Scientism and Self-Refutation

Philosopher J.P.Moreland has written a fine book titled Scientism and Secularism (2018) from which some of what follows has been borrowed. Scientism is not to be confused with science, but scientists, particularly naturalist or materialist scientists, are often proponents of scientism. Scientism is actually a philosophical view which holds, paradoxically, that science is the only reliable means of apprehending truth.

The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking famously declared in a book he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow titled The Grand Design (2010) that "philosophy is dead" and that all the answers to life's important questions, at least those that can be known, are to be answered henceforth by science.

Hawking is here giving expression to his scientism, the view that all the important questions can either be answered by science or not answered at all, and that the methodologies of science are the only valid path to truth and knowledge. All other ways of knowing must give way to the supreme authority of science, especially the natural, or "hard" sciences like physics and chemistry.

Scientism is a common view, but not only does it have some serious liabilities, the notion that science supersedes philosophy is surely false.

There are at least three things wrong with scientism:

1. It's self-refuting.
2. It's false that science is the only sure way of knowing truth.
3. It's false that philosophy is dead. If it were then science would be impossible.

Scientism is self-refuting because the claim that only what is testable by the methods of science can be trusted to be true is itself a philosophical claim. The claim itself is not subject to being tested through the methods of science. Thus, the basic claim of scientism itself must be false.

Nor can science be the only way of knowing since there are many other things we can know with at least the same level of certainty as we know any of the deliverances of science.

For example, which do you know with stronger certitude, that atoms are the basic building blocks of matter or that torturing children for fun is evil? The latter is not a scientific claim at all, it's a metaphysical claim, yet most of us are far more sure of its truth than we are of the truth of the claim about atoms.

There are other examples of things we know that do not lend themselves at all to scientific demonstration. For example, I can know: that I took a walk on my last birthday, that I hold certain beliefs about science and philosophy, that I have an itch in my foot, that sunsets are beautiful, that justice is good; and I can know the basic laws of math and logic, e.g. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I know that if a proposition (P) entails another proposition (Q) then if P is true so must Q be true.

Not only do we all know such things, we know them with far more certainty than we know the truth of the claims of scientists about, say, global warming, atomic theory or Darwinian evolution.

Moreover, science depends for its very existence upon a series of assumptions, none of which are themselves scientific. All of them are philosophical, so if philosophy is dead where does that leave science?

Here are some examples: The law of cause and effect, the law of sufficient reason, the principle of uniformity, the belief that explanations which exhibit elegance and simplicity are superior to those which don't, the belief that the world is objectively real and intelligible, the belief that our senses are reliable, and the belief that our reason is trustworthy. All of these are philosophical assumptions that cannot be demonstrated scientifically to be true.

Scientism is a bid by some materialists to assert epistemological hegemony over our intellectual lives and especially over the disciplines of philosophy and theology. However, just as similar attempts in the 20th century such as positivism and verificationism fell victim to self-referential incoherence, so, too, does scientism.

The claim that science is uniquely authoritative and that we should all recognize and bow to its supremacy is quite simply false.

Endorsing Philosophy

Shannon Rupp is a journalist who, in a piece at Salon.com, claims that the most valuable courses she took as an undergrad were philosophy courses.

This may seem literally incredible to some readers, so I encourage you to follow the link to the original article and read her endorsement for yourselves.

Meanwhile, here are a few salient excerpts:

I tell people the most useful classes I took were all in philosophy.

Yes, the course of study that has long been denigrated as frivolous and useless in the job market has been the part of my education that I lean on again and again. For work and everything else.

[A] smattering of undergrad philosophy classes taught me something applicable to any and every job: clarity of thought. Name me one aspect of your life that doesn't benefit from being able to think something through clearly.

Because it delivers real skills, philosophy doesn't go out of fashion the way the vague, trendy subjects do. The University of Windsor just announced it's closing its Centre for Studies in Social Justice, after 11 years. I suspect some of the problem there may be that no one can actually define "social justice." And the importance of defining terms to ensure we all mean the same thing when we're talking is one of those skills I picked up in philosophy.

Epistemology -- the study of what we can know -- turned out to be particularly useful, since people love to tell reporters what they believe as if it's a fact. Well, to be fair, they often don't know the difference between their beliefs and facts. They think the mere fact that they believe something is true -- for example, that angels watch over us -- makes it true.

Logic had obvious benefits, as did ethics. And I've found that genuine disciplines that train us to think more clearly in any field never lose their value.

It seems that the postmodernist theory that began infecting the academy some 40 years ago has sent sensible students running, screaming. English was hit particularly hard by this nonsense. Where they once emphasized writing, they now turn students into PoMo phrase generators who are of no use to anyone.

I've long thought that the debate about whether universities should be offering trades training or educating citizens is something of a red herring -- the discussion should be about whether to study knowledge or nonsense. Post-secondary schools are as subject to fashions and fads as any business trying to edge out competitors; they have to fight for public funding and private donors as well as students. All too often that has them promoting programs that are little more than trendy course titles with flimsy credentials. Or selling seats in cash cow courses like journalism.

Rupp closes with this:

... I also recall a philosophy teaching assistant, who took a sabbatical from his fat-salaried job in the computer industry to do a company-funded PhD. He had benefited from that wave of computer development that hired logical thinkers to be trained in the new-fangled gizmos. For a brief, shining moment, BAs in philosophy had been hot commodities at places like IBM. One of his pals even wrote patents for companies that developed innovative tools and techniques.

He thought some philosophy courses ought to be mandatory for every undergrad, partly because of the economic and technological upheaval of the time. The prognosticators warned that we would change careers an average of six times and work in jobs heretofore unimagined in this brave new world.

