Wittgenstein's Poker

Almost seventy three years ago, in October of 1946, a group of highly accomplished philosophers and intellectuals gathered in a room at King's College, Cambridge to hear two of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century engage in a rather odd colloquy.

The two principals were Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Popper had prepared a paper critical of Wittgenstein's view that there were no genuine philosophical problems, only linguistic puzzles.

According to journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow who wrote a 2001 book about the encounter titled Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, as Popper was reading his paper, Wittgenstein, who had a reputation for not listening to papers all the way through, as well as for rudeness and arrogance, interrupted Popper, and an acrimonious exchange ensued.

As the back and forth grew increasingly heated Wittgenstein picked up a fireplace poker and began waving it around. Shortly afterward he threw down the poker and exited the room.

On these major points there was unanimity among eye-witnesses, but on the details there were discrepancies. Some claimed the poker was red hot, others that it was cool. Some say Wittgenstein only used it to make his point, others, including Popper, allege that he threatened Popper with it.

Some say he left after angry words with Bertrand Russell who was serving as a moderator, others, including Popper, asserted that he stormed out after Popper gave as an example of an obvious moral principle that one shouldn't "threaten visiting speakers with pokers." Some claim that Popper only said this after Wittgenstein had left the room.

Some insist that he slammed the door, others that he left quietly.

I find this episode interesting because even though the details diverge among the witnesses, the main facts are not in dispute. No one, not even the most skeptical reader of Edmonds and Eidinow's book, would ever dream of concluding that because there are discrepancies in the telling of the tale that therefore it's all fiction.

Yet this is exactly how some scholars react to the accounts in the New Testament of the Bible, particularly the accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus. We're told that because the reports we have of this event seem to disagree in this or that detail, because there seems to be some confusion among the alleged eye-witnesses as to what, exactly, they saw, therefore the whole thing is rubbish.

It's like saying that because there are discrepancies among the eye-witness reports of the Wittgenstein/ Popper contretemps that therefore there was no disagreement, that Wittgenstein didn't really wave a poker about or leave early, or that there was, in fact, no meeting at all between these two worthies.

The witnesses were somehow hallucinating or otherwise mistaken.

In other words, even if it's true that there are minor discrepancies in a historical account that does nothing to impugn the reliability of the overall narrative, particularly when there's overwhelming evidence that the major events described in that narrative actually happened.

No historical record is 100% accurate in every detail, and to require that degree of accuracy from historical documents is to relegate all history to the realm of fiction.

Our Amazing Eyes

For about the last century or so Darwinian naturalists have cited the eye's design as evidence against the existence of an intelligent designer. This is surprising because the eye is an exquisitely engineered organ, but the argument of the Darwinians has been that there are several design flaws in the eye's structure that any competent engineer would have avoided.

One of the alleged flaws is that the rod and cone cells in the retina face backward rather than forward which would seem to minimize the amount of light that reaches them.

As such, the eye seems to be sub-optimally engineered, and, the argument goes, since sub-optimal structures are what we would expect given that naturalistic evolution is a blind, rather haphazard, process, they're the very opposite of what we would expect were the structure intelligently constructed by a competent designer.

As the short video below illustrates, however, the backward facing cells are actually an ingenious way to optimize vision and not a defective design at all.

The video also makes short work of the claim that complex eyes evolved over very long periods of evolutionary time by numerous successive short steps. In fact, the very earliest eyes found in the fossil record are just as complex as are the eyes found in organisms today. If eyes did evolve the process must have been very rapid and thus, it's reasonable to suspect, somehow intelligently directed.

Indeed, the only basis there can be for ruling out an intelligent agent guiding the process is an a priori commitment to metaphysical naturalism, but why privilege naturalism in such a way if there's evidence to suggest it may be wrong? Yet people do it all the time as this famous quote from geneticist Richard Lewontin reveals:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism [i.e. naturalism].

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As Lewontin's declaration of fealty to naturalism illustrates, it's not science as such that conflicts with the notion of intelligent agency at work in biology. The conflict is between two metaphysical worldviews, naturalism and theism.

Lewontin is acknowledging that his choice to embrace naturalism is a subjective philosophical preference, a preference akin to a personal taste and not based on any empirical evidence at all.

He embraces naturalism for no reason other than that he has a deep metaphysical, and perhaps psychological, aversion to theism.

Anyway, give the video a look:

The Knife-Edge

In the 1991 movie City Slickers Billy Crystal played a bored-with-life salesman whose son's school was hosting a day in which fathers came in to talk about their jobs.

When Crystal's turn came up he launched into the following description of modern life notable for the way in which it illustrates the emptiness so many experience:

Value this time in your life, kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices. It goes by so fast. When you're a teenager, you think you can do anything and you do. Your twenties are a blur.

Thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money, and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?"

Forties, you grow a little pot belly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud, one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.

Fifties, you have a minor surgery - you'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery.

Sixties, you'll have a major surgery, the music is still loud, but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway.

Seventies, you and your wife retire to Fort Lauderdale. You start eating dinner at 2:00 in the afternoon, you have lunch around 10:00, breakfast the night before, spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt and muttering, "How come the kids don't call? How come the kids don't call?"

