Some Thoughts on Last Week's Walkout

Last week, thousands of students across the nation, rightly alarmed by the fact that they're sitting ducks on their gun-free campuses for any deranged nihilist who wants to be famous, walked out in protest of gun violence. One certainly sympathizes with their concern, at least the concern of many of them.

I qualified that last sentence because, despite the media's apotheosis of the students and their demonstration, decades of teaching high school students has made me both cautious and curious.

I wonder, for example, how many of the young men who joined those demonstrations went home that afternoon and sat down to play violent video games in which the object is to kill as many virtual enemies as possible.

I wonder, too, how many students who walked out of their classes just wanted to get out of school or to stick their thumb in the eye of school authorities or were otherwise indifferent to the fears that motivated their classmates.

Many schools of course condoned the walkouts, but I wonder how enthusiastically schools and the media would've supported these students had they been demonstrating against the vast number of people slaughtered in our nation's abortion clinics or the hundreds of people killed every year by illegal immigrants.

I wonder what the media would've said about the exploitation of five to twelve year olds by adults who used children as props in these demonstrations had the cause they were protesting been, say, the devastation wrought on their families by liberal policies like easy divorce and other fallout from the sexual revolution.

I wonder, also, how Hollywood celebrities can piously deplore gun violence in his country while making their living performing in movies which glorify precisely that very kind of violence.

I wonder, finally, how many of the politicians and journalists who used this walkout as another lever to weaken the voters' resistance to disarming the citizenry themselves employ bodyguards or carry weapons.

In other words, although I'm sure thousands of those students were sincerely and justly concerned about the terrible carnage that's been visited upon our schools over the last decade or two, I nevertheless wonder how much hypocrisy we were treated to last week by some of their schoolmates and faculty and even more by our media and politicians.

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick's Day

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Stephen Hawking, R.I.P.

Perhaps no contemporary scientist has acquired the cultural cache and fame that Stephen Hawking managed to accrue during his career as a physicist. He even had a movie made about his life during his lifetime.

Hawking died Wednesday at the age of 76 which was itself an amazing achievement since he had suffered ever since the 1960s from ALS, a degenerative nerve disease that usually claims its victims long before they reach their seventies. Hawking, however, was fortunate in the quality of his medical care, the love of the people around him and his own strength of will and humor.

A piece at New Scientist offers a good overview of his life and his contribution to cosmology. It opens with this:

Stephen Hawking, the world-famous theoretical physicist, has died at the age of 76.

Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world.

“He once said: ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him for ever.”

The most recognisable scientist of our age, Hawking holds an iconic status. His genre-defining book, A Brief History of Time, has sold more than 10 million copies since its publication in 1988, and has been translated into more than 35 languages. He appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. His early life was the subject of an Oscar-winning performance by Eddie Redmayne in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything.

He was routinely consulted for oracular pronouncements on everything from time travel and alien life to Middle Eastern politics and nefarious robots. He had an endearing sense of humour and a daredevil attitude – relatable human traits that, combined with his seemingly superhuman mind, made Hawking eminently marketable.

But his cultural status – amplified by his disability and the media storm it invoked – often overshadowed his scientific legacy. That’s a shame for the man who discovered what might prove to be the key clue to the "theory of everything", advanced our understanding of space and time, helped shape the course of physics for the last four decades and whose insight continues to drive progress in fundamental physics today.

Hawking’s research career began with disappointment. Arriving at the University of Cambridge in 1962 to begin his PhD, he was told that Fred Hoyle, his chosen supervisor, already had a full complement of students. The most famous British astrophysicist at the time, Hoyle was a magnet for the more ambitious students. Hawking didn’t make the cut. Instead, he was to work with Dennis Sciama, a physicist Hawking knew nothing about. In the same year, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neurone disease that quickly robs people of the ability to voluntarily move their muscles. He was told he had two years to live.

Although Hawking’s body may have weakened, his intellect stayed sharp. Two years into his PhD, he was having trouble walking and talking, but it was clear that the disease was progressing more slowly than the doctors had initially feared. Meanwhile, his engagement to Jane Wilde – with whom he later had three children, Robert, Lucy and Tim – renewed his drive to make real progress in physics.

There's much more about Hawking's scientific work at the link. His philosophical ideas seemed sometimes ill-informed, as in his book The Grand Design, but he was clearly a scientific genius and an amazing human being.

Dialogue "Partners"

I’ve been reflecting lately on why some people, even some friends, are difficult to have a conversation with. There are some people with whom it's easier to dialogue via email than it is face-to-face, and I've been wondering why that is, exactly.

I've arrived at the conclusion that in my experience there are at least six types of conversation "partners" and five of them are hard to engage with in any meaningful way. Readers may be able to come up with more than six types, I don't claim my taxonomy to be exhaustive, but here are the six that I've encountered:

One type consists of those who seem constantly distracted while you're talking to them. In the middle of what you're trying to say they're constantly looking away as if something else is capturing their interest, they're staring out the window or fidgeting with their phone or calling out to acquaintances who happen by. This is a behavior we've all come to expect from unmannered children, but it's disconcerting to have to endure it from an adult. The person is either rude or suffers from ADD.

A second type is the individual who expatiates interminably on whatever the topic of the moment may be, never permitting you an opportunity to insert even the slightest contribution to the matter beyond a grunt of assent now and then. You can scarcely utter a word before your dialogue "partner" seizes hold of the conversation again. A discussion with this person consists of him talking and you listening. You're expected to essentially play the role of audience to his monologue. This conversational type combines rudeness with narcissism.

A third type is the fellow (or lady) who appears to be listening to you but who is in fact mulling over in his mind what he wants to say as soon as you shut up. Like the previous two, this individual doesn't much care about what you think, only about what he thinks.

Then there's the individual who gets angry, aggressive or defensive, as soon as you offer a dissenting opinion to whatever he or she has happened to say or believe. Some people simply cannot brook any disagreement no matter how politely expressed. The previous three types may be tolerable (barely) if taken in infrequent doses, but this type rarely is. This person is just unpleasant to try to talk to, at least whenever the dialogue turns to matters upon which there are divergent points of view.

Another type of interlocutor is the one who dismisses your opinions with a disdainful gesture or joke, or changes the subject, or otherwise treats your words as though none of them are really worth listening to. This maneuver establishes them in their own eyes, perhaps unconsciously, as superior or dominant, somewhat like type two. The individual is not only arrogant but, like all the other preceding types, rude as well.

The last type is the individual who genuinely makes an effort to listen to you, to understand what you're saying and gives you time to develop your thought fully before responding. They're a pleasure to spend time with and one always looks forward to conversing with, and learning from, such people.

I know we all sometimes take on the aspect of each of these types. We dialogue differently with different people and sometimes fall into one or more of these types, even in the same conversation, but wouldn't it be wonderful if we, and everyone else, were, most of the time, more like the last type.