"Jobs change. But if you teach students to think clearly first, they can do whatever else they want to do," was the argument he made.

Of course, I'm biased, but I think everything Rupp says here is on the mark.

This is not to argue that all students should major in philosophy (although a minor in philosophy can be very useful), but it is to affirm that taking some traditional philosophy classes (I'd recommend staying away from the "boutique" courses) would not only open up whole new ways of seeing the world, but also train students to think more clearly and more deeply about a much wider range of ideas than they may have ever realized existed.

Thoughts on the Khashoggi Affair

Like a cat chasing a laser dot around the carpet the media is currently fixated on the apparent murder of a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi government agents in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. If the details that have emerged about this crime are true then it is indeed a particularly grisly piece of butchery, but I have a couple of questions about the reaction to it in the American media.

First, murders committed by governments in this part of the world, and other parts as well, are not unheard of. Why is the media so interested in this particular homicide? Surely our media elites know that the Russians, Chinese, and dozens of lesser nations imprison, torture and/or murder dissidents and other problematic citizens with regularity, and yet our journalists show little serious interest in these stories unless the crime is committed on foreign soil such as were the poisonings of Russian citizens in England. The Saudi embassy is not foreign soil, however. It's Saudi territory.

Is the outcry over this crime especially acute because Saudi Arabia is an American "ally"? But so are Egypt and Pakistan our allies, after a fashion, and neither of these countries are particularly squeamish about dealing brutally with their internal dissenters.

In Islamic and communist countries Christians are often horribly persecuted, both by the government or with government connivance and acquiescence, but the Western media merely yawns even though the facts are easily available to them. Why does the Khashoggi affair suddenly arouse their indignation? Is it because he's a fellow "journalist"? Is it because they hope, perhaps, to be able to use his murder to somehow discredit President Trump? Is it because Khashoggi was a Muslim Brotherhood activist?

I really have no idea, but the media's high level of concern for Khashoggi does seem odd considering their general indifference to the murders of other dissidents, especially Christians.

But more than the media's selective outrage, I'm piqued by the moral contradictions in the secularist worldview that this episode spotlights.

For example, we're frequently reminded by our elites, both in the media and in academia, that we in the West cannot judge other cultures, that we have no business imposing Western values on people elsewhere in the world, that what's wrong for us isn't necessarily wrong for others, that right and wrong are relative to the time and culture in which people live, and that it's crass cultural chauvinism for us to hold others to our Western moral standards.

In other words, our elites have for over half a century sought to inculcate in us a moral attitude that philosophers call moral relativism. This is the conviction that moral standards are established by the culture, that there is no universal, absolute morality, and that we should therefore be tolerant of how other people view right and wrong since we don't have a monopoly on moral truth.

Yet in the present case, when agents from a very different culture have done something that would be considered a horrific crime in the U.S., the relativists in our media immediately doff their relativism as easily as a child sheds a Halloween mask and they passionately commence condemning the foreign government for violating Western standards of behavior.

This is a strange reaction, to be sure, for folks who would otherwise declare their fealty to a relativistic view of morality.

Yes, we should condemn the murders of citizens wherever they live. Of course we should insist that it's wrong everywhere for a government to harm anyone without due process of law and certainly to do their citizens harm simply for being a political or religious dissenter.

But if relativism is true we're not justified in doing any of this. We can only make a moral judgment on the Saudis if we reject relativism and maintain that there is, in fact, an absolute standard of right and wrong which enjoins us to treat others justly.

But the existence of such a standard is precisely what relativists deny.

Perhaps one reason for this denial is that one can only hold the belief that there is an absolute moral standard if one also holds that there is an absolute moral authority which transcends human culture and consensus.

This, though, leads uncomfortably close to the conclusion that there's a Divine moral law-giver which establishes that standard, and this alarming implication many of our elites are simply loath to accept.

They'd prefer to continue with an unlivable relativism that makes them look foolish and confused in situations like the Jamal Khashoggi affair than admit that their very condemnation of the murder of this Saudi citizen by Saudi agents is a tacit acknowledgement that their naturalistic, materialistic worldview is philosophically untenable.

Of Blind Faith and Metaphors

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

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

The Krebs Citric Acid Cycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once the design of a new metabolic sequence is achieved, a refinement of the pathway may be necessary, and then, a further optimization process will move the design toward maximum efficiency by reaching optimal values of rate and affinity constants of enzymes. Such an optimization process as a result of natural selection is also a well-documented feature of biological evolution.... the design of the pentose phosphate and Calvin cycles can be mathematically derivedby applying optimization principles under a well-established physiological function.... By considering the first stages in the history of life, we may attempt to determine logically under what conditions the Krebs cycle was organized and what its first purpose was.

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

Here's another metaphor:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Belief in Free Will Obsolete? (Pt. III)

In yesterday's post we looked at an argument made by philosopher Stephen Cave in an article in The Atlantic wherein he assumes that libertarian free will is an illusion.

Picking up where yesterday's post left off, Cave next addresses the human and social consequences of a widespread belief in the truth of determinism. They're not good:

Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency....This development raises uncomfortable — and increasingly non-theoretical — questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

Some philosophers have suggested that given the consequences of living consistently with an awareness of the truth of determinism that the philosophical elites ought (strange word in this context) to deceive the masses and just not tell them about it. The elites should foist upon the public a kind of Platonic Noble Lie.

Cave, however, demurs:

[F]ew scholars are comfortable suggesting that people ought to believe an outright lie. Advocating the perpetuation of untruths would breach their integrity and violate a principle that philosophers have long held dear: the Platonic hope that the true and the good go hand in hand.

