Darwin Doubters

Charles Darwin's birthday will be celebrated on February 12th, but the last forty years or so have not been kind to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Despite the fact that it is the reigning orthodoxy in our academic institutions much of the homage paid to it, except by the true believers, is obligatory lip service.

Indeed, confidence that a naturalistic theory like Darwin's, or the neo-Darwinian synthesis, can explain the phenomena that scientists are discovering in their laboratories and field work is waning among front line researchers.

Despite the fact that the Darwinian priesthood still has the power to punish heretics in the academy, over a thousand scientists have grown so disenchanted with Darwinian versions of evolution that they've taken the bold step of going public with their doubts.

These dissenters have affixed their names to a document, which can be viewed here, and which makes clear that these men and women have serious reservations about the scientific credibility of Darwinism. They may not all believe that intelligent design is correct either, but they're quite convinced that Darwinian evolution is inadequate as an explanatory paradigm.

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News describes the document these worthies have signed:

It reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” The signers hold professorships or doctorates from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other prominent institutions.

They are also an increasingly international group. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences are represented. Discovery Institute began taking names of signatories in 2001 in response to frequently heard assertions that there is no dissent, or “virtually” none.

Actually, there are very serious problems with any naturalistic explanation of biological origins and development. Ten of the most serious are discussed here.

What makes this document even more impressive than the number and status of the signatories is the fact that they almost surely represent only the tip of the scientific iceberg. It can be reasonably assumed that thousands more harbor similar doubts but, out of concern for their professional well-being, are reluctant to publicly express them.

Klinghoffer elaborates:

What’s significant about the Dissent from Darwinism list is not so much the names and the institutions listed there but what they tell you about the many Darwin skeptics in the science world who wouldn’t dare sign.

Scientists know the career costs that would come from publicly challenging evolutionary theory. Discovery Institute and its sister research lab, Biologic Institute, have welcomed refugees who were chased out of top spots in the research world....

The signers of the Dissent list have all risked their careers or reputations in signing. Such is the power of groupthink. The scientific mainstream will punish you if they can, and the media is wedded to its narrative that “the scientists” are all in agreement and only “poets,” “lawyers,” and other “daft rubes” doubt Darwinian theory.

In fact, I’m currently seeking to place an awesome manuscript by a scientist at an Ivy League university with the guts to give his reasons for rejecting Darwinism. The problem is that, as yet, nobody has the guts to publish it.

Other scientists, like the Third Way group or the researchers who met at the Royal Society in 2016, reject standard evolutionary theory but would not sign the Dissent list because they (mistakenly) think it conveys an even worse source of ritual contamination — the taint of intelligent design. In fact, the Dissent text doesn’t in any way imply support for ID, as the website’s FAQ page emphasizes.

The simple observation that neo-Darwinism can’t explain the origin of complex life forms does not lead directly to a design inference. That is a separate argument with separate evidence. Every ID proponent is a Darwin doubter, but not every Darwin doubter is an ID proponent.

But I understand why people fear to go public, even if they would seem to have nothing to lose. I recall a visit a colleague and I made to the office of a Nobel laureate in a relevant field who gruffly stated his own rejection of evolutionary theory but refused to say anything in public. He is not a young man. Given his senior status, you would think he’d have nothing to fear. Yet he was afraid.

Anyway, one wonders whether totally in-the-tank Darwinian naturalists aren't actually troubled about biological discoveries in the coming years. After all, the more we learn about the way life works the less tenable Darwinism seems. The more awesome and amazing the biological world appears the less confidence the average person has that it's all a result of blind, impersonal chance and forces.

Someday it may turn out that the ardent defenders of the old paradigm will be like those solitary WWII Japanese soldiers still holding out in the jungle, never having heard that the war was over.

Senators, Please Read Article VI

The Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee would've fit right in as inquisitors ferreting out heresy a couple of centuries ago, but what was condoned centuries ago in Europe, imposing a religious test on those seeking public office, has been unconstitutional in this country since 1789.

Unfortunately, Senator Cory Booker and several of his colleagues seem unaware of that fact.

The following is taken from a piece by Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media:

On Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a 2020 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, asked Trump judicial nominee Neomi Rao, an Indian-American former law professor, if she considered homosexual relationships to be sinful.

Booker seized on Rao's 2008 article opposing the Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized homosexual activity. He then directly asked her,

"Are gay relationships in your opinion immoral?"
"I am not sure the relevance of that," Rao responded.
"Do you think gay relationships are immoral?" he continued.
"I do not," Rao said.
"Do you believe they are a sin?" Booker pressed.
"My personal views on any of these subjects are things I would put to one side," the nominee said.
"So you're not willing to say whether you believe it is sinful for a man — for two men — to be married?" the senator pressed once again.
"No," Rao responded.
"Excuse me?" Booker said.
"My response is that these personal views are ones that I would put to one side. Whatever my personal views are on the subject, I would faithfully follow the precedent of the Supreme Court," the nominee said.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) slammed Booker for his line of questioning, arguing that questions about what is sinful should be utterly off-limits in confirmation hearings. He cited the Constitution's ban on a religious test for public office, and declared, "I don't believe this is a theological court of inquisition."

"The Senate Judiciary Committee should not be a theater for twisting nominees' records or views, nor should it be an avenue for persecution," Cruz declared. "We have seen a growing pattern among Senate Democrats of hostility to religious faith.

I was deeply troubled a few minutes ago to hear questioning of a nominee asking your personal views on what is sinful. In my view that has no business in this committee."

Booker is only the latest in a series of Democrats whose hostility to Christian nominees and Catholics in particular has emerged in confirmation hearings. Senator Dianne Feinstein made it known to all and sundry that the Catholic views of Amy Coney Barrett should disqualify her from the federal bench.

An article by Carrie Severino at National Review Online provides some examples:

During Barrett’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017, Senator Dianne Feinstein pointedly told the then-nominee, “the dogma lives loudly with in you, and that’s a concern.” The “dogma” to which she referred was Barrett’s Catholic faith, and Feinstein’s not-so-subtle suggestion was that an observant Catholic could not also be a fair and impartial judge.

Severino continues:

Senate Democrats have continually engaged in questioning that test the limits of the Constitution’s Article VI prohibition on “religious tests” for holding government office.

Their latest target is Brian Buescher, a federal district court nominee from Nebraska. Following Mr. Buescher’s November 2018 nomination hearing, Senators Mazie Hirono and Kamala Harris submitted questions for the record interrogating Buescher about his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus—a fraternal service organization of the Catholic Church that claims two million members worldwide.

The Knights are an arm of the Church and one of the world’s great charities, having made billions of dollars in charitable contributions and given millions of hours of volunteer service. Their mission includes aid to the poor, support for people with physical and developmental disabilities, and assistance to victims of natural disasters.

