More on Metaxas

In an earlier post I mentioned an article in the Wall Street Journal by Eric Metaxas, and a couple of days later I mentioned in an update that the article has stirred up some controversy. The controversy is a bit surprising, actually, since what Metaxas wrote about has been circulating among philosophers and scientists, both theist and atheist alike, for the last twenty years. Perhaps the thought of facts like those cited by Metaxas being disseminated among the general public has aroused concern among those who desire to keep the divine foot from getting in the door, as biologist Richard Lewontin once put it.

One critic who has taken exception to Metaxas' piece is atheistic physicist Laurence Krauss. He wrote a letter to the WSJ which Daniel Bakken at Evolution News and Views excerpts and to which he offers a cogent reply.

Philosopher V.J. Torley has a lengthier and more thorough response to another of Metaxas' critics, Catholic philosopher Francis Beckwith, at Uncommon Descent.

In the course of his critique of Beckwith Torley quotes writer Damon Linker who contends that even if Eric Metaxas’ argument were valid, it doesn’t prove the existence of a God who loves us, let alone the God of the Bible. Says Linker:

...[N]atural theology doesn’t demonstrate the existence of the God of the Bible....Even if we consider it reasonable to speculate about the possible, mysterious role played by some form of divine intelligence on the origin of life, that provides not one ounce of support for the detailed, specific stories of divine revelation laid out in the pages of scripture. The God of the philosophers (and the scientists) is not the God of the Bible. At least not obviously or inevitably. And no new piece of scientific evidence is likely to change that.

Linker is technically correct, of course, but it's a little difficult to place much weight upon his objection. To see why, imagine for a moment that it were established with a high degree of probability that the universe is in fact the work of an intelligent agent. What might we reasonably conclude about the nature of that agent?

Surely we could conclude that the agent is transcendent, i.e. it's not itself the universe - not material nor temporal - but is rather the being which fashioned the physico-spatio-temporal manifold and that it did so out of nothing since the material universe came into being, according to most cosmologists, ex nihilo (i.e.out of nothing).

We could also conclude that this being must be both unimaginably powerful and incomprehensibly intelligent. Since it transcends time it might also be eternal. Since it transcends space it's not limited by space. Moreover, since it has created, either directly or indirectly, personal beings with a sense of morality, justice, beauty and humor, it's reasonable to believe that it itself is personal and either possesses the aforenamed qualities or at least understands how they operate and "feel."

Finally, since it is the being upon which the contingent universe depends it's reasonable to think that this being has the property of being self-existent, not dependent on anything else for its own existence, otherwise we're faced with the absurdity of an infinite regress of creators.

Now all this may not add up to the God of traditional Christian theism, but it's pretty close. In other words, once it's admitted that the universe was created it's not a big leap to to the belief that the creator possesses many of the qualities of the God of Christianity. Thus, although a compelling argument for a cosmic designer does not amount to a knockdown proof that God exists, that's not what's important or significant about the argument. What's significant is that it provides rational justification for the theist's belief that God exists.

Indeed, it's also warrant for believing that theism is more rational than atheism. After all, the rational course is always to believe what's more probable than what's less probable, and the fine-tuning of the universe that Metaxas talks about is certainly more (epistemically) probable given that theism is true than it is given that naturalism is true. Put differently, intentional agency is a much better explanation for cosmic fine-tuning than is blind chance.

Drawing Opposite Conclusions

One of the frustrations of dialogue with those who hold opinions opposite our own is that so often we look at the same event and come to completely different conclusions about it. The conclusions we draw are shaped by our worldview, including our political ideology and religious convictions. Liberals and conservatives often talk past each other because they begin from different philosophical starting points and also because it's often hard for either to really understand how the other thinks.

There was an example of this over the weekend in the Washington Free Beacon which featured an excerpt of an interview on MSNBC with the very liberal columnist from the Washington Post Eugene Robinson. Here's the Beacon's report:

While appearing on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Friday, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said it was good that the terrorist attacks taking place in France this week didn’t occur in the United States because America has more guns. Robinson said that the wide availability of firearms in the United States would lead to further violence in similar situations to those the French are now dealing with. He did not elaborate on why he believed that was the case.

“Just to keep it in perspective, I don’t think we should imagine that the conditions and the threat are exactly the same in the United States as they are in France,” he said. “They are different.”

“In fact, one thing that is different here is weapons are universally available and so, uh, it is actually a very good thing that…that…that the tensions are not exactly the same because we would expect to have a lot more of that sort of carnage here.” The Islamic extremists who have attacked locations across Paris were reportedly heavily armed despite the country’s strict gun laws. However, most of their victims were reportedly not armed.

As near as I can figure Robinson seems to be suggesting that should terrorists wish they could do a lot more harm in the U.S. than in France because weapons are more readily available here than there.

This, though, makes no sense to me. The Paris terrorists apparently had no difficulty procuring weapons and were heavily armed. The problem in France was that there weren't enough weapons in the hands of the victims. One reason, it might be argued, that incidents like the Charlie Hebdo and the Kosher deli attacks would actually have a smaller chance of "success" in the U.S. is that the shooters would be more likely to encounter someone who could shoot back.

If Mr. Robinson thinks the chances of slaughter in this country would be diminished if Americans would disarm all he has to do is look at what happened in France where most citizens and even the responding police were unarmed. Indeed, every mass killing in this country, whether in a school or a movie theater or even on a military base, occurred when the only person who had a gun was the killer, and these tragedies often ended when the killer encountered another person with a gun.

Pace Mr. Robinson, if Americans were to disarm the chances of carnage like we saw last week in Paris would actually increase because the killers would have certainly no trouble obtaining weapons and they'd know they'd encounter no immediate resistance. This seems to me to be pellucidly obvious, but evidently it's not so to Mr. Robinson, and I have to wonder why not. Of course, he'd probably wonder the same about me.

Are We Charlie?

David Brooks puts his finger on a peculiarity in some of the reaction in the United States to the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff. Brooks notes that the same intolerance of those who voice opinions we don't like, of those who ridicule our most cherished beliefs, exists right here in the putative bastion of free speech, the American university.

It does seem both fatuous and hypocritical for American liberals to proclaim "Je suis Charlie" while at the same time establishing campus speech codes, disinviting speakers, and punishing faculty for holding opinions that lie outside the mainstream of acceptable progressive thought.

Brooks puts it this way:

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.

Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.

Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.

So this might be a teachable moment. As we are mortified by the slaughter of those writers and editors in Paris, it’s a good time to come up with a less hypocritical approach to our own controversial figures, provocateurs and satirists.

Brooks' column provokes a question: How much of the left's willingness to identify itself with the Charlie Hebdo staffers is a consequence of the fact that much of Charlie Hebdo's satire was aimed at targets the left holds in contempt? Would the left be as sympathetic if the magazine were written from a more "right-wing" perspective and went to great lengths to lampoon the pieties of the left? In any case it certainly is ironic to see folks of the same ideological stripe as those who seek to silence critics of global warming, Darwinism, gay marriage, and other progressive sacred cows painting, if only in a figurative sense, "Nous sommes Charlie" on their faces.

