Dr. Nassar and Objective Moral Wrong

The recent publicity surrounding Dr. Larry Nassar, the man who has been recently convicted of sexually abusing dozens of young female gymnasts, brought to mind a couple of posts I wrote in December on the explosion of accusations against prominent men who have evidently been abusing women for years.

The two posts can be found here and here. I thought I'd rerun the second one today because I think the message is important: From the initial revelations on October 5th of Harvey Weinstein's predations, up until 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 (of December) 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 a great deal of 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.

Indeed, unless there really is a transcendent, personal, moral authority, it's hard to imagine how what these men have done can truly be objectively wrong and not merely a violation of our culture's collective subjective preferences or conventions.

If, however, we agree that to sexually assault someone is objectively despicable in a moral sense, that it's wrong whatever the perpetrator, or anyone else, may think or believe about it, then logic demands that we acknowledge, too, that there exists a transcendent, personal, moral authority.

How Fish Know

Ever wonder how spawning fish can return to the precise stream from which they emigrated years before? It's an astonishing feat made possible by an extraordinarily complex olfactory system that allows the fish to detect stream-specific chemicals in the water.

Somehow, pelagic species of fish like the sockeye salmon detect these chemicals in the ocean and follow them back to the stream in which they hatched.

This video uses computer animation to explain a little bit about the microscopic olfactory system that enables salmon to accomplish their amazing journey.

Of course, salmon aren't the only creatures with such a highly sophisticated sense of smell. Many insects are equally as gifted.

Whether in fish or in insects there are really just two live options for explaining how such systems arose: Either they're the product of thousands (millions?) of lucky and highly improbable genetic mutations over eons of time, or these receptor systems and neuronal circuits were somehow intentionally engineered.

Of course, we have no evidence that blind, purposeless mechanistic processes can produce systems like this by chance, but we do have lots of evidence right in front of us (our computers) and all around us (the wiring in our houses) that intelligent agents can do it.

As the great skeptic David Hume argued, we should always base our beliefs on our experience. If we have a uniform experience of a phenomenon occurring through natural mechanisms then we should be extremely reluctant to attribute the occurrence of such a phenomenon to non-natural processes.

Hume was arguing here against belief in miracles, but if his principle is sound it surely has broader application. We have a uniform experience of systems and circuits similar to those illustrated in this video being the work of minds but no indubitable, non-question-begging experience of such contrivances occurring through undirected processes.

Thus, an intelligent agent, an electrical engineer of sorts, would seem to be the most probable and thus the most reasonable explanation for the salmon's wonderful olfactory capacities.

For the biologically-minded there's more on the research into the salmon's abilities here.

Not with the Program

If there were an award for defeating your own argument while adamantly affirming it the man featured in this video would surely be a candidate for the prize.

Famous evangelist for both evolution and atheism, Richard Dawkins, interviews "Darwinian medicine" advocate Dr. Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan, and both men are insistent that design in the human body is an illusion, that all of the amazing processes and structures in the body are the result of purely unguided physical processes like natural selection and genetic mutation.

Yet every time they bring up an example of Darwinian "design" Dr. Nesse seems to unwittingly refute it. It happens so often and so inadvertently that the viewer almost has to laugh.

Dr. Nesse agrees with Dawkins that the human body could not be intelligently designed because no intelligent designer would create structures like, for example, the two thin bones in our forearms because their thinness makes them susceptible to a certain kind of fracture. He then immediately goes on to explain, however, that that very thinness allows for dexterity of motion that allows for everything from piano playing to throwing a baseball, both of which might seem to the viewer as decidedly advantageous.

It's as if Nesse is acknowledging that he has to say all this Darwinian stuff to make professor Dawkins happy, but he's not sure he really believes it. He does something similar in part two when talking about the eye.

One of the most fascinating parts of the video is when Dr. Nesse says this:

I am amazed, Richard, that what we call metazoans, multi-celled organisms, have actually been able to evolve, and the reason [I'm amazed] is that bacteria and viruses replicate so quickly -- a few hours sometimes, they can reproduce themselves -- that they can evolve very, very quickly. And we're stuck with twenty years at least between generations. How is it that we resist infection when they can evolve so quickly to find ways around our defenses?

This is an excellent insight. The bacteria and viruses that wish to have us for lunch, as Nesse puts it, reproduce and thus evolve far more rapidly than do human beings. How then have they not managed to find ways to decisively defeat our immune system? Indeed, how did the immune system evolve fast enough to fend off microbial invasion in our early ancestors? It would seem that all creatures would have been vulnerable to microbial onslaught long before they'd had enough time to evolve defenses.

Nesse then concludes that thought with this:

What exactly that transition was between one-celled organisms or few-celled organisms and multi-celled organisms -- the ability of an immune system to protect us from things that evolve so much faster than we do, that want to have us for lunch -- must be very crucial in the origins of life.

Crucial, yes, and awfully hard to explain in terms of Darwinian naturalism.

Anyway, watch the video and note how hard it is for Dr. Nesse to talk about the body without using the word "design" and how Dawkins has to keep clarifying that, of course, Dr. Nesse doesn't really mean "design". That word, after all, implies a "Designer", and Dawkins just won't stand for that sort of nonsense.

One gets the feeling that Dawkins is thinking the whole time that this guy is just not with the program and is certainly not helping the cause.

We Are Not a Sim

Michael Egnor argues that computers simply compute, they do computations in which keystroke inputs are mapped to outputs expressed on the screen.

The computer, however, has no understanding of what it's doing and therein lies his argument against the possibility that our world, and we ourselves, are actually a computer simulation designed by some super-smart programmer in some other universe in the multiverse:

But of course you aren’t living in a computer simulation. Here’s why.

We begin with this question: What is computation? Computation is a mapping of an input to an output according to a set of rules (an algorithm). The output is a function of the input, calculated for each independent variable in the input. For example, as I type this post, the electrical signal evoked by each keystroke is mapped to a pattern of electrons on my computer screen, according to the rules of the algorithm in my Microsoft Word program.

Note that the mapping is independent of the meaning of the input and the output signals. Microsoft Word pays no heed to the meanings conveyed by my keystrokes. The program doesn’t “care” whether I am typing an essay or a poem or a novel. It doesn’t even really care that I am typing anything at all. It merely maps the electrical signal generated by my keystrokes to electrical signals on my computer screen.

It is an electro-mechanical process, not any kind of comprehension. Computation is mapping of signals, and pays no heed to the meaning of the signals it maps. Computation pays no heed to the meaning of anything.

Egnor goes on to explain that human thoughts are always about something. They have what philosophers call intentionality, that is, they're directed at something - either a conceptual or a physical object. Another way of saying this is that our thoughts have meaning.

Egnor then concludes by arguing that this quality of minds precludes our living in a sim:

So are we living in a computer simulation? As I noted above, meaning is precisely what computation lacks. The most fundamental human power — the power of thought to have meaning — is just what a computer simulation cannot do.

Computation is syntax, whereas thought is semantics. If we were living in a computer simulation, and our mind were computation, the one thing we couldn’t do is think. We couldn’t ask the question “Are we living in a computer simulation?” if we were living in a computer simulation....If we are living in a computer simulation, we couldn’t think to ask the question.

