Brilliant Feats of Micro-Engineering

I show this video to some of my classes because it's so well done. Drew Berry is an animator who creates computer generated animations of cellular processes. The processes he depicts here are occurring all the time in each of the trillions of cells in your body. As you watch it keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

And notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did they evolve in the first place? Perhaps we'll eventually discover naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible naturalistic explanations sound to all but the irrevocably committed and the more it looks like the living cell has been intelligently engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

The Worst Enemy of Black People

A short piece by economist and syndicated columnist Walter E. Williams appeared recently in The Meridian Star and is getting a lot of play on social media.

The essay is titled The Worst Enemy of Black People and it starts off recounting how, despite his very controversial legacy, Malcolm X is very much respected in the African American community.

Malcolm has been called one of the most influential black Americans and schools and streets bear his name in cities across America. Yet despite the homage he has received over the years since his assassination in 1965, Williams writes, there's one thing he strongly believed that has been quietly ignored.

Remember as you read this that as Williams, who is himself black, notes, during the 1960s the word "Negro" was still a respectable term for, and among, blacks.

Malcolm X said: “The worst enemy that the Negro has is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems.

I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Williams goes on to cite some deeply troubling facts:

Malcolm X was absolutely right about our finding solutions to our own problems. The most devastating problems that black people face today have absolutely nothing to do with our history of slavery and discrimination. Chief among them is the breakdown of the black family, wherein 75 percent of blacks are born to single, often young, mothers.

In some cities and neighborhoods, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births is over 80.

Actually, “breakdown” is the wrong term; the black family doesn’t form in the first place. This is entirely new among blacks.

According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, that year only 11 percent of black children were born to unwed mothers. As late as 1950, female-headed households constituted only 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent.

In much earlier times, during the late 1800s, there were only slight differences between the black family structure and those of other ethnic groups. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households were two-parent households.

Welfare has encouraged young women to have children out of wedlock. The social stigma once associated with unwed pregnancy is all but gone. Plus, “shotgun” weddings are a thing of the past. That was when male members of a girl’s family made the boy who got her pregnant live up to his responsibilities.

The high crime rates in so many black communities impose huge personal costs and have turned once-thriving communities into economic wastelands. The Ku Klux Klan couldn’t sabotage chances for black academic excellence more effectively than the public school system in most cities.

Politics and white liberals will not solve these and other problems. As Malcolm X said, “our problems will never be solved by the white man.”

Indeed, liberal policies and attitudes are largely responsible for the erosion of the black family. Every urban region with a substantial black population is governed by liberal Democrats, nowadays often black but nevertheless supported by the larger white liberal consensus in the Democratic party. Liberalism has done nothing to reverse the decline of the family in general and the black family in particular and has, on the contrary, done much to accelerate it.

Malcolm X saw this clearly, but too few African Americans see it at all today.

The Case for Dualism

Philosophical materialists maintain that the brain is all that's involved in our cognitive experience and that there's no need to posit the existence of an immaterial mind or soul. Moreover, given that brain function is the product of the laws of physics and chemistry, materialists argue that there's no reason to believe that we have free will.

For materialists mind is simply a word we use to describe the function of the brain, much like we use the word digestion to refer to the function of the stomach, but just as digestion is an activity and not an organ or distinct entity in itself, likewise the mind is an activity of the brain and not a separate entity in itself.

As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses in this fifteen minute video, however, the materialist view is not shared by all neuroscientists and some of the foremost practitioners in the field have profound difficulties with it.

Egnor explains how the findings of three prominent twentieth century brain scientists point to the existence of something beyond the material brain that's involved in human thought and which also point to the reality of free will.

His lecture is an excellent summary of the case for philosophical dualism and is well worth the fifteen minutes it takes to watch it:

What Are Their Reasons?

A puzzling aspect of the debate over the border wall is this: Mr. Trump has often articulated why we need a barrier between the U.S. and Mexico. He and others who share his conviction that a wall should be erected have claimed that we need to control who comes into the country to minimize the risk that criminals, terrorists and other unsavories will gain easy access.

They've insisted that we can't afford to allow masses of poor people to overwhelm our social welfare network nor our institutions and resources. Nor can we allow our culture to be extinguished by waves of illegal immigrants whose presence in the country would profoundly alter the nation as it has existed for 250 years.

You may disagree with these reasons, but the point is they're out there to be argued about.

The Left in general and Democrats in particular, however, never seem to argue that the reasons are false. They simply deny them and act as if their denials are sufficient to refute them. Nor do they themselves offer with much conviction reasons why they oppose a wall.

More precisely, whatever reasons they give seem so silly, even to their advocates, that they're usually advanced only half-heartedly.

Here are a few examples you may have heard:

1. $5 billion is too expensive.
2. A wall won't work.
3. A wall would be too easy to circumvent.
4. A wall does not represent "who we are."

Maybe there are some others, but these are some of the most frequently stated reasons for refusing to grant the president the money needed to begin construction of a wall along our southern border.

Let's briefly consider each:

1. This objection is raised by Democrats who think nothing of wasting enormous sums on projects that accomplish nothing, but that aside: There have been tens of thousands of Americans killed, either by deliberate murder or by motor vehicle accidents caused by illegal aliens. Tell the families of those victims that the lives of their loved ones were not worth a relatively tiny fraction of our federal budget.

2. This is an odd objection for two reasons: First, it's obvious that the wall built by the Hungarians has worked to keep refugees from flooding Hungary, and the wall built by the Israelis has worked to keep Palestinians from crossing illegally into Israel. Terrorism in Israel has dropped sharply since their wall was built.

