Justifying Hate Speech

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D - MN) is a Muslim woman who has made repeated deprecatory comments toward Israel and Jews, comments that many Jews, including members of her own party, have taken to be anti-semitic. This has caused a lot of dissension in the party between those who still think that hate speech is wrong no matter who engages in it and those who think it wrong only if Republicans engage in it.

The former demanded a resolution that would've chastised Omar (and others) for their increasingly audacious anti-Jewish remarks, so, in an attempt to heal the rift, Speaker Pelosi advanced a weak-tea resolution that condemned just about every offensive form of speech anyone could imagine. the resolution was so childish and anodyne that even Ms. Omar voted for it, notwithstanding that it was originally instigated to serve as a condemnation of her conduct.

Some of her defenders in the Democratic caucus have subsequently embarrassed themselves by advancing the silliest arguments heard in the halls of congress since, well, since the debates over the border wall.

Speaker Pelosi, for example, insisted that the poor woman didn't understand the significance of her statements about Jews and Israel, but that seems to be a veiled allegation of the congresswoman's stupidity. If she doesn't understand why her comments have repeatedly offended Jews in the United States what's she doing in a position of national leadership?

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), herself a Jew, voiced this remarkable justification for overlooking her colleague's anti-semitism:

I want to tell you, part of being a Jew is to be welcoming to the stranger. And I want to tell you, Ilhan Omar is a refugee from Somalia. She comes from a different culture. She has things to learn.

So, being a refugee from a different culture makes hatred okay. That's a great argument for shutting down the immigration of Muslims altogether. Ms. Omar, who is Somali, has been living in the U.S. since 1995 and has been a citizen since 2000. One would think she'd understand by now that ethnic hatred is not acceptable here.

She also, it must be said, comes from a culture that practices genital mutilation of women, honor killing, and which holds it to be a religious duty to kill apostates. Does Ms. Schakowsky think we should give a pass to those behaviors among immigrants as well? If not, why not?

She added that,

I am not either trivializing anti-Semitism or the things that she said or saying that it's okay that she said them. But what I am saying is that I think this a learning moment for her and a learning moment for the caucus on how to get along.

But she is trivializing anti-semitism by excusing it on the basis of a misguided cultural relativism. Had a Republican been making comments like these Democrats would be outraged by the hatred it evinced and demanding that she be punished.

In fact, a few months ago Republican congressman Steve King was stripped of all committee assignments for a pattern of remarks which many on both sides of the aisle felt to be too sympathetic with the notion of white supremacy.

Even sillier than Rep. Schakowsky's moral relativism, however, were the comments from Democratic House Whip James Clyburn who complained that media outlets weren't reporting that Omar lived through the Somali Civil War. "I’ve talked to her, and I can tell you she is living through a lot of pain," Clyburn said.

Does Mr. Clyburn suggest that we are to accept that, having lived through pain caused, be it noted, by other Muslims, we are to exonerate Ms. Omar for her hostility to Jews? What's the connection between the hardships of her childhood and Jewish people?

If the hardships she endured as a consequence of the civil war excuse her repeated bigotry, I wonder if Mr. Clyburn, who is African American, would apply that same standard to the bigotry of white southerners toward blacks during Reconstruction.

Those whites lost everything in the American civil war, a war fought in large part for the benefit of blacks. If living through a civil war is justification for despising a group of people then why is the racist behavior of southern whites not at least understandable, if not justifiable?

The bald fact is Ms. Omar is an anti-semite and attempts by her colleagues to sugar-coat her hatred of Jews is as embarrassing as it is ineffective. She has no more business serving in the House of Representatives than does any member of the KKK.

Our Amazing Universe

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

Here's another example courtesy of biologist Ann Gauger. Gauger quotes philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon who writes that,

[I]f we measure the width of the observable universe in inches and regard this as representing the scale of the strengths of the physical forces, gravity is fine-tuned to such an extent that the possibility of intelligent life can only tolerate an increase or decrease in its strength of one one-hundred-millionth of an inch with respect to the diameter of the observable universe.

To which Gauger responds,

That is literally awesome. That 1/10^8 inch movement is the same as 0.00000001 of an inch, or about the width of a water molecule, in either direction compared to the width of the observable universe. That is an incredible amount of very fine-tuned order — the relationship between the strong nuclear force and the gravitational force has to be that precise for stars and planets to form, and the elements that are necessary to support life.

Just one water molecule’s width compared to the width of the whole universe — if the ratio were just a little too little, stars’s lives would be cut short and there would be no time for life to develop; too much and everything would expand too fast, thus preventing star and planet formation.

No wonder fine-tuning is called one of the best evidences for intelligent design. People have proposed ways around the challenge, mainly to do with the multiverse hypothesis. But there are so many other instances of fine-tuning and design perfect for creatures like us that it begins to look like a genuine plan.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Gauger refers to the assumption held by some that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must inevitably exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many moderns choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are quite remarkable.

Aborting Gay Babies

Stephen Lavedas and his wife are distraught. They're convinced that no one can tell a woman what she can do with her body. They're convinced that a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason at any time. Yet when they sought to exercise their right to choose they ran into a stony wall of resistance and hate.

Why? Well, because they discovered that the child Mrs. Lavedas was carrying was gay, and, given the statistics and their own interests and opinions, they thought their child would have a very difficult life, and his sexual predilections would make their own life difficult as well.

So, having absorbed and assented to all the arguments proffered over the years in defense of a woman's right to choose, they opted to abort the child.

Lavedas tells their story here. His account is in fact a clever satire, but it's worth trying to imagine how those who defend a woman's right to choose would respond, as Lavedas tells it, to the mother's choice when her choice transgresses the boundaries of progressive orthodoxy.

Here's his lede:

My girlfriend and I recently found out she is pregnant. I told her I’d support her and the baby, and secretly started saving for an engagement ring. She said she thought I would have wanted her to get an abortion. I didn’t—at least at first.

She was excited and started planning the nursery. It took me two months to save up, but I finally got on one knee and popped the question. She cried and said yes. I’m still scared about being a dad, but I’ve got a good job and so does she. We’ll make a great family, just the three of us.

Last week, though, she went in for a checkup. We decided to get full fetal blood work done. Everyone’s doing it; the doctor said there is little risk to the fetus, and better safe than sorry, right? I’m sure everything will be fine, and we’ll learn the sex. I really hope it’s a boy.

Oh, and we decided to make everything official with a trip to the courthouse. We are married now!

