Russian Savagery

No European nation since the Germans in WWII has perpetrated so many horrific atrocities on another European nation has have Vladimir Putin's Russians against the Ukrainians. Michael Weiss at Yahoo News elaborates. Here are a few excerpts:

Details of brutal war crimes committed by the Wagner Group in Ukraine have been published by Gulagu.net, a Russian human rights organization. In the horrifying testimonies, Azamat Uldarov and Alexei Savichev, who say they served as Wagner unit commanders, confess in explicit detail the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians, injured Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian servicemen who had deserted or refused to take part in the massacre.

Wagner has played a key role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by filling out the Kremlin’s front lines with waves of its mercenary fighters. Moscow has allowed Wagner to recruit convicts like Uldarov and Savichev directly from Russian prisons, offering amnesty even for the most violent offenders in exchange for throwing them into the maw of war.

In January, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Wagner as a transnational criminal organization, accusing it of having “engaged in an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and physical abuse in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali.” The killings described by Uldarov and Savichev allegedly took place during the recent Russian offensives in Bakhmut and Soledar.

The mercenaries gave Gulagu.net explicit details about how Russian forces were ordered to go house by house in Bakhmut, killing anyone they found inside, civilian and military alike. “To kill everyone. Not to take anyone prisoner." Uldarov claimed, adding that his forces carried out these orders ruthlessly.

“When I went into the basement, there were children there. And I was instructed not to release any. I was in command. Me and my group killed everyone. Then we all left. We didn’t let anyone out,” he said. “There were about 40 children there. I gave the command to kill everyone. It was a big house, nine floors. The whole basement was packed and mined. I made the decision to ‘zero’ everyone.”

In another chilling video, Uldarov describes how he personally murdered a young Ukrainian girl. “She is screaming. She’s little, you know? Five, maybe 6 years old. And I took a kill shot, you know?”

In separate video testimony, Savichev detailed to Osechkin the murder of unarmed young Ukrainian teenagers earlier this year. Savichev recounted how teenagers captured by Russian forces were made to pull up their shirts to reveal any possible tattoos — a common Russian tactic to determine their ideological disposition.

Wagner mercenaries shot those with tattoos, Savichev said. He attempted to justify his actions by claiming he didn’t consider the teenage Ukrainians to be “civilians.” The presence of tattoos, he asserted, was evidence that his victims were members of the Azov battalion, a nationalist unit in the Ukrainian military.

Supporting evidence of the ex-mercenaries’ atrocities was further published by Ukraine’s domestic security service, the SBU. On its Telegram channel, the organization published what it claims was an intercepted phone call between a Russian soldier and a woman who is apparently his wife, supporting the testimonies made by Gulagu.net.

In the recording, the unnamed Russian soldier details a similar “no quarter” policy, explaining how he, too, had to kill women, children and teenage girls. The woman attempts to justify the murder of civilians, claiming that “anyone peaceful will have already left.”

Last week, a video circulated on social media showing a captive Ukrainian soldier being beheaded by his Russian captors. Another video showed two beheaded Ukrainian soldiers near a destroyed Ukrainian M113 armored personnel carrier.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, told the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda that his office has received “dozens” of videos showing Russians publicly executing Ukrainians. "There are beheadings, cutting off genitals, ears, nose, limbs or phalanges on the hands,” Lubinets said. “Some [of the perpetrators] have been identified.”

When there's no moral compass in a man's life he finds that there's really nothing preventing him from behaving like a beast, which is, after all, what a secular society claims we actually are. Ever since Darwin children around the globe have been taught that we're just a bundle of appetites, that there's no soul, no objective right and wrong, no transcendent moral judge who will hold us ultimately accountable.

So far from being created in the image of God, children have been taught that we're created in the image of apes. It's no wonder that men in war behave so savagely. We reap what we sow.

The Scientific Case for Theism

During much of the 19th and 20th centuries it was simply assumed among philosophers and scientists that atheism (naturalism) was obviously true and that any belief in any non-natural or god-like entities was irrational. Naturalism implied materialism and materialism entailed that there are no immaterial entities like souls, minds or God.

The universe was assumed to have had no beginning, it was infinitely old, and thus there was no need to account for an origin of space, time, matter and energy. Moreover, Darwin made it possible to explain life, it was thought, without recourse to a creator.

Everything could ultimately be explained in terms of physics and chemistry and naturalism was seen as the intelligent, educated worldview for anyone not in thrall to delusion and superstition.

It's remarkable that starting about fifty years ago all that began to change.

