The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

There was an interesting exchange during the interview with philosopher Brad Monton posted yesterday (A Refreshingly Open Mind Pt. II) that went like this:

So what sort of scientific evidence would be compelling enough to change your mind?
It would be evidence for mind as a fundamental feature of the universe. As far as I'm concerned, God would have to be a purely mental entity, not connected to physical reality in the way that we are through our bodies.

So if we could discover some kind of evidence that mind is fundamental, then that would go a long way toward making me a believer. And if we could find evidence that the physical world isn't causally closed—that not only is mind a fundamental entity, but it likewise plays a causal role in the structure of the world—then that would also be compelling evidence for the existence of God.

Now, if it is found that mind plays a role in our brain processes alone, that by itself wouldn't make me believe in God, though it would certainly make me more open to the idea. But if we were to discover that mind is intervening in other places in the world besides our brain processes, then that would pretty much be the smoking gun.

Monton's reply brought to mind this VP post from a few years ago:

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. It would indeed be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to underlie the very fabric of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathphobic students may wince at a statement like this, but it gets worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises. In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

A Refreshingly Open Mind (Pt. II)

On Saturday we looked at the first part of a very interesting interview at Salvo magazine with philosopher of science Bradley Monton in which Monton, an atheist, expresses support for Intelligent Design.

He said at the end of the portion included on Saturday's post that his open-mindedness has been rewarded with calls by some of his colleagues at Colorado State University for him to be fired. This is, of course, a ridiculous response, one typical of narrow-minded people so insecure in their own convictions that they fear having them subjected to open and critical examination.

Anyway, I'd like to post some highlights today from the rest of the interview. The interviewer's questions are in bold font and excerpts from Monton's answers follow:

You've written that intelligent-design arguments have made you less certain of your atheism. What would it take to make you abandon it altogether?
Some people have come to believe in God on the basis of divine revelation, which is intellectually legitimate, as far as I'm concerned. I wish that I could have that sort of profound revelatory experience because then I could stop struggling with philosophical arguments and the extent to which the fine-tuning of the universe points to a creator. But the fact is that I haven't. A lot of other people haven't either, which leaves us searching for alternative forms of proof.

I don't find the historical evidence for Christianity—or any other religion, for that matter—especially compelling. It's not that this sort of evidence is definitely flawed; it's just that it isn't compelling enough for me. Absent revelation and historical evidence, the best place to find God, in my opinion, is in science, and that's one of the reasons I'm so motivated to think about intelligent design.

So what sort of scientific evidence would be compelling enough to change your mind?
It would be evidence for mind as a fundamental feature of the universe. As far as I'm concerned, God would have to be a purely mental entity, not connected to physical reality in the way that we are through our bodies.

So if we could discover some kind of evidence that mind is fundamental, then that would go a long way toward making me a believer. And if we could find evidence that the physical world isn't causally closed—that not only is mind a fundamental entity, but it likewise plays a causal role in the structure of the world—then that would also be compelling evidence for the existence of God.

Now, if it is found that mind plays a role in our brain processes alone, that by itself wouldn't make me believe in God, though it would certainly make me more open to the idea. But if we were to discover that mind is intervening in other places in the world besides our brain processes, then that would pretty much be the smoking gun.

[My note: This is a fascinating answer inasmuch as there's a growing number of physicists who believe that reality is indeed fundamentally mental rather than material, i.e. that mind, not matter, is what's ultimately real. I wonder what Monton thinks of this.]

Are there other atheist scientists out there who believe that intelligent-design arguments hold some merit?
Thomas Nagel comes to mind as someone who feels that intelligent-design arguments have value, even though he's an atheist and not inclined at all to believe in God. In his new book Mind and Cosmos, he pushes for a teleological theory of reality, which is different from the standard naturalistic science view, but also different from the intelligent-design hypothesis.

Nagel's view is that the universe is fundamentally goal-oriented. It has this teleological structure to it that we will someday discover through scientific investigation. Part of how Nagel argues for his theory is by positively citing the arguments of intelligent-design proponents, which he believes support the existence of his teleological structure rather than a designer.

A Refreshingly Open Mind

Salvo magazine has reprinted an interview with philosopher of science Bradley Monton in which Monton, an atheist, expresses surprising support for Intelligent Design, the view that life and the cosmos give very strong reasons for believing that they have both been designed by an intelligent agent or agents.

Here are a few highlights. The interviewer's question are in bold font and excerpts of Monton's responses follow:

What makes you take intelligent design (ID) seriously?
....I find the arguments of the opponents of ID too emotionally driven and not as intellectually robust as one would hope. I get upset with my fellow atheists who present bad arguments against intelligent design and then expect everyone to believe that they have somehow resolved the debate with these bad arguments.

Why do you think some scientists refuse to take intelligent design seriously?
....I would say that some atheists exhibit a fundamentalism that prevents them from even imagining that someone reasonable, rational, and intelligent could hold views different from their own.

You write in your book that you don't fully endorse intelligent design. In your opinion, what are some of the weaknesses of ID?
At one time, I would have said that the greatest weakness was the failure of ID proponents to put a theory on the table that makes testable predictions, but that all changed with Jonathan Wells's book The Myth of Junk DNA. In it, Wells predicted that this purported junk DNA—these stretches of DNA in our genome that many scientists had claimed were useless—would be purposeful for the structure of human biology.

Well, within the past year or so, empirical investigation has confirmed that there is in fact much less junk DNA than scientists had previously thought. It's just a great example of a testable prediction that was made by a proponent of intelligent design that turned out to be successful.

Then why can't you fully support intelligent design?
I still believe that ID scientists need to do a lot more in terms of testable predictions. I recognize that this is difficult to do. I'm not saying it's an easy project. However, it sure would be nice if they had more of a full-fledged research program that led to the development of theories in science. I think this is possible, though it's incredibly difficult to come up with new scientific theories that result in a paradigm shift....

So what are the strengths of intelligent design?
The main strength is that it is getting people to think very carefully about the extent to which there is scientific evidence for either God or some other creator. Plus, the specific arguments themselves are interesting and important to consider. For example, I find Michael Behe's investigation into irreducibly complex biological systems an extremely compelling line of inquiry, even if it turns out to be a flawed argument. It simply helps the progress of science to put arguments such as Behe's on the table.

The same goes for the more physics-based fields of intelligent design, such as the work being conducted by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards. They believe that our universe is ideally suited not just for the existence of life, but also for observability. Why is there a correlation between the regions of the universe that are habitable by creatures such as us and regions that are suitable for making observations and learning about the universe?

That's an interesting question, but as far as I know, no atheist-minded physicist had ever thought about it before Gonzalez and Richards came on the scene. Advocates of intelligent design get people thinking in new ways about science and scientific investigation.

Do you think intelligent design should be taught in public schools?
I think it could be pedagogically useful to do so, certainly. What I know from being a teacher these past thirteen years is that it's wrong to ignore matters that students may have heard about or are certainly going to hear about in the future.

For example, did you know that the California teacher guidelines for K–12 students state that if a student asks about intelligent design, he should be told that it doesn't belong in the science classroom—that he should talk to his family or pastor about it instead?