There have been numerous others who have been subjected to this line of inquiry. Severino lists them for us:

• In November 2018, Senator Feinstein submitted written questions for the record to Paul Matey (Third Circuit) asking about his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus.
• In October 2018, Senators Feinstein, Leahy, Blumenthal, Whitehouse and Harris submitted written questions for the record to Allison Jones Rushing (Fourth Circuit) asking about her involvement with Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nonprofit organization “that advocates for the right of people to freely live out their faith.”
• In May 2018, Senator Kamala Harris submitted written questions for the record to Peter Phipps (W.D.P.A.) asking about his affiliation with the Knights of Columbus.
• In March 2018, Senator Feinstein submitted written questions for the record to Michael Scudder (Seventh Circuit) noting his membership in the St. John the Cross Parish and asking about his involvement with the parish’s efforts to establish a residential crisis pregnancy center as cited in a parish bulletin.
• In June 2017, Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) submitted written questions for the record to Trevor McFadden (D.D.C.) about his personal views on issues of same-sex marriage and abortion in light of his church membership.
• And the church bashing has not been exclusive to the Senate Judiciary Committee: during a nomination hearing before the Senate Budget Committee in 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders accused Russell Vought—a Christian and President Trump’s nominee for Deputy Director of The White House Office of Management and Budget—of being an “Islamaphobic” on account of his religious views.

Not only is this line of interrogation in conflict with Article VI of the Constitution which explicitly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office under the United States,” it's also grossly hypocritical. None of these senators would ever dream of posing such questions to a Muslim nominee.

Catholic Christians, however, notwithstanding that their views on abortion and gay marriage are more moderate than those generally held by observant Muslims, are considered legitimate targets for the senators' bigotry.

Northam's Infanticide Views Are No Shocker

There's been a lot of shocked commentary on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's support for infanticide, but I'm not sure why people are surprised at his views.

Infanticide, causing the death of already born children or fetuses in the process of being born, has been supported by leading Democrats for at least twenty five years and supported by philosophers like Peter Singer for much longer than that.

For example, Republican-led Congresses first passed bills banning partial-birth abortion (PBA) in December 1995 and again October 1997, but both pieces of legislation were vetoed by President Bill Clinton.

PBA, also known as intact dilation and extraction, is a late-term abortion procedure. After inducing labor, the abortion provider typically turns the baby around (while still within the mother) and pulls the child’s leg(s) out, leaving the head in the uterus.

The baby’s head is then pierced with a sharp implement, creating a cavity through which the brains are sucked out, causing the skull to collapse and making it easier for the baby to be pulled out. In other words, the baby is killed while in the process of being born.

After Mr. Clinton was no longer in office the procedure was again banned by Congress, and the ban was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003. It was challenged in the courts by pro-choice groups and upheld by the Supreme Court in Gonzales v. Carhart.

Contemporaneously, the Illinois state senate sought several times in the early 2000s to protect the lives of children born alive after a botched abortion. These children were often left to die of exposure and dehydration in various facilities around the state, and the state senate sought to end this inhumane neglect with the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA).

BAIPA was introduced to insure that babies who survive attempted abortions are provided the same medical care and sustenance as any other infant born alive. BAIPA was introduced after evidence was presented that babies born alive after unsuccessful abortions were simply discarded in utility closets without food, care, or medical treatment until they died.

As an Illinois state senator at the time, Barack Obama voted twice against the BAIPA.

Mr. Obama saw such protections for the child as an unconstitutional infringement on a woman's right to choose even though the nation's foremost abortion advocacy group, NARAL, had no problem with it. As President, Mr. Obama also expressed concern about the Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on PBA.

Whether the issue has been eugenics back in the 1920s, or abortion in the 1970s, or partial birth abortion in the 1990s, or infanticide in the 2000s progressives have often supported the most extreme position.

It's little wonder, then, that Governor Northam would be taken aback by the outcry over what he probably thought was a reasonable articulation of the mainstream liberal position.

Naturalism's Incoherence Problem

I was listening to a podcast discussion the other day between two philosophers, one an atheist and one a theist, on the topic of whether or not naturalism is incoherent. Disappointingly, the discussion quickly devolved into an exchange over whether or not God exists and never did get around to exploring the original topic.

Maybe it's just as well because I think the topic title is slightly misconceived.

A concept is incoherent when it contains mutually contradictory features. For example the concepts of a married bachelor, or a giant pygmy, or a round square are incoherent because the first term in each contradicts and precludes the second and vice-versa.

But naturalism itself is not incoherent in this way. There don't appear, to me at least, any internal contradictions in the view that nature, as can be described by science, is all there is.

However, this is not to say that there are not coherence problems in trying to live as a consistent naturalist. Many who adopt a naturalistic worldview find themselves unable to live with it and have to go about their daily lives acting as if naturalism were false.

For example, most of us deeply desire in our lives a number of what might be called existential qualities, none of which can be sustained under naturalism:

• We desire meaning. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, wrote in his book Man's Search for Meaning that men can't live without meaning. Yet on naturalism, there's no meaning to be found anywhere in the cosmos, just "blind, pitiless indifference" in the words of Richard Dawkins.
• We desire to ground our moral judgments in something solid, but on naturalism morality is "just an illusion, fobbed off on us by our genes, to get us to cooperate with each other" according to philosopher Michael Ruse. Nothing is really right or wrong in a moral sense. It's just useful or not in promoting the survival of the species.
• We desire justice, but on naturalism death is the end and selfish and cruel men experience the same fate as their victims - total extinction. Unless there's accountability for our actions justice is a fiction.
• We desire dignity, but on naturalism we're just animals, gobs of protoplasm in thrall to our genes, with no free will and no real specialness. In the words of Stephen Hawking "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it this way: "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." On naturalism no lives matter.
• We desire to live, but on naturalism we all die and when those we love are gone they're gone forever. The late Will Provine of Cornell University writes: "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death...no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will." (emphasis mine)
• We desire happiness, but on naturalism the fate of most humans who've ever walked the earth has been simply to be born, suffer and die. There are moments of pleasure, Woody Allen once said, "but they don't add up to anything."

Most people who believe that the natural world is all there is, however, can't live consistently with these implications of their fundamental assumption. They're like a person who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. They live their daily existence as though their lives were meaningful, as though there were such things as justice, dignity, and morality, but then they switch into their alter ego and insist that the only thing that could actually make any of these possible - i.e., God - doesn't exist.

There's an incoherence in naturalism, to be sure, but it's not found in the concept itself. Rather, it's found in the attempt to live as though the concept were true.

Ralph Northam's Very Bad Week

Be glad you're not Virginia's Democratic governor Ralph Northam.

Northam was roundly criticized last week for supporting the killing of babies after they'd been born. Legislation Northam supported was ultimately defeated in the Virginia state legislature, but, had it passed, it would've legalized infanticide.

Northam claims he was taken out of context, but it's hard to see how else he could have been understood. He clearly favored a law that would have facilitated the killing of children. Here's what he said:

If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

He added that he thought the furor over the bill “was really blown out of proportion.”

Then, as if that wasn't trouble enough, on Friday it emerged that the hapless governor was discovered to have posed in blackface for a picture in his medical school yearbook alongside another student dressed as a Klansman (It may have been the other way around, no one knows for sure, but it hardly makes any difference).

The picture was clearly intended to demean and make fun of African Americans, and an irony in this is that Mr. Northam's successful campaign for the governorship benefitted handsomely from having painted his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, as a racist.

Calls from both left and right for the governor to resign have been increasing in volume, although I'd wager that were he a Republican the amplitude of the demands coming from the left would be exponentially greater than what they've been.

