Technology and Immortality

An article in the New York Post describes efforts by scientists to extend the human life span by decades and even to the point of immortality. The article is based on information in a soon-to-be-released book by Michael Shermer titled Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.

The major lines of research Shermer adumbrates involve cryonics, singulatarians, and mind uploading. Here are some excerpts about each from the article:

On Jan. 12, 1967, James Bedford, a psychology professor at Glendale College in California who had just died of cancer, took his first step toward coming back to life. On that day, the professor became the first person ever frozen in cryonic suspension, embedded in liquid nitrogen at minus-321 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bedford was neither the first, nor the last, to attempt the impossible — beating death at its own game, according to Shermer’s book.

Cryonics is the process of suspending a just-deceased person in a frozen state until the remedy for what killed them has been discovered. Then, theoretically, the person can be thawed out and cured.

Science will only consider a person properly preserved if they can be revived with all of their memories intact. Many question whether those currently frozen can be successfully revived.

Currently, the cryonic process “vitrifies” the brain, turning it “into a glass-like substance.” Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch — echoing the opinion of many experts — said it would be “utterly amazing” if this change to the brain’s chemistry didn’t destroy the synapses that hold memories, writes Shermer.

Singulatarians believe that artificial intelligence will expand human capacities so much that we'll reach a point - a technological singularity - where technological growth and human capacity will explode exponentially.

The premier evangelist for the singularity is scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil....Kurzweil believes we’ll reach a point where “the world will change more in a decade than in a thousand centuries, and as the acceleration continues and we reach the singularity, the world will change more in a year than in all pre-singularity history,” writes Shermer. “When that happens, humans will achieve immortality.”

“By the 2030s we will have nanobots that can go into a brain non-invasively through the capillaries, connect to our neocortex and basically connect it to a synthetic neocortex that works the same way in the cloud,” he said. “So we’ll have an additional neocortex . . . and we’ll use it . . . to add additional levels of abstraction.”

“As they gain traction in the 2030s, nanobots in the bloodstream will destroy pathogens, remove debris, rid our bodies of clots, clogs and tumors, correct DNA errors and actually reverse the aging process.

“I believe we will reach a point around 2029,” Kurzweil added, “when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy.

Proponents of “mind uploading” go further than Kurzweil, believing that you won’t even need a body or a brain to exist, because one day human consciousness will live on a computer.

The key to uploading the brain is the connectome, which is a comprehensive map of the brain’s neural connections and pathways that equals the sum total of one’s brain function.

Scientists are currently trying to figure out how to assemble and preserve the connectome of a brain. Once that’s achieved, they will theoretically be able to download a human being’s conscious mind.

This, of course, assumes that the conscious mind is simply and solely a function of the material brain which is certainly in dispute among philosophers and scientists. In any case, you can read more on each of these lines of research at the link.

I claim no expertise in these matters but the most intriguing and perhaps the most realistic development, at least in the near term, is the treatment of illness and other disorders by means of nanobots in the bloodstream. That could indeed lead to increased life spans and better quality of life throughout one's lifetime.

Nevertheless, if it's immortality one seeks perhaps one should be looking elsewhere than the science lab for it.

Who's Done More?

Which president has done more for African Americans: Barack Obama, for whom 92% of African Americans voted, or Donald Trump who received only 8% of the African American vote?

If one goes by the unemployment figures the answer is easily Donald Trump. In 2010 black unemployment soared to 16.5% and never fell below 8.2% until the last two months of 2016 when it touched 7.9.

The lowest black unemployment had ever been was 7% during the dot-com boom of 2000.

This is certainly good news for the African American community although Trump's critics are quick to point out that black unemployment is still higher than that of whites (3.7%) and that blacks continue to lag far behind whites in pay, wealth and home ownership. Even so, the gaps are narrowing and under no other president, including the first black president, have the economic prospects looked better for so many blacks as they do now.

Parenthetically, as the Dow scores record highs, stretching well past 25,000, it's somewhat amusing to recall the fretful pre-election predictions that a Trump victory would surely cause the stock market to crash. Here are some excerpts, for example, from an article in Politico in October 2016:

Wall Street is set up for a major crash if Donald Trump shocks the world on Election Day and wins the White House.

New research out on Friday suggests that financial markets strongly prefer a Hillary Clinton presidency and could react with panicked selling should Trump defy the polls and deliver a shocking upset on Nov. 8.

“Wall Street clearly prefers a Clinton win certainly from the prospective of equity prices,” said Dartmouth College’s Eric Zitzewitz, one of the authors of the new study along with the University of Michigan’s Justin Wolfers. “You saw Clinton win the first debate and her odds jumped and stocks moved right along with it. Should Trump somehow manage to win you could see major Brexit-style selling.”