The End of Secularism

Some years ago a professor of political science named Hunter Baker came out with a fine book titled The End of Secularism. The problem Baker addressed in his work was the largely successful attempt in the latter part of the 20th century to purge religious sentiments from the public square and to instill in our everyday life an assumption of, or bias toward, secularism.

His main argument is that politics simply cannot be separated from religion, that the secularist alternative is neither neutral nor desirable, and that it will ultimately fail. Secularism should be seen not as the only reasonable occupant of the public square but rather as one competitor among others jockeying to be heard in the marketplace of ideas.

Secularism is not to be confused with the separation of church and state. The latter refers to institutional independence. The former refers to the separation of religion from public life. Separation of church and state is a good thing for everyone involved. The separation of religion from public life is not.

Baker argues persuasively that the courts have erred in seeing the First Amendment as a prohibition of religious expression in taxpayer subsidized spaces. The establishment clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...") was not about religious freedom at all. It was about who had jurisdiction in church/state matters.

The Founders were saying that the role of religion would be a matter for the several states to resolve each for themselves, and that the federal government had no business injecting itself into what was a state matter. Each state was to be free to develop its own relationship with religion in whatever way it chose without the federal government telling it what it could or couldn't do.

Of course, that's not how our courts have chosen to interpret the Amendment. They've ruled, in effect, that the First Amendment is a mandate for secularism, which actually privileges one religious view - secularism - above all others.

Baker traces the uneasy history of church state relations from the early Roman church to the present and attributes the rise of secularism in the West to three main 19th century developments: The emergence of German higher criticism, the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and the schisms wrought by the Civil War and slavery in both the nation and the church. The clincher, though, was the Scopes Trial in 1926 and its aftermath.

The trial was a humiliation for Christian fundamentalism and launched secularism on a trail of victories for the next sixty years that made it seem invincible.

Today, however, the picture is much different. Since the latter part of the 20th century secularism has come under intense scrutiny by "its own advocates, conservative Christians, other conservative religionists, and postmoderns." The critique of secularism includes the irony that secularists have absorbed as their own the values of our common Christian heritage even as they claim that secular thinking is actually the source of these values.

Baker spends several pages on Stanley Fish's critique of the secularist project and why it is doomed to fail. For example, "Bracketing off religion does not solve the problem of toleration. It just disadvantages one set of orthodoxies from interacting with the many secular orthodoxies roaming free in a liberal society." This is true. It also privileges the secularist orthodoxies by essentially insulating them from criticism by banning the opponents most likely to present the most powerful critiques - religious opponents - from the public square.

We must exclude religious reasons and motivations from our public discourse, the secularist argues, because we need to allow only viewpoints that are accessible to everyone and held by everyone in the public arena. The assumption, however, that secular viewpoints are somehow metaphysically neutral is a fraud. The secularist is no more disinterested than is the religious citizen and for him to claim that he should be allowed to judge what passes for legitimate discourse is like permitting a baseball pitcher the prerogative of calling the balls and strikes.

All public discourse reduces to two fundamental visions of reality. One maintains that the universe is the product of a rational, personal, and good creator and the other holds that everything is a result of chance and impersonal forces. The secularist wants to rule the former out of court and allow only the latter in the public square, but conveniently, the latter view happens to be his own. Postmodern thinkers like Fish have been particularly adept at pointing out the self-serving nature of the attempt to establish a monopoly for one's own view while maintaining the pretense of neutrality.

Baker makes the interesting observation that although secularism serves essentially the same role in the Democratic party that religion serves in the GOP, the media, though eager to report on the influence religion has among Republicans, rarely reports on the influence secularism has among Democrats. One never hears, for instance, how the Democrats have "shored up their base among the unchurched, atheists and agnostics."

We're often reminded that schools must not teach religious values, but secularist values like environmental attitudes and fads, tolerance, opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia are all deemed perfectly legitimate topics for taxpayer-funded schools. In other words, taking Judeo-Christian religion out of the public square does not leave the square religion-free. Rather, it leaves secularism as the only religion to be allowed a voice in our public deliberations.

There's much more in Baker's relatively short (194 pages) book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in Church/State issues and the role of religion in public life.

George Berkeley at 333

Yesterday was the 333rd anniversary of the birth of Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685). I recently came across a very good essay on Berkeley and his philosophy by Ken Francis at New English Review. Berkeley is famous for his philosophical idealism. He believed that material substance is an illusion created by minds, that all that really exists are ideas in minds.

Francis begins by mentioning the Scottish clergyman Ronald Knox who sought to mock Berkeley's philosophy:

[T]he philosopher George Berkeley did not believe in the existence of the material world .... In fact, he did not believe in the physical existence of the entire universe for that matter (or should it be ‘non-matter’?). Knox’s limerick to Berkeley went something like this:

There was a young man who said God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there’s no one around in the quad.

An anonymous reply to Knox’s limerick added:

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the quad
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by yours faithfully, God.

There's much of interest in Francis' article which touches on other philosophers (Plato, Locke, Kant) besides Berkeley. He poses, for instance, this puzzle:

Are the words that you are now reading on this page, including the backdrop to wherever you are reading, part of the conceptualized reality of a Supreme Entity, of which our collective consciousness is a manifestation? Berkeley believes that every-day objects are such a manifestation with multiple visual aspects that can change depending upon the circumstances. This also brings into play the problem of appearance and reality.

Take for example a fingerprint. If asked to describe one, the obvious answer would be that it’s a small black blob, about two-inches in circumference, with whirly lines going through it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell would call this favouritism, as we tend to view objects from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light, but the other colours/shapes which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real.

In other words, if we look a little closer, through a powerful microscope, our conventional idea of what a fingerprint looks like takes on a whole new meaning. For here we see something that resembles a huge mountain range, a kind of dark grey version of the Himalayas.

And if we stand back from the fingerprint, say about 20 feet, it looks like a tiny black spot (without the whirly bits). The same applies to everything else we perceive—from tables and chairs to mountains and oceans. But we describe most everyday objects from the very convenient distance, usually a couple of feet away, of a human perceiver, with its meaning relative to how such a perceiver thinks.

So, is reality observer relative? Does what it's like depend upon how we perceive it? If so, then doesn't our perception actually in some sense establish the reality that something has?

These are fascinating questions. I encourage you to read Francis' entire article at the link, and don't forget to wish the Reverend Berkeley a happy 333rd.

The "Old Enough" Argument

I should say up front that I don't in principle oppose raising the age at which someone can purchase some firearms to 21.

That may surprise, and even miff, some readers, but I'm not sure that a restriction is any more an infringement on our second amendment rights than is prohibiting 14 year-olds from buying certain weapons, or prohibiting anyone at all from buying a fully automatic rifle or a grenade launcher.