Shutting down discussion and debate in this fashion is bad pedagogy. Teachers should be forthright about all of the evidence and tell students that issues regarding the origin of life are still open for debate.

Do you think academic freedom is limited for non-tenured proponents of intelligent design?

There certainly are documented cases of professors getting in trouble for putting forth intelligent-design ideas, and I think that's really unfortunate. The academy should be about respecting ideas, however controversial they might be. Once you screen people on their ability to be intellectually sophisticated, they should be allowed to pursue the issues they want to pursue, even issues that go against the current orthodoxy—that violate the standard canons of how thinking should be done.

Intelligent design should be allowed in the academy because most of the proponents of intelligent design are intellectually sophisticated. There's no doubt about it. People such as Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells should be allowed to pursue empirical and philosophical investigations in whatever way they think best leads to truth.

How have other academics responded to your writings and statements on intelligent design?
The degree to which I have been attacked is actually pretty ludicrous. I gave a public lecture on intelligent design here at the University of Colorado, and a number of the school's biology professors demanded that I be fired. One such professor, Michael Klymkowsky, went so far as to organize his own public lecture in response to mine.

Unfortunately for him, his lecture ended up being a mess, misrepresenting my views and then failing to make arguments of its own. At the beginning, the audience was mostly on his side, but by the end they didn't know what to think because his arguments were so weak.

So I've received preposterous critiques such as that one, but I've also had a lot of support, especially from philosophers who don't have a dog in the intelligent-design fight. They haven't gone to great pains to investigate ID, but they appreciate my open-minded perspective.

They have also told me that they are disturbed by the narrow-minded and emotionally driven attacks on the part of the philosophical and scientific critics of intelligent design. It has been quite heartening to receive that kind of support.

------

There's more to the interview and you can read the entire Q&A at the link. There are a couple of additional questions to which Monton gives what I think are fascinating replies, and I'll discuss these a bit on Monday.

Why Muslims Believe Jerusalem Belongs to Them

In an article at PJ Media Raymond Ibrahim explains the grounds upon which Muslims base their claim to Jerusalem. Ibrahim writes:

An Islamic preacher who recently appeared on official Palestinian Authority television made all the usual angry remarks that Muslims often make concerning Israel’s right to exist, particularly in the context of its claim to Jerusalem.

His comments may suggest to the casual Western listener that “by rights,” and as a matter of universal justice, Jerusalem belongs to Muslims.

However, the comments are laden with religious and historical references and observations that only Muslims might understand, and of which none accord with Western notions of universal rights and justice.

This is especially evident in the cleric’s assertion that Jerusalem “is a religious, Sharia, and historical right of the Muslims, and of no one else but them.”

Why is Jerusalem a “religious” right for Muslims? Because Islamic tradition teaches that one night in the year 610, Muhammad -- miraculously flying atop a supernatural horse-like creature (al-Buraq) -- visited and prayed in it.

Why is Jerusalem a “Sharia” -- or legal -- right for Muslims? Because according to all interpretations of Islamic law, or Sharia, once a territory has been “opened” to the light of Islam, it forever belongs to the House of Islam, or Dar al-Islam.

This leads to the third, and most telling “right”: that Jerusalem is a “historical right of the Muslims” because in the year 637, Muslim Arab armies “opened” -- that is to say, conquered -- Jerusalem.

In other words, according to Ibrahim, Muslims believe that once they've conquered a city or territory, once a city or territory has been exposed to Islam, it's forever destined to be Muslim. It cannot ever be reconverted or reconquered.

This only applies, of course, to lands and peoples conquered by, and converted to, Islam. Anything conquered by say, Jews, in their numerous wars against their Arab neighbors must be handed back to Muslims, but anything conquered by Muslims belongs to Muslims forever.

How convenient. How unpersuasive.

Suicide Culture

There's been a lot written about what's wrong with our culture in the wake of the recent suicides of celebrities Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and, earlier, Robin Williams. Some attribute it to mental illness and no doubt that plays a role, but that answer only pushes the question back a step. What's at the root of so much mental illness?

I wonder if the underlying malady isn't, at least in part, the same for many suicide victims as it is for many mass killers. Perhaps the fundamental problem is that modern society has failed to imbue people with a sense that our lives are meaningful, that they amount to anything. We often hear instead that we're just blobs of protoplasm, products of impersonal forces, that we exist for a moment and then are gone forever, like the light of a firefly.

We're just dust in the wind, we're told, and neither we nor anything else really has any significance or purpose. We're bereft of any reason to hope that there is or could be anything more to our being here. The sole purpose of human existence is, to quote biologist Theodore Dobzhansky, "to live, to leave more life" and then get out of the way. That's the unhappy legacy of modern secularism.

I'm not saying this is the only reason, and certainly not a conscious reason, behind every suicide or mass murderer, but I do think that a culture which has stripped away any sense of genuine transcendence leaves people with a profound emptiness. It promises them that that emptiness can be satisfied with consumer goods, sex, success, music, drugs, whatever, but these turn out in the end to be false gods and false hopes. Many of the people who are choosing to end their lives have all of these things in abundance, yet they're still empty inside.

Human beings yearn for transcendence, our psyches need it like our body needs solid food, but modern culture throws us a stick of cotton candy and promises us that it's as nourishing as it is sweet. It's a lie.

Writer Caroline D'Agati says:

Every human being must at some time confront the same disease that claimed Anthony, Kate, Robin, and every other person who takes his or her life: meaninglessness. Why are we here and is this life worth living? It’s a sobering thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche—another struggler—said that anyone with a “why” to live could endure almost any how. These wealthy, accomplished people had some of the most marvelous “hows” anyone could imagine. Yet none of it could make up for the lack of “why.”

Those with everything are often no different. The highest highs show us that, no matter what we achieve or acquire, the hopelessness doesn’t go away. Both the king and the pauper stare life in the face and see that it’s merely “vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

D'Agati goes on to write,

As Kate, Anthony, Robin, and so many other entertainers show, even giving joy to others, in the end, is not enough. So in the end, why bother? How can we not be defeated when we set our eyes on the brokenness of this world? The answer: to fix our eyes on another world. The writer C.S. Lewis famously said that, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” If we believe this life is all there is, the darkness will blind us to the majesty and beauty of life.

Suicide is the tragic, but reasonable response to being confronted by life’s reality with no salve of deeper meaning to bandage the wound. This is why a life without God, no matter how grand, will always leave our hearts unfulfilled.

Augustine, writing almost two thousand years ago, recognized the problem. In his autobiographical Confessions he exclaims to God, "You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

As our contemporary moderns are discovering to their pain, nothing else is working very well.

Absolute Equality

Samuel Gregg at The Federalist argues that the American obsession with equality is dangerous and potentially fatal to our democracy. Drawing on Alexis de Toqueville's magisterial study of 19th century America, Democracy in America (1835/1840), Gregg wonders whether American democracy's emphasis on equality might not eventually make the whole experiment come undone.

He writes:

Democracy’s emphasis on equality helps to break down many unjust forms of discrimination and inequality. Women gradually cease, for instance, to be regarded as inherently inferior. Likewise, the fundamental injustice of slavery becomes harder and harder to rationalize.

