Ms. Gay's Resignation

Claudine Gay has resigned as president of Harvard. She has, she implies, succumbed to racist animus which has put unsustainable pressure on her and the Board of Directors.

Here's an excerpt from her resignation letter:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Racism is, of course, the left's go-to response whenever a progressive black person is held to the same standard of conduct as everyone else, and although she may have received despicable emails or phone calls, it's absurd to think that that's what brought about her downfall.

Ms. Gay has been determined to have committed almost fifty acts of plagiarism in her scholarly publications, an offense for which lowly undergraduates are routinely suspended.

She also demonstrated an alarming degree of moral maladroitness when she was unable to condemn calls for genocide of Jews on her campus when asked to do so by a House committee.

The Fellows of Harvard College claimed to have accepted her resignation "with sorrow":

While President Gay has acknowledged missteps and has taken responsibility for them, it is also true that she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks.

While some of this has played out in the public domain, much of it has taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls. We condemn such attacks in the strongest possible terms.

That first line above presumably refers to her failure, when given the opportunity before a Congressional panel, to condemn antisemitic demonstrations among her student population during which some demonstrators called for the genocide of Jews.

Gay stated that she was caught up in a combative exchange with Congressional interrogators and "failed to convey what is my truth.”

That it's wrong to threaten students with violence is somehow her truth, as if someone else might legitimately have a different "truth," is a notion which should alone be enough to disqualify her from being the president of a college, but set that aside. Jim Geraghty at National Review asks,

Hey, who among us hasn’t gotten caught up in the moment and argued that calling for the genocide of Jews might be okay in certain contexts? Some of us might say that if you can stumble into telling Congress that, in certain circumstances, calling for genocide is acceptable, you really shouldn’t be running anything, much less the most prestigious university in the country.

“Is calling for genocide a form of harassment?” should be the sort of question they ask when they are trying to assess if you’ve had a concussion.

Geraghty goes on to write:

Here’s the thing: If you’ve done nothing wrong, are being falsely accused of rampant plagiarism, and all of your critics are racists or are gushing “racist vitriol” . . . why are you resigning? Why are the Harvard Fellows accepting your resignation?

The contention of Gay and the Harvard Fellows is that Gay did nothing seriously wrong, certainly nothing that warrants her resignation, but she’s resigning anyway, because a bunch of racists are demanding it.

Good point. Ms. Gay's massive breach of professional ethics and her moral and epistemic squishiness, not her race or gender, disqualify her from holding the position she did.

Taught to Hate Jews

It's difficult, perhaps, for many Westerners to grasp the hysterical hatred that many Muslims have for Jews. It's a hatred that seems to consume a significant majority of them and which boiled over in the horrific atrocities of October 7th.

This article gives some insight into how Jew-hatred is instilled in Muslim children almost from their infancy and how some Muslims have rejected it and the religion that fosters it.

Here's the lede:

The following five ex-Muslims grew up in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, but they were all indoctrinated, they say, with the same views on Jews and Israel.

They remember a childhood shot through with antisemitic moments ranging from the mundane (one woman recalls her aunt claiming Jews put cancer in her vegetables at the market) to the deadly (a former extremist went as far as to pick a location in London for a terrorist attack he planned to carry out at 17).

These hateful ideas, repeated by their family members, religious leaders, and teachers, are part and parcel of the same animus, they say, that fueled Hamas’s attacks on October 7.

Some of the people you will hear from below have received death threats for speaking out on issues like antisemitism and sexism in the Muslim world. One uses a pen name to protect herself and her daughter from her terrorist ex-husband, who is currently jailed in Egypt.

All of them came to reject their loathing for Jewish people and the West, and have rebuilt their lives in the wake of their realizations. Here are their stories, which you can read or click to listen to each author recite in the audio recordings below.

One wishes that virtues like grace, tolerance, and love were more in evidence in a religion adhered to by 20% of the world's people. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Perhaps more Muslims will eventually realize that hatred and violence are spiritual dead ends and follow the example of the five whose testimonies were featured in this article.

The Elephant's Trunk

One of the animal kingdom's most amazing features is the elephant's trunk. It's an amazing piece of engineering and another example of how the Darwinian explanation for it requires an enormous amount of faith, blind faith, in undirected chance.

The following video gives some insight into the capabilities of this fascinating structure:

C.S.Lewis and Systemic Racism

People are often heard reciting some variation of, "Of course, there's still racism in America," but when asked to give an example of a racist occurrence, the individual is often at a loss to come up with one. Undeterred, they'll sometimes insist that the difficulty in citing examples just shows how insidious racism is. Though individuals may not show their racism outwardly, we're told, they're still guilty of it inwardly. Or, it's claimed that the racism is "systemic" - embedded so deeply in our institutions that it's not easily visible.