Having said that, though, I think there's an amusing irony in the arguments made by some liberals in favor of raising the age at which certain weapons can be purchased.

Before I explain that I should note that Florida has just passed such a restriction, and although many Democrats voted against it, they did so only because the legislation provides for a program to train school faculty to carry a firearm. They generally favored raising the age at which a person can buy a weapon.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R.) signed new state gun restrictions into law on Friday, including raising the minimum age to buy a gun to 21 and instituting a three-day waiting period for all firearm purchases.

The new law also banned the sale of bump stocks in Florida and allowed police to ask judges to confiscate weapons from those deemed a threat to themselves or others, as well as granted monies for the training and arming of school personnel, the Miami Herald reports:

Scott signed the bill despite his opposition to creation of a program that allows school personnel to carry concealed weapons on campus.

Family members of all 17 Parkland victims signed a statement supporting passage of the legislation.

The Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program, named in memory of the assistant football coach at the school who died protecting students from gunfire, will create a $67 million program for county sheriffs to train school personnel to neutralize an active school shooter.

I trust that the county sheriffs in Florida know a bit more about how to train people to neutralize an active shooter than the sheriff of Broward County apparently does, but in any case, there's an irony in hearing liberal Democrats argue that the age at which guns can be purchased should be raised to 21.

Back in the 1970s, when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, it was liberal Democrats who led the way, and one of their chief arguments was that if someone was old enough at 18 to go to Vietnam and fight and possibly die then he/she was surely old enough to vote. The argument struck many as silly, but like other silly arguments before and since, it carried the day with our politicians, and the voting age was duly lowered.

Eighteen year olds were henceforth to be considered old enough and mature enough to be entrusted with the great responsibility of choosing our nation's leaders.

Forty some years later, we find liberal Democrats now rejecting almost the same argument they made in the 1970s. Even though 18 year olds may be old enough and mature enough to go off to Iraq and heaven-knows-where-else to fight and possibly die, we now hear liberals say, they're not old enough to buy a weapon here at home.

Yet, if they're old enough to go to war, and thus old enough and mature enough to vote, why are they not also old enough and mature enough to own a weapon?

Maybe someone should ask them.

As I said above, I myself have no objection in principle to raising the age at which certain kinds of weapons can be purchased, but then neither have I ever impressed with the "old enough to fight and die" argument, nor could I ever see the wisdom of lowering the voting age to 18.

The Art of the Witty Insult

A couple of recent posts touched on the loss of civil discourse in our public square and reminded me of a Viewpoint post from long ago which catalogued a sampling of famous quotes that raise the act of insult to an artform. Some of them are funny and they're all clever. Enjoy:

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." -- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." -- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." -- Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." -- Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." -- Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one." -- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill. "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one." -- Winston Churchill's response

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -- Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." -- John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." -- Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." -- Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." -- Paul Keating

"He had delusions of adequacy." -- Walter Kerr

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." -- Mae West

"Winston, if you were my husband, I would poison your coffee!" -- Lady Astor to Winston Churchill at a dinner party. "Madam, if I were your husband, I would drink it!" -- Winston Churchill, in response

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." -- Oscar Wilde

Alinsky's Rule #12

Students sometimes wonder why and how our politics have gotten so nasty. Actually, this is not a recent development. Many conservative commentators trace the nastiness back to the ugly slanders to which Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas were subjected by Senate Democrats, particularly Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, in the late 80s and early 90s.

Liberal pundits, on the other hand, point to the impeachment of Bill Clinton by Republicans as another event that created wounds so deep that it may be decades before our public discourse ever recovers.

Whatever the more public catalysts may have been, it seems that a lot of people in politics today have taken rule #12 in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to heart: "Pick the target. Freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct personalized criticism and ridicule works.)"

It's worth noting that Alinsky was a left-wing radical writing a manual for progressive activists. There's nothing that I'm aware of in all of conservative literature that comes anywhere close to Alinsky's adjuration to dehumanize and degrade one's political opponents. One searches in vain through Edmund Burke, William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, or even Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin for anything that matches in cruelty or odiousness Alinsky's rule #12.

Yet Alinsky is the left's tactical lodestar and guru. Barack Obama incorporated his teaching into his work as a community organizer. Hillary Clinton wrote her Master's thesis on him. Alinsky is must-reading for leftist activists in good standing. Thankfully, not all of them follow him, but evidently enough do that our political discourse has been gravely coarsened by his more devoted disciples.

It's perhaps no coincidence that the Left's attacks over the years not only on Bork and Thomas, but also Ronald Reagan, Ken Starr, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Carrie Prejean, the tea partiers and town hall protesters, and, more lately, Donald Trump and anyone who voted for him, were and are so personal, vicious, and vile. Like Alinsky said, smearing and dehumanizing one's opponent works, especially if the media plays along.

Anyone who gets in the way of the progressive agenda can expect to be vilified, insulted, libeled, slandered, and ridiculed. It's the tactic their esteemed mentor urged them to employ and Alinsky's votaries, or at least too many of them, employ it with distressing gusto.

Unfortunately, we're likely to continue seeing this ugliness in our politics until the media and the public demand an end to it. Meanwhile, it's imperative that those on the right who value civil discourse ensure that their side, no matter how much they're angered by the behavior of the left over the last two decades, doesn't fall into the same destructive, degrading rhetorical cesspool and that we dissociate ourselves from those on the right who may already be swimming in it.

It's appropriate to shine a light on this depraved behavior when we encounter it, but let us not succumb to the temptation to respond to it in kind.

Projection

Annafi Wahed describes herself as a tiny, talkative, Asian young woman who spent four months on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign staff. To the consternation of her friends she chose to attend CPAC, an annual gathering of politically active conservatives.

As Andrew Klavan tells it, when she set out for the event her liberal friends expressed actual concern for her safety, as if she were descending into a den of violent ruffians.

What Wahed found instead completely surprised and confounded her friends' stereotypes. She writes about her experience in a column for the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Where some saw a circus, I saw a big tent. I spoke with Jennifer C. Williams, chairman of the Trenton, N.J., Republican Committee and a transgender activist. Twenty feet away, I spoke with a religious leader who opposes same-sex marriage.

While a panelist touted capital punishment, several attendees crowded the Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty booth. Hours after President Trump recast Oscar Brown Jr.’s song “The Snake” as an ugly anti-immigrant parable, several influential Republicans were asking me, a naturalized citizen, how they can support my startup.

In retrospect, I’m embarrassed at how nervous I was when I arrived. I found myself singing along to “God Bless the USA” with a hilariously rowdy group of college Republicans, having nuanced discussions about gun control and education policy with people from all walks of life, nodding my head in agreement with parts of Ben Shapiro’s speech, and coming away with a greater determination to burst ideological media bubbles.

