Do Walls Work?

President Trump has renewed his promise to build a wall along our southern border and, despite fierce political opposition, figures to have built or renovated 450 miles of wall by the end of 2020.

One of the objections opponents of a border wall with Mexico raise against the president's determination to erect such a barrier is that a wall simply wouldn't work to keep illegal aliens out. A wall would be enormously expensive to build and maintain, the argument goes, and it wouldn't be effective in preventing people from coming into the country illegally in any case.

Well, I don't know if a partition along our southern border would work or not, but the general claim that walls don't work is nonsense. Perhaps the best refutation of the claim is found in Israel which has a security fence that runs for 760 kilometers (about 456 miles) along the West Bank. Most of the fence was constructed between 2002 and 2009 and during that span terror attacks inside Israel declined over 90 percent and related deaths plunged over 98 percent.

The Israeli barrier has had some very unfortunate consequences for people who found themselves walled off from their orchards and fields, but it has certainly been a success in protecting the Israeli people from the intrusions of those who wish to do them harm.

Perhaps the reason open borders proponents raise the "walls don't work" objection to a border wall with Mexico is not because they don't believe it would work, but because they believe it will.

Another objection frequently heard is that a generous and caring people wouldn't prevent needy migrants from coming into the country and thus a wall is a symbol of selfishness and cold-heartedness. This objection is even sillier than the "walls don't work" canard.

It is doubtless safe to say that everyone who makes this argument, from Pope Francis who is surrounded by a huge wall at the Vatican, on down to the average citizen, lives in homes whose doors are locked against unwanted visitors. If someone sincerely believes that it's unkind to exclude those who seek to enter our country illegally why on earth don't they act consistently and unlock the doors to their homes and cars when they leave them so that those in need can avail themselves of whatever resources they can find therein?

Of course they don't do this, and won't do this, which suggests that their claim that locked doors or closed borders are somehow immoral is disingenuous.

The Information Enigma

The skeptical philosopher David Hume, in arguing against the reasonableness of belief in miracles, famously declared that,

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined....There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.

And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle....

Hume's definition of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature is deeply problematic, but let that go for now (see here for a discussion of some of the problems with that definition).

Hume goes on to say that,

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is that the objects of which we have no experience, resemble those of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations.

Hume would doubtless be aghast at the implications of this maxim (or rule) for the contemporary controversy over intelligent design. He employed the rule against belief in miracles, arguing that because we have an overwhelming experience against violations of the laws of nature we should reject any report that a "violation" occurred.

If we grant Hume his rule (which I don't - the rule only entails skepticism of the report of a miracle, it doesn't warrant outright rejection of it) there's no reason not to apply it to the discovery over the last fifty years that the universe and life are both information-rich.

Couple that discovery with the fact that we have a uniform experience of information, whether in a library, on a hard drive, or wherever, being produced by intelligent minds, and it would seem that Hume would have to grant that we should believe that the information contained in biological cells and organisms must be the product of an intelligent mind.

We have no experience, after all, of information being produced by random, impersonal processes and forces. Indeed, we have a uniform experience of random action degrades information and generates disorder.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer discusses the problem biological information poses for naturalistic evolution in this video:

Beetle Origami Redux

The other day I watched a beetle in my backyard fold up its wings, and it reminded me of a post I did a couple of years ago titled Beetle Origami. It's truly amazing what these insects can do, and I thought it'd be worthwhile to share that post again:

One of the countless fascinating examples of engineering in nature that defies explanation in terms of random mutation and natural selection is the ability of insects, such as beetles, to fold and unfold their wings. It's an astonishing ability since the folds are quite complex as this video of a ladybug beetle shows:

If the metaphysical view called naturalism is true, such processes are the result of fortuitous accidents and coincidences throughout the history of beetle evolution, yet one might rightly wonder how accident and coincidence, acting with no goal or purpose in mind, can produce a feature that, were it found in some other context, would certainly be attributed to the design of an intelligent agent.

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News quotes from an article on this phenomenon from USA Today:

Japanese scientists were curious to learn how ladybugs folded their wings inside their shells, so they surgically removed several ladybugs’ outer shells (technically called elytra) and replaced them with glued-on, artificial clear silicone shells to peer at the wings’ underlying folding mechanism.

