Egoism and Utilitarianism

Peter Singer is a philosopher at Princeton who has gained substantial notoriety for invoking his utilitarian ethical principles to justify infanticide and animal rights. In a piece at The Journal of Practical Ethics the editors interview Singer and question whether utilitarians can, or do, live consistently with their own ethical philosophy.

Here's part of the interview:

Editors: Frances Kamm once said...that utilitarians who believe in very demanding duties to aid and that not aiding is the same as harming, but nevertheless don’t live up to these demands, don’t really believe their own arguments....She concludes that ‘either something is wrong with that theory, or there is something wrong with its proponents’. What do you think about this argument? Why haven’t you given a kidney to someone who needs it now? You have two and you only need one. They have none that are working – it would make a huge difference to their life at very little cost to you.

Peter Singer: I’m not sure that the cost to me of donating a kidney would be “very little” but I agree that it would harm me much less than it would benefit someone who is on dialysis. I also agree that for that reason my failure to donate a kidney is not ethically defensible.... Donating a kidney does involve a small risk of serious complications. Zell Kravinsky suggests that the risk is 1 in 4000.

I don’t think I’m weak-willed, but I do give greater weight to my own interests, and to those of my family and others close to me, than I should. Most people do that, in fact they do it to a greater extent than I do (because they do not give as much money to good causes as I do). That fact makes me feel less bad about my failure to give a kidney than I otherwise would. But I know that I am not doing what I ought to do.

This response raises several questions, but I'll focus on just one. Singer believes it's wrong not to give the kidney and he feels bad, he feels guilty, about not doing so, yet why should he? In what sense is his violation of utilitarian principles morally wrong?

Indeed, why is utilitarianism morally superior to the egoism to which he admits to succumbing?

To put it differently, if Singer chooses to be a utilitarian and donate the kidney while someone else chooses to be an egoist and keep his kidneys, why is either one right or wrong? Given Singer's naturalism, what does it even mean to say that someone is morally wrong anyway?

On naturalism there's no moral authority except one's own convictions and no accountability so in what way is keeping one's kidneys an offense to morality?

Elsewhere in the interview, Singer notes that his ethical thinking is based on the work of the great 19th century ethicist and utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and mentions that,

Sidgwick himself remained deeply troubled by his inability to demonstrate that egoism is irrational. That led him to speak of a “dualism of practical reason”—two opposing viewpoints, utilitarianism and egoism, seemed both to be rational.

In other words, the choice between them is an arbitrary exercise of personal preference, although Singer doesn't agree with this because he believes evolution affords grounds for rejecting egoism. It's hard to see how this could be the case, however, since blind impersonal processes cannot impose moral duties.

Nor is it easy to see how acting against the trend of those processes can be morally wrong. How is one doing anything wrong if he chooses to act contrary to the way mutation and natural selection have shaped the human species? Why should he accept the ethical results of evolutionary history any more than we accept the physical limitations imposed on us by gravity when we go aloft in an airplane or hot air balloon?

The only reason we have for not putting our own interests ahead of the interests of others - as in the example of the kidney - and the only rational reason we would have for feeling guilt over our failure to consider the needs of others is if we believe that such failures are a transgression of an obligation imposed upon us by a transcendent personal moral authority.

Singer lacks such a belief and can thus give no compelling reason why anyone should be a utilitarian rather than an egoist. Indeed, egoism is a rational moral default position for anyone who embraces a naturalistic worldview.

Alien Hand Syndrome

This will sound very weird, but there's a phenomenon called alien hand syndrome that bears on the question of free will and determinism. Neuroscientist Michael Egnor explains the condition in an article at Mind Matters:

This neurological condition occasionally afflicts patients who have had split-brain surgery or other procedures or injuries that disconnect regions of the brain. They experience involuntary movements of limbs. Most commonly it is the left arm, which seems to have a mind of its own. The classic example...is a patient who intentionally buttons her shirt with her right hand while her left hand follows, unbuttoning her shirt, which she doesn’t intend!

In other words, the two halves of the brain seem to have conflicting wills which suggests that the will is neither unitary nor free. Here's another example quoted in Egnor's piece:

Another example [is] related to food, where the right hemisphere was not pleased with what the left hemisphere had been cooking and threw a vial of salt on the food, to render it useless. These examples do seem to imply that will and awareness are indeed split, and there is a struggle for power between the two hemispheres, and thus the two sides of the body.

These examples seem, at least at first glance, to support the materialist view that all of our willful decisions are really the product solely of our material brain, but Egnor disagrees:

[A]lien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t. We have, broadly speaking, two kinds of volition. In common with animals, we have appetite. Appetite is volition that arises from material processes in the brain.

Appetite may or may not be entirely conscious, but it entails motor acts and perceptions linked to specifics of the environment—a keyboard, a button, a bowl of food, or a sexually attractive person. We, along with non-human animals, experience powerful appetites arising from brain processes (neurochemicals, action potentials, and the like) all of the time.

In fact, appetite is the only type of volition that non-human animals experience.

But human beings have another kind of volition as well. We have will, which, unlike appetite, does not arise from brain processes. Will follows from intellect, which is the human ability to think abstractly, without linking the thought to particular objects.

I may desire an extra slice of cake (appetite), but I think about how bad that would be for my nutritional health (intellect) and decide, based on my abstract concern for my health, to forgo the cake (will). My will can override my appetites.

Because will follows on intellect, which is an immaterial power of abstract thought, will is free, in the sense that it is not determined by physical processes such as brain chemicals. Will is, of course, influenced by physical processes. If I’m really hungry and tired, I may decide to have that piece of cake anyway because my appetite has got the better of my compromised intellect. But I still chose to have the cake.

My choice was not determined by chemistry, although it was influenced by chemistry.