Among liberals, conservatives have a reputation for being closed-minded, even deplorable. But in the Washington Republicans I encountered at CPAC, I found a group of people who acknowledged their party’s shortcomings, genuinely wondered why I left my corporate job to join Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in 2016, and listened to my arguments before defending their own positions....

As I look back on all the people who greeted me warmly, made sure I didn’t get lost in the crowd, and went out of their way to introduce me to their friends, I can’t help but wonder how a Trump supporter would have fared at a Democratic rally. Would someone wearing a MAGA hat be greeted with smiles or suspicion, be listened to or shouted down?

Judging by the frequent behavior of the Left toward opinions they don't like, it's doubtful those wearing MAGA hats would get a polite hearing. Conservatives, including the MAGA hat crowd, have, over the last two years, endured being shouted at, cursed, reviled, spit upon, beaten and ostracized by those who claim for themselves the mantle of tolerance.

Some on the Left have actually called for the imprisonment and even death of those who disagree with them on climate change and other issues.

Matt Vespa at TownHall.com answers Wahed's question this way:

[L]iberals would shout down Trump supporters and conservatives at their gatherings, things will be thrown at them, and they would be called racists. With the exception of Ms. Wahed, today’s liberals cannot share space, have relationships with, or even be near someone who voted for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. We’re anathema. Period.

Yet, it shows how the ideological roots of the two sides yield entirely different results. The values of the Republican Party are grounded in the rule of law, respect for life, the family, and equalizing opportunities. It’s about hard work and the principles of freedom that are grounded in our founding and the Constitution.

There is nothing that’s race-specific about freedom, love of country, and ensuring everyone has the opportunity to make it in America. Anyone can be a conservative, which probably explains why the Left is so aggressive in trying to paint the movement as racist, and call any person of color who identifies as such a race traitor, confused, or someone acting against their own interest. It’s abject nonsense.

Where Vespa says "Republican" I'd prefer to stay with "conservative", and Ms. Wahed is certainly not the only liberal who would treat her political opponents with civility, but otherwise what he says is a pretty accurate description of how vicious our politics has become.

The friends who warned Ms Wahed about mingling with conservatives were not only stereotyping but also indulging a very human tendency to engage in projection. They knew how their side often treats their political opponents and assume that the other side would surely behave the same way.

It's nice that Ms. Wahed found that the stereotype promoted on the Left isn't the reality.

Socrates

Socrates (470–399 BC) was one of the most influential philosophers in all of human history. He himself never wrote anything but his unique mode of discourse, which came to be known as the “Socratic method,” remains as one of the great teaching styles and modes of inquiry still in use today.

Dr. Paul Herrick writes a good overview of Socrates' style as well as the details of his trial and death at Philosophy News. Here are some excerpts from his discussion of the Socratic Method:

At some point around the middle of his life...Socrates became convinced that many people think they know what they are talking about when in reality they do not have a clue. He came to believe that many people, including smug experts, are in the grips of illusion. Their alleged knowledge is a mirage.

Similarly, he also saw that many believe they are doing the morally right thing when they are really only fooling themselves—their actions cannot be rationally justified.

As this realization sank in, Socrates found his life’s purpose: he would help people discover their own ignorance as a first step to attaining more realistic beliefs and values. But how to proceed?

Some people, when convinced that others are deluded, want to grab them by their collars and yell at them. Others try to force people to change their minds. Many people today believe violence is the only solution. None of this was for Socrates. He felt so much respect for each individual—even those in the grips of illusion and moral error—that violence and intimidation were out of the question. His would be a completely different approach: he asked people questions. Not just any questions, though.

He asked questions designed to cause others to look in the mirror and challenge their own assumptions on the basis of rational and realistic standards of evidence. Questions like these: Why do I believe this? What is my evidence? Are my assumptions on this matter really true? Or am I overlooking something? Are my actions morally right? Or am I only rationalizing bad behavior?

This may not seem like such a big deal but it is. Most of us have no desire to question our beliefs about important matters like religion or politics, and when someone does question us our response is often to get defensive and to just shout louder than the other person until the exchange ends in anger. We see a form of this when college students shout down speakers with whom they disagree and refuse to let them speak (for a couple of recent examples see here and here).

Such behavior is not just rude and intellectually immature, it's a signal that the shouters have no good reasons for believing what they do and deep down realize that their beliefs can only prevail if the other side is denied a hearing. The cause of truth is ill-served by such tactics, but then the thugs who engage in this behavior aren't really interested in truth in the first place.

Herrick continues:

Looking in the mirror in a Socratic way can be painful. For reasons perhaps best left to psychologists, it is easy to criticize others but it is hard to question and challenge yourself. There are intellectual hurdles as well. Which standards or criteria should we apply when we test our beliefs and values?

Socrates, by his example, stimulated a great deal of research into this question. Over the years, many criteria have been proposed, tested, and accepted as reliable guides to truth, with truth understood as correspondence with reality.

These standards are collected in one place and studied in the field of philosophy known as “logic”—the study of the principles of correct reasoning. Today we call someone whose thinking is guided by rational, realistic criteria a “critical thinker.” Our current notion of criterial, or critical, thinking grew out of the philosophy of Socrates.

So, moved by the pervasiveness of human ignorance, bias, egocentrism, and the way these shortcomings diminish the human condition, Socrates spent the rest of his life urging people to look in the mirror and examine their assumptions in the light of rational, realistic criteria as the first step to attaining real wisdom. Knowledge of your own ignorance and faults, he now believed, is a prerequisite for moral and intellectual growth.

Just as a builder must clear away brush before building a house, he would say, you must clear away ignorance before building knowledge. As this reality sank in, his conversations in the marketplace shifted from the big questions of cosmology to questions about the human condition and to that which he now believed to be the most important question of all: What is the best way to live, all things considered?

Socrates’s mission—to help others discover their own ignorance as a first step on the path to wisdom--explains why he expected honesty on the part of his interlocutors. If the other person does not answer honestly, he won’t be led to examine his own beliefs and values. And if he does not look in the mirror, he will not advance. For Socrates, honest self-examination was one of life’s most important tasks.

When our most deeply-held beliefs are at risk, when we're confronted by compelling challenges to those beliefs, honesty is often difficult. Not only are our convictions at stake but so is our pride. It's humbling to have to acknowledge that we've been wrong about a belief we've held. We resort to all manner of diversion, obfuscation and fallacy in order to escape the conclusion our interlocutor's argument may be leading us toward. We resist it, we refuse to believe it, regardless of the price we must pay for that refusal in terms of our intellectual integrity.