The universe was found to have actually had a beginning. It was also found to consist of forces, constants and other parameters that were exquisitely fine-tuned to life-permitting values. Life itself was found to be information-rich, and consciousness turned out to be inexplicable on a materialist view of life.

Philosophers, and gradually scientists, began to realize that these facts all pointed away from naturalism and toward the hypothesis that the universe and life had been intelligently engineered by a Mind.

This is not to say that everyone today is on board with this revolutionary development in philosophy and science, the intelligent engineer view is still in the minority, but it's no longer possible to say that this view is irrational, uneducated or superstitious. Indeed, it has proven itself to be extremely compelling for anyone who's not dead-set against it.

Dozens of books have been published in the last thirty years outlining the arguments for jettisoning a naturalistic worldview and adopting a theistic perspective. One of the most recent and also one of the best is a book by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer titled Return of the God Hypothesis.

The book itself may be a bit too sciency for anyone not familiar with some basic concepts in physics and chemistry, but Andrew Klavan of the Daily Wire interviewed Meyer about the book and Meyer does a good job of simplifying the argument so that any college educated and reasonably interested viewer can understand it.

The interview is twenty minutes long and can be viewed below. If you're interested in why there's dissatisfaction among philosophers and scientists with naturalism and a deepening appreciation for the greater explanatory power of theism, check it out:

Why Ukraine Matters

George Weigel has an essay at First Things (Subscription may be required) in which he explores the meaning of the Ukraine war - for Ukraine, for Russia and for the West, including the U.S. He writes:

So what does Ukraine mean? What has the Russian war on Ukraine this past year revealed?

What Ukraine means for world politics is that the seemingly stable post–Cold War settlement in Europe was in fact a truce.

What Ukraine means for Russia is that its political culture is suffering from a false historical-cultural narrative that has metastasized into a form of paranoia, accelerating the country’s descent into kleptocratic autocracy and international pariah status.

What Ukraine means for Ukraine is that an impressive process of nation-building, which has accelerated since 2013, must be continued and intensified amid a war for national survival.

What Ukraine means for the United States is that there is no holiday from history and no escape from world politics for America and Americans.

At the macro level of world politics, the Russian war on Ukraine has falsified the post–Cold War conviction of many in Western Europe, and some in North America, that a Europe without wars was possible. Perhaps there would be occasional flare-ups in the ever-restive Balkans. But big wars between big states were a thing of the past, it was thought, because alternative security arrangements, underwritten by economic interdependence, were securely in place.

A war whose stated purpose was the restoration of Russian greatness has become the war that has finally stripped the mask from post-Soviet Russian corruption, incompetence, and self-delusion, while further exposing the extraordinary social and cultural damage done to Russia by seventy-four years of communism.

It has also shown the Russian leadership for the savages that they are. Deliberately bombing apartment complexes and schools, shooting unarmed civilians, kidnapping and transporting thousands of children from Ukraine back to Russia, and ghastly tortures of civilians and soldiers:

As Oleksandra Matviichuk, executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, told Jay Nordlinger, Ukrainians are fighting, not just for the territory that is historically theirs, but for the people living in those areas:

This war started not in February 2022 but in February 2014 [when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and occupied parts of eastern and southern Ukraine] . . . I am very aware of what Russians did to people in the occupied territories. I have interviewed hundreds of people. They have told me how they were beaten, how they were raped, how their fingers were cut off, how they were crammed into wooden boxes, how they were tortured with electricity. One lady reported that her eyes were dug out with a spoon. We will never leave our people alone in these occupied territories. It would be inhuman to leave them . . .

In a recent op-ed that Weigel excerpts, Sen. Tom Cotton explains why the U.S. must help the Ukrainians:

We should back Ukraine to the hilt because the likeliest alternative isn’t peace, but rather another “frozen conflict” that favors Russia and harms our interests. Russia would retain key strategic terrain and much of Ukraine’s industry and agriculture. Food and energy prices would remain high, potentially starving many nations and exacerbating the migrant crisis in the West.

Meanwhile, Russia could rebuild its strength and seize the rest of Ukraine when the opportunity arose. Such an outcome would create millions more Ukrainian refugees, drive inflation higher, and worsen supply-chain disruptions. Russia would also extend its border deep into Europe. Next on the chopping block would be Moldova, site of another frozen conflict. And after that, a NATO nation.

Stopping Russia also will allow the U.S. to focus on the greater threat from China. A Russian victory would force us to divert more resources for a longer time to Europe to deter Russian expansionism, creating persistent threats on both fronts. But a Ukrainian victory and a durable peace will secure our European flank as we confront China.

