Katie's Soul

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor has a fine piece at Plough.com in which he argues against the materialist view that we are simply material beings with no spiritual or mental remainder. The materialist holds that everything about us that might be attributed to qualities like soul or mind are ultimately reducible to the physical structure of the material brain. Matter and the laws of physics can in principle explain everything.

The opening paragraphs of Egnor's essay call this view into serious question. He writes:

I watched the CAT scan images appear on the screen, one by one. The baby’s head was mostly empty. There were only thin slivers of brain – a bit of brain tissue at the base of the skull, and a thin rim around the edges. The rest was water.

Her parents had feared this. We had seen it on the prenatal ultrasound; the CAT scan, hours after birth, was much more accurate. Katie looked like a normal newborn, but she had little chance at a normal life.

She had a fraternal-twin sister in the incubator next to her. But Katie only had a third of the brain that her sister had. I explained all of this to her family, trying to keep alive a flicker of hope for their daughter.

I cared for Katie as she grew up. At every stage of Katie’s life so far, she has excelled. She sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister. She’s made the honor roll. She will soon graduate high school.

I’ve had other patients whose brains fell far short of their minds. Maria had only two-thirds of a brain. She needed a couple of operations to drain fluid, but she thrives. She just finished her master’s degree in English literature, and is a published musician.

Jesse was born with a head shaped like a football and half-full of water – doctors told his mother to let him die at birth. She disobeyed. He is a normal happy middle-schooler, loves sports, and wears his hair long.

Some people with deficient brains are profoundly handicapped. But not all are. I’ve treated and cared for scores of kids who grow up with brains that are deficient but minds that thrive. How is this possible?

Well, if materialism is true it's hard to see how it could be possible, but if materialism is false then there might be an explanation that includes a soul or mind that's somehow integrated with the brain but which is nevertheless not ultimately explicable in terms of the material stuff that makes us up.

Egnor goes on in his essay to show that mental processes like thoughts and sensations cannot be reduced to physical structures and also why the materialist denial of human free will is almost certainly wrong.

He offers the sorts of arguments that are making it very difficult nowadays to be a consistent materialist. Indeed, some materialists are finding it so difficult to explain phenomena like human consciousness solely in terms of the material brain that they've even taken to denying that consciousness exists, but this seems like madness. After all, doesn't one have to be conscious in order to think about whether consciousness exists?

Evidently, some philosophers will go to any lengths, no matter how bizarre, to avoid having to accept any idea that may lead to the existence of anything that's consistent with a theistic worldview.

Egnor concludes his column with this:

There is a part of Katie’s mind that is not her brain. She is more than that. She can reason and she can choose. There is a part of her that is immaterial.... There is a part of Katie that didn’t show up on those CAT scans when she was born.

Katie, like you and me, has a soul.

On Beauty

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) often said that the two best arguments for the truth of the Christian faith are the lives of the saints and the beauty of its art. Like the other two ancient transcendentals, Goodness and Truth, Beauty is indeed a difficult thing to explain apart from the existence of a God who appreciates it.

Biologist Ann Gauger writes about this at ENST. Here are a couple of salient excerpts:

If the world is evolved by a process of random mutation and natural selection, by a universe that does not care, then why is there beauty? Why is it so beautiful? Beauty is always a surprise, a delight. Beauty does not come from randomness.

It is beauty, not ugliness that must be explained. If we are merely atoms in motion, the result of purely unguided processes, with no mind or thought behind us, then beauty is completely unexpected.

It’s not hard to make a muddy brown splotch when painting, but to paint a beautiful flower arrangement requires knowledge of where to place the brush, and the restraint to choose wisely among colors. Choosing what to do and what not to do is design. The highest forms of art, of music, and of physical performance require choice, discipline, knowledge, and restraint in what is done and not done, by design. Architecture and mathematics require the same.

In fact, for any human endeavor to be done beautifully, discipline, knowledge of what to do and what not to do, and how best to bring things together in service to the whole are essential. The result is beauty, which is by design, not by accident....

The argument has been made that we evolved to like what are presumed to be safe environments, like the savannahs of Africa from which we came. This I doubt.

Mountaintops with blue glaciers, wind-sculpted sand dunes, and steep cliffs overlooking a restless sea are not particularly safe places to live. Yet something in them captures our eye. Their proportion and balance and richness move us. It’s design. And it’s what holds the biosphere together.

Indeed, the beauty of the world is far more abundant than what any naturalistic account seems able to explain. It's gratuitously excessive. From the gorgeous architecture of microscopically small diatoms to the glorious splendor of the night sky, beauty pervades every nook and cranny of our world.

Consider these words from Mike Mitchell at his blog Thought Sifter:

A lot of people claim that the world as we know it came about randomly, meaning there was no one who intended the world to exist. They say all the universe just came about in the same way a certain pattern of dust collects on a bookshelf. They then try to use the same explanation for the stunningly sophisticated systems that fill our world: Our ecosystem, solar system, nervous system, digestive system, reproductive system, etc.

These are all supposed to be random systems, but a "random system" is the same kind of phrase as a square circle. It cannot be both. A system is an intentionally ordered grouping of multiple parts which works to carry out a particular purpose. There can be no such thing as a random system that is intended to work in a certain order for a particular purpose, because random means that which is without intent, order, and purpose.

The same is true of beauty. We cannot coherently talk about "random beauty." There is an inescapable chain of logic that can't be broken without falling into nonsense. When we say something is beautiful that means the thing is important. To say something is important is to say the thing is meaningful.

To say it is meaningful is to say that it exists for a purpose. But again, "random" necessarily means the absence of importance, meaning, and purpose.

These three are to beauty what squares are to a cube. We cannot talk intelligibly about cubes while denying the existence of squares.

The theological significance of beauty in the world cannot be overstated. To paraphrase the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, beauty is the battleground over which God and the devil contend for the heart of man.

We might wonder why it is that Goodness, Truth and Beauty seem always to walk hand-in-hand with each other just as evil, hatred and ugliness seem always to be found in each other's company. Is it just a coincidence?