This is a strange reaction, it seems, for if determinism is true, why should scholars be uncomfortable promoting a lie? What would make such a tactic morally wrong if their decision to employ it was actually compelled by their environment or their genes?

Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower.

There's something very odd about a metaphysical view - physicalism - the implications of which are so destructive that they can't be shared even among many of those who accept the view. If a belief is such that one cannot live with it consistently there's probably something deeply wrong with the belief.

Physicalism, however, does entail determinism and as Cave points out in his essay, the consequences of determinism are bleak. Here are a few other consequences of determinism:

• Praise and blame, reward and punishment, are never deserved since these assume that the recipient could have acted otherwise than he or she did act.
• There are no moral obligations, no moral right and wrong, since morality is contingent upon uncompelled free choice.
• There's no human dignity since dignity is predicated on the ability to make significant choices.
• If it's true one's belief that it's true is determined by many factors which have nothing to do with its truth value.

It's hard to see how people could live with a belief which has these consequences without falling into nihilism and despair. Yet that's where physicalism - and the closely related views called naturalism and materialism - lead.

Philosopher John Searle offers an antidote to the determinism described by Cave in this Closer to the Truth interview:

Is Belief in Free Will Obsolete? (Pt. II)

Philosopher Stephen Cave writes recently in The Atlantic that the idea that human beings have free will is dying out among scientists. The results of the experiments of neuroscientists, he argues, all seem to support the notion that at any given moment there's only one possible future. Our "choices" are determined by causes of which we may be completely unaware but which make our decisions ineluctable.

I've excerpted parts of Cave's essay below and follow the excerpts with critical comments.

Cave observes that,

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment.

But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

It should be noted that the agreement to which he refers is a tacit consequence of a metaphysical assumption shared by many researchers - the assumption that there are no non-physical, non-material factors at play in the universe or in human beings. This view is variously called materialism or, more properly, physicalism. If physicalism is true then determinism follows, but there's no good reason to think that it's true and several good reasons to think, or at least hope, that it's not.

Cave goes on to write that,

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior — otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Quite so, but it doesn't follow from the fact that changes in the physical brain cause changes in behavior that therefore the physical brain is all that's involved in behavior. A viewer can change the physical settings on his television and thereby change the image on the screen, but it would be foolish to conclude that therefore the image can be exhaustively explained in terms of the workings of the television set.

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

This is a misreading of Libet's work, a clarification of which can be read here. Libet himself believed that human beings had free will. It would've been peculiar of him to hold this view after he had proven that the view was wrong.

The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond.

In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

If the system which produces our choices is indeed "a physical system like any other" then determinism is very probably true, but the assumption that our choices are solely the product of physical causes is an unprovable metaphysical statement of faith. If we are also possessed of an immaterial, non-physical mind or soul, as many philosophers believe, that faculty could possibly function as a locus of free choice. The only reason for thinking that such minds don't exist is an a priori commitment to physicalism, but such a commitment is no more rational than is an a priori commitment to a belief in an immaterial mind.

We'll finish up our consideration of Cave's article tomorrow.

Is Belief in Free Will Obsolete? (Pt. I)

Yuval Noah Harari has an essay in The Guardian in which he argues that liberal democracy will not survive the technological age as long as we continue to believe that we have free will, or something like that. His argument is dubious for a couple of reasons.

1. It's not clear how accepting volitional determinism will enhance liberal democracy and save us from corporate and governmental powers which would seek to use technology to control us.

2. He doesn't make much of a case for believing that determinism is true. He simply asserts it.

The closest he comes to arguing for it is this passage:

Unfortunately, “free will” isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of “free will” to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices. If our choices aren’t made freely, why should God punish or reward us for them?

According to the theologians, it is reasonable for God to do so, because our choices reflect the free will of our eternal souls, which are independent of all physical and biological constraints.

This myth has little to do with what science now teaches us about Homo sapiens and other animals. Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have. You don’t decide to be introvert or extrovert, easy-going or anxious, gay or straight. Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.

I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.

It's true that there's much about us that we don't choose, but as neuroscientist Michael Egnor points out, these things are not will:

Humans have emotions which are indeed not free, in the sense that we cannot freely choose our passions. Appetites—lust, greed, hunger, fear, etc—are common to all animals, rational and irrational. While humans can tame our appetites to a considerable extent, we are indeed subject to them and do not have libertarian control over them.

Will is a different matter entirely. Will is an immaterial power of the human mind, and it follows on intellect, which is also immaterial. The immateriality of intellect and will is obvious from the objects of intellection and will—universal and abstract concepts, which are immaterial themselves.

The contemplation of these concepts is necessarily immaterial in turn. The immateriality of human intellect and will has been demonstrated logically and philosophically for several millennia by philosophers of all (and no) religious stripes, and the immateriality of intellect and will is strongly supported by modern neuroscience, despite Harari’s uninformed claim.

Harari's belief that free will is a myth is an unstated entailment of his belief in materialism. If all there is to us is our material body, if there is no such thing as an immaterial mind, then determinism may well be true, since matter is indeed deterministic (except at the quantum level). If, however, we do have immaterial minds then our intuition that we really are somehow free to choose may well be true.

Belief in libertarian free will is a properly basic belief. That is, it's a belief that has had a powerful hold on us most of our lives, and since free will is necessary if we're to make sense out of our moral experience, there's no good reason to give it up unless Harari can give us a powerful argument, a defeater, for that belief. This, however, he doesn't do. He simply assumes materialism is true and tacitly concludes that therefore determinism is true also.