People hearing these allegations too often nod in agreement. They acquiesce to what's proffered as common knowledge whether or not they're given any evidence in support of it. It seems impolite or unnecessarily provocative or confrontational to demand that the person present some empirical evidence before they can expect their claims to be credible.

Yet why should anyone acquiesce? Why should people go along with the assertion that "Of course there's still racism in America" if they've never seen it or been shown specific, unequivocal examples of it? Are people just supposed to accept the existence of virulent racism on faith or on the supposed authority of their interlocutor?

It all reminds me of a passage from C.S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves. Lewis is writing about the claim made by some that deep friendships between men are really evidence of homosexual attraction.

Lewis debunks the claim in the following excerpt in which he presents argument that applies as much to "racism" as to "homosexuality." He writes that the assertion that friendship evinces homosexual love...

...though it cannot be proved, can never of course be refuted....The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behavior of two Friends does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: "That," they say gravely, "is just what we should expect."

The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke just proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.

He then adds this,

[This is like] arguing like a man who should say "If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there's an invisible cat in it."

A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it.

Indeed, those who claim to see the invisible cat of racism in every chair are often people who are desperate to blame the invisible cat for the failures of those whom they insist are the victims of this nebulous, and perhaps imaginary, form of oppression.

If those who claim that racism is alive and well in contemporary America can adduce evidence of this assertion then, fine, we should heed them. If they can't adduce evidence they should be ignored.

What They Did to the Women

The New York Times recently ran a story on what the Palestinians did to the Israeli women on October 7th. John Hinderacker at Powerline excerpts from the Times' story some of the eyewitnesses' descriptions of the atrocities committed by these adherents of the "religion of peace."

Hinderacker opens with this:

I am generally contemptuous of the New York Times, but it deserves credit for this article on the violence against Israeli women and girls that was perpetrated by Gaza on October 7. The article is long and chilling. Organized gang rape, mutilation and murder were obviously features of the Gazans’ strategy. The evidence described by the Times is sickening; I credit a left-wing outlet for being willing to describe unflinchingly what Hamas’s supporters did.

He goes on to quote from the Times' article:

The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.

An eyewitness describes what she saw:

The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.

She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.

“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.

She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.

Another eyewitness offered this:

Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.

He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.

“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”

“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”

Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”

A dentist who worked with some of the bodies gave this testimony:

Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.

Hinderacker adds one more excerpt:

There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.

Whenever we see students demonstrating against Israel and on behalf of the Palestinians, the above is what they're endorsing, either implicitly or explicitly. They may deny it but they're tacitly approving of such heinous crimes.

Here's Hinderacker's conclusion:

What accounts for this savagery? The sick culture that prevails among the so-called Palestinians, and that especially dominates Gaza. The Gazans are lost in hate and have been trained to do evil from childhood. It is that culture that must be destroyed, not [just] the political organization of Hamas, which is a symptom not a cause.

A number of commentators have written that the Israelis must not seek revenge for the atrocities of October 7. I don’t understand that. They absolutely should wreak vengeance on the Gazans. (“Everyone over there is a terrorist,” as one retrieved hostage says.)

In my opinion, Israelis have a moral duty to avenge the Gazans’ atrocities. Happily, they seem to be well on their way to doing so.

How can they not?

Kwanzaa

President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden recently wished everyone a Happy Kwanzaa. You might wonder how Kwanzaa ever came about and why the President observes the day, so Lloyd Billingsley at Powerline blog tells us about the man who got it all started. His name is Ron Karenga, although he was born Ronald McKinley Everett in 1941.

Here's Billingsley:

Karenga was a political activist in the late 1960s and came to prominence as a theoretician of the black nationalist movement.

In “The Quotable Karenga” handbook, the Kwanzaa inventor told followers: “When it’s burn, let’s see how much you burn. When it’s kill, let’s see how much you kill. When it’s blow up, let’s see how much you blow up.”

Karenga also established Kuzaliwa, a tribute honoring Malcolm X’s birthday on May 19, and Uhuru Day on August 11, to commemorate the 1965 “civil disturbance” in Watts. Between 1971 and 1975, Karenga “dropped out of sight while serving a prison term for ordering the beating of a woman.”

In 1971, a court convicted Karenga of kidnapping and torturing two women in his organization. According to “Karenga Tortured Women Followers, Wife Tells Court,” from the May 3, 1971 Los Angeles Times, Karenga stripped naked Deborah Jones and Gail Davis, whipped them with an electrical cord, and beat the women with a karate baton.

The Kwanzaa founder also stuck a hot soldering iron into Davis’ mouth, and used a vise to clamp down on one of her toes.