Sky Dancers

Sean Davis at The Federalist applies C.S. Lewis' description of men without chests in his Abolition of Man to that segment of our modern media which has allowed themselves to be intimidated into dhimmitude by Islamic violence.

Here's an excerpt:

Following the Charlie Hebdo attack, CNN allegedly issued a memo to staff detailing what types of images and words would be banned by the network and what would be allowed:

"Although we are not at this time showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet considered offensive by many Muslims, platforms are encouraged to verbally describe the cartoons in detail. This is key to understanding the nature of the attack on the magazine and the tension between free expression and respect for religion.

"Video or stills of street protests showing Parisians holding up copies of the offensive cartoons, if shot wide, are also OK. Avoid close-ups of the cartoons that make them clearly legible.

"It’s also OK to show most of the protest cartoons making the rounds online, though care should be taken to avoid examples that include within them detailed depictions of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons."

Where to begin? For starters, note that the network is apparently afraid of even using the word Muhammad. Instead, the Islamic religious figure is referred to by CNN merely as “the Prophet.” Not a prophet. And not even the prophet. “The Prophet,” with a capital P.

If we are to take CNN’s memo at its word, no other prophets existed before or after Muhammad. He is literally the only one. Forget Moses. Forget Abraham. Forget that both are major prophets for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Nope. Muhammad is the only one (even if that statement itself is heretical to the ideology they’re desperately trying not to offend) and he will be faux-respected by fearful news executives, even if that faux respect results in the blatant disrespect of other religions that outright reject Muhammad’s alleged teachings. Your offense is only worthy of note if comes packaged with a death threat.

I look forward to CNN referring to Jesus Christ as “the Messiah” from now on. I look forward to CNN referring to God as “G-d” out of respect for Jews who believe it is sinful to utter His name. And I really look forward to never seeing another historically illiterate Easter-time screed masquerading as news about how Jesus is just a silly myth who never really existed and that people who put any stock in the most well-attested historical documents in all of antiquity are just a bunch of nutty kooks.

I mean, if we’re talking about respect for religion, surely that must mean respect for religions that don’t send masked terrorists to gun down your news bureau whenever it publishes something stupid and insensitive, right? Or do my views only deserve respect insofar as they refuse to acknowledge your right to even exist?

For the Men Without Chests, however, history, theology, and even grammar must bow low before the altar of terrorism.

It's surpassingly ironic that a media and arts culture which praises Andres Serrano's photos of Jesus Christ on the cross immersed in a jar of urine, which admires Chris Ofili's painting of the virgin Mary covered in elephant dung, which mocks the Catholic priesthood because of pedophile priests, which scoffs at religious believers who dare question the creation myths of the metaphysical naturalists, which produces scores of books seeking to debunk and deride Christian belief, nevertheless wriggles and twists like journalistic sky dancers trying to explain why they won't show the cartoon images published by the Parisian magazine Charlie Hebdo that so outraged the Muslim psychopaths.

Even so, I don't fault our cultural elites for their fear nor their reluctance to give offense, and I can understand why devout Muslims might be offended at some of those cartoons. What I fault the elites for is their sanctimonious self-congratulation for their "bold" and "daring" "transgressions" against Christian piety while cowering in fear of doing anything that might provoke angry Muslims. I fault them for their punctilious regard for the sensibilities of intolerant devotees of the Prophet and their complete disregard for the sensibilities of Christians. They know they can mock the pope and even the Christ whom Christians believe to be God incarnate, and the most unpleasant consequence that'll befall them will be that Christians will pray for them. They also know, on the other hand, that if they publish a cartoon of Mohammed in an unflattering light they may find their workday interrupted by automatic rifle fire aimed in their direction.

Given those realities they choose to mock Christ and profess reverence for Mohammed. Wouldn't it be more virtuous and less cowardly to just show respect for both?

Feral Philosophy

In a column for the New York Times' Opinionator Steve Neumann discusses the need for popular, as opposed to academic, philosophy. It's not that academic philosophy is not important for Neumann, it's just that, like any academic discipline, it's inaccessible to the public which would benefit greatly from its insights and ideas. Neumann writes:

I really do believe we need philosophy journalists in the same way and for the same reason we have science journalists — to prepare the arcana of academia into a dish digestible by the public. But philosophy journalists like me certainly aren’t enough — we also need professional philosophers practicing their craft outside the academy.

The strength of philosophy — the unflinching interrogation of existence, in accord with the highest standards of reasoned argument — is mostly being exercised between academics relegated to making incremental refinements to their areas of specialization....

This sentence, perhaps inadvertently, sums up why so much contemporary scholarship, not just in philosophy but in other humanities subject areas as well, seems so pointless and arid. Once most of the great advances in a discipline have been made there's little left to occupy its practitioners but to putter around the margins. This is stifling for many bright minds, and it's the reason, in my opinion, why a lot of academics advance novel theories and churn out work that borders on the bizarre. They're desperately trying to do something original so that their life's work doesn't seem so meaningless to them and to others.

Those who find this puttering to be a frivolous use of one's time either leave the profession or settle for teaching others about those great advances. Neumann gives us a couple of examples of philosophers who have followed both paths:

Nigel Warburton, who left his position as a senior lecturer at the Open University in 2013 to devote his time to the popular Philosophy Bites podcast, among other things, told me it was primarily the limited opportunities for teaching subjects that he was interested in that led him to leave. “It didn’t work for me. Perhaps that’s my problem,” he said. “But I’ve been heartened by the number of academics who have written to me saying they feel more or less the same but don’t have a straightforward escape route.” He added that he wished more philosophers would follow suit, but that “many are too timid, or are effectively gagged on controversial topics by their institutions.”

Another philosopher who left academia to try his luck in “nature red in tooth and claw” is Dan Fincke, the author of Camels With Hammers, a blog on the atheist channel of Patheos. Fincke told me that, like Warburton, he left his position as an adjunct philosophy professor at both Hofstra and Fordham Universities because of “the demands to produce technical scholarship rather than just continue to follow my philosophical interests.” Fincke is a prolific blogger who was excited by the prospect of being able to “speak to the wider educated lay audience out there about the relevance of philosophical concepts to what they actually cared about.” In addition to his daily blog, he also runs an online philosophy class via videoconference.

These are examples of what Neumann later refers to as "feral" philosophy. It's philosophy geared to the layman outside the formal university classroom.

The great value of philosophy, at whatever level it's taught, is that it teaches people what the important questions in life are are, what others have thought about those questions, and helps us to think about them for ourselves.

Philosophers have for thousands of years debated questions like why am I here? What purpose, if any, does my life have? How did the cosmos and life ever come to be? Does God exist? If so, what is God like? Is the material world all there is? Do we have minds? Do we have free will? If not, does anyone ever deserve reward or punishment? Is love more than just a chemical reaction in our brains? In what sense is the world outside of our minds real? In what sense is time real? What does it mean to know something? Can we have knowledge without certainty? What's the difference between knowing and believing? What is right to do? What makes something right? Must I care about other people's welfare or just my own?