At the same time, as Tocqueville scholar Pierre Manent has observed, democracies gravitate toward a fascination with producing total egalitarianism. Democracy requires everyone to relate to each other through the medium of democratic equality. We consequently start seeing and disliking any disparity which stems from an inequality of conditions. Equality turns out to be very antagonistic toward difference per se, even when differences are genetic (such as between men and women) or merited (some are wealthier because they freely assume more risks).

In other words, we've made equality a kind of golden calf to which we bow down and worship. If equality is good, we've decided, then total, absolute equality must be better. Thus, we find ourselves obliterating all distinctions and all judgments of better or worse. We don our social and psychological Mao suits, loath to acknowledge any differences among us.

But this obsession with equality as sameness cripples our ability to inculcate virtue:

The idea of virtue implies that there are choices whose object is always good and others that are wrong in themselves. Courage is always better than recklessness and cowardice. But language such as “better than,” or “superior to” is intolerable to egalitarianism of the leveling kind. That’s one reason why many people in democratic societies prefer to speak of “values.” Such language implies that (1) all values are basically equal, and (2) there’s something impolite if not downright wrong with suggesting that some purportedly ethical commitments are irrational and wrong.

Virtue, however, is inseparable, in the U.S., at least, from Christianity. Thus, if virtue is to be diluted to a kind of bland "values clarification" Christian religion must be emasculated, shrunken to a meaningless series of church suppers and insipid sermons.

This is ironic since the concept of human equality is rooted in the Christian belief that all men are created by God who cares equally about each of us. No naturalistic or secular ground for the doctrine of human equality exists, it's not derivable from Darwinism nor secular reason, and indeed, prior to the rise of Christianity the notion of human equality would've been unintelligible.

The concept of equality before God (and before the civil law), however, has in our secular age been conflated with the concept of absolute sameness which is no part of its original meaning. Unless we return to that original meaning, Gregg argues, we will lose not only the concept of equality, but also whatever remnants of virtue remain as well as the religious belief that grounds both virtue and equality.

When that happens tyranny and the loss of our liberties will not be far behind.

Read more of Gregg's argument at the link.

The "Myth" of Objectivity

A brief piece by Katherine Timpf at NRO is so good it's hard to decide what to excerpt and what to leave out.

She describes a phenomenon incubating in the spawning grounds of ludicrous ideas, i.e. college campuses, which holds that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and have no real existence. They're merely “social constructs.”

This is presumably the sort of thing one must believe nowadays if one is to be a progressive in good standing, but it's really quite silly.

Timpf describes a course that will be offered at several colleges next year in which students will be taught about "white mythologies" which are defined as "long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged.”

The class is titled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions.

She tells us more:

Students [in the course] will explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women.

It's hard to take this seriously. Why is the word logic in the above quote cast in the plural? Are "logics" like geometries which can be different depending on whether the surface is a plane or a sphere? Is there a logic in which the principle of non-contradiction doesn't hold? Is there a logic in which it's not fallacious to beg the question or deny the antecedent of a hypothetical syllogism? Are the creators of this course suggesting that logical thinking is a talent that only white males can master? If so, isn't that a racist assumption?

Timpf continues:

As crazy as this story may sound, this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this kind of thinking on a college campus. In April of 2017, a group of students at Pomona College wrote a letter to the school’s outgoing president claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth . . . is a myth and white supremacy.”

Also last year, a professor at Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine argued that “meritocracy” is a “whiteness ideology.” This year, two University of Denver professors claimed that scientific objectivity works to “spread whiteness ideology.”

This sounds very much like an unintentional rationalization for the dominance of whites (and Asians?) in the sciences. It also sounds ludicrous. Is it part of "whiteness ideology" to insist that earth's gravity objectively accelerates all falling objects at 9.8 m/s2 regardless of whether one believes that it does, or likes the fact, or thinks it's unjust, or believes that there could be lots of differing opinions on the matter?

It's an objective fact, i.e. a truth, that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate (neglecting factors like air resistance, location on the earth, etc.), and you don't have to be white in order to understand this.

Timpf again:

The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Objectivity isn’t a myth.

For example: In case you didn’t know, water is objectively wet, and that has nothing to do with “whiteness,” or with anything else. Objective truth absolutely does exist — and something that is an objective truth isn’t just dissimilar to a myth, it’s the exact opposite of a myth. That’s not even just my opinion; that’s an absolute fact based on what words mean.

Things that are objectively true are not made more or less true by factors such as race or sex or class or anything else — they just are; the fact that some things are objectively true is not made more or less a fact by factors such as race or class or sex or anything else — it just is.

The next time you're told by a progressive that the left is the party of science, that progressives live in the world of fact-based reality, ask your interlocutor whether what he/she just told you is objectively true.

People who deny that there is objective truth and argue that, in fact, objective truth is only a "whiteness mythology," are surely not representing the "party of science." They're representing the party of delusion.

Bill Maher's TDS

Who really cares about the poor? It's certainly not Bill Maher and his audience of lefty progressives, and they both admit it - Maher explicitly and his audience implicitly. During his HBO show last Friday night Maher delivered himself of two very foolish comments, one of which was simply dumb the second of which was cruel. Katherine Timpf describes the first foolish comment:

“I don’t know if we’re a western democracy anymore,” claimed Maher. “One of their big issues [at G7] is democracy. It’s in trouble, and Russia is meddling in all of them. These are issues he [Trump] doesn’t care about or is actively working against.”

“He wants to be king,” the comedian continued. “I keep saying: slow-moving coup. I’ve been saying it since before the election. Macron tweeted ‘nobody is forever’ about Trump yesterday. That was his burn. I’m sorry, but dictators are.”

What Maher doesn't seem to understand is that an aspiring dictator does not behave the way President Trump has behaved. Would-be dictators do not disperse power to local governments, they don't deregulate businesses. Rather, they arrogate power to themselves by stripping it from the people, and they enact laws that give the central government, i.e. themselves, more and more control over people's lives.

This is precisely the opposite of what Trump has done. By overturning most of President Obama's executive orders President Trump has devolved power from the executive branch back to local governments and individual citizens. By appointing numerous conservatives to the federal district and appeals courts he has acted to ensure that the Constitution will remain the law of the land and that policy will not be determined by the ideological preferences of solitary judges imposing their views on the rest of us by usurping the authority of the legislature.

So Maher's first comment was just dumb. The second comment was not only dumb but cruel. Here's Timpf again:

Maher asked guest Shermichael Singleton his opinion of the economy during a panel discussion. Singleton said, “It’s going well. For now.” This led perfectly into Maher’s bombshell remark. “Thank you, that’s my question,” Maher added. “I feel like the bottom [of the economy] has to fall out at some point, and by the way, I’m hoping for it.”

“I think one way you get rid of Trump is a crashing economy. So please, bring on the recession. Sorry if that hurts people, but it’s either root for a recession or you lose your democracy.”