Why bother with such seemingly frivolous research? It turns out that how the bugs naturally fold their wings can provide design hints for a wide range of practical uses for humans. This includes satellite antennas, microscopic medical instruments, and even everyday items like umbrellas and fans.

“The ladybugs’ technique for achieving complex folding is quite fascinating and novel, particularly for researchers in the fields of robotics, mechanics, aerospace and mechanical engineering,” said lead author Kazuya Saito of the University of Tokyo.

The highlights are mine.

It's truly remarkable that our most brilliant engineers are being taught design by what they are seeing in living things. It's not something that would be expected given a belief in a mechanistic, purposeless, atelic natural world.

On the other hand, it's not at all surprising that the natural world would be infused with engineering marvels if the natural world is itself the product of intelligent engineering.

Our Deadliest Predator

Quick quiz: What's the deadliest predator of human beings on the planet?

It turns out that it's the tiny mosquito and Timothy Winegard has written a book about it titled, The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, which Joseph Bottum reviews at the Washington Free Beacon.

Winegard, in Bottum's telling of it, writes that the mosquito transmits a catalog of deadly diseases including yellow fever, dengue fever, West Nile virus, and many others, but the worst is malaria:

Malaria has probably killed, down through the millennia, more human beings than any other illness. The Mosquito offers the high estimate of 52 billion people killed by mosquitoes, half the people in the history of the world. The global death toll from mosquito-borne diseases is still 830,000 people a year.

In fact, the mosquito is at least partly the reason that Africans became the chief victims of the slave trade:

Somewhere around 6,000 B.C., certain African populations along the Niger River acquired a genetic mutation that caused red blood cells to have a crescent-like sickle shape—and people with the mutation survived because sickle cells provided relative immunity to the malaria caused by mosquito bites.

That population also had the potential to suffer oxygen deprivation, because the same sickle shape that prevented malarial infections from taking hold in red blood cells also weakened the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen to internal organs.

The result could be bad, especially at higher altitudes, and The Mosquito devotes a powerful section to the story of Ryan Clark, the safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers who collapsed after a 2007 football game at Mile High Stadium in Denver and nearly died from oxygen-deprivation damage to his spleen and gallbladder, caused by the sickle-cell trait in his blood.

Still, a harsh Darwinian biology in early human history favored the mutation: Fewer people of childbearing age died from sickle-cell anemia than died from mosquito-borne malaria. In the Niger Delta, mosquitoes were the killers, not altitude.

One terrible result is that decreased mortality from mosquito-borne disease also made those Africans valuable as slaves in the lowlands of the Caribbean, Spanish Main, and southern regions of North America. Many still died, but the captive workforce generally survived better than others the brutal outdoor life in swampy, lowland areas.

American slavery, Timothy Winegard argues, happened in part because of mosquitoes.

This fact raises a question, however, that the review doesn't answer, although Winegard's book might: How did indigenous populations of indians in the Caribbean survive these diseases for millennia before Europeans and Africans ever came to their shores? Did they also build up some sort of immunity?

Anyway, it's certainly interesting to reflect that such a tiny pestiferous insect as the mosquito (and the flea which transmitted the bubonic plague which devastated Europe and Asia in the 14th through 17th centuries) can have such an enormous impact on the flow of human history and the actions of man.

Hurting Those You Want to Help

On Labor Day it might be appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employed 150 people, paid a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act was required to provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of those on the left, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the very people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking that the politician really cares about them and deserves their vote.

Privileging Psychology Over Biology

Travis Barham at The Federalist recounts the stories of two prominent scholars:

In 2017, Dr. Allan Josephson spoke at the Heritage Foundation on how medical professionals should treat children with gender dysphoria. His talk was based on decades of research and clinical experience. For 15 years, Josephson led the University of Louisville’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology, turning the program around. In the three years before his speech, he had earned perfect marks on his annual reviews.

At Heritage, he argued doctors should understand and treat the psychological issues that often cause this confusion before pursuing more radical, aggressive treatments. This sort of reasoned, methodical approach mirrors how medical professionals handle other conditions, let alone those where the treatments might have permanent, negative side-effects.

Yet these few short moments derailed his career. Within weeks of speaking, he was demoted because his remarks angered a few of his colleagues. For the next year, he endured a demeaning, hostile work environment, before the university announced it would not renew his contract, effectively firing him.