Second, saying that walls don't work is like saying that locks on doors don't work. Of course, people who are determined to get into the country might find a way to defeat the wall, just as people who are determined to get into your house will find a way to do it, but that's not an argument against putting locks on your doors.

The real reason progressives oppose the wall is that they fear it will work, not that they think it won't.

3. This objection is similar to the last. Drug smugglers will tunnel under a wall, we're told. Others will ladder over it. Ironically, many of the people who think this argument makes sense have placed walls and fences around their homes, including former president Obama.

Again, no wall will stop every single illegal entry, but the more difficult it is to gain entry the fewer people there are who will try it, and the more resources that can be devoted to stopping those who do try.

4. It's hard to say exactly what this objection actually means, but regardless, anyone who says that we should be the kind of people who allow anyone in who wants to come in should be asked if they have adopted the same policy for their home. When they leave their house or car do they lock the doors? If so, why? Isn't that being selfish, depriving others who may be in need of the accumulated resources safeguarded behind those locked doors? If they have a dinner party in their home do they allow anyone to come who wants to join in? If not, why not?

The left won't often come out and say it, but what they really want is a borderless world.

This would, of course, be a calamitous absurdity. Imagine that the U.S. had no border and a foreign government decided to move an armed force into our country and occupy, say, California. What grounds would we have for telling them they can't do this? What would it even mean to declare such a move an act of war?

If we had no border there'd be nothing illegal with what that foreign government would be doing. Anyone could go anywhere and live anywhere they wish.

Even if we thought there was something wrong with such an occupation, we could only repel the invasion with an armed force of our own, but not having any borders to defend why would we even have an armed forces?

No nation could continue to exist for long without borders which means that there would ultimately be one government for the entire world, and it would perforce be totalitarian.

It's a progressive's dream, to be sure, but it's a realist's nightmare.

New Year's Prayer for You

I want to wish all our readers a safe and meaningful new year. It's my prayer for you that wherever you live in the world, whatever your vocation in life, whatever your ideological, political and religious convictions may be, 2019 proves to be a year filled with peace, good health, satisfying work, and much joy.

Thank you for your readership and may God bless you and the ones you love in the coming year.
Sincerely, R.L. Cleary

On the Reading of Good Books

I'd like to share a delightful post sent by a friend. It was written by a man named Bob Trube, and in his post he talks about reading, particularly what he calls "reading well". Trube writes:

Among the resolutions people make each new year is some variant on “read more books.” That’s certainly a goal that I can applaud when the average number of books read by adults is twelve a year (a number skewed by avid readers; most people read about four a year). But I have a hunch that many of these resolutions fare no better than those of losing weight or exercising more, and probably for the same reasons: lack of specific goals that are realistic, forming a habit, social support and a good coach. I will come back to these but I want to address something I hear less about – reading well.

For a number who read this blog, I don’t have to convince you about the value of reading, and in many cases, you already have good reading habits and exceed that book a month average. And even if you don’t, you probably sense that reading isn’t about numbers of books but part of a well-lived life. You read not only for amusement or diversion but to better understand your world and how to live one’s life in it. That can be anything from understanding the inner workings of your computer and how to use it better to a work of philosophy or theology or even a great novel that explores fundamental questions of life’s meaning, living virtuously, or the nature of God.

Trube goes on to list four aspects of reading well:

1. Reading well is an act of attentiveness. We read well when we read without external and internal distractions. A place of quiet and a time when we are not distracted with other concerns helps us “engage the page.” It also helps to turn off the notifications on your phone or tablet, or better yet, put the electronics in another room. Read on an e-reader without other apps if you prefer these to physical books.
2. Visual media often encourages us to passively absorb content. Books of substance require our active engagement–noticing plot, characters, and the use of literary devices like foreshadowing, allusions and more. Non-fiction often involves following an argument, and paying attention to the logic, the evidence, and whether the argument is consistent. Reading well can mean jotting notes, asking questions, or even arguing with the author. Above all it means reflecting on what we read, and how the book connects with our lives.
3. Reading well over time means choosing good books to read. What is “good”? I’m not sure there is one good or simple answer. There are a number of “great books” lists out there and they are worth a look. You might choose one of those to read this year. One test of a book’s worth is whether people are still reading the book and finding value in it long after its author has passed. Also, in almost any genre, there are reviews, websites, and online groups. Over time, you will find sources of good recommendations.
4. Finally, I’d suggest choosing something to read off the beaten path. Reading authors from other cultures, or a genre you don’t usually read can stretch your horizons. This year, I want to work in some poetry and get around to the Langston Hughes and Seamus Heaney that I’ve had laying around.

He closes with a few thoughts "For those who simply want to read more and get into the reading habit." I encourage you to go to the link and check them out.

I sometimes wonder if reading isn't becoming a lost art, like knitting. Our lives are so full of work and other obligations that we don't have much time to read. Even during what leisure we may have we're constantly plugged in to some device or other that distracts us and makes reading seem boring by comparison. Yet good books are like vitamins and minerals for the mind. They nourish and enrich us in ways that last for a lifetime.

If you're one who would like to read more, but just can't seem to get into it, check out the tips that Trube gives at his blog. They're very good.

Abandon Religion, Embrace Superstition

There's an odd phenomenon apparently unfolding among millenials. As belief in God declines, belief in the efficacy of astrology is growing.

In other words, there's evidently a longing among young adults for transcendence, for something more than what materialism can offer them, but unwilling to return to the religious beliefs of their forefathers, they've been casting about among the occult for something else to serve as a substitute.

Denyse O'Leary wrote about this phenomenon some time ago at Mercatornet.

She noted that polls reveal belief in astrology at about 25% of the population in North America and Britain and that superstitious beliefs in general, e.g. belief in ghosts and witches, are increasing especially among liberal-minded young adults. Indeed, top liberal websites like Buzzfeed, Bustle and Cosmo feature much more superstitious content than do conservative sites.

