Racial Privilege

A recent Rasmussen poll found that one-in-three Democrats actually believe it’s racism any time a white politician criticizes a politician of color. This is both stunning and depressing.

To be sure, this is not as high as the percentage of Democrats (51%) who believed George W. Bush was somehow complicit in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers, but it does reflect the same curious deficiency in common sense.

Commenting on the Rasmussen poll, Matt Margolis at PJ Media writes:

Let’s put this another way: A third of Democrats believe that minority politicians should be immune from criticism by white politicians. Their policies can’t be challenged without there being an inherent racist motive. This is what a third of Democrats actually believe.

If you’re a white politician and oppose raising taxes, you can debate higher taxes with another white politician, but if you have the same debate with a minority politician, you’re racist.

Just so. The term "racist" has been used so promiscuously by folks on the left that it no longer carries the opprobrium it once did. If it's racist for white politicians to criticize the words and policies of minority politicians then the concept of racism has been debased to the point of being little more than a joke.

Moreover, we're evidently abandoning the ideal of racial equality, an ideal that has been tacitly rendered obsolete, at least in the minds of a third of Democrats. After all, if minority politicians have to be protected from criticism by granting them some sort of race-based privilege or immunity then the implication is that they're not really mature, intelligent adults, but are rather like children with such fragile self-esteem that they must not be held responsible by members of another race for anything they say or do, no matter how silly.

It's fatuous nonsense, of course, but that's the world the intersectional left is creating for the rest of us to live in. In that world skin color is a totem to be venerated, an idol to be worshipped.

If we want to realize the dream of those who fought and died for the cause of racial equality in this country we need to reject any notion that anyone of any color is immune to criticism, and reaffirm the idea that all men and women of whatever race or ethnicity should be held to the same standards of reason, logic, behavior and treatment from others.

Otherwise, we will continue to generate ever increasing resentments among ever more isolated racial groups in this nation, but then that may be precisely what some on the left (and right) would very much like to see happen.

Is Morality Just Neurochemistry?

Philosopher Patricia Churchland has a new book out titled Conscience in which she discusses the role of the brain in producing our sense of morality, our sense that some acts are right and others wrong. We might call this a sense of moral oughtness. It's a sense of what we ought and ought not do.

Ms. Churchland is an eliminative materialist which is a fancy way of saying that she believes that everything that exists is either matter or a derivative of matter. There's nothing, she believes, that's independent of matter - no mind, no soul, no God - just atoms and energy and the phenomena comprised of these.

She was interviewed by Sigal Samuel at Vox recently, and in the interview she says a number of things worth noting. Samuel's introduction suffices to give a sense of Ms. Churchland's views, but interested readers should read the transcript of the interview at the link.

Here are Samuel's introductory remarks:

For years, [Ms. Churchland has] been bothered by one question in particular: How did humans come to feel empathy and other moral intuitions? What’s the origin of that nagging little voice that we call our conscience?

In her new book, Conscience, Churchland argues that mammals — humans, yes, but also monkeys and rodents and so on — feel moral intuitions because of how our brains developed over the course of evolution. Mothers came to feel deeply attached to their children because that helped the children (and through them, the mother’s genes) survive. This ability to feel attachment was gradually generalized to mates, kin, and friends. “Attachment begets caring,” Churchland writes, “and caring begets conscience.”

Conscience, to her, is not a set of absolute moral truths, but a set of community norms that evolved because they were useful. “Tell the truth” and “keep your promises,” for example, help a social group stick together. Even today, our brains reinforce these norms by releasing pleasurable chemicals when our actions generate social approval (hello, dopamine!) and unpleasurable ones when they generate disapproval.

Rooting morality in biology has made Churchland a controversial figure among philosophers. Some think that approach is itself morally repugnant because it threatens to devalue ethics by reducing it to a bunch of neurochemicals zipping around our brains. A number of philosophers complain that she’s not doing “proper philosophy.” Other critics accuse her of scientism, which is when you overvalue science to the point that you see it as the only real source of knowledge.

There's an important metaethical point to note here. Let's suppose that everything she says about the origin of our moral sense is correct. If so, morality itself is a kind of illusion. Terms like morally right and morally wrong have no real force. They simply refer to what the community approves and disapproves.

Nor can there be any genuine moral obligation. We cannot be morally obligated to adhere to the communal norms otherwise if we lived in Nazi Germany we'd have to approve the persecution of Jews or, if we lived in the Jim Crow South we'd have to favor discrimination against black Americans.

Nor could there ever be social progress since the moral consensus is right ab defino and the dissenter is by definition wrong and should not be heeded or should even be punished.