The eighties, you'll have a major stroke, and you end up babbling with some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand, but who you call mama.

Any questions?

This is a parody, of course, but the life it parodies is very real for millions of people. What's the point of it? Amidst unprecedented affluence moderns are spiritually empty.

Physicist Steven Weinberg described the human predicament like this:

The worldview of science [naturalism] is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson.

We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions.

At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

And there's not much room for meaning on that knife-edge between wishful thinking and despair.

When man is reduced to little more than the product of physical, economic or social forces one of the first things that must be given up is the notion that our lives have some purpose, that there's some compelling reason why we're here.

Unfortunately, if the only reason we're here is that the unfeeling universe somehow belched us up and will soon swallow us back up again then our lives are, in Shakespeare's words, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

But man can't live without meaning, which is why, even though he may insist that naturalism is true, he can't live consistently with it. Naturalism is a worldview completely incompatible with our deepest longings and with the way our psychology is constructed.

Yet people prefer it to the theistic alternative which offers a basis for meaning and for hope. They'd rather live in a state of despair and spiritual inanition than concede that theism offers a more liveable alternative.

And make no mistake, it's not that there are better arguments for the truth of naturalism and so we should have the intellectual honesty to bite the bullet and accept it. There are, in fact, no good arguments for it. It's simply a metaphysical preference.

As Friedrich Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science, what decides against belief in God now is one's taste, not his reasons.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Here are a couple of questions for anyone who embraces a naturalistic worldview and also believes that there's an objective right and wrong independent of any transcendent moral authority (i.e. God):

In Woody Allen's 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, successful opthamologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) is cheating on his wife with a woman named Delores (Angelica Huston). Delores wants Judah to leave his wife, Miriam (Claire Bloom), for her, but Judah is unwilling, so Delores threatens to tell his wife all about their affair.

This would essentially ruin Judah's life, but Delores follows through with a letter to Miriam explaining the relationship she's had with Judah. Judah, however, discovers the letter before Miriam sees it, and it throws him into a panic. His life is about to come crashing down, and he doesn't know what to do to stop it.

He confides in his brother, Jack, who has underworld connections, and Jack suggests having Delores murdered. Judah is reluctant at first, but he eventually can see no other way out. Delores, who has no family, is killed, and although Judah is terrified that he'll be implicated, he eventually realizes to his great relief that he has gotten away with the crime. Nothing ties him or anyone else to the homicide.

No one knows what has actually happened except his brother and him, and he's able to live "happily ever after."

My questions are these: Is what Judah Rosenthal did morally wrong (as opposed to illegal)? If so, why is it wrong? Assuming a Godless universe in which Judah gets away with the crime, what does it mean to say that murder is wrong?

No one can be consistent who says on the one hand that there is no God and on the other that it was a moral outrage to murder that woman. Yet almost everyone but a psychopath has a visceral certainty that what was done to Delores was wrong which means that to be a consistent atheist most people have to somehow deny what they're certain is true.

This is an untenable predicament. To be rational an atheist has to either give up her atheism or give up what she's certain is true. It's astonishing, to me, at least, that so many would prefer the latter course of action to the former.

The Singularity Is a Supernatural Being

Mathematician, physicist and cosmologist Frank Tipler is one of the most accomplished scientists in his field. Together with John Barrow he co-authored a definitive treatise on the anthropic principle, titled The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, and has been outspoken in his criticism of attempts to avoid the theological implications of the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the universe.

In the video below he discusses cosmic fine-tuning, the multiverse and some related topics, but the most striking issue he takes up is the nature of the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang and to the space-time universe we inhabit. According to what's called the standard model the universe arose from an infinitely dense point called a singularity, and Tipler claims that the singularity must be, by definition, a supernatural being.

What's more, although he doesn't develop this as much in this short segment as I would've liked, he insists that the singularity must also be rational.

A rational being which transcends space, time and matter and from which the entire universe emerges sounds an awful lot like the theist's conception of the God of creation.

This conclusion makes naturalist physicists very uncomfortable which is why, Tipler maintains, there have been so many attempts to explain the origin of the universe without invoking a singularity at its beginning. It's Tipler's contention, however, that every one of these attempts lacks empirical support. They're not good science, but are, rather, little more than speculative products of physicists' imaginations.

The video is eleven or so minutes long, but if you're interested in the theological implications of the origin and fine-tuning of the universe, you'll find it a very interesting eleven minutes:

The Moral Landscape

A former student and VP reader wrote to ask me my opinion of a TED Talk given by philosopher Sam Harris around his book titled The Moral Landscape. The talk is a bit shy of twenty minutes, but I've posted it here so anyone interested can watch it for the context of my reply to my student:

Here's my response (slightly edited):

Hi K--,

Thanks for linking me to Sam Harris' interesting TED talk. You asked my opinion on Harris' moral views. I think, first of all, that he's correct in rejecting relativism - In fact, he's one of the few atheists who does. He's correct in affirming that there are facts about human flourishing that obtain across cultures.

Where I disagree with him is in his belief that morality needs no supernatural sanction, that it can be derived solely from science. Here I think he misses several important facts and leaves unanswered some crucial questions:

1. He starts off by saying that he wants to base morality on science but then he defines morality as concern for human flourishing, This, however, is not a scientific claim, so in order to get his project going he has to build it on a non-scientific foundation.