After all, as J. Christian Adams at PJ Media reminds us that former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott discovered to his sorrow that the standard of acceptable behavior is set far higher for Republicans than for Democrats.

Back in 2003, for instance, the Senate threw a birthday party for a 100-year-old colleague from South Carolina named Strom Thurmond who in his youth had been a staunch segregationist. Senator Lott offered a toast to Senator Thurmond in which he committed the unpardonable sin of lightheartedly suggesting that, had the country voted for Strom Thurmond for president when he ran in 1948, the country would be better off today.

It was an old man’s birthday. Lott never mentioned race. He was just being kind and not even thinking of the racial implications of what he was saying. Nevertheless, Adams writes, in a flash, Lott was gone from the Senate.

Lott's absent-minded insensitivity meant that he had to go, yet contemporaneously a former Klansman, the late Senator Robert Byrd (also of Virginia), had been serving in the Democratic party's top Senate positions for over three decades, and no one on the left seemed to mind.

Northam's defenders say that the offensive photo was taken in 1984 and that he's not the same man today. I sympathize with that argument. I don't think we should judge people in their late fifties simply by what they did and thought in their youth. Young men often do or say dumb, even awful, things, but people mature and change.

I believe in redemption, but here's the thing: People who sought to destroy Brett Kavanaugh for what he might have done as a teenager decades ago are hardly in a position to say now that Northam's case is different (Northam was in his mid-twenties when the photo was taken) and that he should be given a pass.

Adams points out another irony:

Just last week, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing where a representative of the NAACP testified in favor of a new federal mandate that would let all felons vote. When pressed, advocates admitted that a full restoration of rights – including the right to run for office, such as Governor of Virginia – would apply to murderers and child rapists.

There you have it. Northam has to go because of the yearbook photo while the same gang wants to ensure that murderers and rapists can hold public office. These are things I suspect nobody in 1984 would have believed could ever come true.

We can pass laws to allow felons to vote and run for office, but posing in a racially insulting photo disqualifies somebody for life from holding public office? What a topsy-turvy world we live in today. Update: This post was amended from the original to show that Northam's yearbook photo was taken when he was in medical school, not high school.

The Amazing Uniqueness of Human Language

Last week I did a post titled Human Exceptionalism in which I noted that many researchers investigating the uniqueness of human language have concluded that it defies any naturalistic explanation for its origin.

That post sent me back to one I did a couple of years ago on the last book written by the late Tom Wolfe which was also on the mystery of human language and thought I'd repost it.

Here it is:

I've been enjoying Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the theory of evolution and/or the history of the study of linguistics. Michael Egnor at Evolution News concurs with this commendation, and goes even further. Rather than me telling you what the book is about, I'll quote Egnor:

Tom Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and it's superb. Wolfe's theme is that human language is unique and is not shared in any way with other animals. He argues forcefully that evolutionary stories about the origin of human language are not credible.

In the first chapter of his book, Wolfe describes an article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology from 2014, co-authored by leading linguist Noam Chomsky and seven colleagues. Wolfe declares that:

"The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever," [the authors] concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we'll keep trying, they said gamely... but we'll have to start from zero again.

One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. "In the last 40 years," he and the other seven were saying, "there has been an explosion of research on this problem," and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia....

One hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced, and they had learned...nothing....In that same century and a half, Einstein discovered the ...the relativity of speed, time and distance... Pasteur discovered that microorganisms, notably bacteria, cause an ungodly number of diseases, from head colds to anthrax and oxygen-tubed, collapsed-lung, final-stage pneumonia....Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the so-called building blocks genes are made of...and 150 years' worth of linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline discovered...nothing...about language. What is the problem? What's the story?...What is it that they still don't get after a veritable eternity?

Wolfe provides a précis of his argument:

Speech is not one of man's several unique attributes -- speech is the attribute of all attributes!

Yet despite almost two centuries of speculations and hypothesizing we're no closer today to being able to explain what language is or how we come to have it than we've ever been. Indeed, Darwin and his votaries tried to come up with a plausible explanation and failed so utterly that scientists gave up for almost eighty years trying to explain it. Says Wolfe:

It is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man - language - was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

It's also hard to believe that it's been 67 years since 1949 and still no progress has been made on this question. Egnor writes:

And yet, as Wolfe points out, Darwinists are at an utter loss to explain how language -- the salient characteristic of man -- "evolved." None of the deep drawer of evolutionary just-so stories come anywhere close to explaining how man might have acquired the astonishing ability to craft unlimited propositions and concepts and subtleties within subtleties using a system of grammar and abstract designators (i.e. words) that are utterly lacking anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Egnor, who is himself a neuroscientist, closes his piece with these words:

I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities -- the intellect's ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing -- and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language -- a simulacrum of our abstract minds -- has no root in the animal world.

Language is the tool by which we think abstractly. It is sui generis. It is a gift, a window into the human soul, something we are made with, and it did not evolve. Language is a rock against which evolutionary theory wrecks, one of the many rocks -- the uncooperative fossil record, the jumbled molecular evolutionary tree, irreducible complexity, intricate intracellular design, the genetic code, the collapsing myth of junk DNA, the immaterial human mind -- that comprise the shoal that is sinking Darwin's Victorian fable.

The charm of Wolfe's book is that it reads like a novel, which is the metier for which Wolfe is famous. It's free of scientific jargon, it's funny and contains some fascinating insights into several of the major figures in the history of the search for an explanation for the origin and nature of language. Plus, it's only 169 pages long.

All in all a great read.

The Skunk at the Picnic

Just as Democrats were beginning to recover their mojo after the 2016 debacle, along comes billionaire Howard Schultz, a man who raised himself out of poverty, founded a chain of coffee shops which he named Starbucks, and became exceedingly wealthy.

Schultz has publicly voiced dismay at how far left the Democratic Party has lurched and how rapidly the lurch has been accomplished. Most of the Democratic candidates who'll be running for the White House in 2020 are far left progressives or socialists, the sort of people whose policies would drive a stake into the heart of the American economy, and Schultz has concluded that moderates like him no longer fit in the party.

As Tyler O'Neil at PJ Media put it: "The former Starbucks CEO has attacked the Democratic Party for running too far to the Left, and even bringing the destructive ideology of socialism to America."

Shultz is alarmed at the prospect of a socialist America and is himself considering a run for the presidency as an independent.

This possibility has thrown his erstwhile comrades into a panic. They realize that a moderate third party candidate could siphon a lot of Democratic votes from almost any left-wing Democrat running for the nation's highest office and all but guarantee Donald Trump's reelection.

David Rutz chronicles some of the progressive alarm in a column at the Washington Free Beacon. Here's an extended excerpt:

Democrats like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), Rep. Katie Hill (D., Calif.) and Julian Castro said his efforts would catapult Trump back into the White House, while CNN "conservative" commentator Ana Navarro said his running would help Trump and "maybe Putin."

"Majority Report" host Sam Seder said Schultz didn't "get to be king just because he's so rich," and liberal MSNBC analyst Karine Jean-Pierre said his actions were "very dangerous" and "we cannot allow this to happen." Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden tweeted she would boycott Starbucks and called Schultz's "vanity project" a "disgusting" thing that would destroy democracy.