The President's Next Pick

President Trump will announce his next pick for the Supreme Court on Monday, and there's swelling panic among those who fear that Mr. Trump will pick a judicial conservative as a replacement for retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. If he does it'll have a profound effect on the Court's future decisions.

Given all the talk about his nomination it's appropriate at this point to get some terminology straight. Specifically, what exactly do people mean when they talk about "judicial conservatives" and "judicial liberals"?

Briefly, a judicial conservative is a man or woman who believes that cases should be decided on the basis of how closely the issues raised by the case hew to the Constitution of the United States. If there's no reasonable warrant for thinking that the Constitution supports an argument brought before the Court, a conservative is not likely to find in favor of that argument.

For conservatives the Constitution is the touchstone, it's the interpretive key for deciding the merits of the case.

A judicial liberal, on the other hand, is much more prone to treating the Constitution as having only secondary importance. A liberal jurist will tend to find in favor of arguments that seem to be based on the current consensus among progressive elites, regardless of whether the arguments which are adduced before the Court are grounded in the Constitution.

Liberals see the Constitution as far more supple and far less authoritative than do conservatives.

Liberals, then, want federal judges and Supreme Court Justices who will not feel bound by either the laws or the Constitution because such jurists enable an end run around the legislature. If liberal policy cannot be enacted into law through Congress then by finding a sympathetic judge on the district or federal bench or five Justices on the Supreme Court, liberal policies can be enacted regardless of the will of the people.

The preceding summarizes the general differences between conservative and liberal attitudes toward jurisprudence, but there are, of course, many other ways to understand liberalism and conservatism.

One other way is to examine their respective views of what it is to be human - what it is, in the metaphysical sense, to be man. What follows is not true of all conservatives nor of all liberals, but I think it's fair to say that it is true of a great many, perhaps the majority, of both.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference in the anthropology of conservatives and liberals is that conservatives tend to see man as bearing the image of God, possessing immortal souls, and loved by God. This is significant because from this starting point conservatives,

• See human rights as divinely ordained and based in the will of God, and thus objective and inalienable.
• See man as fallen from his original estate and prone to sin. Thus follows the conservative skepticism of governmental power and the need for institutional checks and balances.
• See history as both meaningful, because it is the outworking of a Divine plan, and replete with lessons for the present because human nature doesn't change much.
• See science as a fruitful means of making sense of the world because the world was created by a rational being and yields its secrets to rational inquiry.
• See morality as rooted in a personal, transcendent moral authority who promulgates an unchanging moral law to which each of us is held accountable.

On the other hand, many liberals tend to see man as the product of the blind, impersonal, random process of evolution. For many liberals, particularly secular liberals, which perhaps comprise the majority, God plays little to no role in either the creation of the world or in human affairs. From this starting point, then, liberals often,

• See human rights as the product of a consensus of enlightened thinkers.
• See man as basically good and malleable, and evolving toward ever greater capacities and perfections.
• See history as an indecipherable, meaningless flux of events about which we can know little and learn less, since humanity is constantly evolving and changing.
• See science as the only trustworthy source of knowledge and the pronouncements of scientists as authoritative, if not infallible.
• See morality as an arbitrary, relativistic set of arbitrary norms which have evolved to help us get along with each other. There are no objective moral absolutes and probably no accountability for how we live in this life.

These disparate worldviews have profound consequences. One's starting point largely determines where one winds up.

If, for instance, human rights are simply a human invention then they're grounded in little more than the will and whims of those in power. They're just words on paper. They have no objective existence and can be discarded or changed whenever someone has the power and desire to do so. Indeed, to accuse a government of violating the human rights of its citizens makes no sense if those rights are simply whatever the government decides they are.

Likewise, if human nature can be altered and molded then the temptation to use government to compel people to conform to the image decided upon by the elites becomes irresistable. Since there is no objective right to liberty the government can and should do whatever's necessary to create the utopian society. That, of course, leads to Orwellian dystopias.

Ideas have consequences and the bigger the idea the more far-reaching the consequences. We're going to see this writ very large in the coming debate over President Trump's next nomination for the Supreme Court.

Conjectures and Refutations

A story at Phys.org discussed a recent paper which, I should've thought, would have created shock waves among scientists and philosophers, but which so far has generated very little comment.

A little background: Darwinian evolutionists argue that life on earth has been around for billions of years and that the various forms, were we able to see all that have ever appeared, would be observed to grade into each other almost seamlessly. In a gradual process that takes millions of years, one species slowly transitions to a similar but slightly different form, until the original form and its descendents become two separate species.

On the Darwinian view different taxa would appear at different times in the history of the earth, and thus the age of one species might be substantially different from the age of another, perhaps by millions of years.

On the other hand, many creationists, at least those who eschew the notion of universal descent from a common ancestor, assert that both of these claims are incorrect. They predict that on the creationist hypothesis, all species on earth are approximately the same age and that since the major taxa were created independently there will not be significant evidence of transitions between them.

The article in Phys.org reveals that both of these creationist predictions, neither of which is entailed by Darwinian evolution, seem to have been confirmed. Here are a few excerpts:

The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. "This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," [said David Thaler at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who co-authored the findings last week.]

That reaction is understandable: How does one explain the fact that 90 percent of animal life, genetically speaking, is roughly the same age? Was there some catastrophic event 200,000 years ago that nearly wiped the slate clean?

In analysing the [genetic] barcodes across 100,000 species, the researchers found a telltale sign showing that almost all the animals emerged about the same time as humans.

This doesn't mean that life is only 200,000 years old. It only means that 90% of the species on earth today have been in existence for about the same length of time. In other words, this is consistent with the creationist hypothesis that there was a major environmental event early on in the history of the human race that produced a biological bottleneck of sorts, out of which emerged most of the forms that we find inhabiting the planet today.

This does not, of course, refute Darwinism and establish creationism, but it is a finding that requires a secondary explanation on Darwinism but which is directly predicted by creationists.