Moreover, an education in science is no proof against an inclination toward superstition:

[I]nterestingly, “sciencey” types who lack scepticism about Darwin are often superstitious, despite the longstanding dismissal of occult beliefs from science.

The 2003 study, done at a British science fair, found that twenty-five percent of the people who claimed a background in science also reported that they were very or somewhat superstitious.

She closes with these observations:

Superstition feeds on itself. Like a drug habit, it at once satisfies and creates an appetite for more -- in this case, an appetite for occult knowledge, as opposed to transparent knowledge. That appetite can affect a person's perception of everyday reality.

It’s not science that holds superstition in check in Western society. It’s traditional Western religion, which insists on transparent truths (truths that all may know) and forbids attempts at occult, secret truths.

It's puzzling that people who scoff at the possibility of miracles and the existence of a supernatural God are nevertheless open to the possibility of an occult world of ghosts and demons, etc. Why is the latter any more plausible than the former?

The early twentieth century British writer G.K. Chesterton once said that, "When people cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." Perhaps we're seeing evidence of the truth of Chesterton's claim in the early twenty first century.

TDS

Why does the left hate Trump? Their disdain is so visceral, so seemingly irrational that some have called it Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). After all, given his accomplishments you'd think progressives, particularly those in the media, would be at worst neutral toward him, if not actually in love with him.

Yet when he announces that the United States is pulling out of Syria, a move that the left would slobber all over were it made by President Obama, the progressives at the cable shows have suddenly, like Bruce Banner transmogrifying into the Incredible Hulk, metamorphosed into war hawks, deriding the decision to pull out of a quagmire as a foreign policy blunder.

When the president gets a criminal justice reform bill through the legislature with 87 Senators voting for it, a bill for which the left has been pushing for decades, the progressives scarcely can bring themselves to notice that it was Jared Kushner and Donald Trump who were the key movers of the measure.

When it's announced that the Trump economy has generated the lowest minority unemployment numbers in history the left quibbles that that achievement germinated under Obama. Yet it's hard to point to anything the Obama administration did that would have produced these results.

When the president adopts protectionist trade policies, long a progressive desideratum, he's harshly castigated for starting a tariff war with China.

The left was embittered by Trump's temerity in defeating the lackluster Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hopeful, in what is perhaps an interesting case of psychological projection, that he will soon be implicated in some plot with the Russians to have stolen the election.

Yet despite the Stakhanovite efforts of Robert Mueller's team of Democratic prosecutors to leave no stone unturned they've apparently failed to turn one over that reveals any evidence of "collusion."

In fact, the inability (so far) to find any evidence that Trump and Putin have been holding hands has deflated progressives' hopes for impeachment and actually incensed them even further.

Of course there are policies the president has implemented or is pursuing that the left opposes - tax cuts, a border wall, a freeze on immigration from countries in which terrorism is spawned - but these seem hardly the sorts of issues that might be expected to generate the arrant hostility the left has shown toward the man.

After all, taxes were cut drastically under the sainted Democrat John Kennedy and a border wall and restrictions on immigration were popular among many liberal Democrats until less than a decade ago.

Of course, Trump also refuses to be bound to unwise agreements entered into with other nations by his predecessors. He's renegotiated NAFTA to make North American trade fairer for all parties, pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran which was mostly ineffective in halting Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, and walked away from the Paris climate accords.

The latter is especially galling to the left since climate change has for liberals the status of a religious dogma, but the data on climate change is disputable, and subsequent events in France should give the left at least some reason to think that it might be a good thing we're no longer bound by those agreements.

Some will point to Trump's boorish, uncouth attitudes toward women as the root of the left's contempt for the president, but it's hardly credible to think that people who would gleefully vote for the Kennedy brothers, Bill Clinton, Robert Menendez, et al. are sincerely upset over Donald Trump's sexually dubious biography.

Others accuse him of racism and bigotry, but the allegations are usually stand-alone assertions, lacking in any hard supporting evidence, suggesting that perhaps there just isn't any.

In sum, the degree of hatred on the left seems wildly excessive, over the top, unfounded, and irrational, but maybe the explanation for it has nothing to do with any of the sorts of things mentioned above. Maybe the reason has to do with a growing desperation incited by what Trump is doing to the judicial branch of government.

In the past, the left could always count on activist courts to circumvent refractory legislatures and implement progressive policies, but Trump is quietly appointing dozens of judges to the federal bench who believe that their role is to interpret the law, not to make it.

Moreover, he's already appointed two Justices to the Supreme Court who seem to share that judicial philosophy, and, if he's re-elected in 2020, and if the Senate remains in Republican hands, he's almost certain to name one or two more.

This would change the ideological direction of the Court for at least another generation and constitute a potential disaster for progressives. It could halt, and perhaps even reverse, the left's long, steady slog toward a socialist, statist nirvana that they've assumed was just around the corner. Their long march through the institutions will have goose stepped right into quicksand.

Thus, the left's hope and sense of urgency that Trump be removed from office or otherwise politically neutered. The left fears that many of the progressive gains of the last thirty years or so are grievously threatened by a conservative judiciary, perhaps irretrievably, and in their panic they're saying and doing some remarkable, some absurd, some almost insane things.

Despite the fact that President Trump is doing much that they wished President Obama would've done, his reshaping of the judicial branch has made progressives desperate, and fear and desperation have apparently spawned in their liberal breasts an implacable hatred for the president.

Is an Israeli/Palestinian Peace Possible?

Every administration since Truman's has wrestled with the question of how to secure peace in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Some believe that there'll never be peace until one or the other side is exterminated or driven from the region.