Before that torture session, Karenga created a black nationalist organization known as “US.” The rival Black Panthers, who made common cause with white radicals, mocked Karenga’s group as “United Slaves.”

On January 17, 1969, the Black Panthers and United Slaves shot it out at UCLA over control of the black studies program. Panthers John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter perished in the gun battle.

Billingsley has more on Karenga, but the preceding should suffice to give the reader a sense of the sort of gentleman the originator of Kwanzaa is. Given the character of the man, one might be tempted to think the holiday he invented is a giant con.

In any case, I think I'll stick with Christmas, a day associated with a God of love, rather than with a criminal with a record of hate and violence.

Booty for Allah

One difference between Christianity and Islam is that if a Christian preacher gave a sermon like the one excerpted below he'd rightly be subjected to popular opprobrium and media outrage. He'd probably also be cashiered from his church, at least he should be, but in American mosques it's evidently acceptable to sound like a medieval barbarian.

Robert Spencer at PJ Media explains:

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas jihad massacres in Israel, Muslim clerics in mosques all over the United States have prayed for the victory of the Muslims and the destruction of Israel. But in one mosque in Bayonne, New Jersey, a cleric went even farther than that.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported that during a recent Friday sermon that was streamed on YouTube from the Bayonne Mosque and Community Center, an unnamed Muslim preacher emphasized the importance of Hamas’ jihad against Israel for the entire “Muslim nation,” and prayed an incendiary prayer that included the request that Allah would give the wealth, possessions and even the children of non-Muslims to the Muslims as booty, that is, the spoils of war.

The cleric preached: "Today, we are making the same supplication [as the Prophet did] for the group of people remaining in Gaza today, who are protecting and guarding the remaining dignity of the Muslim nation, and Allah be praised, before what happened on October 7, I met a brother from Gaza, and I said that to him.”

This is puzzling language for anyone who believes the standard narrative that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is over land, and can be solved by Israel ending its “occupation” and dismantling its settlements. If that were the case, what would it have to do with the “dignity” of Muslims around the world.

Evidently, the indignity that the Muslim world has suffered is that land which at one time was under Muslim hegemony is now inhabited by infidels and must be retaken, since it violates the Quran to allow non-Muslims to govern what once belonged to Muslims. Never mind that the Muslims took every inch of land in the Middle East and North Africa from people who were not Muslims, and did it through bloody, violent conquest.

Spencer continues:

The New Jersey cleric is assuming what analysts of the conflict in the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the capitals of Europe steadfastly ignore: that as "The Palestinian Delusion" explains, the real cause of the conflict is the Islamic idea that any land that was governed by Islamic law at any point belongs by right to the Muslims forever. This idea is based on a Qur’anic command, “Drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191).

The claim that the Israelis drove the Muslim Arabs out of what is today the modern state of Israel is a historical myth: they were told to leave by the Arab League in 1948 when Israel declared its independence. The Arab League was promising to destroy Israel in a matter of weeks, after which they could return. Nevertheless, they now claim to have been driven out, making the destruction of Israel a matter of fulfilling the immutable will of Allah.

Spencer has more about this preacher's sermon at the link. He concludes with this:

And so in the waning days of 2023, we have the spectacle of a religious leader in New Jersey praying that the wealth and even the children of non-Muslims become the property of the Muslims as “booty.” The name of the eighth chapter of the Qur’an in Arabic is al-Anfal, which is variously translated as “booty” and the “spoils of war.”

The Qur’an envisions the Muslims waging war on non-Muslims and capturing their belongings and even their women, and using them for their own purposes. Several passages of the Qur’an (4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, and 70:30) make it clear that Muslim warriors are permitted to seize infidel women and use them sexually.

The contrast with Christian teaching based on the words of Jesus couldn't be more stark.

Sex

One of the many questions naturalism finds difficult to answer given a Darwinian paradigm is why sexual reproduction would have ever evolved when asexual reproduction works perfectly well for so many organisms. Sexual reproduction is incredibly complex, so much complicated chemistry has to occur at just the right time, and so many contingencies have to be perfectly synchronized that it's simply extraordinary that both plants and animals would've evolved such an improbable means of perpetuating themselves.

One explanation for this phenomenon that's sometimes heard is that the genetic mixing that results from sex promotes diversity which in turn promotes adaptation which advances the evolutionary process.

Perhaps so, but one problem with this explanation is that, though it might explain why sex is evolutionarily advantageous, it doesn't explain how it could've arisen in the first place.

The excellent video that follows gives an idea of the complexity of the process, but even this elides the incredible challenge of evolving meiosis, sex organs, the complicated chemical reactions that occur throughout the process, and much, much more.