2. Moreover, he never answers the question why we should privilege human flourishing over that of other species. Often the flourishing of humans comes at the expense of the flourishing of other animals so on what grounds does he elevate humans over other mammals?

3. More seriously, even if human flourishing is an appropriate criterion for morality, he doesn't address the metaethical question of why I should care about the well-being of other human beings. Why would it be wrong to just care about my own flourishing? Why should I help people I don't even know who are starving in Africa or sacrifice my comfort today to preserve the planet for people not yet born? Why would it be wrong to be an egoist who puts his own well-being ahead of that of all others? Science cannot answer that question and he doesn't answer it either.

4. Nor can science answer the question of what it even means to say that something is morally wrong in the first place. What does it mean to say that the Taliban are wrong to cover their women in burkas? What does "wrong" mean if we're all just the product of impersonal evolutionary forces that have shaped us to survive in the world? What does it mean to say that "X is wrong" if we're just machines made of meat doomed to die forever and there's no ultimate accountability for what we do? At most "X is wrong" can mean merely that some group of people doesn't like it.

The Judeo-Christian worldview offers the only satisfactory alternative to these shortcomings in Harris' Moral Landscape book. In Christianity (and Judaism) human flourishing is indeed paramount, which is why we're commanded by God to be compassionate and just in our dealings with others. Humans are privileged by the Creator of the universe because He purposefully creates them in His image and loves them specially.

God further commands us to care about others, even if it means sacrificing some of our own well-being to do so. In other words, He prohibits egoism and selfishness, and that's the only thing that could make these behaviors morally wrong.

Finally, on the Christian worldview we are told that we will ultimately be held accountable for our behavior by an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good moral authority. To violate His command to love is to violate the very fabric of creation and such violations will not go unnoticed. On Harris' view there's no reckoning for anyone who does anything that diminishes another person's flourishing, and with no accountability the word "wrong" is emptied of any significant meaning.

To say it differently, Harris is trying to hold on to Christian morality while yanking the foundation out from underneath it. He's piggy-backing on the will of God while insisting that God doesn't exist or is irrelevant. His is an interesting project, but like all such attempts to derive morality from a universe without God, it doesn't succeed.

Celebrating the Fourth of July

Today many Americans will celebrate their Independence Day, the day set aside to commemorate the signing of our Declaration of Independence from the Mother Country and the commencement of our nearly two hundred and thirty year experiment as a constitutional republic.

Citizens of most of the world's nations can point to aspects of their history of which they're justly proud and other aspects which they could wish never happened. Americans are no different. There's much to be proud of and some things we could wish were not part of our history. Even so, the cavils of malcontents, primarily in our universities, notwithstanding, we have much to celebrate.

America was founded on certain principles which are rarely enough observed, even in this modern era, despite the lip-service often paid to them. Our Founders declared that all men are created equal, a claim that made the eventual emancipation of slaves and full citizenship of women inevitable.

They forged a nation based on the principles that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and that human beings are endowed by God with inherent rights that can't be taken away without due process.

These two principles were alien to the communist and socialist totalitarianisms of the 20th century, a circumstance which resulted in two world wars, countless smaller conflicts, and over 100 million corpses. Our Founders also guaranteed that we'd have the right to free speech and the freedom to practice our religion, two essential rights without which no society can be truly free.

Yes, there are black marks. We treated the Indians horribly, practiced chattel slavery for seventy years after becoming a nation, and contemporary urban crime and dysfunction is as distressing as it is undeniable, but though it may sound like boastfulness or chauvinism (I truly don't mean it to be), it's hard to think of any nation or empire in history that has been more powerful, brought greater prosperity to its people and those of the world, and has at the same time exceeded America in terms of sheer moral goodness.

The point has been made by others that America is one of the few countries where one can immigrate from anywhere in the world and become an American. What's meant by that is this: Moving to Japan doesn't make you Japanese. Moving to China doesn't make you Chinese. Moving to Mexico doesn't make you Mexican and moving to France doesn't make you French, at least not in the sense that moving to America makes you American.

The very fact that so many people want to come here, that the free world looks to America for leadership - moral, political, and military - is compelling evidence for the conviction that America is indispensable. Indeed, the fact that so many want to come here gives the lie to the left's portrayal of America as irredeemably racist, oppressive, and corrupt.

New York's governor, retorting to President Trump's call to make America great again, opined that America was never that great. Only someone clueless about American history could make such a fatuous assertion.

Where would Europe be today were it not for the United States? Not just our involvement in WWII but also our reconstruction of it in the aftermath. The Marshall Plan cost the United States $103 billion in today's dollars. What other nation would've done that? What other nation would've rebuilt Japan and return to them their national sovereignty after Pearl Harbor and a brutal war that cost almost 65,000 servicemen dead and over 200,000 wounded?

What would Eastern Europe be today had the U.S. washed its hands of European involvement after WWII and chose not to engage in the Cold War with the former Soviet Union?

What nation would have sacrificed over a million people in a civil war fought largely to abolish the institution of black slavery?

Where would Africa and much of the rest of the third world be today were it not for economic aid and health care, both public and private, donated by Americans?