Similarly, Dr. Nicholas Meriwether had taught philosophy at Shawnee State University for more than two decades when, in 2018, he answered a male student’s question with a simple, “Yes, sir.” After class, the student demanded to be referred to as a woman. When Meriwether respectfully declined, the student became belligerent, called him an expletive, and promised to get him fired.

Meriwether offered to refer to the student by whatever name he wanted but declined to refer to him as a woman (e.g., “she” or “Ms.”) because that would force him to verbally affirm something he does not believe is true. This did not satisfy the student or the university.

Instead, Shawnee State punished Meriwether and warned that he risks “further corrective actions” if he continues to use sex-based terms. Numerous officials have told him this could include immediate firing or suspension without pay.

Set aside whatever opinions of transgenderism you might have for a moment and ponder a few questions:

1. Why does the transgender individual have a right to demand that everyone else conform to his or her belief about his/her gender? We wouldn't insist that others agree to our beliefs about any other aspect of our physical or psychological selves so why this? And why does the transgendered individual's desire to be called by the pronoun of his/her choice trump the right of others to act according to their sincere beliefs about the individual's gender?

It might be a courtesy to accede to the transgender's wishes, but it's hard to see why the transgendered individual should be entitled to be acceded to.

2. The conviction of a biological male that he's in fact a female is a psychological state of affairs. In other words, the person's psychology is discordant with the person's biology. So, on what grounds does society, or some segment of it, justify subordinating the facts concerning an individual's biology to the facts concerning the individual's psychology? Why does psychology enjoy this privileged status over biology? And why does the transgendered individual enjoy a privilege that's denied to those who choose not to acquiesce to the transgender's view of him or herself?

Even if some wish to extend the transgendered individual the courtesy of honoring his/her convictions, from whence does the transgendered person derive the right to demand that everyone do so, even to the point of ruining someone's career if they decline?

That behavior goes beyond merely asking others to respect one's subjective psychological conclusions about one's own gender and crosses the line into abject narcissism and cruelty.

This post is not taking a position for or against transgenderism. It should not be construed as a criticism of anyone sincerely wrestling with the issues raised by gender confusion.

Rather, it's a plea for kindness, grace and common sense. It's an argument on behalf of people like the scholars mentioned above who should have the freedom to act according to their beliefs, and for the proposition that their duty to respect their students does not entail that they have a duty to acquiesce to every demand that a student might make upon them.

Some, transgendered and otherwise, might disagree, but disagreement is the heart of the intellectual enterprise, it's what produces intellectual progress. As long as it's respectful and courteous it should be nurtured and promoted, not stifled.

Sibling Rivals

There's a misconception perpetrated by many progressives that the group Antifa is comprised of people who are not only hostile to fascism but are the antithesis of fascists.

In fact, Antifa, being putatively an organization of far-left socialists, has more in common with fascism than most of its progressive supporters are willing to admit. Indeed, far-left socialism, or communism, has always had something of an ideological kinship with fascism even though there's a great deal of sibling rivalry and even hostility between the two.

Both are totalitarian and oppressive, both are based on socialist economies, both use anarchy and chaos to acquire power, and both promote, and are typified by, hatred.

The differences between them are fairly insignificant. Fascists generally tend to be more nationalistic and focus their hatreds on those of different ethnicities from themselves. Communists tend to be more internationalist and direct their hatreds toward those in the upper socio-economic classes and adherents to theistic religions. In other words, they both practice identity politics.

Because both are forms of socialism it's misleading to call the fascists "far-right." They are, in fact, leftists, and their antipathy toward communist socialists is the hatred spawned between ideological brothers who disagree on relatively minor matters regarding their inheritance.

I discuss all this in more detail here, but the important point to be made in the present post is that the distinctions between Antifa and the Nazi-style white supremacists they despise are minor. They're two faces of the same evil, and no decent person should associate with, or defend, either of them.

An interesting piece by Tyler Stone at The Federalist explains some of the history between the Nazi fascists and the Soviet communists. Were it not for Hitler's betrayal of Stalin, Germany and the Soviet Union might well today share global hegemony.

After recounting the sordid history of cooperation between the communists and the fascists in the late 30s and early 40s Stone concludes with this:

The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany desired the same goals: to defeat democracies, independent Republics, and individual freedom throughout Europe (and the world). Communism and Nazism are just different sides to the same totalitarian coin....