Left-wing comedian Stephen Colbert said he'd had enough of billionaires running for president, telling them to find "new hobbies," and "The View" co-host Joy Behar said Schultz's decision would hand Trump reelection. "Community" actress Yvette Nicole Brown told Colbert that Schultz clearly didn't care about the country and said 2020 was not his time to run, telling him to do it in 2024 instead.

"Pod Save America" co-host and former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau called Schultz's potential run a "f---g awful thing to do," and former Obama adviser David Axelrod simply called it a "gift" for Trump.

MSNBC anchors Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle scolded Schultz over the idea by pointing out Michael Bloomberg had already realized an independent run for president was useless. Velshi accused Schultz of "hubris" similar to Trump's.

Those interviewing Schultz and his adviser Bill Burton over the past few days pressed them on the viability of his campaign and his motives—Erin Burnett at one point asked if he was running for the "right reasons."

Much of what Schultz says makes sense, but what progressives in the media want is not sense but solidarity. They have PTSD nightmares of 2000 when Ralph Nader ran as an independent and took enough votes away from Al Gore to hand the election to George W. Bush, and they've reacted toward Schultz much like picnickers suddenly spotting a skunk perambulating toward their picnic.

The last thing they want is for another independent to take votes away from whomever the Democratic candidate is, even if that candidate is someone whose policies would turn the United States into a Venezuelan-style basket case. Better that, the left fumes, than four more years of the hated Trump.

O'Neil concludes, probably accurately, that, "Howard Schultz is too liberal for the Republican Party and, sadly, too pro-American for the Democratic Party."

That's a very sad commentary on the contemporary Democratic Party.

One Reason We're Divided

One thing we can all agree on in the current political climate is that political discourse has become so toxic and vile that we're creating almost irreparable breaches between conservatives and progressives and even within these groups.

President Trump has set a poor example for us with his childish, insulting Twitter rants, but he's far from the only person in our culture whose Twitter messages demean and degrade our national conversation.

Indeed, demeaning and degrading others is a deliberate tactic employed by left-wing acolytes of the late activist Saul Alinsky, and one step that may go some distance toward nurturing a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people in the Democratic party to dissociate themselves from 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 entire book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salubrious development if more Democrats would disavow 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 their 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.

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malignant effect upon our nation.

Division is what the book advocates, and it's what its votaries want, but if anyone on the left is sincere about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously repudiate Alinsky and his Rules.

The Dire Cost of Raising the Minimum Wage

I frequently remind my students of Richard Weaver's (1948) famous epigram that ideas have consequences. I also like to point out that often the consequences are the opposite of what might have been hoped. So often is this the case that the phenomenon has been dubbed a "law" - the law of unintended consequences.

We see one example of this law at work in attempts to improve the lot of minimum wage workers by mandating an increase in the minimum employers must pay their employees.

Flouting the law of unintended consequences, Democrats, led by the socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, recently introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 by 2024, while also eliminating the tipped wage credit by 2027. "The current $7.25 an hour minimum wage is a starvation wage," he said. "We're going to have a minimum wage that is a living wage."

Unfortunately, things are not that easy. Raising the minimum wage is likely to hurt the very workers it's intended to help. From the link:

Prof. David Macpherson, chairman of Trinity University's economics department, said that such an increase would be unprecedented, but not in the manner Sanders describes. While only 3 percent of hourly workers work under the minimum wage today, the increase would instantly bring 44 percent of them under that umbrella.

Despite that large increase, it would not alleviate the poverty rate as employers, particularly small businesses, eliminated jobs to offset the increased costs. Macpherson, using Congressional Budget Office methodology, found that 2 million jobs would be lost under a $15 rate with the most heavy losses coming in poorer states.

Heidi Mann, who operates a small franchise business of Subway restaurants in Washington state, said that the threat of lost jobs and shuttered businesses is real. She was forced to lay off four of her seven employees at a Seattle location after the city passed a $15 minimum wage and shortened the business hours to make do.

Her Seattle location will most likely shutter by March of 2020 as customers go elsewhere. She expects the same thing will happen across the country if the $15 rate becomes the law of the land.

Workers will bear the burden, she said, pointing to the fact that she can no longer take a gamble on inexperienced employees. Most workers at her suburban Kirkland location are teenagers, compared to the pair of middle aged workers that staff her Seattle Subway.

"These significant [increases] will not only lead to job loss, but our workers will lose out on building their work experience," she said. "It's been frustrating and deflating to watch."

Susan Kochevar, the owner of 88 Drive-In Theatre in Colorado, said her business has already taken a hit since the state raised the minimum wage to $12 an hour. She has been forced to cut her workforce to deal with increasing labor costs and payroll taxes. The move to $15 an hour could prove fatal for small business owners.

"The tax cuts … really helped a lot of small businesses in Colorado, and that will help us ride that minimum wage increase, but to increase it again will [hurt] small businesses," she said. "My labor expenses have already gone up, and I've had to get by with fewer people."

The restaurant industry would be especially hard hit:

Valerie Graham has worked in restaurants for more than 20 years and is a bartender at Jack Rose Saloon in Washington, D.C. She helped organize restaurant workers to oppose a referendum to eliminate the tipped credit in D.C. in 2017.

After voters approved the measure, she successfully lobbied the Democratic City Council to overturn the results and preserve the current rates. She said the $15 wage rate would cause a "massive upheaval" for restaurants and force businesses to close.

"It is one of the few fields where someone without a high school diploma or experience … can earn a middle class life," she said. "The most vulnerable people in our industry will not be helped by the reckless disruption of our industry."

The irony of this is that these workers often support the very politicians and political party whose efforts will ultimately cost them their jobs.

Of course, the workers don't realize that. They just know that they'd like very much to be making more money and that politicians like Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez are trying to get it for them. They unfortunately never stop to think, as Ms Graham did, of what the unintended consequences of raising their wages would be.

So, they'll keep voting for progressive candidates while grousing that nobody seems to be hiring anymore and never thinking to make the connection between the two.

Human Exceptionalism

Biologist Ann Gauger holds the heretical opinion, at least it's heretical in today's cockeyed culture, that among all life forms, human beings are exceptional. Here's a quick summary of some of the traits she lists as making us not just different from other mammals but radically, qualitatively different:

We have specific traits that are well outside the norm, so far outside the norm that some scientists see the gaps as unbridgeable. These include abstract thought, foresight, speech, art, music, sociality, theory of mind, manipulation of the material world, charity, wickedness, and religion.

There may be others I haven’t thought of. We see rudiments of these things in animals, but human abilities are orders of magnitude higher than animals (or lower in the case of wickedness). Our specific abilities are greater than are necessary for survival, so unless they are linked to other traits why should we have a Mozart or an Einstein or a Galileo? What we do as scientists is pretty esoteric, right? Is there a selective advantage to any of it?

Maybe at low levels, but being Shakespeare or understanding the molecular dynamics of ribosomes or however you would describe your work is purely gratuitous.

In other words, it's hard to see how or why natural selection would have sorted out from among our primordial ancestors a few who possessed the capacity to do calculus.