Egnor argues that alien hand syndrome is a phenomenon of appetitive volition rather than of the will:

All of the examples of alien hand syndrome involve particular acts—a hand unbuttoning a button or reaching for an object, and the like. This splitting of volition to do particular acts is splitting of the appetite, not splitting of the will. There are no examples of splitting of the will— no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract intentions.

Now, I don’t mean that we don’t have times of indecision; of course we do. I mean that there are no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract decisions—say, to deliberately will justice and injustice at the same moment or to deliberately do differential calculus and integral calculus (one with the right hand, one with the left) at the same moment.

Will is metaphysically simple, in the sense that it has no parts that can separate completely from one another. In fact, unity of will is more or less what we take to define an individual person. If there are two distinct wills, there are two distinct people. ‘Splitting of the will’ defies what we know to be true of human beings.

It is the abstract nature of will that distinguishes it from appetite and makes it free and metaphysically simple, incapable of being split. Alien hand syndrome is an example of splitting of appetite, which is a brain function driven wholly by material processes.

Thus, alien hand syndrome is not an exception to free will at all. In fact, a proper understanding of alien hand syndrome helps us understand what free will really is.

The fact that split brains can dictate conflicting unconscious behaviors does not seem to be a compelling argument against the existence of an immaterial will. After all, our brains dictate a lot of unconscious behaviors including heartbeats, digestion, the coordinated movements of a baseball player catching a fly ball, etc. All of these are "appetitive" volitions.

Egnor may well be correct in what he writes on alien hand syndrome, and what he says is important, but the most puzzling question of all is still unanswered and probably unanswerable: What, exactly, is the will?

Alone in the Cosmos

Since the mid-twentieth century it's been the accepted assumption that the universe must be teeming with life. So many stars out there. So many stars like our sun. So many planets must be orbiting them. There must be billions of planets with living things many of which are biologically and technologically advanced.

But if so, where are they?

As time went on and more and more discoveries were made about the geo-physical properties that must obtain for a planet to produce and sustain life, the first seeds of doubt began to germinate. Books like Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards began to feed those doubts.

Cosmologists are loath to conclude that earth-bound life is unique in all the cosmos, but the chances of another planet meeting all the criteria that a planet must meet in order to sustain life are so vanishingly slim that some of them are admitting that it may be so. We may be all alone.

Ethan Seigel at Forbes tentatively suggests the formerly unthinkable in a recent essay. He writes:

When it comes to the question of extraterrestrial life, humans optimistically assume the Universe is prolific. After all, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about Earth, and life not only took hold here on our world, but evolved, thrived, became complex and differentiated, and then intelligent and technologically advanced. If the same ingredients are everywhere and the same rules are at play, wouldn't it be an awful waste of space if we're alone?

But this is not a question that can be answered by appeals to either logic or emotion, but by data and observation alone. While our investigations have revealed the existence of an enormous number of candidate planets for life, we have yet to find one where intelligent aliens, complex life, or even simple life is known to exist. In all the Universe, humanity may truly be alone.

He goes on to state that,

• somewhere between 80%-100% of stars have planets or planetary systems associated with them,
• approximately 20%-25% of those systems have a planet in their star's "habitable zone," or the right location for liquid water to form on their surface,
• and approximately 10%-20% of those planets are Earth-like in size and mass.

A substantial fraction of stars out there (around 20%) are either K-, G-, or F-class stars, too: Sun-like in mass, luminosity, and lifetime. Putting all these numbers together, there are around 1022 potentially Earth-like planets out there in the Universe, with the right conditions for life on them.

Unfortunately, the assertion that there's nothing special about earth is very misleading. There are many more conditions that must be met for a planet to be suitable for life than the ones he lists. Here are just a relative few to give an idea of the complexities involved:

In order to support life in its solar system a star must be located within a fairly narrow region in the galaxy. It can't be too close to the center, where radiation would be intense, nor too far away where it would revolve at dangerous speeds around the galactic pinwheel.

The star has to be rich in heavier elements, and has to be fairly remote from other stars in the galaxy. It has to be a middle-aged star of relatively constant luminosity, not too big and not too small, not too old and not too young.

In other words, stars suitable for sustaining life are relatively unusual in our galaxy, but this is just the beginning. The star has to possess a planetary satellite capable of generating and sustaining life and this means that planet has to have perhaps hundreds of precisely-tuned properties.

It has to be just the right distance from its star which means it has to revolve around the star at just the right speed. It has to have a nearly circular orbit and the right tilt to its axis. It has to be just the right mass so that its gravity will hold oxygen in the atmosphere but not hold slightly lighter noxious gases like ammonia. It has to rotate on its axis at the right speed, lest the temperature differences between day and night be too great, and it must possess a shifting crust.

It must also have ample water and carbon, among other things, and also a large moon which has to be at just the right distance from the planet to stabilize its wobble. It must also be in a solar system where it's protected from meteorites by large gravitational vacuum sweepers like Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn, and so on.

As the number of parameters that must be just right in order for a planet to be able to support life increases the chances of such planets existing in great numbers in our galaxy decrease.

Seigel seems to feel the weight of all this and concludes with this paragraph:

But how did life arise to begin with, and how likely is a planet to develop life from non-life? If life does arise, how likely is it to become complex, differentiated, and intelligent? And if life achieves all of those milestones, how likely is it that it becomes spacefaring or otherwise technologically advanced, and how long does such life survive if it arises?

The answers may be out there, but we must remember the most conservative possibility of all. In all the Universe, until we have evidence to the contrary, the only example of life might be us.

And if we are in fact the only conscious, sentient beings in the physical universe, does that suggest that we are in some sense special? In what sense? Could it be that we were intended?