The new report suggests that the stock market is worth 11 percent more under a Clinton presidency than a Trump presidency. This is a highly unusual circumstance because markets historically prefer Republican policies on taxes, regulation and trade to those of Democrats.

And while Trump has pledged to rip up free trade deals and slap tariffs on imports, he has also pledged massive tax cuts on individuals and businesses, policies that Wall Street investors usually embrace....

This also suggests that a shock Trump victory next month could crush stock prices, perhaps by as much as 10 percent, and send the peso and other currencies sharply lower while ushering in a period of intense market volatility as investors try and discern how Trump would govern and whether he would make good on his pledge to start trade wars with Mexico and China and deport 11 million current undocumented immigrants.

“You would see incredible pressure on stock prices if Trump wins and everyone flooding into rare metals like gold and into bonds” in the U.S., Germany and the United Kingdom, said Erik Jones, professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies....

Overall, the authors of the new paper envision a massive global market shock should Trump win. “Given the magnitude of the price movements, we estimate that market participants believe that a Trump victory would reduce the value of the S&P 500, the UK, and Asian stock markets by 10-15%,” they write and “would reduce the oil price by $4, would lead to a 25% decline in the Mexican Peso, and would significantly increase expected future stock market volatility.”

When Donald Trump took office the Dow was just under 20,000. It subsequently "crashed" to just under 25,300 today. Maybe those economic shamans who predicted calamity if Trump won should invest a little of the profit reaped from their investments in 2017 in a new set of chicken bones.

Materialism and Universals

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It is clear, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be. For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed? In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God.

If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems obvious that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would or could exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me. If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing. Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left. Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

Favorite Reads of 2017

Erasmus once said that when he gets a little money he buys books, and if he has any left over he buys food and clothes. I sympathize with his priorities. 2017 was a year filled with good books, and, as is the year-end custom here at VP, I've listed some of my favorite reads from the twelve-month just past.

It was difficult to decide what to include because I enjoyed and profited from reading many more books than those listed below, but here are twenty or so that I'd recommend to anyone interested in the topics the books address:

• Taking Pascal's Wager (Michael Roda): A thorough analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Blaise Pascal's famous argument for the reasonableness of belief in God.
• Knowledge and Christian Belief (Alvin Plantinga): In the year 2000 philosopher Alvin Plantinga's ground-breaking work titled Warranted Christian Belief was published. Knowledge and Christian Belief is a slimmed down version of WCB and is much more accessible to the layman interested in the epistemology of Christian belief.
• Gunning for God (John Lennox): Lennox is a brilliant Oxford mathematician who in this book has written an excellent and witty response to the arguments of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.
• Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel): A fascinating novel about the rise of Thomas Cranmer in the court of Henry VIII.
• Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society (R.R. Reno): Both this book and the next are excellent but very different critiques of our current cultural predicament and what could and should be done about it if one is a Christian. Reno borrows heavily from Charles Murray's highly praised study of the white lower class titled Coming Apart.
• The Benedict Option (Rod Dreher): See the previous annotation. Benedict Option created a much bigger stir than Resurrecting possibly because Dreher is a well-known writer and his prescriptions sound, at least prima facie, more radical than Reno's.
• Hidden Figures (Margot Shutterly): The story of the contribution of a number of black women to the successes of the nascent American space program.
• Reform and Conflict (Rudolph Heinze): 2017 is recognized as the 500th anniversary of the protestant reformation so I read a half dozen or so books on the topic. This one and the next three were the best.
• Martin Luther (Eric Metaxas): An outstanding, entertaining biography of one of the seminal figures in Western history. Another biography of Luther, Beyond the 95 Theses, by Stephen Nichols is also very good.
• The Reformation Experience (Eric Ives): Ives discusses the Reformation as it unfolded in England under Henry VIII and subsequently his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. Very interesting history.
• Hillbilly Elegy (J.D. Vance): Vance is a bright young lawyer who writes an amazing story of his family and the dysfunctional "hillbilly" culture out of which they, and he, came. Reading his account the reader is astonished that, given his chaotic home life and early development, he not only turned his life around but graduated from Ohio State and Yale Law School.
• Infidel (Ayaan Hirsi Ali): Ali writes an eye-opening account of her life from the time she was a young Muslim Somali until, having broken from the religious oppression she endured in Africa, she fled to The Netherlands, gained an education and was elected to Parliament. Her story should be read by anyone who believes the multicultural mantra that all cultures are somehow equally valid.
• The French Revolution and Napoleon (Charles Hazen): A spell-binding account of the 1789 revolution in France with its subsequent Terror and the rise and fall of Napoleon. Hazen's book, published in 1917, was so interesting that I plan to read it again in 2018.
• For the Glory of God (Rodney Stark): I had read this some years ago and picked it up again last year because it addresses such an interesting theme. Stark explains in this book how Christianity led to the rise of modern science, witch hunts, and the abolition of slavery. He packs a lot of fascinating historical information into all of his books and this one especially.
• The Plantagenets (Dan Jones): A very readable account of the history of the early English kings. The sequel to this book, Jones' War of the Roses, about the rise of the Tudors, was also very good.
• Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert): This and the next were two classic novels I had always wanted to read and somehow never did. Madame Bovary is the story of a self-centered woman who tries to find some meaning in her dreary life through an adulterous affair. Things turn out badly.
• Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott): This novel, written in the early 19th century, is a fabulous tale of knights in shining armor and heroic deeds set in the early 13th century when King John ruled England and his brother Richard was returning to claim his crown. The story did much to perpetuate the legend of Robin Hood, but the most interesting aspect to me was its depiction of the shameful attitudes toward Jews harbored by people who called themselves Christians in medieval England.