One of the most inexplicable uniquely human traits is our capacity for language. Gauger quotes the late psychologist David Premack who challenged anyone to:

...reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or proto-humans were hunting mastodons…Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers, to be able to remark, ‘Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack’?

Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like.

For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

Gauger also cites an abstract from a scientific article on language evolution at the website Scorched Earth which concludes that there's simply no evolutionary explanation for human language:

We argue ... that the richness of [speculations about how language evolved] is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.

We show that, to date,

(1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity;

(2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved;

(3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon;

(4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable.

Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.

So, there is no plausible naturalistic explanation for how language arose in human beings, just as there's no plausible naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, or the origin of human consciousness, the origin of biological information or even for biological processes like meiosis, mitosis, metamorphosis, or sexual reproduction.

Nor can naturalism provide us with a satisfactory scientific account of cosmic fine-tuning or moral obligation.

When confronted with the most fundamental ontological questions naturalism simply shrugs its shoulders, and yet we're told by some that naturalism is nevertheless the most rational position to hold. Its chief competitor, the belief that there's an intelligent mind underlying the cosmos and all that it contains, we're told, is mere superstition.

We might be forgiven for suspecting that between these two worldview alternatives - unconscious, purposeless forces or an intelligent purposeful mind - the latter is actually the more rational explanation for the phenomena Gauger lists and the former is the more superstitious.

The Exorbitant Cost of Illegal Immigration

One of the arguments against the border wall is that it costs too much, but the crucial question is not how much a wall would cost but rather what's the cost of not building it.

A website called FairU.S. has run the numbers and the cost is staggering. According to Fair the net cost to the federal government (i.e. the money spent by taxpayers minus the tax revenue paid to the treasury by illegals) far exceeds the $5.7 billion that President Trump has asked for starting construction on the wall, and the fiscal burden incurred by the various state governments is even greater.

The following is from their site:

The Federal government spends $45.8 billion on illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children. This amount includes expenditures for public education, medical care, justice enforcement initiatives, welfare programs and other miscellaneous costs. It also factors in the meager amount illegal aliens pay to the federal government in income, social security, Medicare and excise taxes.

The approximately $46 billion in federal expenditures attributable to illegal aliens is staggering. Assuming an illegal alien population of approximately 12.5 million illegal aliens and 4.2 million U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, that amounts to roughly $2,746 per illegal alien, per year.

For the sake of comparison, the average American college student receives only $4,800 in federal student loans each year.

Since the federal government takes in about 15 billion in tax revenues from illegal aliens the American people pay out approximately 30 billion of goods and services to people who have no legal right to be here. Here's the breakdown:

• Federal Education - $1.6 Billion
• Federal Medical Costs - $17.1 Billion
• Federal Justice Expenditures - $13.1 Billion
• Federal Welfare Programs - $5.8 Billion
• Total Federal Expenditures - $45.8 Billion

But this is just the federal payout. Add in the outlays of the various state and local governments, which come to $88 billion, and the total annual cost to the American taxpayer, not counting the costs to victims of motor vehicle accidents and crime perpetrated by illegal aliens, comes to approximately $116 billion every year.

President Trump asked Congress for a relatively measly $5.7 billion to build a barrier to stem the flow of illegal immigrants across the border in order to relieve this unsustainable expense, and the Democrats, for no discernibly coherent reason, refused.

What's the explanation for this refusal?

If we bracket out cynical explanations for the Democrats' obstinacy - such as they're intent on bankrupting the country, or they just want more Democrat voters in Texas to turn that state blue, or they hate Trump so much that they'll pay any price to avoid helping him - if we eliminate those ignoble reasons then we're left with ........ what?

New York's New Abortion Law

New York State recently passed the most extreme abortion law in the country, essentially allowing a woman to end the life of an unborn child at any point in her pregnancy. Previously, a woman could not get an abortion in New York after the second trimester unless her life was in danger.

Under the new law, she can obtain an abortion after 24 weeks if being pregnant is somehow harming her health, a criterion which is so elastic it can be stretched to cover almost anything.

As one commentator observed, an unborn child a few moments before its birth now has fewer rights in New York than do illegal immigrants.

Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire has a column in which he "argues" that the New York law doesn't go far enough and that it should be expanded to permit post-birth abortions.

Walsh's column is a satire - an effective way to make a very serious point: Any of the reasons used to justify giving women an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy are just as valid as reasons for allowing a woman to "terminate" the life of an already born child.

Three justifications for abortion on demand commonly heard from the lips of pro-choice advocates are:

1. The woman’s autonomy must be respected.
2. The fetus is dependent on his mother and thus not a person.
3. If the fetus is not aborted, it will just become an unwanted child, and we already have enough of those to deal with.

Walsh insists that accepting the legitimacy of these justifications puts us on a slippery slope to justifying not only infanticide but also toddler-cide. He writes:

[A]s I thought more deeply about the issue, I began to see that this law is not quite the victory for freedom and autonomy that I first imagined. It is a good start, but there is much more work to be done. The law allows for a fetus to be terminated at any stage so long as the procedure is needed to protect the life or health of the mother.

This qualification is in itself problematic because it puts someone else — likely a man — in the position of judging whether a woman’s reason for procuring an abortion is “acceptable.” No person other than the woman herself can make such a determination.

Perhaps this is a minor problem. Indeed, “health” can mean anything whatsoever. Emotional health, physical health, psychological health, financial health, spiritual health. An abortion is always a matter of preserving health in some form. The authors of the bill obviously wrote it intending that the “restrictions” would restrict no one. It is an admirable effort, yet there is something else to consider.

If a woman decides to end her pregnancy in the third trimester, she is still (sadly) going to have to deal with labor and delivery. The fetus is treated with a fatal dose of medication administered by an injection into its skull and then, after a few days, the woman gives birth to the now terminated fetus. But how is it in the best interest of the woman to administer this dose to the fetus while it is still inside her?

Isn’t it a further infringement on her autonomy that she be forced to go through such a procedure? And doesn’t it needlessly put her at risk? Wouldn’t it be more consistent with the pro-choice ethic to evacuate the fetus and then administer the treatment? How do we help and respect the woman by arbitrarily subjecting her to such a physically and emotionally taxing process?

It will be objected that a fetus prior to birth is inside the woman while the fetus after birth is outside. Yes, and so? We have already established that the fetus has no rights of its own. Only the mother’s wellbeing matters here, and her wellbeing would be better served by a post-birth procedure.

Read the rest at the link. It'd be funny if the subject matter weren't so grim. If you're pro-life you'll nod in agreement the whole way through. If you're pro-choice it'll make you grind your teeth, but then teeth-grinding is a poor rebuttal.

What pro-choice advocates need to do is explain, if they can, why what Walsh says is wrong.

Puncturing Myths about Western Civilization

I find myself often referring in conversation with friends to Rodney Stark's excellent book titled How the West Won. Like all his books HWW is history that reads like a novel. He argues in the book that all of the progress we've enjoyed in the world since the medieval period has had it's genesis in the West.