When Maher uttered this remark his audience applauded. Why? Do these people think about what they're cheering for or are they just mind-numbed automatons who hoot and whistle like the offspring of five generations of incestuous marriages whenever Maher says something stupid?

Do they realize how much a recession hurts people, especially the poor? Do they care? Evidently not. For these people, being liberal apparently means that you only have to pretend that you care about the poor. You don't actually have to be sincere about it.

As Timpf says:

It doesn’t get more deranged than that, does it? A wealthy Hollywood elitist is hoping for the bottom to fall out of the economy and an economic crash. “Sorry if that hurts people” is the most disgusting part of the whole ugly diatribe. Many families are still recovering from the long drawn out Great Recession which began in 2008 as lifetime savings were wiped out and jobs were lost. Now, in order to get rid of President Trump, he would like a repeat of that.

Maher and his ilk hate Trump more than they love their fellow Americans. As he laments western democracy in America he fails to recognize that it is a western democracy that keeps our American elections in place and provides him with the right to criticize the president for a living. The man cannot accept the result of the last presidential election and it has crippled him. Those audience members who applaud such political discourse should check themselves, too. Do they wish the same pain, even upon themselves?

Well, no, not upon themselves, of course, but if others are hurt that's just the price that has to be paid to get rid of a president who has achieved the best unemployment numbers for the poor in history and the best economic growth in a generation. But who cares about that, Maher and his audience ask, what matters is that we preserve our democracy by ousting the man who is actually saving it.

This is the logic of the left. and it's symptomatic of psychological derangement. It's a symptom of the corrosive effect of pure hatred on a person's heart, soul, and mind.

Beating the Greenhouse

In his book Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg publishes an interesting graph that represents what he calls The Miracle. The graph, he avers, is the most important "hockey stick" graph in all of human history, and he's surely right. It shows that human beings everywhere around the globe lived on the equivalent of $1 to $3 a day throughout all of history until the late 18th century, but that since then human well-being and prosperity have skyrocketed in ways that seem nothing short of miraculous.

The graph looks like this:

This unprecedented boon to those languishing in perpetual poverty around the globe is largely the result of technology developed in the West which is itself, though Goldberg doesn't explicitly make this point, largely the result of the use of petroleum.

A lot of people are calling for the world to curtail its use of petroleum-based fuels, a call which, were it heeded, would be devastating to the poor. If fuel prices were raised substantially it would have a profound effect upon everything from the price of food to the cost of heating homes to the cost of transportation. This would make it very hard for those living on either side of the lower edge of the middle class to stay there and for those living in poverty to emerge from it. It would be an economic death sentence for billions of people.

Now comes news that, whether global warming is real, man-made or neither, it may not really matter. If it's the result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere Western technology may have once again provided a solution.

The Federalist's David Harsanyi provides us with some details. Here are a few excerpts from his column:

A team of scientists at Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering announced this week that they’ve figured out a low-cost, industrial-scale method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Needless to say, it sounds like an exciting technology, which would, as The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.”

“This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Atlantic.

It now seems likely that we’re going to be able to reach environmentalists’ carbon-cutting goals at a fraction of the price. The paper claims that companies will be able to remove a metric ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for as little as $94. The cost of averting less than one degree of warming by 2100, according to some, would have cost around $2 trillion every year for a century — which doesn’t include the economic toll it would extract from the world’s economy.

In the near future, in addition to continued gains in efficiency, your community may have a choice between paying for giant, expensive fields of intermittently useful windmills and solar panels or a plant that cleans the air by converting hydrocarbon into liquid fuel. I wonder which one rational people will choose.

This is wonderful news and should be welcomed by everyone, although, as Harsanyi notes, it will probably not be welcomed by the social engineers who want to dictate to everyone how much carbon they can produce and when they can produce it.

Technological innovation flourishes under free markets. The graph above illustrates how the entire world has benefited from that innovation, yet the left still despises capitalism because it makes some people obscenely rich and others not. Better, progressives seem to argue, that everyone be poor than that some be poor and others wealthy.

Nevertheless, as Goldberg observes, "Capitalism isn't just the best anti-poverty program ever conceived, it's the only anti-poverty program ever conceived."

Read Harsanyi's column for more on this hopeful new development in the hunt for a means of cleansing the atmosphere of greenhouse gas.

Astonishing Machines

Here's a post I've run several times in the past but that I thought worth running again since Viewpoint is always picking up new readers:

Among the phenomena which support the claim that life is the product of intentional, intelligent design is the sheer number of complex molecular machines that operate in each of the trillions of our body's cells to ensure that these cells carry out the functions that keep us alive.

One of these machines is the system of proteins that synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Here's a short video animation that describes how this machine, called ATP synthase, works:

There are thousands of such machines in the cell, all of which, on the standard Darwinian account, somehow developed - through random, undirected, processes - not only their structure, not only the coordination with other systems in the cell necessary for proper function, but also the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control how and when the machine operates.

David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely.

Applying Hume's principle to the present case, when confronted with a structure like ATP synthase we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that such an astonishing thing came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

It seems to me that the only way one can assert the former is if they've already, a priori, ruled out the possibility of the existence of the intelligent engineer, but, of course, that begs the question. Whether the intelligent engineer exists is the very matter we're trying to answer by asking whether blind chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the existence in living things of such machines as ATP synthase.

If we allow the evidence to speak for itself rather than allow our prior metaphysical commitments to dictate what the evidence says then I'm pretty sure most people would say that the kind of specified complexity we see in this video points unequivocally to the existence of a designing mind.

If this video has whetted your interest here's another that pushes us toward the same conclusion. It's an animation of just a few of the structures and processes in a living cell. Note the amazing motor protein that carries the vesicle along the microtubule:

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it the product of intelligent agency? Setting aside our metaphysical preconceptions, what does our experience tell us?

Progressivism in Academia

Once upon a time a liberal education meant that one studied, and desired to study, the best that had been thought and written in the humanities. One was deeply enriched by his or her encounter with the classics in literature, philosophy, history, etc. Times have changed, however. The term "liberal education" has taken on a rather different signification today than it had a few decades ago. Take Oberlin College, for example, a liberal arts school in Ohio where students a couple of years ago submitted a list of 50 "non-negotiable" demands to the administration described in a New Yorker column.

The Daily Caller has distilled the New Yorker's essay to a few of the more absurd aspects of the students' "concerns." Here is a sample of their complaints (The text in italics is from the Daily Caller, the rest is my commentary):

This institution [Oberlin] functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy. In addition to wondering what some of this actually means, one might also wonder what the school would look like if it "functioned" on the basis of the contraries of these premises.

The students' demands included a request for an $8.20-an-hour "activism wage," the firing of nine Oberlin employees deemed insufficiently supportive of black students, and the tenuring of black faculty. How, exactly, does one demonstrate "insufficient support"? Are the students saying that if these nine employees don't agree with their concerns they should therefore be fired? Is it the students' idea of justice to deprive someone of their livelihood because they don't agree with their opinion? If so, it is Stalinesque.