Complicated systems with which we're familiar are always the product of intelligent engineering and design, but naturalists insist that blind processes like genetic mutation and sheer chance could've done the job of producing sex. I suppose they could've but to believe that they actually did requires an enormous investment of blind faith in serendipity.

Watch:

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day

Our world is filled with violence and war - in Ukraine, in Israel, in Africa and dozens of other less well-known places around the globe. The incessant brutal conflict makes it hard to believe that there could ever be "peace on earth, goodwill to men."

In 1863, in the midst of the American Civil War, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was wracked by similar thoughts. Grieving the loss of his wife in a fire two years before and the more recent wounding of his son in battle, he was bitterly contemplating what that phrase could possibly mean, what hope it could possibly offer.

As he sat at his desk on Christmas morning, despairing, he heard the village church bells ringing. Their sound suddenly filled him with assurance that evil would not ultimately prevail. He took up his pen to compose a poem of optimism and hope. The poem was titled I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, and has since been set to music in several different arrangements. Here's one I especially like.

I wish all my readers an especially meaningful Christmas today:

Two Noels

I thought it fitting as we approach Christmas eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

After you watch, I highly recommend listening to the Bonner family sing O Holy Night. It's spectacular:

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Three Christmas Symbols

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. Actually, the X is a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin, it has signified the opposite of any attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word is.

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A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

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No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young, and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be quite likely condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (Say the words "Saint Nicholas" quickly with a European accent and you'll understand how we got the name Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

The Amazing Eye

One of the points of conflict between naturalists and theists is the origin of the human eye. Naturalists insist that natural, random evolutionary processes have designed the eye whereas most theists believe that the eye has been designed by an intelligent agent.

There are a couple of arguments naturalists have employed to buttress their case, but the most well-known has for most of the twentieth century been the assertion that the eye is in fact poorly designed. If an intelligent agent designed it, the argument goes, he did a lousy job of it.

On the other hand, if blind evolutionary processes were the "agent" at work then we would expect sub-optimal designs to occur in living things, and this is what we find in the structure of the eye.

This nine-minute video explains in very clear terms why the argument based on the alleged poor design of the eye has fallen into disfavor among biologists and why discoveries in the twenty-first century have shown the eye to be even more marvelously designed than was previously thought.

The video is quite well done and very informative:

An Incomprehensible Story

If Christians are correct about what happened on that first Christmas day it's an event of such magnitude as to be incomprehensible. If what the Gospel writers tell us is true then the child who was born in a stable that day was not just a special baby, it was the incarnation, the incorporation, of the very creator of the universe!

This is such a breathtaking thought that it's humanly impossible to get one's mind around it. The God who created us and all the galaxies in the cosmos deigned to make Himself like one of us in order to share in the pains and sorrows of being human, being willing ultimately to suffer an excruciating death, all so that our death need not be the end of our existence.

This is what the Gospel narratives insist actually, literally happened, and if they're correct, if they're only approximately true, they surely recount the greatest, most astonishing, story ever told.

This three minute video beautifully illustrates the point:

As we go about making our Christmas preparations this year, it'd be good to keep in our minds the literal wonder of what it is we're preparing to celebrate.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities with the movie are purely coincidental, although the similarities with my novel Bridging the Abyss, are not.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him.

Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever. That's why she celebrated his birthday every year.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

The Meaning of Christmas

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding an incomprehensible idea, the idea of the Incarnation.

The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and we could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, that hope, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with mystery and magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the real source and traditional meaning of the night are irrelevant or that they're something other than what they really are.

People feel they should be joyful at Christmas, but they can't say why. They seem to be trying to manufacture some sort of artificial "Christmas spirit," just like they try to gin up a feeling of near-delirium on New Year's eve.

An analogy: Picture the celebrations of players and fans after winning the Super Bowl or the World Series, but imagine the revelry and rejoicing even though the game hadn't yet been played. It'd certainly seem nonsensical and strange, but this is pretty much what a secular Christmas is like. No "game" has been played, nothing has been won, there's really nothing to celebrate, but the merriment and partying goes on nonetheless. Why?

All the talk of reindeer, ads for cars, beer, and phones, all the insipid "holiday" songs and movies - none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. The "joy" seems phony, empty, and forced.

Indeed, Christmas Eve is hollow without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last-minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

One of the things that makes Christmas "good news that will cause great joy for all the people," is that the One who came to dwell among us has made it so that we can break out of the prison-house of meaninglessness and hopelessness that enchains us if all there is to life is being born, enjoying a few good meals, suffering and eventually dying.

Christmas represents the possibility that we can throw off the crushing weight of purposelessness, emptiness, and despair that plague modern life. It reminds us that our lives can matter for eternity.