These and many other questions we could think of weave together to form the tapestry of philosophy and it's mind-expanding and fascinating to ponder them. We may not ever arrive at the correct answers to these questions, indeed for some questions there may be no correct answers, but what addressing them does is enable us to develop a more coherent view of our life, our place in the world and of human existence in general.

Neumann says something like this when he writes that:

I think the key difference between science and philosophy is that we need the results of science more than we need everyone in the body politic “doing science.” By contrast, we need everyone “doing philosophy” more than we need the results of philosophy. In other words, we don’t need to know or understand how the scientist has gone from the minute molecular intricacies of DNA to a public good like genetic counseling.

On the other hand, the emulation of the critical thinking and logical argument of a philosopher is a virtue that can be applied to any area of life — from where you stand on the most important social and political issues of the day to how best to spend the rest of your days on this planet.

I agree.

The Paris Massacre

There has, of course, been a lot of commentary in the wake of the Paris mass murder of two police officers and ten employees of the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Some of the commentary has focused on the nature of the magazine, which is, in my opinion, irrelevant. To be sure, the magazine and its staff were despicable. They specialized in offensive portrayals of religious figures (masturbating nuns and popes wearing condoms), but that's certainly no justification for their murders. Murdering those who offend is the sort of thing that savages do. Murdering innocent civilians and police who get in the way is beneath savagery.

Speaking of the slain police officers, their deaths are an example of the needless tragedy inflicted upon people by liberal policies. The officers arrived at the scene unarmed and on bicycles. Other officers were forced to retreat because they had no weapons with which to confront the terrorists. If they had had access to what the average cop in America has in his squad car, or if any of the victims had had a gun in his desk drawer, the death toll might not have been nearly as high. One has to wonder why on earth French police are not armed.

Whatever the case, other commentary has been devoted to the nature of the religion which motivates people like these three to commit murder. The editors of National Review have written a very good piece on this. Here's an excerpt:

A religion that commands murder as the punishment for blasphemy offends the God it professes to worship. In reality, it worships the Devil. And by such deeds as the half-random murders of innocent people ye shall know that truth.

Is Islam that religion? For most of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, it is not. They follow the precepts of the Koran and seek to live harmoniously alongside their infidel neighbors, and where two Koranic interpretations clash, they choose to believe the one that conforms more to the civil laws and social customs of their societies. Most of the time they don’t ponder much on religious texts but get on with the daily business of living.

That is not so, however, for a large minority of Muslims — maybe hundreds of millions worldwide — who cleave to interpretations of their faith that enjoin murder, rape, torture, and cruelty as pious, even mandatory, acts. They take their diabolic faith seriously, and the result is what we saw in Paris today.

Thus, there are in practical terms two Islams — a religion, if not of peace, then of peaceful accommodation, and a religion of death.

Western political leaders try to dismiss this second death cult as a perverted or false Islam, or even as nothing to do with Islam at all. That dismissal is false and, worse, completely unpersuasive. The death cult has learned imams and sophisticated theologians among its adherents. They can quote Islamic texts in support of their revolting doctrines — and do so far more convincingly than President Obama, David Cameron, or Tony Blair do in support of their own.

Their scholarship strengthens the faith of the suicide bombers and child soldiers. And because they justify murder and issue fatwas mandating it, they exercise some intimidation even over the leaders of the other Islam.

There are indeed two Islams. Those who adhere to the religion of "peaceful accommodation" need to face a very unhappy truth: Until those who adhere to the "religion of death" are repudiated and expunged from the umma, Islam will continue to be seen in the eyes of the world as a great evil rather than the work of God. Nothing any secular Westerner could do could cause as much harm to the image of Allah, the Prophet, or of Islam as what has been done in their name by those who profess to revere them. People like those French Muslim terrorists are the worst enemies Islam could have.

Galston on Americans' Religious Beliefs

William Galston, currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, served in the Clinton administration and in the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Al Gore. He's written a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he reflects on American exceptionalism and cautions his fellow Democrats against disregarding the religious sentiments of the American people that are largely responsible for it:

Although this phrase [American exceptionalism] is much abused in partisan polemics, it should not be discarded. The United States does continue to differ from most other developed democratic countries. And the heart of that difference is religion. The durability of American religious belief refutes the once-canonical thesis that modernization and secularization necessarily go hand in hand....

It's common to hear modern western society described as post-Christian, but Galston cites statistics to indicate that this isn't quite accurate, at least not in the U.S.:

[D]espite the enormous growth in the nation’s diversity over the past 225 years, Christian conviction remains pervasive.

If you doubt this, take a look at the survey the Pew Research Center released without much fanfare two weeks ago. Among its principal findings: 73% of U.S. adults believe that Jesus was born to a virgin; 81%, that the baby Jesus was laid in a manger; 75%, that wise men guided by a star brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh; and 74%, that an angel announced the birth of Jesus to shepherds. Fully 65% of Americans believe all four of these elements of the Christmas story, while only 14% believe none of them.

Although Republicans are more likely to espouse these beliefs than are Democrats and Independents, each group endorses them by a two-thirds majority or more. As expected, conservatives are more likely to espouse them than are moderates and liberals. But here again, majorities of each group endorse each belief. Among liberals, 54% profess a belief in the virgin birth.

What about the growth of secular thought in young Americans? As the Pew report dryly notes, there “is little sign of a consistent generation gap on these questions.” That’s an understatement. Seventy percent of adults age 18 to 29 believe that Jesus was born to a virgin; 69% that an angel announced his birth; 80% that he was laid in a manger; and 74% that the wise men made their gift-laden trek.

To be sure, the most-educated Americans are less likely to profess belief in the Christmas story. But even among adults with postgraduate degrees, 53% affirm the virgin birth of Jesus, with comparable or larger majorities for the story’s other elements.

All of this may be true, but what it suggests, I think, is that Americans live in a manner very inconsistent with what they profess to believe. Majorities of Americans may cling to the traditional Christmas story, perhaps for sentimental reasons, but an awful lot of us evidently live as though the significance of that story were irrelevant to modern life.

In any case Galston issues a warning to his colleagues on the left:

These public beliefs have constitutional consequences. When it comes to church and state, many Americans are soft rather than strict separationists. When asked whether religious symbols like Christian nativity scenes should be permitted on government property, 44% said yes, whether or not the symbols of other religions are present. An additional 28% said that Christian symbols would be acceptable only if accompanied by symbols of other faiths. Only 20% took the position that no religious symbols should be allowed.

Democrats should pay careful attention to these findings. In reaction to the excesses of the religious right in recent decades, many secularists and strict separationists took refuge in the Democratic Party. Their voices are important. But if the party takes its bearings only from their concerns, it risks serious misjudgment.

I'm not sure what the excesses were to which Galston alludes, nor do I think that whatever they were they were the motivating factor driving secularists into the arms of the Democrat party, but, nevertheless, skeptics and their philosophical allies have indeed taken up residence there, and their views have come to dominate the party's agenda. Even those who claim to be religious subordinate their religious views to the ambitions of the secular wing of the party.