A student wanted trigger warnings on required reading. The book which triggered the demand for triggers was Antigone. This student activist had wrestled with suicidal tendencies and so does Antigone. One can sympathize with the student's apprehensions while nevertheless thinking that "trigger warnings" are, in general, a concession to emotional adolescence. Any student can google any book and find out what its basic themes are if he's concerned that he might suffer an emotional or psychological ambush while reading it.

The students wanted the removal of a “harmful” multicultural mural. The former chair of the Student Union Board reports that students ordered a mural featuring people of a number of different races destroyed because they feared that it “exoticized” minorities. I'm not sure what it is to be "exoticized," but it sounds bad. Whatever it is, though, it's hard to imagine a depiction of anyone which could not be said to "exoticize" that individual, or his or her race, gender, or class.

A Jewish student was told he cannot have certain opinions because his “culture has never been oppressed.” After he criticized a sexual harassment policy that would have classified “flirtatious speech” as harassment, Aaron Pressman reported, “A student came up to me several days later and started screaming at me, saying I’m not allowed to have this opinion, because I’m a white cisgender male.” He feels that his white maleness shouldn’t be disqualifying. “I’ve had people respond to me, ‘You could never understand — your culture has never been oppressed.'” Pressman laughed. “I’m, like, ‘Really? The Holocaust?'”

This criticism of Pressman was odd in light of the fact that one Oberlin professor reportedly posted anti-Semitic messages on Facebook. “[Her] posts suggested, among other things, that Zionists had been involved in the 9/11 plot, that Isis was a puppet of Mossad and the C.I.A., and that the Rothschild family owned “your news, the media, your oil, and your government.” This professor wasn’t terminated and perhaps shouldn't have been, but evidently had she been as insufficiently supportive of black students' concerns as she apparently is of Jewish students' concerns, there'd have been calls for her dismissal.

In any case, the notion that unless you belong to a group that has suffered you cannot understand their angst and are not entitled to speak out about their problems is one of the oddest flowers in the ideological greenhouse. Besides, who cannot lay claim to membership in some group that at some point in history has been "oppressed"?

One student leader is “tired” of listening to dissenting opinions. “I do think that there’s something to be said about exposing yourself to ideas other than your own, but I’ve had enough of that after my fifth year,” she said. Apparently she thinks there should be a statute of limitations on free speech and dissent. Perhaps students should have to suffer disagreeable opinions for four years and then after that grace period every opinion should agree with hers.

Students wanted to eliminate bad grades. “More than thirteen hundred students signed a petition calling for the college to eliminate any grade lower than a C for the semester, but to no avail.” According to the New Yorker they didn't want their grades to decline while they were devoting their time to activist causes.

They hate capitalism at Oberlin. A student leader stated that higher education is a “tool of capitalism” that “can’t be redeemed,” even though capitalism is closely associated with the kind of free speech that allows students to become activists in the first place. Meanwhile, socialist and communist countries — think Mao’s China or Lenin's Russia — frequently throw dissenters in jail, although many of these students may not even know this, given how open they seem to learning new things.

These students don't see their university years as a wonderful opportunity to learn but rather as an opportunity to vent. They wish to turn universities into summer camps for radicals where they can gather to rage against the machine and all that. And when they graduate what will they have prepared themselves to do in life, other than to become themselves poorly educated college professors who will continue the cycle of educational malfeasance and decline?

Permit me to suggest a modest proposal for disaffected students. It's similar to the course of action what people are advised by progressives to follow if they find that they don't like salacious television programming, or movies, or the laws regarding abortion. It's this: "Don't watch, don't go, don't have one."

University students who don't like the curriculum, who don't like a college's atmosphere, who don't like having to pass courses, simply should not go to a school which features these characteristics in the first place, or, having made the mistake of enrolling, they should transfer out.

Better yet, they should realize that their anxieties often appear peevish, self-absorbed, and childish to those who work for a living or who don the nation's uniform, that to these folks many of the concerns expressed by the Oberlin students seem akin to a child's fear of the goblin under the bed at night, and that the students should work harder to outgrow these preoccupations.

Why Talk of White Privilege Is Harmful

I had a student last semester who wrote a very thoughtful response to a post she found on VP on what's come to be called "white privilege." She ably defended her conception of this sociological dogma, and I felt that I should explain to her my objection to the concept.

I replied to her with this (slightly edited):

My problem with the emphasis on white privilege in the academy is that it's divisive and breeds resentment and bitterness among both blacks and whites. When people are taught that one group, of which they're not a member, has advantages that they'll never have simply because of their race it fosters bitterness among the "disadvantaged" group and generates resentment toward those who are perceived to have the unfair advantage.

This causes us as a society to be further divided into us/them categories which I think is exactly what we don't need.

It also breeds resentment and bitterness among those in the "privileged" group because they resent being made to feel guilty simply because of their skin color.

Not only does talk of "white privilege" encourage these effects, I think it's psychologically harmful to blacks and other minorities in that it's dispiriting for people to believe that no matter how hard they work they'll always be at a relative disadvantage.

Not only is such a belief dispiriting, it's also false. Too many minorities have done well in this country to think that being a member of a minority group ipso facto puts success out of one's reach. Those who promote the white privilege meme are, whether they realize it or not, handing those who never succeed because they never try a convenient rationalization for their both to succeed and to try. As such, it's insidious.

It's insidious also because it's so divisive. When people who've worked hard to achieve are told that they succeeded largely because of their race it can cause them to feel either enormous guilt or enormous resentment. The first is socially and psychologically crippling while the second creates a lot of social animosity. Indeed, one reason Donald Trump is president today is because many people resent having to apologize for things for which they bear no personal responsibility.

Some might say that if white privilege exists then we should talk about it regardless of the consequences, but I don't think those who'd say this really mean it. If they did then they'd have to apply the principle across the board that no racial issues should be quarantined because of their consequences, and that would mean that the question of relative intelligences among the races would be open for serious discussion, but it clearly is not.

Anyway, it's past time to relegate talk of "white privilege" to the trash bin of "very unhelpful ideas." Talking about it does no good and does much harm.

Philosophical Fashion

A piece in Aeon by J. Bradley Studemeyer makes the case that philosophy as a discipline is often subject to the whims of fashion, not fashion as in wearing apparel but as in fashionable ideas. He writes:

The rise and fall of popular positions in the field of philosophy is not governed solely by reason. Philosophers are generally reasonable people but, as with the rest of the human species, their thoughts are heavily influenced by their social settings. Indeed, they are perhaps more influenced than thinkers in other fields, since popular or ‘big’ ideas in modern philosophy change more frequently than ideas in, say, chemistry or biology. Why?

The relative instability of philosophical positions is a result of how the discipline is practised. In philosophy, questions about methods and limitations are on the table in a way that they tend not to be in the physical sciences, for example. Scientists generally acknowledge a ‘gold standard’ for validity – the scientific method – and, for the most part, the way in which investigations are conducted is more or less settled.

Falsifiability rules the scientific disciplines: almost all scientists are in agreement that, if a hypothesis isn’t testable, then it isn’t scientific. There is no counterpoint of this in philosophy. Here, students and professors continue to ask: ‘Which questions can we ask?’ and ‘How can we ask, much less answer, those questions?’ There is no universally agreed-upon way in which to do philosophy.