Letter to My Daughter

Some years ago I had occasion to write a letter to my just barely teen-age daughter on the subject of happiness. I subsequently posted it on Viewpoint, and a reader digging through the archives read it and liked it, so I thought I'd like to share it again. Here it is:

Hi Princess,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should behave as you would if you were happy (satisfied with the way your life is going) even if you don't feel particularly happy. When you do act that way your feelings gradually change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, by smiling a lot, and by not complaining. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,

Dad

Who Created God?

Philosopher of science Jay Richards is a proponent of intelligent design, i.e. the view that the universe and life show evidence (lots of it) of having been intelligently engineered. Richards asserts that one of the most frequent objections he encounters, one raised in fact by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion is, "If the universe and life are designed then who designed the designer?"

Laypeople can be forgiven for asking the question because it seems common-sensical, but someone of Dawkins' stature should know better and he took a lot of heat from philosophers, even philosophers sympathetic to his metaphysical naturalism, for his evident lack of philosophical sophistication.

Here's a short video in which Richards addresses the question:

It's worth noting, I think, that the attempt to use this question as an indictment of the intelligent design hypothesis is misguided for other reasons besides those Richards gives.

Let's look at the first part of the question: "If the universe and life are designed...." implies a willingness to accept for the sake of argument that the universe is designed, but as soon as he's granted that the naturalist has gotten himself into trouble.

Once it's conceded by the naturalist, even if only hypothetically, that the universe is designed then whether there's just one designer or an indefinite number doesn't much matter. Naturalism would stand refuted since naturalism holds that the universe is self-existent.

Moreover, to posit more designers than what's necessary to explain the universe is a violation of the principle that our explanations should contain the minimum number of entities necessary to explain what we're trying to explain - in this case, the universe. So the simplest, and therefore the best, explanation is that there's only a single designer of the universe. There's no warrant for thinking that anyone who believes there's a designer of the universe must allow for an infinite regress of designers.

We might also point out that the universe is the sum of all contingent entities. Thus, whatever designed the universe cannot itself be contingent lest it be itself part of the universe. Now contingent entities require a necessary being as their ultimate cause and a necessary being is, by definition, not itself dependent upon anything else for its existence. So, if the universe was designed by a non-contingent being then it makes no sense to ask what designed it. Nothing designed it. If it were designed it would be contingent and thus part of the universe.

Finally, it should be noted that if there is an intelligent designer it must not only be a necessary being, but it must also transcend space and time because these are aspects of the universe. Therefore, the designer must be non-spatial and non-temporal. It must also be very intelligent and very powerful. In other words, it must be something very much like God.

Given all this, the naturalist would be better off resisting the temptation to ask "who designed the designer." It's a question which carries far less polemical punch than they think it does.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Back in 1998 when Democrat Bill Clinton was the president and an Independent Prosecutor named Ken Starr had, after a lengthy grand jury investigation, recorded President Clinton's shenanigans in his report, Congressman Jerrold Nadler was adamantly opposed to the report being made public without first being redacted.

It's illegal to release grand jury material, Nadler pointed out, because innocent people, caught up in the investigation, could be deeply harmed by embarrassing testimony and because sensitive national security information could be compromised.

Here's what Mr. Nadler said in 1998 about releasing the special prosecutor's report:

Mr. Starr in his transmittal letter to the speaker and the minority leader made it clear that much of this material is Federal Rule 6(e) material, that is material that by law, unless contravened by a vote of the House, must be kept secret.

It’s grand jury material. It represents statements which may or may not be true by various witnesses, salacious material, all kinds of material that it would be unfair to release.

So, I assume what’s going to have to happen before anything else happens is that somebody — the staff of the Judiciary Committee, perhaps the chairman and ranking minority member — is going to have to go over this material, at least the 400 or 500 pages in the report to determine what is fit for release and what is, as a matter of decency and protecting people’s privacy rights, people who may be totally innocent third parties, what must not be released at all.

Notwithstanding his scruples in 1998, Mr. Nadler today chairs the House Judiciary Committee and he's demanding that special counsel Robert Mueller's full report be released without any redactions regardless of its impact on innocent people and national security:

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee’s chairman, made clear that Democrats are not satisfied with Attorney General William P. Barr’s assurances on Friday that he will produce a full, albeit redacted, copy of the nearly 400-page report to Congress by mid-April.

“As I have made clear, Congress requires the full and complete special counsel report, without redactions, as well as access to the underlying evidence,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement. “The attorney general should reconsider so that we can work together to ensure the maximum transparency of this important report to both Congress and the American people.”

What might have changed Chairman Nadler's mind on releasing unredacted an report the contents of which might humiliate people in ways unrelated to the purpose of Mueller's investigation? I don't know for sure, but here's a possibility: In '98 the president was a Democrat, today he's a Republican.

Moral Skyhooks (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post addressed the scandal (called "Operation Varsity Blues") surrounding the fraudulent efforts by wealthy parents to get their children accepted into top-tier universities.

The main question I began to consider yesterday concerns the grounds people are relying upon in order to make the judgment that these parents and the others involved were doing something morally wrong.

The post was based on an article written by Jennifer Graham at Deseret News. In her column Graham says this:

Steve Mintz, an ethicist and professor emeritus at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, believes a cultural problem seethes beneath what prosecutors call "Operation Varsity Blues," and that until Americans can admit their moral compass is askew and take steps to fix it, the nation will continue to suffer scandals like this.

“There is no way to justify this type of activity. It reflects a society where people no longer live by conventional standards of morality," Mintz said. “I can’t imagine any of these parents stopped and thought, ‘Is what I’m doing harming others? Am I taking away a position from other kids who might be more worthy?’

This is what ethics is all about — considering how your actions might affect others before you do something, not after the fact, after you’re caught. To look at this one incident in isolation is wrong, in my point of view," he said.