I hope you find lots of good books to read in 2018 and lots of time to read them. P.J. O'Rourke advises that we should always read books that make us look good if we die in the middle of them.

On Reading Good Books

I'd like to share a delightful post sent by a friend. It was written by a man named Bob Trube, and in his post he talks about reading, particularly what he calls "reading well". Trube writes:

Among the resolutions people make each year is some variant on “read more books.” That’s certainly a goal that I can applaud when the average number of books read by adults is twelve a year (a number skewed by avid readers; most people read about four a year). But I have a hunch that many of these resolutions fare no better than those of losing weight or exercising more, and probably for the same reasons: lack of specific goals that are realistic, forming a habit, social support and a good coach. I will come back to these but I want to address something I hear less about – reading well.

For a number who read this blog, I don’t have to convince you about the value of reading, and in many cases, you already have good reading habits and exceed that book a month average. And even if you don’t, you probably sense that reading isn’t about numbers of books but part of a well-lived life. You read not only for amusement or diversion but to better understand your world and how to live one’s life in it. That can be anything from understanding the inner workings of your computer and how to use it better to a work of philosophy or theology or even a great novel that explores fundamental questions of life’s meaning, living virtuously, or the nature of God.

Trube goes on to list four aspects of reading well:

1. Reading well is an act of attentiveness. We read well when we read without external and internal distractions. A place of quiet and a time when we are not distracted with other concerns helps us “engage the page.” It also helps to turn off the notifications on your phone or tablet, or better yet, put the electronics in another room. Read on an e-reader without other apps if you prefer these to physical books.
2. Visual media often encourages us to passively absorb content. Books of substance require our active engagement–noticing plot, characters, and the use of literary devices like foreshadowing, allusions and more. Non-fiction often involves following an argument, and paying attention to the logic, the evidence, and whether the argument is consistent. Reading well can mean jotting notes, asking questions, or even arguing with the author. Above all it means reflecting on what we read, and how the book connects with our lives.
3. Reading well over time means choosing good books to read. What is “good”? I’m not sure there is one good or simple answer. There are a number of “great books” lists out there and they are worth a look. You might choose one of those to read this year. One test of a book’s worth is whether people are still reading the book and finding value in it long after its author has passed. Also, in almost any genre, there are reviews, websites, and online groups. Over time, you will find sources of good recommendations.
4. Finally, I’d suggest choosing something to read off the beaten path. Reading authors from other cultures, or a genre you don’t usually read can stretch your horizons. This year, I want to work in some poetry and get around to the Langston Hughes and Seamus Heaney that I’ve had laying around.

He closes with a few thoughts "For those who simply want to read more and get into the reading habit." I encourage you to go to the link and check them out.

I sometimes wonder if reading isn't becoming a lost art, like knitting. Our lives are so full of work and other obligations that we don't have much time to read. Even during what leisure we may have we're constantly plugged in to some device or other that distracts us and makes reading seem boring by comparison. Yet good books are like vitamins and minerals for the mind. They nourish and enrich us in ways that last for a lifetime.

If you're one who would like to read more, but just can't seem to get into it, check out the tips that Trube gives at his blog. They're very good.

Hope for Alzheimer's Sufferers

If you're one of the millions of Americans who has a loved one in one stage or another of Alzheimer's dementia this news release might give you some hope:

A drug developed for diabetes could be used to treat Alzheimer's after scientists found it "significantly reversed memory loss" in mice through a triple method of action.

The research, published in Brain Research, could bring substantial improvements in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease through the use of a drug originally created to treat type 2 diabetes.

Lead researcher Professor Christian Holscher of Lancaster University in the UK said the novel treatment "holds clear promise of being developed into a new treatment for chronic neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease."

The tests were done with the diabetes drug because researchers hadn't found a new treatment for Alzheimer's in fifteen years and they thought it might be worthwhile to test drugs that had already been developed rather than spend time trying to develop new medications. Type 2 diabetes produces some effects in the brain similar to those of Alzheimer's and is considered a risk factor for Alzheimer's.