Lovely thought, that, and one of the good things about it is that it's never too late for the transformation to begin. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of What Child Is This on their album Lost Christmas Eve.

The part I find most poignant and hopeful occurs about halfway through the song when an older man, though coming to the end of his life, finds his life transformed by reflecting on the Christmas story and cries out, "To be this old and have your life just begin!"

Here's Rob Evan of TSO performing the song in concert.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. VI)

Today's post concludes the series on the eighteen facts that I believe are better explained by theism than by naturalism (i.e. atheism). In some cases the fact is much better explained by theism than by any materialistic, naturalistic ontology.

Here's the eighteenth fact:

18. Our desire to survive our own death

Human beings want desperately to live and yet we know we're going to die. In a Godless universe, the fate of each of us is annihilation.

There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever "see" them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, they must acknowledge that their bravery serves to mask an inner despair.

Many still harbor a profound wish, and hope, that their deceased loved ones still exist and that they'll someday be reunited with them. But if death is the end of our existence our life truly is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," as Shakespeare put it.

If death is the end human existence is completely absurd. But, of course, death is the end if the atheistic materialist is correct.

Only if God exists is there a realistic basis for hope of something beyond this life. Only if God exists can we have a reasonable hope that our longing for life will be fulfilled.

So, to sum up, we are confronted with a choice: Either we believe that there is no God and that consequently our existential yearnings are inexplicable and unfulfillable, a view which leads to nihilism, or we believe that there is a God and that we have those yearnings because they point us to the source of their satisfaction. They point us toward God.

In other words, the existence of God is, I believe, the best explanation for the human condition. The atheist has no good explanation for these yearnings, nor for the other facts we've discussed in this series, and must take a leap of faith to avoid the nihilism and despair toward which her worldview pushes her.

She has to live as if God exists while denying that He does. Many atheists implicitly repudiate their own naturalism simply by the way they choose to live their lives.

I've sought in this series of posts to briefly suggest why the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest longings and feelings of the human spirit is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions are most simply accounted for by positing the possibility of their satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God.

If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in the hope that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which obligates us to respect others, which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment and which will ultimately mete out justice.

We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless and existentially chaotic world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the nature of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling, indifferent universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence.

The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled.

How, then, do we come to have these yearnings? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically out of phase with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the atheist should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence.

Nevertheless, of all the atheist writers I've ever read there are few who've expressed such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to desiring, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke.

Nagel writes in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me at least, to understand.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. V)

Today's post continues our series on theism as an inference to the best explanation for eighteen facts about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.

I'd like today to discuss the following three existential traits of human beings:

15. Our desire for justice
16. Our need for meaning and purpose
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self

Human persons long for justice, but it's a longing for which there's no fulfillment if death is the end of our existence. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives filled with terrible fear, pain and grief and then they die.

Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering come to the end of their lives peacefully and content after many years of pleasure. In a world without God everybody comes to the same end, everyone vanishes, and there's no reward or punishment - just nothingness. In the world of the atheist, it doesn't matter ultimately whether you're Mother Teresa or Adolf Hitler, and there's no hope that justice will ever be done.

Only if there's a transcendent moral authority, like God, who has the power to hold us accountable for how we treat others is justice in any ultimate sense possible.

Humans also crave meaning to our existence. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but in the absence of God death nullifies everything and renders it all meaningless. There's no fixed purpose or value to anything we do.

Everything we strive for is destined to perish either after we die or eventually in a solar explosion that will incinerate the earth, after which there'll be not a trace that humans ever existed. What will all of our efforts and achievements matter then?

The universe has no meaning or significance and neither does anything in the universe. On atheism it's all just atoms bouncing around pointlessly, and all our struggles are like the furious running of a gerbil in its treadmill.

Our lives are just a footprint in the sand at the edge of a space-time surf. When all is washed away and the cosmos is left as though we were never here, the greatest acts of heroism, charity, and scientific discovery will mean absolutely nothing.

If the atheist is correct, if our existence is simply a temporary fluke of nature, a cosmic accident, then we have no reason to think that anything we do actually matters in any permanent sense. If, on the other hand, we've been created by God we may assume that He had some purpose for making us. We may not know what that purpose is, but we have a reason for thinking there is one.

Indeed, if there is a God then we have reason to hope that what we do is not ephemeral, it's eternal, and that each life has an everlasting meaning.

Another point: In a Godless world the concept of soul becomes problematic and with it the notion of a self other than the physical body. Since our body is constantly changing, however, we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment, year by year.

There's nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent "I," only a kaleidoscopic, fragmented bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who I really am.