Well, I agree with everything Mintz said, but it's what he didn't say that's most important. What he didn't tell us is why what these parents and their abettors did is wrong. Is it wrong because, as he put it, it violates "conventional standards of morality"? That can't be right.

What makes those standards obligatory? Just because the consensus opinion has always endorsed them why does that make them right? What if a society's conventional standards affirmed slavery, infant sacrifice or honor killing? Would those practices then be right and would opposing them be wrong?

It would be very helpful if Mintz would answer these fundamental metaethical questions, for if they're left unanswered then all of our theorizing about ethical standards amounts to little more than hand-waving.

Graham continues:

Mintz believes that a creeping moral nihilism, coupled with a widespread belief that few people face serious consequences for ethical wrongdoing, have erased a bright line of right and wrong, leaving in its place a “gray streak.” He said that a deterioration of public discourse is further evidence of the problem, saying “civility and ethics go hand in hand.”

“For many years, we’ve had the Golden Rule, but it’s hard to say that this is still the basic ethical or moral rule in society anymore,” Mintz said.

What Mintz apparently is reluctant to come right out and say is that a secular society in fact has no solid basis for making moral judgments. Only if there is a transcendent, personal moral authority who has somehow revealed moral truth to us can any moral judgment be anything more than an expression of one's own personal tastes and feelings.

In order to be binding people must believe that moral obligations are imposed upon them by something beyond themselves and beyond society. They must believe that morality is objectively real. That harming others is objectively, not merely subjectively, wrong and that those who harm others will ultimately be held accountable for their actions even if they get away with it in this life.

The reason the Golden Rule lacks the authority in people's lives that perhaps it once had is that fewer people today believe that the Golden Rule expresses the will of God. For too many folks the rule that we should treat others as we want to be treated is no more, and probably a lot less, authoritative than the rule that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others.

Morality must be divinely sanctioned if it's to have any power to motivate people to override their desires and appetites, but in a society which has abandoned the concept of the divine it's very hard to say why it's wrong to yield to those desires and appetites, whether or not doing so results in harm to others.

Maybe this is why no one in Graham's article offers an explanation for why cheating to get into college is really wrong. Unless they're willing to invoke God's law there's simply no way to support the claim that cheating is objectively wrong, but, of course, invoking God is no longer fashionable.

Moral Skyhooks (Pt. I)

Jennifer Graham at Deseret News uses the college admissions scandal to highlight moral impoverishment among our cultural elites.

Her article is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.

For those unfamiliar with the scandal, wealthy parents paid up to half a million dollars to get their children admitted into prestigious universities. The strategies employed by William “Rick” Singer, the California consultant who ran the college admissions scheme through a fraudulent charity included doctoring photos, cheating on admissions tests and paying athletic coaches to add the student to their teams even though the student wasn't an athlete.

Some 50 people, including 33 parents and 13 coaches are involved in the scheme, and Graham notes that at least some of the parents were indifferent to the moral issues involved. “To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue here,” said one Connecticut parent, co-chairman of a global law firm, according to court documents.

He had no "moral issue" with having his daughter fraudulently diagnosed as learning disabled so she could get extra time taking a college placement test, or with having another person take online courses on her behalf.

Graham's article contains a lot of moral hand-wringing by various ethicists, but no one in the article seems to recognize the fundamental reason for the ethical indifference of parents like those quoted above.

For instance, Graham asks, "If moral standards are encoded in our DNA, as many theologians and philosophers have taught, how can people go so wildly off course? And when our moral compass malfunctions, how can we recalibrate?"

Her first question answers itself. If morality is simply a feeling imposed on us by our genes then why should anyone think themselves obligated to heed it? After all, feelings of selfishness, lust, greed, ethnocentrism, etc. are also generated by our genes and most people think these inclinations should be repressed or ignored. How do we differentiate between genetically-derived impulses which should be followed and those which should not unless we're tacitly adverting to a higher standard which transcends DNA?

Moreover, if genes are the arbiters of moral right and wrong then if some people's genes make them psychopaths why is psychopathic behavior morally wrong?

If moral standards are encoded in our genes then what does it mean to say that it's wrong to commit fraud? At most it can only mean that we've acted in defiance of our genetic programming, but why is that wrong? What law says that we must always act in accord with what our genes dictate?

In other words it's precisely because society has bought into the notion that right and wrong are simply epiphenomenal expressions of the chemicals in our DNA that people have concluded that there's nothing wrong with cheating to get one's child into a prestigious university.

Morality has to be hung from a transcendent support or else it's like skyhooks hanging on nothing at all.

I'll have more to say about this tomorrow, meanwhile you might check out Mike Mitchell's fine piece on this scandal at his blog Thought Sifter.

The Most Fortunate Generation in History

David Harsanyi at The Federalist declares that, notwithstanding the asseverations of millennials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the contrary, today's millennials are the most well-off generation in human history.

Specifically, he claims, "...if the world continues on its present trajectory, American millennials will have collectively lived the most peaceful, wealthiest, safest, most educated, and most globally connected lives in the history of the world."

The facts he amasses to support this affirmation are impressive:

For starters, millennials had the world opened to them like no one else, benefiting from the perhaps greatest technological revolution in information and commerce–even more consequential than the printing revolution.

For most millennials... any book, any piece of music, any great work of art—virtually any nugget of human knowledge—has been at their fingertips throughout their entire adult lives. And today, more Americans have access to high-speed internet than ever. This is a manifestation of prosperity.

During the adulthood of most of today's millennials there's been only a single quarter of negative GDP growth, and 13 quarters of more than 3 percent growth.