Dr Doug Brown, Director of Research and Development at Alzheimer's Society, said: "With no new treatments in nearly 15 years, we need to find new ways of tackling Alzheimer's. It's imperative that we explore whether drugs developed to treat other conditions can benefit people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. This approach to research could make it much quicker to get promising new drugs to the people who need them."

Although the benefits of these 'triple agonist' drugs have so far only been found in mice, other studies with existing diabetes drugs such as liraglutide have shown real promise for people with Alzheimer's, so further development of this work is crucial."

One hesitates to get too optimistic over reports like this, but this drug would be a tremendous blessing to millions of families around the world if it works. Let's get on with whatever further tests need to be done to see if the drug will work in humans and, if so, get it on the market as soon as possible.

Here's more from the article:

This is the first time that a triple receptor drug has been used which acts in multiple ways to protect the brain from degeneration. It combines GLP-1, GIP and Glucagon which are all growth factors. Problems with growth factor signalling have been shown to be impaired in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

In a maze test, learning and memory formation were much improved by the drug which also:

• enhanced levels of a brain growth factor which protects nerve cell functioning
• reduced the amount of amyloid plaques in the brain linked with Alzheimer's
• reduced both chronic inflammation and oxidative stress
• slowed down the rate of nerve cell loss

Either/Or

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.

Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.

And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.

That's an account recited by David Berlinski in his book Devil's Delusion. His point is that when men lose the belief that there is a God to whom we are accountable for how we treat each other then they will often treat each other atrociously. I might add that it is also the case that when men believe there is a God which expects us to treat each other atrociously, as some Christians did in centuries past and many Muslims do today, then they certainly will do so.

Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference. When Christians act barbarously toward the other they're betraying everything that the One they claim to follow taught. They're rejecting His commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. They're rejecting the lesson of His Parable of the Good Samaritan. By elevating hate over love they're doing precisely the opposite of what He taught and how He lived.

On the other hand, when a Muslim kills "infidels," so far from betraying the one he claims to follow, he's actually following his prophet's example, and when an atheist commits murders like the one described by Berlinski or, for that matter, by atheist Devin Patrick Kelley who walked into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas last November and murdered 26 people and wounded 20 more, or by atheist Stephen Paddock who slaughtered 58 and wounded nearly 500 from his hotel window at a Las Vegas concert in October, he's betraying nothing.

This is not to say that these men were motivated by their atheism any more than that German soldier was, but it is to say that in a world where "God is not watching" there's no real accountability, no genuine guilt, and nothing that's objectively wrong, no matter how horrible. That soldier believed his highest duty was to the Fuehrer, Kelley and Paddock believed they had no higher duty at all, and given their atheism, they were right.

We're horrified by what these men did, just as we're horrified when we watch a video of a lion kill a baby antelope, but the lion is not evil. It's not doing anything morally wrong, it's just doing what lions do. In the absence of God human predators are likewise just doing what human predators do. Our horror and revulsion at their crimes are misplaced. These reactions are simply non-rational emotional responses to events which are unpleasant or abhorrent to our sensibilities.

This conclusion, the notion that if atheism is true there are no moral wrongs and thus no moral guilt, offends our deepest intuitions, but that reaction confronts us with a choice: either our intuitions are wrong or atheism is wrong. One of the strangest facts about our modern age is that there are many who would sooner deny the legitimacy of their moral intuitions than consider that their atheism might be false.

New Year's Prayer

I want to wish all our readers a safe and meaningful new year. It's my prayer for you that wherever you live, whatever your vocation in life, whatever your ideological, political and religious convictions may be, 2018 proves to be a year filled with peace, good health, satisfying work and much joy.

God bless,
Dick

Why Has New York's Murder Rate Dropped?

Heather MacDonald is the author of The War Against Cops and writes often on crime and urban policy. She has a very interesting take on the recent statistics showing a drop in the murder rate in New York City to levels not seen since the 1950s, one response to which is that proactive policing - stop and frisk and other such measures - are unnecessary. MacDonald disagrees.

Here's an excerpt from her recent essay in National Review:

The New York Police Department’s reported-stop activity plummeted earlier in this decade as a result of a groundless trilogy of racial-profiling lawsuits against the department. Yet crime in New York ultimately continued its downward trajectory. Therefore, proactive policing like pedestrian stops is unnecessary, [some] cop critics say.

Their arguments are specious. New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime.

It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps, trailing in their wake legitimate commerce and street life, which further attracts law-abiding activity and residents in a virtuous cycle of increasing public safety.

The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent.

Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks. In 2000, whites were one-third of the black population in Crown Heights North and Prospect Heights; now they exceed the black population by 20,000.