There's an old ditty that captures the psychology of this well: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

Socrates himself encountered this resistance to having one's beliefs challenged and paid with his life for having discredited the certainties of very proud and vain men. You can read about what happened to him in Herrick's column at the link.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning Made Easy

Philosopher of science Robin Collins is one of the world's foremost authorities on cosmic fine-tuning, a topic that has popped up on Viewpoint pretty often. Back in 1998, an essay by Collins titled The Fine-Tuning Design Argument: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God, appeared in a collection of essays edited by philosopher Michael Murray titled Reason for the Hope Within. His essay begins with this:

Suppose we went on a mission to Mars, and found a domed structure in which everything was set up just right for life to exist. The temperature, for example, was set around 70 °F and the humidity was at 50%; moreover, there was an oxygen recycling system, an energy gathering system, and a whole system for the production of food. Put simply, the domed structure appeared to be a fully functioning biosphere. What conclusion would we draw from finding this structure? Would we draw the conclusion that it just happened to form by chance? Certainly not.

Instead, we would unanimously conclude that it was designed by some intelligent being. Why would we draw this conclusion? Because an intelligent designer appears to be the only plausible explanation for the existence of the structure. That is, the only alternative explanation we can think of–that the structure was formed by some natural process–seems extremely unlikely. Of course, it is possible that, for example, through some volcanic eruption various metals and other compounds could have formed, and then separated out in just the right way to produce the “biosphere,” but such a scenario strikes us as extraordinarily unlikely, thus making this alternative explanation unbelievable.

The universe is analogous to such a “biosphere,” according to recent findings in physics . . . . Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the “fine-tuning of the cosmos” . . . For example, theoretical physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies–whose early writings were not particularly sympathetic to theism–claims that with regard to basic structure of the universe, “the impression of design is overwhelming” (Davies, 1988, p. 203) . . . .

As the eminent Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson notes, "There are many . . . lucky accidents in physics. Without such accidents, water could not exist as liquid, chains of carbon atoms could not form complex organic molecules, and hydrogen atoms could not form breakable bridges between molecules" (p. 251)--in short, life as we know it would be impossible.

Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the "fine-tuning of the cosmos." It has been extensively discussed by philosophers, theologians, and scientists, especially since the early 1970s, with hundreds of articles and dozens of books written on the topic. Today, it is widely regarded as offering by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God. For example, theoretical physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies--whose early writings were not particularly sympathetic to theism--claims that with regard to basic structure of the universe, "the impression of design is overwhelming" (Davies, 1988, p. 203).

Similarly, in response to the life-permitting fine-tuning of the nuclear resonances responsible for the oxygen and carbon synthesis in stars, the famous astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle declares that:

I do not believe that any scientists who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars. If this is so, then my apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme. If not then we are back again at a monstrous sequence of accidents. [Fred Hoyle, in Religion and the Scientists, 1959; quoted in Barrow and Tipler, p. 22]

Collins then goes on in his essay to give five examples of cosmic fine-tuning. In each case had a particular parameter, such as the initial expansion rate of the universe or the strength of gravity, varied by incomprehensibly minute amounts the universe would never have formed.

It's all absolutely breath-taking if the universe is designed by an intelligent agent, but it's literally incredible, at least for me, to think that it's all just a "lucky accident."

What's the Alternative?

In the course of a recent column Rod Dreher gives an excellent explication of why Donald Trump is today the President of the United States. Dreher is no fan of Trump, but he argues cogently that the progressive left has placed us on a trajectory to social and cultural tyranny and that it was public recoil from that trajectory which has landed Trump in office.

There's much worth highlighting in Dreher's essay, but mentioning just a few of his points will serve to illustrate his main theme.

After describing an awful incident in which two cafeteria workers at NYU were fired because they innocently "offended" a student with their menu offerings he writes this:

[T]his is what the media don’t get. They accuse Trump of fomenting white tribalism, and they’re not entirely wrong to say so. But here’s the thing: events like the firing of the cafeteria workers do all of Trump’s work for him. They signal to ordinary working people that the elites (college presidents, for example) will happily throw them to the wolves to appease progressives.

He then quotes an eloquent email he received from a middle class man who's trying to resist the seductions of the alt-right:

I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

I am very lower middle class. I’ve never owned a new car, and do my own home repairs as much as I can to save money. I cut my own grass, wash my own dishes, buy my clothes from Walmart. I have no clue how I will ever be able to retire. But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.

Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull.

And yet I still follow this stuff, not really accepting it, but following it just because it’s one of the only places I can go where people are not always telling me I’m the seed of all evil in the world. If it’s a struggle for someone like me to resist the pull, I imagine it’s probably impossible for someone with less education or cultural exposure.

It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza.

Why are they unable to put themselves into the shoes of disaffected white guys and see how something similar might appeal to them? Or if they can make this mental leap, why are they so caustically dismissive of it — an attitude they’d never do with, say, a black kid who has joined the Nation of Islam?

I’m sorry, but there are two alternatives here. You can push for some kind of universalist vision bringing everybody together, or you can have tribes. There’s not a third option. If you don’t want universalism, then you just have to accept that various forms of open white nationalism are eventually going to become a permanent feature of politics. You don’t have to LIKE it. But you have to accept it and learn to live with it — including the inevitable violence and strife that will flow from it.

If the Left can’t let go of identity politics, then let me be clear: What comes next is on THEM. A lot of us don’t want to live in a world of tribes, and we never asked for it. But people will like those young dudes attracted to white nationalism are going to play the game according to the rules as they find them, and they will play to win. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Dreher then observes that as progressives continue their purge of the culture and their attempt to homogenize all thought and speech, such sentiments will proliferate:

You know what’s going to happen? Middle-class white people who find Donald Trump vulgar and beyond the pale, but who keep their mouths shut about what they really think so they will keep their jobs, understanding that the only thing standing between them and ruin is the goodwill of people from the culturally privileged tribes.

They will correctly figure that there is no way to tell from one day to the next which of their words or deeds might cost them their careers. They won’t tell anybody what they’re thinking, but quietly, they will reconcile themselves to voting for Donald Trump, or whoever his successor is — not because they love Trump, but because they fear progressives in power.

This is, of course, precisely what happened in 2016. Donald Trump wasn't elected because of who he is, but rather because of who his opponent was. Many voters, rightly or wrongly, looked at Hillary and saw in her a continuation of the slide toward an Orwellian future initiated by the Obama administration and saw Trump as the only realistic hope for staving that off.

Whether you are of the left or the right read the entire original. If you're a progressive it'll help you understand why 2016 happened. If you're a conservative it'll feel like he's saying what you wished you could say every time your liberal friends ask you how you could stomach Donald Trump.

The short answer to their question is, "What's the alternative?"

Do We Have Free Will?

In this five minute video from Prager U. Frank Pastore gives us an introduction to the question of whether we actually have free will and how the question bears on the further question of whether we also have a mind rather than just a material brain.