Many Americans believe that religion has a legitimate if limited role in public life—including politics. Many Americans believe that it is wrong—not always, but usually—for laws and regulations to coerce individuals contrary to their conscientious beliefs. As Democrats pursue new policies in areas from health care to equal rights, they should work hard to minimize their intrusion on these convictions.

They should, but it's doubtful that they will. Much of the Democrat party stands for too many things the opposition to which comes almost exclusively from those whose convictions are informed by their religion. Abortion on demand and gay marriage are just two examples. Put differently, Democrat policies have, wittingly or unwittingly, facilitated the erosion over the last few decades of sexual restraint, the traditional family, the importance of work, individual liberty, and religious freedom. This is why many religious people tend to be conservatives and gravitate to the Republican party.

It's not that they like everything Republicans stand for, but rather that they see Republicans as their only realistic hope, short of divine intervention, for arresting the progressive statist juggernaut that threatens to steamroller them.

Why Dads Matter

One of the chief concerns of many Americans, including those who are socially liberal, is domestic violence and abuse. The irony of this concern is that the high rates of domestic turmoil we've witnessed over the last several decades may largely be the result of successful attempts by liberals to weaken the traditional family structure.

W. Bradford Wilcox at The Federalist has a column in which he in effect makes the politically incorrect claim that the safest place in our society for women and children is in a home in which the biological father is present. He writes:

[V]iolence against women (not to mention their intimates and children) is markedly rarer in families headed by married parents regardless of how well-off or well-educated mom is. We can speculate about the precise mechanisms—is it the commitment, the stability, the mutual support, the kinship ties, or the sexual fidelity marriage fosters more than its alternatives?—that accounts for this empirical link. But what should be clear to analysts willing to follow the data wherever it leads is this: a healthy marriage seems to matter more than money when it comes to minimizing the scourge of domestic violence in American families.

Wilcox develops his argument by citing a study that includes this graph:

The disparity depicted in this chart is rather startling. Wilcox adds:

[H]omes headed by never-married, separated, or divorced mothers are about five times more likely to expose children to domestic violence, compared to homes headed by married, biological parents. What’s more: family structure outweighs education, income, and race in predicting the odds that children witness domestic violence in the home.

Women and children are in much greater jeopardy when the male in the household is not married to the woman than when the male is the woman's husband and the father of her children. The left has been telling us since the sixties that the traditional family is an oppressive, patriarchal social structure that women and children are often better off without and that other arrangements are at least as conducive to their flourishing as is the traditional structure. Well, we've largely abandoned the traditional structure, the data are in, and the results are not anything the left is likely to boast about.

Who's Angry?

I have to say that as one who considers himself moderately conservative, I cringe when listening to some of the major voices on talk radio. Some conservative talkers too often sound shrill and angry. I thought of this the other day reading a piece by James K.A. Smith a philosopher at Calvin College and the editor of the journal Comment. I like Smith's work and have enjoyed and profited from reading several of his books, but in the course of his editorial in which he made the case for redeeming and refashioning conservatism as a more sunny sort of ideology I felt vaguely miffed.

Smith wrote (subscription required):

...those Christians who trumpeted their 'conservatism' just seemed so, well, angry. Their demeanor felt more like reactionary warfare than charitable hospitality. In many ways their moral crusades demonized the people we went to college with and the causes our friends care about. What they decried as ominous threats and menaces had names and faces for us: they were our classmates, our teammates, our roommates - and we liked them, loved them. For a host of reasons, then, we shouldn't be surprised that the default posture for a new generation is leftish, perhaps without realizing it.

When I asked myself why I was bothered by this several thoughts came to mind at once. First, it seems like the only people on the ideological spectrum who are ever described pejoratively as angry are conservatives. If a black liberal or a liberal woman is angry, then their anger is "righteous." If the talking heads at MSNBC look like they're about to burst a carotid artery, well, they have good cause to be outraged considering what those right-wing extremists in Congress are trying to do to our sainted president's agenda. Indeed, has Smith never read the writers and academics on the left who talk about "hating" Republicans, conservatives, and George W. Bush? Who on the right talks that way? When someone like Ann Coulter traipses close to the line she's repudiated and reproved for it by other conservatives.

A second reason I was somewhat consternated by Smith's criticism is that although it certainly does apply to two or three radio talkers, there's far more humor and good cheer on the contemporary right than on the left. Think of the work of Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, P.J. O'Rourke, Jim Geraghty, and many others and compare them to the utter desert of mirth that is liberal/left journalism. Has Smith never opened the pages of the Nation which is the most humor-deficient political magazine on the American newsstand? Car and Driver is funnier to read. For that matter, has he never listened to a Hillary Clinton speech and compared it to, say, a Mike Huckabee peroration?

Third, Smith unwittingly insults his friends and loved ones whom he claims are driven left, not by rational analysis of the ideologies of right and left, not because they've taken the trouble to think seriously about the ramifications of liberal and conservative policies, but because they're put off by personalities, of all things. Smith makes these people whom he says he loves sound like they have the maturity of a bunch of middle-schoolers.

Finally, it occurred to me that if some conservatives are angry, just maybe they have good reason to be. Are we not assured that if women and African-Americans are angry their anger is totally justified because they see themselves treated like second-class citizens, they see their "rights" under assault? Yet conservatives see the country they love being dismantled and the values they cherish being discarded and presumably they're supposed to put on happy faces and yuk it up with the people doing all the damage.

As I said above, I agree with Smith that the tone of people like Mark Levin or Michael Savage is counterproductive, and I agree that it's not something a Christian should be comfortable with, but it's hardly a problem unique to the right, and I find it a little annoying when it's insinuated, implicitly or explicitly, that it is. If he keeps writing like this it may push me toward being a little "leftish," perhaps without realizing it.

The Cosmological Argument

One of the classical arguments for the existence of God is called the Cosmological argument. The name refers to the fact that the argument is based on the existence and/or nature of the cosmos (it was first called the Cosmological argument by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century in his Critique of Pure Reason).

There are many variations of the argument. Here's one that's been championed in recent years by philosopher William Lane Craig. It's simple, easy to understand, and enjoying renewed popularity:

UPDATE: Several days ago I cited a column by Eric Metaxas in the Wall Street Journal in which Metaxas expressed his amazement at the examples of fine-tuning scientists have discovered to pervade the universe and which he attributed to a Cosmic Designer. Since then, atheistic cosmologist Lawrence Krauss has responded in a letter to the editor criticizing Metaxas' column.

Another cosmologist, the Australian Luke Barnes, has weighed in on his blog Letters from Nature. He faults Metaxas for sloppiness (though I don't think Barnes' criticisms affect Metaxas' overall argument) and faults Krauss for just being wrong. Readers interested in the exchange are invited to follow the links Barnes provides.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning

One of the most impressive arguments for the existence of an Intelligent Designer behind the universe is the extraordinary precision with which so many of the parameters, forces and constants that comprise the structure of our universe are set. The precision is so fine that should the value of any one of them have deviated from its actual value by the most unimaginably tiny amount the universe would either not have formed, or not have lasted, or not be the sort of place that could sustain life.