If America ceased to exist in 2020 what would be the likely consequence? Europe would soon become a vassal to an expansionist Russia; North Korea would undoubtedly swallow up South Korea and perhaps Japan; China would certainly grab Taiwan and perhaps Indonesia and the Philippines; India and Pakistan, two nuclear nations, would seek to settle old scores; Radical Muslim groups would turn much of the world into an abattoir; and Israel would be in a fight for its existence against much of the Muslim world, a fight that'd probably result in nuclear war.

It's not unrealistic to fear that America is the only nation preventing much of the world from spiralling into a state of darkness and violent chaos, with freedom flickering out almost everywhere.

On this Fourth of July let's humbly and gratefully celebrate the fact that America is still the hope of freedom-loving people everywhere. Let's all work, those of us who are Americans (and even those who aren't), to keep it that way and to strive continuously to be worthy citizens of this great nation.

Science Uprising, Episode 5

One of the biggest science stories we rarely hear about is how with almost every discovery the Darwinian model of evolution looks weaker rather than stronger.

Even worse for any naturalistic model of origins is the problem of explaining how living things originated in the first place.

Despite occasional news releases promising that breakthroughs have been made in the field of abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-life) the problem remains unsolved and intractable. No one has come up with a plausible account of how blind, purposeless processes could accomplish the equivalent of constructing a fully functional computer in some primordial environment.

Episode 5 in the Discovery Institute's Science Uprising series highlights this problem of the origin of life. It features one of the premier organic chemists in the world, James Tour, along with protein chemist Douglas Axe and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer.

Tour is withering in his rejection of all claims that scientists have built a living cell in the lab. Claims that researchers have created “proto-cells,” he says, are like claims that someone has created a “proto-turkey” by mixing some cold cuts together with broth and a few feathers in a cooking pot.

Even more absurd, according to Tour, are claims that blind, mechanical processes could've created a cell by chance: “All of these little pictures of molecules coming together to form the first cell are fallacious, are ridiculous. The origin of life community has not been honest.”

Strong words, but given that the information necessary for a functional cell is encyclopedic, and given that encyclopedias are, to say the least, not easy to manufacture by means of random word generators, the problem of accounting for the origin of the information necessary to build even the simplest fully functional biological cell, while excluding any intelligent input, seems insurmountable.

Here's episode 5:

Just Talking Nonsense

There's an odd and contradictory juxtaposition of opinions currently manifesting itself among contemporary progressives. On one hand, progressives have been insisting for decades that religious belief has no place in public affairs, that matters of policy should be free of any religious justification.

Yet, on the other hand, we're also being told by progressives in the media, who are largely secular folk, that the conditions of migrants on the border are inexcusable, unjustifiable and a moral stain on the country.

The reason this is odd is because secularists generally adopt a worldview, either tacitly or explicitly, of metaphysical naturalism, and, given naturalism, deploring the treatment of an unfortunate group of people is merely an expression of one's subjective preference. There's nothing objectively wrong with mistreating others, yet, just as most secular progressives would blanch at the treatment received by Untouchables in Indian society, and declare that treatment to be highly immoral, they contend that the miserable conditions on the border are immoral as well.

But when naturalists make a moral judgment, which they're implicitly doing when they express their outrage over the conditions in which migrants are held on the border, they're actually committing ethical plagiarism on theism.

Nothing in the naturalistic worldview gives its adherents a basis for making moral pronouncements. They feel strongly that what's happening is profoundly wrong, yet it can only be wrong if theism is true, so they surreptitiously free-load off of theism to proclaim their moral judgments while at the same time paying lip-service to the principle that religious views have no place in deciding political matters.

What basis is there, after all, for umbrage that migrants are being shorn of their dignity, if, as naturalism presupposes, human beings have no dignity in the first place.

Steven Pinker at Yale calls dignity a "stupid concept." Bioethicist Ruth Macklin calls it "useless," and, on naturalism, they're both right.

Human dignity exists only because men and women are created in the image of God and loved by God. If that's not true then as Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared:

When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.

Or as the great cosmologist Stephen Hawking wrote:

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.

Of course, some of the progressive talking heads and scribblers may in fact be devout Christians or pious Jews who are basing their moral assessment on the obligation imposed upon us by God to love our neighbors as we love ourselves and to treat them justly, i.e. with dignity, but, if so, they're tacitly importing their religion into the public arena, an act of smuggling which they and their colleagues insist must be prohibited, at least when attempted by conservatives.

So, either we scrub the public square of anything that carries the scent of religious belief and shut up about the horrible conditions of the migrants in the detention camps, or we allow denunciations of those conditions to be piggy-backed into the public square on the shoulders of theistic assumptions about the dignity and worth of human beings.

Otherwise, we're just talking nonsense every time we make a moral judgment about how other people are being treated.

Gratuitous Beauty

One characteristic of living things that has thrilled everyone who has ever considered it is the astonishing level of beauty they exhibit. Consider, as an example, this bird of paradise:

or this blue dachnis:

Why are living things like birds and butterflies so beautiful? Darwin thought that females selected mates based on their fitness and that this sex selection caused beauty to evolve as a by-product. This is still the reigning explanation today (although it doesn't explain the beauty of flowers), but as an article by Adrian Barnett at New Scientist explains, not everyone is on board with this explanation, maybe not even Darwin himself. Here's an excerpt:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.