Here's another:

And yet—another unexpected finding from the study—species have very clear genetic boundaries, and there's nothing much in between. "If individuals are stars, then species are galaxies," said Thaler. "They are compact clusters in the vastness of empty sequence space."

The absence of "in-between" species is something that also perplexed Darwin, he said.

In other words, the lack of transitions between species is perplexing on the Darwinian view of a gradual evolution of life. Creationists have long pointed to the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record, but this study shows that even in extant forms of life species seem to be genetically isolated from each other. Again, there could be a satisfactory Darwinian account of why this is, but the point is that it confirms a direct prediction of the creationist hypothesis.

None of this means that creationists are correct and that Darwinians are wrong. The article offers some possible explanations for why, on Darwinian terms, the results I've alluded to may obtain. What it does seem to suggest, though, is that the Darwinian criticism of creationism, that it's a metaphysical, not a scientific, construct, is becoming harder to defend.

The distinguishing characteristic of science is what philosopher Karl Popper called conjectures and refutations. That is, scientific researchers make predictions based on theory and then test those predictions to see if they're confirmed or refuted by the evidence.

To the extent that the creationist hypothesis generates predictions that are confirmed by the empirical evidence, to that extent it confounds those who wish to exclude it from the realm of science and consign it to the sphere of religious faith.

On the Fourth of July

Today many Americans will celebrate their Independence Day, the day set aside to commemorate the signing of our Declaration of Independence from the Mother Country and the commencement of our nearly two hundred and thirty year experiment as a constitutional republic.

Citizens of most of the world's nations can point to aspects of their history of which they're justly proud and other aspects which they could wish never happened. Americans are no different. There's much to be proud of and some things we could wish were not part of our history. Even so, the cavils of malcontents, primarily in our universities, notwithstanding, we have much to celebrate.

America was founded on certain principles which are rarely enough observed, even in this modern era, despite the lip-service often paid to them. Our Founders declared that all men are created equal, a claim that made the eventual emancipation of slaves and full citizenship of women inevitable.

They forged a nation based on the principles that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and that human beings are endowed by God with inherent rights that can't be taken away without due process.

These two principles were alien to the communist and socialist totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a circumstance which resulted in two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, and over 100 million corpses. Our Founders also guaranteed that we'd have the right to free speech and the freedom to practice our religion, two essential rights without which no society can be truly free.

Yes, there are black marks. We treated the Indians horribly, practiced chattel slavery for seventy years after becoming a nation, and contemporary urban crime and dysfunction is as distressing as it is undeniable, but though it may sound like boastfulness or chauvinism (I truly don't mean it to be), it's hard to think of any nation or empire in history that has been more powerful, brought greater prosperity to its people and those of the world, and has at the same time exceeded America in terms of sheer moral goodness.

The point has been made by others that America is one of the few countries where one can immigrate from anywhere in the world and become an American. What's meant by that is this: Moving to Japan doesn't make you Japanese. Moving to China doesn't make you Chinese. Moving to Mexico doesn't make you Mexican and moving to France doesn't make you French, at least not in the sense that moving to America makes you American.

The very fact that so many people want to come here, that the free world looks to America for leadership - moral, political, and military - is compelling evidence for the conviction that America is indispensable. Indeed, the fact that so many want to come here gives the lie to the left's portrayal of America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and corrupt.

If America ceased to exist what would be the likely consequence? Europe would eventually become a vassal to an expansionist Russia; North Korea would undoubtedly swallow up South Korea and perhaps Japan; China would certainly grab Taiwan and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines; India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, would seek to settle old scores; Radical Muslim groups would turn much of the world into an abattoir; and Israel would be in a fight for its existence against much of the Muslim world, a fight that'd probably also result in nuclear war.

It's not unrealistic to fear that without America much of the world would spiral into a state of darkness and violent chaos, with freedom flickering out almost everywhere.

On this Fourth of July let's humbly and gratefully celebrate the fact that America is still the hope of freedom-loving people everywhere. Let's all work, those of us who are Americans, to keep it that way and to strive continuously to be worthy citizens of this great nation.

Freely Confused

At a neuroscience blog called TheNess Steven Novella shares some thoughts about free will, meaning and morality, and either he's confused or I am. He begins by affirming his belief, standard among materialist neuroscientists, that free will is an illusion:

From everything we know about brain function, our experience of our own existence, including what we perceive and the apparent choices we make, are largely a constructed illusion. Many times we feel as if we are making a conscious choice, but we can see in the brain that the choice was actually made subconsciously before we are even aware of it.

Even when the choice is made consciously, meaning we are aware of the factors that are affecting the decision, that does not mean we have truly free will. The brain is still a machine, and is dependent upon the laws of physics. A stone does not have free will to choose its path as it rolls down a hill. Its path is entirely determined by physics. Some argue that brain processes are no different, just orders of magnitude more complex.

He acknowledges, however, that he can't really live consistently with this belief:

Even though I am highly aware of what neuroscience has to say about the illusion of free will and decision making, I also recognize that we have to live our life as if we have free will. We do make decisions, and those decisions have moral and ethical implications.

In other words, his basic outlook or worldview is one which he admits is unlivable. His materialist neuroscience tells him there's no free will, but he has to live as if there is:

We need, to some extent, to divorce our abstract thinking from our practical and emotional thinking about our lives. The abstract thinking is useful, and it informs how we approach things, but we cannot get lost in the weeds.

This doesn't sound very scientific. If science says there's no free will, if the truth is that our "choices" are determined, then how is it rational to just pretend that that's not really the way things are at all?

The same dilemma presents itself to Novella when he takes up the question of meaning:

To give yet another example, is there meaning in life? From a purely abstract philosophical perspective, I would have to say no. There is no objective source of meaning. But from a practical point of view I say – humans have a need for meaning, and we can make our own meaning in life. Sure, it’s subjective, but so what? Everything depends on your perspective anyway.