I suspect that 99.9% of the people who have lived on this planet have had no idea how incredibly improbable it is that such a universe as ours could have come into being.

Anyway, I came across a short video the other day which does an excellent job of illustrating this. The video is accessible to any reasonably intelligent, educated, and interested viewer and is only a few minutes long. Despite its brevity it provides a great education on the topic of cosmic fine-tuning. Give it a look:

2014's List of Books

In keeping with established precedent here's a list of books I completed in the year just past with a sentence or two of description:

1. Knowing Christ Today (Dallas Willard): A contemporary examination of who Jesus Christ is and was.
2. Coming Apart (Charles Murray): A sociological study of the increasing divergence in attitudes between upper and lower class whites toward traditional values.
3. The Rebel (Albert Camus): A study in European nihilists and nihilism.
4. Human Traffic (Craig MacGill): A look at the worldwide problem of human trafficking.
5. The Possessed [2nd reading](Fyodor Dostoyevsky): Dostoyevsky's novel about 19th century Russian leftist anarchists.
6. The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): An allegorical account of innocence in the midst of a materialist superficial culture.
7. The Fault in Our Stars (John Green): A rather implausible story of two teenagers both afflicted with cancer.
8. Crime and Punishment [2nd reading](Fyodor Dostoyevsky): Dostoyevsky's classic treatment of a man who believes himself beyond the slave morality categories of good and evil. Dostoyevsky guides the reader through the man's fall and redemption.
9. The Pursuit of God (A.W. Tozer): A classic in Christian devotional literature.
10. Poor Folk (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): An exchange of letters between an impoverished man and the similarly poor younger woman he loves illustrating both the hopelessness of their condition and of his love for her.
11. Who's Afraid of Relativism (James K.A. Smith): Smith defends postmodern epistemological relativism.
12. How (Not) to be Secular (James K.A. Smith): A helpful commentary on philosopher Charles Taylor's massive work A Secular Age.
13. Return to Life (Jim Tucker): Fascinating accounts of young children who apparently have memories of events that occurred long before they were born.
14. Nothing to be Frightened of (Julian Barnes): Barnes' amusing and thoughtful meditation on death. Written from an atheistic point of view.
15. The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak): A novel about a girl living in Munich toward the end of WWII and how she coped with the war.
16. How the West Won (Rodney Stark): Stark enumerates the virtues of western civilization and why it has achieved cultural ascendancy.
17. Quantum Enigma [2nd reading](Rosenblum and Kuttner): A lucid and fascinating introduction to the mysteries of quantum mechanics.
18. Finite and Infinite Goods (Robert M. Adams): A fairly technical treatment of Adams' version of Divine Command ethics.
19. Five Views on Apologetics (S. Cowen, ed.): Five approaches to Christian apologetics by practitioners of each.
20. Flags of Our Fathers (James Bradley): An account of one man's experiences during the WWII battle for Iwo Jima.
21. Diary of a Superfluous Man (Ivan Turgenev): The diary by a man who has a few days left to live as he recounts incidents of his life.
22. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri): Dante's famous journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Highly recommended that anyone reading this work do so with a commentary in hand.
23. The House of the Dead (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): A novel based on Dostoyevsky's own experiences in a Russian prison camp.
24. The Broker (John Grisham): A novel set in Italy read enroute to Italy to get me in the mood for my visit.
25. The Harbinger (Jonathan Cahn): A book by a rabbi who finds current events foretold in the book of Isaiah.
26. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh): A novel about life among the British upper crust in the early years of the 20th century.
27. Ameritopia (Mark Levin): Levin traces the history of utopian ideas and discusses how these same ideas are extant today among contemporary statists.
28. From Union Square to Rome (Dorothy Day): Dorothy Day's account of her conversion from atheistic communism to devout, socially-conscious Catholicism.
29. Scholastic Metaphysics (Ed Feser): A treatment of the metaphysics of Aristotle, Aquinas, and their medieval successors.
30. Mysteries of the Middle Ages (Thomas Cahill): Fascinating details of of the lives of some figures whose names are often the only thing about them that appears in our history books.
31. Morality: It's Critics and Defenders (Timm Triplett): A fictional series of student discussions on ethics.
32. Being as Communion (William Dembski): A metaphysical analysis of information and the difficulties it poses for naturalism.
33. Bonhoeffer (Stephen Nichols): A look at Bonhoeffer's Christian beliefs.
34. True Paradox (David Skeel): A collection of arguments in support of the Christian faith.
35. This Town (Mark Leibovitch): An amusing exposé of the foibles and conceits of the Washington elite.
36. Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson): A wonderful book written by a man who has given his life to providing legal and emotional support to poor people on death row in Alabama.
37. Bad Religion (Russ Douthat): An account of the decline of the Christian church from the years prior to WWII up to the present. Douthat prescribes what he thinks is needed to reverse the decline.

I wish you all much personal growth and accomplishment in 2015.

Superintelligence

We've run a few posts here at VP lately which talk about reasons for believing that the conditions necessary to permit the emergence and persistence of advanced life may be exceedingly rare in the cosmos and that intelligent life may exist only on one solitary planet in the entire cosmos, ours.

There are some philosophers and scientists, however, who still think that there must be many planets out there which exhibit the properties necessary for life and among these thinkers are those who believe that many of those planets must host civilizations much older and far more technologically advanced than ours.

This line of thinking has led some like Nick Bostrom to assume that at some point computers would be built by a race of beings so incredibly brilliant that they'd be able to program their machines to run simulated universes much like your computer can run a simulation of a medieval battle. Indeed, Bostrom argues that it's likely that we ourselves are living in one such simulation.

Others believe that technology must be so far advanced elsewhere in the universe that computers have replaced brains and that the intelligence of these silicon-based creatures is to human intelligence as human intelligence is to the intelligence of a goldfish. Motherboard has an interesting, though highly speculative piece on this theory. Here are a few excerpts:

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers — outside the realm of science fiction, that is — have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program....

Schneider argues that given the fact that alien civilizations that we might come in contact with would be vastly older than our own they'd likely be far more technologically advanced than we are. According to Schneider:

Everything about their cognition — how their brains receive and process information, what their goals and incentives are — could be vastly different from our own. Astrobiologists need to start thinking about the possibility of very different modes of cognition.

There’s an important distinction here from just ‘artificial intelligence.’ I’m not saying that we’re going to be running into IBM processors in outer space. In all likelihood, this intelligence will be way more sophisticated than anything humans can understand.

The reason for all this has to do, primarily, with how old those civilizations may be. Seth Shostak explains:

As soon as a civilization invents radio, they’re within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI. At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model.

The way you reach this conclusion is very straightforward. Consider the fact that any signal we pick up has to come from a civilization at least as advanced as we are. Now, let’s say, conservatively, the average civilization will use radio for 10,000 years. From a purely probabilistic point of view, the chance of encountering a society far older than ourselves is quite high.