Those who argue that the universe is a simulation must make the assumption that human consciousness, the ability to have sensory experiences like pain, color and sound, as well as the ability to abstract and to have ideas, is something that can somehow be programmed into a simulation. Yet, as far as I know, no one has the foggiest idea how this could be done.

For that matter, we don't even have the foggiest idea what consciousness actually is let alone how it could be simulated by a computer.

Why the Universe Can't be Temporally Infinite

The standard model of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang model, implies that space, time and energy, the constituents of the universe, arose out of nothing (ex nihilo). If the standard model is correct the universe had a beginning, and apart from this beginning there was nothing.

Some cosmologists (scientists who study the origin and structure of the universe), particularly those who hold to a naturalistic worldview, don't like the Big Bang because it strongly supports theism. They've thus been casting about for a plausible alternative ever since the Big Bang was first suggested back in the 1920s.

Most, if not all of these alternatives depend somehow on the universe being eternal, that is, infinitely extended in time, but there's a very serious, if not fatal, mathematical problem with theories which posit an infinite temporal extension: Infinities are useful conceptual tools in mathematics but for reasons Physicist Kirk Durston explains, they are difficult to imagine existing in the real world.

Durston writes:

A mathematical infinite past is certainly no problem with mathematical models, but in the real, physical world, it is impossible to “count down” an infinite number of actual years, one at a time, from minus infinity to the present.

In the real world, an infinite past means that if you were to set this current year as t = 0 and count backward into the past, there would never be an end to your counting, for there is no year in the past that was the “beginning”. No matter how long you counted, you would still have an infinite number of years ahead of you to count and, if you were to look back at the set of years you have already counted, it would always be finite. Always!

If we can't start at the present and count backwards to infinity, neither can we start at infinity and count forward to the present. Counting from past infinity to the present is just as impossible as counting from the present to past infinity.

Imagine that we have counted from the present back to any arbitrary number of years - a million years, a trillion years - how much further do we have to go to reach the beginning of an infinitely old universe? We still have an infinite number of years to go. So how long would it take to count from the infinite past to a point, say, a million years ago? It would take an infinite number of years! We could never arrive at any finite point in the past if the universe is infinitely old.

As Durston states:

[I]f the past is infinite, actual history would never, ever make any progress at all in getting closer to the present, or any other arbitrary point in time at a finite distance from t=0. There would always be [an infinite number of] years to go.

Yet here we are. This can only be possible if the past is not actually composed of an infinite number of years. The set of years in the past must necessarily be finite (as opposed to infinite), which means there was a beginning, as science also seems to indicate.

And if there was a beginning it's reasonable to assume that there was a cause of that beginning. Moreover, whatever caused the beginning of the universe, it's reasonable to assume, must have been outside the universe of space, matter and time, i.e. transcendent. It must have been non-spatial, immaterial, and eternal, and, if it's eternal, it's reasonable to assume that it still exists.

The cause of the universe, it also seems reasonable to assume, must be very powerful and very intelligent to cause such a vast and incredibly fine-tuned and elegantly mathematical universe to come about.

Furthermore, if the cause is intelligent and since it has produced personal beings we can think it reasonable to assume that the cause itself is personal.

No wonder non-theists resist the notion of a finite universe, one that had a beginning and thus a cause. If a finite universe leads to the conclusion that it's reasonable to believe that the universe has a transcendent, immaterial, personal, extremely powerful, extremely intelligent cause then it's hard to see how naturalism, or atheism, is a more reasonable or rational position.

For a fuller explanation of the concept of infinity in the context of the age of the universe see Durston's article. It's not long and it's very helpful.

Premoderns and Postmoderns Pt. III

This is the third in the series of reflections on Joseph Bottum's essay titled Christians and Postmoderns. Scroll down for the two previous posts on his essay.

Bottum writes that:

[Theists] should not become entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the key - the postmodern attack on modernity is right: without God, essences are the will to power. Without God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful or good is actually an attempt to compel other people to agree.

Of course believers are tempted, when they hear postmodern deconstructions of modernity, to argue in support of modernity. After all, believers share with modern nonbelievers a trust in the reality of truth. They affirm the efficacy of human action, the movement of history towards a goal, the possibility of moral and aesthetic judgments. But believers share with postmoderns the recognition that truth rests on a faith that has itself been the sole subject of the long attack of modern times.

The most foolish thing believers could do is to make concessions now to a modernity that is already bankrupt (and that despises them anyway) and thus to make themselves subject to a second attack - the attack of the postmodern on the modern. Faithful believers are not responsible for the emptiness of modernity. They struggled against it for as long as they could, and they must not give in now. They must not, at this late date, become scientific, bureaucratic, and technological; skeptical, self-conscious, and self-mocking.

A better word in the previous sentence might have been "scientistic" rather than "scientific," scientism being the belief that only science can give us knowledge and that any questions science can't answer, such as metaphysical questions, aren't worth worrying about.

In any case, "premoderns" are torn between modernity and postmodernity precisely because they share so much in common with both. They bristle at the withering assaults of the postmoderns on modernity's belief in objective truth, particularly truth about morals. Yet they are in fundamental agreement with the postmodern critique of the futility of modernity's attempt to ground meaning and truth in the philosophical quicksands of positivism, naturalistic metaphysics, the scientific method, or whatever. They recognize that modernity reduces man to a machine and thus robs him of his dignity and worth and inevitably his human rights.

We live in a tragically empty age, one in which the promises of secular reason to usher in a golden era of enlightenment and knowledge were dashed on the rocks of two world wars and the bloodiest century in human history. Postmoderns rightly ridicule the impotence of reason, it's utter inability to offer human beings meaning or to lead us into a humanist nirvana, but they offer nothing in its place other than subjectivity and nihilism.

We can't go back to the premodern era, of course, nor would many of us want to. Modernity, despite its failures and shortcomings, has made the physical burdens of life immeasurably easier to bear. Perhaps, though, we could, if we really set our minds to it, import the crucial assumptions of the premodern age about the necessity of a transcendent foundation for knowledge, meaning, morals, and human nature into our present era. Then not only would the physical burdens of life be easier to bear but so, too, would our spiritual and existential burdens.

Premoderns and Postmoderns Pt. II

I'd like to continue our look at the First Things essay (Christians and Postmoderns) by Joseph Bottum that I began yesterday.

Bottum writes that:

[T]he massive scientific advance of modernity reveals how easy it is to discover facts, and modernity's collapse reveals how hard it is to hold knowledge. We have an apparatus for discovery unrivaled by the ages, yet every new fact means less than the previously discovered one, for we lack what turns facts to knowledge: the information of what the facts are for.

Precisely so. Modernity offers us no satisfying interpretive framework for assigning meaning to the facts discovered by science. It attempts to supply the need for such a framework by interpreting everything in terms of evolutionary development, but the view that each of us is just a meaningless cipher in the grand flow of time and evolution fails somehow to quench our deepest longings. According to the modern worldview there really is no purpose for the existence of anything. The facts discovered by science, as important as they may be for the furtherance of our technology, don't really have any metaphysical significance. Like everything else, they're just there.

Bottum continues:

And so "we must learn to live after truth," as a group of European academics wrote in After Truth: A Postmodern Manifesto. "Nothing is certain, not even this . . . The modern age opened with the destruction of God and religion. It is ending with the threatened destruction of all coherent thought." Nietzsche may have been the first to see this clearly .... But, even in the fundamental thinkers of high modernity, hints can be found that knowledge requires God: Descartes uses God in the Meditations in order to escape from the interiority where the cogito has stranded him; Kant uses God as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to hold on to the possibility of morality.