From an objective perspective we are a fleeting grain of dust in a vast universe that does not recognize or care about our brief existence. But from a human perspective, in both time scale and space, we have a great deal of impact on the people around us and our little corner of the world. I choose [?] to focus on the perspective that scales with my life, and not dwell on our ultimate insignificance.

In other words, science reveals that there's no free will and no meaning to life. Novella accepts those conclusions because he's a scientist and believes that science is our best guide to reality, but the entailments of those conclusions are uncongenial so Novella chooses (his word, strangely enough) to ignore them and live according to his subjective preferences. How is that rationally consistent?

He concludes by saying this:

In the same way, while I find the question of free will interesting, I focus on living a moral and ethical life as a free agent.

But if there really is no free will pretending there is seems a bit delusional.

Moreover, if there's no free will there can be no moral or ethical duties. You can't have a duty to do something unless you also have the ability to choose to do it.

If there's no free will there's no moral obligation, no human responsibility, and no human dignity. If Novella believes there indeed are obligations, responsibilities, and human dignity then by implication he's affirming that there really is free will.

If, on the other hand, he wants to say that obligations, responsibilities, and dignity don't exist but that we should pretend they do, then he's living in a fantasyland.

That sounds to me neither scientific nor reasonable.

Agnostic Agonistes

One of the most famous astronomers of the twentieth century, Robert Jastrow, discusses the struggle he had in reconciling his scientific materialism and agnosticism with what science had learned about the cosmos in the previous century.

Actually, discoveries over the last few decades concerning the fine-tuning of the forces and constants of the universe have only amplified Jastrow's struggle, or would have were he still alive today.

See here, for instance:

Our Amazing World

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop. Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-blowing.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically:

Sowing and Reaping

So Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring from the Supreme Court at the end of July and the left is in a panic over the prospect of President Trump placing yet another Justice on the bench.

Since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused in 2016 to allow a vote on President Obama's pick, Merrick Garland, to replace the late Antonin Scalia until after the election Democrats are demanding now that he follow the same course this time and hold a vote on Trump's selection until after the November midterms. Their hope is that the Democrats will be able to retake the Senate in November and thus block any conservative Justice that Trump would nominate.

It's not clear that the Democrats have much of a chance of regaining power in the Senate, but that aside, their demand that McConnell treat this nominee as he treated Judge Garland on pain of being guilty of gross hypocrisy suffers from historical amnesia.

Joseph Wulfsohn at The Federalist gives the background:

It was in 2013 when then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) established the infamous “nuclear option,” which allows a simple majority in the Senate to approve all judicial nominees with the exception of Supreme Court appointees. At the time, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) actually warned his Democratic colleagues, saying “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.” Well, Reid and the vast majority of Senate Democrats passed the nuclear option in a 52-48 vote.

The "nuclear option" allowed judges to be approved on a simple majority in the Senate rather than needing 60 votes. Senator Reid imposed this rule because Democrats had a majority but they lacked enough votes to override any Republican reservations about a particular candidate. By requiring only a simple majority the Democrats were able to ignore Republican concerns about a nominee and fill the courts with liberal judges.

Then, in February of 2016 Justice Scalia died. President Obama chose Garland to fill his seat. Garland would probably have been confirmed if his nomination came to a vote but McConnell cited a suggestion by then Senator Joe Biden, who was now Obama's Vice-President, that the Senate not approve Supreme Court nominees during a presidential election year and allow voters to decide in November whether they want the president's nominee on the Court.

Biden had made this recommendation in order to stall a Republican Court nominee, but the "Biden Rule", as it came to be called, only pertained to nominees in a presidential election year, not a midterm election year. Thus, it seems a little disingenuous for Democrats to demand that McConnell, having invoked the "Biden Rule" to stop an Obama appointee in a presidential election season, do the same now in a midterm year.

Anyway, Democrats were angry about the delay of the Garland nomination, but everyone expected that Hillary would be elected president in November and that Obama's pick would then be confirmed.

It didn't work out that way, of course. Trump was elected, largely because voters were fearful of the havoc a liberal Supreme Court might wreak upon the nation. Trump picked Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy, a pick which embittered the left and animated them to do everything they could to prevent Gorsuch from being seated.

They could indeed block Gorsuch because the "nuclear option" only applied to lower court judges, not SCOTUS appointees. If the Republicans couldn't get 60 votes to confirm Gorsuch his nomination was dead. McConnell warned his Democrat colleagues that if they continued to obstruct Gorsuch's nomination he’d be willing to change the Senate rule to require only a simple majority for SCOTUS nominees as well as other judges. The Democrats didn’t yield, so McConnell had the rule changed and Gorsuch was ultimately confirmed.

Here's Wulfsohn again:

[The] Democrats are trying to use McConnell’s 2016 political maneuvering against him, saying that the Senate should halt the nomination process until after the election. But even the Washington Post had to call out their BS since McConnell [following Biden] stressed the Senate shouldn’t approve nominees during a presidential election and not during midterm elections.

Plus, Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have conveniently forgotten that the Senate confirmed President Obama’s SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan in August 2010, just months before those midterms.

In other words, the Democrats are reaping what they themselves have sown. They were warned that this would happen, but they put political expediency over political prudence and now McConnell is making them pay.

So, President Trump will name a nominee within the next few weeks, and barring some sort of revolt against Trump by squishy (Collins, Murkowski) or spiteful (McCain, Flake, Corker) GOP senators, that nominee will be confirmed.

The Court will then, probably, have five Justices who believe that the country should be run in accord with the Constitution and not current political fashion.

It could make a substantial difference because even though Kennedy often sided with the Court's conservatives there were key cases in which he did not.

But the really troubling news for the left is that it's quite possible that the Republicans will hold power in the Senate in November and that Trump will get to appoint at least one more Justice before 2020. We'll see. Meanwhile, the left being what it is, the next couple of months could get very ugly.

It's a Mystery

I filched some of the following post from philosopher V.J. Torley at Uncommon Descent. He has some interesting things to say about Dr. James Tour's work and views on the origin of life that I'd like to pass on to you.