If we don't have free will it's hard to imagine how we could be held responsible for our actions, how praise or blame could be deserved, how we could have a duty to act in one way rather than another, and why we should pay any attention to our feelings of guilt or regret.

If all of our choices are determined then we really couldn't have chosen otherwise than we did, our choice was a product of factors outside our control - the environment in which we grew up or the genes we inherited from our forebears.

It's also very hard to see how, on materialism, we could have free will. If our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain then where does the freedom fit in? It would seem that our choices would have to be determined by the laws of chemistry and physics and those laws admit of no freedom.

Thus, materialists are often determinists, but they're also often inconsistent determinists because they often give praise or blame to others, they often hold people responsible for their behavior, and they speak of moral duties that we have toward each other. Yet were they to be asked for an account of how these things could exist in a deterministic, materialistic world the response they'd give would be something along the lines of "They just do!", which, of course, is not very helpful.

A materialist, it seems to me, either has to be a determinist or, if not, they have to reassess their commitment to materialism. Otherwise they'll often find themselves living as if the materialism they advocate is actually false.

Hard Lesson

Early last month several hundred Syrian troops accompanied by hundreds of Russian mercenaries, about 500 attackers in all, launched a ground attack on a Syrian militia base where American advisors were embedded. It's not clear why they attacked, but the speculation is that they were either seeking to occupy a nearby oil refinery and/or they were testing America's resolve in the region, probing the Americans to see how they would respond to provocation.

They paid a high price to find out.

As soon as the attack began American troops answered with artillery strikes and followed up with AC-130 gunships, fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters. The attackers had tanks, artillery, multiple-launch rockets and armored personnel carriers but no air cover. Their armor was destroyed in the first few minutes and they suffered grievous casualties. Some reports listed the number of dead Russian mercenaries at over 100 with another 200 wounded.

Intercepted audio transmissions (Transcripts here) reveal the extent of the devastation and carnage visited upon the attackers by the American forces who seem to have suffered no casualties themselves.

Although the Russian troops are said to have been independent contractors and not active military personnel this distinction is sometimes a fig leaf, as it has been in the Ukraine, that allows the Russian government to deny that it's their policy to engage in hostilities with non-belligerent forces. It also allows them to deny that their policies are getting Russian boys killed in acts of military aggression.

If Putin and the Russian government were behind the February assault it'd be most alarming that they'd be willing to use Russian troops to directly attack American forces. Why would they do this? Are they trying to precipitate a wider conflict with the U.S. in the Middle East? What would they have to gain? Yet it seems, if this WaPo report is correct, that somebody in the Kremlin gave the green light for some sort of undertaking in Syria:

A Russian oligarch believed to control the Russian mercenaries who attacked U.S. troops and their allies in Syria this month was in close touch with Kremlin and ­Syrian officials in the days and weeks before and after the assault, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

In intercepted communications in late January, the oligarch, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, told a senior Syrian official that he had “secured permission” from an unspecified Russian minister to move forward with a “fast and strong” initiative that would take place in early February.

Moreover, if this were a deliberate attack sanctioned by the Kremlin, having suffered a humiliating defeat will they be inclined to strike again at some point to try to vindicate Russian honor? It's hard to believe that the Russians would just accept this bloody nose without seeking some sort of revenge.

On the other hand, there's some reason to doubt that the Russian leadership was directly responsible for this episode:

Not only is it difficult to see what the Russians would've hoped to gain by attacking a base where Americans could be expected to be engaged in combat, American officers were apparently in radio contact with their Russian counterparts before, during and after the battle. Perhaps the Russian military knew what was in the offing and was at pains to insure that the Americans didn't think that they were in any way responsible for the attack.

It may be that whoever gave the orders for the Russians to launch the raid may have been acting on his own and may have incurred the displeasure of the Russian authorities, but at this point that's just a guess.

As of the present neither the Russians nor the Americans have had much to say about the matter, which is, of course, a positive sign that may point to a desire on both sides to avoid escalation.

In any case, conflict between Russia and the U.S. is both highly unnecessary and highly undesirable. Hopefully, Mr. Putin sees it the same way.

UPDATE: As more is learned about what happened in this fight it may be that Russian casualties weren't nearly as high as originally reported. See here for details.

Lawrence Krauss and the Moral Problem

Buzzfeed has an article which recounts accusations of sexual improprieties toward women by celebrity atheist and physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Krauss has been active over the last ten years or so promoting atheism and debating theistic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. Whether Krauss is actually guilty of behaving boorishly or not I can't say, but I was interested in some of the readers' remarks in the article's combox, particularly one from an atheist named Jim MacIver who wrote this:

This [Krauss' alleged conduct] is disgusting. It is the sort of behavior I expect from god-worshippers but not Atheists. We are supposed to be the ones who lead for truth and justice, logic and reason. Harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do but especially if an Athieist [sic] does it. The religioniists [sic] will use this against us. This hurts us as a movement. This will hurt all Atheists, everywhere. Even more important, it hurts women who are victimized by men they thought they could trust.

You may think that Mr. MacIver sounds a bit like a teenager here, but a link accompanying his comment takes you to his Facebook page, and it turns out that he really is an adult. Given what he has said above, another claim he makes on his page sounds weirdly paradoxical:

I have no morality myself. Morality is arbitrary rules made up by old men to control the sex lives of human beings, particularly women. I have ethics, which tells you whats [sic] right.

Set aside his inapt distinction between morality and ethics, and set aside, too, the fact that on atheism, truth, justice and reason are all highly problematic notions. What I wonder about is how a man who claims to have no morals can say that "harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do".

I also wonder why it's especially indecent if the behavior is perpetrated by someone (i.e. an atheist like Krauss) whose worldview offers no basis for objective moral, or ethical, values and no reason to think that there's any ultimate accountability for anything one does in life.

On atheism, as Mr. MacIver acknowledges, there's no morally right or wrong conduct. The only criterion for assessing whether one should do something that one desires to do, if one is an atheist, is whether one can get away with it.

If someone's behavior hurts women, victimizes women, why, given atheism, should Mr. MacIver be upset about that? All he's doing is emoting, expressing his subjective dislike for behavior that he finds personally unpleasant, but that hardly makes it wrong for others to do.

To make a moral judgment of another person's conduct the atheist must piggy-back on a theistic worldview and hope that no one will notice that he's deriving his moral sustenance from a source that he in fact believes has no actual validity.

Whenever an atheist makes the sort of judgments Mr. MacIver does he's engaging in a kind of moral parasitism, drawing nourishment from the host of theism because his own metaphysical assumptions lack the resources to support those judgments.