What Ms. Churchland has shown, if she's right, is nothing more than why we feel certain things to be right or wrong, why we feel that we should do X rather than Y, but how could it be wrong to go against one's feelings? Or how could it be wrong if one's feelings predispose him to be kind and another's feelings incline her to be cruel?

If our moral sense has evolved as a result of genetic mutation and natural selection, if it's simply the product of dopamine levels in our brains, then how can we have genuine obligations to be kind rather than cruel? How can neurochemistry make an act right or wrong?

Moreover, the human species has evolved all sorts of feelings and behaviors, selfishness and selflessness for example. If Ms. Churchland is correct the only way to arbitrate between these is to compare them to the norms of the community, but how can community consensus make something objectively right or wrong? If the community consensus is that slavery or child sacrifice is right then how could anyone insist that the community is wrong?

What gives the community consensus authority over an individual's moral intuitions? If the community consensus is that we should strive to eliminate our neighbors and seize all their resources, would an individual dissenter from this view be morally wrong? And what does it mean to be morally wrong other than that one's brain chemistry isn't congruent with that of his fellow citizens?

Ms. Churchland's thesis that our moral sentiments are simply due to chemical processes in the brain may be of some interest to brain scientists and sociologists, but it's quite irrelevant to moral philosophy and ethics. It may explain why we behave in certain ways, but it has nothing to say about how we ought to behave, which is what moral philosophy is all about.

The Universe Is Math

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. He was prompted to make this remark because it would be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathephobes may wince at a statement like this, but it gets even worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises.

In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and, since information is exclusively the product of mind, that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of a mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

Is Trump a Racist?

There's been a lot of silliness surrounding the infamous tweet storm unleashed by our president in recent days critical of the four Democrat congresswomen who fancy to call themselves "The Squad." The tweets that triggered extreme dudgeon among liberals and anxiety attacks among some conservatives were these:

So interesting to see 'Progressive' Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.

Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!

Well, since The Squad is comprised of four "women of color" these words drew from among his detractors, as do almost any words nowadays, the allegation of racism, but why? Have we sunk to the point in our polity where it's now deemed racist to criticize any politician who is a minority? If The Squad consisted of four Caucasian women would his remarks have been construed as proof of racism?

Or is he a racist because he advised the women to go back to fix their home countries when three of the four were born in America. That's clumsy wording, to be sure - he obviously meant to refer to the home country of their parents - but what's racist about it?

A woman on MSNBC's Hardball show last night insisted that not only is Trump a racist but that those who still support Trump are declaring themselves also to be racist. This is ridiculous. It's like saying that if you supported John Kennedy then by implication you supported Roman Catholicism.

There are lots of people who admire Charles Darwin for his theory of natural selection, we even observe Darwin Day on February 12th, but Darwin was a racist. There are lots of Progressives who would have voted for Woodrow Wilson or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but both those men would be considered racists by today's standards.

No one is perfect. Support for what a man is doing in office does not imply total support of everything the man says or believes. This is such an obvious truth that one wonders how the lady on Hardball could've missed it.

One final question. What exactly is racism, anyway. There may be no word in our lexicon used more frequently, the meaning of which everybody assumes they know until they're asked to define it.

Often when people on the left do offer up a definition it distills to something like, "a disease that afflicts white people," but this is a bit too tendentious and banal to be accepted by reasonable folks. So, I invite readers to submit their own definition of racism via our Contact Us feature. It'll be interesting to see what turns up.

Six Impossible Things

In Lewis Carroll's classic Through the Looking Glass Alice is chided by the Queen for her inability to believe that the Queen is over a hundred years old:

“I can’t believe that!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again, draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Thinking of the debate between naturalism and theism brought this exchange between Alice and the Queen to mind. If one is a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) one must, like the Queen, believe at least six impossible things before breakfast every day.

For example, to be a consistent naturalist one must believe that:

1. Something (the universe) arose uncaused from nothing.
2. Life emerged by chance despite the fact that as physicist Fred Hoyle put it the odds of just a single functional protein arising by chance are about the same as giving Rubik's Cubes to 10^50 blind people and finding that they all solve it at the same moment.
3. Organisms like the Venus flytrap emerged purely by blind, chance processes.
4. Human consciousness was somehow produced by non-conscious matter.
5. No objective moral duties exist. Moral rights and wrongs are simply fictions.
6. The notions of human equality and objective human rights are likewise fictions.

Technically, a naturalist might not find the last two impossible to believe, but they do find them impossible to live by unless they're nihilists.

Most naturalists, though, prefer to cling to the idea of human equality and the conviction that there really are objective moral obligations - the obligation to treat people fairly, for example - even though, if naturalism is true, there's no reason at all to hold either of these beliefs. They're just arbitrary preferences.