This excerpt doesn't mention it, but the United States also has a moral obligation to help Ukraine by the fact that we strongly urged Ukraine to give back to Russia the nuclear arsenal that the Soviets had placed there during the cold war.

The Budapest Memorandum (1994) that we pressured Ukraine to sign, and which was also signed by the U.K., Russia, et al. guaranteed that Russia would respect Ukraine's borders in exchange for the nuclear weapons that were left on its soil after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1990-1991). Russia clearly violated the memorandum in 2014 when they first invaded Ukraine, sending a stark message to the nations of the world that if they have nukes they better not give them up, and if they don't have them they better get them.

Russia's further invasion in 2022 imposes on us a responsibility, having been largely responsible for Ukraine's having forfeited a potential nuclear deterrent, to help provide Ukraine with the resources - short of actual troops - necessary to repel the Memorandum's violaters.

Weigel continues:

America is not going to be great, stay great, or become great again — choose your slogan — if we do not soberly face the reality that America’s interests are deeply implicated in the outcome of the war in Ukraine. Rebuffing Putin’s aggression and sustaining Ukrainian sovereignty will make the world, and Americans, safer, while demonstrating to China that the mature democracies that are the backbone of a decent global order have not decayed into fecklessness.

Western civilization is suffering from a wasting disease of self-absorption, based on defective ideas of the human person, human community, and human happiness. The dominant cultural forces in the West insist that we are mere bundles of desires, all of which are morally commensurable or equal; that the gratification of those desires is the meaning of happiness; and that seeing to the satisfaction of those desires is, in the name of human rights, the primary responsibility of the state.

Meanwhile, woke culture, spreading out from our institutions of higher learning like a plague and infecting the bureaucracies of the administrative state, is creating a society of silos in which race-mania, “gender identity,” and “isms” of all sorts are somehow supposed to foster living in solidarity, although they are fostering precisely the opposite: social fragmentation leading to perilously high levels of mental illness, violence, and public irrationality.

Over the past year, Ukraine and Ukrainians have provided the West with an alternative vision of the human condition.

By looking death in the eye and refusing to flinch, Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, have reminded the West that we are more than our subjectivity — that we can know, embrace, and live by truths greater than “me.” We can make sacrifices. We can exhibit courage. We can refuse to be mastered by evil. We can live in a solidarity that is based on the truths built into the world and into us.

Such courage and character deserve our support.

Arguing Well

Casey Chalk at The Federalist gives us three principles for arguing well which he borrows from ethicist Matthew Petrusek. Chalk is writing for conservatives in particular, but the principles apply to anyone.

1. Know Their Arguments Better Than They Do

In order to effectively argue, we need what Petrusek calls a disposition for constructive debate rather than simply point-scoring (as fun as it may be to “own” the other side). That includes trying to sympathetically understand our opponent’s position.

A great way to do that is to try to repeat the person’s argument back to them in your own words. It can be as simple as saying, “Tell me if I understand you accurately: What you are saying is [fill in the blank]?”

The purpose of this is not simply to be charitable to the other side (though that’s certainly important). It’s also a way to force your opponent to actually make an argument, rather than simply an emotive, often aggressive assertion.

Petrusek explains: “Central to playing the game of truth-seeking is knowing the opponent’s position at least as well, if not better, than he or she does.” And by helping the person package an argument, their errors usually become manifest.

2. Insist That People Define Their Terms

Arguments can only go so far when two or more people aren’t using the same terms in the same way because the two camps define their words differently. Thus before jumping right into the point-counterpoint debate, we should ask our interlocutors to define their terms. Sometimes the result of that will be that people realize they don’t know what those terms even mean.

Alternatively, it could become clear there is a deeper origin point for the disagreement.

“Without pinpointing where the conflict originates, there can be no authentic debate; the disagreeing parties will simply be talking (or more likely, shouting) past each other,” writes Petrusek.

3. Find the Underlying Philosophical Principles

This points to another important element of real, productive debate: identifying the underlying philosophical principle often doing the unmentioned work in an argument. Petrusek explains that isolating arguments and breaking them down into parts enables us to more clearly recognize their faulty premises because “sound arguments have valid propositions and unambiguous terms.”

Consider the claim that, “We shouldn’t legislate morality.” This claim is premised on the empirical belief that certain laws are based on hard, empirical truths, while other laws are based on flimsy, subjective definitions of morality. But the problem is that all laws are moral in the sense that they obviously communicate that some behaviors are good, and others are bad. Not legislating morality is, in a word, impossible.