Given that philosophy’s foundational questions and methods are still far from settled – they never will be – it’s natural that there is more flux, more volatility, in philosophy than in the physical sciences. [T]his volatility... is [similar to] changes of fashion.

When thinking about fashion in philosophy, there are four basic categories under which texts, thinkers and ideas can be grouped. By considering the interrelation of these groups, we can begin to glean how an idea becomes fashionable. The four categories are the fashionable, the foundational, the prohibited, and the unfashionable.

I'm not sure Studemeyer is correct in what he says about testability being the litmus test of science. Perhaps it should be, but it often isn't. For example, it's difficult to imagine how some of the hypotheses concerning the origin of life, macroevolution, the big bang, the multiverse, string theory, and so on, could be tested. Yet they're all considered by many scientists to be legitimate science. The notion of a "scientific method," despite the fact that it's in the early chapters of just about every secondary school textbook, is not one that many working scientists actually ascribe to.

Scientists like their theories to be testable, but if they aren't they want them to be elegant, and if they aren't they want them to have expansive explanatory power, and if they don't they want them to at least conform to a materialist worldview, and if they're incompatible with materialism, well, then, they're not science.

In any event, the rest of the article is given to fleshing out Studemeyer's four categories. One of the best parts of the essay is a side-bar question, to which readers are invited to respond, which asks what philosophical ideas are fashionable today but won't be much longer.

Some of the responses are very interesting although they're not all strictly philosophical. My guess is that metaphysical materialism itself might fall out of fashion. It's hard to see how, given all the evidence that's accumulating against it, it can survive among reasonable people. Even so, since the chief alternatives are often compatible with Christian theism, I suppose a lot of philosophers will continue to cling to it no matter how much evidence accumulates against it.

Scandal-Free

In something of a stunner former President Obama averred recently that his administration had been "scandal-free." This is certainly an amusing assertion, one reminiscent of his infamous assurances that Obamacare would not only allow people to keep their doctors but would also drive the cost of insurance coverage down.

His profession of the ethical purity of his tenure could be true only if one defines a scandal as something considered to be such by the media and which is assiduously pursued by the majority of journalists at the major networks and newspapers until it finally dominates the 24/7 news cycle.

In other words, if a scandal is defined as whatever the media decides is a scandal, then the Obama administration was indeed free of any taint of disgrace because no matter what the Obama administration did the majority media would have insisted on either excusing it or looking the other way.

If, however, a political scandal is defined as an event that should bring discredit or disgrace to a person or administration and which should result in significant firings and/or legal jeopardy, even if such consequences never eventuate, then the Obama administration was, as David Harsanyi reminds us, as rife with scandal as any in modern times.

Here's a partial listing of the Obama administration's infamies:

• Fast and Furious, a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.
  
  The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons, but an off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.
  
  Attorney general Eric Holder became the first AG in history to be held in contempt of Congress because he refused to cooperate with the congressional investigation into this scandal.
• The administration interfered with law enforcement's attempt to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terrorist organization Hezbollah because the administration didn't want to upset the Iranians during the negotiations that would culminate in over a billion dollars being shipped to Iran in return for a promise not to build nuclear weapons for ten years.
• The Obama DOJ illegally spied on political reporters and other citizens in order to ferret out the source of White House leaks and then lied about what they were doing.
• The IRS leadership, specifically Lois Lerner, aggressively and prejudicially targeted conservative groups before elections and they subsequently admitted as much in an apology letter. Lerner was held in contempt by Congress for refusing to comply with investigators’ demands. She never answered questions for this genuine attack on democracy.
• Although they knew the assault on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya was a complex terror attack, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cut television ads to placate radicals in Islamic nations by repeating the claim that a video motivated the attack and they then even apologized for American free speech, which was a scandal in itself.
  
  Worse, however, the administration detained the man who produced the offensively amateurish “Innocence of Muslims” video and initially charged him with lying about his role in its production. This was a blatant attack on free expression. Yet most of the mainstream press continued to take the administration’s word and report that the video was indeed the cause of the “protests.”

Of course there were other scandals that elicited little more than yawns from the media. As Harsanyi says:

Democrats in general just kept pretending that every accusation [against the Obama administration] was merely a partisan, racist plot to undermine the president. Whether it was bypassing process and oversight to fund cronyistic green projects that enriched political and ideological allies with tax dollars, or the Secret Service’s embarrassing debauchery, or Hillary Clinton’s attempts to circumvent transparency or, perhaps the most immoral, the Veterans Affairs’ negligence regarding veterans, they would never admit they faced a scandal.

No one has gone to jail for any of these disreputable acts and few people lost their jobs because of them.

You can read more of the details of each of the above Obama administration scandals at the link. Meanwhile, if you think that any of this wretched misconduct did not really amount to a scandal and that Obama's claim to have run a scandal-free administration is not actually absurd, simply ask yourself what the reaction would've been had Donald Trump and his administration perpetrated or indulged in anything like it.

The media outrage would have been volcanic, and the attempts to destroy this president would have been even more obsessive, compulsive, and relentless than they already are.

Removing the Guardrails

Over at Thought Sifter my friend Mike writes about the recent referendum in Ireland in which a substantial plurality of Irish voted to rescind the constitutional provision which bans abortion in Ireland. He has some interesting things to say about the reasoning behind the pro-choice movement both there and here.

He writes:

The philosophical debate of abortion hinges on the question of when the life which grows in a woman’s womb actually becomes a child and thus acquires human rights. Even if someone rejects the idea proposed by the American founding fathers that people don't “acquire” rights but are “endowed by their Creator” with inalienable rights, it is an irrefutable fact that no one has the ability to discern when the magic moment occurs in the womb when fetal flesh becomes a human being.

So, In the most plain, unembellished language, the right to an abortion is the right of a woman to make a gamble by which she either kills her own child as it grows in her womb or kills a lump of flesh which will soon be her child....

But the right to gamble on killing that which is a baby or soon-to-be baby has all the characteristics of a zealous campaign for justice: shouting protesters, picket signs, demonization of opponents, etc. The part that’s hard on the brain is that the movement is often framed as a fight against oppression, as if to say, “Those heartless, iron-fisted traditionalists aren’t gonna tell me I can’t kill my baby! Nobody’s going to punish me with parenthood just because I had sex!”

Up until this point in history, the ones who kill babies and fight those who want to save them have been thought of as oppressors. How is this no longer the case?

Mike's question is rhetorical, but there's an answer to it even so. It's no longer the case because the supreme value in contemporary society is personal autonomy, particularly in matters related to one's sexual conduct. We've demanded that the guardrails that keep society from careening over the cliff - traditional custom, morality and religion - be removed from the highway's shoulders so that we can be free to go wherever we want.

This is liberating, we're told, it allows us to be free, to be "who I am."

It's seductive, to be sure, but where there are no guardrails, there's no backstop for human recklessness. The end result is often death - not necessarily physical death, though that's common enough, but spiritual, emotional, psychological death. Absolute autonomy ultimately spawns a degenerate culture of morbidity. At least it seems to have done so in the U.S. where our entertainment is filled with themes of death and horror, our laws seem to be moving ineluctably toward broadening the circumstances, both at the beginning and at the end of life, under which life can be terminated, and we're becoming inured to the almost daily news reports of murder and mayhem in our cities and schools.