The Brooklyn Navy Yards has now been declared the next cool place to be by the tech industry. Business owners are moving their residences as well as their enterprises to the area.

This demographic transformation has enormous implications for crime. A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker, according to perpetrator identifications provided to the police by witnesses to, and victims of, those shootings. Those victims are overwhelmingly minority themselves.

When the racial balance of a neighborhood changes radically, given those crime disparities, its violent-crime rate will as well. (This racial crime disparity reflects the breakdown of the black family and the high percentage of black males — upwards of 80 percent in some neighborhoods — being raised by single mothers.)

The high-crime areas of Baltimore and Chicago have not been gentrified. Baltimore is experiencing its highest per capita murder rate for the third year in a row. While Chicago’s homicide numbers are down somewhat this year, thanks to the aggressive use of shot-spotter technology, they remain at a level far higher than in the past decade. The year 2017 will mark only the second time since 2003 that homicides surpassed 600, according to the Chicago Tribune.

In other words, when upscale yuppies and similar folk take over a neighborhood, violent crime goes down. In cities where gentrification hasn't happened on the same scale as in New York violent crime remains high.

MacDonald has much more to say about this in her essay which you can access at the link.

Movin' on Out

Conservatives have long argued that liberal policies, however well-intended they may be, are often counterproductive and/or destructive. One bit of evidence that can be adduced in this regard is the out-migration of residents from three states - New York, Illinois, and California - that have been dominated by liberal Democrats for decades.

For many residents, apparently, the tax and spend policies of their liberal state governments have made their states just too burdensome to live in:

The exodus of residents was most pronounced in New York, which saw about 190,000 people leave the state between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released last week.

New York’s domestic out-migration during that time period was about the same as it was in the same time 2015 and 2016. Since 2010, the state’s outflow of just over 1 million residents has exceeded that of every other state, both in absolute terms and as a share of population, according to the free-market think tank Empire Center.

Long-beset by twin budget and pension crises and the erosion of its tax base, Illinois lost so many residents that it dropped from the fifth to the sixth-most populous state in 2017, losing its previous spot to Pennsylvania.

Just under 115,000 Illinois residents decamped for other states between July 2016 and July 2017. Since 2010, the Land of Lincoln has lost about 650,000 residents to other states on net, equal to the combined population of the state’s four largest cities other than Chicago, according to the Illinois Policy Institute.

Illinois’ domestic out-migration problem has become a nightmare for lawmakers, who must find a way to solve the worst pension crisis in the nation as the state’s tax base shrinks year after year. Illinois’ Democratic-dominated legislature has tried to ameliorate the situation with tax hikes, causing even more people to leave and throwing the state into a demographic spiral.

“As people leave the state, they take their pocketbooks with them. That means there are fewer Illinoisans to pay the bills,” Orphe Divounguy, chief economist with the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s worrying because if you have a declining population and a declining labor force, you will for sure have a further slowdown of economic activity going into 2018.”

California was the third deep blue state to experience significant domestic out-migration between July 2016 and July 2017, and it couldn’t blame the outflow on retirees searching for a more agreeable climate. About 138,000 residents left the state during that time period, second only to New York.

In the past the high tax regimens in these states were tolerable because state and local taxes (SALT) could be deducted on one's federal income tax returns, but the newly-enacted tax reform bill caps SALT deductions at $10,000, a limit which will hit taxpayers in those states harder than just about any other state:

According to the Tax Foundation, New York, Illinois and California had three of the five highest tax rates expressed as a percentage of per capita income, with residents paying 12.7 percent, 11 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

An irony in this is that these states (Illinois being an exception) are on balance slightly increasing their population, but the increase is coming from births and international migrants. In other words, the people who are leaving are generally taxpayers who are being replaced by people who will contribute less in taxes and require more in benefits.

These states are about to pay a steep price for their fiscal irresponsibility. As Margaret Thatcher once said about socialism, pretty soon you run out of other people's money. When that happens the state's leaders will probably raise taxes again triggering another round of taxpayer flight, or they'll go to the federal government - i.e. the rest of us - demanding a bail-out to rescue them from their profligacy and the economic death spiral they'll find themselves in.

Which Questions?

The science writer at Forbes, Ethan Siegal, was asked which of these five physics-related mysteries would he most like to have the answer to:

• Did cosmic inflation happen or was there another process?
• Is earth the only place in the cosmos with life?
• How [can we] merge general relativity and quantum mechanics?
• What is dark energy and dark matter?
• How did life begin on Earth?

These are all fascinating questions, and I'd like to know the answers to all of them, especially the last. Siegal gives interesting explanations at the link as to why these questions are significant, and interested readers should check it out, but for me the two most fascinating science-related questions are not on this list.