As T.S. Eliot put it in The Cocktail Party, "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

Our sense that we are a self strongly suggests, however, that there's more to us than just our physical being. Yet, unless there is a God physical flux is all there is.

If there is a God, then it's possible that our self, our identity, persists through time because He constantly holds us, our individual essence, in His mind. So, while in one sense we're constantly morphing into someone different, in another sense we remain the same person we've always been.

We'll conclude this series of posts tomorrow.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. IV)

The theme of the last three posts has been that if we employ the principle of inference to the best explanation to the question of the existence of God it's reasonable to conclude that the best explanation for a host of facts about the world and human existence is that there is an intelligent mind, a God, that accounts for them.

In today's post I'd like to briefly examine six facts of human existence and explain why I think theism accounts for them more seamlessly than does naturalism. The six facts are these:

9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
10. Our sense of moral obligation
11. Our sense of guilt
12. Our belief in human dignity
13. Our belief in human worth
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights

Since these are facts about the human condition they comprise what might be called an existential case for the existence of God:

Consider the first of these. It's part of the human psyche to desire answers to life's most profound questions. As human beings we want answers to the deepest, most perplexing questions raised by our existence, but in the world as the atheist sees it there are no answers, there's no assurance about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die.

We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - Why am I here? Why do we suffer? Why do we want from life what we cannot have? - but in a Godless universe there's no reply, only silence. The cosmos is indifferent to our desire for answers. We are alone, forlorn, as Sartre put it, and our quest for answers is absurd.

If there are no answers to these questions it's a puzzle as to why we would've evolved in such a way as to feel such an urgency for answers to them. If, on the other hand, God exists then it's possible that each of those questions has an answer, and if there are answers then the fact that we have those questions and desire their answers makes sense. We may not know what the answer is, but we have a reasonable hope that our questions aren't futile or meaningless and that there is a reason why they gnaw at us.

The atheist must counsel acquiescence to the disconnect between our deep need and the impossibility of fulfilling that need. The theist is in a position to counsel hope.

Another aspect of the human condition is that we are burdened with a deep sense that we are obligated to act morally. As human beings we strive to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but if there is no God there is nothing else upon which to base them. In a purely material world morality is nothing more than whatever feels right to the individual.

This is not to say that the non-theist cannot live a life similar in quality to that of a theist. She can of course, but what she cannot say is that what she does is morally good or right in any objective sense. There simply is no objective moral good unless there is an objective, transcendent standard of goodness, and the existence of such a standard is precisely what non-theists deny. Consider these two quotes from some well-known atheists:

"In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. The way our biology forces its codes is by making us think that there is an objective higher code, to which we are all subject." Philosopher Michael Ruse.

"Life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins.

For the atheist moral judgments can be little more than expressions of personal preference, and no one's preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's. This leads ineluctably toward a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or the level of the state.

Whatever those who possess power do is neither right or wrong, even if they commit torture or genocide, it just is.

Moreover, unless there is a transcendent moral authority there is nothing whatsoever which obligates us to act in one way rather than another. What could possibly obligate me, in a moral sense, to act in the interest of others rather than in what I perceive to be my own interest? Given naturalism, there is nothing which obligates us to care for the poor, nothing which makes kindness better than cruelty, nothing to tell us why the holocaust was morally wrong.

Given atheism, morality is either subjective, and thus arbitrary and personal, or it doesn't exist at all, and our sense, our conviction that it does exist is simply self-deception. If God exists, however, then, and only then, does our intuition that objective moral value and obligation also exist make sense.

Related to the preceding point, we experience feelings of guilt, and have a sense that guilt is not just an illusion, but without an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there can be no real guilt. Human beings are no more guilty in a moral sense than is a cat which has caught and tortured a bird. The feeling of guilt is merely an evolutionary epiphenomenon which arose to fit us for life in the stone age and which, like our tonsils, we no longer need. Indeed, it's a vestige of our past that we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

On the other hand, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good Creator of the universe, then our sense that we are actually guilty has an explanation. We feel guilt because we have transgressed the moral law instituted by the Creator before whom we stand and to whom we must give an account.

It is this Creator who imposes upon us moral obligation. Take away God and there's no moral law, there's no moral duty, there's no transgression, and no guilt. As the great 19th century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it, "If God is dead everything is permitted."

An additional fact about our existence is that we profess a belief in human dignity but modern atheism tells us that we are little more than machines made of flesh - sacks of blood, bone and excrement. There is no soul; there's nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We are more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout.

In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit the rest of us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he might profit from so doing. The universe reminds us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

If, however, we are made in the image of God and personally and specifically loved by Him then we have a basis for believing that we are more than a machine. We have a ground for human dignity that is simply unavailable on the assumption of naturalistic atheism.