In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).

But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.

What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.

And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests.

Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.(emphasis mine)

As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone. Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin.

In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.

The difficulty here, at least for me, is that it doesn't explain why animals would have developed a sense of beauty in the first place. Pair-bonding and reproduction certainly don't require it, obviously, since many organisms, including humans it must be said, successfully reproduce without benefit of physical attractiveness. So why would some organisms evolve a dependence upon it, and what is it in the organism's genotype that governs this aesthetic sense?

Could it be that animals, or at least some of them, are intelligently designed to just delight in beauty?

How Is it That We Exist?

A brief but provocative piece at Aeon raises a perplexing question about the structure of the universe and our existence in it:

In 1928, the UK physicist Paul Dirac stumbled on an equation that seemed to show that, for every particle, there’s another, nearly identical particle with an opposite electric charge. Just four years later, the US physicist Carl David Anderson proved Dirac’s prediction correct by capturing a picture of a ‘positron’ – a particle with the same size and mass as an electron, but with a positive charge rather than a negative one.

This rapid series of developments unlocked one of the most momentous and enduring conundrums of physics: if particles with opposite electric charges annihilate one another when they meet, why is there any matter left?

And if there’s no more matter than antimatter in existence, then the Universe should have annihilated itself soon after the Big Bang – yet, here we are.

This video explains the problem in very easy-to-understand terms:

Could it be that this is yet another of the amazing "cosmic coincidences" that have produced a universe in which conscious observers such as ourselves are possible?

At what point does it become no longer plausible to attribute these coincidences to blind, undirected processes? At what point does the intuition that the universe is intentionally engineered become too overwhelming to deny?

Socialism Didn't Work in Sweden

According to an article at The Federalist the conventional wisdom, which holds that Sweden is a socialist success story, is simply false.

The author of the article, Susanna Hoffman, cites Swedish economist Johan Norberg who writes that, “Free markets and small government made Sweden rich. The experiment with socialism crashed us.”

Hoffman writes,

Sweden stood as the world’s fourth wealthiest country nearly five decades ago. Its taxes were lower than most western countries, including the United States. The economy was deregulated, and public spending was hardly above 10 percent gross domestic product (GDP).

Then Sweden began its experiment with socialism and was soon teetering on the brink of collapse:

No one guessed the system would crash. The country was ripe for a socialist experiment in the early 1970s. The Swedes were hardworking, optimistic, wealthy, and trusting of their politicians. As programs were implemented in the ’70s and ’80s, public spending almost doubled and labor markets became regulated. The new welfare state, however, appeared to enhance Sweden’s already strong economy with large-scale redistribution and high taxes.

This brief period when socialism seemed to work is the model promoted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Norberg said at a The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) event last week. Today, 36 percent of Americans are sympathetic to socialism compared to only 9 percent of Swedes.

Reversing Sweden’s traditions of small government and an open economy disintegrated its successful business climate. Big companies like IKEA either evaded taxes or left the country. Athletes like Björn Borg and entrepreneurs fled the country. High inflation raged and not a single net job was created in the private sector.

The new generation raised in socialism had no incentives to work. The once healthy population began calling in sick because of the generous benefits for sick days. They shamelessly accepted the public benefits that their hardworking parents once despised.

Sweden not only fell from being the 4th richest country to the 14th richest country, but its very nature as a country changed. An authoritarian-like government was necessary to ensure the population did not abuse its welfare system. Sweden’s democracy was sliding into a dictatorship, and the Swedish people were not pleased.

The system began crashing after debt-fueled inflation in the ’80s. The ’90s were stained with a massive economic crisis. Banks were on the brink of collapse and, for a brief moment, the Central Bank had 500 percent interest rates to defend the Swedish currency.

So how did Sweden avoid disaster?

The 30-year experiment “was a brief interlude of failure,” Norberg said. To reform and save its economy, Sweden reverted back to its capitalist structure. It reduced public spending by a third, demolished taxes on property and inheritance, and reduced taxes in other areas. Defined benefits were cut and only defined contributions were permitted.

The system became partially privatized with privately-owned accounts. The markets became opened to private providers and private companies who contributed to institutions like healthcare and schools. Sweden also deregulated markets to cause a surge in entrepreneurship.

Swedish healthcare became regionally run and funded by local state tax. Overconsumption had created long hospital lines depriving those with urgent needs of immediate attention. These kinds of inefficiencies of the universal programs caused Sweden to open to more private companies.

Put simply, the Swedes reverted to free market remedies. When Bernie Sanders and other Democrats call for Swedish-style socialism they're calling for something that Swedes themselves have rejected, and only 9% of them want back.

A line from Norberg nicely summarizes Ms. Hoffman's article: “Swedish Socialism is the longest way from Swedish capitalism to Swedish capitalism.”

It's Even Happening at Science

It's pretty clear that big social media platforms are making a concerted effort to stifle conservative opinion. The recent news about Google's intent to influence the 2020 election is just the latest in a string of revelations of the deplatforming and demonetizing of conservative users.

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a short piece that shows how political bias is also corrupting at least one major scientific journal.