But like most determinists Harari can't live consistently with his determinism. In the conclusion of his essay he employs language that only makes sense if in fact we're free. In answer to the question of what we should do in the face of threats to liberal democracy from those who would use technology to control us, he answers:

We need to fight on two fronts simultaneously. We should defend liberal democracy, not only because it has proved to be a more benign form of government than any of its alternatives, but also because it places the fewest limitations on debating the future of humanity.

At the same time, we need to question the traditional assumptions of liberalism (i.e. that we have free will), and develop a new political project that is better in line with the scientific realities and technological powers of the 21st century.

Perhaps he's right about what we should do, but whenever one uses the word "should" in this context one is implying that one's interlocutors possess the ability to choose between alternatives. In other words, Harari is assuming we have the freedom to deny that we are free even as he implies that we are indeed free to pursue the alternatives he urges us to pursue. This borders on being incoherent, if indeed it doesn't cross the line altogether.

More on this important topic tomorrow.

18 Facts about Us and the World

One form of argument employed by investigators - whether police, scientists or philosophers - is called abduction or inference to the best explanation. When confronted by certain facts or evidence, the investigator asks which explanation, among the possible options, fits or explains these facts best with the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

That explanation is then considered the most probable, or best, of the alternatives, and it becomes a working hypothesis until further evidence arises which makes it less tenable.

Below are eighteen facts about the world, some of which are scientific and others of which might be called existential. There are basically two competing metaphysical explanations for these facts in Western culture - naturalism and theism. We must approach the evidence objectively, that is with no a priori assumptions about the truth or falsity of either explanation, and then ask which of the two explanations do these seventeen facts mesh with most comfortably.

Do they conform best with the view that everything is a product of blind forces and serendipity, or are they best explained by assuming the existence of a transcendent, intelligent agent?

Remember, no a priori assumptions about which of the two alternatives is correct are permitted.

Here are the eighteen with a brief elaboration on each:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning: What caused the universe to come into being when it did? Could it have "just happened"?
2. The fact of cosmic fine-tuning: Is it just a lucky accident that there are dozens of forces, constants and other parameters that are calibrated to within astonishingly precise limits such that were it otherwise either life or the universe itself could not exist?
3. The fact of the ubiquity of biological information: It's the uniform experience of human beings that information is the product of a mind. How, then, did the information in DNA and other macromolecules arise?
4. The fact of human consciousness: How does brain matter by itself generate meaning, sensation and awareness?
5. The fact that mathematics can explain much of the world and that we can comprehend math:
Is it just a coincidence that the world is explicable in the language of math? How did we evolve the ability to do higher math when such an ability had no survival value?
6. The joy we experience when we encounter beauty: Why does beauty, whether visual or auditory, affect us?
7. The fact that we believe human reason to be generally reliable: If reason evolved to aid in survival then it doesn't necessarily produce true beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, so why should we trust it?
8. Our sense that we have free will: If we're just a collocation of atoms governed by the principles of chemistry where does the powerful intuition that we're in some sense free to choose and responsible for our choices come from?
9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions: Why would the evolutionary process produce in us a desire for answers which are completely unnecessary for survival?
10. Our sense of moral obligation: Where does our sense that we have a duty to do some things and to avoid others come from? Why do we think this sense of duty is somehow binding upon us?
11. Our sense of guilt/regret: If nothing is really right or wrong why do we have a sense of guilt when we engage in certain behaviors? Why do we feel guilt if we're not guilty and what does it mean to be guilty?
12. Our belief in human dignity: If we're just an animal, an ephemeral product of chance and physical law, from whence comes the notion that we have dignity?
13. Our belief in human worth: Ibid.
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights: Ibid.
15. Our desire for justice: Why have we evolved a desire for justice if there is no such thing, at least not in an ultimate sense?
16. Our need for meaning and purpose: Why, if we're the product of natural selection and genetic mutation, do we yearn for a deeper meaning to life beyond mere reproduction?
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self: If all we are is a "pack of neurons" (Francis Crick) what is it about us that makes us think we're something more, something that perdures through time?
18. Our desire to survive our own death: If death is just a natural part of life, why do we seek to do what we can to avoid it? Why do we have a desire for something more?

So, which worldview, in your opinion, is the best explanation of these eighteen facts?

Fundamentally Transforming the Country

Just a few years ago, students and young people in general faced a dismal job market upon graduation. Burdened with onerous student loan debt some despaired of ever finding a job that would allow them to pay it off, much less support a family, buy a home and embark upon a meaningful career.

If they were poor their outlook was especially bleak. There just were no jobs for the unskilled, our president was admonishing us that many good paying jobs had fled overseas and weren't coming back and that we all needed to get used to this "new normal."

Then came 2016 and the election of a man whom Matthew Continetti describes in a column at the Washington Free Beacon this way:

He brags, he intimidates, he pouts, he jokes, he insults, he is purposefully ambiguous, and he leaves no criticism unanswered. He is unlike any postwar American president, though he shares some qualities with LBJ and Reagan. He is frenetic and polarizing, a showboat and a salesman. His methods are over-the-top, combative, and divisive.

In place of the politics of consensus he adopts the politics of confrontation. Where others mindlessly repeat politically correct clichés, Trump unequivocally challenges them. He has ushered in a new era of American politics by dissolving the varnish that for so long obscured fundamental cultural divisions between and within the parties. He is president of a country that is wilder, zanier, and more unpredictable than before.