His theory, convincingly defended, to my mind, is that progress only occurred in areas with high levels of personal liberty, low taxation, and strong property rights. To the extent these were absent, as they have been in most parts of the world throughout history, progress died in the crib, as it were. He also argues that the crucial soil for progress was a Judeo-Christian worldview in which the universe was seen as an orderly, law-governed, rational product of a personal, non-arbitrary God. Where this belief was absent, as it was everywhere but Europe, science and technology, medicine and learning, either never developed or were never sustained.

Along the way Stark punctures a host of myths that have become almost axiomatic on the left but which are at complete variance with the historical facts. He makes a strong case for the claim that capitalism and even colonialism have been blessings, that the fall of Rome was one of the single most beneficial events in world history, that the "Dark Ages" never happened, that the crusades were not at all the rapacious ventures by murderous Christians of gentle, pastoral Muslims we've been told they were, that historical climate change had many salubrious effects on Western progress, that there was no scientific "revolution" but rather a continual and accelerating unfolding of scientific discovery that began at least as far back as the 13th century and probably earlier.

I urge anyone interested in history to get a copy. Stark includes a lot that he covered in earlier works, but much of it is new and what isn't new bears repeating anyway.

An example of something that's both myth-busting and new was Stark's discussion of the work of Robert D. Woodberry.

Woodberry's research makes it clear that much, if not most, of the progress made around the world is due to the work of Western missionaries who labored a century or more ago.

Here's what Stark writes about the role missionaries played in making life better for millions:

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the charges leveled against Christian missionaries (along with colonialists in general) is that they imposed "modernity" on much of the non-Western world. It has long been the received wisdom among anthropologists and other cultural relativists that by bringing Western technology and learning to "native peoples," the missionaries corrupted their cultures, which were as valid as those of the West....But to embrace the fundamental message of cultural imperialism requires that one be comfortable with such crimes against women as foot-binding, female circumcision, the custom of Sati (which caused women to be burned to death, tied to their husbands' funeral pyres), and the stoning to death of rape victims on the grounds of their adultery.

It also requires one to agree that tyranny is every bit as desirable as democracy, and that slavery should be tolerated if it accords with local customs. Similarly, one must classify high-infant mortality rates, toothlessness in early adulthood, and the castration of young boys as valid parts of local cultures, to be cherished along with illiteracy. For it was especially on these aspects of non-Western cultures that modernity was "imposed," both by missionaries and other colonialists.

Moreover, missionaries undertook many aggressive actions to defend local peoples against undue exploitation by colonial officials. In the mid-1700s, for example, the Jesuits tried to protect the Indians in Latin America from European efforts to enslave them; Portuguese and Spanish colonial officials brutally ejected the Jesuits for interfering. Protestant missionaries frequently became involved in bitter conflicts with commercial and colonial leaders in support of local populations, particularly in India and Africa....

A remarkable new study by Robert D. Woodberry has demonstrated conclusively that Protestant missionaries can take most of the credit for the rise and spread of stable democracies in the non-Western world. That is, the greater the number of Protestant missionaries per ten thousand local population in 1923, the higher the probability that by now a nation has achieved a stable democracy. The missionary effect is far greater than that of fifty other pertinent control variables, including gross domestic product and whether or not a nation was a British colony.

Woodberry not only identified this missionary effect but also gained important insights into why it occurred. Missionaries, he showed, contributed to the rise of stable democracies because they sponsored mass education, local printing and newspapers, and local voluntary organizations, including those having a nationalist and anticolonial orientation.

These results so surprised social scientists that perhaps no study has ever been subjected to such intensive prepublication vetting....

Protestant missionaries did more than advance democracy in non-Western societies. The schools they started even sent some students off to study in Britain and America. It is amazing how many leaders of successful anti-colonial movements in British colonies received university degrees in England - among them Mahatma Ghandi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya....

Less recognized are the lasting benefits of the missionary commitment to medicine and health. American and British Protestant missionaries made incredible investments in medical facilities in non-Western nations. As of 1910 they had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals. To sustain these massive efforts, the missionaries recruited and trained local doctors and nurses, who soon greatly outnumbered the Western missionaries....

[Woodberry's] study showed that the higher the number of Protestant missionaries per one thousand population in a nation in 1923, the lower that nation's infant mortality rate in 2000 - an effect more than nine times as large as the effect of current GDP per capita. Similarly, the 1923 missionary rate was strongly positively correlated with a nation's life expectancy in 2000.

These missionaries battled every kind of pestilence, hardship, and deprivation. They were often murdered or died from disease, all in an effort to make life better for people living in miserable circumstances, while leftist academics sit in their comfortable, air-conditioned offices, never having made anything better for anyone, blithely and foolishly condemning those who did for being "superstitious" and "cultural imperialists" who imposed their values on idyllic societies that would be better off if left alone.

Some might call these academics intellectually arrogant or even stupid, but if nothing else they certainly display a moral blindness.

Woodberry's paper can be read in pdf here.

Expanding the Boundaries of Science

An article by two physicists, Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in the NYT, suggests that science is experiencing an identity crisis. It used to be assumed that what distinguished science from other disciplines was that science was based on testing predictions which were entailed by a theory. This was called the hypothetico-deductive method.

Unfortunately, it seems that some theories in physics and biology have reached the limits of testability. In particle physics, for example, in order to probe more deeply into the structure of matter we have to build particle accelerators that would circle the earth.

Since this is economically and, presumably, technically impractical, particle physics may have reached a dead end. It's not that we know everything there is to know, it's that we may have reached a point where we know everything which can be known, at least about particle physics.

Rather than submit to this glum state of affairs, however, some scientists want to expand the boundaries of legitimate science to include metaphysical speculation. The problem of discerning what to count as science is called by philosophers the Demarcation Problem, and the tendency to blur the lines between science and philosophy (metaphysics) is especially prominent among string and multiverse theorists. Here's part of what Frank and Gleiser have to say about this:

A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.”

Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”

Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

[This raises] a philosophical question: How are we to determine whether a theory is true if it cannot be validated experimentally? Should we abandon it just because, at a given level of technological capacity, empirical support might be impossible? If not, how long should we wait for such experimental machinery before moving on: Ten years? Fifty years? Centuries?

Consider, likewise, the cutting-edge theory in physics that suggests that our universe is just one universe in a profusion of separate universes that make up the so-called multiverse.

This theory could help solve some deep scientific conundrums about our own universe (such as the so-called fine-tuning problem), but at considerable cost: Namely, the additional universes of the multiverse would lie beyond our powers of observation and could never be directly investigated.

Multiverse advocates argue nonetheless that we should keep exploring the idea — and search for indirect evidence of other universes.

Similar difficulties seem to be looming in cosmogeny (the study of the origin of the universe), the origin of life and the origin of consciousness, all of which confront researchers with this awkward question: If scientists yield to the desire to include in the discipline of science explanatory theories which are inherently untestable and which are essentially metaphysical, on what grounds can anyone argue against allowing the teaching of Creationism in public school science classes?

Another Bad Week for Media Credibility

Our American media has churned out yet another round of fake news this week. Two recent stories illustrate our media's sad and maddening descent to the level of supermarket tabloids.

The first was the feeding frenzy among cable news talking heads sparked by a BuzzFeed story claiming that there was incontrovertible evidence that President-elect Donald Trump ordered his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about his real estate projects in Russia.