In 2008 the journal Science published research co-authored by John Hibbing and Douglas Oxley that purported to show that persons with strong political beliefs and less sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support the liberal position on a number of issues whereas people who demonstrated more visceral reactions to those same factors were more likely to favor conservative positions.

The article became widely cited as demonstrating that conservatism is largely determined by properties in the brain associated with primitive fears and sundry other neanderthalish traits.

It fit the narrative, so to speak, of conservatives as brutish, non-rational yokels, but recently another group of researchers tried to duplicate the study's results and found that they could not.

Here's Klinghoffer:

Some other researchers decided to test the Science results — to confirm, not disconfirm, them. They tell their story in an article for Slate that is an eye-opener.

They used a larger field of subjects, 202 instead of just 46. Guess what? The results of the study by Hibbing and his colleagues were not reproducible.

And guess what again? Science preferred not to publish this finding. There was no implication that Oxley et al. had committed any errors. There was no “train wreck” in this case. It was just that, as often happens, their results did not repeat themselves, at all, when a more extensive study was attempted.

The most prestigious science journal perhaps in the world was perfectly willing to publish a paper that has been used to disparage about half or more of the country's population, but they were unwilling to publish a more thoroughly researched paper that would've helped correct the misimpression.

The rebuffed team wrote this at Slate:

Our first thought was that we were doing something wrong. So, we asked the original researchers for their images, which they generously provided to us, and we added a few more. We took the step of “pre-registering” a more direct replication of the Science study, meaning that we detailed exactly what we were going to do before we did it and made that public.

The direct replication took place in Philadelphia, where we recruited 202 participants (more than four times the original sample size of 46 used in the Science study). Again, we found no correlation between physiological reactions to threatening images (the original ones or the ones we added) and political conservatism — no matter how we looked at the data.

The authors of the more recent study describe their failure to persuade the editors at Science to consider their paper:

We drafted a paper that reported the failed replication studies along with a more nuanced discussion about the ways in which physiology might matter for politics and sent it to Science. We did not expect Science to immediately publish the paper, but because our findings cast doubt on an influential study published in its pages, we thought the editorial team would at least send it out for peer review.

It did not. About a week later, we received a summary rejection with the explanation that the Science advisory board of academics and editorial team felt that since the publication of this article the field has moved on and that, while they concluded that we had offered a conclusive replication of the original study, it would be better suited for a less visible subfield journal.

We wrote back asking them to consider at least sending our work out for review. (They could still reject it if the reviewers found fatal flaws in our replications.) We argued that the original article continues to be highly influential and is often featured in popular science pieces in the lay media (for instance, here, here, here, and here), where the research is translated into a claim that physiology allows one to predict liberals and conservatives with a high degree of accuracy.

We believe that Science has a responsibility to set the record straight in the same way that a newspaper does when it publishes something that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We were rebuffed without a reason....

Our cultural credibility crisis must be very far advanced when one of the most trusted journals - in a field that has traditionally stood for the objective pursuit of the truth - seems to have adopted a policy of declining papers that transgress their own ideological predilections.

Materialists and Madmen

G.K. Chesterton, observes in his book Orthodoxy, that "The materialist has the fantastic outline of the figure of a madman. Both take up a position at once unanswerable and intolerable." Nor, he says elsewhere, do either of them ever seem to have doubts.

I was reminded of this comparison while watching episode 4 of the Discovery Institute's series titled Science Uprising. Early on in this episode there's tape of Bill Nye - whom generations of middle school students came to know as the "Science Guy" - declaring with all the fervor and certainty of a madman that he's just "a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.”

Well, what Mr. Nye claims about himself may be true of Mr. Nye, I'm not in a position to disagree with him, but it's very likely not true of humanity in general.

As the brief video below points out, the universe has all the appearance of having been intentionally designed to permit life-forms like us to inhabit it. In fact, the only way to avoid this conclusion, other than to not think about it at all, is to invoke the existence of a multiverse, for which there's no empirical evidence and only scanty theoretical evidence.

The multiverse hypothesis is indeed unanswerable. There's no way to test it, and, given its extravagance (an infinity of universes!), it's scientifically intolerable and thus not fit to be entertained by serious scientists. Metaphysicians, perhaps, but not scientists.

I suspect that Chesterton might opine that invoking the existence of entities (an infinity of universes) for which there's no empirical evidence merely to escape an otherwise uncomfortable conclusion (a single Creator-Mind) - the empirical evidence for which is presented to our senses no matter the part of the universe to which we apply our microscopes and telescopes - is itself a form of madness, or at least neurosis.

Anyway, here's episode 4 of Science Uprising:

Very smart people are like very fast cars. If they start out heading in the wrong direction they just get further down the wrong road more quickly than others would.

Double Standard

Liberals in the state of Oregon, Washington and Colorado are seeking to ruin family-run businesses which "deny service" to people who solicit them to participate in gay wedding services to which they have religious objections.

The details of how cruel some of these plaintiffs can be are deeply disappointing. Barronelle Stutzman's ordeal is especially so since suit was brought against her and her floral shop by a long-time customer she thought was a friend.

The Oregon case was brought before the Supreme Court which on Monday vacated a lower court decision against the bakers, Melissa and Aaron Klein.