Yet he has done more to make the country stronger, to help the poor, and to offer a hopeful future to young people than any president before him, including Ronald Reagan. Wherever one looks - trade, judges, foreign policy, the economy, he is succeeding in doing what his predecessor also promised to do, i.e. fundamentally transform the country, but not in the way that President Obama had in mind.

Whereas Mr. Obama saw socialism as the future of the United States and did what he could to move us in that direction, Mr Trump is freeing markets to do what socialism can never do, create jobs and create opportunities for everyone to have a better life, including the poor.

Unemployment, both overall and for minorities, is at record lows, average family income is at record highs, the welfare rolls are shrinking and most college students can expect to find ample career opportunities awaiting them once they secure their diploma.

Mr. Trump has accomplished all this while being relentlessly hounded by a special prosecutor and a media which despises him and despite being opposed at every step by a Democratic party which perhaps sees their hold on the lower economic classes slipping from their grasp and their dreams of a burgeoning centralized government that has its fingers in every pie fading into oblivion.

Here are some of the ways Continetti sees President Trump transforming the country:

TRADE: Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced it had reached an agreement with both Mexico and Canada to revise and rebrand the North America Free Trade Agreement as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. This announcement fulfills one of President Trump's key pledges on the campaign trail while benefiting constituencies in important states such as Michigan (autos) and Wisconsin and Minnesota (dairy). Trump also renegotiated the Korea Free Trade Agreement and has made progress with the Europeans as well as the Japanese.

ECONOMY: The Trump Bump continues, with overall unemployment at its lowest level since 1969. Consumer confidence is high, and data from the manufacturing and service sectors indicate continued growth. No president is responsible for the state of the American economy, but fiscal and regulatory policy help, and presidents take credit or receive blame in any event.

JUDGES: Judge Brett Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court will secure a five-vote majority of originalist and textualist judges on the high court for the first time in modern memory. Such a transformation of the federal judiciary has been a goal of Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. The fact that it will be Donald J. Trump who will cement this victory is no small feat. On the contrary, it may turn out to be his greatest and longest-lasting achievement.

FOREIGN POLICY: President Trump is slowly and steadily re-orienting U.S. foreign policy to face the central challenge of the twenty-first century: the rise of China to great power status. Beginning with the national security strategy released at the end of 2017...Trump has accomplished the "pivot to Asia" that the Obama administration so often talked about. What the pivot looks like is a policy of containment—one that should have been pursued decades ago. Trump has made this move while sanctioning Russia, getting tough on Iran, ending the farcical Middle East "peace process," and attempting to defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Mr. Trump is not without his faults, but what he has done for the workers of this country and for the future of our young people is unprecedented. Those who oppose him do so not because of his failures but because of his successes. They don't want to see capitalism succeed inasmuch as it'll make it that much harder for them to regain power and to implement the socialist policies they believe to be the only just economic system.

Nor do they want to see him succeed in appointing judges and Justices who will interpret the law rather than legislate from the bench because it's a lot easier for the left to get their way when they can do it through the courts rather than having to go through the people's representatives in the legislature.

No one has a crystal ball, of course, and the trajectory of the country could change overnight, especially if Mr. Trump's political opponents regain the House and Senate in November, but if you care about jobs, if you care about the poor, if you care about our young people's future, and if you care about the rule of law, you have to be gratified with the overall direction we're moving in today.

Time for Dems to Disavow Alinsky

I commented yesterday on the deplorable state of our political rhetoric, a state that fell to a new nadir with the Kavanaugh hearings. With the elections looming in November and so much riding on the outcome, it's unlikely that our discourse is going to become less toxic anytime soon.

Even so, one step that may go some distance toward a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people on the left to repudiate and renounce the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) has had on left-wing political activism. They don't have to renounce the whole book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salutary development if more of them would distance themselves from Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here are the rules I have in mind:

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the almost fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ Alinsky's methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity. Indeed, Alinsky promotes polarization in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies.

Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy. Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but the opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed just as this writer for the Colbert show tweeted the other day:

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malign effect upon our society. Division is what the book advocates and it's what its votaries want, but if they're serious about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously renounce Alinsky and his book.

Rock Bottom

If there's truth to the aphorism that people are known by the company they keep then rank and file Democrats must be feeling a bit uneasy and embarrassed by the sheer wickedness and lunacy of some of the people who vote the way they do.

There are, of course, awful people on both sides of the political spectrum, but no prominent Republican has said or done anything as remotely vile as have some prominent Democrats.

To be sure, Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who brought the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that when they were at a high school party he forced her into a bedroom and then jumped on top of her (she claims to have escaped from the room before anything else happened and none of the people she names as witnesses have corroborated her story), claims now to be receiving death threats. If this is true it's absolutely disgusting and contemptible, but as of yet there are no records of the threats and we have no idea who might be doing this.

Yet, in terms of sheer hatred, cruelty and verbal violence, from people who are in the public eye and can be counted among the elite in our society, it's hard to match what we're seeing from some on the left.

Consider just two recent examples. Georgetown University Professor C. Christine Fair, who, according to a piece in The Daily Caller, has a sordid record of vulgar and hateful rhetoric, tweeted recently:

“Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.”

“All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps,” Fair wrote. “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

A second example of the left's moral dwarfism comes to us from a writer for the Stephen Colbert show named Ariel Dumas who tweeted on Saturday before the Kavanaugh confirmation vote that, "Whatever happens, I'm just glad we ruined Brett Kavanaugh's life."

It evidently doesn't matter to these people that Kavanaugh might well be innocent. It doesn't matter that even if he did try to force himself on a woman while intoxicated 36 years ago that he may be a man of completely different character today.