But we're happier, aren't we? Isn't life more fulfilling when we can do away with all those priggish rules about sex and the value of human life and create our own rules? Well, if we werehappier psychiatry and counseling wouldn't be such popular majors among college students looking for a career.

When players in a game can throw out the rule book and make up their own rules as they go along, the game soon falls apart. Likewise with a society or culture which insists on throwing out whatever traditional rules infringe on personal autonomy. The social fabric frays and individual lives come undone.

Personal autonomy has become an ersatz religion for many otherwise non-religious secularists of our time, and abortion has become something of a sacrament, one of several, by which devotion to the spirit of the age is expressed. That's the way it is, but it's not making us healthier as a culture or happier as individuals. In fact, the opposite seems to be very much the case.

Read more of Mike's thoughts at his blog Thought Sifter.

Follow the Evidence

For the last twenty five years or so, book after book has been published in which various authors have pummeled the orthodoxies of Darwinian evolution. Most recently philosopher of science Stephen Meyer (Darwin's Doubt), philosopher Alvin Plantinga (Where the Conflict Really Lies), geneticist Michael Denton (Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis), novelist Tom Wolfe (The Kingdom of Speech), and molecular biologist Doug Axe (Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed) have released books deconstructing the biological and philosophical underpinnings of the Darwinist paradigm that has ruled the biological and social sciences for a century and a half.

Now comes yet another work by prominent journalist Tom Bethell (Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through the Darwin Debates) which discusses why Darwinism seems to be teetering. Uncommon Descent pulls a few quotes from the book:

• The science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts. I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy—the philosophy of materialism—and atheism along with it. Page 20
• The scientific evidence for evolution is not only weaker than is generally supposed, but as new discoveries have been made since 1959, the reasons for accepting the theory have diminished rather than increased. Page 45
• Darwin might well have been dismayed if the meager evidence for natural selection, assembled over many years, had been presented to him 150 years after The Origin was published. ‘A change in the ratio of preexisting varieties? That is all you have been able to come up with?’ he might reasonably have asked. It is worth bearing in mind how feeble this evidence is, any time someone tells you that Darwinism is a fact. Page 79
• Natural selection functions in the realm of philosophy, not science. Page 81
• Evolutionists, of course, believe that they are appealing to science, in contrast to the religionists’ reliance on faith. But the truth is that when they utter their two-word incantation, ‘natural selection,’ they are not being remotely scientific. Nor are they expected to provide any details. Page 123
• Darwinian evolution can be seen as a way of looking at the history of life through the distorting lens of Progress. Given enough time, society in general, including human beings, would be transformed into something superior and perhaps unrecognizably different. Page 248

It has been something of an open secret for at least a decade that many biologists have either tacitly or explicitly agreed with what Bethell writes. Many have admitted in so many words that the Neo-Darwinian version of the theory is deeply inadequate and probably wrong, but until there's another scientific theory to put in its place they're stuck with it. Any theory which replaces the old paradigm must rely on physical mechanisms and causes which act solely naturalistically (i.e. with no input from supernatural agency) in order to qualify as a scientific theory, and there's simply no such hypothesis on the horizon.

There's some truth to this, but as long as scientists and philosophers of science cling to the notion that science must exclude non-natural causes they hamstring themselves in their attempt to make headway on the problem of biological origins. If certain phenomena point to an intelligent provenience, as a multitude of biological phenomena do, scientists should be allowed to posit intelligent agency even if they can't explain how that agent worked to bring about the phenomena in question. They should, in short, follow the evidence wherever it leads.

As philosopher of science Del Ratszch once put it, if some future astronaut scientists were to discover a large, perfectly cubical piece of polished titanium on some desolate, uninhabitable planet the scientists may not have any idea who put it there, nor how they managed to get it there, nor why they did it, nor how they made the cube, but they would be perfectly justified in believing that it was the product of an intelligent mind or minds.

There's a passage from William James' 1896 lecture titled The Will to Believe that's apposite here. James insists that, "...a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be."

Just so.

Lifting the Poor Out of Poverty

Surveys have revealed that among younger voters capitalism is losing favor and socialism is gaining it. Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont, is a hero, unlikely as that seems, among millenials.

Why is this happening? Objectively, there seems to be little basis for it. Socialist countries like Venezuela and many African countries are economically moribund or worse. Yet, despite the negative effects of socialism in many of the places it's been tried, the blight of poverty is shrinking on a global scale. This improvement in the lives of so many is due not to socialist policies but to free enterprise capitalism.

In his book Suicide of the West Jonah Goldberg offers us some facts about global poverty:

• "Around the world the number of people considered poor has decreased both relatively and absolutely - an incredible feat, given massive increases in population."
• "In 1820, 94.4% of the world's population lived on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, and 83.9% lived on less than $1 a day....As of 2015 only 9.6% of the world's population lived on less than $1.50 a day."
• As recently as 1970, almost 27% of people world-wide lived in abject poverty (less than one 1987 dollar a day). A little more than 5% did as of 2006."
• Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of the population in developing countries living in poverty fell from 43 to 21 percent, a reduction of almost one billion people.
• In 2015, for the first time in human history, less than 10% of the world's population was considered extremely poor.

What's responsible for this fantastic improvement in the quality of life of so many people? Goldberg makes the case that the answer is economic growth and technological innovation, both of which are much more likely to occur under free-market capitalism than under government controlled economies.

It's hard to understand how anyone who claims to care about poor people could endorse socialist nostrums which inevitably entail bigger, more bloated government and stifling economic regulations, but, in a triumph of feeling over fact, they often do.

This short video, for example, addresses and debunks five myths people believe about free enterprise that cause them to turn to socialism:

The lesson is, if you care about the poor, don't vote for people who, in the name of fairness and equality, would place unreasonable and unneccessary restrictions on free markets and the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate.

Income Inequality

One of the recurring themes among our commentariat is that the disparity in wealth between the haves and the have nots is corrosive to our well-being as a society. The growing gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor, we're often reminded, is a danger to our polity and national cohesion and threatens to result in an upheaval something like the French Revolution.

Well, I don't know what to make of this. I don't know how the disparity between today's rich and poor is relevant or meaningful or particularly disturbing. Wealth and poverty are relative.

To paraphrase Jonah Goldberg in his excellent book Suicide of the West, if everyone was a billionaire except me and I was only a millionaire I'd be poor compared to everyone else, but I think I'd be quite content in my relative impoverishment. Moreover, if everyone's income doubled the gap between us would grow, but I'd still consider myself to be doing pretty well in terms of absolute wealth.

The important consideration is not the gap between us but the benefits of life to which I have access.

What difference does it make, after all, if one person has enough income to be comfortable, but someone else has a hundred times as much? What difference does it make if that gap widens every year as long as the "poorer" person is not regressing in absolute terms?

The inequality that we should be talking about, and rejoicing in, is the inequality between our contemporary poor and those who were wealthy in almost every other period of human history. This inequality is one of the greatest achievements in human history and, though I've written about it before, it bears reiterating.