The first question I'd like to read a convincing answer to is how did brute matter - atoms and sub-atomic particles - ever give rise in evolutionary history to human consciousness? Indeed, what exactly is consciousness? It would seem that the explanatory gap between material stuff and conscious experience is enormous so how was it bridged in human development or, for that matter, how is it bridged in each human brain?

The second question I'd like to see answered is what is matter in the first place? What is the fundamental constituent of matter? Is it something solid or is it a force of some kind? If it's the latter then how does solidity arise? Is solidity just an illusion? Is the material world objectively real and to what extent is it so?

Someone might dismiss such questions with the remark that the answers make no difference to how we live our everyday lives, and at one level they'd probably be correct. But, if, as a lot of very smart people think, the answers to these questions would point to an ontic reality beyond the universe itself, an intelligent mind, then the implications for everyday life could be considerable.

If, for example, it should turn out that consciousness cannot arise from matter but must be itself the product of consciousness then it would appear that conscious mind underlies the cosmos, and if it should turn out that matter (or mass/energy) reduces to information then, since information is the product of minds, it would appear, again, that a mind must underlie the cosmos.

Those are conclusions, one would think, of immense significance.

Perhaps we'll never know the answers. Perhaps we cannot know them. Perhaps solving these puzzles is as far beyond our intellectual capacities as solving quadratic equations is beyond the intellectual capacities of a rabbit. All the same, it'd be a stupendous achievement were the answers ever found.

The President's First Year

President Trump has taken a remarkable and unprecedented drubbing in the media this year, but he's nevertheless ending 2017 with numerous accomplishments to his credit, and even some of his critics are beginning to acknowledge it.

Axios discusses just a portion of what has been achieved in the first year of the Trump presidency:

• The big picture: You might not like his words or actions. But measured in terms of what Republican voters want and expected, he's winning on important fronts:
• The tax bill passed with almost unanimous Republican support, before the end of the year, and in keeping with mostly mainstream conservative orthodoxy. Trump won a bigger corporate tax break than either Bush ever got, and will sign the most consequential new tax law in 30 years. And he followed through on cutting taxes for most small businesses and most Americans. He did this without losing a single GOP senator — even his harshest critics.
• He failed to repeal all of Obama's health-care law. But Trump axed the individual mandate with the tax bill, and has chipped away at other parts of the law's foundation. Again, you might hate the outcome. But it's a significant step to blowing up a program most Republicans demanded be destroyed.
• Axios health-care editor Sam Baker emails: "The smaller administrative steps Trump has taken — an executive order, cuts to enrollment outreach, ending a critical stream of funding for insurers — [are cumulatively] weakening the ACA's insurance exchanges and prompting some insurers to question whether those markets are worth the trouble."
• Trump has tilted the court rightward in lasting ways. Justice Neil Gorsuch was a substantial, conservative addition to the Supreme Court. And it wasn't a one-off: The dozen new U.S. Circuit Court judges he has named is the most during a president's first year in office in more than a century.
• Trump has followed through on eviscerating regulations, many of them imposed by Obama. He has revoked 67, and delayed or derailed more than 1,500 others.
• No matter that much of it is not of his doing, the economy has grown consistently under his watch.
• ISIS is in retreat. The N.Y. Times' Ross Douthat calls it "A War Trump Won."

All of these points are profoundly significant and as might be expected the media have been largely loath to talk about any of them. At CNN and MSNBC they're still fixated on Russian collusion and the Mueller investigation, hoping that something will come of it that'll force Trump from office.

Ross Douthat is a fierce but honest anti-Trumper at the New York Times, and the column referred to above praises, albeit somewhat grudgingly, Trump's foreign policy successes in the Middle East. He writes:

There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice.

I mean the war against the Islamic State, whose expansion was the defining foreign policy calamity of Barack Obama’s second term, whose executions of Americans made the U.S.A. look impotent and whose utopian experiment drew volunteers drunk on world-historical ambitions and metaphysical dreams.

Its defeat was begun under Obama, and the hardest fighting has been done by Iraqis — but this was an American war too, and we succeeded without massive infusions of ground troops, without accidentally getting into a war with Russia, and without inspiring a huge wave of terrorism in the West.

Why haven’t we noticed this success?....

[T]his is...a press failure, a case where the media is not adequately reporting an important success because it does not fit into the narrative of Trumpian disaster in which our journalistic entities are all invested....

I include myself in this indictment. Foreign policy is the place where the risks of electing Trump seemed to me particularly unacceptable, and I’ve tended to focus on narratives that fit that fear, from the risk of regional war in Middle East to the perils in our North Korean brinksmanship.

Those fears are still reasonable. But all punditry is provisional, and for now, the Trump administration’s approach to the Middle East has been moderately successful, and indeed close to what I would have hoped for from a normal Republican president following a realist-internationalist course.