It doesn't matter that both of these women doubtless voted for Bill Clinton, a man credibly alleged to have been a serial sexual assaulter and both presumably would have supported Ted Kennedy, who was not only renowned for his sexual improprieties but was actually responsible for the death of a young woman.

Indeed, it wouldn't have mattered whatsoever if the allegations had never been brought against Judge Kavanaugh. No one in the Senate would have voted any differently than they did vote.

Fairness and logical consistency are irrelevant when one is consumed by hatred to the point that the most important thing is ruining someone's life or gloating over the prospect of their murder and mutilation.

Also embarrassing for Democrats must be the behavior of protestors in the Senate gallery as the vote was taken on Saturday. Women screamed, screeched and howled like inmates in an asylum. These are the people who want to determine who runs the country? These are the people who demand that we listen to them? Why on earth should we?

Perhaps those who belong to the same party as these women are outraged at the black eye their party's being given. Perhaps they're asking themselves what it is about their candidates that appeals to people like these, and perhaps they're asking themselves whether they really want to be associated with individuals who give so much evidence of being mentally and/or morally sick.

If they're not perhaps they should be.

The Demise of Science (Pt. II)

I suggested in the previous post that science would deeply harm itself if it abandoned the distinctive criteria that set it apart from other intellectual pursuits. Today I'd like to consider another reason science is jeopardizing its own fruitfulness, and it's a consequence of the naturalism (i.e. the view that the natural, physical world is all that exists) that led to the problems discussed yesterday.

This additional way in which naturalism and its adherents may be bringing about the demise of the scientific enterprise is highlighted in a piece at Stream.org. Here's an excerpt:

In his profound book The Death of Humanity, Richard Weikart documents how self-appointed spokesmen for “Science” such as “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins — and thousands who follow his lead — reject the idea of objective morality, free will, and the meaningfulness of life.

Instead they blithely insist that everything — every single thing — in human nature can be traced to natural selection and blind variation. Religious impulses, altruism, friendship, love, even scientific curiosity, must all be explained away as the purposeless side-effects of mutations.

Human consciousness itself is a purely chemical, deterministic process entirely driven by the firing of neurons in the brain — which means that it is impossible to describe knowledge as objective, or any statement as really “true.”

The perception each of us has that a proposition is provable, or an experiment is conclusive, is no guarantee of anything in external reality; instead it is the outcome of subatomic dominoes falling in random patterns. How can science continue if even scientists start to believe this about their minds?

The answer is that it cannot. The death of humanity which Weikart describes will also be the death of science. We are already seeing state attorneys general trying to prosecute scientists who question the political orthodoxy of climate activists, federal regulations overriding the medical judgments of doctors treating “transgender” patients, and a dogmatic refusal on the part of many well-educated people to admit that a human embryo is either living or human, or that physical sex (gender) exists.

In other words, science is naturalism's summum bonum, but naturalistic assumptions are corrosive, if not fatal, to science. Science arose and flourished in the Christian culture of the West, a culture that took it for granted that the world was the product of a rational, logical God who created man in the image of himself.

Being the creation of a rational being the world was thus assumed to be orderly and law-like and could be expected to yield its secrets to logical inquiry by men who were its divinely appointed stewards.

Early philosophers and scientists believed that because the Creator was rational there was a reason why everything happened and that those reasons could be uncovered by rational investigation.

Naturalism, though, rejects the notion of an intelligent, personal Creator without realizing that everything else that it wants to hold on to is contingent upon the conviction that the world is the product of such a being as they deny. In the absence of God, belief in an objective, law-governed universe discoverable by human reason crumbles like very old paper as soon as it's touched.

Naturalists, ironically, exalt science without realizing that science and naturalism are fundamentally incompatible and cannot indefinitely co-exist.

The Demise of Science (Pt. I)

Science has flourished for three hundred years in the West, and has been in many ways a marvelous blessing to the world, but it may nevertheless soon find itself on life support. Ironically, the agent of its potential senescence is the rejection of a couple or three metaphysical assumptions that many credit with having given it its robust vigor and success in the first place.

The assumptions I refer to are these: 1. The conviction that science should limit itself to the study of natural, physical causes, and 2. that the theories it propounds should be based on physical, empirical evidence. Those theories, moreover, should 3. have the quality of being in principle falsifiable - that is, there should be a way to test the theory and a conceivable result of that test which, if it obtained, would show the theory to be false. Whatever hypotheses cannot meet these criteria - e.g. religious, ethical, epistemological, or aesthetic theories - belong to philosophical inquiry and reside outside the boundaries of science.

That's been the prevailing view ever since the Enlightenment, but there's sympathy in some scientific and philosophical precincts today for quietly doing away with both the need for empirical evidence as well as the falsifiability criterion, and the reasons for this, or at least a couple of them, are interesting.

Some scientists, for instance, think these criteria are too confining and, worse, they lead to unhappy metaphysical conclusions about the existence of God.

Specifically, some (many?) philosophers and scientists want desperately to legitimize multiverse hypotheses as legitimate science because if our universe is the only one that exists the conclusion that it is intentionally designed becomes virtually inescapable.

As one might imagine, this ineluctability makes metaphysical naturalists (atheists) quite uncomfortable. As Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London puts it, it's either the multiverse or God. Those are the only two live options.

The reason the multiverse seems necessary to save naturalism is that cosmic fine-tuning is so compelling (see video below), and the probability of a universe as incredibly fine-tuned as ours existing is so infinitesimally tiny, that if one wishes to avoid the conclusion that a supernatural Designer exists, or even the weaker but still important conclusion that the universe affords much evidence that such an intelligence exists, one has to hold that there's an infinite array of worlds in which every possible universe is actual.