Related to the previous point is the further truth that most of us have a belief in human worth, but if all we are is an ephemeral pattern of atoms, a flesh and bone mechanism, then in what does our worth as human beings consist? We have value only insofar as others, particularly those who wield power, arbitrarily choose to value us.

If atheism is true there is no inherent value in being human. Only if theism is true and we are valued by the Creator of the universe can human beings have any objective worth at all. There is no other non-arbitrary ground for it.

Similarly, we have a belief that human beings have certain fundamental rights. Unfortunately, if there is no God there's nothing at all upon which to base those rights save our own prejudices and predilections. As Thomas Jefferson acknowledged in the Declaration of Independence, we have the right to life and liberty only because we are children of the Creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us and in whose eyes we are precious.

If there is no Creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules, mere words on paper, which some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked.

When atheists talk about human rights someone might ask them where those rights come from. Who confers them? Who guarantees them? If it is not God then it must be the state, but if so, our rights are not inalienable. If the state decides what rights we shall have then the state can determine that we have no rights at all.

The fact is that if atheism is true human rights are no more substantial or real than the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

More tomorrow.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. III)

Continuing the case for theism as the best explanation for the evidence available to us, let's consider the next four examples of that evidence:

5. The fact of human consciousness
6. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
7. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
8. Our sense that we have free will

One quality of the world that sits better on the assumption of theism than atheism, particularly atheistic materialism, is the existence of human consciousness.

How does it happen, for instance, that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or pain or the taste of sweet)? How do electrochemical reactions in our neurons produce a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, expectation, or frustration, boredom, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book)? How does it want, worry, or have intentions?

How do the chemicals that make up the matter of the brain happen to make that matter aware of itself and its surroundings? How does matter come to hold beliefs or understand what it believes? How does pure matter impose a meaning on a text that one reads or a lecture to which one listens?

These are vexing questions for a materialist view of the world. It may be that if we put the proper chemicals in a flask under the appropriate conditions the flask would become conscious or feel pain, but we have no idea how it could do so, and the belief that it could is simply an article of materialist faith.

In other words, on the assumption that human beings are solely material beings consciousness is inexplicable. After all, a robot could function pretty well without experiencing any conscious phenomena at all, so why did consciousness evolve in humans?

The existence of consciousness suggests that material substance is not the only constituent of reality, which may be one reason why some materialists (called eliminative materialists) pretty much deny the existence of consciousness.

If there is, in addition to the material substance in our world, also mental substance, how could such a thing have arisen in a purely physical/material universe? The hypothesis that there is an intelligent Creator of the universe who is itself pure mind presents us with an explanation where naturalism must just shrug its shoulders.

Related to the matter of consciousness is the question of beauty, or more precisely, why it is that gazing at, or listening to, something beautiful should fill us with delight, or even rapture. It's possible, I suppose, to formulate some convoluted ad hoc hypothesis in terms of purposeless physical forces acting over billions of years on dozens of fortuitous mutations to produce response mechanisms to certain stimuli in our neuronal architecture. But why?

Why should a sunset fill us with wonder and a mountain range fill us with awe? Why and how would blind, unintentional processes produce such responses? What urgency would such seemingly gratuitous responses have in the struggle for survival that the whole panoply of mutations and selective pressures would be brought to bear to cultivate them?

A simpler explanation for such phenomena, perhaps, is that our encounters with beauty, like our encounters with good, are intimations of God. Beauty is one means by which God reveals Himself to us in the world. Our encounters with beauty are glimpses He gives us of Himself, and the delight we feel in them is a prelude to heaven.

Another aspect of the world that is better explained in terms of a theistic rather than an atheistic or naturalistic worldview is our sense that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes is not likely itself to be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, can be trusted to be rational or true, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and the reliability of scientific investigation, like "truth," is chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist is in the awkward position of having no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it.

We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any such justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

The next characteristic of human beings that makes more sense given the existence of God than given the truth of atheism is our sense that we are free to make genuine choices and that the future is open. In the absence of God our sense that we are free to choose and are responsible for those choices is problematic.

In a Godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to physical laws. There is no free will, there is only an inexorable determinism. At any given moment there is only one possible future, and our belief that we can freely create a future is pure sophistry and illusion.

Thus an atheist who faults me for writing this post is acting inconsistently with his own assumptions. If there is no God I am compelled to write and express these ideas by causes beyond my control and for which I am not responsible. Indeed, if there is no God, it's hard to see how anyone could ultimately be responsible for anything they do.

More tomorrow.