Harsanyi quotes from National Review’s Jim Geraghty:

But the U.S. economy has added jobs for 100 consecutive months, and there are seven million unfilled jobs in the country. The housing market either quickly or gradually recovered depending upon your region, and auto production recovered, both at companies that received government bailouts and those that did not.

There’s not too much inflation or deflation. Energy prices declined as U.S. domestic production boomed. Wage growth has been slow, but some research indicates this reflects companies hiring more young workers, who generally earn less than older, more experienced workers.

Scott Lincicome lays out how more Americans households can afford more products. The stock market hit new world highs last year. In late 2018, the World Economic Forum ranked the United States the world’s most competitive economy for the first time in a decade. Even the more pessimistic economists concede that the U.S. economy’s problems are smaller and less severe than anyone else’s.

There's more:

More broadly, no group of Americans has ever had more of an opportunity to achieve personal prosperity. In 1965, there were only 5.9 million Americans enrolled in college—mostly rich kids. By 2012 there were 21 million Americans enrolled in college. According to the Federal Reserve study, millennials are the most educated generation, with 65 percent of them possessing at least an associate’s degree.

It’s often claimed that millennials have “lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth.” This is because many of them are still young. Getting a college education defers financial success to later years. The average earning potential of a college graduate is higher than for trades that don’t need it.

Moreover, more millennials choose to live in expensive urban areas—where they pay high rent and rarely own houses—and get married later than previous generations. The longer you defer getting married, the longer it takes to realize your potential earnings, generally speaking.

Because of...technological advances, almost everything is cheaper today. In the last 50 years, spending on food and clothing as share of family income has fallen from 42 to 17 percent. At the same time we have countless choices—many of which would seem exotic to an average person in 1989.

Millennials have been economically fortunate but they've been even more fortunate, perhaps, in terms of their health never having had to worry "about measles, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, or polio. The cancer death rate has fallen over 27 percent [over the last decade] — which equals more than two million deaths averted during that time period."

Harsanyi goes on to cite statistics which show that violent crime, deaths from vehicular accidents and deaths from war are all down significantly over the last couple of decades, and adds that even the anxieties millennials harbor over what they believe to be the looming disaster of climate change has been blown out of proportion by the scare-mongers:

“Climate change” has affected millennials in about the same way nuclear winter, global cooling, overpopulation, and other Malthusian scares have affected previous generations—which is to say, not at all. Every generation has its End of Days myth. In the real world, the imperceptible change in climate during [our millennials'] lifetime has done nothing to diminish prosperity here or abroad.

All of which makes it very difficult to understand why millennials seem eager, according to some polls, to jettison capitalism in favor of socialism. Perhaps they should reread Aesop's story about killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

Head Transplant Update

A few years ago we commented here at Viewpoint on news from Italy wherein a surgeon by the name of Sergio Canavero was striving to develop a technique that would allow him to transplant a human head onto another human being's body.

Part of the process would involve severing and restoring spinal cord function. If this could be done it would offer hope to accident victims whose spinal cords had been severed.

An article in USA Today suggests that progress is being made. Here's the lede:

Surgeons from China and Italy claimed that two studies published Wednesday add evidence to their ability to treat "irreversible" spinal-cord injuries and a related controversial aspiration to perform the world’s first human head transplant.

Xiaoping Ren and Sergio Canavero said the new work they published in a scientific journal showed that monkeys and dogs were able to walk again after their spinal cords were "fully transected" during surgery and then put back together again. The neurosurgeons described the results as medically "unprecedented."

The article goes on to say that,

While the researchers have tested head transplants, with some success, on small animals including mice and dogs, it's a concept that raises profound ethical, psychological and surgical questions.

It's interesting to speculate as to how a brain that has developed for decades in tandem with a particular body would accommodate itself to another body that has entirely different capacities and abilities. How much would have to be relearned? How psychologically jarring would the change be to the patient?

Would the resulting individual be a new person or would he/she be the same person that provided the head?

Canavero intends to eventually perform the extraordinarily expensive operation in China since America and Europe won't permit it: "The Americans did not understand," Canavero told USA TODAY two years ago as he announced that he would soon perform the world’s first human head transplant in China because medical communities in the United States and Europe would not permit him to do it there. From space exploration to climate-change science, China has indicated it intends to lead, not follow, the U.S. in all the major scientific and technological frontiers over the coming decades.

Canavero estimated the procedure would cost up to $100 million and involve several dozen surgeons and specialists. He said the donor would be the healthy body of a brain-dead patient matched for build with a recipient's disease-free head.

The procedure itself is described in the USA Today piece:

The researcher said he would simultaneously sever the spinal cords of the donor and recipient with a diamond blade. To protect the recipient's brain from immediate death before it is attached to the body, it would be cooled to a state of deep hypothermia.

Michael Sarr, a former surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and editor of the journal Surgery, told USA TODAY in 2017 that....Doctors "have always been taught that when you cut a nerve, the 'downstream side,' the part that takes a signal and conducts it to somewhere else, dies," he said.

"The 'upstream side,' the part that generates the signal, dies back a little – a millimeter or two – and eventually regrows. As long as that 'downstream' channel is still there, it can regrow through that channel, but only for a length of about a foot."

This is why, he said, if you amputate your wrist and then re-implant it and line the nerves up well, you can recover function in your hand. But if your arm gets amputated at the shoulder, it won't be re-implanted because it will never lead to a functional hand.

"What Canavero (would) do differently is bathe the ends of the nerves in a solution that stabilizes the membranes and put them back together," Sarr said. "The nerves will be fused, but won't regrow. And he will do this not in the peripheral nerves such as you find in the arm, but in the spinal cord, where there's multiple types of nerve channels."