What [theistic] believers have in common with postmoderns is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge. To be a believer, however, is to be subject to an attack that postmoderns, holding truthlessness to themselves like a lover, never have to face. The history of modernity in the West is in many ways nothing more than the effort to destroy medieval faith. It is a three-hundred-year attempt to demolish medieval (especially Catholic) claims to authority, and to substitute a structure of science and ethics based solely on human rationality.

But with the failure to discover any such rational structure - seen by the postmoderns - the only portion of the modern project still available to a modern is the destruction of faith. It should not surprise us that, in very recent times, attacks on what little is left of medieval belief have become more outrageous: resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic broadsides, vicious mockery of evangelical preaching, desecrations of the Host in Catholic masses. For modern men and women, nothing else remains of the high moral project of modernity: these attacks are the only good thing left to do. The attackers are convinced of the morality of their attack not by the certainty of their aims - who's to say what's right or wrong? - but by opposition from believers.

I take Bottum to be saying here that modernity, in its death throes, wishes only to finish the business of killing off God, or at least belief in God. Modernity has nothing else to offer. It cannot give answers to any of life's most gripping existential questions. Nowhere in the writings of the anti-theists at large today do we find an answer to any of the following: Why is the universe here? How did life come about? Why is the universe so magnificently fine-tuned for life? Where did human consciousness come from? Why do we feel joy when we encounter beauty? How can we prove that our reason is reliable without using reason to prove it? How can we account for our conviction that we have free will? What obligates us to care about others? Why do we feel guilt? Who do I refer to when I refer to myself? What gives human beings worth, dignity, and rights? If death is the end justice is unattainable, so why do we yearn for it? Why do we need meaning and purpose? What is our purpose?

Ask the Richard Dawkins of the world those questions and all you'll get in reply is a shrug of the shoulders or a recitation of the alleged historical crimes of the Church. They dodge the question because they have no answer. This is a bit ironic: Neither modern nor postmodern naturalism has an answer to the most profound questions we can ask. The only possible answer lies in the God of the "premodern," and this is the one solution to man's existential emptiness that the modern and postmodern naturalist simply cannot abide.

Premoderns and Postmoderns Pt. I

Having just this week finished talking about the philosophical distinctions between premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews in my classes I thought it might be useful to rerun some posts on the subject from a couple of years ago. This one is the first in a three-part series:

There are in the West three basic ways to look at the world, three worldviews which serve as lenses through which we interpret the experiences of our lives. Those three worldviews are essentially distinguished by their view of God, truth, and the era in which they were dominant among the cultural elite. We may, with some license, label these the premodern, modern, and postmodern. The premodern, lasting from ancient times until the Enlightenment (17th century), was essentially Christian.

The modern, which lasted until roughly WWII, was essentially naturalistic and secular, and the postmodern, which has been with us now for a couple of generations, is hostile to the Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and objective truth.

I recently came across a wonderful treatment of the tension between these three "metanarratives" in an essay written by medieval scholar Joseph Bottum for First Things back in 1994. FT reprinted his article in an anniversary issue, and I thought it would be useful to touch on some of the highlights.

Bear in mind that although the terms premodern, modern and postmodern refer to historical eras there are people who exemplify the qualities of each of these in every era, including our own. Thus though we live in a postmodern age due to the dominance of postmodern assumptions among the shapers of contemporary thought, especially in the academy, there are lots of premoderns and moderns around. Indeed, outside our universities I suspect most people are either premodern or modern in their outlook.

About a quarter of the way into his essay Bottum, writing on behalf of the Christian worldview, says this:

We cannot revert to the premodern, we cannot return to the age of faith, for we were all of us raised as moderns.

And yet, though we cannot revert, we nonetheless have resources that may help us to advance beyond these late times. The modern project that attacked the Middle Ages has itself been under attack for some time. For some time, hyper-modern writers have brought to bear against their modern past the same sort of scarifying analysis that earlier modern writers brought against the premodern past. These later writers, supposing the modern destruction of God to be complete, have turned their postmodern attacks upon the modern project of Enlightenment rationality.

The postmodern project is, as Francois Lyotard put it, a suspicion of all metanarratives based on reason. It rejects the Enlightenment confidence that human reason can lead us to truth about the world, particularly truth about the important matters of meaning, religion and morality. Indeed, postmodern thinkers are skeptical of any claims to a "truth" beyond simple empirical facts.

Bottum continues:

In some sense, of course, these words premodern, modern, and postmodern are too slippery to mean much. Taken to refer to the history of ideas, they seem to name the periods before, during, and after the Enlightenment, but taken to refer to the history of events, they seem to name the period from creation to the rise of science, the period from the rise of science until World War II, and the period since the war.

It is tempting to define the categories philosophically, rather than historically, around the recognition that knowledge depends upon the existence of God. But the better modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes and Kant, as opposed to, say, Voltaire) recognize that dependence in some way or another.

Perhaps, though definitions based on intent are always weak, the best definition nonetheless involves intent: it is premodern to seek beyond rational knowledge for God; it is modern to desire to hold knowledge in the structures of human rationality (with or without God); it is postmodern to see the impossibility of such knowledge.

In other words, premoderns believe we can have knowledge of God through direct experience apart from reason. As Pascal put it, "The heart has reasons that reason can never know." Moderns believe that knowledge can only come through the exercise of our reason. Postmoderns hold that moderns are deluding themselves. None of us can separate our reason from our biases, prejudices, experiences and so on, all of which shape our perspective and color the lenses through which we view the world. For the postmodern there is no such thing as objective reason or truth.

Bottum again:

The premoderns said that without God, there would be no knowledge, and the postmoderns say we have no God and have no knowledge. The premoderns said that without the purposefulness of final causation, all things would be equally valueless, and the postmoderns say there is no purpose and no value. The premoderns said that without an identity of reality and the Good, there would be no right and wrong, and the postmoderns say there is neither Good nor right and wrong.

Though they may disagree on whether God exists, premoderns and postmoderns share the major premise that knowing requires His existence. Only for a brief period in the history of the West-the period of modern times-did anyone seriously suppose that human beings could hold knowledge without God.

Here is an interesting insight. Christians hold in common with modern atheistic naturalists that there is objective truth, that there is meaning to life, and that there is moral right and wrong. At the same time they hold in common with postmodern atheists (not all postmoderns are atheists, it should be stressed) that none of those beliefs can be sustained unless there is a God. Does this, as Bottum alleges, put Christians closer to postmoderns than to moderns?

More tomorrow.

A Couple of Thoughts on the SOTU

Here are a couple of thoughts I had watching President Trump's State of the Union speech Tuesday night:

President Trump announced his plan to give the Dreamers, immigrants that were brought to this country illegally as children, as well as other illegal immigrants amnesty and a path to citizenship - not just legal residency status but a path to full citizenship - in exchange for the border wall, an end to chain migration, and an end to the visa lottery system. I suspect that millions of Hispanics consider this an offer they'd be foolish to refuse, but it maneuvers the Democrats into a very awkward position vis a vis a significant segment of their base.