Well, got the blood work results, and there’s good news and bad news. Good news: It’s a boy and he’s healthy. Bad news: He’s gay. I didn’t even know there was a blood test for that now, but I guess it’s new? They found the genes that cause homosexuality and they test for them now.

So here's a question for our left-leaning friends: Would it be okay for parents in Lavedas' position to abort their child because it's gay?

Read the whole essay at the link. It's not long, but it does put a lot of pro-choicers in a bit of a logical pickle and offers a serious and rather unique challenge to their rationalizations.

SJW Heretic

I suppose there are conversions from right to left, ideologically speaking, as well as from left to right, but it seems that the latter have been more frequent in recent years.

A fellow by the name of Barrett Wilson writes of his own experience in an interesting piece at The Federalist. Wilson, a liberal, hasn't abandoned his liberal ideas, but he does find that he has much more in common with conservatives than with his fellow progressives.

Here's his lede:

Recently, I went to have a beer with one of my friends from my former life as a social justice crusader. He’s one of the few left-leaning friends I have left since I was mobbed and shamed out of my lefty, social justice community for “toxic behavior” on Twitter (in a straight-up Justine Sacco-style event). He’s a great guy, and he’s still friends with my old friends, so when we meet, it’s a secretive thing.

As I was on my way, I started thinking about just how many people I had lost in my life over the last year or two. It’s got to be in the hundreds. People who have known me for 20 years or more, who said they loved me, who took care of me and let me take care of them, are all mostly gone now. For many, it’s a matter of their own social survival. Guilt by association is a h-ll of a thing.

As I was starting to tally the people I have lost touch with, another thought occurred to me: I probably have more conservative friends than liberal friends now. For a lifelong “bleeding heart” liberal, this is quite the unexpected life development. I decided to tweet something to that effect.

I tweeted: “Since I was mobbed out of my social justice community, I’ve found that conservatives are more kind, forgiving, and open-minded people than my old crew. I’ve found friendship and acceptance despite disagreement. I can’t get in trouble anymore for saying so—so I’m saying so.”

Wilson's doubts seemed to have been prompted by the demonization of people he knew personally who weren't anything like they were being portrayed by his leftist friends:

Even when I was at my most insufferable, social justice version of myself, I had a soft spot for conservatives. My family is deeply religious, and some supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election. I was appalled by this choice (I am still no fan of Trump), but I know the hearts of my family members, and I know that they are good people who simply have different beliefs than me.

When the media and my social group continually went on about how Trump supporters were fascists and white supremacists, it made me deeply uncomfortable. They were talking about my parents, my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I know these people to be tolerant, inclusive, and generous. They do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, or sex. They, like most conservatives these days, are LGBT-friendly.

I love them. And they are worthy of love and respect.

When I got unpersoned, in a social-media driven mobbing, I was self-injurious and my life was at risk. My family was there for me, and they helped me get healthy again. Then I met some friends. Some people had seen what I had gone through and wanted to offer support and discussion.

Wilson goes on to explain how, having been driven by his erstwhile friends on the left into outer darkness he found tolerance and acceptance among his new friends who were, perhaps ironically and unexpectedly, conservatives.

The interesting thing about Wilson's experience is how Stalinist so much of the left has become. There's no room for dissent, no allowance for ambiguity. Everything is absolute, black and white, us versus them, and if you vacillate in your enmity toward the other side you're condemned as a heretic and shunned.

Just as was the fate of ideological deviants in the old Soviet Union, one becomes a non-person, a traitor to the cause deserving the punishment of being "unfriended."

He goes on to describe the attendees at a social gathering held for the staff of a journal for which he now works:

Some were liberals like me, but all had been unpersoned in one way or another, whether it was a result of false allegations, “heretical” thinking, or some minor unwoke gaffe. Many were conservatives who were thrilled to be a part of this new cultural movement, where ideas could be freely exchanged. It was the most extraordinary thing.

The one thing they all had in common was that they cherished the principle of free speech. Modern conservatives and exiled liberals cherish free speech more than ever because they share the experience of being silenced in the name of social justice. (I’m not saying that social justice shaming is exclusively the purview of the left, but I think most reasonable people would agree it happens much more frequently on the left.)

Here's his conclusion:

And I suppose that’s why I have forged meaningful friendships with conservatives. The policing of language and shutting down of open inquiry has never been more popular among the modern left. Say the wrong thing or associate with the wrong person, and the left will lose you. It seems today’s conservatives are more moderate than today’s liberals. That’s quite the thought.

Even in our more intense disagreements (abortion, rights, trans rights, guns) my conservative friends have never aggressively lashed out at me, deplatformed me, unpersoned me, or tried to ruin my livelihood. They understand how important forgiveness and redemption will be if we are ever going to move on from these divisive times.

While I am not planning to abandon my liberal beliefs, I do feel that my fellow liberals could learn a lot from the way modern conservatives comport themselves.

For what it's worth, I think he's right. I'm sure there are conservatives who say and do things that would make other conservatives wince, but how often is the sort of treatment visited upon Wilson by his liberal friends meted out by conservatives to those who deviate from conservative orthodoxy?

Maybe it's happening more than I'm aware, but if so where are the testimonials like Wilson's?

It's About Time (Pt. III)

Let's today tie together some thoughts that've been explored in the previous two posts.

There are two theories as to the nature of time. The first, the A theory, is the common sense view that time is like a flowing river that carries the events of our lives past us like the stream carries water past a person standing in the stream. Future events lie upstream, heading toward us, and the past is downstream, flowing away from us. Events, on this view, are said to have tense - past, present and future.

Another theory, more counterintuitive but nevertheless popular with many, maybe most, philosophers and scientists, derives from Einstein's theory of the relativity of time. On this view, called the B theory, every event that has ever occured is happening somewhere now. Our consciousness somehow moves from event to event, but time itself is static and tenseless.

We employed the analogy in Saturday's post of a movie that's been burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie, every moment, is present simultaneously, but is only "read" off the DVD by the player in a "one moment at a time" sequence. On the B theory, then, our birth, high school graduation, marriage and death are all in some sense happening now.

One of the interesting consequences of this view, although I don't think I've ever seen it alluded to, is that if it accurately describes the way things are, if the flow of time is an illusion, then it would seem to make little sense to ask how old the universe is.

Claims that the universe is 13.7 billion years old should really be understood as claims about how old it appears to us to be. If every event exists simultaneously somewhere on the temporal DVD, then the apparent lapse of 13.7 billion years, or any "length" of time, is simply the illusory consequence of the way our minds process events, but the objective age of the universe, if there is one, is inscrutable.

The universe - its birth, life and death - potentially came into being simultaneously, or at least in no particular order, like the beginning and end of a movie could theoretically be impressed upon the DVD instantaneously.