Are Canavero and Xiaoping Ren quacks or are they medical pioneers? A hundred years ago no one thought that hearts, livers, kidneys, hands or faces could ever be transplanted, but today they are being transplanted frequently. Perhaps it's just a matter of time before someone whose body is dying but whose brain is healthy can be given a new body.

If they have $100 million to spend on it.

Materialism and Panpsychism

Materialism is the view that matter (and energy) are the fundamental realities in the universe. Everything that exists is reducible to, and explicable in terms of, matter. Materialism has always been a popular metaphysical assumption those holding a naturalistic worldview, but in the 20th century materialism found itself challenged by two developments, one was the discoveries being made in quantum physics and the other was its inability to account for human consciousness.

If we think of consciousness, at least in part, as possessing awareness it appears that subatomic particles like electrons exhibit a very rudimentary consciousness. Thus, some thinkers have revived a theory called panpsychism to account for this.

If we can't conceive of how material objects can generate consciousness perhaps it helps to assume that all material objects, down to the tiniest subatomic pieces, are to some degree conscious and that in aggregate are able to comprise conscious beings like ourselves.

I posted several pieces on the topic of panpsychism in the past (2/15/18, 2/16/18/, 2/19/18) and invite the interested reader to check them out.

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, who has written a lot about mind and consciousness, has a column at Mind Matters in which he argues that consciousness requires senses and that inanimate objects, lacking senses, must a forteriori lack consciousness.

Perhaps, but as much as I'd like to agree with Egnor I think there's a problem with his argument. Egnor is a theist and if theism is correct then there are pure minds - e.g. God, angels and perhaps the souls of deceased human beings - that are surely conscious but which possess no physical senses. Thus, consciousness would not seem to require, necessarily, a physical sensory apparatus.

This is not to say that I accept the panpsychist's argument, as a perusal of the posts from February of last year will make plain, but I do think there's a problem with our understanding of material substance. The problem can be found lurking in the materialist's assumption that matter is fundamental and that consciousness is the product of material brains. Maybe things are really the other way around. Perhaps it is mind that is the fundamental substance and that matter is somehow a product of minds. Perhaps matter is to mind as wetness is to water. It's not that every bit of matter possesses mind, as the panpsychist would have it, but rather that matter is an expression of mind. Imagine, for instance, that, like the images on a computer screen, the fine structure of the physical world is comprised of pixels of exceedingly high resolution. These are not pixels made of chemicals like those on your monitor, rather they're pixels made of information or mind. What appears to us to be material stuff could in fact be a three dimensional manifestation of information flowing from a universal mind somewhat like the pixels on a screen are a two dimensional manifestation of the information flowing from the programmer's mind. Whatever the case, the days when it seemed obvious that matter is the fundamental reality appear to be waning. As the physicist Sir James Jeans presciently noted back in the middle of the last century, "The world is beginning to look more like a grand idea than a grand machine."

Not Enough Evidence

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

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

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

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity.

This evidentialism or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 19th century and into the 20th among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

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

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink.

The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. They're based rather on an intuition of probability. The more intuitively probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it.

Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world.

When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

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

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise.

Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

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

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

Abstract Thought and Materialism

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that among the things that a material brain cannot accomplish just by itself is abstract thought. Egnor concludes that this is evidence for mind/brain dualism because certainly human beings are capable of abstract thinking.

Why does he say that the material brain is incapable of generating abstract thoughts? He makes his case in a short essay at Evolution News, excerpts from which follow:

Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy.

He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.

His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.

Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.

During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:

There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mindaction"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind....If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact.

The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way.

But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[emphasis mine]

Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer, apparently, is that the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.

Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.

There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this: If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience, and since stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.

This is not proof that there's a mind, of course, but it is certainly consistent with the dualist hypothesis that we are a composite of mind and brain and certainly puzzling on the materialist hypothesis that the material brain is solely responsible for all of our mental experience.

Unhealthy Obsession

President Donald Trump has been cleared of the charge of colluding with Russia to fix the 2016 election. Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team have, after two years of searching and spending $25 million of taxpayers' money, found no evidence to support the charge that had seemed to many in the media as a matter of course: That Mr. Trump was guilty.

So certain were they of the president's culpability that they were willing to forfeit their professional credibility by uttering numerous very intemperate asseverations as a video at Grabien.com documents.

One wonders what evidence that the special prosecutor did not have that these people did have which convinced them that Mr. Trump would surely be found guilty of crimes, some of which (treason) carry the death penalty.

And if they had no evidence but were simply engaging in wishful thinking their irresponsibility in perpetuating what amounts to a slander on the president and further divides an already divided country.

Not only have they been complicit in setting Americans more sharply against each other, but they've made it very difficult for Mr. Trump to succeed on the foreign policy stage since most of our adversaries, like China and North Korea, have probably assumed that the president would soon be politically crippled and that there was no point in truckling to him in whatever negotiations were taking place.

So far from rejoicing that the president is not a traitor many of his domestic enemies are, like those ISIS holdouts in Syria, refusing to give up and admit their error and are instead pinning their desperate hopes on Mueller's claim that although there was insufficient evidence to support the allegation that the president also obstructed justice, there was also insufficient reason to conclude that he did not.

This rather ambiguous loose end has been seized upon by the Democrats in Congress and the media as justification for pressing on in their pursuit of Mr. Trump. Like Captain Ahab obsessed with wreaking vengeance on Moby Dick they're determined to politically and legally harpoon the president, even if their monomania destroys their party's electoral chances in 2020.

Their hatred for Donald Trump is beginning to appear even to some of their allies as all-consuming, and their failure to defeat him in 2016 and their subsequent failures to rid the White House of him seems, like Chief Inspector Dreyfus' failure to rid himself of the inept Inspector Clouseau in the old Pink Panther movies, to be driving them toward madness.