If so, then in an infinity of worlds every possible world has a probability of one, including our world. This would mean that the cosmic fine-tuning may be no big deal.

Thus, the multiverse is seen as the best way on offer to rescue naturalism from the theists. But the problem is there's no physical evidence that such a plethora of worlds really does exist, only that their existence is possible, nor is there any way to test or falsify the claim that this ensemble of worlds exists. Thus, many philosophers and scientists argue, the multiverse theory is not a scientific hypothesis at all. It's metaphysics, just like religion, ethics, aesthetics, etc.

This "reduction" of the stature of the theory won't do, however, because if it's not a "scientific" theory it won't have any particular authority or claim on people's minds, so what's the solution? If the hypothesis doesn't meet the criteria of science then one solution is to discard the inconvenient criteria altogether so that science becomes simply whatever it is that scientists do.

But this makes science something other than what it's been for three centuries. It robs it of its distinctive character and, let's repeat, transforms it into an exercise in metaphysics, just like religion.

There's another way science seems to be losing its distinctive character, and we'll look at that in the next post.

How Much Evidence?

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably want to exempt this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity. This evidentialism or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 1930s and 40s among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink. The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. They're based rather on an intuition of probability. The more probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it. Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world. When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult, if not impossible, task for an inconclusive argument to accomplish.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise. Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

It's also profoundly ironic that some folks who demand overwhelming evidence for the existence of God before they'll commit themselves to believing it, are nevertheless willing to whole-heartedly commit themselves to believing the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh despite the fact that there's no evidence whatsoever that he did any of the things he's accused of.

It seems that some people are highly selective about the matters upon which they insist that evidence is required to justify their belief.

Would the Democrats Confirm This Man to SCOTUS?

As perhaps you've heard by now, Judge Kavanaugh's enemies have developed a new line of attack against him. Corroborating evidence for the accusations of sexual impropriety has not materialized, but no matter, there are other salacious allegations, as yet unsubstantiated, that can be mustered into the mission of destroying Mr. Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court. One of these is the claim that as a student Kavanaugh drank beer before attaining legal age and got himself mixed up in a few shameful brawls.

This has elicited gasps of horror from media fainthearts who insist that such a man is simply too odious, violent and unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. Indeed, Senator Mazie Hirono is scandalized to learn that in one such altercation the young Mr. Kavanaugh is actually alleged to have thrown ice cubes at an antagonist in a tavern.

Moreover, I have it on good authority that he also pulled Suzie's pigtails when he was in kindergarten.

Anyway, if the leftist progressives in the Democratic party and the media are apoplectic at the mere thought of a Justice Kavanaugh what would they say and do if President Trump were to nominate a man to the highest court in the land who publicly described his younger self as a "thug" who got into a lot of fights, who regularly drank to excess and did illegal drugs while not taking school seriously. In fact, imagine that this nominee admitted to occasionally drinking a six pack of beer before going to class.

Given their revulsion at Brett Kavanaugh's alleged behavior they'd surely be appalled by this nominee and regard him as manifestly unsuited to be elevated to such an estimable position. They would surely reject his nomination out of hand, smear him, devastate his family and destroy his reputation and career. Late night hosts would make him the object of incessant ridicule and cable news talking heads would be shaking their heads and wagging their fingers at the very thought that such a man could aspire to a seat of power and prominence.

This is, after all, how they've treated Kavanaugh, so our hypothetical nominee could certainly expect no less and could, perhaps, expect to be treated even worse.

Except the man in question is not hypothetical. He actually did aspire to a position of power and prominence and he achieved it. More than that, the left deified him, idolized him, and worshipped him and his family. His past thuggery and druggery were of no moment to them. They couldn't care less what he did as a young man, all that mattered to them was who he is now.

The man, of course, was Barack Obama, and you can watch him acknowledge his youthful transgressions and indiscretions in an interview here. He also wrote about them in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father.

It's amazing that the standard to which the left wishes to hold Brett Kavanaugh seems to have been invented just for him. It certainly didn't exist in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was running for the most powerful office in the world, but then Mr. Obama was a progressive Democrat and Kavanaugh is a judicial conservative.

That probably explains quite a lot, don't you think?

A Warning from Ancient Rome

Here are words of a man who lived over two thousand years ago in circumstances not too dissimilar from those we find ourselves in today. His words might cause us to pause and reflect. The man is Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the chief citizens of Rome in the first century B.C. and one of the most famous of all Romans. He writes:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

I hope Cicero was right that a nation can survive fools and the ambitious. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he's right that a nation cannot survive corruption that starts and spreads from within. When the pillars of society, the institutions that bind us together and strengthen us as a people, are undermined we become like a massive tree that's hollowed out by years of internal decay and which crashes to the ground in the next strong wind.

When people are conditioned by those who want to see us fall to lose trust in their government, their courts, the news organizations and the free market, when our citizens are encouraged to no longer value family, church, school and the Constitution, when everyone is propagandized to believe that all that matters is their own personal happiness and that the way to achieve that is through accumulating consumer goods, entertainment and pleasure, then we, like that tree, like ancient Rome, will be too corrupt to withstand stresses imposed from outside.

When a people abandons the principles that made it free - the principle, for example, that a conclusion of guilt must be supported by evidence and that a simple accusation of guilt is insufficient to warrant that conclusion - then the rot is very far along, indeed.

One way to avoid that fate is to recognize that there are many voices out there whose rhetoric is designed to erode our confidence and faith in the institutions that made America great (I apologize if that sounds Trumpian. I don't mean it to.). The second thing is to stand up to those voices or stop listening to them altogether. The third thing is to get about the business of repairing the damage that has been done to those "pillars of the city."