A Colorado baker has been sued three times even though each time the courts have ultimately ruled in his favor. Nevertheless, the progressives persist in harassing all of these people and seem determined to drive them into financial ruin.

Meanwhile, a number of social media platforms are giving the boot to conservatives whose views those who manage these platforms don't like.

Columnist Michelle Malkin wrote last summer:

Pro-life, pro-border security and anti-jihadist journalists and activists have all been selectively gagged on Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter..... in the unhinged era of the anti-Trump resistance, intermittent purges, "accidental" suspensions and suspicious deletions of conservative content have spiked to a level of systemic censorship.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey ... admitted his company's left-wing bias and dismissed revelations from his own engineers, who confided to undercover Project Veritas journalists that they were creating algorithms to "ban a way of talking," "down rank" users based on politics and employ "machine learning" to create special triggers and keywords -- "the majority of (which) are for Republicans."

She then listed the fate, as of last summer, of a number of conservative users of social media:

In April, the brilliant anti-leftist street artist Sabo disappeared from Twitter without warning or explanation. My friend and CRTV.com colleague Gavin McInnes was silenced on Twitter recently for absolutely no good reason and remains suspended.

Prager University .. has been suppressed on Facebook and it's clear it was no accidental glitch. One of the videos yanked was conservative millennial vlogger and CRTV.com host Allie Stuckey's piece called "Make Men Masculine Again."

Author and philosopher Stefan Molyneux, whose video podcasts have 250 million views, was also silenced by speech suppressors on YouTube, which arbitrarily issued community guideline violation strikes against him for videos including an interview with British journalist Katie Hopkins and a discussion on the Death of White Males.

My friend and conservative social media guru Nick Short, of the Security Studies Group, was one of thousands of conservative activists who discovered they've been throttled by Twitter's use of a "complex and opaque Quality Filter algorithm that has the effect of disproportionately restricting the voices of conservatives under the guise of limiting harmful or abusive users."

In the past year, Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager (again) have all been deplatformed or demonetized.

So here's the question. If, in the progressive way of seeing things, it's a wrong worth destroying people's lives over for private business owners to abide by their religious convictions and "deny service" to gays wishing to make them complicit in their wedding, why is it not also wrong for a private business like Facebook, Google or Twitter to deny service to conservatives wishing to use their service?

Is there an answer to this question, or is this an example of hypocrisy on the part of the progressives who condemn bakers and florists but not their fellow lefties at Big Social Media?

Is Elvis Still Alive?

J. Warner Wallace is a former detective who brings his forensic experience to bear on questions surrounding the existence of God. In the following four minute video he addresses the problem posed to naturalism by the fine-tuning of the cosmos.

As we've discussed at this site on numerous occasions, dozens of the forces, constants and parameters that comprise the universe in which we live, are so exquisitely calibrated that had any of them deviated from its actual value by the most unimaginably infinitesimal amount either the universe wouldn't exist at all or, if it did, life would be impossible in it.

The most popular naturalistic response to the fine-tuning problem is to propose that there are an infinite array of universes, with every possible set of values for these forces and constants existing somewhere in the array. Thus, a universe like ours, as improbable as it is, must exist.

This is called the multiverse hypothesis and Wallace asks some interesting questions concerning it, including the one in the title of this post. Take a look:

Thanks to Evolution News for bringing the video to my attention.

Mind-Boggling

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.

Enjoy:

A Quixotic Task

Philosopher Patricia Churchland has a new book out titled Conscience which is reviewed by Andrew Stark at The Wall Street Journal (Paywall).

Ms. Churchland is an eliminative materialist who believes that nothing exists that's not reducible to its material components. Thus, for her, mind is simply a word we use to describe how the function of the material brain, just as we use "digestion" to describe the function of the stomach. There are no mental substances as such, in her world, only chemical reactions occurring in the brain.

In Conscience, according to Stark, she undertakes to analyze the origins of human morality and to explain it in terms of these neurobiological brain processes. Here's Stark:

At the core of her argument is the claim that morality is rooted in neurobiology. Pleasure-causing brain chemicals, among them oxytocin and dopamine, get released by evolutionarily adaptable activities such as mother-child bonding, in-group caring and the praise earned by cooperating with others. Such conduct, she says, comprises the common building blocks of moral behavior....

A tribal culture will define in-group caring differently from a cosmopolitan one, but in either case the moral codes developed will take root because they activate the pleasurable brain chemicals that have evolved to be stimulated by concern for others....

In Ms. Churchland's view, morality ... is the scaffold of rules that, if we observe them, elicit the pleasurable brain chemicals that evolved to encourage behavior suited to the survival of the species.

Set aside the breezy, magical, wave-of-the-wand view of the evolutionary deus ex machina that's always available to materialists to solve every survival difficulty and need. The deeper problem with Ms. Churchland's view of morality is that although it may explain why we have moral feelings or sentiments, it completely empties the notion of right and wrong of any substantive meaning.

If one's behavior is a result of chemical reactions in the brain in what sense is any behavior morally wrong? If Joe gets pleasure from acting selfishly why is his selfishness wrong? If Frank gets pleasure from molesting children or raping women why is he morally wrong to engage in these behaviors?