In particular, Trump has avoided the temptation often afflicting Republican uber-hawks, in which we’re supposed to fight all bad actors on 16 fronts at once. Instead he’s slow-walked his hawkish instincts on Iran, tolerated Assad and avoided dialing up tensions with Russia. The last issue is of course entangled with the great collusion debate — but it’s still a good thing that our mini-cold war has remained relatively cool and we aren’t strafing each other over Syria.

Douthat goes on to commend the Trump team for its handling of the Saudis, the Yemen calamity, and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. He closes with this:

The rule with this White House is that if you write in praise of anything it has done, something disastrous swiftly follows. So if this column conjures up a Saudi invasion of Lebanon, a renewed intifada, or something terrible in the Koreas — well, I apologize in advance.

But if you had told me in late 2016 that almost a year into the Trump era the caliphate would be all-but-beaten without something far worse happening in the Middle East, I would have been surprised and gratified. So very provisionally, credit belongs where it’s due — to our soldiers and diplomats, yes, but to our president as well.

Tax Cuts and Bonuses

You won't hear much about this on the mainstream media, but even before the recently passed tax reform bill has gone into effect hundreds of thousands of average Americans were already benefiting from it.

Some corporations are giving out thousand dollar bonuses to their employees, others are raising their minimum wage to $15.00 and hour, and others are planning on expanding their businesses and creating more jobs.

It started with AT&T expanding its bonus program to an additional 200,000 staffers getting $1,000 apiece.

Next came Boeing announcing a gift of $300 million in investment in its employee-related charitable program “to support our heroes, our homes and our future.”

Wells Fargo and Fifth Third Bancorp announced they would raise their minimum wage to $15 in the New Year, with Fifth Third kicking in an additional bonus of $1,000 to 13,000 employees.

Comcast NBC Universal anted up $1,000 bonuses to more than 100,000 non-executive employees, announcing the move was not only tied, like all the others, to the tax cut but to the Federal Communications Commission’s elimination of government regulation of the Internet. Comcast NBC Universal Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Brian L. Roberts added the company plans to spend more than $50 billion in the next five years on infrastructure investments that he expects will create “thousands of new direct and indirect jobs.”

In fact, before the bill was even passed, Kroger Chief Executive Officer W. Rodney McMullen offered that the legislation would influence his company “to continue to invest in our business, which will grow jobs.”

No Democrat in the House or Senate voted for it. In fact the opposition to it was fairly fierce. Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the bill an “Armageddon” for the American people and insisted that it was "the worst bill in history." The Democrats' main argument was that by dropping the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% we'll just be making the rich richer and doing nothing to help the middle class.

It may be that under the new tax reform law the cumulative tax break for some will only be a couple of hundred dollars but add that to enhanced job creation and thousand dollar bonuses and it's a lot more money than most average Americans received from any policy enacted in eight years of the Obama administration.

It makes one wonder how much those who opposed tax reform really understand about businesses and how much they really care about the average worker.

For a full listing of what some American companies have done for their employees in the wake of the passage of tax reform, not including what might be done by other companies in the weeks and months ahead, go to the link.

Xmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, but perhaps their discomfiture is misplaced, as the late theologian R.C. Sproul explains:

People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ....There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

This is interesting and helpful, but I still suspect that a lot of people use Xmas to avoid writing Christmas and have no idea what the etymology of the word is. In any case, Sproul goes on to explain the origin of the fish as a symbol for Christianity:

The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom.

I hope this Xmas has been a wonderful and meaningful day for you.

A Christmas Eve Meditation

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 that the source and traditional meaning of the night is irrelevant. All the talk of Santa Claus, 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. 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 2017:

This next is my favorite Christmas hymn:

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.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

The Secularist's Confusion

A few years ago Susan Jacoby wrote a piece in the New York Times about a book by Phil Zuckerman titled Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions. Her review serves up several examples of how to miss 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 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 upon. 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 to 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 disdains 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 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.

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.

St. Nick

This is a post I've put up on VP a few times over the years during the Christmas season that I think you'll find interesting:

Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

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 A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of 5. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be 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 as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned 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 the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also 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.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some, perhaps apocryphal, traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas (Say Saint Nicholas quickly with an Italian accent and you get Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him. Read the whole thing at the link.

Better Hurry

Democrats' dreams of somehow prying Donald Trump out of the White House are in a race against time. The longer he remains as president the more likely is a significant portion of the Democrat base to wash right over to him in 2020. Several news stories this week tell why.

First, black unemployment is at its lowest rate in 17 years. If African Americans come to believe that their improved prospects didn't just fall out of the sky but are due to an improved economy brought about by Trump's dismantling of the stifling regulations put in place by past administrations some fraction of them will begin to realize that Republicans have done a lot more for them than have Democrats.

And the perception is that the economy is improving. Indeed, economic optimism is soaring. James Carville famously demanded that Bill Clinton's campaign focus on the economy since it's the economy that wins elections ("It's the economy, stupid"). Well, if that's true, Democrats are going to have a very difficult slog, especially in 2020 when Trump is up for re-election.