I say we should rejoice because, although it may sound "insensitive" to say it, our poor are astonishingly wealthy, at least in material goods, compared to almost everyone else who has ever lived, including even the wealthiest aristocrats.

A multi-millionaire from a hundred and fifty years ago may have had enormous wealth but there was relatively little he could buy with it. He actually had a lot less and in many ways his life was a lot harder than is the case for most Americans living below the poverty line today.

The rich had more and bigger houses than do today's American poor, of course, and lived in safer neighborhoods, but that's about it. Those houses were not air-conditioned and often indifferently heated. They didn't have running water or flush toilets. Nor were they blessed with electricity, artificial light, refrigeration, television, radio, or a bevy of labor-saving appliances and devices.

The rich couldn't listen to music any time they wanted nor watch movies or television news. They didn't have telephones much less cell-phones, nor did they have computers or the internet to facilitate communication and learning.

Their clothes were certainly less comfortable and in many ways more poorly crafted. They couldn't get food, paid for by the taxpayer, by walking to the corner supermarket at any time of the day or night, where the choices and variety would astonish someone transplanted from the late 1800s.

They could afford the best medical and dental care of the day, but the best care was nowhere near as good nor as convenient as what is available today, even to our poor, whose bills are paid by medicaid. The poor today have access to a plethora of medications undreamt of by the wealthy of the 19th century - aspirin, penicillin, novocaine, blood pressure medicine, depression medicine, etc. - all of which make life infinitely better than it was for the rich 150 years ago.

Today's poor are much more mobile thanks to public transportation, than were the earlier rich who had to rely on carriages drawn by horses which needed to be maintained, and the roads they traveled were often either ridden with potholes, dusty, muddy, or otherwise treacherous.

The rich had vacation villas, but it took lengthy train and carriage rides in hot, dirty uncomfortable conveyances over those miserable roads to get there. Poor families today often have access to an air-conditioned car that can get them to the beach for a day's recreation in relative comfort, on excellent highways, and with relative speed.

Today's poor have access to free education and public libraries. They're almost all at least somewhat literate, they live longer and much more comfortably than did even the richest people throughout all of human history save the last century or so.

Relative to the wealthier classes today our poor may seem to have little, but they're immeasurably rich relative to the unfortunate "wealthy" wretches who happened to be born a century and a half or more earlier. Indeed, if a contemporary member of the lower economic classes were transported back in time, but able somehow to live like they can live today, their neighbors would marvel at their extravagance and quality of life.

All of this is often simply taken for granted, but it shouldn't be. It's part of what Goldberg calls The Miracle of the last century and a half. Today's poor are, generally speaking, incomprehensibly well off, in material terms, compared to anyone who lived prior to the 20th century.

None of this is to say that modern poor people don't have needs that must be addressed, but it is to say that the claim that our system is unjust because there's a gap between rich and poor is hard to credit.

So, the next time someone in your hearing complains about the unfairness of the disparity between rich and poor in this country you might ask them what it is, exactly, that's unfair about it.

Subjectivism, Relativism, and Emotivism

A commenter at Uncommon Descent, in defense of the view that morality has no objective grounding, since it's rooted in our evolutionary development, delivers himself of this head-scratcher:

Since the moral fabric is man made, all we are doing is seeing it change, as it has done over the centuries. Sometimes history shows that the change has been for the good, and sometimes for the bad. But since civilization is thriving, it is reasonable to conclude that we have had more wins than losses.

What's puzzling about this is that if morality is man-made then what's the standard by which we can tell whether any change is good or bad? Doesn't this comment tacitly assume that there's an objective reference point, a moral horizon, as it were, by which we can tell whether we're flying upside down or right side up?

On evolutionary terms there is no objective referent. About that the commenter is correct. On evolution morality is all man-made and therefore purely subjective.

If it's claimed that civilizational thriving is a measure of whether practices are good or bad we might ask whether the Aztecs and other civilizations which presumably thrived for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years after they introduced human and child sacrifice were doing something good.

The post at the link cites Lewis Vaughn's Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues which provides an excellent explanation of the differences between relativism, which Vaughn avers can be subjective or cultural, and emotivism. Some might want to quibble with his terminology but it's very helpful nonetheless:

Subjective relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one approves of it. A person’s approval makes the action right. This doctrine (as well as cultural relativism) is in stark contrast to moral objectivism, the view that some moral principles are valid for everyone.

Subjective relativism, though, has some troubling implications. It implies that each person is morally infallible and that individuals can never have a genuine moral disagreement.

Cultural relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one’s culture approves of it. The argument for this doctrine is based on the diversity of moral judgments among cultures: because people’s judgments about right and wrong differ from culture to culture, right and wrong must be relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles.

This argument is defective, however, because the diversity of moral views does not imply that morality is relative to cultures. In addition, the alleged diversity of basic moral standards among cultures may be only apparent, not real.

Societies whose moral judgments conflict may be differing not over moral principles but over nonmoral facts.

Some think that tolerance is entailed by cultural relativism. But there is no necessary connection between tolerance and the doctrine. Indeed, the cultural relativist cannot consistently advocate tolerance while maintaining his relativist standpoint. To advocate tolerance is to advocate an objective moral value. But if tolerance is an objective moral value, then cultural relativism must be false, because it says that there are no objective moral values.

Like subjective relativism, cultural relativism has some disturbing consequences. It implies that cultures are morally infallible, that social reformers can never be morally right, that moral disagreements between individuals in the same culture amount to arguments over whether they disagree with their culture, that other cultures cannot be legitimately criticized, and that moral progress is impossible.

Emotivism is the view that moral utterances are neither true nor false but are expressions of emotions or attitudes. It leads to the conclusion that people can disagree only in attitude, not in beliefs. People cannot disagree over the moral facts, because there are no moral facts. Emotivism also implies that presenting reasons in support of a moral utterance is a matter of offering nonmoral facts that can influence someone’s attitude.

It seems that any nonmoral facts will do, as long as they affect attitudes. Perhaps the most far-reaching implication of emotivism is that nothing is actually good or bad. There simply are no properties of goodness and badness. There is only the expression of favorable or unfavorable emotions or attitudes toward something.

I'd probably want to say that all three of these are subsumed under the heading of subjectivism, i.e. the view that moral judgments are based on individual preferences and feelings and that cultural relativism is simply subjectivism writ large. Even so, the important point is that any moral assertion not based on an objective foundation is purely illusory. It's just a rhetorical vehicle for expressing one's individual tastes and biases and has no binding force on anyone else.

Moreover, there can only be an objective moral foundation if there is a moral authority which transcends human fallibility and weakness. In other words, unless there is a God there can be no objective moral values or obligations on anyone.

This is why moral claims made by non-theists don't make sense. They wish to deny the existence of God and yet implicitly hold views about morality that can only be true if God exists.

A Memorial Day Tribute

Technically, Memorial Day is set aside to remember those who gave their lives in service to our nation, but it's appropriate, I think, to also honor the sacrifices and bravery of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its yearlong mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God.