Others think that the Palestinians really do want to live peacefully alongside their Israeli neighbors and that the key is persuading the Israelis to make enough concessions to Palestinian demands that the Palestinians will be mollified.

A recent poll taken among Palestinians is, however, a splash of cold water in the face of optimists who believe that peace is attainable and just over the horizon. The Washington Free Beacon provides a summary of the poll's findings:

• If a new presidential election was held today between the current president, Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, and the leader of the terrorist group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas would beat Fatah 49 percent to 42 percent.
• 88 per cent said that Palestinians who sell property to Jews are traitors. 64 percent said the punishment for selling property to Jews should be the death penalty.
• Palestinians oppose the concept of a two-state solution, 55 percent to 43 percent.
• "A large minority of 44 percent thinks that armed struggle is the most effective means of establishing a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel while 28 percent believe that negotiation is the most effective means and 23 percent think non-violent resistance is the most effective."
• In lieu of negotiations, "54 percent support a return to an armed intifada," i.e. terrorism.
• 50 percent of Palestinians reject in principle the holding of negotiations in order to resolve the conflict.

When such large percentages of people are opposed to any genuine rapprochement it's hard to see how there can be any peaceful solution to the "Palestinian Problem." It causes one to wonder whether the last seventy years of low grade conflict interspersed with intense spasms of open warfare won't be the template for the next seventy years as well.

For a concise, five minute overview of the problem watch this Prager U. video:

The Moral Crisis of Our Time

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?” The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here.

Toner writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.” The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution.

We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

We have always flouted moral standards but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, but that's where large segments of our culture are headed in these postmodern times.

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime. The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter. The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.”

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

• If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.
• If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.
• A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.
• Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever we wish.

Unless there is a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there is no such thing as a moral obligation.

As the great Russian novelist Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

The price we pay in a secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas means by the following:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner continues:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power.”

You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality is not good.

On Christmas Eve

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding the Incarnation. The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and His creatures could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with magic and mystery.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the source and traditional meaning of the night is irrelevant. All the talk of Santa Claus, ads for cars, beer, and phones, all the insipid "holiday" songs and movies - none of these do anything at all to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. Christmas Eve is sterile and empty without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

Here are two traditional Christmas pieces that capture some of the beauty, mystery, and power of this night. I hope you enjoy them and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful Christmas and a very special 2019:

It might be best just to listen to this next one without watching it since the video is a bit out of sync with the audio:

A Message from Space

Astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer have teamed up to write a piece for National Review commemorating an event that occured on Christmas eve fifty years ago. Here are some excerpts:

Emerging from the moon’s far side during their fourth orbit, they [Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders] were mesmerized by their vision of Earth, a delicate, gleaming swirl of blue and white, contrasting with the barren lunar horizon — the famous Earthrise picture.

To mark the event, the crew decided, after much deliberation, to read the first ten verses from the book of Genesis, starting with the familiar “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The reading, and the reverent silence that followed, went out over a live telecast to an estimated 1 billion viewers, then the largest audience in television history....

Reading the creation story while viewing the earth from 220,000 miles away seemed fitting, but, as Gonzalez and Meyer note, there are many who think that the God of Genesis had nothing to do with the creation of the universe.

Yet we know so much more today about the universe than we did fifty years ago, and it gets increasingly more difficult to deny that the universe has an overwhelming appearance of having been intentionally engineered. Here's Gonzalez and Meyer:

Astronomers now know that Earth is a rare, life-friendly “oasis in the big vastness of space,” as Borman later reflected. In the past few decades they have discovered that life on our planet depends on many improbable “rare-earth” factors. Earth must orbit the sun at just the right distance, with just the right axial tilt, and with just the right-shaped orbit and right planetary neighbors.

Life depends on Earth having a moon of the right size at the right distance. The solar system as a whole must also reside in a narrow life-friendly band of space within our galaxy, the “galactic habitable zone.”

We’ve also come to appreciate that we inhabit a privileged platform for scientific discovery. Earth’s crust is endowed with the abundant mineral and energy resources required for advanced technology, including that necessary for sending astronauts to the moon.

Our clear atmosphere and location far from the center of a large galaxy allow us to learn about the universe near and far.

There are so many more properties of earth that make it suitable for life that they could've mentioned, but they chose instead to expand their topic to encompass the whole universe:

At a deeper level, physicists now know that the universe itself exhibits extreme fine-tuning. Even slight changes to the relative masses of fundamental particles or to the strengths of fundamental forces, or to the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe or to its initial arrangement of mass and energy, would have rendered the universe incapable of sustaining life.

In the 1960s, physicists had just begun to discover examples of such fine-tuning. Now they know of many more. This suggests “the common sense interpretation,” as Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle put it, “that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.

Nor are the discoveries pointing to intentional agency limited to just the physical sciences:

In the 1950s, Watson and Crick discovered that DNA contains digital information, which many biologists and computer scientists have likened to software code. Molecular biologists have since elucidated a complex information-processing system serviced by equally complex nano-machinery in even “simple” one-celled organisms.

These discoveries have thwarted attempts to explain the origin of life by undirected processes. By 1980, Francis Crick would acknowledge that the origin of life appears “to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”

These developments and many, many more affirm the wisdom of the Apollo 8 astronauts' choice of readings on that Christmas eve in 1968.

The Etymology of Xmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, but perhaps their discomfiture is misplaced, as the late theologian R.C. Sproul explains:

People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ....There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

This is interesting and helpful, but I still suspect that a lot of people use Xmas to avoid writing Christmas and have no idea what the etymology of the word is. In any case, Sproul goes on to explain the origin of the fish as a symbol for Christianity:

The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom.