One question all this raises is whether any kind of artificial intelligence could be conscious in any meaningful sense. Schneider acknowledges the possibility that it's not, but thinks that consciousness could nevertheless arise in superintelligent artificial beings.

I believe the brain is inherently computational — we already have computational theories that describe aspects of consciousness, including working memory and attention. Given a computational brain, I don’t see any good argument that silicon, instead of carbon, can’t be an excellent medium for experience.

Be that as it may (I'm skeptical), the article addresses several other interesting questions. One of them is whether superintelligent aliens would care to contact us. Schneider and Shostak don't think it's likely. Here's Shostak:

If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn’t be here. My gut feeling is their goals and incentives are so different from ours, they’re not going to want to contact us.

I’d have to agree with Susan on them not being interested in us at all. We're just too simplistic, too irrelevant. “You don’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out reading books with your goldfish. On the other hand, you don’t really want to kill the goldfish, either.

I have my doubts about this, too. Suppose we had the chance to study some earlier evolutionary precursor to human beings (assuming for the moment such precursors existed), some australopithecine apes, for example. Would we not want to examine these more primitive species and perhaps communicate with them if we could? Would we not be fascinated by the prospect of gaining more clues as to where we came from and how we arrived where we are? Why think the super-advanced creatures out there would not be curious enough to want to treat us as living fossils to be studied for clues about their own ancestry?

Anyway, like I said above, as interesting as all this is, it's highly speculative. So far, after decades of searching, there's absolutely no evidence of any life anywhere else but earth. That doesn't mean there's none out there, but as of now there's little reason, as opposed to faith and hope, that there is.

NYPD Work Stoppage

It appears that the NYPD has decided that for whatever reasons it's not going to go out of its way to enforce minor infractions of the law such as illegally selling loose cigarettes. Apparently the officers have decided that if one unfortunate bungled arrest attempt resulting in tragedy is going to bring down the wrath of a sizable number of protestors and the contempt of their boss, Mayor de Blasio, then why risk it? The following is from the New York Post's report:

It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage.

NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety, The Post has learned.

Angry union leaders have ordered drastic measures for their members since the Dec. 20 assassination of two NYPD cops in a patrol car, including that two units respond to every call.

It has helped contribute to a nose dive in low-level policing, with overall arrests down 66 percent for the week starting Dec. 22 compared with the same period in 2013, stats show.

Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.

Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.

Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241. Drug arrests by cops assigned to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.

Police sources said Monday that safety concerns were the main reason for the dropoff in police activity, but added that some cops were mounting an undeclared slowdown in protest of de Blasio’s response to the non-indictment in the police chokehold death of Eric Garner.

“This is not a slowdown for slowdown’s sake. Cops are concerned, after the reaction from City Hall on the Garner case, about de Blasio not backing them.” The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association has warned its members to put their safety first and not make arrests “unless absolutely necessary.”

The lack of police protection doesn't extend to felonious behavior, for which the people of New York can be thankful, but if it did we'd be able to witness an interesting experiment. Throughout the protests of the last days angry protestors and pundits have frequently alleged that people in black neighborhoods live in fear of the cops. Perhaps so, and if so, it should not be so, but if the police were to stop protecting the people who say they fear them what would ensue? What would these neighborhoods look like if all the thugs, miscreants, rapists, and thieves that inhabit them knew that they could perpetrate their depredations on the innocent with impunity?

If the police did limit their presence in these neighborhoods we'd get a chance to see who it is the people really fear. How long would it be before the citizens of these neighborhoods would be pleading with the "racist" cops who "don't care about black people" to come back and risk their lives to protect them from the predators in their midst?

They might not like or appreciate the cops, they might not like being hassled on occasion, but they have far more cause to fear their own neighbors than they do to fear the cops, and if they don't know that I suspect they'd learn it pretty quick were the police to simply stop responding to calls in those precincts. In other words, the real problem, the real threat, to black kids in cities all across the country is not racist cops, though there probably are some, the real threat is other black kids. That's what Mayor de Blasio should have cautioned his son about, that's what the protestors should be demonstrating about, and that's what the talking heads on tv should be addressing.

Theory of Everything

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking is perhaps the most famous living scientist, famous not only for his brilliance but also for his decades long battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. What's less well-known, perhaps, is that Hawking, an atheist, had been married until the mid-nineties to a woman named Jane who is a devout Christian.

A movie based on his life has just been released titled A Theory of Everything which is a reference to the holy grail of cosmologists: a single equation that would tie together both relativity and quantum mechanics and unite the four fundamental forces in a single force. Fr. Robert Barron at Real Clear Religion has some interesting things to say about the movie which he describes as "God-haunted."

In one of the opening scenes, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, in a bar and tells her that he is a cosmologist. "What's cosmology?" she asks, and he responds, "Religion for intelligent atheists." "What do cosmologists worship?" she persists. And he replies, "A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe." Later on, Stephen brings Jane to his family's home for dinner and she challenges him, "You've never said why you don't believe in God." He says, "A physicist can't allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator," to which she deliciously responds, "Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists."

This spirited back and forth continues throughout the film, as Hawking settles more and more into a secularist view and Jane persists in her religious belief. As Hawking's physical condition deteriorates, Jane gives herself to his care with truly remarkable devotion, and it becomes clear that her dedication is born of her religious conviction.

Their relationship is reminiscent of that between Charles Darwin, who was an agnostic, and his wife Emma who was devout, and is interesting on its own, but the more important part of Barron's piece is what he has to say about how the science Hawking (and Darwin) loved so deeply was actually the product of a Christian worldview:

[I]t is by no means accidental that the modern physical sciences emerged when and where they did, namely, in a culture shaped by Christian belief. Two suppositions were required for the sciences to flourish, and they are both theological in nature, namely, that the world is not divine and that nature is marked, through and through, by intelligibility.

As long as the natural world is worshiped as sacred - as it was in many ancient cultures - it cannot become the subject of analysis, investigation, and experimentation. And unless one has confidence that the world one seeks to analyze and investigate has an intelligible structure, one will never bother with the exercise. Now both of these convictions are corollaries of the more fundamental doctrine of creation. If the world has been created by God, then it is not divine, but it is indeed marked, in every nook and cranny, by the intelligence of the Creator who made it.

Hawking's pursuit of what scientist's call the TOE (Theory of Everything) serves to illustrate Barron's point:

In light of these clarifications, let us look again at the central preoccupation of A Theory of Everything, namely, Hawking's quest to find the one great unifying equation that would explain all of reality.... Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn't the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless? Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe's structure?

Why, indeed, is the universe the sort of place that discloses its secrets to reason and logic? Why is it intelligible? Barron and many other scientists and philosophers, both past and present, have argued that the intelligibility of the universe is much more probable given the belief that the universe was created by an intelligent agent than on the assumption that it's the product of sheer chance. Moreover, since reason instructs us to always believe what is more likely than what is less likely the rational position is to incline toward the view that the universe is the product of an intelligent creator.

It seems remarkable, at least to me, that so many people, brilliant people like Stephen Hawking, accept that principle in every precinct of their personal philosophy and professional endeavors except when it comes to God. In that one sector of their intellectual life they for some reason set the principle aside.