Eighteen Facts (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post introduced the concept of inference to the best explanation and eighteen facts about the world and our existential human condition, the best explanation for which, I argue, is God, or something very much like God. Today we'll consider the first four of those facts:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact that life's origin is inexplicable on naturalism
   
4. The fact of biological information
   

The first of these facts is our conviction that the universe must have had a cause and didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that its existence depends upon something beyond itself. It's possible, perhaps, that it somehow created itself, but that seems counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator Itself requires an explanation. As philosopher Del Ratzsch points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider an analogy to the discovery on Mars of a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium .

Most people would think that the cube was produced by some kind of intelligent beings, aliens, and would regard the cube as virtual proof that such beings existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of alien beings, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation of the cube, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the mysterious structure and therefore their belief in intelligent aliens is groundless.

Such a reply would certainly sound odd.

The inability to say anything much about who the aliens were or where they came from doesn't count at all against the theory that intelligent agents were responsible for the cube, nor does it mean that the alien theory is no better than the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube, as well as the existence of an intelligent cause of the cosmos, is surely an inference to the best explanation.

The second fact about the world that is easier to explain on the theistic rather than the atheistic hypothesis is that the parameters, forces and constants which govern the cosmos are exquisitely fine-tuned. Here is one example of the dozens which could serve:

If the initial density of matter in the universe had deviated by as little as one part in 10^60 (a value referred to by scientists as the "density parameter"), the universe would have either fallen back on itself or expanded too quickly for stars to form. This is an unimaginably fine tolerance.

Imagine a stack of dimes stretching across 10^30 universes like our own. Let the dimes represent calibrations on a gauge displaying every possible value for the density parameter. Imagine, too, that a needle points to the dime representing the critical value. If the initial density of our cosmos deviated from that critical value by a single dime our universe, if it formed at all, would not be suitable for life.

Or imagine a console featuring dials and gauges for each of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of constants, parameters, and other cosmic contingencies which define the structure of our world. Imagine that each dial face shows trillions upon trillions of possible values. Each of those dials has to be calibrated to precisely the value to which it is actually set in our world in order for a universe to exist and/or for life to thrive.

Of course, it could be an astonishing coincidence that all the dials are set with such mind-boggling precision. Or it could be that there are a near infinite number of universes having all possible values and that ours just happens to be one that is perfectly calibrated for life. But not only is this an extraordinarily unparsimonious hypothesis, it also elicits the question of what it is that's generating these universes and what evidence we have that they even exist.

It's much simpler to bow to Ockham and assume that there is just one universe and that its structure manifests a level of engineering of breath-taking precision, a conclusion perfectly compatible with the idea that there's an intelligent agent behind it all. "It's crazy," as philosopher Richard Swinburne says, "to postulate a trillion universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job."

One further point: Scientists assume as they study the universe that it is rational, that it lends itself to rational inquiry, but if so, then an entirely non-rational explanation for it seems less likely than an explanation which incorporates rational causes.

The third fact is that it has proven exceedingly difficult to explain how the first living unit, a cell able to metabolize, reproduce, eliminate waste, manufacture proteins, etc., could have ever arisen solely by chance. The odds against a chance origin of life, with no input from an intelligent agent, are so improbable as to make belief that it happened a matter of extraordinary blind faith.

It's somewhat like insisting that a very complex, fully functional and self-replicating pocket calculator could have arisen by dumping a mixture of aluminum, silicon, carbon and water into a mixing bowl and stirring it with an egg beater for a couple million years until a pocket calculator that could replicate itself emerged.

It's important to note that none of the scientists who work in the Origin of Life field have been able to come up with a sound theory as to how a living cell could've been produced by natural, unguided and unintelligent processes.

A fourth fact about the world from which we might infer that there is an intelligent agent involved somehow in its development is the existence of biological information. The biosphere is information-rich, a fact which raises the question where this information came from and how it ever came about.

The naturalist's answer is that the information, such as we find in DNA and cellular processes, resulted from blind mechanistic forces acting purposelessly and randomly over eons of time. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, of course, but if we're going to limit ourselves to the lessons of experience we must acknowledge that information whose provenience we can ascertain is always the product of an intelligent mind.

Random processes can produce highly improbable patterns (like the particular pattern of craters on the moon) and they can produce very specific recognizable patterns (like the repetition of a single letter typed by a monkey), but what we've never observed a random, non-teleological process do is generate both (such as we find in a computer program). Yet that is precisely what we have in the genetic code.

The genetic code and the complex of proteins and transcription molecules necessary to decipher that code, must've arisen prior to the ability to replicate and thus prior to the action of any selection mechanism, in other words, by sheer chance. Believing it happened is somewhat analogous to believing that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard could leave in its wake a fully assembled and functional jet airplane.

There may someday be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information, but until that day arrives the obvious existence of that information suggests an intelligent agent lurks somewhere in its history.

More tomorrow.