This is not to say that this is how things actually are. It's only to say that it seems like a plausible consequence of the B theory of time.

Thus, if either time is a subjective phenomenon, a consequence of our mental architecture as we discussed on Friday, or if the B theory is true it would follow that the question of the age of the universe is moot.

If that's so, then one of the major points of contention between those who believe the universe is relatively young, on the order of ten thousand years old, and those who believe it is much older is also moot. The universe could be scarcely any age at all even though there's plenty of empirical evidence that gives it the appearance of being almost 14 billion years old.

It all depends on the actual nature of time.

It's About Time (Pt. II)

In Saturday's post (On Time Pt.I) I wrote that:

[Physicist Paul] Davies is saying here that the flow of time is an illusion like the apparent movement of the sun across the sky is an illusion. It's we who are moving, not the sun. Likewise, on Davies' view, sometimes called the static view of time, every moment of time, every event, past, present, and future exists now, and somehow our consciousness moves from one to the next.

On this view, the universe is like a movie that has been instantaneously burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie exists simultaneously with every other event, but the characters in the movie, and even the person viewing the movie, perceive those events as happening sequentially.

Suppose for a moment that this is true. It would seem then that time does not exist "out there" but is rather somehow an internal feature of our minds. Time is a word we use to describe the way our minds apprehend events. Our minds create the illusion of temporality.

Immanuel Kant declared that "time, apart from the subject [i.e. the perceiver], is nothing". In other words, Kant is saying that time is not an objective reality at all but rather a structure of the human mind that enables us to experience the world. If Kant is correct then it follows that if there were no minds there'd be no time. There might be events like the events in the movie that's been impressed onto the DVD, but they wouldn't occur in any time unless they were experienced by a mind.

If we take this a step further it makes moot the questions of the age of the universe or the age of the earth. Since there were no minds (if we bracket out the mind of God) to perceive the unfolding of the universe, then from the original "Big Bang" to the appearance of minds the events would have all occurred instantly or simultaneously, like "burning" an entire movie instantly onto a DVD.

Eventually, when observers with minds appeared they looked back at the evidence of cosmic history and concluded that, had a human observer been watching this "movie" it would have taken about 13.5 billion years, but since we're assuming there were no observers, no minds, it didn't take any time at all.

In other words, when human beings look back at the history of cosmic evolution - the expansion of the universe, the birth and death of stars, radioactive disintegrations, etc. - it's like popping the DVD into the player and watching the movie. Until the movie is played and observed it's just a bunch of pits in a disc. There's no time on the disc. Nothing on the disc has any meaning until it's put in the player and observed by a mind.

If Kant's view that time is part of the structure of our minds is correct then if the human race, or at least all creatures with minds structured to experience time, were to disappear, time itself would disappear. Just as there would be no pain or sound or color if there were no organisms with senses structured to experience these sensations, likewise there'd be no time if there were no minds to experience it.

This seems astonishingly counter-intuitive, but then Galileo's view that it was the earth, not the celestial bodies, that was moving was also counter-intuitive. The more we learn about the universe the stranger it seems. Indeed, it's quite possible that the world we experience is in reality not at all as it appears to us to be.

It's also quite possible that the only way to hold onto the belief that there is an objective time - that time would continue to exist even if human beings and other minds were extinguished from the earth - is to believe that an objective time exists because an omnipresent mind, the mind of God, observes every event in the universe.

We'll finish up this discussion tomorrow.

It's About Time (Pt. I)

St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) wondered in his Confessions about the nature of time. He wrote that "As long as nobody asks me I know perfectly well what time is, but as soon as I'm asked to explain it I haven't the faintest idea".

Philosophers and scientists ever since have sympathized with Augustine's perplexity. Time has been called one of the universe's greatest mysteries, and no one really knows what it is.

John Steele, the publisher and editorial director of Nautilus puts some questions about time to physicist Paul Davies. In an interview for Nautilus Steele asks Davies the following:

• Is the flow of time real or an illusion?
• Where does the impression of flow of time come from?
• Is time fundamental to the Universe?
• Could time be an emergent property of the universe?
• If multiple universes exist, do they have a common clock?
• What do you think are the most exciting recent advances in understanding time?

Davies' answers to most of these questions amounts to an admission of scientists' ignorance on the topic, but his answer to the first question is interesting. He replies:

The flow of time is an illusion, and I don’t know very many scientists and philosophers who would disagree with that, to be perfectly honest. The reason that it is an illusion is when you stop to think, what does it even mean that time is flowing?

When we say something flows like a river, what we mean is an element of the river at one moment is in a different place of an earlier moment. In other words, it moves with respect to time. But time can’t move with respect to time—time is time. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that the claim that time does not flow means that there is no time, that time does not exist. That’s nonsense. Time of course exists. We measure it with clocks. Clocks don’t measure the flow of time, they measure intervals of time. Of course there are intervals of time between different events; that’s what clocks measure.

Davies is saying here that the flow of time is an illusion like the apparent movement of the sun across the sky is an illusion. It's we who are moving, not the sun. Likewise, on Davies' view, sometimes called the static view of time, every moment of time, every event, past, present, and future exists now, and somehow our consciousness moves from one to the next.

On this view, the universe is like a movie that has been instantaneously burned onto a DVD. Every event in the movie exists simultaneously with every other event, but the characters in the movie, and even the person viewing the movie, perceive those events as happening sequentially.

If this is true then it would seem that time does not exist "out there" but is rather somehow a feature of our minds. It's the way our minds apprehend events.

I'll have more to say about this on Monday.

Our Delinquent Media

Much of the American media would have us believe that anyone wearing a MAGA hat is a violent vulgarian. They certainly believe it themselves which is why they were so quick to swallow the Jussie Smollett allegations.

That a couple of white Trump supporters would attack a gay black man at 2:00 in the morning, tie a noose around his neck and tell him to stay out of "MAGA country" seemed totally plausible to these naifs who never paused to wonder why a couple of MAGA hat-wearing white thugs would be hanging around at 2:00 in the morning in a neighborhood populated mostly by gays and African Americans.

These folks and others had also been quick to cast the Covington Catholic kids as the villains in the episode in D.C. following the March for Life. After all, the boys matched all the liberal stereotypes and prejudices: They were white, male, MAGA hat-wearing Catholics. What more evidence that they were felonious reprobates was needed?

Well, it turns out the judgmental, self-righteous secular puritans were embarrassingly, humiliatingly, foolishly wrong in both cases so you would think that even they would have learned their lesson.