The technical name for the origin of life is abiogenesis, the emergence of living cells from non-living material precursors. Abiogenesis is a necessary first step for the evolution of higher life forms. Until there was life there was no evolution.

Interestingly, all theories of naturalistic abiogenesis entail mind-blowingly improbabilities, which means that it's highly probable that naturalism, the belief that everything is explicable in terms of natural processes and forces, is false.

Torley introduces us to Dr. Tour who is nothing if not an expert witness:

Professor James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology, who is also is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. In addition to holding more than 120 United States patents, as well as many non-US patents, Professor Tour has authored more than 600 research publications.

He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, and he was named among “The 50 most Influential Scientists in the World Today” by TheBestSchools.org in 2014. Tour was named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine in 2013, and he won the ACS Nano Lectureship Award from the American Chemical Society in 2012. As if that were not enough, Tour was ranked one of the top 10 chemists in the world over the past decade by Thomson Reuters in 2009.

So how does Dr. Tour say that unaided nature produced the first living cell? He states emphatically that we have no idea whatsoever:

We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins, were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex system, and eventually to that first cell.

Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those who say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis.

From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system.

That’s how clueless we are. I’ve asked all of my colleagues: National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners. I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professor says, “It’s all worked out,” [or] your teachers say, “It’s all worked out,” they don’t know what they’re talking about. It is not worked out.

In other words, all those people who tell us that the naturalistic evolution of life is a fact and that only nincompoops, Trump voters, and Westboro Baptists are skeptical of its efficacy, are in fact clueless as to how the first step in the process could have ever been taken.

Torley quotes Tour some more:

Let us assume that all the building blocks of life, not just their precursors, could be made in high degrees of purity, including homochirality where applicable, for all the carbohydrates, all the amino acids, all the nucleic acids and all the lipids. And let us further assume that they are comfortably stored in cool caves, away from sunlight, and away from oxygen, so as to be stable against environmental degradation.

And let us further assume that they all existed in one corner of the earth, and not separated by thousands of kilometers or on different planets. And that they all existed not just in the same square kilometer, but in neighboring pools where they can conveniently and selectively mix with each other as needed.

Now what? How do they assemble? Without enzymes, the mechanisms do not exist for their assembly. It will not happen and there is no synthetic chemist that would claim differently because to do so would take enormous stretches of conjecturing beyond any that is realized in the field of chemical sciences…

I just saw a presentation by a Nobel prize winner modeling the action of enzymes, and I walked up to him afterward, and I said to him, “I’m writing an article entitled: ‘Abiogenesis: Nightmare.’ Where do these enzymes come from? Since these things are synthesized, … starting from the beginning, where did these things come from?” He says, “What did you write in your article?” I said, “I said, ‘It’s a mystery.’” He said, “That’s exactly what it is: it’s a mystery.”

It's a mystery, he says. If a theist were to give this answer in reply to some question about God the skeptic community would suffer collective side-stitches from laughing so hard, but the cornerstone of naturalism, the belief that life arose from non-life without any intelligent intervention or direction, is an inexplicable mystery. Yet naturalists insist that it's rational to believe in an inexplicable mystery, no matter how improbable it may be, and that it's irrational to believe that somehow life arose as a consequence of intelligent agency.

Let's put this a different way. Which is more probable, that a functioning computer could be produced by a series of highly improbable physical accidents or that a functioning computer could be produced by an intelligent engineer? We have lots of experience of engineers producing amazingly complex structures which contain high information loads, but we have little or no experience of such things being produced by the random action of natural processes. As with computers, so, too, with the first cell.

Thus, the existence of a first cell is more probable given the existence of an intelligent agent than it would be if no such agent exists, and since it's more rational to believe what's more probable than to believe what's less probable, it's more rational to believe that life arose as a result of intelligent agency.

If you've a background in cellular chemistry or an interest in the topic and would like to watch Tour's entire lecture it's here.

Improbable Things Happen All the Time

It's pretty much accepted on all sides of the theism/naturalism debate that a life-permitting universe existing by chance is astronomically improbable and that the chance organization of a self-replicating cell is likewise astronomically improbable.

Theists therefore conclude that chance explanations are literally incredible and that the best inference from these improbabilities is that the universe and living things are not the result of chance processes but are instead intelligently orchestrated.

Naturalists sometimes reply with a shrug and a dismissive claim that improbable things happen all the time so we shouldn't get excited over the fact that a finely-tuned universe or an exceedingly complex biological cell are improbable. After all, they say, your own existence is highly improbable, given all the contingencies that needed to occur for you to be conceived. Yet here you are.

There is, however, something wrong with this response.

To see the error consider poker. The odds of being dealt a royal flush (Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and ten of the same suit) are the same as being dealt any other combination of five cards, but if you were dealt a royal flush in a high stakes poker game you wouldn't be lackadaisical about it. You'd be stunned at your good fortune. But why should you be if a royal flush is no less likely than any other hand?

There are at least two reasons, the second being related to the first:

First, a royal flush has an apriori significance. It's the highest, most valuable, hand in poker. It's that specified prior significance which makes the royal flush so much more extraordinary than any other hand of equal probability.

Second, even though a royal flush is no more improbable than any other particular five card hand, what would astonish a poker player who was dealt a royal flush is that being dealt some other, non-royal flush combination of cards is unimaginably more likely than being dealt a royal flush. In other words, being dealt the specific combination of cards that has the highest specified value in the game is far less likely than being dealt any other combination that lacks these two properties.

This is similar to the lottery. What makes winning the lottery so improbable is not that the particular combination of numbers on your ticket is less likely than any other possible combination but that it's far more likely that any ticket you purchase will not be a winning combination of numbers. It's astronomically less likely that a lottery player will buy the ticket which specifies the particular combination of numbers that specifies a big payout than that he or she would buy a ticket displaying some other combination of numbers.