The Democrats' predicament is this: If they support his DACA proposal to give 1.8 million Dreamers and other illegal aliens a path to citizenship Mr. Trump will almost certainly get the credit for it, and many grateful Hispanics may see him as their political "savior", rewarding him with their allegiance in future elections.

If, though, the Democrats oppose the president on DACA, and their obstruction causes these immigrants to lose their temporary legal status, Hispanics will see the Democrats as having stood in the schoolhouse door, so to speak, preventing those Dreamers from eventually becoming citizens. This could potentially result in the alienation of a sizable fraction of Hispanic voters who had heretofore been a reliably loyal Democratic voting bloc.

The Democrats thus seem to find themselves politically between a rock and a hard place. They often accuse President Trump of being an idiot, but he has certainly outfoxed them on this one. It's no wonder they looked so grumpy during the SOTU.

On another issue, the president has also received sharp criticism for his scolding of certain FBI officials who have allegedly abused their power in an attempt to promote a personal political agenda, i.e. securing the election of Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump should be ashamed, the critics say, for demeaning a great and venerable institution like the FBI.

That this chastisement is coming from liberal progressives who, going back as far as the Bureau's surveillance of Martin Luther King in the 1960s, have scarcely ever had anything kind to say about the FBI, is at the very least peculiar. Suddenly now they're very concerned that the Bureau's reputation is being sullied?

The argument that the FBI should be beyond criticism and that taking it to task will only cause the public to lose confidence in it, is just silly. Consider an analogy: The Catholic church is comprised of many good and virtuous priests who do much good work among the poor and disadvantaged around the world.

Does this fact exempt the church from criticism when some priests abuse their station by abusing young boys and other prelates cover up for them? Should we refrain from insisting that the church purge itself of the miscreants just because it's a great and venerable institution in the world and that to expose clerical abuses will only precipitate a loss of confidence in it?

Of course not. Neither should we exempt the FBI from criticism if it's merited, and besides, the left, whose solicitousness of the FBI's reputation is very touching, will be eager to excoriate it as soon as it suits their political purposes to do so.

Various Views

Yesterday's post addressed the topic of what kind of theory intelligent design is and whether it's guilty of the "god of the gaps" fallacy. Those who don't closely follow the problem of the origin of life and related matters are often confused by the welter of conflicting views on the subject so I thought it might be helpful to offer thumbnail sketches of the major options in this very perplexing and very important debate.

Darwinian Evolution (DE): The Darwinian version of evolution is based upon a naturalistic worldview. It holds that all of life arose through natural processes like natural selection, genetic mutation, and genetic drift acting in accord with the laws of nature and that there was no non-natural intervention or activity of any kind involved. This view doesn't necessarily rule out God's existence but it does leave Him with very little to do and thus quite irrelevant.

Special Creation (SC): The view that God created the major taxa (classes and/or phyla) of living things de novo. On young earth special creation God accomplished this in six days approximately ten thousand years ago. On the old earth creationist view His creative activity was spread out over billions of years. SC is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the physical evidence of life with the Genesis account of the Bible.

Theistic Evolution (TE): This is similar to Darwinian evolution except that on TE God initially created the laws of nature (and perhaps initiated the Big Bang) that led to the development of living things. Some versions of TE hold that God guided the evolutionary process while others hold that once God created the world He left the evolutionary process to unfold on its own. Both versions agree that belief in God's existence and creative activity is a matter of faith, that there's no evidence of God to be found in the natural world and that all apparent design can be explained in terms of the action of natural forces and processes.

Intelligent Design (ID): This view maintains, contrary to both DE and TE, that both living things and the finely-tuned physical world display the signs of having been engineered by an intelligent agent. Unlike SC, ID takes no official stance on how long ago this happened, or how it was done, or even who the intelligent agent was. It does not attempt to reconcile the empirical evidence with Genesis but rather to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Nor, as was argued in yesterday's post, does ID commit the "god of the gaps" fallacy but is instead an example of a common form of scientific reasoning called inference to the best explanation. Some ID theorists in their personal lives are special creationists, some are evolutionists (though not naturalistic evolutionists), and, surprisingly, there are even one or two who are atheists.

Although most proponents of ID are theists those who are atheists leave open the possibility that the intelligent agent who designed the universe and living things could be a denizen of some other world in the multiverse and not the God of traditional theism. The notion that our universe is a computer simulation designed by an intelligent being in some other universe is compatible with this view. Even so, in practice almost all atheists are Darwinian evolutionists and most theists fall somewhere among the other three options.

The debate is important because if it could be shown that Darwinian (or naturalistic) evolution is an unsatisfactory explanation of the appearance of information-rich biological systems or the fine-tuning of the cosmos it would seriously undermine naturalism and make it a much less tenable philosophical position, at least until some other naturalistic theory of origins could be found.

God of the Gaps

In debates over how best to account for the fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of life's major taxa and the origin of consciousness one often hears the claim that those who are skeptical of the power of natural processes to account for these phenomena, and who maintain that an intelligent designer is a better explanation of their provenience, are guilty of the "god of the gaps" fallacy.

This fallacy occurs when someone argues that because natural causes can't explain a phenomenon P, that therefore P must be the result of supernatural causes. In other words, it's alleged that the guilty party is unnecessarily filling the gap in our knowledge with a supernatural entity, i.e. God.

People often accuse Intelligent Design (ID) theorists of committing this fallacy, but that's a mistake as philosopher Stephen Meyer explains in an article at PJ Media.

Meyer explained that "god of the gaps" arguments fail to convince because they are arguments from ignorance. Such arguments "occur when evidence against a proposition is offered as the sole grounds for accepting an alternative position."

For instance: Evolution cannot explain this part of life, ergo there must be a designer.

Intelligent design does not work like this, the author argued. "Proponents of intelligent design infer design because we know that intelligent agents can and do produce specified information-rich systems," Meyer wrote. "Indeed, we have positive, experience-based knowledge of an alternative cause sufficient to have produced the effect in question — and that cause is intelligence or mind."

In other words, ID does not commit the god of the gaps fallacy because ID is not based on what we don't know about information but rather upon what we do know. There's good reason for supposing that information-rich systems can be generated de novo by intelligent agents and cannot be produced by random processes and forces.

Put differently, we have no experience of blind, undirected processes producing complex information like computer programs or libraries full of books, so we're at a loss as to how to explain how such processes could have produced the even more complex information that runs a living cell.

We do, however, have daily experience of such information systems being produced by intelligent agents, therefore it's not fallacious to hypothesize that the very complex information contained on DNA sequences and the information which choreographs the functions that occur within the cell are themselves a result of intelligent agency.

Thus, so far from commiting the god of the gaps fallacy positing intelligent agency is an example of a perfectly ordinary process in science called inference to the best explanation.

Here's a two and a half minute video of Stephen Meyer explaining why ID is innocent of the fallacy of which it's often accused:

Why People Don't Trust Them

Here are two examples - out of the many which could be cited - of the sort of media bias that has caused a lot of folks today to distrust, and even in some cases to loathe, the news media:

1. Imagine for a moment that journalists had in their possession a photo of Donald Trump, before he was president, schmoozing with a man who was perhaps the most notorious racist, anti-semitic bigot in the U.S. Suppose this man had said things like:

• Jews are Satan
• Jews caused the Holocaust
• Black people deserve to die
• Black people are devils and are subhuman
• The Jews were behind 9/11
• Interracial marriage is evil
• Hitler was a very great man

Do you think there's any journalist in the country that would conceal that photo from the public? Not only would they publish it for all to see, they should publish it for all to see, don't you agree? And what would you think of Donald Trump were he seen in that pic smiling warmly in the bigot's company and having his picture taken with him?