I wonder how they'd explain that.

Science and the Case for God

Recently I've posted several pieces on Viewpoint on how many aspects of the solar system and the earth must be just as they are in order for intelligent life to arise and persist on the earth (Here, here and here). Eric Metaxas has an essay in the WSJ (subscription required unless you google his name and the title) titled Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God in which he expresses his astonishment at how exquisitely engineered not only the solar system but the entire universe must be in order for creatures like us to exist.

Metaxas writes:

In 1966 ... astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 21 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.

In light of these calculations it seemed obvious to everyone that other intelligent beings were out there and that it was just a matter of time and effort before we detected their presence. Sagan's ideas were the inspiration for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project and also for the movie Contact. It began in the 60s but, as Metaxas puts it:

[A]s years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis—0 followed by nothing. What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

In other words, the earth, and the intelligent life it sustains, may be unique in the universe. For anyone who absorbed their science from shows like Sagan's Cosmos in the 60s through the 80s when it was simply assumed that life would be abundant in the universe this is a jaw-dropping conclusion. Metaxas goes on:

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here.

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart....The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are. How do we explain it? Or, as Metaxas asks,

Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

I agree with Metaxas' point, but in the eyes of the materialist he's got things a bit backward. The materialist might counter Metaxas' implied conclusion by insisting that there is no God and thus, since we're here, the coincidences, as amazing as they are, must have occurred. Metaxas, in other words, sees these coincidences as clear evidence of intentional design, the materialist doesn't, or maybe more accurately, chooses not to.

Metaxas is astonished by the evidence of fine-tuning exhibited not only by the earth but by the whole universe:

There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp(See here for a couple of even more incredible examples).

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” Theoretical physicist Paul Davies [an agnostic] has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

The sorts of facts Metaxas musters in WSJ have been circulating among scientists and philosophers for about two decades now and many books have been written about them. The fact that the arguments are making their way into more popular venues like newspapers means that more non-academics will be exposed to the impressive cumulative argument they make for the existence of intelligence as the ontological source of the cosmos. That can only be a good thing.

The Secular Life

My friend Byron passed along a link to Susan Jacoby's discussion in the New York Times of a book by Phil Zuckerman titled Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions. Jacoby's review serves up several examples of missing the point. As an atheist herself Jacoby is eager to defend Zuckerman's thesis that one can live a life that's just as morally good, or better, than that of any theist. Belief in God, both Jacoby and Zuckerman aver, is not necessary for the moral life. She writes:

Many years ago, when I was an innocent lamb making my first appearance on a right-wing radio talk show, the host asked, “If you don’t believe in God, what’s to stop you from committing murder?” I blurted out, “It’s never actually occurred to me to murder anyone.”

In addition to the usual tendentious use of the word "right-wing" whenever a progressive is referring to anything to the right of the mid-line on the ideological highway, her answer to the question is a non-sequitur. The host is obviously asking her what, in her worldview, imposes any moral constraint on her. To answer that it never occurred to her to do such a thing as murder is to duck the question. The question is on what grounds would she have thought murder to be morally wrong if it had it occurred to her to commit such a deed? She continues her evasions when she says this:

Nonreligious Americans are usually pressed to explain how they control their evil impulses with the more neutral, albeit no less insulting, “How can you have morality without religion?”

We might want to pause here to ask why Ms Jacoby feels insulted that someone might ask her what she bases her moral values and decisions on. Is it insulting because she's being asked a question for which she has no good answer? Anyway, after some more irrelevant filler she eventually arrives at the nub of Zuckerman's book:

[Zuckerman] extols a secular morality grounded in the “empathetic reciprocity embedded in the Golden Rule, accepting the inevitability of our eventual death, navigating life with a sober pragmatism grounded in this world.”

Very well, but why is it right to embrace the principle that we should treat others the way we want to be treated but wrong to adopt the principle that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others? Is it just that it feels right to Zuckerman to live this way? If so, then all the author is saying is that everyone should live by his own feelings. In other words, morality is rooted in each person's own subjective behavioral preferences, but if that's so then no one can say that anyone else is wrong about any moral matter. If what's right is what I feel to be right then the same holds true for everyone, and how can I say that others are wrong if they feel they should be selfish, greedy, racist, dishonest, or violent? Just because I, or Susan Jacoby, feel strongly that such behaviors are wrong that surely doesn't make them wrong. Jacoby seems unaware of the difficulty, however:

The Golden Rule (who but a psychopath could disagree with it?) is a touchstone for atheists if they feel obliged to prove that they follow a moral code recognizable to their religious compatriots. But this universal ethical premise does not prevent religious Americans (especially on the right) from badgering atheists about goodness without God — even though it would correctly be seen as rude for an atheist to ask her religious neighbors how they can be good with God.

This paragraph is unfortunate for at least three reasons. First, Jacoby's insinuation that only a moral pervert would reject the Golden Rule (GR) is a case of begging the question. She's assuming the GR is an objective moral principle and then asks how anyone could not see it as such, but the notion that there are objective moral principles is exactly what atheism disallows. Indeed, as indicated above, it's what Zuckerman and Jacoby both implicitly deny.

Second, the fact that someone can choose to live by the GR is not to the point. Anyone can live by whatever values he or she chooses. The problem for the atheist is that she cannot say that if someone disregards the GR and chooses to live selfishly or cruelly that that person is doing anything that is objectively wrong. In a Godless world values are like selections on a restaurant menu. The atheist can choose whatever she wants that suits her taste, but if her companion chooses something she doesn't like that doesn't make him "wrong."

Third, Jacoby seems to imply that belief in God doesn't make one good, and in fact makes it hard to be good. This is again beside the point. One can believe in God and not know what's right. One can believe in God and not do what's right. The point, though, is that unless there is a God there is no objective moral right nor wrong. There are merely subjective preferences people have to which they are bound only by their own arbitrary will.

Morality requires a transcendent, objective, morally authoritative foundation, a foundation which has the right to impose moral strictures and the ability to enforce them. That is, it requires a personal being. If no such being exists then debates about right and wrong behavior are like debates about the prettiest color. They're no more than expressions of personal taste and preference.

Jacoby unwittingly supplies us with an interesting example from which to elaborate on the point:

Tonya Hinkle (a pseudonym) is a mother of three who lives in a small town in Mississippi....Her children were harassed at school after it became known that the Hinkles did not belong to a church. When Tonya’s first-grade twins got off the school bus crying, she learned that “this one girl had stood up on the bus and screamed — right in their faces — that they were going to HELL. That they were going to burn in all eternity because they didn’t go to church.”

Jacoby thinks this was awful, as do I, but why does Jacoby think that what these children did to Tonya's children was wrong - not factually wrong but morally wrong? She might reply that it hurt the little girl, and so it did, but on atheism why is it wrong to hurt people? Jacoby, falling back on the GR, might say that those kids wouldn't want someone to hurt them. Surely not, but why is that a reason why it's wrong to hurt others? How, exactly, does one's desire not to be hurt make it wrong to hurt others? All an atheist can say by way of reply is that it violates the GR, but then she's spinning in a circle. Where does the GR get it's moral authority from in a godless universe? Is it from social consensus? Human evolution? How can either of these make any act morally wrong?