I hope this Xmas has been a wonderful and meaningful day for you.

The Story of St. Nicholas

This is a post I've put up on VP a few times during the Christmas season that I think you'll find interesting:

Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of five. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.).

Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some, perhaps apocryphal, traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas (Say Saint Nicholas quickly with an Italian accent and you get Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him.

Read the whole thing at the link.

The Problem of Evil (Part III)

In the last couple of posts we discussed one classical response by theists to the problem of evil based upon the assumed existence of human free will. It was pointed out, however, that although human volition might account for some kinds of evil, what's usually called moral evil, the question remains as to why an all-powerful, benevolent God would tolerate evil that resulted not from human free will but from natural causes like storms, accidents, famine, and disease.

Before attempting to address this question, we should be reminded that the understanding of God's power that we're working with holds that God can do anything that is logically possible to do, i.e. God can do anything that does not entail a contradiction or a logically inconceivable state of affairs.

For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it. That's a logical impossibility and not even God can do the logically impossible.

So, the question before us is, wouldn't a perfectly good and omnipotent creator have designed a world in which there was no natural evil?

One way to answer this question, perhaps, is to suggest that it may not be possible, even for God, to create a world governed by physical laws in which there's no potential for harm. Any world governed by gravity, for instance, and the law of momentum is going to contain within it the potential for people to fall and suffer injury.

Thus the laws of gravity and momentum are not compossible with a world free of the potential for injury. Once God decided to create a world governed by laws, those laws entailed the possibility of harm.

At this point it might be objected that theists hold that God creates heaven and that heaven is a world in which there is no natural evil so it must be possible for a world governed by laws of some kind to exist without there being any human suffering. If God could create heaven, why wouldn't he, if he was perfectly good, create this world like that?

Perhaps the answer is that God did create this world like that. Perhaps the reason that there is no evil in heaven is that God's presence suffuses that world, fills every nook and cranny and acts as a governor, an override, on the laws which might otherwise result in harm to beings which exist there.

The skeptic might rejoin that even were he to grant that God's presence in heaven could serve as an override to the laws which govern that world, that doesn't help the theist because there's no reason why God couldn't do that here in this world as well, and, since he doesn't, he must not be perfectly good.

This is, however, exactly what Judeo-Christian theology says that God did, in fact, do. The account goes something like this: God created a world regulated by the laws of physics and indwelt that world with man, his presence negating any harmful effects the expression of those laws may have had. Although the potential for harm existed, there was no disease, suffering, accident, or even death.

At some point, however, man betrayed the idyllic relationship that existed between himself and God. In an act of cosmic infidelity, man chose to use his freedom in a way, the only way, apparently, that God had forbidden. It was as if a good and faithful husband returned home to discover the love of his life in bed with his worst enemy.

If, as the idea of an "open future" suggests, God did not foresee (though he was aware of the possibility) this crushing blow coming, it must have broken his heart, metaphorically speaking. Man had made a choice to treat with contempt the wishes of his creator, and God would not force him to do otherwise.

Grief-stricken at the rejection he suffered at the hands of his beloved, God withdrew his presence from the world, leaving man, in his self-imposed, self-chosen alienation and estrangement, to fend for himself against the laws and forces which govern the universe.

God did not abandon man entirely, but he has given man his autonomy, he has set man free in the world. All subsequent history is the story of God's attempt to woo mankind back to himself, to win back the heart of his unfaithful lover. God's love for us still burns, and he wants us back despite our disloyalty. Indeed, in the Christian account, he desires our love so much that he redeems us himself.

Man's infidelity deserves eternal divorce, eternal separation, from God, but God atones for our unfaithfulness himself on the cross in the person of Jesus the Messiah. The story of God's redemption is a magnificent, beautiful, tragic story, a romance, a story of faithfulness, goodness and perseverance, and it's the reason why Christians celebrate Christmas. It's a story that makes sense of human history.

If God does not exist, if death is the end of our existence, then all of life, all of history, is a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." There is no purpose, there is no significance. It's all absurd. The evil which besets us, the suffering, pain, and grief we experience, are all meaningless. They're all for nothing.

Atheism, carried to its logical conclusion, ends in nihilism, the belief that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters.

In the face of this despair Christianity infuses life with hope, meaning, and dignity. Christianity redeems the absurdity of the world by insisting that nothing in our world is for nothing. There is a reason for our existence and a reason why there is evil. We may not know what it is, but if we were created by God we may assume that God had a purpose for doing so, and that that purpose is our purpose.

If our world is beset by evil we have grounds for hoping that there is a reason why God endures it, and that in some future existence justice will be done and suffering will be no more.

Atheism offers no such hope. In a world without God people are born out of nothingness, they suffer, and eventually sink back into the void from whence they came, and there's no significance or meaning to any of it at all.

Atheism offers no basis for hope that there is any ultimate meaning to life or any ultimate justice in the world. It offers no basis for believing that right and wrong are grounded in anything other than subjective feelings. It offers no basis for granting human beings dignity and significance.

In a world without God there's no point or purpose to life beyond whatever short-term goals we set for ourselves to keep us from reflecting on the fact that everything we do ultimately goes for naught.

The Christian narrative may not be true, but each of us, including the atheist, should certainly want it to be and should certainly hope that it is. Inexplicably, though, most atheists hope for the very opposite. They hope that they are right that there is no God.

The atheist, in fact, finds himself in the awkward position of holding firmly to a view which, one might think, he should hope with all his heart and mind is completely wrong.

The Problem of Evil (Pt. II)

Yesterday we began a three part series on the problem that suffering (or evil) poses to theistic belief. We left off by asserting that the traditional anti-theistic claim that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent Creator fails because it's possible that the Creator is both able to prevent evil and desires to prevent evil but nevertheless has good reasons for permitting evil to exist.