You'd think that when they were confronted with a case of brutal assault for which there is dispositive evidence they would seek to atone for their past buffoonery and demand that now, in this case, which also involves a MAGA hat-wearer, a case in which the video evidence clearly shows guilt and innocence, that justice be exacted and the vicious offender be vigorously prosecuted.

Except one can hardly find mention of this most recent case (it occured about a week ago) on any of the most reliably progressive news outlets. There's been almost total silence. What could possibly account for this seeming lack of interest in a case where a young man was seen on video being savagely attacked by another man, the identity of whom should be easy to establish?

Perhaps, it's because they see the thug as an ally, a conscientious progressive who took umbrage at the kid wearing a MAGA hat and understandably punched him in the face as condign punishment for being a Trump supporter. When thuggishness is perpetrated by people on the correct side of the issues the mainstream media has no difficulty finding other diversions to occupy their attention.

The apparent trigger of this goon's rage was the fact that the victim, a Berkeley student named Hayden Williams, was manning a table with a sign which read, "Hate Crime Hoaxes Hurt Real Victims," which is surely true, but the black-clad brute was so outraged by this truism, ironically enough, that he was provoked to commit a genuine hate crime.

Here's the video of the episode put together by Campus Reform. You're cautioned that there's a lot of vulgar language, and the violence is pretty sickening to watch.

I only post it by way of asking whether there's anything of which readers are aware that's been done deliberately by any Trump supporter that has matched this incident for sheer ugliness, or even come close, and also to tacitly ask what the media reaction would've been had the attacker been wearing the MAGA hat and the victim been a gay or African American student.

The police have identified the attacker, but as of this writing no arrest has been made. Why not? And why haven't they made public the man's identity? Perhaps we'll find out soon, but if so, it won't be because of any pressure from the apparatchiks in our media.

What ARE We?

A BBC article from a year ago raises the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix and in the course of discussing the pros and cons of the hypothesis gives an interesting insight into why philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals, like Elon Musk, are entertaining this speculation:

The idea that we live in a simulation has some high-profile advocates.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

However, there is a second, more popular, scenario that seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely so how can the existence of such a finely-tuned universe as ours be explained? There are two (naturalistic) options. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago. I'm reminded of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

The Born Alive Act

Whatever one's views on a right to abortion may be, surely the overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to killing babies after they're born. Yet, a bill voted on by the Senate Monday night which would've made it illegal to allow newborns to die despite having survived attempts to abort them could only garner three Democrat votes and fell short of the 60 votes needed to pass.

It's stunning that in the entire Democratic Senate caucus of 47 members only three were willing to say that it should be illegal to allow children born alive, wanted or unwanted, to die from inanition.

The argument used to be that as long as the child was inside the mother's body she should have the right to determine whether it lives or dies, but that once the child is outside the body, its right to live supersedes her wishes.

Evidently, we have passed that point on the slippery slope, we've passed the point where the New York state delegation lights the city in pink and stands and cheers when a bill passes that allows the mother to decide to kill the baby as it's being born. We're now at the point where Democrat politicians cannot even say they oppose killing the baby even after it has left the mother's womb.

The Washington Free Beacon gives us the discouraging details:

Democrats blocked the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act in a Monday roll call vote, which would have made it mandatory for doctors to provide medical care to babies who are born alive during an abortion. The bill needed 60 votes to pass, but fell on a 53-44 vote.

The legislation sponsored by Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) had nothing to do with Roe v. Wade and the ability to obtain an abortion, but only babies outside of the womb....

The bill is overwhelmingly popular with voters, including a vast majority of those who identify as pro-choice; 70 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and 86 percent of Republicans support providing care to abortion survivors, according to the McLaughlin & Associates poll commissioned by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List.

Sasse took to the Senate floor emphasizing that the bill would not apply to Roe v. Wade just prior to the vote. He said Democratic rhetoric about the Born-Alive act had "nothing to do what's in this bill."

"As you get ready to cast this vote, picture a baby that's already been born, that is outside the womb, gasping for air. That's the only thing that today's vote is actually about," he said. "We're talking about babies who've already been born, nothing in this bill touches abortion access."

Nevertheless, some senators actually tried to argue that a mother should have the right to decide whether her child, though outside of her body, lives or dies:

Democrat Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) called the bill a "solution in search of a problem" and a "threat to women's reproductive health." She said physicians and mothers should be left to decide whether a live infant should receive care or be allowed to die on the table, rather than the law.

"Conservative politicians should not be telling doctors how they should care for their patients. Instead women, in consultation with their families and doctors, are in the best position to determine their best course of care," she said.

Senator Hirono's assertions are extraordinary. It's regrettable that no one asked her to declare what age a child must attain before its mother no longer has the right to decide whether it lives or dies.

If a newborn child hasn't the right to life, at what age does it acquire it? What are the criteria Senator Hirono believes we should base the child's right to life upon? Being successfully potty trained? Demonstrating rudimentary language skills? Graduating from high school?

Other questions arise:

If an unwanted child can be left to die should an abortion fail to kill it, what logical grounds remain for not removing protections from any baby that the mother decides she doesn't want, even if she never attempted to abort it?

How many of the senators who voted against protecting baby human beings would vigorously support a law preventing the harvesting of baby seals or whales? How many of them would support conferring rights on animals and rivers, even as they deny the most basic right to the most vulnerable human beings?

The Trump administration endorsed the bill ahead of the vote, saying that it was necessary to "prevent infanticide" and "ensure that the life of one baby is not treated as being more or less valuable than another."

"The bill draws a sorely needed bright line of protection around abortion survivors by requiring that they be given the same level of care as any other premature infant," the administration said. "A baby that survives an abortion, and is born alive into this world should be treated just like any other baby."

It should be, certainly. A society that has nevertheless lost the ability to value a child's life, which regards a baby's life as expendable, is a society in the process of moral disintegration and slow-motion collapse.

Every Republican in the chamber voted to approve the act, along with Democrats Bob Casey (PA), Doug Jones (AL), and Joe Manchin (WV).

The rest of them - following in the footsteps of their political ancestors who from the inception of the Democratic party in 1792 until the 1970s refused to consider blacks to be deserving of basic rights - refused Monday to consider human babies to be deserving of human rights.

What a sad indictment of their moral impoverishment.

Pro-Life Nation?

An article at Axios discusses the findings of a new Marist poll which reveal a profound shift in Americans' attitudes toward abortion, especially among young Democrats.

The poll found that for the first time in ten years as many Americans identified as pro-life as identified as pro-choice.