A lot of what gets labeled an “argument” today is less true argumentation and more just fighting and name-calling (claims about alleged racism, white supremacy, or “the patriarchy” often fall into this category).

It is not hard to identify opportunities to employ these tactics. Think about how you could respond to those who claim people need to be protected from “harmful” or “dangerous” speech. Typically, these arguments amount to little more than emotivism and voluntarism: the assertion that a person’s emotions and individual will trump everything else, even, ironically, things they otherwise claim to believe in, such as logic, science, or democracy.

Chalk gives a bit more by way of examples at the link, but it's certainly true that our society would be better off were we all better trained in the art of argument. An argument should be a rational attempt to find truth, it should never be a shouting match or name-calling, yet that's what it too often is.

The hardest part about good arguing - a calm, reasoned exchange of ideas and defeaters - is admitting when the other side has the better argument and being willing to accept that one's own beliefs need to be modified, held less confidently, and/or abandoned altogether.

This, for most of us is a bitter pill and our pride often prevents us from going this far. Our pride, in other words, often stands between us and the truth, which is really a shame and a tragedy.

Obama's Blunders

For decades after WWII the world was able to limit the spread of nuclear weapons and confine these weapons of mass destruction to just a handful of countries that already had them. All hope of limiting them evaporated, however, during the Obama administration as a result of several terrible mistakes.

As part of the old Soviet Union Ukraine was home for a significant arsenal of nuclear weapons, and when the U.S.S. R. collapsed in 1989 Russia wanted them back. Walter Russell Mead, a Wall Street Journal columnist explains one of these blunders.

The Clinton administration devoted much of its diplomatic energy to persuading Ukraine, along with Kazakhstan and Belarus, to return those weapons to Russia, but the Ukrainians resisted American pressure to denuclearize since they were afraid to give them up because they thought that’s the only thing that protected them from an expansionist Russia.

So the Clinton administration promised the Ukrainians that if they give up their nukes America and others would guarantee their defense. This promise was codified in a memorandum signed by a number of countries, including Russia, in Budapest in 1994.

Ukraine trusted these nations to keep their word and returned the weapons to Russia, but as Mead says, trusting the word of a U.S. president and the rules of the international order rather than relying on a nuclear deterrent was a "blunder of historic proportions."

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970 and was permanently extended five months after the 1994 signing of the Budapest Memorandum. In that memorandum, Russia, the U.S. and U.K. agreed not to threaten or attack Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and to consult on helping if they were attacked; also, the three former Soviet republics joined the NPT as nonnuclear states.

History will mark 2014 as the definitive end of nuclear non-proliferation. In that year Russia violated the Budapest memorandum that they had signed, invaded Ukraine and seized large swaths of territory including Crimea. the Obama administration responded by sending the Ukrainians nothing more lethal than blankets and field rations.

As a result of Obama's failure to do anything substantive to aid Ukraine, Russia was emboldened to seize more of Ukraine in 2022, and, equally as bad, our loss of credibility has spurred other nations to realize that they better get their own nukes because the U.S. can no longer be counted on to protect them against superpowers like Russia and China.

Here's Mead:

The barriers to nuclear proliferation are rapidly weakening around the world. Russia and China are abandoning all pretense of opposing the North Korean arsenal. In South Korea, polls show that 70% of the population believes that the time has come to follow the North’s lead.

In the Middle East, Iran’s relentless progress toward nuclear weapons is touching off the long-feared regional proliferation cascade. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are taking the first steps toward acquiring the capability to enrich uranium. Turkey is unlikely to lag far behind as nuclear weapons become a normal part of the arsenal of middle powers.

Nationalists in countries such as Brazil and Argentina will want their countries to join the expanding nuclear club.

The fight against nuclear proliferation has been a centerpiece of American foreign policy since the first bombs fell on Japan in 1945. American diplomacy tried and failed to stop the Soviet, British, French, Chinese, Israeli, Indian, Pakistani and North Korean programs.

And soon Iran will have them.

Mead puts much of the blame on Obama:

History will name Barack Obama as the man on whose watch nonproliferation definitively failed. His waffling response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine not only marked the end of the post-Cold War holiday from history; it also marked the death of the dream that the leaders of the democratic world had the strength and vision to uphold the principles of the rules-based international order in the face of a ruthless opponent.