Well, it happened. Except it wasn't Trump who was in the photo, it was Barack Obama, and the statements above weren't said about blacks they were said about whites by one of the most odious racists and anti-semites alive today, Louis Farrakhan. The photo has been around since 2005, but the people in whose possession it was sat on it until recently for fear that it would harm Mr. Obama's career.

Can you imagine a journalist withholding such a photo of Mr. Trump out of concern for his career?

Journalist Askia Muhammed said he took the photo but decided to suppress its publication in order to protect Obama’s presidential ambitions. Now that Obama’s political career is over, Muhammad is going public with the picture and publishing it in a new book called “The Autobiography of Charles 67X.”

The photo was first published last week by the Trice Edney News Wire....The veteran journalist told the news service that he “gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy” to protect Obama.

2. As readers are probably aware, our economy has been booming as a consequence of President Trump's dismantling of the stifling regulations placed on businesses by the Obama administration and also as a result of the tax reform bill passed last December.

Millions of people have received bonuses of $1000 to $2500 and millions more, indeed 95% of all workers, will see more money in their paychecks in 2018 as a result. Moreover, many businesses, like Apple and Disney, plan to reinvest billions in the economy which will create an explosion of new jobs.

But the Democrats are horrified that the Republicans will be seen as the benefactors of workers across the country and are desperately trying to minimize the perception that Trump's policies have been responsible for the burgeoning economy. Attempting to downplay the economic benefits average folks have been enjoying and will continue to enjoy they're making themselves sound foolish.

Nevertheless, rather than exposing the truth both about the policies and the absurd response to them, the media are essentially covering up the Democrats' risible remarks because they know they'll only discredit Democrats with the voters.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats predicted the tax bill would be a disaster for the working class — “Armageddon” is how Pelosi described it — only to see more than three million American workers receive bonuses and pay raises as a result of the GOP tax cuts. Additionally, 90 percent of workers are expected to see an increase in take-home pay in 2018. Pelosi, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, has consistently dismissed the bonuses that workers are receiving as “pathetic” and “crumbs.”

Democratic Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, former chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), similarly struggled to explain the bonuses when confronted about them at a town hall. Wasserman first claimed that she hadn’t “heard of any bonuses over $1,000,” even though tens of thousands of workers have received bigger bonuses than that. (Apple, for example, gave employees $2,500 bonuses.) After establishing that misleading premise, Wasserman Schultz then claimed that $1,000 doesn’t go “very far for anyone.”

But the establishment media have ignored the entire Democratic debacle. As of this article, the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN have combined for zero articles about Pelosi’s “crumbs” comments, even as she has doubled– and tripled-down on them.

As has been noted by numerous observers, had the Democrats produced such a boon to average Americans and the Republicans derided it as mere "crumbs", the media would be excoriating them and mocking them for their elitism, insensitivity and for being so out of touch with average Americans.

As it is, though, since it's Democrats who are out of touch and insensitive, the mainstream media has uttered hardly a peep. This disregard for professional ethics on the part of the media, and the resentments it engenders among consumers of news, is one of the main reasons why so many voters pulled the lever for Donald Trump in 2016.

What the Crusades Were Not

It's common to hear people cite the Crusades as a terrible debacle and a stain on the history of Christian Europe, and while there definitely were horrible atrocities committed by some undisciplined mobs, especially against the Jews in the Rhine valley of Germany, the history of the Crusades is much more complex than some history textbooks would have us believe. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Crusades, and the belief that they were unprovoked attacks against innocent Muslims who were minding their own business in the faraway Middle East is one of them.

Steve Weidenkopf had an article at Crisis Magazine a few years back titled Crash Course on the Crusades in which he lamented the historical distortions and fabrications about the Crusades in the popular culture. He began his essay with this lede:

The Crusades are one of the most misunderstood events in Western and Church history. The very word “crusades” conjures negative images in our modern world of bloodthirsty and greedy European nobles embarked on a conquest of peaceful Muslims. The Crusades are considered by many to be one of the “sins” the Christian Faith has committed against humanity and with the Inquisition are the go-to cudgels for bashing the Church.

While the mocking and generally nasty portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders on the big screen ranges from Monty Python farce to the cringe worthy big budget spectacles like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), it is the biased and bad scholarship such as Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones (of Monty Python acclaim) that does real damage. From academia to pop-culture, the message is reinforced and driven home with resounding force: the Crusades were bad and obviously so. The real story is of course far more complicated and far more interesting.

It is worth our time to be versed in the facts and especially to recall the tremendous faith, sacrifice, and courage that inspired the vast majority of the Crusaders to act in defense of Christendom.

Weidenkopf then sought to set the record straight by debunking the following five myths:

• The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression.
• The Crusades were about European greed for booty, plunder and the establishment of colonies.
• When Jerusalem was captured in 1099 the crusaders killed all the inhabitants – so many were killed that the blood flowed ankle deep through the city.
• The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be considered the first Holocaust.
• The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West.

None of these beliefs, despite being widely held, is true, or at least not the whole truth. I encourage readers to go to Weidenkopf's article and read what he says about each of them. As you might expect, the actual history is much more complex and far less damning of the Crusaders than it has been portrayed by those who wish to grind anti-Catholic axes.

For those looking for an excellent and very readable book on this topic I highly recommend God's Battalions by Rodney Stark.

The Spectre of Meaninglessness

Las Vegas police have declared that the motives of Stephen Paddock, the man who slaughtered 58 people and wounded hundreds of others at a country music festival in Las Vegas last October 1st, are still unknown. It is indeed strange, I suppose, that a wealthy man in his sixties would commit such a horrible crime.

I thought of Paddock and Devin Kelley, the man who killed twenty six people in a Texas church in November, and a number of other mass killers while reading Charles Taylor's highly acclaimed book, A Secular Age.

Taylor writes that the spectre of meaninglessness is haunting Western culture as a consequence of modernity's denial of transcendence. One result of that denial is that secular man is left with a view of human life "which is empty, cannot inspire commitment, offers nothing worthwhile, and cannot answer the craving for goals we can dedicate ourselves to."

This "flatness", the emptiness so many feel since the banishment of God from the public square, has been called the "malaise of modernity". Perhaps this malaise, the desire to rise above the ordinary humdrum of existence, the desire to break through the stifling ennui of daily life, the wish to give some meaning to a meaningless life by performing great feats, the yearning for significance in a universe that reminds all who think about it that we are just dust in the wind, maybe this is what impelled these men to commit their horrible crimes.

Paddock was said to be a man without convictions. He was indifferent to religion and politics. He seemed very much like Camus' antihero in The Stranger, a man named Meursault who murders someone for no particular reason. For Meursault the deed amounted to little more than something to do to rise above the tedium of an otherwise pointless and empty life.

Kelley, on the other hand, was an outspoken atheist. His life was devoid of any ultimate meaning because for him death is the end of existence and thus negates all proximal meanings in life. He was also, apparently, consumed with hatred for Christians.