Or consider throwing a bucket of paint against a wall. Let's assume that the chances of any particular pattern being formed by the splattered paint are the same as any other particular pattern. Yet the chances of producing some random pattern are perhaps infinitely greater than the chances of producing a picture of the Mona Lisa.

The odds that a universe would exhibit all the precise values for the parameters, constants, and forces that specify a life-sustaining universe, out of the endless possible values it could've had, are like the odds of getting the Mona Lisa by splashing a bucket of paint against the wall. And that's why the "improbable events occur all the time" argument fails to impress.

That's also why so many thinkers who wish to avoid the conclusion of theism embrace the multiverse hypothesis. If only we're dealt enough hands, the thinking goes, if only we buy enough tickets, if only we splash enough paint, we're bound to get a royal flush, a winning ticket, or the Mona Lisa eventually.

So, if there's an infinity of different universes out there then all possible universes must exist, and, since ours is a possible universe, there just has to be one as improbable as ours. There has to be a Mona Lisa in that infinity somewhere, the multiverse proponents tell us, and we just happen to be it.

Progressive Bigotry

Being a progressive means never having to worry about being consistent.

On the heels of revelations that MSNBC's premier progressive and Trump-hater, Joy Reid, has in the past written some very nasty things about gays and others, comes word that last Friday night White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant because the owner dislikes her politics.

The northern Virginia eatery is called the Red Hen and is owned by a woman named Stephanie Wilkinson. Wilkinson later claimed that she and her staff had moral objections to the Trump administration’s reluctance to have taxpayers pay for elective transgenderizing surgery and hormones for soldiers, and over the weekend many on the left celebrated her bold slap in the face to Trump and his minions.

Of course, had a bakery owner declined to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple because of moral objections to gay weddings, or if a Jewish restaurateur declined on moral or political grounds to serve a Muslim who was known to be anti-zionist, or a white refused on moral grounds to serve a black patron who had publicly favored massive civil disobedience, the progressive left would have been screaming that this was a violation of the patrons' constitutional rights. They would have been initiating lawsuits and calling for the offending business to be shut down.

But, of course, it's okay for a progressive to discriminate against a conservative because, well, it's the moral thing to do.

It's okay for progressives to refuse service in a public accomodation to someone with whom they disagree politically. It's okay for a fashion designer to refuse to design a dress for the First Lady for political reasons. It's okay for progressives to incite violence as Maxine Waters is doing with her absurd calls for more intimidation of conservatives. It's okay for progressives like Donny Deutsch to call Trump voters nazis on MSNBC. It's okay for progressives to harass politicians and their families, but were a conservative to do any of these things they'd be prosecuted, sued, fired, run out of business.

As Joy Pullman observes, however, there's a big difference between the polite refusals of the cake bakers and florists to participate in a gay wedding and the refusal of Ms Wilkinson to serve Sarah Sanders' party:

The Christian [business people] happily serve and sell to LGBT people. Both Phillips and Stutzman explicitly have, and eagerly offer to continue, serving those they disagree with. The only thing they will not do is participate in a religious ceremony with them. Every other commercial transaction is on the table.

On the contrary, the Trump political opponents who refuse service will not do so in any fashion. It has nothing to do with religion or a particular context or message for them. They refuse to serve the group they disagree with entirely.

Progressives promote tolerance but are themselves often exceedingly intolerant. They condemn bigotry but are themselves bigots. They talk about civility but call for harassment and even violence not only against political figures and their families but also employees of ICE and their families. Indeed, they advocate the harassment of anyone who disagrees with their agenda.

One wonders what principles, if any, guide people on the left. It's a good thing for progressives that so many voters don't care much about consistent adherence to principle. If they did very few progressives would get many votes. They certainly wouldn't get votes on the basis of their ideas because they articulate none. They appeal only to raw force and intimidation.

Sarah Sanders is probably too gracious a lady to do it, but I wish she'd initiate a lawsuit against the Red Hen. Ms Wilkinson deserves a taste of the left's own medicine.

Undeniable

Among biologists, and indeed anyone interested in the question of life's origin, there are, broadly, two live options. The first, the regnant view in most universities, is that life itself and ultimately the grand diversity of living things, arose through purely natural processes acting over long periods of time.

This is the view commonly called Darwinism and was indeed the position held by Charles Darwin himself.

On this model there's no room nor need for any supernatural intelligence to act at any stage in the process. Darwinians hold that in principle all of biology can ultimately be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry and the initial conditions of the universe, all of which just happen to be what they are.

The second option is that however life may have first arisen and diverged into the manifold forms we see around us, it could not have occurred solely through natural processes. A supernatural intelligent agent must have been involved. The manner of that involvement is controversial among those who hold this view, but there's nevertheless broad agreement among them that apart from that involvement no life would have ever appeared on earth or anywhere else.

Protein chemist Doug Axe, the author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed elaborates on this second option in a piece at Evolution News. In a dialogue with a friend Axe says:

I understand why you, as a theist, are okay with God having created life either by divine fiat or by wielding natural forces the way a sculptor wields a chisel. So am I! The problem is that neither of those options is on the table in the biology departments of the major research universities. There, chance and nature (both completely blind) are the only options on offer.

As understood by their main proponents, Darwinism and design are most emphatically not compatible...: proponents of design hold that living things cannot have arisen by ordinary natural processes, whereas Darwinists hold the opposite view. I understand the appeal to giving a nod in both directions, but that doesn’t resolve the contradiction. Evolution is either unguided (in which case it doesn’t work) or overwhelmingly dependent on guidance (in which case it isn’t natural). It can’t be both!

This is the fundamental divide in the Evolution debate. The critical disagreement is not between special creationists and evolutionists, nor between theistic evolutionists and intelligent design theorists. The fundamental debate is between those who believe life to be solely the product of an unguided, purely naturalistic process and those who believe that an intelligent agent is somehow necessary to explain what we find in the biosphere.

Axe goes on:

Keep in mind that the improbabilities I’m referring to are not at all restricted to the origin of the first bacterial cell. For example, hummingbirds exhibit high-level functional coherence that is entirely absent from bacteria.