Communism stood side by side with Nazism, and marched with it across Europe. As Friedrich Hayek in his book, “Road to Serfdom,” states: “[T]o both [Nazis and Communists], the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type [i.e. conservatives].”

If the left wants to remove offensive objects from history, then perhaps they should start by acknowledging that the hammer and sickle is just as hateful and oppressive as the swastika.

It's an interesting historical fact that progressives and communists in the United States, prior to Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, were very supportive of Hitler and his demands. As long as the fascists and communists were allies the left in the U.S. insisted that the United States remain neutral in the conflict unfolding in Europe, but once Germany invaded the U.S.S.R. American communists and their progressive acolytes did a complete turn-about and beat the drums for war against Germany.

One lesson in this, I suppose, is that we should be very careful about being seduced by what groups like Antifa proclaim as their goal. Their agenda is, in fact, the erection of a totalitarian state and the abolition of individual freedom, and they'll do and say whatever it takes to achieve that end. Indeed, one of their heroes, Vladimir Lenin, said this in a speech in 1920:

We repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas....Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order...

Thus began a movement which, before the end of the twentieth century, had murdered approximately 100 million people. Antifa and groups like it are the ideological heirs of both Lenin and Hitler, and we should put as much distance between them and ourselves as we do between ourselves and the neo-Nazis.

Embryogenesis and Information

Do you have six minutes? Watch this time lapse video of a fertilized egg developing into a newt, and ask yourself as you're watching how each of the cells in this embryo "knows" where to go and how to get there.

That the migrating cells wind up in the right place is crucial lest the newt have a leg grow out of its head or an eye grow out of its tail. Obviously, there's an enormous amount of information directing this process, so it's worthwhile to ask where the information comes from that coordinates everything you see happening. Complex information that programs a specific process is uniquely the product of minds. It's never the product of blind, random forces like those posited in the Darwinian hypothesis.

But if purposeless biochemical processes are inadequate to explain the complex, specified information that guides embryogenesis, if only minds can provide an adequate explanation, where did the information responsible for the development of this newt and, indeed, of every living thing, come from and how did it arise in biological history?

This is a very difficult and perplexing problem for anyone holding a materialistic, naturalistic worldview, one that's causing a lot of folks who hold to that worldview to have second thoughts about Darwinian evolution.

The Politics of Hatred

How did it come about that popular opinion seems to hold that hatred exists predominantly on the ideological right, even though historically, and even contemporaneously, the left is as equally riven with hateful rhetoric and deeds as is the right, and quite arguably much more.

Historians can probably point to several events in which the "political right = haters" had its genesis, but one contender for the most salient example was the propaganda following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Kennedy was an icon on the left despite pushing economic and foreign policies that were anything but compatible with leftist ideology.

According to Jonah Goldberg writing in his excellent book Liberal Fascism, Kennedy campaigned on a the need for stronger military defense. He tried to depose Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba, and presided over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He brought the world to the threshold of nuclear war in the Cuban missile crisis, and got us deep into a pointless war in Vietnam before he was assassinated.

He also cut taxes, and although he championed civil rights legislation for blacks, he was simply building on what Republicans had started in the 1950s under Dwight Eisenhower.

Nevertheless, he became posthumously a mythical character among liberals. When he was shot, the media, particularly people like CBS reporter Dan Rather, were quick to blame the political right for the crime and brand Dallas, Texas, the city and state in which the assassination occurred, the loci of hate in America.

When it turned out that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was in fact a Marxist, a man of the left, liberals were stunned. They proceeded, however, to nourish the Kennedy mystique, ascribing heroic traits to the man that he never possessed in real life and claiming that anyone (i.e. Republicans) who opposed him politically must've been motivated by hatred.

The irony is that Kennedy was much closer ideologically to contemporary Republicans than he would've been to contemporary Democrats, or even to Democrats of the 1960s.

The point, though, is that Kennedy hagiography became a big business. He was turned into a martyr by his party and a media which, always eager to be seduced by superficiality, adored him for his charmingly suave persona.

In order to achieve his canonization, however, his opponents had to be vilified and it was convenient to accomplish this by convincing people that his opponents were "haters."

The ruse worked, and continued to work for several decades thereafter, largely because people got their political opinions from relatively few sources, almost all of which were committed to propagating the myth of Kennedy sainthood and right-wing hatred.