In the recent poll 47% of Americans identified as pro-life with an equal number identifying as pro-choice. In a similar poll last month pro-choicers enjoyed a 17 point edge.

Nevertheless, two things about this poll should temper the excitement of pro-lifers:

1. If the numbers can swing that much in one month they can certainly swing back again in an equally brief period of time.

2. The increased popularity of the pro-life position is alleged to be a consequence of the recent controversy over legalizing infanticide, which is, in the minds of many pro-choice advocates, a logical extension of pro-choice thinking. If, though, this controversy manages to get swept under the rug, by a complicit media the revulsion that fed it may also subside and the numbers fall back to earlier levels.

On the other hand, pro-choicers should be deeply concerned that:

1. Overall 80% of Americans want abortion limited to the first trimester. This is not the pro-choice position which is that abortion should be available to a woman who chooses it at any time in her pregnancy, and, among many Democrats in New York, Virginia and Vermont, even after the baby has been born.

2. The shift is largely due to a change in attitudes among Democrats: Democrats, specifically those under the the age of 45, seem to be leading the shift: This month's poll found 34% of Democrats identify as pro-life vs. 61% pro-choice. Last month, those numbers were 20% and 75%, respectively.

3. Younger Americans overall are moving toward the pro-life view. Among Americans under 45, 47% identify as pro-life vs. 48% pro-choice. In January, those numbers were 28% and 65%, respectively.

More details can be found at the link. I wonder whether the infanticide controversy is the only factor at play in the remarkable turnabout in the polls' findings. Perhaps there's also been a slow, cumulative germination of pro-life sympathies sown by the several undercover exposés of Planned Parenthood's grisly practices that have swept across YouTube and social media in the last few years.

In any case, if 80% of Americans want abortion restricted to the first trimester, then I think it fair to say that the United States, apart from the coastal elites and despite the laws as they currently stand, is largely a pro-life nation.

Basic Epistemology

Professor Laurence A. Moran, a biochemist at the University of Toronto and evangelistic atheist, recently found himself in conversation with a theologian named Denis Alexander. He subsequently posted a critique of their conversation on his blog Sandwalk. Whatever the merits of Moran's overall criticism of Alexander may be he certainly takes a misstep at the start when he says this:

If you believe in such a being [as God] then that conflicts with science as a way of knowing because you are believing in something without reliable evidence to support your belief. Scientists shouldn't do that and neither should any others who practice the scientific way of knowing. Denis Alexander thinks there are other, equally valid, ways of knowing but he wasn't able to offer any evidence that those other ways produce true knowledge.

There are several problems with what Prof. Moran says in this paragraph.

1. He conflates knowing and believing. He oscillates between talking about beliefs and talking about knowledge, but knowledge and belief are not the same thing. One must believe something in order to know it, but merely believing something isn't the same as knowing it. You can believe something and not know it, but you can't know it and not believe it. To be knowledge the belief must be warranted somehow, and it must have a high probability of being true.

2. He assumes evidence is required to justify a belief. That is something he himself apparently believes, but what evidence could he offer to justify believing it? He simply believes this claim without any evidence at all.

Presumably, he means that our beliefs must be supported by sensory evidence, but this is surely false. Scientists as well as laymen hold all sorts of beliefs for which there's no sensory evidence whatsoever.

Many believe, for instance, that life originated purely naturalistically although there's not a shred of evidence that it did or that such an origin is even physically possible. They often seek to avoid the implications of cosmic fine-tuning by promoting the existence of a multiverse for which there's no empirical evidence. They believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and spend their careers searching for it, despite the utter lack of any evidence for such life. They believe that it's wrong to falsify data on a scientific paper, but cannot explain scientifically why anything at all is wrong.

Put another way, I can know that I'm experiencing pain even if I have no way to prove it to you; I can know that, despite much evidence against me, I'm innocent of a crime of which I've been accused; I can know that as a young boy I found a dollar bill, though I'd be helpless if asked to present evidence of the fact.

These are all things that I can know despite my inability to produce evidence that I could offer to anyone else, especially to someone predisposed to doubt me.

If Prof. Moran were to reply that I have the evidence of my own internal states, the subjective experience of pain, the assurance of my innocence, the memory of finding the money, and that these states count as evidence, he'd be putting himself in an awkward position. He'd have to explain why these states warrant the relevant beliefs, but the internal assurance one might have of experiencing God does not warrant believing that God exists.

3. He's simply mistaken to assert that there's no reliable evidence to support theism. It's been argued on this site for the past fifteen years that as Pascal said, there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not dead set against it. Alvin Plantinga gives a couple dozen arguments for theism among which, in my opinion, the best are certain forms of the cosmological, moral, and cosmic fine-tuning arguments as well as the argument from the contingency of the universe.

I'm sure Professor Moran is a fine biochemist, but perhaps he'd do well to stick to his field and avoid dogmatic philosophical pronouncements.

For a more extended critique of Prof. Moran's argument against Alexander see philosopher V.J.Torley's discussion here.

Problems with Determinism

It's a common assumption among naturalistic materialists that, despite the inescapable sense that we're often able to make genuine choices, this sense is an illusion. In a completely material world governed by physical laws, there's no room for the sort of freedom we normally, and naively, think we have.

Given this view, our every choice is the product of all of the influences that have acted upon us from the time of our conception and at any given moment there's really only one possible future. Let's call this view volitional determinism. According to volitional determinism free will is an illusion, as is your conviction that you freely chose to read this post.

Volitional determinism is a derivative of what might be called broad or universal determinism. This is the idea that everything that happens in nature, in the physical universe, is the inevitable consequence of prior causes such that, given the cause, or series of causes, the consequence must necessarily obtain.

Since our choices are events that occur in the universe our choices are necessarily determined.

The argument can be summarized like this:

1. Every event in the physical universe is determined by antecedent physical causes.
2. Our choices are events in the physical universe.
3. Therefore, our choices are determined by antecedent causes.

The argument is valid, to be sure, but both of its premises are open to challenge. In fact, the first premise is almost certainly false, and the second one might well be false. But, if either premise is false then the argument falls apart.

As neuroscientist Michael Egnor explains in a brief article at Mind Matters the first premise is indeed false since physicists have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that the universe is not entirely deterministic.

Egnor writes:

In a previous post, I argued that if determinism is true, we cannot have free will. That is, if everything we do is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, there is no room for genuine freedom. In that respect, I am an “incompatibilist”—I don’t believe that free will is compatible with determinism.

What do I mean by determinism? Determinism, in the scientific sense intended here, is the view that for every moment in time, the state of the universe is completely determined by the state that immediately precedes it. If you knew all of the details of the universe — the location and state of every particle — at any given moment, you could know with certainty what comes next.