In 2017, for the first time ever the Dow-Jones stock index rose 5000 points in a single year, and buoyed by the prospect of passing tax reform this week, stock futures continue to rise.

Despite the economic boon this reform would provide to the country, the Democrats, under the leadership of liberal dinosaurs like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, are resolved to vote against it, but their recalcitrance will look absurd to all but the uninformed and the left-wing true believers if the economy continues to flourish under the new tax policy.

Meanwhile, GDP is projected to approach 4% in the fourth quarter of the year. During the Obama years it struggled to achieve an annual rate greater than 2%, and in 2016 it was an anemic 1.6%.

If Carville was right the Democrats would do well to give up their hopes of impeachment, take off their Resist! buttons, and start working with Republicans so they can claim at least a piece of the credit for all this. But they won't. It's just not in their DNA.

If you're interested in how you might fare under the Republican tax reform bill, you can go here to get an idea. You have to ignore the glass half-empty headline (it is an NBC site, after all) and understand that the data isn't definitive, but it gives an idea of what you can likely expect given your income and the state in which you reside.

Men Behaving Badly

From the initial revelations on October 5th of Harvey Weinstein's predations up to December 11th the New York Times has tallied 42 men in the media, entertainment, politics, or the corporate world who've been fired or resigned due to sexual misconduct and another 24 whose conduct is under review.

As of the 17th The Daily Beast claims 97 men and one woman who've fallen afoul of the #MeToo movement. And the toll continues to mount almost daily. Indeed, The Daily Caller reports today that MSNBC made a separation payment of $40,000 to an unwilling recipient of boorish behavior by Chris Matthews in 1999.

It's really quite a remarkable development and we might wonder why so many men in positions of influence and power are behaving so badly toward women.

Perhaps one reason is that many of the men guilty of these assaults don't think that what they did was in any objective sense morally wrong, and, sadly enough, the culture in which they've all their lives been steeped has facilitated the very behavior that it now condemns.

Men today have been marinated in pornography from the time they were first able to access the internet, and, concomitantly, they've been inculcated with the Playboy philosophy that sex is really just a form of recreation, like dining out. They've been taught, moreover, that human beings are just animals, the product of blind, impersonal, amoral forces, with animal appetites that yearn to be sated.

They learned during the Clinton years that power has its prerogatives and that as long as you're on the right side of the political spectrum (or actually the left side) you're insulated and protected by your allies from any serious consequences to your behavior. They've also been told, in so many words, that there's really no objective right and wrong because there is no God and morality is just a creation of one's own conscience.

Then men who have absorbed all these lessons throughout their lives, who have been cosseted and feted by society, who have had pretty much whatever they want in life handed to them, who have accepted the notion that Christian morality is an anachronism, find themselves in environments with provocatively attired young women whom, we're told by feminists, have the same drives and desires as men and shouldn't be considered to be different in any significant way.

Indeed, men have had it drilled into them that it's demeaning to put women on a pedestal or to otherwise treat them deferentially.

Then they're told that, even so, they should refrain from acting consistently with all of that.

It's a little bit like putting a plate of fresh-baked cookies in front of a hungry child, telling the child that the cookies are delicious but that he must not touch them, and then being dismayed when the child has crumbs on his chin.

Temptations are hard enough to resist when the tempted individual believes with all his or her heart that it'd be wrong to give in, but they're all but impossible to resist for the person who believes all the cultural, moral, and anthropological claptrap that contemporary men and women have been exposed to and have absorbed over the course of their lifetimes.

After all, if it's true that men and women are just soulless, sexual animals, if there are no objective moral wrongs, if there is no ultimate accountability to a God, if the woman "really wants it" as badly as the man and just needs to have her resistance worn down, what sort of behavior can we realistically expect from men, especially those who have power over their subordinates?

If we sincerely want to change how men behave toward women then we have to change the hyper-sexualized environment in which they grow up, we have to change their belief that they're just material beings, we have to change their belief that something is only wrong if one gets caught, and we have to change the belief that men and women differ only in their anatomy.

Simply punishing men for being found out is only a palliative, a temporary remedy. All it does is send others the message that they themselves need to be more careful, that those who've been shamed have merely transgressed a transient politically correct norm of our very confused and fickle culture, and that with time things will probably revert back to the "good old days," especially if another Bill Clinton is elected to high office.

What punishment alone doesn't accomplish, despite all the insincere mea culpas that the outed villains have dutifully delivered, is to convince either them or others that they've actually done anything objectively wrong.

By the way, Vice-President Mike Pence's rule about never dining with a woman unless his wife is along, a rule for which he was roundly and fatuously mocked, looks pretty smart right now, doesn't it.