There are other beliefs that many naturalists hold that really are incompatible with naturalism. Belief in free will is one and belief in a mind or soul is another.

A worldview that forces one to believe things that are so unlikely as to be in all practical respects impossible is certainly not rational. It's not much different than a superstition. Or a Lewis Carroll fantasy. Yet many would rather live in this looking glass world of impossible beliefs than believe that theism is correct, even though each of those beliefs is completely compatible with theism.

That seems to be an odd fact about people that one might think would interest sociologists and psychologists more than it apparently does.

The Venus Flytrap

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't.

But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

Some while ago Evolution News ran an essay that discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain. Here's what they said about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid. The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients.

The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey. The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volken­burgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival. The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food. The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's a video that shows the Venus Flytrap in action:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture and digest prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

The trap mechanism is exceedingly complex and also completely gratuitous, but the digestion of the prey itself requires extensive modifications and genetic changes, all of which would have been unnecessary for the plants' survival and pretty much useless until they were all in place.

This kind of engineering requires foresight, and foresight, as biochemist Marcos Eberlin notes in his book by that title, is not a trait possessed by blind, impersonal Darwinian processes. It requires a mind.

The Multiverse Religion

Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist, cosmologist and non-theist. This latter point is relevant because in the short video below she criticizes the multiverse hypothesis which has been near and dear to non-theistic hearts for at least a decade now, so her criticisms cannot be dismissed as being based on some sort of religious agenda.

The multiverse hypothesis enjoys the approbation of those eager to squelch any hint of a God behind the universe because it provides a rebuttal of sorts to the theist's argument that the fine-tuning of the universe is powerful evidence of intelligent engineering.

Hossenfelder avers, however, that the multiverse hypothesis is itself religious, largely speculative and outside the bounds of empirical science. This is not to pass judgment on whether or not it's true, but rather to point out that scientists, qua scientists, have no business promoting it. When they do, and they do it often, they're stepping outside their proper domain into the domain of metaphysics and forfeiting whatever scientific authority they may have had.

There are lots of posts in our archives cataloguing the numerous reasons for doubting that the multiverse explanation is correct, but Hossenfelder is here concerned merely with getting it out of the realm of empirical science and into the realm of religious belief where it belongs.

The video is about four and a half minutes long, but she packs a lot into those four and a half minutes. Give it a look:

The Cosmos as God

The late atheist astronomer Carl Sagan was famous for his declaration in the opening line of his 1980 book Cosmos (on which the television series was based) that "The Cosmos is all there is, all there ever was and all there ever will be."

That Sagan was presenting a creed for a substitute religion is apparent from his capitalization of Cosmos. The cosmos is Sagan's ersatz God. It's the ultimate reality in his ontology, the source of all else that exists. He regarded the universe as the only self-existing, eternal being, one which required no transcendent Creator to account for its existence.

This is a remarkable thing for an astronomer to say since he was writing some fifteen years after the discovery of the cosmic background radiation that pretty much proved, to the extent that scientific theories can be proven, the reality of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang was the event in which the universe came into being so it had a beginning and is not eternal. Nor is it uncaused since whatever begins to exist must have a cause that pre-exists the effect and which therefore transcends the effect.

The universe, then, did not cause itself and therefore must have been caused by something that transcends space, time and matter which means that the cause itself must be spaceless, timeless and immaterial. Moreover, it must be enormously powerful and intelligent to have created the exquisitely fine-tuned universe in which we find ourselves.

This sounds a lot like the theistic concept of God, but Sagan had little time for the Judeo-Christian God whom he mockingly described as "an outsized, light-skinned male, with a long white beard." Perhaps he gleaned this childish concept from viewing Michelangelo's depiction of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but, in any case, it's astonishingly naive.

Sagan believed, furthermore, that we have a moral duty to the cosmos from which we sprang. He believed, oddly, that we have an obligation to the universe to survive.

This is silly, and it calls to mind Chesterton's aphorism that when men cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

It's nonsense to speak of an obligation to an impersonal entity. One may as well speak of a duty one has to gravity or to friction. If we have obligations of any sort they can only be to other personal beings. Impersonal objects like trees or universes have no duties to personal beings and personal beings can have no duties to impersonal objects.

Sagan's Cosmos was enormously influential to at least two generations of young people. The series was shown in middle school and high school science classrooms by science teachers all across the country for three decades, and may still be.

Yet the metaphysical message Sagan tried to inculcate in the minds of young students, the message that belief in the traditional God can no longer be sustained in a scientific age and that instead our worship should be directed to the "Sun and stars" is philosophically absurd.

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.”