rarely do I find them bitter, angry or judgmental. They, too, want a society that is inclusive—not merely for the groups now chic to defend, but for all.

I wonder how many of the bureaucrats and school administers assigned to monitor "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" ever give a moment's thought to the millions of people marginalized in our culture because they don't fit into the privileged pigeon-holes chosen by our progressive elites.

Becoming a Butterfly

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies highlight the incredible difficulties faced by any purely unguided and natural account of the origin of metamorphosis.

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no plausible answer.

The standard Darwinian account, remember, maintains that this process evolved through an unguided, purposeless series of genetic mutations combined with natural selection. No intelligent agency was involved.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

Irish scriptoria

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

No Center, No Cause

Contemporary cosmologists - scientists who study the origin and structure of the universe - believe that the universe has no center and had no cause.

These are two strange claims.

We often think of the expanding universe like an exploding firework whose fragments all radiate out from the rocket, but that's evidently not the best way to think of what's going on in our universe.

Imagine instead a child blowing soapy film in a plastic ring.

Now imagine the plastic ring shrinks to a diameter so tiny it can't be seen, and the bubble emerging from this tiny aperture pinches off and breaks free of the ring.

As the bubble floats in the air it continues to expand, but - and this is the point - there's no central point from which the expansion grows. The whole bubble expands as if every point were the center.

This is something like what scientists have in mind when they say that the universe has no center. The universe is, strangely enough, like the surface of the bubble, and it's unimaginably vast.

Watch this five minute video to get an idea of how immense it is:

When scientists say the universe had no cause they mean that it had no physical cause in space and time. It arose out of nothing and there's no scientific explanation for how it happened.

It's not that we don't know the scientific explanation, but rather that there can't be one. This is because until there was a universe there was no space, time nor matter, nor were there any physical laws that could have mediated its creation.

Science can't operate in a scenario in which there are no parameters, no laws and no forces. Apart from these, science has nothing to work with and nothing to investigate.

Thus, either the universe was uncaused or, if it did have a cause, its cause was beyond space, time and matter. In either case, science can't say anything about it, although theology can since a cause beyond space, time and matter powerful enough and intelligent enough to create a vast, finely-tuned universe sounds very much like God.

Of course, one who believes the universe is uncaused can side-step the conclusion that God created it, but rejecting the principle of causality merely to avoid the God conclusion is intellectually regrettable.

If, on the other hand, you accept the principle that whatever comes into existence must have a cause of its coming into being then you're acknowledging that the cause of the universe's coming into being must either be God or something very much like God.

It's hard to imagine any other plausible option.

To put it simply, God is a little bit like the girl in the picture producing the bubbles.

Young, Liberal and Depressed (Pt.II)

Yesterday's post addressed the sense of hopelessness that, according to surveys, seems to be afflicting the young, particularly liberal, or progressive, young people.

This "nihilism index," as it was called in yesterday's post, is much more pronounced among young females than young males and to a greater extent among young progressives than young conservatives.

According to an article at slowboring.com,

[L]iberal girls have the highest increase in depressive affect and conservative boys have the least. But liberal boys are more depressed than conservative girls, suggesting an important independent role for political ideology.

Why should this be? One possibility suggested in the article is that "progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.

The article quotes a podcaster named Jill Filipovic who writes that she is increasingly convinced that,

there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent.

Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response.

This makes sense. Young progressives are often see themselves as perpetually oppressed and victimized. They often believe the world is soon going to end in climate catastrophe, and they find it very difficult to maintain much of a sense of humor.

They're often bitter, angry and judgmental. Such individuals can hardly help being depressed.

Filipovic continues:

That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstrap their way into well-being.

It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off.

Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

It's also a pretty reliable way to make oneself feel miserable, angry and perhaps bitter, and other people don't usually enjoy spending much time around someone who's miserable, angry and bitter unless they themselves are also miserable, angry and bitter. And when the only people who care to spend time with a person are people who are themselves miserable, angry and bitter then everyone's misery, anger and bitterness is amplified and reinforced.

Why, though, are girls more affected than boys? Perhaps it's because girls are more sensitive to all the things mentioned above than are boys, and being more sensitive they're more vulnerable to them.

I don't know, but whatever the case, it does seem that progressivism is a very unhealthy mindset. At least it is if one wishes to be a happy person.

Young, Liberal and Depressed (Pt. I)

The statistics are alarming. Rusty Reno writes about them in the recent First Things (Paywall):

According to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, 57 percent of high school girls say they persistently feel sad or hopeless. That’s up from 36 percent a decade ago. For boys, what might be called the nihilism index went up from 21 percent to 29 percent.