Both men were nihilists in that neither believed that anything had any real meaning or value. Nothing really mattered for either man, certainly not the lives they took, nor even their own. They saw both their own lives and those of their victims as utterly worthless.

So perhaps in searching for a motive for these awful crimes we should bear in mind that in a life so flattened, so meaningless and empty, there's sometimes a deep yearning to do something significant, something memorable, to be recognized, and even, like Meursault in The Stranger, to revel in being execrated by the crowd.

Join all this together with the fact that in their world there's no ultimate accountability for anything they do and thus no real guilt of any kind, and we have all the ingredients necessary for a deed that shocks people who don't see the world the way these men did.

In a world without God nothing really matters. Living, in the words of the Smashing Pumpkins' song Jellybelly, "makes me sick, so sick I want to die". In the throes of such a sickness suicide makes sense, but why do it anonymously? Why not go out in a blaze of public horror while venting your hatreds and your frustrations on as many others as you can?

If that's the sort of psychology that lies behind what Paddock, Kelley, and numerous others have done in schools, churches and movie theaters across the country then we might well fear that in a culture whose fundamental premises inevitably spawn such twisted, dessicated souls, it's going to happen a lot more in the future.

Two Intellectual Virtues

One of my favorite works in philosophy is a book by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) titled On Liberty. Throughout this elegantly written essay Mill offers excellent advice on how to think clearly about the proper limits of state coercion and the freedom of the individual citizen.

In chapter two he takes up the related topic of a citizen's responsibility to inform him or herself on important matters like "morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life". In these, Mill suggests, we should make it our practice to follow the example of one of the greatest rhetoricians in history, Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Mill writes:

The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.

How many people know, for example, the arguments on the other side of the issue from their own on matters like the existence of God, evolution, immigration, climate change, abortion, gay marriage, etc.? If we don't know what the opposing arguments are on such questions how are we justified in dogmatically declaring or believing that our opinion is the only one that it's reasonable to hold?

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.

In other words, if we only hear opposing views from those who agree with our position then we're probably not hearing those views presented as cogently as they would be by someone who really believed them. We shouldn't be afraid to read books and listen to lectures by people with whom we disagree. It'll either sharpen our own views or lead us closer to the truth.

Those on college campuses today who seek to shout down speakers they disagree with, or to prevent them from even appearing on campus, are, in addition to revealing their own intellectual primitiveness, doing both the truth and their fellow students a grave disservice.

John Stuart Mill

Most people, even educated people, Mill laments, don't really know the arguments against the positions they hold:

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavoured to see the reasons of both in the strongest light.

Of course, few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to thoroughly explore all sides of all important issues, but if we don't then we certainly have no justification for being dogmatic in expressing our opinions. It would be better instead to display a genuinely open-minded intellectual humility which, so far from communicating the message, "I'm right and you're wrong", says instead that, "I might well not know all that I should about this matter, but here's what I think based on what I do know...."

Unfortunately, just as in Mill's time, open-mindedness and humility are two intellectual virtues not conspicuous among those participating in debates on the issues of our day.

Multiverse Metaphysics

Mention of the multiverse hypothesis came up in some of my classes this week in the course of a discussion of the difference between metaphysics and science, and I thought it might be helpful to run a post on the topic from a couple of years ago:

Physicist Adam Frank is impressed, as most scientists are, with the degree of fine-tuning scientists are finding in the cosmos. He writes:

As cosmologists poked around Big Bang theory on ever-finer levels of detail, it soon became clear that getting this universe, the one we happily inhabit, seemed to be more and more unlikely. In his article, Scharf gives us the famous example of carbon-12 and its special resonances. If this minor detail of nuclear physics were just a wee bit different, our existence would never be possible. It’s as if the structure of the carbon atom was fine-tuned to allow life.

But this issue of fine-tuning goes way beyond carbon nuclei. It's ubiquitous in cosmology.

Change almost anything associated with the fundamental laws of physics by one part in a zillion and you end up with a sterile universe where life could never have formed. Not only that, but make tiny changes in even the initial conditions of the Big Bang and you end up with a sterile universe. Cosmologically speaking, it’s like we won every lottery ever held. From that vantage point we are special — crazy special.

Indeed, the figure of one part in a zillion hardly begins to capture the incomprehensible precision with which these cosmic constants and forces are set, but lest one conclude that perhaps it's all purposefully engineered, Frank quickly waves the reader away from that unthinkable heresy:

Fine-tuning sticks in the craw of most physicists, and rightfully so. It’s that old Copernican principle again. What set the laws and the initial conditions for the universe to be “just so,” just so we could be here? It smells too much like intelligent design. The whole point of science has been to find natural, rational reasons for why the world looks like it does. “Because a miracle happened,” just doesn’t cut it.

This is a bit too flippant. Intelligent design doesn't say "a miracle happened" as though that were all that's needed to account for our world. ID says simply that natural processes are inadequate by themselves to explain what scientists are finding in their equations. Even so, it's ironic that every naturalistic theory of cosmogensis does say that the origin of the universe was miraculous if we define a miracle as an extraordinarily improbable event that does not conform to the known laws of physics.

In any case, how do scientists who wish to avoid the idea of purposeful design manage to do so? Well, they conjure a near infinite number of universes, the multiverse, of which ours is just one:

In response to the dilemma of fine-tuning, some cosmologists turned to the multiverse. Various theories cosmologists and physicists were already pursuing — ideas like inflation and string theory — seemed to point to multiple universes.

Actually, these theories merely allow for the existence of other universes, they don't require them, but be that as it may, the advantage of positing a multiplicity of different worlds is that the more different worlds you have the more likely even a very improbable world will become, just as the more times you deal a deck of cards the more likely it will be that you'll deal a royal flush. Frank, though, issues a caveat:

There is, however, a small problem. Well, maybe it’s not a small problem, because the problem is really a very big bet these cosmologists are taking. The multiverse is a wildly extreme extrapolation of what constitutes reality. Adding an almost infinite number of possible universes to your theory of reality is no small move.

Even more important, as of yet there is not one single, itty-bitty smackeral of evidence that even one other universe exists (emphasis mine)....

Finding evidence of a multiverse would, of course, represent one of the greatest triumphs of science in history. It is a very cool idea and is worth pursuing. In the meantime, however, we need to be mindful of the metaphysics it brings with it. For that reason, the heavy investment in the multiverse may be over-enthusiastic.

The multiverse meme seems to be everywhere these days, and one question to ask is how long can the idea be supported without data (emphasis mine). Recall that relativity was confirmed after just a few years. The first evidence for the expanding universe, as predicted by general relativity, also came just a few years after theorists proposed it. String theory [upon which the multiverse idea is based], in contrast, has been around for 30 years now, and has no physical evidence to support it.

I'm surprised Frank doesn't mention the irony in this. Scientists feel impelled to shun ID because, they aver, it's not scientific to posit intelligences for which there's no physical evidence (set aside the fact that the existence of a finely-tuned universe is itself pretty compelling evidence). Yet, in its stead they embrace a theory, the multiverse, for which, as Frank readily admits, there's no physical evidence and yet they think this is somehow more reasonable than embracing ID.