If the theist adopts this line of argument, however, he or she is likely to be challenged to suggest a candidate for a good reason for allowing the awful suffering that has been inflicted upon men, women and children by nature and other men throughout history.

One possible response put forward by Christian theologians and philosophers ever since Augustine in the fourth century goes something like this:

Part of God's essence is that he is perfect love. Love desires an object, something to lavish itself upon, something to live in a relationship with. He could have made man so that man would have no choice but to love God, but this would be about as satisfying as programming the screen saver of your computer to say "I Love You." The most satisfying relationships are those between persons who are free to both receive and give love. Thus God created persons to live in a love relationship with him, and he endowed them with the quality of freedom so that they could genuinely choose to requite his love or to reject it.

This freedom is what makes us human, it makes us more than brutes, it gives us dignity. Without freedom we're little more than sophisticated robots and there's no dignity in that. Freedom is part of the Imago Dei. God gives us the freedom to choose as a marvelous gift, and to the extent that we misuse that gift, to the extent we use our freedom wrongly, moral evil enters the world.

So God could prevent moral evil and wants to eliminate it, but doing so would entail depriving us of the very thing that makes us human and makes our relationship with him meaningful, our free will. This would not only reduce us to automatons and destroy our humanity, it would nullify the whole purpose for which we were created in the first place, which is to live in a freely chosen love relationship with God.

Some might deride the idea that this love between God and man is worth allowing men to inflict such terrible misery upon his fellows. Whether this is so is difficult to ascertain from our vantage. We have to look at the matter sub specie aeternitatis, or from the standpoint of eternity. Surely, if this life is all there is then all human suffering is meaningless and existence is a cruel hoax for hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been filled with it.

On the other hand, if this life is a relatively brief interlude between nothingness and eternity, then our temporal suffering, as horrible as it may be, may ultimately seem a very small price to pay for having lived it.

So, the suggestion that moral evil exists because God gave man free-will as a means of enhancing and elevating our relationship to him seems plausible. It also seems plausible that the reason God does not prevent evil is because he considers it an even greater evil to strip us of our freedom and thus of our humanity.

However, this brings us to the difficulty we mentioned at the beginning of yesterday's post. Let's assume that it's possible to know the future. Let's assume, therefore, that God knows the future and thus knows what would happen in any world, not just this one, that he could create.

Among the worlds God could have created are worlds in which people are free to choose, but in which they always choose to do right.

Imagine God before the creation of the world. He has an image in his mind of every world he could possibly make. Because he knows everything it is possible to know (assuming that it is possible for God to know the future) he knows every choice that every being would make in every one of those worlds if that world were to actually be created.

At least one of those worlds, it would seem, would contain free beings who always chose to do the right thing. They could have chosen to do wrong, but they don't.

Such a world is certainly possible, after all, since Christians believe that heaven will be such a world. So the question is, would not a perfectly good and loving God have created that world instead of the world he did create where people are free but choose to do evil far too often?

Why, in other words, didn't God create the best world he possibly could? For God to have done less is to have deliberately created a world in which some people would suffer terribly, and then, if the traditional Christian view of hell is true, spend eternity in further torment, when he could have created a world in which no one would suffer from moral evil and no one would choose hell.

People would be free to choose in this world and would always choose to love God and each other. So, if that world is a possible world, one which God could have created, why didn't he create that world instead of this one? The fact that he didn't, it is alleged, is powerful reason to conclude that God is not perfectly good.

Faced with this question the theist is put in a difficult spot. He can plead that at this point our ability to understand God's ways simply fades out; or he can resort to something like Alvin Plantinga's concept of trans-world depravity, a flaw that afflicts every human in any possible world in which humans exist, and thus makes it impossible for God to create a world in which free people always choose to do right.

Or he can say that perhaps one of the things that is beyond God's power is to know what free beings will choose in a future which does not yet exist.

In this latter view, the world God fashioned may well be the best possible world he could have created, consonant with the existence of human freedom. Given that God desired to create a world in which humans were free, he had to accept that although he knew all possible outcomes, he didn't know for sure, or deliberately chose not to know, how man would use his gift of freedom.

Would man use it to love or to hate? In order to have creatures to love, God took a tremendous risk. He knew the stakes and deemed the risk to be worth taking.

As was said earlier, despite the advantage of providing an answer to the question why God didn't create a better world than the one he did create, there are serious difficulties with this theory and for that reason many theologians and philosophers think it to be on balance not worth the cost of what has to be given up in order to embrace it.

Some have even called proponents of this "Open Future" idea heretics.

In any case, the argument that evil is a consequence of human freedom, to the extent that it is persuasive, only accounts for why there is moral evil. It doesn't explain the existence of natural evils such as accidents, famines, disease, etc.

We'll talk about that tomorrow.

The Problem of Evil (Pt. I)

The philosophical problem of suffering (or evil) has come up in my classes so I thought it might be useful to reach back to a pair of posts from 2004 (7/27 and 8/8) which offer a few thoughts on the topic. The first post follows and the second will be up tomorrow:

In an earlier post entitled God and Time I mentioned that despite the serious liabilities entailed by the idea that God does not have complete knowledge of the future - that is, he doesn't know what choices free beings will make in their future - it is nevertheless an attractive idea because it provides the theist with an answer to a difficult apologetic question. That question arises in the course of attempts to give a reply to the problem of evil.

Let's look at that problem first and then the problematic question that it raises.