Media commentators on almost every network were giddy with excitement over Mr. Trump's manifest subornation of perjury and his inevitable impeachment. Until, that is, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller issued a denial that any such evidence was in hand. With that, crestfallen news reporters began their by now regular and reluctant walkback of their earlier stories.

Even so, the damage had been done and large portions of the population, including even Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand, remained convinced that the story was true despite Mueller's disclaimer.

Then came the orgy of media outrage arising from the completely phony revelation of a bunch of teenagers from Covington Catholic High School harassing a native-American demonstrator during a protest in Washington, D.C. The students, who had been participating in the March for Life (which you probably didn't even know occurred if you only get your news from mainstream sources), were waiting for their bus when they were approached by a group from an organization called Black Hebrew Israelites who began hurling racist, homophobic slurs and taunts at them.

Because the media falsely made the students out to be the aggressors in this incident they and their families are being threatened, their school has been vilified, social media nitwits are doing everything they can to ruin these kids' lives, and the whole thing was a lie amplified by a media with a ravenous appetite for scandal involving anyone who can be tied to President Trump (some of the students were wearing MAGA hats).

One gentle soul who works for something called Vulture declared that “I just want these people to die. Simple as that. Every single one of them. And their parents.” The students, this beacon of comity averred, were “white slugs.”

Well, they were also the innocent party in this sordid episode, and the secular puritans, both left and right, who were so quick to condemn them have behaved at best irresponsibly and at worst reprehensibly. And, of course, the walkback has begun.

For a full account of what actually happened go here. For a description of the execrable behavior exhibited by the boys' critics see this article at PJ Media.

There was a time when journalists occasionally cared about the effect their reporting might have on the lives of the people they reported on. There was a time when journalists demanded that a story be independently corroborated before they'd publish it.

Today that standard has been abandoned and replaced with one which allows for the public airing of almost anything that reflects poorly on the president or his supporters, and any innocent bystanders who suffer are just written off as collateral damage.

Retractions can always come later, if need be, after public perception of the president has been ratcheted down a few more notches and public hatred for him and his voters boosted a few degrees higher.

Not all journalists have the ethics of a mob hit man, of course. Some of them are still old-fashioned enough to believe they have a professional responsibility to make sure their reports are true before they put them before the public, but it's hard today to find any of those dinosaurs on CNN or MSNBC.

Little wonder so many Americans agree with President Trump when he accuses the media of persistently trading in "fake news."

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. III)

This is the final installment in a series of posts on objections raised by philosopher Erik Wielenberg to the moral argument for the existence of God (scroll down for the previous two posts). Recall that Wielenberg couches his challenge to the moral argument in the form of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

In the previous post we looked at question #1 to determine how persuasive it was as an objection to the claim that if objective moral duties exist, God must exist. Today we'll look at questions #2 and #3.

One response to #2 is to point out that in fact our fundamental moral obligations to do justice and show compassion and mercy are known by everyone, atheist and theist alike. The apostle Paul writes that "they [unbelievers] show the work of the [moral] law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them." (Romans 2:15).

In other words, everyone has a basic sense of what's right and what's wrong, but if there's no transcendent ground for this sense then there's nothing obligatory about following it. It can easily be explained away as a product of social conditioning or evolution and then we're back to the argument of our first post in this series.

In response to #3 it's hard to see how commanding people not to, say, commit murder actually introduces more evil into the world. Wielenberg seems to think that murder is evil because God prohibits it, but that's silly. Murder isn't evil because God forbids it. God forbids it because it's evil. People would still murder others had God never proscribed it. In fact there'd probably be more murder had God not forbidden it and therefore there'd be more evil.

Even if not everyone heeds the command forbidding murder surely most people do, and therefore God's command reduces the amount of killing and human suffering rather than introducing more of it.

We can conclude this series of posts with this observation: If the God of traditional theism exists He is perfectly good, He transcends human subjectivity, and He is able to hold us accountable for what we do. Only such a being could serve as an adequate ground for the existence of objective moral duties.

When people seek to live what would be considered a "good moral life" while denying the existence of the only adequate basis for their moral values, they're in fact piggy-backing on theism while at the same time claiming to reject the theism on which their moral life depends.

That doesn't seem to make much sense.

Celebrating an American Hero

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday and it would be well to focus on why we do. King was a man of great courage who was resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America.

His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's sad that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his dream of racial harmony has not.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to identity politics.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Sadly, people are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history, but that's precisely contrary to Martin Luther King's dream.

Nor do I think he would have been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it were somehow separate from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of American history. The civil rights movement was not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded.

It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely upheld these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to realize that racism is a sin to which all races are prone and is not exclusive to the majority race.

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and our minds, and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. II)

In yesterday's post we outlined one version of the moral argument for the existence of God. It goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

We also mentioned that in a debate with theistic philosopher William Lane Craig, atheistic philosopher Erik Wielenberg challenged the first premise of the argument and therefore rejected the conclusion.

Wielenberg's challenge was packaged in a series of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

Quite apart from Craig's response, I'd like to venture a reply myself to Wielenberg's questions.

Taking them in order, I understand Wielenberg to be asking in #1 why there could not be other sources of moral obligation besides God. Why, he's asking, must we think that only God is a sufficient source of moral duty?

In reply it seems appropriate to ask what else could be an adequate source of moral obligation if not God? Several possibilities may perhaps suggest themselves: Social consensus, evolution and collective human reason are three, but there are serious shortcomings with each of these.

If the consensus of a society serves as a moral authority then, as was argued in yesterday's post, whatever a society deems to be right is right. Thus, if a society countenances slavery, oppression of women or child abuse those things would be morally proper.

Furthermore, if someone were to dissent and insist that slavery, say, is wrong, and if the dissenter happens to be in the minority in his or her society, then the dissenter must of necessity be holding a morally incorrect opinion. The dissenter is wrong by definition. The consensus of society is otherwise, and if the consensus is right ab defino then the minority opinion is always wrong.

And, if that's so, how would a society ever experience moral improvement since moral progress is almost always initiated by people holding a minority opinion?

Well, what about the evolutionary possibility? It's sometimes argued that we have evolved traits like sympathy for our fellow human beings and that we're therefore morally obligated to treat others sympathetically or kindly, but it's hard to see how this conclusion follows from the premise.

The fact that a behavioral trait has evolved is hardly a reason to consider ourselves morally obligated to behave accordingly. After all, as philosopher David Hume pointed out 250 years ago, just because human beings are a certain way, it doesn't follow that we should be that way.

In addition, if behavioral traits are the products of evolution then selfishness, male aggression and male dominance of females, among other unsavory aspects of human nature, are all evolved traits. Should we therefore consider ourselves obligated to be selfish, violent and oppressive?

And if all our behaviors have the same evolutionary provenience how do we arbitrate between our sympathy for others and our contempt for others? Why is sympathy right and good and contempt wrong and bad if evolution has produced them both?

Finally, we might ask how a blind, impersonal process like evolution could ever impose a moral obligation upon us in the first place. Obligations can only be imposed by personal beings with minds. Impersonal processes like natural selection and genetic mutation cannot make selfishness and greed, violence and hatred, morally wrong, nor can they forbid them and impose on us a duty to refrain from them.