Even today, the left continues to push the meme, labelling much that Republicans, especially the president, say as hateful, racist, bigoted, etc., and people who lack the time or the inclination to ask what, exactly, is hateful about whatever it is that has been called such by the media or one's Facebook friends, simply accept that it must be.

It would be good for all of us to think more critically when these terms are tossed about, to ask, when someone calls someone else a racist, what their definition of a racist is and how and why it applies to the individual in question.

Many times we'll find that those using these labels have no good answer to these questions. They simply use them as rhetorical vehicles for expressing their dislike for the other and because it saves them the hard work of having to develop arguments and to actually think.

Intellectual Integrity

Anyone who engages in public commentary and debate is often tempted to color facts to better fit his position, to overstate his case, or to do something which might be intellectually not-quite-honest. 

Some ten years ago a blogger who called himself Mike Gene did a post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty in which he listed ten good rules to follow when participating with others in dialogue.

Since the link to his post no longer works I'll take the liberty to list his ten rules along with his explanations (slightly edited). They're very much worth heeding for anyone who wishes to participate in the debates occurring in our contemporary public square.

Here they are:

1. Do not overstate the power of your argument. One's sense of conviction should be in proportion to the level of clear evidence assessable by most. If someone portrays his opponents as being stupid or dishonest for disagreeing, intellectual dishonesty is probably in play. Intellectual honesty is most often associated with humility, not arrogance.

2. Show a willingness to publicly acknowledge that reasonable alternative viewpoints exist. The alternative views do not have to be treated as equally valid or powerful, but rarely is it the case that one and only one viewpoint has a complete monopoly on reason and evidence.

3. Be willing to publicly acknowledge and question one's own assumptions and biases. All of us rely on assumptions when applying our worldview to make sense of the data about the world, and all of us bring various biases to the table.

4. Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points.

5.Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Those selling an ideology often have great difficulty admitting to being wrong as this undercuts the rhetoric and image that is being sold. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

6. Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

7. Address the argument instead of the person making the argument. Ad hominem arguments are a clear sign of intellectual dishonesty. When resorts to insulting their opponent, often by relying on stereotypes, guilt-by-association, and superficially innocent-sounding "gotcha" questions they're revealing the inadequacy of their own arguments and trying to deflect attention away from that inadequacy.

8. When addressing your opponent's argument, do not misrepresent it. Misrepresenting an argument in order to make it look weaker and easier to defeat is called the "straw man" fallacy. Straw man often occurs when people are quoted out-of-context or are paraphrased incorrectly. When critiquing an argument one should show that one has made a good faith effort to both understand it and to represent it in its strongest form.

9. Demonstrate a commitment to critical thinking. This seems self-explanatory.

10. Be willing to publicly acknowledge when one's opponent has made a good point or criticism. If someone is unwilling to admit that his opponent has made a telling point or an incisive criticism it demonstrates an unwillingness to honestly engage in the give-and-take of dialogue.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules Mike describes I sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary nonetheless. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed. 

Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. I've printed out Mike's Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty and have them posted over my computer.

Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

Why Darwinism Is in Trouble

I prefer to avoid posting long videos because life is short and people don't have the time to commit to a lengthy conversation between two interlocutors even if both are uncommonly sharp.

I'm going to make an exception, though, for a video of an interview by Ben Shapiro of philosopher of science Stephen Meyer about the challenge posed to Darwinism by the theory of intelligent design.

You wouldn't know it from reading most media outlets, but the theory of Darwinian evolution is currently in profound turmoil and Meyer does a masterful job of explaining why as he addresses Shapiro's very incisive questions.

Sometimes conversations like this tend to ramble and get lost in the weeds, but this one is extremely focussed and informative.

The video is just short of an hour long, but it's like taking an entire course in one class period. Shapiro asks all the right questions. He's perhaps the most well-informed lay interviewer on this topic that I've seen, and Meyer is simply brilliant.

Give it ten minutes and see if you don't want to keep watching. If the topic is one that interests you, and it should interest everyone who thinks deeply about life because it has enormous worldview ramifications, I bet you'll want to stay with it longer:

Butterfly Metamorphosis

A couple of short videos excerpted from Illustra Media's film titled: Metamorphosis: The Beauty and Design of Butterflies highlight the incredible difficulties faced by any purely unguided and natural account of the origin of metamorphosis.