This is dreadfully inconsistent, although it occurs with surprising frequency among atheists. If Mr. MacIver truly believes that sexual misconduct toward women is objectively wrong, and if he truly prizes reason and logic he might want to reassess his atheism. He might also reflect on these words from a few fellow atheists whose understanding of the implications of their atheism manifests a bit more clarity than does Mr. MacIver's:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…. Cornell University biologist Will Provine

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ Nobel laureate biologist Francis Crick

...Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature....We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg

If these luminaries, atheists all, are correct then it's very hard to see how anyone could say that Lawrence Krauss, if he really did that of which he's accused, was acting in any way inconsistently with his atheism. Nor can one say how what he is accused of doing is in any way objectively "wrong."

NORKs Get an Eye-Opener

Strategy Page suggests a possible (probable?) reason for the sudden apparent thawing on the part of the North Koreans toward the South. Ironically, if their analysis is correct, the reason Kim Jong Un is toning down his bellicose rhetoric and sounding like he wants to make nice is due to an intelligence coup on their part.

Here's the crux of the story:

The recent change of attitude by North Korea towards South Korea could be attributed to a number of obvious factors like the continued collapse of the North Korean economy along with morale and effectiveness of the North Korean military and security forces in general. Recent defectors from North Korea report that conditions inside the military are bad and getting worse. Physical exams of these defectors confirms those reports.

But there is another reason for the change of attitude that was not commented on much because of the sensitive nature of the information. In short, at the end of 2017 North Korea got a look at South Korean and American war plans and were alarmed at what they found. The northerners had every reason to believe this information was accurate because in late 2017 South Korean military networks were hacked and a large quantity of secret documents appear to have been copied.

This apparently included several OPLANs (Operational Plan, a plan for a single or series of connected operations to be carried out simultaneously or in succession by specified military units).

The article goes on to give details as to what OPLANS are and what they do and then says this:

What was scary about all this from the North Korean viewpoint was that the OPLANs detailed capabilities many North Korean generals believed were enemy propaganda. But OPLAN documents are top secret and only for internal use. No need for propaganda there, and that made it clear the North Korean military was a lot more vulnerable than North Koreans realized. The South Korean and American intelligence knew a lot more about the location and status of North Korean weapons than the North Korean generals had believed.

Not only that but the OPLANS described in detail how the many modern weapons the South Koreans had, like smart bombs and guided missiles, would be able to do a lot more damage to the North Korean military and do it faster than the North Koreans had believed possible.

The OPLANS described how the North Korean air defense system would be quickly destroyed and South Korean and American commando teams would hit key targets. OPLANS made reference to messages broadcast to North Korean civilians emphasizing help (food, medical care, elimination of the police state) was on the way.

While many North Koreans would fight to defend the Kim dynasty the North Korean secret police (that monitored public attitudes) knew that a growing number of North Koreans would welcome the southerners as liberators.

Once the North Korean hackers delivered the stolen OPLANs documents in September 2017 it took a few months for the military and other security agencies up north to digest all this information and conclude that the north was screwed.

Supreme leader Kim Jong Un was briefed, followed by him firing another few senior advisors who were apparently on the wrong side of this new reality. Kim then told South Korea that he wanted to improve relations, send a delegation to the Winter Olympics and get together with South Korea leaders to have friendly discussions about matters of mutual interest.

Much of the bluster coming from Pyongyang was rooted in a belief that they were largely invulnerable to military action by South Korea and the U.S. The purloined OPLANs showed them otherwise and has made their barbaric leadership markedly more amenable to "talks".

This is what Ronald Reagan meant when he talked about "peace through strength". Had the Norks not realized the danger their bombast and provocations were placing them, had they not discovered that they were going to pay a terrible cost, we might well be hurtling toward war today.

As it is we still might be, but it seems that the danger is less now than it was six months ago.

Augustine on Friendship

A couple of weeks ago I posted some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on the topic of friendship. Lewis spoke of how friendship was rooted in shared loves and interests. Lewis writes, for instance, that,

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).

He also says this:

The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends.

In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.

I recently came across some thoughts from St. Augustine on the same subject. Augustine reflects on the desire to share a common love, particularly a love for the life of the mind (although that's not what he calls it) has on him. He writes wistfully about it:

...I do love wisdom alone and for its own sake, and it is on account of wisdom that I want to have, or fear to be without, other things such as life, tranquility and my friends. What limit can their be to my love of that Beauty, in which I do not only not begrudge it to others, but I even look for many who will long for it with me, sigh for it with me, possess it with me, enjoy it with me. They will be all the dearer to me the more we share that love in common.

Lewis and Augustine have something important to teach us about friendship. Two people can be companions for awhile even if they don't share much in common, but they'll only develop a true friendship if they both love some of the same things. For Augustine the chief of these loves is the love of wisdom, and surely the love of wisdom encompasses the love of truth.

That love has been largely lost in our post-modern age during which a lot of people seem to believe whatever suits their political or religious preferences. So far from loving truth (and wisdom) many seem almost to despise it as irrelevant if it gets in the way of their appetites and prejudices.

I wonder how many modern friendships are grounded in the same love that Augustine muses upon, or even could be.

Why Naturalism Is Self-Refuting

Among the live options for worldviews on offer in modern times certainly one of the most popular among scientists, philosophers, and other academics is the view called naturalism. This view states that all that exists is ultimately explicable in terms of the sorts of explanations employed by scientists. In other words, nature and nature's laws are all there is, there's nothing else.

Most worldviews offer a Grand Story for how we got here. In naturalism the Story is some iteration of Darwinian evolution. Blind, natural processes generated life which evolved through genetic mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift to produce the grand diversity of life including man and his marvelous powers of reason. The problem with this Story, though, is that according to philosopher John Gray (who is himself a naturalist) it's self-refuting.

In a piece in The New Republic critical of his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins Gray writes:

[T]he ideas and the arguments that [Dawkins] presents are in no sense novel or original, and he seems unaware of the critiques of positivism that appeared in its Victorian heyday.

Some of them bear re-reading today. One of the subtlest and most penetrating came from the pen of Arthur Balfour, the Conservative statesman, British foreign secretary, and sometime prime minister. Well over a century ago, Balfour identified a problem with the evolutionary thinking that was gaining ascendancy at the time. If the human mind has evolved in obedience to the imperatives of survival, what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of reality, when all that is required in order to reproduce the species is that its errors and illusions are not fatal?

A purely naturalistic philosophy cannot account for the knowledge that we believe we possess. As he framed the problem in The Foundations of Belief in 1895, “We have not merely stumbled on truth in spite of error and illusion, which is odd, but because of error and illusion, which is even odder.”

Balfour’s solution was that naturalism is self-defeating: humans can gain access to the truth only because the human mind has been shaped by a divine mind. Similar arguments can be found in a number of contemporary philosophers, most notably Alvin Plantinga. Again, one does not need to accept Balfour’s theistic solution to see the force of his argument. A rigorously naturalistic account of the human mind entails a much more skeptical view of human knowledge than is commonly acknowledged.