Some would argue that human reason is the source of moral obligation, but it's difficult to see how human reason can impose a duty to do something like sacrificing one's goods to help anonymous poor people in a distant continent. Why would I be wrong to refrain from helping those people? What does it even mean to say that it would be wrong not to help them?

Human reason seems to me to lead not to some Kantian kingdom of ends in which we act in ways that we would want all people to act. Rather reason tells me to put my own interests first, ahead of the interests of others. The moral imperative produced by a secular human reason is "Look out for #1."

Indeed, another atheist philosopher, the Canadian Kai Nielsen expressed deep disappointment with the inability of philosophers to find a way to base a moral system on reason:

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality.

Richard Rorty, also an atheistic philosopher, declared that:

...if you do not believe in God you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do.

Very well, then, but about Wielenberg's questions #2 and #3?

We'll consider those next week.

A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. I)

Two philosophers, William Lane Craig and Erik Wielenberg, met last February to debate (see the video here) what's called the Moral argument for the existence of God. Simply put, the argument they debated goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Craig, who is a theist, argued on behalf of the soundness of this argument and Wielenberg, who is an atheist, argued against it.

Generally, those who seek to evade the conclusion that God exists either 1) deny the first premise and argue that even though God does not exist objective moral duties do exist. Or, they 2) deny the second premise and claim that God does not exist and that there are no objective moral duties either. Any moral obligations that exist are merely subjective - self-chosen and self-imposed.

Those who adopt the first tactic have a difficult time explaining where objective moral duties could possibly come from if not from God. What entity could have the moral authority, the right, to impose a moral obligation upon us to, say, love our fellow man. The state can, of course, impose legal duties to refrain from harming others, but it cannot impose a moral duty to not hate others or to not be selfish or greedy. The state can control human behavior through the civil law, but it has no authority over the human heart.

Moreover, if the state could impose such a duty, if the state was in fact the highest moral authority, then whatever the state sanctioned would be ipso facto right. So if the state, as it has done historically, endorsed genocide, or human sacrifice, or chattel slavery, or denial of the right to vote to women all of those would be morally right and proper, and one who denied that they were right would be, by definition, wrong.

Those who opt for the second tactic, on the other hand, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile their belief that no objective moral duties exist with the way they actually think and live their lives.

For example, if there are no objective duties then no one can say that anything anyone else did was objectively wrong, yet almost everyone, theist and atheist alike, agrees that child abuse, raping a toddler, molesting altar boys, or beating a crying infant are all morally wrong. And almost everyone would agree that anyone who refuses to make that judgment is at best morally stunted and at worst morally depraved.

This short video illustrates the moral argument:

Wielenberg agrees that objective moral duties do exist, he accepts the second premise, but he denies that God exists. In other words, he rejects the first premise of the moral argument and, thus, he rejects the conclusion.

He summarizes his objection with three three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

We'll consider this challenge to Craig's argument in tomorrow's post.

The Relevance of Philosophy

Robert Tracinski has written some wise words on the topic of the importance and relevance of philosophy in these times.

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not each of us adopts a particular philosophical view of life and the world. We do this as individuals and we do it corporately as a society. To study philosophy is to consciously examine the views we're adopting and to ask ourselves and others whether those views make sense.

Here's a portion of what Tracinski writes:

The primary purpose of philosophy is to offer guidance for one’s life. It asks questions like: How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? How do we know what is right or wrong? What is the moral purpose of our lives? Do we have a choice over our personality and control over our destiny? When we say philosophy talks about “the meaning of life,” that’s not an understatement. These are the kinds of questions that, depending on the answers, can give meaning and coherence to the course of our lives.

They also make a tangible difference in how we live it. If you don’t think you have control over your life — if you think everything is determined by your genes, upbringing, God or “the system, man” — then you’re not likely to take much action to improve your life. So the questions philosophy deals with are the kind of questions that really matter.

What philosophy does for a single person’s life, it also does for the political life of a nation. If we want to make America great again, for example, we need to know what “greatness” is and how to achieve it. We need to know what government can do, ought to do, and shouldn’t do. All of these questions have huge, life-and-death consequences.

Politics is about ideas and power. Philosophy asks us to follow our ideas to their logical conclusion to see whether those endpoints are really best for ourselves and our nation. It helps us to consider how power should be exercised in a society that aspires to justice.

Tracinski continues:

In that regard, there are whole schools of philosophy — including the ones dominant today — that undermine the role of philosophy itself. They are helping to turn us into an unphilosophical country with an unphilosophical political culture.

The dominant schools today are essentially subjectivist. They encourage you, Oprah-style, to assert “your truth,” which is valid because you feel it, so there’s no need to listen to anyone else. The subjectivists have cultivated a reputation for being “open-minded” and freewheeling, but this actually shuts down discussion. ... this is how we get the peculiar dogmatism of political correctness [according to which]...[t]here is no universal truth, just your ‘perspective,’ as a trans person of color or a left-handed lesbian tugboat worker, or whatever.

And no one else is entitled to question your perspective. It’s true because it’s true for you. If you are aggrieved, the very fact of your grievance validates itself.

If that’s the case, what’s the point of discussing any of it? It’s not for others to question or for you to explain. You just scream out your rage and frustration, and they have to cave.

In other words, so much of what passes for "dialogue" today is merely emotive venting (see the video here, for example). People often are unable or unwilling to give a rational defense of what they believe so they substitute yelling, name-calling, intimidation, censorship, and/or violence, all of which are tacit admissions that they have no good reasons for their beliefs and cannot persuade others to accept them but can only impose them on others by refusing others the opportunity to analyze, debate and promote an alternative point of view.

We see this often whenever matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, evolution, climate change, or politics arise in the classroom or in informal discussions. As soon as an opinion is raised which clashes with conventional orthodoxy, especially the orthodoxy of the left, the dissenter is treated like a heretic or a social leper.

In some cases on university campuses where the heretics have been grad students they've been expelled from their degree programs, and when they've been faculty members they've sometimes been denied tenure or their classes have been disrupted. In cases where the dissenters from the approved opinion have been invited speakers they've often been disinvited or shouted down or even assaulted.

Tracinski concludes:

When we disregard philosophy, when we don’t used reasoned debate to examine our moral and political assumptions, then all that’s left is some kind of appeal to emotion. When you appeal to emotion, as most people do these days, then the only people you can gather to your side are those already inclined to feel the same emotions you do. You end up appealing only to people like you, to those with the same background and upbringing.

College-educated blue-staters will agree with college-educated blue-staters. Blue-collar red-staters agree with blue-collar red-staters.

Actually, in today’s politics, the responses are even narrower, because so much of the political debate is based on an appeal to our emotions about a particular person. Do you love or hate Hillary Clinton? Do you love or hate Donald Trump? That’s all you need to know to determine where you stand in a partisan fight, and even on public policy.

The end of the road for the appeal to emotion is the kind of tribalism and cult of personality we see in today’s politics.

The only cure for it is philosophy.

Well, maybe not the only cure but the ability to think philosophically is certainly an essential part of any cure.