Not surprisingly, the number of teenagers reporting that they have seriously considered suicide has also increased, reaching 30 percent for girls.

Why? Reno doesn't think much of what usually passes as reasons for this slide into despair. Instead he argues that it's a consequence of overweening secular progressivism:

[T]oday’s cultural propaganda forbids our acknowledging the obvious fact that the last decade has seen the imposition of gay marriage, “shout your abortion,” transgender ideology, and lots of Rainbow flag-waving. During the same ten years, marijuana has been legalized and “white privilege” has been demonized. Black Lives Matter announces that our country is hopelessly racist; environmental activists tell us we’re on the brink of extinction.

In short, we’ve created a toxic culture.

He goes on to claim that,

The nihilism index should include more than the percentage of teens reporting despair and contemplating suicide. Marriage and fertility rates belong as well, as do drug overdose deaths, murder rates, and mass shootings.

Other factors are relevant, too: workforce participation, civic involvement, religious attendance.

I invite social scientists to give rigorous formulation to a nihilism index, a much-needed measure of how bad secular progressivism has made life for so many people.

Over the last fifteen years, the United States has gone from hosting no pediatric gender clinics that facilitate “transitions” to hosting more than one hundred. Over the same period of time, mental health for young people has declined and the rate of teen suicide has increased.

We have gone from no pot shops to thousands of them—and from 27,000 drug overdose deaths per year to more than 100,000.

Correlation does not prove causation, but it demands investigation.

Whatever you think of the particulars of Reno's indictment it seems plain that for many modernity has drained the meaning out of life.

People used to find meaning in family, church, community and work, but today many families have disintegrated, church no longer seems a realistic option, and neighborhoods are rarely comprised of people who have a generational attachment to them.

All that's left is work, and work by itself doesn't usually satisfy our yearning for purpose, especially when so many work from home, isolated from meaningful human contact.

Indeed, we're evolving into a nation of social isolates, atomized individuals with few, if any, emotional connections to other people.

A sense of loneliness, emptiness and pointlessness is pervasive, and people, including the young, have turned to ersatz emotional and psychological fixes - facebook "friends," drugs, alcohol, pornography, gaming, progressive causes, even bullying - but none of these satisfy the deepest hungers in the human psyche.

Which is why the needle on the "nihilism index" is pointing to the red.

More tomorrow.

Who Perpetrated the Violence on January 6th?

Just as we were apparently not told the truth about "Russia Collusion" and the origins of Covid, neither have we been given all the information about the January 6th riots of which many in Congress were aware.

Apparently, the stories that had circulated after the riots that provocateurs such as Antifa had infiltrated the crowd and were responsible for much of the violence - stories which until now were difficult to assess - have now been confirmed by a series of videos that have recently come to light.

The videos, with commentary, can be seen here.

A government that consistently lies to its citizens for partisan reasons is illegitimate. It's not much different than totalitarian governments throughout the last hundred years which have sought to manipulate their citizens in order to consolidate and retain their own power and oppressive policies.

When people talk about draining the swamp it is ensconced bureaucrats in our law enforcement agencies like the Department of Justice and elsewhere in the executive branch which need to be drained.

Too many of these folks live by a pragmatic ethic that holds that whatever works to accomplish their aims - whether those aims be destroying their political opponents or imposing their preferred policies on the nation - is right and moral, but pragmatic ethics are incompatible with justice and have no place in a healthy republic.

If you're interested in what many on the House of Representatives January 6th committee must have known but refused to share with you, watch the videos.

Meanwhile, kudos to those in Congress who are now seeking to make transparency a reality.

Policy Has Consequences

I often remind my philosophy students that ideas have consequences in the real world. Victor Davis Hanson reminds us in his latest column that public policy also has consequences, and the consequences of a lot of the policies enacted by federal, state and local authorities today are calamitous.

In his lede he comments on a video of shoplifters in Portland confronted by a man who urges them to return their purloined merchandise:

Recently there were some remarkable online videos of a Portland, Oregon good Samaritan confronting shoplifters and forcing them to dump loads of their pilfered goods.

More stunning, however, was the sheer outrage — of the thieves!

They pouted. They screamed. They resisted. How dare anyone stop them from stealing anything they wished.

The criminals entertained no fear of any consequences for walking out with bags of things that were not theirs.

They had no care that mainstreaming their habits would undermine the entire fabric of society.

What is common to the pandemic of smash-and-grab, carjacking, fighting on airliners while in flight, and deadly Saturday night shoot-outs is this same apparent assurance there will be no consequences.

Hanson argues that the failure of authorities to prosecute crime is a contagion spreading across the urban landscape of our nation.