When you're determined to escape the conclusion that the universe is intentionally engineered, it seems, you'll embrace any logic and any theory, no matter how extraordinary, that permits you to maintain the pretense of having refuted the offending view.

The Wager

Imagine that you're a contestant on a game show and that the game consists of placing a sealed box in front of you and being told that the box contains either $1,000,000 or $1. There's a 50/50 chance of either. You have to guess which it is, and if you choose correctly you get to keep whatever it is that you guessed. Suppose further that refusing to guess at all is the same as guessing $1.

Those are the terms of the game. What would you do? Would you play? Which option would you choose?

Suppose you were told that the odds were not 50/50 but rather 100 to 1 that there was $1 in the box. Which option would you choose then?

The reasonable thing to do, of course, is to guess that there's a fortune in the box regardless of the odds. If you're right you gain $1,000,000, and if you're wrong you lose almost nothing. If, on the other hand, you bet that there's $1 in the box and you're right you gain very little, but if you're wrong you lose out on a fortune. To bet on the $1 seems irrational and foolish.

This is, broadly, the argument proposed by the brilliant French physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century that's come to be known as Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's version the choice is between believing God exists and committing one's life to Him or declining to believe He exists. As with the box and the fortune, Pascal says that if you believe and you're wrong you lose relatively little, but if you believe and you're right you gain an immeasurable benefit.

By "believe" Pascal doesn't intend a simple intellectual assent but rather he means a placing of one's trust in the one in whom he believes. Nor is Pascal offering this argument as a "proof" that God exists. Nor does he assume that one can simply choose to believe or even should choose to believe as a result of a calculation of the benefits and liabilities. What he's saying is that belief, if one has it, makes perfect sense.

In other words, the skeptic who declares theistic belief to be irrational is simply wrong. The theist has everything to gain and relatively little to lose. The skeptic has relatively little to gain and everything to lose, so whose position, Pascal might ask, is the more rational?

This argument has triggered a lot of reaction, much of it negative. There are a number of objections to it, and although most of them are pretty weak, some of them are not. Susan Rinnard a philosopher at Harvard, did a video on Pascal's argument which does a pretty good job in just a few minutes of explaining the Wager and which offers a version of the argument that avoids some of the pitfalls of the original:

For those interested in reading an excellent treatment of the Wager with responses to the major objections Michael Rota's book Taking Pascal's Wager is one of the best resources out there. It's certainly much better than most of the stuff one finds on Pascal's Wager on YouTube.

Understanding and Believing

Keith Blanchard (who apparently has no particular expertise in biology) wrote a column for The Week a few years ago that gained some attention at the time and which perpetuates some common misunderstandings.

The ostensible purpose of his article was to exhort people to embrace evolution as science and not as a matter of faith. As Blanchard says, we should understand evolution, not believe in it. If his point is simply that we can grasp the basic points of evolutionary theory without making a doxastic commitment to them ourselves, well, then that seems a little banal, but if his point is that if you understand those points you will presumably believe them then his point is manifestly, glaringly false.

There are many people who understand the main idea of Darwinian evolution perfectly well, but who reject it nonetheless. Many of those who reject evolution are not so much hostile to the idea of some kind of universal relationship among living things, but rather the way naturalistic metaphysics is smuggled in with the less innocuous aspects of the evolutionary package.

I might add that I have no quarrel with evolution. It may be in some sense true for all I know. My quarrel is with naturalism and naturalistic views of evolution which tell us that evolution is a blind, unguided, completely natural process. That's a claim that goes well beyond the empirical evidence. In other words, human beings may have arrived here through some sort of descent through modification, but if so, there's much reason to believe that there was more to our developmental journey as a species than purely unintentional, unintelligent, physical processes like mutation and natural selection.

At any rate, Blanchard offers a summary of the basic claims of evolutionary theory which, were they correct, could apply to any kind of biological evolution, naturalistic or intelligently directed. The problem is, Blanchard's summary describes evolutionary theory as it stood about fifty years ago. Few evolutionists accept Blanchard's view today as anything more than a heuristic for elementary school children.

Here's his summary with a few comments. For a much more extensive critique of Blanchard's essay go here.

Blanchard writes:

• Genes, stored in every cell, are the body's blueprints; they code for traits like eye color, disease susceptibility, and a bazillion other things that make you you.

No doubt our genes code for many aspects of our physical body, but Blanchard does not say that they code for everything that makes us us and for good reason. There's no genetic explanation for some our most important traits. It's a mystery, for example, how genes could possibly produce human consciousness, or many behaviors in the animal kingdom. How, after all, does something like an immaterial mind arise from material interactions of chemical compounds? Not only do we have no explanation for how conscious experience arises in individual persons, we have no explanation for how such a thing could ever have evolved by physical processes.

The same is true of behaviors. All birds of any particular species behave similarly, but how do genes, which code for proteins which in turn form structures or catalyze chemical reactions, produce a behavior? It's no more clear how molecules of DNA can produce behavior than it is how molecules of sucrose can produce the sensation of sweet.

• Reproduction involves copying and recombining these blueprints, which is complicated, and errors happen.

Yes, they do and those errors are almost always dysgenic. They detract from fitness not enhance it. Just as an error in copying computer code is much more likely to cause a system to crash than it is to cause it to work better.

• Errors are passed along in the code to future generations, the way a smudge on a photocopy will exist on all subsequent copies.

As I said above, a smudge is a flaw. As similar "smudges" accumulate the result is not a new and different picture of high quality, it's an increasingly weaker and useless representation of the old.

• This modified code can (but doesn't always) produce new traits in successive generations: an extra finger, sickle-celled blood, increased tolerance for Miley Cyrus shenanigans.

These examples, particularly the last, are dysgenic to human beings. Polydactyly may not be dysgenic but neither does it confer a survival advantage. If it did it would spread through the population, but it hasn't.

• When these new traits are advantageous (longer legs in gazelles), organisms survive and replicate at a higher rate than average, and when disadvantageous (brittle skulls in woodpeckers), they survive and replicate at a lower rate.

This is the selectionist theory of evolution, i.e. that natural selection, acting on genetic mutations, drives evolution. It is held today by few biologists because it's fraught with empirical difficulties. In order to finesse these difficulties biologists have adduced other mechanisms such as genetic drift to do the heavy lifting in evolution.

In fact, as Michael Behe pointed out in his book The Edge of Evolution, any theory based on fortuitous mutations defies probability. Many traits require more than one specific mutation occurring fairly rapidly in an organism, and the chances of this happening are astronomically poor.

I repeat, this might have happened through a long evolutionary process, but to say that the process was completely natural (a claim Blanchard doesn't make, by the way) is to go beyond empirical science and enter the realm of faith and metaphysics, and even the belief that it happened at all requires a considerable amount of blind faith.

We can understand the basic hypothesized lineaments of the process, but that doesn't mean that it's appropriate to believe that the process actually happened. To believe in it is to have faith that the theory is the true explanation for how we got to be here. There are people who understand the theory and who believe it's true. There are people who understand the theory and don't believe it, and there are many who understand it and are agnostic, believing that the scientific evidence often conflicts with the theory, as Stephen Meyer has so powerfully shown in his two books Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt.

In my opinion, a humble agnosticism with respect to the means by which life originated and diversified is the most intellectually prudent course. I'm far more confident, however, in the truth of the claim that however we came to exist as a species it's far more probable that it was the result of the purposeful agency of an engineering genius than that blind chance accomplished the equivalent of producing a library of information entirely unintentionally.