Determinism is more or less the view that nature is a machine. If we know the position of the gears, we can know the future with certainty.

The question that naturally follows is this: Is determinism true? If so, free will is impossible in principle. If not, free will is possible.

In 1964, Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990) published a paper titled “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox”. In it, he observed that there is a way to test determinism at the quantum level by measuring the ratio of quantum states of particles emitted by radioactive decay.

Bell’s experiment has now been done many times, and the answer is unequivocal: determinism at the quantum level is not true. Nature is not deterministic.

The experiments showed that every quantum process entails some degree of “indeterminism”; that is, there are predictable probabilities but there is never certainty. If we knew the exact state of the universe at any given moment, we could still never know with certainty what would happen next.

Determinism in nature has been shown, scientifically, to be false. There is no real debate about this among physicists.

The second premise is also questionable because unless one has ruled out apriori the possibility that human beings possess an immaterial mind there's no reason to think that our choices must be physical events occurring in the physical universe.

If immaterial minds do exist then it's quite possible that our choices occur in that faculty, at least in part, and are therefore not subject to the physical laws and forces that govern the material world.

If naturalistic materialism is true then determinism is probably true, but if naturalism is false determinism could well be false.

What one thinks about determinism and free will all depends upon whether one has embraced a naturalistic worldview or not.

The President's Legal Authority

Sean Davis has an excellent essay on the subject of President Trump's legal authority to declare the border situation a national emergency and use funds originally allocated by congress for other purposes to construct a wall along our southern border.

Davis breaks the issue into several questions which I list below with a summary of Davis' response to them:

Does President Trump have the legal authority to declare a national emergency along the border?
National Emergencies Act of 1976, explicitly authorizes the president to declare a national emergency. Congress put no constraints on whether a president may declare an emergency, or what conditions must be met in order for a particular event or crisis to be considered an “emergency.” Instead, the law leaves that decision solely up to the president.

Does the president have the legal authority to use funds allocated for other purposes for wall construction under the national emergency?
Within the context of the emergency border wall debate, that law is 10 U.S.C. 2808, which delegates to the president, in the event of a national emergency that requires the U.S. military, the authority to reprogram existing appropriations for military construction projects in order to address the ongoing emergency.

Who determines whether the use of the armed forces is required during a particular national emergency? The simple answer is that such discretion belongs to the president of the United States in the discharge of his duties as commander-in-chief.

Is a border wall a military construction project?
Some legal commentators assert that the answer is “no,” since immigration enforcement and border security generally fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.

As a broad matter, that seems to be a difficult position to hold, given that it requires one to argue that the military has no role in protecting the United States. If border security is solely the matter of non-military agencies, then it must follow that the U.S. military would have no role, authority, or jurisdiction in repelling an invasion of the United States, a position that is clearly nonsensical.

Similarly, it makes little sense to argue that two presidents were justified in using emergency authority to reprogram funds to build and maintain U.S. facilities in foreign nations in order to protect their security, as they did 18 separate times between 2001 and 2014, but that the current president has no authority to use the same funds to secure actual American soil from foreign invasion.

But should he do it?
As a legal matter, Trump’s authority to declare a national emergency on the border then reprogram a limited amount of existing military construction or civil defense project appropriations to address the emergency is well-established. Whether it is wise to do so as a political matter is an entirely different question. The question of “should” is entirely different than the question of “can.” And there many valid political arguments on both sides of the debate.

Davis presents much more detail in his column, and it's worth reading regardless of whether one is in favor of or opposed to a border barrier.

Unfortunately, proper legal authority is not likely to be a primary consideration for activist judges who've demonstrated a willingness in the past to ignore the law in order to impose their own personal will on the elected president of the United States.

That's why most observers, including Mr. Trump, believe this controversy will only be resolved when it reaches the Supreme Court.

Voter Suppression

Here's some interesting news.

Whenever attempts have been made to ensure the integrity of our electoral process by making it harder for those not eligible to vote to cast a ballot at the polls cries of racism and voter suppression have erupted across the social landscape.

This always perplexed a lot of ordinary citizens who wondered, perhaps naively, why anyone would object to making it more difficult for non-citizens to vote in our elections.

One such attempt to tighten up election security is legislation to require voters to produce an identification at the polls to show that they are in fact citizens. This seemed to many to be a common sense measure since ID is required at so many other venues in our everyday life. Indeed, it's hard to imagine getting through a week without having to produce an ID somewhere for something.

The ostensible objection to requiring ID to vote, however, is that it would place an undue burden on the poor who could not be expected to do whatever was necessary to procure an ID card. This objection seems insulting to the poor, assuming as it does that being poor makes one a helpless invalid, and it struck many Americans as such a feeble rationale for opposing voter ID that suspicions were raised that it was disingenuous.

Nevertheless, that argument has largely prevailed in many precincts despite its lack of cogency.

Now, however, comes word that a recent study has shown that, to the extent that these concerns are sincere, they're misplaced. The study concludes that voter ID laws are not unfairly onerous for any segment of our population.

Here's Angela Morabito at The Federalist:

Voter ID requirements do not affect voter turnout, according to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The researchers looked at 1.3 billion data points on U.S. voters from 2008 to 2013, and they found that “the laws have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”

For years, opponents of voter ID laws have equated them with disenfranchisement. The American Civil Liberties Union says “voter ID laws deprive many voters of their right to vote” and that they “reduce participation.” Writing for CNN Politics, reporter Eric Bradner addressed voter ID requirements as “discriminatory voting laws.” The Democratic Party’s official website addresses voter ID laws as if they are anathema to democracy.

As it turns out, none of their fears about voter ID were backed up by this large study. This is great news: The country can now take obvious steps to protect the integrity of our elections, knowing that enacting voter ID laws will not disenfranchise anyone.

There's much more on this in Morabito's article and those interested in this issue are encouraged to read it. She goes on to point out, for example, that:

Of the eight states that require photo identification at the polls, all of them issue voter ID cards to their citizens free of charge. Of the 10 states that request photo identification, four issue ID cards at no cost. The other six allow voters without photo ID to cast their ballots so long as they verify their identity another way, like with a signature that matches the one on their registration.

One would think that with these examples in view, and the results of this study in hand, a lot of other states would be eager to pass their own voter ID laws, but, since this would depend upon the common sense and honesty of those who populate our political establishments, we probably shouldn't be optimistic.