No doubt the most troubling objection to the existence of a God as traditionally construed by theists is the existence of evil in the world. Whether people are persuaded by the presence of evil that the existence of a God is unlikely or whether they employ evil as an a posteriori rationalization for the disbelief they've already embraced, it is a difficult challenge for theists and has been since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.

One thing that needs to be said about the problem is that despite its power to instill and sustain doubt, the reality of evil does not constitute a proof against God's existence. Its philosophical strength, its advocates argue, is that it makes the existence of God unlikely.

The traditional argument takes the form of a dilemma:

1.If God is perfectly good he would want to prevent evil.

2.If God is all-powerful he would be able to prevent evil.

3.However, evil exists.

4.Therefore, either God is not perfectly good or God is not all-powerful.

In either case, God is not the God of traditional theism.

As I said a moment ago, this is not a proof that God doesn't exist or that he's not all-powerful or good because it's possible to slip between the horns of the dilemma and reply that God could be both able to prevent evil and wants to prevent evil but for some reason chooses to permit it to occur.

Most anti-theists grant this as a theoretical possibility, but, they argue, the existence of evil makes the existence of an all-powerful all-loving God improbable. After all, they ask, what kind of God would allow evil to exist if he could prevent it? What loving father would stand by and do nothing as his child suffers if he could do something to stop it?

No reason the theist can come up with, the skeptic argues, can justify the suffering of an innocent child. Thus, it is unlikely that the world is the product of the kind of God theists believe in.

Before we consider the classical theistic response to this challenge we should lay a bit more groundwork.

First, we need to understand that to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he can do anything at all. Rather, it is to say that God can do anything that it is logically possible to do. This means that it is beyond God's power to do anything which entails a contradiction of some sort.

For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it, or, it is not within his power to bring it about that you and I, or God himself, never existed. These are contradictory states of affairs and therefore logical impossibilities.

A theist, though, might object here that God is not constrained by the laws of logic, that God really can make a square circle if he wishes, but if one wants to argue this way he has to recuse himself from arguing at all and retreat into a private mysticism where nothing much can be said about God. To abandon the constraints of logic is to put God beyond the ability of men to reason about him, or to know anything about him, because anything that one could say about God could be both true and false at the same time, which is incoherent.

The second thing we should mention is that there are two basic kinds of evil. There is evil that emerges from human volition, and there is evil which results from natural causes like disasters, disease, famine, etc. The first we may call moral evil and the latter we'll call natural evil.

Having established this, tomorrow we'll look at why God might allow moral evil to exist, given that all sides agree that it's within his power to prevent it. We'll take up the question of natural evil in part III.

The BGV Theorem and the Cosmological Argument

One of the most popular forms of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God (or at least something like God) goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

The argument then goes on to flesh out what sort of attributes a cause of the universe must have, and it turns out that those attributes describe a being that comes pretty close to the God of theism. It must, for example, transcend space, time, and materiality. It must be unimaginably powerful, intelligent, and personal.

Skeptics, however, take issue with the second premise. They argue that the universe could be past eternal, i.e. that it never had a beginning, but this view seems to run counter to the standard Big Bang model of cosmology which states that the universe exploded into being from a single point about 14 billion years ago.

One of the most prominent cosmologists in the field is a physicist named Alexander Vilenkin, who, along with Alan Guth and Arvinde Borde, developed the Borde, Guth, Vilenkin theorem which asserts, among other things, that any universe that has the characteristics that ours does, had a beginning. Vilenkin writes about the implications of this theorem in an interesting piece here.

The passages most relevant to the second premise of the above argument are these:

Inflation [of the universe] cannot be eternal and must have some sort of a beginning.

[T]he universe could not have existed for an infinite amount of time before the onset of inflation.

This leads immediately to the conclusion that a cyclic universe cannot be past-eternal.

The answer to the question, “Did the universe have a beginning?” is, “It probably did.” We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed.

Nevertheless, Vilenkin sees a problem with the first premise. He asserts that it's possible for a universe to pop into existence out of nothing:

If all the conserved numbers of a closed universe are equal to zero, then there is nothing to prevent such a universe from being spontaneously created out of nothing. And according to quantum mechanics, any process which is not strictly forbidden by the conservation laws will happen with some probability.

...No cause is needed for the quantum creation of the universe.

The theory of quantum creation is no more than a speculative hypothesis. It is unclear how, or whether, it can be tested observationally. It is nonetheless the first attempt to formulate the problem of cosmic origin and to address it in a quantitative way.

Two things: Vilenkin is not saying that the universe actually did begin causelessly out of "nothing," but rather that quantum theory can't rule it out.

Secondly, Vilenkin employs a metaphysically problematic concept of "nothing." He seems to be saying that the pre-creational state could have been a physical system of zero energy out of which the universe could have arisen uncaused. This state he defines as "nothing," but a physical state of any sort is surely not nothing.

It may have no material substance and the positive and negative energies may total zero or there may be no energy at all, but if it's a physical state then it's not nothing. We may have difficulty comprehending it and describing it, but at least we can say that it is something.

Nothing means "not anything," and what Vilenkin describes does not fit that definition.

In any event he closes his paper with these thoughts:

When physicists or theologians ask me about the BGV theorem, I am happy to oblige. But my own view is that the theorem does not tell us anything about the existence of God. A deep mystery remains. The laws of physics that describe the quantum creation of the universe also describe its evolution. This seems to suggest that they have some independent existence.

What exactly this means, we don’t know.

And why are these laws the ones we have? Why not other laws? We have no way to begin to address this mystery.

Well, with due respect to Professor Vilenkin, a good beginning to addressing the mystery can be found in the argument at the top of this post.

The "Hush Money" Bomb

Now that charges have been brought against Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for paying money to silence women with whom Mr. Trump had apparently had illicit relationships, Democrats are giddy at the prospect that the president will be implicated in a campaign finance violation which could lead to criminal charges.