According to the argument I put forward in Undeniable, the probabilistic implications of this simple observation make it impossible for accidental processes acting on bacteria to have produced anything comparable to hummingbirds, whether on Earth or on any other planet.

...Darwin offered first and foremost a mechanism which he thought explained the origin of all modern life from some simple first life. I’m saying he was comprehensively wrong about that .... Specifically, I’m saying we can be very confident that the blind natural mechanism he appealed to can’t possibly be the inventor of new forms of life.

His other big contribution was the idea of all life being related by common descent — Darwin’s tree of life. That idea is separable from the question of mechanism, and I’m very willing to consider its merits (in fact, this is one focus of my current work). Undeniable takes no position on common descent.

In other words, even if one assumes that somehow, against astronomical odds, a primeval, self-replicating cell were to have formed eventually giving rise to all creatures extant throughout the history of earth, the crucial metaphysical question is still whether chance, matter, and physical law can provide a sufficient account for this history or whether the evidence is better explained by invoking purposeful engineering.

Axe's book Undeniable makes a powerful case that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the intelligent agent view unless one, because of an apriori philosophical commitment to naturalism or atheism, simply refuses to consider it.

The Deepest Mystery in Biology

The following video is of an interview with neuroscientist Giulio Tononi in which Tononi explains what's called the "hard problem" of human consciousness.

Consciousness, our awareness of our experience of the world, has proven to be extremely difficult to explain. How do electrochemical goings-on in the brain produce the sensation of blue, or the taste of sweet, or the sound of a violin?

No one knows, and our inability to explain consciousness in material terms has led many philosophers to doubt that materialism provides a correct or complete picture of human beings.

Many have argued that in addition to our physical material brains there must be something else, an immaterial substance, mind or soul, that somehow plays a role in producing sensations like pain, color, warmth, and so on.

Indeed, the nature of consciousness is perhaps the deepest mystery in biology, and this video helps give some insight why that's so:

Dropping Their Masks

One thing we can say about Donald Trump is that he certainly has a talent for getting liberals to reveal their true selves. Recently we've been treated to an extraordinary spectacle of rudeness, vulgarity and cruelty by people who call themselves liberal and progressive.

Here's a recap of just a few examples:

Robert De Niro stepped to the microphone to give a simple introduction to Bruce Springsteen’s Tony-nominated show, and immediately went full Trump Derangement Syndrome: “I’m gonna say one thing … F–k Trump,” De Niro declared with his fists in the air. “It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump,’ it’s ‘F–k Trump!'”

His remarks were welcomed with cheers and a standing ovation from his audience. De Niro has also said about the president that he’d like to “punch him in the face.”

Bill Maher told his viewers that he was hoping for another recession because a crashing economy can hurt Trump’s reelection chances. “Sorry if that hurts people,” Maher added insincerely, “but it’s either root for a recession or you lose your democracy.”

“Full Frontal” host Samantha Bee trashed Ivanka Trump for posting a picture on social media accounts of her and her infant son during the emotional immigration debate. Bee called the First Lady a “feckless c–t.”

Peter Fonda ranted, somewhat incoherently, that, "We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles and see if mother will stand up against the giant a**hole she is married to. 90 million people in the streets on the same weekend in the country. F***."

Fonda also tweeted this about Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielson: "Kristjen Nielson is a lying gash that should be put in a cage and poked at by passerby. The gash should be pilloried in Lafayette Square naked and whipped by passerby while being filmed for posterity."

Then there's a truly sick piece from the degenerate mind of someone at Occupy Wall Street. It's titled What to Do If You Encounter An ICE Agent and it consists of a series of six panels (You can see it here if you have the stomach) illustrating the following "instructions":

1. If an ICE agent tries to take your child at the border, don't panic.
2. Pull your child away as quickly as possible by force.
3. Gently tell your child to close his/her eyes and ears so they won't witness what you're about to do.
4. Grab the ICE agent from behind and push your knife into his chest with an upward thrust, breaking through his sternum.
5. Reach into his chest and pull out his still beating heart.
6. Hold his bloody heart out for all other agents to see, and tell them that the same fate awaits them if they f*** with your child again.

This sort of despicable rhetoric will sooner or later get someone killed.

These examples illustrate how corrosive hatred can be to the human soul. Hatred makes people spiritually ugly, and spiritually ugly people do and say ugly things.

Nor are these examples symptomatic of the moral sickness of just a few isolated individuals. Rather than be greeted by repugnance and disgust, they received standing ovations, cheers and hundreds of retweets and "likes".

What has happened to our culture that it produces and celebrates people who say such things? Why do so many who gravitate to the left express themselves in such vicious and vulgar ways? What is it about liberalism that attracts such people? Why do people in the Democratic party and the liberal media not condemn this behavior in the strongest possible terms?

If anyone on the right had said things about President Obama, his wife or the Obama children anywhere close to what has been said about President Trump, his wife and his son, the offenders would've been turned into social pariahs and those who cheered for them treated with the opprobrium they would've deserved.

Not so, however, in these cases. If the media notices it all, they minimize it, make excuses for it, rationalize it. They make themselves complicit in the continuing degradation of our political discourse and complicit in the bloodshed that may well eventually result from it.

Donald Trump has, without even trying, illumined some very dark hearts. He has provoked these people to drop their masks and reveal to the world the sleazy, depraved individuals they are, and that's no mean public service.

Good and Evil

In the following brief video Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft explains why any reference to moral good or moral evil presupposes that there's a God - a personal, transcendent moral authority who establishes objective moral obligations and who holds human beings ultimately accountable for their behavior.

Modern secularists find themselves in a troublesome spot when it comes to talking about matters such as these. They want very much to say that behaviors like child abuse, sexual assault, torture, and environmental destruction are objectively immoral, but they realize, if only subliminally, that such language implies an objective standard of morality, which in turn implies the existence of a personal God.