That expectation of exemption is why the Antifa thugs in Atlanta were so bold in their latest violent attacks on the police.

And why not, after the 120 days of rioting, looting, arson, and assault in the summer of 2020 which resulted in few Antifa indictments, fewer convictions, and almost no imprisonments?

But it's not just the urban underclass who know that their behavior will not be prosecuted. Our elites know it, too:

Former FBI Director Andrew McCabe admittedly lied on four occasions to federal investigators, apparently with the prescient expectation he would never be prosecuted.

The same hubris was true of former CIA Director John Brennan, who admittedly lied under oath to Congress — twice — with absolute impunity.

The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper not only lied under oath to Congress, but crowed that he gave the “least untruthful” answer. He too faced zero consequences.

Read his column. There's much more in it and it's quite good.

Liberal/Progressives who dominate both our federal Department of Justice as well as city council members and District Attorney's offices in most of our major municipalities seem to be under the impression that the best way to reduce crime is to decline to punish it.

They're apparently guided by the deeply counterintuitive notion that if criminals know they won't be held accountable for their crimes then, by golly, they won't commit them.

The possibility that this delusion is rampant among progressives charged with enforcing the law is one explanation for what we see happening, but it's not, in my opinion, the most plausible explanation. These people, after all, are not stupid. They know what they're doing.

A more plausible explanation is that a significant number of progressives are Marxists or heavily influenced by Marxist theory. They would rarely acknowledge it publicly, but many of them hate this country as it's currently constituted.

They see the United States as irredeemably racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They despise capitalism and the freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights, especially in the first two amendments.

They'd love to reconstruct the nation along Marxist lines through the ballot box, but that seems too difficult to accomplish given the inherent conservatism of the American people, so the only way to "fundamentally transform" the nation - to quote Barack Obama - is to overload the structures and institutions of society to the point of collapse.

If crime is rampant, if people are living in fear, if the institutions that serve as glue holding society together - government, police, schools, hospitals - are so overburdened that they cannot function, then the people will be ripe for revolution - preferably peaceful (liberals) but violent if necessary (leftists).

The Marxist model is to disarm the populace (repeal the 2nd amendment), control and manipulate the public discourse (cancel culture and the Twitter files), emasculate the church and destroy the nuclear family.

Marxists strive to reduce people to atomized individuals who believe themselves to be solitary voices standing in the path of an ideological behemoth and helpless to resist it. Once the left has secured their political hegemony they'll be able to impose their will on society, just as they did in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba and numerous lesser states.

Then the flame of freedom will flicker and go out and the hapless ciphers who comprise the citizenry will find themselves inhabiting a bleak totalitarian dystopia.

That's the implicit consequence of the policies of the contemporary left. They will not admit this, of course, and many perhaps would not even admit it to themselves, but the policies they enact are leading ineluctably in this direction, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not.

Turning Hume on His Head

The skeptical philosopher David Hume, in arguing against the reasonableness of belief in miracles, famously declared that,

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined....There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.

And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle....

Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature is deeply problematic, but let that go for now (see here for a discussion of some of the problems with that definition).

Hume goes on to say that,

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Having written those lines, the great Scottish philosopher would doubtless be aghast at the implications of this maxim (or rule) for the contemporary controversy over intelligent design. He employed the rule against belief in miracles, arguing that because we have an overwhelming experience against violations of the laws of nature we should reject any report that a "violation" occurred.

If we grant Hume his rule (which I don't - the rule only entails a reasonable skepticism of the report of a miracle, it doesn't warrant outright rejection of it) there's no reason not apply it to the discovery over the last fifty years that the universe and life are both information-rich.

Couple that discovery with the fact that we have a uniform experience of information, whether in a library, on a hard drive, or wherever, being produced by intelligent minds, and it would seem that Hume would have to grant that we should believe that the information contained in biological cells and organisms must be the product of an intelligent mind.

We have no experience, after all, of information being produced by random, impersonal processes and forces. Indeed, we have a uniform experience of random, unguided processes degrading information and generating disorder.

Hume intended his maxim to be a knockout blow to the idea that there's a personal deity at work in the world, but if we take the maxim seriously it actually leads to the conclusion that such a deity must, in fact, exist.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer discusses the problem biological information poses for naturalism in this video:

Collapsing Bird Populations

A column by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times a couple of years ago bears the alarming news that scientists studying the populations of over 500 species of birds in North America reported 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 throng together in flocks numbering in the thousands, that accurate counts are very difficult to obtain.

Much 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 since 1970.

Cape May Warbler

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

Whatever the explanation, it seems obvious that habitat loss, and perhaps diseases like West Nile virus, wind turbines, collisions with skyscrapers 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.