Balfour's argument is sometimes a bit difficult to understand when encountered for the first time, but it says essentially that any trait selected for survival by natural selection can only coincidentally be a trait that is useful in discovering truth. If human reason is the product of naturalistic evolution it would have been selected for because it somehow conferred survival value, not because it was reliable in finding truth. There's no necessary connection between knowing truth and survival of a species.

In her recent book titled Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism Secularism, and Other God Substitutes Nancy Pearcy quotes a number of naturalist thinkers who make this point but who don't seem to realize that it undercuts their own naturalism (The following draws upon an excerpt of Pearcy's book at Evolution News and Views). Pearcy writes:

Of course, the sheer pressure to survive is likely to produce some correct ideas. A zebra that thinks lions are friendly will not live long. But false ideas may be useful for survival. Evolutionists admit as much: Eric Baum says, "Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth." Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not." The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false.

An example comes from Francis Crick. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, he writes, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive."

But, Pearcy tells us, that means Crick's own theory cannot be relied upon to be true.

To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value.

The same thing is often said about morality. "It's an illusion," philosopher Michael Ruse wrote, "fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." But if all of these things are the illusory products of evolution how do we know that the theory of evolution and the naturalistic worldview it supports are not also illusions? Why should we think these things true if our thinking is as likely to lead us to falsehood as it is to lead us to truth? Pearcy continues:

A few thinkers, to their credit, recognize the problem. Literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, "If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? ... Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it."

On a similar note, philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, "Is the [evolutionary] hypothesis really compatible with the continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge?" His answer is no: "I have to be able to believe ... that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct -- not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so." Hence, "insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining."

Pearcy goes on to show that Darwin himself, and many of his followers, argued that man's mind leads him to belief in God but that our minds, being the product of blind chance and selection, are too untrustworthy to credit that conclusion. Yet they never applied that same skepticism to the theory of evolution itself.

People are sometimes under the impression that Darwin himself recognized the problem. They typically cite Darwin's famous "horrid doubt" passage where he questions whether the human mind can be trustworthy if it is a product of evolution: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy."

But, of course, Darwin's theory itself was a "conviction of man's mind." So why should it be "at all trustworthy"?

Surprisingly, however, Darwin never confronted this internal contradiction in his theory. Why not? Because he expressed his "horrid doubt" selectively -- only when considering the case for a Creator.

In another passage Darwin admitted, "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man." Again, however, he immediately veered off into skepticism: "But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" That is, can it be trusted when it draws "grand conclusions" about a First Cause? Perhaps the concept of God is merely an instinct programmed into us by natural selection, Darwin added, like a monkey's "instinctive fear and hatred of a snake."

In short, it was on occasions when Darwin's mind led him to a theistic conclusion that he dismissed the mind as untrustworthy. He failed to recognize, though, that to be logically consistent he needed to apply the same skepticism to his own theory.

Pearcy concludes the excerpt with a quote from Oxford mathematician John Lennox who wrote that according to atheism "the mind that does science ... is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn't trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science."

One way to summarize all this is to say that you can believe your reason is trustworthy or you can believe in naturalistic evolution, but you can't believe in both.

The Astonishing Krebs Cycle

The Krebs citric acid cycle is a complex process that occurs in the mitochondria of most of the cells in our bodies resulting in the production of molecules like ATP (Adenosine triphosphate) which are the fuel that sustains life. Without this tiny ATP molecule our bodies would shut down just like an engine that had run out of gasoline.

Amazingly, the extremely complex series of reactions leading to the production of ATP occurs in even primitive bacteria so it must have evolved early on in the history of life and therefore very rapidly, which is astonishing to think about, given the enormous complexity of the cycle:

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

The naturalistic view is that the evolution of this cycle occurred without any direction, without any guidance, without any goal in sight, that all the pieces were assembled from pre-existing chemicals, arranged by random trial and error through the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection. It's an almost miraculous defiance of probability.

This is not to say it didn't happen that way. It could have, and lots of very intelligent people think it did even though when they write about it they can't help but use telic language (i.e. language that implies a goal or purpose).

Consider this excerpt from a well-known paper from 1996:

During the origin and evolution of metabolism, in the first cells, when a need arises for a new pathway, there are two different possible strategies available to achieve this purpose: (1) create new pathways utilizing new compounds not previously available or (2) adapt and make good use of the enzymes catalyzing reactions already existing in the cell. Clearly, the opportunism of the second strategy, when it is possible, has a number of selective advantages, because it allows a quick and economic solution of new problems.

Thus, in the evolution of a new metabolic pathway, new mechanisms must be created only if ‘‘pieces’’ to the complete puzzle are missing. Creation of the full pathway by a de novo method is expensive in material, time-consuming, and cannot compete with the opportunistic strategy, if it can achieve the new specific purpose.

We demonstrate here the opportunistic evolution of the Krebs cycle reorganizing and assembling preexisting organic chemical reactions....

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function....

By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

This language is of course intended to be metaphorical, but the point is that it's exceedingly difficult to describe the origin of pathways such as the Krebs cycle without comparing it to an engineering problem solvable by intelligent agents. In fact, the metaphorical, telic language often employed by scientists serves the perhaps unintentional purpose of obscuring how improbable it is that this pathway and others like it would have somehow arisen by chance genetic mutations and natural selection.

Here's another metaphor:

Suppose a card dealer shuffles a deck and lays the cards out on the table one at a time. We're assuming that the cards already exist and don't have to be manufactured (though some of the chemicals in the Krebs cycle did not already exist before the Krebs cycle evolved).

Let's also assume that the dealer has a goal in mind (nature had no goals in mind). The dealer's goal is to obtain a sequence in which each suit from ace to king appears in the order hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs.

Let's further assume that whenever he fails to get the ace of hearts as the first card he reshuffles the deck and starts over. When he does get an ace of hearts he then lets it lay and tries for a two of hearts. If he doesn't get a two of hearts on the first attempt he reshuffles the entire deck and starts over. And so on.

How long would it take to get the sequence he has in mind? This is a bit like the difficulty confronting the chance evolution of a complex system like the Krebs cycle, but with the evolution of the Krebs cycle, at least the naturalistic version, there's no goal in mind, and indeed no mind. Just random trial and error, chemicals bumping about, until something useful is hit upon and somehow conserved and eventually added to.

Of course, an intelligent card dealer, even a child, can order the cards in the desired pattern, but desired patterns, goals, and certainly intelligent dealers, are prohibited in naturalistic explanations.

The naturalist declares that he relies on science and not on faith in non-natural intelligent agents, but it seems to me that it takes a lot more faith to believe that the Krebs cycle could have arisen with no intelligent input than to believe that it arose through the agency of a biochemical genius.