If enough people commit themselves to this project then perhaps we can avoid the fate that Rome suffered. If not, if we lose the will to resist, as Cicero puts it, then how will we keep the human wolves at bay?

Reason vs. Emotion

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist observes that the Kavanaugh hearings were largely about appeals to feelings rather than appeals to reason. He writes:

But evidence and logic are not what we heard about in most of the reactions to the hearings. What we heard about is how the testimony made people feel.

The attack on logic began before the hearings, with commenters pointing to quotes saying the case against Kavanaugh is “plausible” and “believable”—but providing no actual evidence that it actually did happen—then describing this as “compelling.” But “plausible” is the opposite of compelling.

Direct evidence compels belief, logically speaking. Someone’s speculations about what might have happened have no logical standing and compel nothing.

Or consider the phrase you probably heard a thousand times today: that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because he is “credibly accused.” What does that mean? What makes the accusation “credible,” and what evidentiary status does that give it?

A vague accusation with no independent corroboration from the very people the accuser herself described as witnesses doesn’t sound all that credible to me.

But you will look in vain for any clear standard of what is “credible.” It is not an evidentiary term but an emotional one. All it means is “this is something I feel like believing.”

People are not judging credibility based on evidence. They are judging based on how the two witnesses made them feel, which is to say that they base it on a purely emotional reaction—a reaction heavily influenced by partisan loyalties that prejudice you for or against the two witnesses.

So we get pure appeals to emotion like this one: “I can’t imagine how many thousands of women, around the world, are in tears as they listen to Christine Blasey Ford’s voice cracking.” Kavanaugh’s voice cracked, too. Does that mean we should also embrace his side of the story?

Judge Kavanaugh was in a no-win situation on Thursday. If his accuser choked up it was said to be because she was reliving her trauma. If he choked up it was said to be "scripted." If he got angry it showed he lacks a calm judicial temperament or that his anger showed him to be just the sort of person who would've assaulted a girl when he was 17.

No matter what Judge Kavanaugh said or did the minds of many people were made up apriori, based upon nothing more than his and his accuser's respective genders. The whole affair is reminiscent of the 2006 Duke lacrosse team case (see here and here) in which several white lacrosse players were accused by a black "exotic dancer", who offered no corroborating evidence, of having assaulted her at a party.

The boys' lives were ruined until it turned out that they were innocent after all. They were privileged white males accused by a relatively poor, black female, and that was enough to establish the boys' guilt in the mind of the prosecutor, the Duke administration and much of the liberal faculty, as well as leftist progressives everywhere.

For those who wish to block Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court evidence doesn't matter. His accuser presented no evidence to corroborate her allegations, but she doesn't need to. In our postmodern, post-fact environment the accusation itself is all the evidence one needs.

Some women were citing their own personal experience with sexual assault as proof that Kavanaugh was guilty. Their reasoning seems to be that they were assaulted by a man, Kavanaugh is a man, therefore Kavanaugh is guilty of assault.

There's more from Tracinski about the irrational nature of these proceedings at the link, but the most a reasonable person can conclude is that in the absence of evidence he is entitled to the presumption of innocence and that it's an execrable act of moral depravity to destroy him and his family the way the Democrats are seeking to do.

When the mere allegation, unsupported by any evidence, is enough to destroy a man's reputation and career and devastate his family, then we're no longer the America most of us grew up in. We are the Soviet Union of the 1920s to the 1980s. We are the France of 1793-1794.

We are every tyranny which has ever blighted the face of the earth.

Wishful Thinking

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

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

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair. The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism is wrong. Why that belief should be thought to be "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are very good reasons for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true. Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

Political Taxonomy

The election season is once again heating up so to help readers understand some of the terminology that's being thrown around, I thought it might be helpful to rerun the following post. It's one that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and it explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean. This post will try to correct that omission so that as we roll deeper into the campaign season readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms listed in the previous paragraph denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quarrel, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is perhaps the most well-known libertarian writer.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to be libertarians, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the central, federal government and giving it back to the states and localities.

They're reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. They also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is perhaps the most well-known contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley is the most well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Bill Clinton was an example of a liberal politician.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives tend to see the Constitution as often an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the last presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, but the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics. Paradoxically, so is Antifa.

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it doesn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation. Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading in the runup to the election this November.

Journey into the Cell

A video titled Journey Inside the Cell narrated by Dr. Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, gives a glimpse of a small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell.

As Meyer's Signature in the Cell makes clear the process is much more complex than what the video shows, but even so, the video does a nice job of illustrating why so many people today have trouble believing the materialist story that the astonishing complexity of the cell is all a product of blind chance and natural selection.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be the result of intelligent minds. To think that it could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that so many bright people are convinced that that's what happened.

Nevertheless, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this: Only material, physical processes can be considered in science. Enormously complex structures like cells exist. Therefore these structures must have been produced solely by physical processes.

The error here, of course, is confusing what science has limited itself to considering with what the best explanation for biological entities might be. Just because some people think that science should be restricted to allowing only physical causes to play a role in their explanations it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

Nor does any scientist who insists on dealing exclusively with physical causes - and not all scientists think this is wise - have any right to rule out intelligent causes.

The most a scientist can say is that he chooses not to theorize about causes that can't be observed or measured. He cannot say that such causes don't exist or haven't operated in the world or can't be inferred from what we are able to observe and measure.

Yet many scientists do say this, but when they do they're not speaking as scientists, they're speaking as philosophers making metaphysical pronouncements.