It's not clear, though, whether Mr. Trump actually committed a crime or, if so, how serious a crime it is, but if the Democrats push for prosecution thinking they finally have the "bomb" that'll finish off the Trump presidency they might find themselves in the position of Wile E. Coyote who had the bomb blow up in his face every time he tried to use it to finish off the Roadrunner.

As Elad Hakim reminds us in a piece at The Federalist,

According to the Chicago Tribune, members of Congress have a “taxpayer hush money fund,” where claims for sexual harassment, discrimination and other workplace issues are settled and paid out with money supplied by the U.S. Treasury.

Unlike the payments in Trump’s case, which were seemingly made using personal funds, congressional settlements and payoffs used taxpayer funds. More importantly, if prosecutors take the position that hush-money payments made to protect a person’s reputation and family should be deemed campaign related expenditures (because they might affect an election), the precedent could be very problematic and far-reaching.

Indeed. If Trump is prosecuted how will our august legislators, whose number must rise to many dozens and include many Democrats, avoid similar legal jeopardy? If Trump is somehow legally "exposed" for using campaign funds, which may have been his own money, to pay off his paramours, how much more legal exposure should congresspersons have for using taxpayer money for the same purpose?

Hakim again:

If Trump’s payments are deemed to be campaign-related expenses for the purpose of impacting an election, should each and every House or Senate member who has engaged in such conduct face criminal charges?

According to The Daily Signal, “Last year, it was reported that Congress has secretly paid out over $17 million to settle close to 300 cases by staffers claiming sexual and other forms of harassment and discrimination.”

If prosecutors failed to pursue charges relating to each of these individual claims and payments (normally these are made in secret and the identities of the parties are withheld unless suit is filed), would they be applying the law arbitrarily and unfairly?

Hakim closes with this admonition:

Although some legal scholars have openly stated that the payments in Trump’s case do not appear to have violated campaign finance rules, Mueller, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and congressional Democrats should think long and hard about the precedent they are attempting to set.

While their eyes are set on one particular person, the potential impact could end up netting many others who have engaged in similar (or worse) conduct.

Little wonder that some Democrats are now suggesting that, on second thought, maybe it wouldn't be a good idea to make a big deal out of Trump's hush money payments.

1776 or 1789?

In his recent book Last Call for Liberty, Os Guinness adopts as his theme the idea that our culture is riven between those who walk in the traditions of two historical revolutions: The American revolution of 1776 and the French revolution of 1789.

Borrowing Guinness' motif we might ask which of these traditions informs our own thinking. How do we regard the freedoms vouchsafed in the first two amendments to the United States' Constitution? Indeed, how do we think of freedom itself?

Do we believe, for instance, that individuals have the right to voice whatever they believe to be true as long as they neither inflict nor encourage physical or economic harm to others?

Should individuals who disagree with the consensus on matters of race, science, gender, politics or religion be free to express those views without being sanctioned and compelled to silence? Should people have to risk being assaulted, losing their jobs or being shouted down merely because their views are unpopular?

If you believe that certain unpopular views are offensive and hateful and that no one should have the right to voice them publicly then you stand in what Guinness calls the tradition of 1789.

If you believe that minority views should be granted the same rights as majority views and that minority opinions should be countered not with rudeness, violence or the loss of one's livelihood but with superior arguments respectfully formulated, then you stand in the tradition of 1776.

If you believe that people should be free to practice their religion even if it inconveniences someone else, as long as it does others no physical harm, then you stand in the tradition of 1776.

On the other hand, if you believe that those who hold religious beliefs that run counter to the popular consensus on race, science, gender, etc. should be compelled to conform to the consensus beliefs then you stand in the tradition of 1789.

The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in 1762, that "Whoever refuses to pay obedience to the general will (i.e. the state) shall be liable to be compelled to it by the force of the whole body. And this is in effect nothing more than that he may be compelled to be free."

Rousseau's disciples have ever since taken him to be condoning state coercion of not only behavior but also of speech.

Liberty encompasses freedom to and freedom from. In the 1776 tradition the freedom to hold and voice opinions, to practice one's religion and to be free from needless government constraint are prized.

Another French philosopher, Voltaire, has been credited with having declared that he may disagree with what you say, but he will fight to the death for your right to say it. If he indeed did say this then he walked in the tradition of 1776.

Those who today impose speech codes on campus, who police politically correct expressions, who shout down speakers with whom they disagree walk arm in arm with those who imposed the French Terror in the wake of 1789.

Moreover, if you believe that the second amendment confers upon individuals the right to defend their families, themselves and their property you're following the path of the American founders. If you believe that no such right accrues to individuals, nor should accrue, then you're following the path of those who rose to power in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution.

The 1776 tradition holds that individual persons are significant because each is endowed by his or her Creator with certain inalienable rights. The 1789 tradition, or at least the mindset that arose in the wake of 1789, holds that the individual is simply a cog in the grand machinery of the state and has only those rights which the state deigns to grant. The state is everything, the individual is nothing.

The thinking of 1789 led quickly to a bloodbath by guillotine from 1792 to 1794 in which as many as 40,000 persons were slaughtered, and that pattern reemerged in the Russian revolution of 1917 which produced Stalin and the deaths of millions, and also in Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s which led to the deaths of millions more.

If you believe that individuals have dignity, worth and certain inalienable rights you will feel a kinship with the American founders. If you believe that individuals are of value only insofar as they're useful to the state then you'll feel a kinship with the French Jacobins, the Stalinists and the Maoists who sought to carry this view to its logical conclusion and who would do so again today in Europe and in the U.S. if ever they're allowed to rise to power.