Coherence and the Rush to Judgment

There is among some philosophers who work in the field of epistemology (the study of the nature of knowledge, belief and truth) a theory that a statement or proposition is true if it coheres or harmonizes or fits with other beliefs we hold to be true. On this view, a claim that doesn't fit with our other beliefs is at best dubious.

An example would be a Darwinian confronted with the claim that the earth is only a hundred thousand years old. This assertion is so wildly out of synch with everything else the Darwinian believes that it would be rejected out of hand.

Coherence works the other way, too. A claim that a fossil had been discovered that shows an evolutionary link between, say, whales and land mammals would, at a minimum, have Darwinians hoping that the claim was true because it fits exactly with everything else they believe and lends support to their other beliefs.

I use evolution as an example but the post is not about that. It's about something quite different. It's about why the media and others, especially on the left, but not exclusively so, were so quick to believe Jussie Smollett.

It seems that every time a story that involves racist violence hits the news, social media explodes with condemnation and outrage, especially when the victims are alleged to be minorities, before any of the facts float to the surface.

Then, almost invariably, when the facts come out the story turns out to be a concoction or a fraud and those who rushed to judgment sheepishly slink back into egg-faced silence. Until, that is, the next such shocking account is announced, and then they're right back at it, heaping outrage and imprecations on the alleged perpetrators until the evidence shows once again that the charges are fraudulent.

They never seem to learn. Either that or they operate on the principle that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and assume that, like someone playing the roulette wheel, one of these times the ball just has to land on the right number.

Judgmental people simply can't help themselves. Like secular Puritans they feel a duty to display their own moral righteousness by furiously lashing out against any and all transgressors, real or imagined, but this only partially explains their lack of caution. The deeper question is why they're so prone to believe these fabrications in the first place, and this is where the coherence theory comes in.

From the Duke Lacrosse assault case to the University of Virginia rape case through a dozen or so other examples all the way up to the recent Covington Catholic boys and now the Jussie Smollett imbroglio, the attestations of racism, sexual assault, bigotry and violence have been shown so frequently to be empty and libelous that one wonders why the media talking heads and opinionators continue to fall for them.

Why don't they learn from their previous mistakes? Why don't they exercise prudence and wait for the evidence to come in? I think it's largely because these allegations cohere so well with their assumption of what America is like that their confirmation bias simply overrides their prudential judgment.

In the Smollett case I suspect that some people so despise Donald Trump and those who support him that not only were they prepared to believe the worst about those they hate, they actually hoped that the worst was true. Smollett's account of racist white men putting a noose around his neck, shouting anti-gay and racist slurs, dousing him with bleach and declaring him to be unwelcome in MAGA country comported so closely with the stereotype of Trump and his voters to which some in the media and on social media cling that Smollett's claims just had to be true.

For many, the actual facts don't matter. We live in any case in a post-fact culture where all that matters is one's personal feelings, and any testimony, no matter how bizarre, is credible if it coheres with and confirms our worst prejudices.

We need to be better than this.

What Is Your Self?

One of philosophy's most fascinating puzzles is the question of personal identity. What is it about me that makes me me? Is it my body? Is it my brain? Is it the information in my brain?

If the body is constantly changing then in what sense does my self perdure through time? If my identity is just the contents of my brain how do I remain the same self over time as those contents change? What significant thing about me remains the same over time that keeps me the same person?

My fingerprints and my DNA stay relatively constant over time, but are these what I'm referring to when I say "I"? Am I referring to my DNA or my fingerprints everytime I use the word "me" or "myself"?

The questions just keep coming. Suppose we say that it's our brains and their contents that make us who we are. Imagine that your body is dying but your mind is working well. Imagine further that doctors have, through amazing leaps in technology, developed the ability to transplant brains into different bodies. Suppose your brain is transplanted, at your request, into the body of a person named John who suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When you awaken from the surgery, who would you be, you or John?

Brain scientists know that if they cut the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, two different centers of consciousness can be created. If either hemisphere is destroyed it's possible that a person could live on as a conscious being. Suppose your brain is transplanted in such a way that one hemisphere is placed in the body of John and the other hemisphere is placed in the body of Mary.

Have you survived the operation? If so, are you now two people? If you're only one person, which person are you, John or Mary? Is it possible to be more than one person simultaneously? If so, if you committed a crime before the operation, should both John and Mary go to jail for it?

If we adopt a skeptical view and say that there is no personal identity but rather that the self evolves over time and we're not the same person today that we were ten years ago, then how can anyone be held responsible for promises they made or crimes they committed ten years ago? If we are not the same person who committed the crime then to punish us would be to punish an innocent person, would it not?

A theist might partially resolve this perplexing problem by claiming that our identity resides in our soul, not in our body or our brain, at least not completely, and that our soul is independent of whatever body or bodies it "inhabits." But how would a materialist or naturalist who has no belief in any non-material constituents to the self, who has no belief in souls, resolve it?

Perhaps their only recourse is to deny the existence of any significant self altogether, as did the philosopher David Hume, and declare that your self is just a bundle of perceptions that you experience from moment to moment. Or they could maintain with biologist Francis Crick that you are nothing but a pack of neurons.

Unfortunately, neither of these options seems very satisfying.

Nothing but Eggshells

An argument made frequently on Viewpoint is that metaphysical naturalism has no resources to undergird any objective moral obligation. Naturalism leads logically to nihilism and from thence to cruelty.

I recently reread a book I had originally read in the 1970s. It was written by a Romanian Lutheran pastor named Richard Wurmbrand who was arrested in 1948 by the Romanian communist government and imprisoned for fourteen years in communist prisons.

His crime was that he sought to carry out his pastoral duties in a country which, like all communist countries in the Soviet bloc, had outlawed Christianity.

In the book he recounts the tortures he and thousands of others suffered simply because of their faith (The book is titled Tortured for Christ).

Beatings while hung upside down from the ceiling, being forced to stand for days in a shallow box with nails in the sides so that the slightest movement caused one's flesh to be torn making sleep impossible, starvation, being placed in refrigeration units until almost frozen to death then removed, revived and returned to the frigid cold, over and over again.

Pastors and priests who refused, even under torture, to reveal names of those who participated in outlawed worship services were forced to watch their children beaten to death in front of them.

The sheer barbarism of the communists is difficult to comprehend.

Wurmbrand relates in the book that he often asked the torturers:

"Don't you have pity in your hearts?" They usually answered with quotations from Lenin: "You cannot make omelets without breaking the shells of the eggs," and "You cannot cut wood without making chips fly."

I said again, "I know these quotations from Lenin, but there is a difference. When you cut a piece of wood it feels nothing. But you are dealing with human beings. Every beating produces pain and there are mothers who weep."