It further taught the world that nuclear weapons are a better defense than American pledges. Coupled with the failure to address North Korea’s nuclear progress and the Iran deal’s sunset clauses, which made the treaty about delaying rather than blocking Tehran’s nuclear advances, Obama-era diplomacy made clear that, despite high-flown rhetoric to the contrary, Washington had no plan to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Obama’s real error was to base his foreign policy around a rules-based international order that he lacked the skill and will to defend. He couldn’t bring about the world he wanted, or prepare the country for life after the death of the dream.

In the Budapest Memorandum, Mr. Clinton made a moral commitment to Ukraine that Mr. Obama declined to honor. The results include an accelerating decay of the nonproliferation regime, a vicious war, the closest alliance between China and Russia since Stalin’s era, and a global decline in the value of America’s word.

Mead alludes to Mr. Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran but doesn't elaborate. Even so, it's surely a contributing factor in the current proliferation of nuclear weapons. The agreement simply postponed Iran's ability to develop a nuclear capability for ten years from the time it was signed.

Today they have all they need to build a nuclear weapon and will soon be in a position to put a nuclear warhead on a missile, a warhead they've sworn to use to attack Israel.

The credibility of America's deterrence also suffered when Mr. Obama warned the Assad regime in Syria that any use of chemical weapons against Assad's foes would be a "Red Line," the crossing of which, it was implied, would bring down the wrath of the U.S.

Mr. Assad ignored the president's tough talk, employed chemical weapons against his own people, and, as Assad expected, Mr. Obama did nothing. Add to this sorry history of fecklessness Mr.Biden's betrayal of the Afghans by suddenly, and without warning, yanking our troops out of that country and abandoning it to the cruelties of the Taliban, and it's little wonder that the rest of the world is leery of American assurances.

This history is surely one reason China feels emboldened to threaten Taiwan. They don't really believe that we'll honor our pledge to defend the island nation, and, given the unreliability over the past fifteen years, it's certainly understandable why they'd think that.

Is Morality Just Neurochemistry?

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

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

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

Here are Samuel's introductory remarks:

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

In her new book, Conscience, Churchland argues that mammals — humans, yes, but also monkeys and rodents and so on — feel moral intuitions because of how our brains developed over the course of evolution. Mothers came to feel deeply attached to their children because that helped the children (and through them, the mother’s genes) survive.

This ability to feel attachment was gradually generalized to mates, kin, and friends. “Attachment begets caring,” Churchland writes, “and caring begets conscience.”

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

Rooting morality in biology has made Churchland a controversial figure among philosophers. Some think that approach is itself morally repugnant because it threatens to devalue ethics by reducing it to a bunch of neurochemicals zipping around our brains.

A number of philosophers complain that she’s not doing “proper philosophy.” Other critics accuse her of scientism, which is when you overvalue science to the point that you see it as the only real source of knowledge.

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

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

Nor could there ever be social progress since the moral consensus of the community would be right ab defino and the dissenter would likewise be wrong. And, if dissenters by definition must be wrong, why should anyone listen to them? Indeed, why should they not be punished if they refuse to accept what the community has established as right?

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

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

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

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

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

The Oppressed

Noam Chomsky is a famous leftist who, perhaps surprisingly, is very critical of postmodern thinking which is ubiquitous on the left. In this 8 minute clip, his own thinking on the subject is presented by using some old 70s and 80s era video clips of the late French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault and others.

The narration may seem a little odd at first but you get used to it. The video offers "a brutal critique" of postmodernism, and almost everything about the critique applies to today's far left.

One passage from the video has particular salience in our contemporary society. Chomsky is cited (6:49) as saying that,

The oppressed are not only the honest seekers of truth, professors willing to speak plainly, marginalized researchers who value clarity but are denied funding if they don't submit to the prevailing power structures, but also the well-intentioned masses who are tricked into paying the salary of the postmodern intelligentsia, thinking they are producing great ideas while, according to Chomsky, nothing of the sort is happening.

The oppressed today are not racial or sexual minorities, although those are the groups the media would have us believe are suffering most onerously under a yoke of tyranny of one form or another. Rather, according to Chomsky, the oppressed are those who are being shouted down, cancelled, assaulted and vilified on campuses across the country, usually with the tacit approval of left-wing faculty and administrators.

They're those who take a principled stand against what they see as perversions of God's intended telos for humanity as well as against the dehumanization of both women and the unborn.

The genuinely oppressed have no lobby, no advocacy organization and attract little sympathy in our culture. There's no letter in the LGBTQ+ alphabet that represents them. No Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office thinks they can add meaningful diversity to the workplace or student body, there are few human resource departments concerned with equity for the truly oppressed and there's little desire in most liberal-controlled institutions to include them.