At this point some people might reply that it's wrong to hurt others because it just is, but at this point the individual has abandoned reason and is resorting to dogmatic asseverations of faith in the correctness of their own moral intuitions - sort of like some of those obnoxious fundamentalists might do.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is, though, that, on atheism, if those kids can hurt Tonya's children and get away with it, it's not wrong, it's only behavior Jacoby doesn't like, and we're back to right and wrong being measured by one's personal feelings.

It's a common error but an error nonetheless when non-theists like Jacoby and Zuckerman seek to defend the possibility of moral values while denying any transcendent basis for them, and it's peculiar that Jacoby feels insulted when she's asked to explain how she can do this.

Another atheist, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist, makes a related mistake in an otherwise fine discussion of the thought of philosopher Ayn Rand. Tracinski explicitly acknowledges that most thoughtful atheists, at least those on the left, embrace moral subjectivism. He writes:

Probably the most important category [Rand] defied is captured in the expression, “If God is dead, all things are permitted.” Which means: if there is no religious basis for morality, then everything is subjective. The cultural left basically accepts this alternative and sides with subjectivism (when they’re not overcompensating by careening back toward their own neo-Puritan code of political correctness).

This is mostly correct except that I'd quibble with his use of the term "religious basis." Morality doesn't require a religious basis, it requires a basis that possesses the characteristics enumerated above: It must be rooted in an objectively existing moral authority - personal, transcendent and capable of holding human beings responsible for their choices. The existence and will of such a being - God - may or may not be an essential element of a particular religion.

Tracinski, then says that:

The religious right responds by saying that the only way to stem the tide of “anything goes” is to return to that old time religion.

This, too, is wide of the mark. It's not necessarily a return to "old time religion," or any religion, for that matter, which is needful for eliminating the subjectivity of moral judgments. It's a return to a belief that the world is the product of a morally perfect being who has established His moral will in the human heart and who insists that we follow it, i.e. that we treat others with justice and compassion.

Those beliefs may be augmented by a belief in special revelation and by the whole edifice of the Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) tradition, but the core belief in the existence of the God of classical theism is not by itself "religious" at all. That core belief may not by itself be a sufficient condition for an objective morality but it is necessary for it.

Which is why people ask the question Jacoby finds so insulting. Put a different way, it's the question how an atheist can avoid making right and wrong merely a matter of personal taste. If that sort of subjectivity is what the secular life entails then its votaries really have nothing much to say, or at least nothing much worth listening to, about matters of right and wrong.

For Christmas Eve

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 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 His creatures could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, 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 magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending the source and meaning is irrelevant. All the talk of Santa Claus, ads for cars, beer, movies and phones, all the insipid secular "holiday" songs, none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. Christmas Eve is sterile and empty 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.

Here are two traditional Christmas pieces that capture some of the magic, mystery, and power of this night. I hope you enjoy them and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful Christmas and a very special 2015:



It might be best just to listen to this next one without watching it since the video is a bit out of synch with the audio:

Thoughts on the Murder of Ramos and Liu

When Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords was shot a few years ago the left was all over the media blaming what they called the "incendiary rhetoric" of conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh for creating a climate that encouraged acts of violence. Now that two New York Police officers have been gunned down by a black murderer will the same folks who were so sure that the relatively anodyne comments of Palin and Limbaugh were responsible for the Giffords tragedy now be insisting that Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, the New York City protestors who demanded dead cops, and Mayor Bill DiBlasio all be blamed for the murders of these officers? Don't hold your breath.

When masses of people march through the streets of the city shouting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!", when the attorney general of the nation and the mayor of the city both use rhetoric the logic of which indicts police officers for the deaths of people they're trying to arrest, when ignorant, ill-educated people are encouraged by provocateurs to think that cops are deliberately killing black men because they're black, then the blood of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu is not only on on the hands of the man who pulled the trigger but, according to the logic of those who blamed conservatives for the Giffords shooting, also on those of the people who contributed to a climate in which people feel justified in hating cops.

I'm personally reluctant to make the connection between rhetoric and deed in every case, but the semi-literate moral morons who celebrated the murder of these two officers on twitter willfully accept upon themselves a share of the moral guilt for these murders. To applaud the act is to dip one's own hands in the victims' blood. It is also to declare publicly that one is an execrable human being.

We've heard much in the media about how black lives matter, the subtext being that blacks are frequently killed by white police just because they're black. Indeed, no story on the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner failed to mention that these men were killed by white police officers (or a "white Hispanic" in the case of George Zimmerman). Yet as I watched the reports of the murders of Ramos and Liu on MSNBC the race of the shooter was scarcely mentioned. Why not? Is race only relevant when a black man is killed by a white man? When whites kill blacks is it ipso facto an act of racism, but when blacks kill whites it's something different?

In fact, as was stated in an earlier post, police are more likely to be murdered by blacks than vice versa and blacks are infinitely more likely to be killed by other blacks than by police. Why are there massive protests in the wake of the Garner and Brown deaths but not in the wake of the hundreds of black kids (on average, 40 a month) gunned down by other blacks just in Chicago alone every year?

If the deaths of Garner and Brown point to a serious problem in the prevailing racial attitudes among whites, as numerous commenters have alleged, what do the murders of Ramos and Liu point to? Why are there no calls to seriously probe the racism among blacks in our society?

Mayor DiBlasio publicly criticizes his police rather than support them and is then stunned when police are gunned down on the streets of Brooklyn. Why? In the wake of the Eric Garner death DiBlasio pontificated about having to have "the talk" with his son who is a racially mixed young man. Blacks frequently mention the need to have "the talk" with their sons, cautioning them to be leery of the police, as if "the talk" was a burden only blacks must bear, but it's not. My father had "the talk" with his sons as well. My father instructed my brothers and me that if ever we were stopped by the police to be courteous and respectful. Do whatever they tell you to do. Don't give them a reason to make your life difficult. I suspect that a lot of white fathers in the neighborhood I grew up in between Chester and south Philadelphia in Pennsylvania had the same talk with their sons.

When DiBlasio, the cops' boss, tells the world that he had to give similar advice to his son because his son is African American he implied that a lot of the cops in his city were racists looking for an excuse to bring the hammer down on black kids. Not only was it a public insult to the police of New York it's the sort of statement that feeds into the anger of those who would wish the police harm.

No wonder the cops turned their backs on him when he gave a press conference following the deaths of Ramos and Liu.

When people begin to hold themselves to the same standard of behavior to which they hold their ideological opponents we'll begin to see less polarization in our politics. When people stop making racism the first explanation for every tragedy and offense and begin making it the last, and when everyone, no matter their race, is held to the same standards and set of expectations, we'll begin to see less polarization between the races in our society.

What Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain. But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain. To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face." But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face? Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised. But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us. Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of consciousness. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.