Unwilling to follow their intuitions to their logical conclusion they have to limit their rhetoric to emotional but weak expressions of personal distaste for the behavior in question.

Thus we hear people declare that a given act is "inappropriate", or "not okay", or "unacceptable", or "not cool", but what they can't bring themselves to say is that it's objectively, morally, wrong or evil.

Listening to people in the media, for example, attempting to express their personal disapproval of something like the sexual depredations of a Harvey Weinstein without using moral language is as amusing as the attempt is ridiculous.

The shallowness of much contemporary "moral" discourse is compounded by the fact that many of the same folks who are willing to judge the behavior of others as "inappropriate" will, in other contexts, be heard touting the need to refrain from being "judgmental" and to be tolerant of other people's conduct.

Aside from the fact that there's something absurd about judging others for being judgmental and refusing to tolerate intolerance, there's a further problem. Being judgmental or intolerant can only be wrong if there's an objective standard of right and wrong in the first place. When someone criticizes another for being judgmental or intolerant they're implying, even if they're unaware of it, that they believe these things violate an objective standard of right and wrong, and, by extension, that there's a transcendent personal moral authority, a God, who has established that standard.

The only alternative to this awkward tacit admission on their part is to give up morality altogether, and many thoughtful secularists agree. Consider these statements, from among the dozens which could be cited, from some prominent atheists:

• "What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." Biologist Richard Dawkins
• "What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after." Writer Ernest Hemingway
• “This philosopher (Joel Marks) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality….
  I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality….Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.” Philosopher Joel Marks
• "Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs….The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways." Feminist Margaret Sanger
• "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel." Philosopher Richard Rorty.
• "One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." Charles Darwin
• "As evolutionists, we see that no justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends....
  In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference." E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse

In other words, once we declare our independence from belief in God, we must also recognize that morality is just a subjective preference, like our preference for a particular flavor of ice cream. On the other hand, every time a man says that something is morally wrong, he's pretty much acknowledging that God exists.

The problem is that very few people, including those quoted above, can forego moral judgments. Each of us just knows that some things, like torturing children, are profoundly wrong. This isn't simply a matter of subjective inclination, but on atheism it must be.

Thus the atheist, unless he's an utter moral nihilist, finds that he can't live consistently with his worldview, but rather than give up his atheism he chooses instead to live with the inconsistency. Even if it means withholding any and all moral judgments.

Anything, he reasons, is better than accepting the existence of God.

Nietzsche Was a Prophet

One reason the 19th century atheistic German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is so interesting is that he was exceptionally clear-sighted about the consequences of the European embrace of atheism, particularly the consequences of atheism for traditional morality.

There's a popular conception current today that one doesn't need to believe in God to have moral values or to be good, and of course, in one sense that's true. Anyone can hold whatever moral principles one wishes, but the problem for moderns is that without an objective standard of morality or goodness no values one chooses to live by are any more "right" or "wrong" than any others.

If atheism is true a man can choose to always tell the truth, but had he chosen instead to always lie he wouldn't have been morally wrong, he'd just be different. Without a transcendent, objective standard of right and wrong morality is just a set of subjective preferences, and no one's subjective preference is any more authoritative than anyone else's.

Moreover, without a transcendent moral lawgiver there can be no ultimate accountability for the moral choices we make. Thus, when Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa both died their fates were the same - extinction. There was no real accountability for their choices so what does it matter whether one chooses the path of a tyrant or a saint?

Nietzsche saw all this clearly. In his 1889 book Twilight of the Idols he wrote:

[The English] are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. . . . In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing . . . what a moral fanatic one is. . . .We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. . . .

Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. . . . Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, [nor] what [is] evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.

When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt.

For the English, morality is not yet a problem.

It might be noted that Nietzsche wasn't denying that people can hold certain values without God, he was saying that Christian moral values have no purchase in the absence of belief in God. This is true, but what values do we hold in society that we do not owe to a Christian worldview?

Our belief that all people are equally valuable and that racism is wrong derive from the belief that we are all created in the image of God and that God loves each of us equally.

Our moral repugnance at the sexual abuse of vulnerable women stems from the Christian belief that women are not second class in the eyes of God but have dignity and worth in their own right.

Our alarm at reports of children being separated from their families at the Mexican border stems from the Christian belief that families are instituted by God as the basic unit of society and that it's wrong to interfere with the family without good reason.

Our moral horror at acts of cruelty stems from the Christian belief that we are enjoined by God to treat others with dignity, respect and kindness because God loves them.

None of these beliefs are the products of pagan philosophy nor of what's called evolutionary ethics. Neither racism nor abuse of women nor cruelty to others is "wrong" on either view. In fact, it's difficult to understand what it even means to say that something is wrong if there's no accountability. To say that something is "wrong" is to say little more than that "most people don't like it."

But what does Nietzsche mean by that enigmatic last sentence, "For the English, morality is not yet a problem"?

Western society has built up a certain moral momentum. Even though the train has gone over the cliff it still continues to hurtle forward for a time, but it can't last. When Nietzsche wrote these words the moral consequences of the "Death of God" had not yet been realized. Things were going on as before. People just assumed that some things were right and others were wrong even though they no longer had any basis for making these judgments.

Like a dissolute heir they were living off their Christian inheritance, but the moral capital accumulated during the centuries of Christian hegemony won't last forever.

As Dostoyevsky wrote a bit earlier than Nietzsche, "If God is dead then everything is permitted." If there's no God watching, there's no reason why the Nazis shouldn't seek to exterminate the Jews. If there's no God watching, there's no reason why the Hutus shouldn't slaughter the Tutsis. If there's no God watching there's no reason why anyone with power should refrain from imposing his will on other human beings - to cheat them, degrade them, torture them, or kill them - if he so desires.

Perhaps we are slowing waking up to the fact that by abandoning God we're abandoning the only foundation we can have for what we call morally good behavior. We're dissolving the fabric that holds our society together. Perhaps we're beginning to realize that morality is becoming a problem. Modern man has no good answer to these questions.

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.

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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.