Proclamations of inclusion like the one below often embrace almost everyone but them. They are excluded, disdained and harassed, and few of those who express passionate concern for "The Oppressed" seem to care overmuch about those who, in our society, truly fit Chomsky's definition of the oppressed.

Can you tell who's not included among those who are welcomed?

Can a Drug Slow Aging?

An article in The Daily Mail claims that medical science may be on the cusp of developing pills that can help to slow, or even reverse, the aging process. Although actually reversing the aging process is a longer term ambition, slowing it substantially may be close to being realized, and alot of very wealthy people are investing a lot of money in realizing it:

Sam Altman, 37, was revealed to have funded biotech startup Retro BioScience to the tune of $180 million last month. He is the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley billionaires to throw their considerable wealth behind the science of aging. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is reported to have invested $3 billion in life-extension startup Altos Labs.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested in the Methuselah Foundation, which has the goal of making "90 the new 50". Tech billionaire Peter Thiel invested in the Methuselah Foundation, hoping to greatly exceed the average person's lifespan.

With all these resources being thrown at curing aging, Andrew Steele, the author of the 2020 book Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, believes pills to prevent aging may be on pharmacy shelves within five years.

While aging does not directly kill people, older people are at risk of many deadly diseases such as Alzheimer's, heart disease and cancer. Around 100,000 people die from age-related diseases every day, according to the World Health Organization.

Drugs which can kill aging cells and restore a measure of vigor are called "senolytics" and there are dozens of companies researching them:

In mice, these drugs cause elderly animals to become lively and healthy suddenly. 'Many of these drugs are drugs that we already understand and use for different purposes, so we don't have to develop new medications,' Mr Steele said.

An example of a senolytic treatment is the combination of datasinib, used for chemotherapy, and quercetin, a molecule found in fruits and vegetables. Used together, they remove aged 'senescent' cells responsible for many of the problems associated with aging.

Another potential general anti-aging drug is metformin. First approved in 1994 for type 2 diabetes, the drug has shown promise extending lifespans by improving blood vessel health.

The article quotes Steele as saying that,

Some of those companies are trying to develop new and more effective drugs that could do the same thing better. That's the sort of thing that's very, very close to clinical realization. And I'd be shocked if in five years we don't have some senolytics in the clinic.

It probably won't be for aging at first. It'll be for a specific disease - and maybe in 10 years, we'll use it for aging.

These things are very, very near term.

There's more at the link. This may all be hype, of course, but it raises the prospect of an interesting confrontation between those who believe we need to limit or reduce the number of people on the earth and those who welcome the prospect of extending human life spans.

It's probably safe to say that the latter group is going to win out. They have both numbers and wealth on their side.

Which fact probably assures us of one thing. If these drugs ever do get produced they'll probably be, at least at first, the monopoly of the wealthy.

Random Musings

• Why is it that when white men dress up in blackface it's considered an insult to blacks, but when men dress up as women and put on heavy facial makeup it's not considered an insult to women?
• Why is it that it's illegal for children to get tattoos, buy cigarettes or guns, drive cars or get married, but in some states they can have their bodies permanently mutilated simply because they're temporarily confused about their gender?
• Why do people scoff at the account of a man rising from the dead while believing that the first living cell could emerge spontaneously by an undirected accident in a chemical stew, an event that's biochemically impossible.
• Why was it wrong to justify slavery by asserting that blacks were less than human, or to commit mass murder of Jews by declaring Jews were less than human, but it's okay for some women to kill their unborn children because, it's argued, they're less than human?
• Why do some people think that no books, no matter how graphic, should be off-limits in elementary school libraries but high school libraries should not carry the works of Mark Twain?
• Why do some people think it's appropriate to subject children to stories about sexual matters, but older students should be given "trigger warnings" before they're exposed to political topics that may make them uncomfortable?
• The easier we make it to vote the more votes that will be cast by people who don't otherwise care much about their civic responsibilities and the more likely it'll be that unworthy candidates will get elected.
• Puritanism has been defined as the fear that someone, somewhere is having fun. Perhaps "wokeism" can be defined as the fear that someone, somewhere is thinking for himself.

John Updike on the Resurrection of Jesus

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but despite his flaws he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively, literally, physically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes to all my readers for a very meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

A Good Friday Allegory

As Christians observe this the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday, it might be helpful for both Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on the first "Good Friday."

It might be well today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and who those people on the train were and are.

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.