The progressive media has destroyed whatever credibility they may have had in their reporting and commentary of the "Russian Collusion" story, as Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi observes, so maybe it's time for all these folks to take a deep breath or two and just let it go before they wind up like Chief Inspector Dreyfus.

Thoughts on Friendship

Last month I posted some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on the topic of friendship. Lewis spoke of how friendship was rooted in shared loves and interests. Lewis writes, for instance, that,

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden).

He also says this:

The companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends.

In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, 'Do you care about the same truth?' The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.

St. Augustine also wrote on the same subject. Augustine reflects on the desire to share a common love, particularly a love for the life of the mind (although that's not what he calls it) has on him. He writes wistfully about it:

...I do love wisdom alone and for its own sake, and it is on account of wisdom that I want to have, or fear to be without, other things such as life, tranquility and my friends. What limit can their be to my love of that Beauty, in which I do not only not begrudge it to others, but I even look for many who will long for it with me, sigh for it with me, possess it with me, enjoy it with me. They will be all the dearer to me the more we share that love in common.

Lewis and Augustine have something important to teach us about friendship. Two people can be companions for awhile even if they don't share much in common, but they'll only develop a true friendship if they both love some of the same things. For Augustine the chief of these loves is the love of wisdom, and surely the love of wisdom encompasses the love of truth.

That love has been largely lost in our post-modern age during which a lot of people seem to believe whatever suits their political or religious preferences. So far from loving truth (and wisdom) many seem almost to despise it as irrelevant if it gets in the way of their appetites and prejudices.

I wonder how many modern friendships are grounded in the same love that Augustine muses upon, or even could be.

The Case for Dualism

My classes will be discussing this week the philosophical debate between dualists - those who believe that human beings are comprised of both a material body and an immaterial mind or soul - and materialists who maintain that we are purely material beings. I thought it'd be helpful to rerun this post that I first put up a couple of months ago to help clarify some of the issues.

The debate is especially acute with regard to our cognitive activity with dualists arguing that thinking involves the integration of our material brains with an immaterial mind and materialists maintaining that the brain is all that's involved in our cognitive experience.

The materialist insists that the brain can account for all of our mental phenomena and that there's no need to posit the existence of an immaterial mind or soul. Moreover, given that brain function is the product of the laws of physics and chemistry, materialists argue that there's no reason to believe that we have free will.

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

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

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

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

There's a lot at stake in this debate. If materialism is true it not only becomes harder to believe in free will, it's also harder to believe that human beings have dignity, that objective moral obligations exist, that we have a self or identity which perdures through time and that there's a meaningful individual existence beyond the death of the body.

Most materialists accept that none of these beliefs are true, Most dualists believe, or at least hope, that they are. Whether you agree with the materialist or you hope the materialist is wrong you'll want to watch Egnor's video.

A Genuine Miracle?

The last few posts have touched on the topic of the inevitability of genuine miracles occurring if there truly exists a multiverse and the difficulty of ruling them out if our world is just one of a vast ensemble of worlds.

I thought it'd be fitting to add an actual contemporary example of what certainly seems to be a miraculous event that's so amazing a major motion picture has been made about it.

The account of the event appeared in a piece by Josh Shepherd at The Federalist, part of which reads as follows:

On January 19, 2015, 14-year-old John Smith was trapped underwater for 15 minutes. First responders pulled him from the icy waters of Lake Sainte Louise in St. Charles, a northwestern suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a month later: “He wasn’t breathing, and paramedics and doctors performed CPR on him for 43 minutes without regaining a pulse.” Yet, after his mother prayed for him, doctors at St. Joseph Hospital West say Smith inexplicably regained consciousness.

“They never expected the heart monitor to respond,” says Joyce Smith [John's mother] in an interview. “The first doctor who treated John wrote in his medical records: Patient dead. Mother prayed. Patient came back to life.”

Even when John reacquired a pulse, doctors anticipated that since his brain had been deprived of oxygen for so long he'd remain in a vegetative state, but the boy has fully recovered and returned to his basketball team. It's truly a remarkable story, and Shepherd provides much more detail in his article than I've given here.

The movie, due to be released on April 17th, and the team behind the film maintains that all the facts have been medically verified, and the story on-screen reflects accounts from multiple sources.

People today are often skeptical of reports of miracles, as they should be, given the number of fraudulent stories that have circulated over the years, but no one should be so skeptical as to rule out the possibility that something for which there's no room in a naturalistic worldview has in fact happened in this instance, and if one believes there's a multiverse, it would seem, one simply can't rule out that such events can and do occur.

This is the multiverse conundrum. If there is no multiverse then the fine-tuning of our universe for life points inexorably to the existence of a supernatural mind, and if one reverts to the multiverse to explain away cosmic fine-tuning she abandons any grounds for skepticism that miracles happen. And if miracles happen the case for that supernatural mind gets much stronger.

Whether you're skeptical or not read the article at the link and see what you think.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. III)

As a followup to our previous two posts here's another example of how embracing the multiverse leads to several unintended and uncomfortable consequences for the naturalist.

Cosmologist Sean Carroll, an atheist, has been quoted as arguing that the multiverse hypothesis, though it does not meet the standard criteria of a good scientific theory (i.e. it's not falsifiable or testable), nevertheless should be accepted as legitimate science.

He writes:

Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth.

The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they’re not falsifiable.

The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.

This reminds me of a passage from William James who asserted that, "any rule of thought which would prevent me from discovering a truth, were that truth really there, is an irrational rule."

Carroll wants to apply James' maxim to science in the belief that it's not reasonable to restrict science only to conjectures about entities whose existence can be tested.

Thus, the multiverse hypothesis should be considered legitimate science even if it's not testable because it's an entity that's either real or it's not, and "refusing to contemplate [it's] possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though [it] might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."