Stark adverts briefly to the problem when he writes that,

If what distinguishes moral from immoral behavior is that the one activates pleasure-causing chemicals and the other pain-inducing chemicals... there would no longer be anything that distinguished good from bad.

The behavior that brings pleasure to one person may bring pain to another. All we can say about what Joe and Frank are doing is that they're engaging in behavior that others don't like, but we can't say that their behavior is immoral. Society may make it illegal, but it can't make it immoral.

Only a transcendent moral authority can do that, and Ms. Churchland doesn't believe there are any such entities.

Thus, she seems to be stuck trying to explain morality while bereft of any sound basis for right and wrong or good and bad. Hers is, I think, a quixotic task.

Any attempt to derive an ethics based on naturalistic, materialistic presuppositions is doomed to fail. It leads to moral subjectivism which leads ultimately to moral nihilism, the view that there's actually nothing that's morally wrong. There are just things that people do.

The nihilist simply takes materialism to its logical conclusion which is that the set of behaviors labeled "moral wrongs" is a null set.

Science Uprising, Episode 3

The great theoretical physicist John Wheeler once said that when he first started studying physics he believed the world was composed of particles. Looking more deeply, he discovered that it was really composed of waves. But then, after a lifetime of study, he concluded that, "it appears that all existence is the expression of information."

Wheeler's conclusion that information is the fundamental component of all of physical reality is slowly spreading throughout the scientific world, and it's generating an intellectual revolution. In many quarters the revolution is exceedingly reluctant, but it seems to be ineluctable nonetheless.

Consider, for example, that the DNA in our cells is a library of information, a kind of computer program, that directs the construction of a body. DNA itself is not information, of course, but is rather the vehicle or medium which carries the massive quantity of information necessary to build and maintain each individual organism.

This has interesting metaphysical implications since in our experience, information, at least complex information such as we find in a book or computer program, is always the product of a mind. Whenever we encounter it we always infer that a mind has generated it because we know that blind, mechanical processes cannot by themselves write books or software.

We might say that information always lies downstream of mind, so the question is, what is the provenience of the information that is expressed in the nucleic acids and proteins in every cell of our body?

To emphasize this point the Discovery Institute has released the third episode of their series titled Science Uprising. The series is designed to demonstrate how the knowledge gained by scientists over the last couple of decades is sparking the aforementioned revolution, especially among younger thinkers, a revolution that rejects the suffocating materialist orthodoxy that has reigned in our culture for a century and a half.

Materialism, while enjoying hegemony in the media and the academy, has refused to permit acknowledgement that the universe and life appear to be the intentional product of a Mind, or, if such an acknowledgement is allowed it's usually so that it can be subjected to ridicule.

But that hegemony is eroding.

The philosopher William James once wrote that, "Any rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

James was, of course, correct. The methodological rule that prohibits all but material explanations in science is not only irrational, it's arbitrary and inconsistently applied, and a lot of people are beginning to notice.

In any case, here's Episode 3 of Science Uprising:

Can't Have Both (Pt. II)

Yesterday I wrote that naturalists, i.e. those who deny that the ultimate reality is a personal intelligent being, are in an intellectually untenable position. They want to maintain a belief in moral responsibility, objective moral duties, human equality, objective human rights, free will, consciousness, and so on even though their fundamental assumption, that material nature is all there is, reduces all of these to illusions.

Here are some quotes, all from philosophical naturalists, to illustrate the point:

• "Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused...[yet] the world as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events."
• "The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe ...[but] when those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."
• "A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion." Steven Pinker MIT in How the Mind Works.
• "The physical world provides no room for freedom of the will...[yet] that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. {So] We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false." Marvin Minsky MIT in The Society of Mind.
• "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom even though there's no ground for it." John Searle
• "We cannot live adequately with ...a complete awareness of the absence of free will ...[thus] we ought to hold on to those central but incoherent or contradictory beliefs in the free will case." Philosopher Paul Smilansky
• "Free will is a very persistent illusion. It keeps coming back." Harvard Psychologist Daniel Wegner
• "Consciousness has to be an illusion." Cambridge Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
• "Common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist." Philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland
• "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." Philosopher John Gray

If free will and consciousness are illusions then there simply can be no objective moral duties or truth, thus no responsibility for anything we do no matter how cruel or harmful to others. There can be no human rights beyond what one powerful group of human beings arbitrarily confer upon another, nor can there be any grounds for trusting our sense perceptions or even our reason.

If truth is subjective, if beliefs aren't true in an objective sense, then the belief that naturalism is true is simply an expression of a subjective preference. It can't be objectively true.

Naturalists (i.e. atheists) have to live in two contradictory worlds. In their everyday lives with family and friends they live like everyone else, behaving as if the common sense view is obviously correct, but in their professional or intellectual lives they live as if human beings are machines with no free will, consciousness or dignity.

In other words, in their daily lives they live as if theism is true while in their intellectual lives they adamantly deny it.

They oscillate back and forth between these two irreconcilable worlds, unable to give up the common sense entailments of theism yet unable to live consistently with what the logic of naturalism, the philosophical worldview they embrace, tells them is the case.

It makes one wonder if perhaps naturalism is a mental illness.