Wurmbrand goes on:

It was in vain. They are materialists. For them nothing besides matter exists and to them man is like wood, like an eggshell. With this belief they sink to unthinkable depths of cruelty.

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man.

And then he adds this:

The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish. I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I haved lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

Of course most people who agree with the communists' atheism would nevertheless find their behavior repugnant, but what they cannot say, at least not if they are going to be consistent, is that the communist torturers were wrong. If the ultimate reality, the universe, is indifferent to human suffering, if men have evolved to behave cruelly toward their fellow men, how can it be wrong to do so?

As the late Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty, himself an atheist, once admitted, "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?'"

The only people who have a moral basis for condemning cruelty, for condemning the torture of those poor prisoners, are those whose ultimate reality is a transcendent, personal being whose essence includes moral perfection and who has the power to hold accountable those who wantonly and with pleasure inflict pain on others.

Absent such a moral authority cruelty is no more wrong in humans than it is in any other animal.

Beto's Feeble Objection

From time to time, one reads of people who, in an attempt to illegally break into a home or building, get caught in a chimney and sometimes die there. Or they fall through sky lights, sometimes to their deaths, or touch an electrical cable and are electrocuted.

I thought of these unfortunate incidents when reading a piece by Madeline Osburn at The Federalist on Beto O'Rourke's opposition to a border wall.

Osburn quotes O'Rourke:

[The border wall] has cost us tens of billions of dollars to build and maintain, and it has pushed migrants and asylum seekers and refugees to the most inhospitable, the most hostile stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, ensuring their suffering and death.

More than 4,000 human beings — little kids, women and children — have died. They’re not in cages, they’re not locked up, they’re not separated — they’re dead.

There are two things to note in O'Rourke's comment. First, is the tacit admission that where walls exist along the border they apparently work since people are being diverted to much more hostile areas.

Second, is his argument that a wall is cruel because it forces people intent upon entering the country illegally into this more dangerous terrain.

This is a very thin argument. It's not unlike arguing that home and business owners should leave their doors unlocked during off hours so that anyone who wants to enter illegally is not forced to seek entry through the chimney or other dangerous portals.

It's tragic that people bring children with them into these inhospitable climes, but to argue that therefore we shouldn't build a wall is like insisting that because intruders into your house may have children with them you should therefore make access to your home easy and safe for them.

O'Rourke also claimed that the wall in El Paso has not made residents safer, but this is contradicted by the city's mayor:

El Paso Mayor Dee Margo told Fox News in December that they need the rule of law, negotiations with Mexico, and a solution to problems in Central America. “We have a fence already in El Paso that was done during the Bush administration, I think back in 2008, and it has stopped criminal activity and it works.”

There may be good arguments against building a border wall, I am open to being persuaded, but I have yet to hear one (see here for more examples), and O'Rourke's effort is certainly no exception.

There are really only two reasons, evidently, why Democrats oppose a wall: First, they want open borders so they can increase their voter base. If they thought for a minute that all or most immigrants would, once they gained citizenship, vote Republican they'd be scrambling all over each other to allocate the entire national budget for a wall.

Second, they can't stand the thought of allowing the President to make good on his signature campaign promise. If Barack Obama had declared a need for a wall there'd be no opposition to it whatsoever. Everyone in the media and in congress would be coming up with reasons why we do indeed need a barrier.

It's a shame that our leaders put political power and petty posturing over the needs of the people, but unless the Democrats can offer a better argument than they have so far it certainly seems that that's what they're doing.

Coming to the End of the Island

The word is that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report will end not with a bang but with a whimper. There'll be no evidence adduced, those in the know are whispering, that President Trump engaged in any collusion with Russia.

Adam Mill (a pseudonym), in a column at The Federalist, claims that everyone should have known this all along but that those on the left have convinced themselves that the only way Mr. Trump could have defeated Hillary Clinton was by receiving aid from those nefarious Russians. They've been as sure of this as any True Believer could be of anything.

But Mill thinks they're in for an enormous letdown. He compares the situation to an old Seinfeld episode. Here's his lede:

In episode 171 of “Seinfeld,” George Costanza makes up a story about having a house in the Hamptons in order to avoid attending an event with his dead fiancée’s parents, the Rosses. He soon learns they know of his deception but the Rosses nevertheless accept an invitation to the fictitious house.

George picks them up and begins driving towards a house that doesn’t exist. Both the Rosses and George maintain the pretense until George drives to the end of [Long Island] past the last house in the Hamptons. George silently pleads for the Rosses to put an end to the charade. The lie’s momentum took on a life of its own as the players all continued acting their parts long after the truth was known.

The episode comes to mind as the media has started backing away from the Russia collusion hoax. Like Costanza, many of the media perpetrators seem to know a reckoning is coming. Politico warned Trump haters, “Prepare for disappointment.”... Mueller’s longtime top deputy at the FBI recently warned, “A public narrative has built an expectation that the special counsel will explain his conclusions, but I think that expectation may be seriously misplaced.”

Mill goes on to give a half dozen signs that should've been obvious from the beginning that the entire "Russian Collusion" investigation was a charade. Anyone interested in why no one should've been duped should read the column.

But many people were duped, perhaps willingly, perhaps not. Consider the good folks at progressive cable outlets like CNN and MSNBC. I think many of them truly believed that Mr. Trump was guilty as sin, and they've invested their entire professional lives for the last two years in promoting the story that Mueller is just one discovery away from ridding us for good of the loathsome imposter in the White House.

They've scarcely talked about anything else every hour of every day since November of 2016. Like lovesick teenagers it seems to be all they think about both waking and sleeping. Some of them have spent the two years past in gleeful expectation of seeing Mr. Trump frog-marched to the metaphorical scaffold.

The prospect of his humiliation has animated them, filled them with the thrilling anticipation of a child on Christmas eve, infused their lives with meaning and purpose.

If Mueller presents them instead with a resounding nullity I'm afraid that some of these poor media folks will have to be put on suicide watch. It'll be too much for them to bear.

Having suffered the incredible shock of election night's stunning upset of Hillary Clinton, whose electoral victory they all assumed was a mere formality, and now having to endure this second crushing disappointment of learning that what they just knew was beyond question - that Mueller would show that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians - is simply false, will be devastating.

If that's what unfolds in the near future the trauma will be like discovering that one's most profound convictions were all complete fabrications. If reporting the election results in front of the cameras was close to torture for them, a nothingburger from Mr. Mueller will be cruelty compounded.

Where is the soul so callous and cold-hearted that he could fail to feel sorry for them?