Very well, but then why wouldn't this same standard also apply to the hypothesis that the world is the creation of God? Wouldn't the same standard also apply to Intelligent Design which is banned from public school science classrooms because it allegedly can't be tested and is therefore not regarded as a genuine scientific theory?

Carroll wants to make the multiverse a viable scientific option because it gives him a means to evade the compelling theistic implications of cosmic fine-tuning, but in order to include the multiverse hypothesis in the field of legitimate scientific inquiry he has to open up the domain of science to include conjectures about the existence and activity of a God, which is the very thing he's eager to avoid.

Tomorrow I'll return to the topic of miracles with a description of a contemporary episode that, assuming it's not a hoax, surely counts as a genuine miracle. Indeed, it would require an even greater miracle for it to be a hoax.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took a look at Vincent Torley's analysis of the multiverse in which Torley argued that if there is a multiverse then miracles must not only be possible but certain to occur in some world in the infinite ensemble of worlds.

The naturalist who embraces the multiverse has a another problem in addition to the problem with miracles. Darwinian evolution is predicated on uniformitarianism, the belief that the laws of physics never change, but if there's a multiverse, of which we are a part, then uniformitarianism becomes highly improbable.

Torley writes:

[S]ince the argument for Darwinian evolution is based on the assumption that the laws and parameters of Nature do not vary, it follows that if we live in a multiverse, then our own universe is infinitely more likely to be one in which the miracles of the Bible occurred than a uniformitarian one in which life evolved in a Darwinian fashion.

... there will still be a number of possible universes in the multiverse, in which life pops into existence in the manner described in Genesis 1, and where living things just happen to exhibit the striking traits predicted by Darwinism, whereas there is (by definition) only ONE way for a given set of laws and parameters NOT to vary: namely, by remaining the same at every point in space and time.

The problem [for the naturalist] is that the uniformitarian requirement that the laws and parameters of Nature are the same at every point in space and time – which is rather like hitting bull’s eyes again and again and again, for billions of years – is inherently so very unlikely, when compared to “singularism” (the hypothesis that the laws of Nature undergo slight, short-lived or local fluctuations)...

Thus in a multiverse scenario, uniformitarianism becomes the albatross around the neck of Darwinism: no matter how many of Darwin’s predictions scientists manage to confirm, the sheer unlikelihood of the hypothesis that we live in a universe whose laws never vary renders Darwinism too unlikely a theory to warrant scientific consideration.

What a pickle. The naturalist rejects miracles and accepts Darwinian evolution (i.e. that evolution is a completely natural process with no intelligent input from a non-natural mind) largely because he rejects the existence of God.

He buttresses that rejection by also accepting the idea of the multiverse as an answer to the argument for God's existence based on cosmic fine-tuning, but by accepting the multiverse he pretty much has to give up the underlying assumption of Darwinism (uniformitarianism) and also his opposition to miracles.

He seems to be mired in an intellectual quagmire, and it's not at all clear how he can extricate himself from it.

More on the naturalist's difficulties tomorrow.

Miracles and the Multiverse (Pt. I)

Naturalism is the view that physical nature is all there is. It holds that there's no non-physical reality, no supernatural entities. Naturalists usually embrace the idea of the existence of a multiverse in which infinite universes, all with different laws and parameters, exist something like bubbles in a bubble bath. Our universe is just one such bubble.

There's scarcely any empirical evidence for the multiverse, however, and it's popularity seems to stem largely from its utility as a response to the powerful argument for a cosmic Designer based on the incredible improbability that a universe like ours, with astonishingly precise values of the parameters that form the fabric of the universe and make life possible, would exist at all.

If, however, there's an infinite array of different universes with different laws and parameters, then even astronomically improbable universes are certain to be among that infinite manifold. Thus, as amazingly improbable as a life-sustaining world is, one pretty much had to exist, given the existence of the multiverse and we just happen to be in it.

Nevertheless, as philosopher Vincent Torley points out in a lengthy treatment of the multiverse at Uncommon Descent there's a perplexing difficulty for the naturalist who clings to the multiverse in order to avoid falling into theism. If the multiverse exists then not only does the improbable become certain, but so, too, does anything that is possible to occur under some set of physical laws. This would, of course, include miracles.

Miracles, after all, are exceedingly improbable events given the laws which appear to govern our world, but they're not logically impossible. The laws of our universe could be structured in such a way that allows for miracles on rare occasions. Such a world must, after all, exist somewhere in the multiverse and perhaps we just happen to be in it.

The irony is that the naturalist rejects the miraculous because he rejects belief in the existence of God, but in order to sustain his non-belief in God he relies on a hypothesis that makes miracles virtually certain to occur somewhere in the vast ensemble of worlds that comprises the multiverse.

Naturalism sees the universe as invariant. That is, the laws of physics hold everywhere and always. They're inviolable. Thus, miracles, for the naturalist, are physically impossible, but as Torley points out, in a multiverse there should be universes in which the laws of physics fluctuate episodically, thereby permitting anomalous events like miracles, and that these universes should be far more common than uniformitarian worlds in which the laws are invariant.

Here's Torley:

[B]ecause multiverses allow laws to vary bizarrely on rare and singular occasions, and because not all such variations are fatal to life, we can conclude that a life-permitting universe is far more likely than not to experience anomalous events (which some might call miracles), and that a life-permitting universe in which Biblical miracles occur is still more likely than one in which the laws and physical parameters of Nature are always uniform.

Thus [the] belief that we live in in a universe where Biblical miracles occurred will still be more rational than the modern scientific belief that we live in a universe whose laws are space and time-invariant, because [these] universes are more common in the multiverse than law-invariant universes.

We'll have more to say about the difficulty embracing the multiverse hypothesis poses for the naturalist tomorrow.