North Korea's Endgame

An article in The Atlantic by James Jeffrey reveals National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster's take on what North Korea is up to, and it's not good. The article isn't overlong, and I recommend that anyone concerned about the possibility of conflict with North Korea read it in its entirety. Here are a few excerpts:

McMaster explained to Chris Wallace on Fox in December that Kim Jong Un’s quest to hold the U.S. mainland at nuclear risk with his ICBM program could well be to advance his goal of conquering South Korea. North Korea’s intentions, he said, “are to use that weapon for nuclear blackmail, and then, to, quote … ‘reunify’ the peninsula under the red banner … and to drive the States and our allies away from this peninsula that he would then try to dominate.”

The problem is that conventional wisdom on North Korea contradicts McMaster, holding that North Korea seeks nuclear weapons primarily to deter an American attack, nuclear or otherwise. (As John Nagl tells Friedman: “I see North Korea pursuing a defensive mechanism to preserve its regime.”) One reason for the popularity of this point of view—that, in a common formula, Kim “doesn’t want to be the next Saddam”—is that it is reassuring. And if it is accurate, then absent an invasion of North Korea, Kim will have no reason to use his nuclear (or impressive conventional) arsenal against anyone.

But if his goal is [instead] to conquer the South, holding the U.S. as nuclear hostage gives him a strategic advantage that threatening Seoul with conventional artillery would not.

Once North Korea can strike the U.S., the willingness of Washington to come to Seoul’s defense would be called into question as during the Cold War. [After all,] would the U.S. risk Seattle to defend Seoul? The prospect would force the U.S. to choose one of three unpalatable options: fail to come to South Korea’s defense, thereby abandoning 80 years of global collective security; come to its defense and risk killing a huge number of Americans if Kim isn’t bluffing; or watch China intervene to “check” Pyongyang, thereby pulling South Korea (and Japan) into China’s security orbit and ending the security regime the U.S. has maintained in the Pacific since 1945.

Given these alternatives, a preemptive strike (or generating a credible threat of one to frighten China to act against Pyongyang), however awful, could be the least risky choice.

McMaster could be wrong about Kim’s motives, even if they arguably best explain his ICBMs and fit the regime’s history and ideology. But it’s not surprising that he considers this possibility; what is surprising is how much of the American security community dismisses out of hand this explanation for Kim’s risky, costly missile program to target the U.S.

The refusal of Americans to believe the worst of our foes is certainly not without historical precedent. Jeffrey gives a couple of examples:

The failure to countenance this possibility could well reflect the historic tendency of liberal societies to discount existential threats simply because they are terrible: The arguments before 1914 that global integration ruled out an extended world war; the appeasement of the Axis powers in the 1930s; and the blinders toward Soviet aggression immediately after World War II.

So what should we do? If McMaster is right and it is indeed Kim Jung Un's plan to conquer South Korea then there are a couple of options to letting both South Korea and Japan fall into either the hands of the NORKs or to become vassals of the Chinese:

Taking this possibility into account, as McMaster has, does not necessarily mean embracing preventive war. But it would justify far more risky Cold War-style military preparations, including redeployment of battlefield nukes in or near Korea, and encouraging the development of Japanese and South Korean long-range conventional strike capabilities or, in extremis, their own nuclear capabilities. The aim would be to affect both North Korean and Chinese calculations and introduce automaticity—an almost unstoppable escalation toward a nuclear exchange once any conflict begins—and thus [deter the initiation of conflict].

Furthermore, such risky military preparations would allow Washington to balance them, without appearing to appease Pyongyang, with more realistic, compromise political goals that give North Korea (and China) diplomatic “outs.” These could include a “temporary” diplomatic solution that stops North Korean development of systems that can strike the U.S., but accepts in practice some nuclear capability, rather than the unrealistic maximalist U.S. position of no nuclear weapons. If McMaster can spark such a discussion, the shiver down our spines is worth it.

It's a fact of history that often there simply are no good options. Decades of concessions and appeasement of North Korea by presidents of both parties, a reluctance to accept that tyrants simply cannot be appeased and will only use the space they're given to make themselves stronger and less vulnerable, have left us in the position we're in today.

In any case, we can be thankful that we have clear-eyed people in this administration who resist the delusion of believing that we live in the world as we'd like it to be rather than the world as it is.

Do Dems Really Want DACA?

Political Science professor Ed Zipperer doesn't think so. He has a piece at the Daily Caller which he begins this way:

Last September, President Donald Trump rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy, and the Democratic Party went into full hyperventilation mode — as if Trump had rescinded oxygen.

The Democrats fired out an all-caps email blast saying: “ON TUESDAY, DONALD TRUMP SECURED HIS LEGACY AS A CHAMPION OF CRUELTY.” Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez emailed that the decision was “morally repugnant” and “rooted in prejudice.” And Deputy Chair Keith Ellison—not to be outdone with hyperbole — compared it to handing over Jews to the Nazis.

Now, however, it seems that the Dreamers are expendable pawns, to be sacrificed in pursuit of a bigger prize. What might that prize be? Why do Democrats who insisted up until last week that it'd be immoral to deport Dreamers and that they wanted border security as much as anyone, now refuse to give Trump the border security he wants in order to protect the Dreamers?

According to Zipperer the answer is simple. Compromising with Trump on DACA by giving him what he wants for border security would cost the Democrats dearly. Zipperer gives six reasons how the political cost would be high, the last of which is probably the worst of the lot from a Democratic point of view:

Democrats see illegal immigrants entering the country as a great bloc of potential, someday voters; we need no ghost come from the grave to tell us that. But many people don’t know that every 711,000 illegal immigrants who cross the border create a new congressional district that, due to the Permanent Apportionment Act which limits the House of Representatives to 435 seats, is taken away from another state.

As an unintended effect of the 14th amendment, each person — whether they’re here legally or illegally — must be counted as a whole person. “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state…” That includes illegal immigrants and nothing short of a Constitutional amendment can change it.

Before the Civil War, southern states were overrepresented because they counted slaves (who were denied the right to vote) as three-fifths of a person toward congressional representation. Today, California is overrepresented because millions of illegal immigrants who cannot vote are counted toward their population. Trump’s border security measures would slow down a process that essentially allows a state like California with an ever-growing population of illegal immigrants to steal House seats (and consequently electoral votes) from other states.

Democrats are going to fight for a “clean” DACA bill sans border security measures — even if it means shutting down the government instead of compromising — because of the political calculus. Why else would the minority party refuse a compromise which gives them everything they’ve been screaming for? For Democrats, the DACA compromise is not about immigration, morality, or Dreamers.

It is about the political costs of real border security which far outweigh the political benefits of helping President Trump pass DACA legislation.

If there's a government shutdown this weekend the reason will be that the Democrats will be refusing to grant the president the funds he demands for border security in exchange for granting Dreamers permanent status. Apparently, it's more important to the Democrats that illegal immigration continue than that the Dreamers be protected.

Zipperer's other five reasons why Democrats are balking at a compromise can be read at the link. Given the animus Democrats feel toward Trump each of the reasons makes a lot of sense.

There's a two minute video here that explains what'll happen if the government shuts down. Most people will hardly notice.