Why such a process would have ever evolved in the first place and how it could have done so are questions for which the standard Darwinian model has no plausible answer.

There's a bit of overlap in the two videos but not much:

Speaking for myself, the idea that such a process evolved seems possible, maybe even plausible, but the idea that the process evolved unaided by any intelligent, purposeful guidance seems to me quite literally incredible.

Condemning Nationalism

The journal Commonweal has published an open letter ostensibly in response to a similar manifesto which appeared in the March issue of First Things. Commonweal so strongly agreed with the letter that they chose to run it even though their staff was not involved in its composition.

At any rate, the signatories are concerned by a "disturbing rise of nationalism, especially among some Christians, in the United States" which they espy in the First Things missive.

It's hard to say what in the First Things piece was so objectionable, but apparently there was enough there to animate the letter published by Commonweal and from which the following excerpts are lifted. I'd like to offer some critical reflections on the excerpts and will begin in the middle of the letter where the authors contrast nationalism with patriotism:

To be clear, nationalism is not the same as patriotism. Nationalism forges political belonging out of religious, ethnic, and racial identities, loyalties intended to precede and supersede law. Patriotism, by contrast, is love of the laws and loyalty to them over leader or party. Such nationalism is not only politically dangerous but reflects profound theological errors that threaten the integrity of Christian faith. It damages the love of neighbor and betrays Christ.

This seems a tendentious definition of nationalism. I would suggest instead that nationalism "forges political belonging" out of a shared national identity. As such it seems to me to be both salutary and innocuous, but having said that, what seems to be happening in this country is more in line with the authors' definition of patriotism. That is, what we're seeing unfold is a frustration with the failure of our political leaders to uphold the laws of the land, especially with respect to immigration, despite a patriotic desire on the part of many Americans to remain faithful to those laws, a desire that transcends party affiliation.

American Christians now face a moment whose deadly violence has brought such analogies to mind. Again we watch as demagogues demonize vulnerable minorities as infesting vermin or invading forces who weaken the nation and must be removed.

Who demonized vulnerable minorities as "infesting vermin?" It would be very helpful if the authors would quote the relevant claims rather than tacitly expecting us to simply trust them to have quoted the "demagogues" correctly. And why is it inaccurate to characterize tens of thousands of people storming across our borders illegally as an "invasion?"

Without answers to these questions the above paragraph is meaningless.

Again we watch as fellow Christians weigh whether to fuse their faith with nationalist and ethno-nationalist politics in order to strengthen their cultural footing. Again ethnic majorities confuse their political bloc with Christianity itself.

This may in fact be happening although to what extent it's happening is certainly unclear. Even so, the authors are correct to deplore anyone confusing Christianity with a particular political party. The disconcerting thing about this concern, though, is that liberal Christians, like those in the black church, and those on staff at journals like Sojourners and Commonweal have been acting like the religious arm of the Democrat party for decades and liberal thinkers have been indifferent or even supportive.

It seems that it's only when conservative Christians start to confuse politics and the gospel that folks like the letter-signers become alarmed.

Then follow five aspects of what the signatories perceive to characterize our present moment and to which they express their disapprobation:

1. We reject the pretensions of nationalism to usurp our highest loyalties. National identity has no bearing on the debts of love we owe other sons and daughters of God. Created in the image and likeness of God, all human beings are our neighbors regardless of citizenship status.

True enough, but how is insistence upon border security and an orderly process of immigration unloving? The signatories don't say. One wonders whether they themselves lock the doors to their homes and cars when they leave them or whether they lovingly welcome anyone who wishes to avail themselves of their houses and vehicles to do so whenever they please.

2. We reject nationalism’s tendency to homogenize and narrow the church to a single ethnos. The church cannot be itself unless filled with disciples “from all nations” (panta ta ethné, Matthew 28:19). Cities, states, and nations have borders; the church never does. If the church is not ethnically plural, it is not the church, which requires a diversity of tongues out of obedience to the Lord.

Why this appears in this manifesto is a head-scratcher. To the extent that there's anything non-trivial here who disagrees with it?

3. We reject the xenophobia and racism of many forms of ethno-nationalism, explicit and implicit, as grave sins against God the Creator. Violence done against the bodies of marginalized people is violence done against the body of Christ. Indifference to the suffering of orphans, refugees, and prisoners is indifference to Jesus Christ and his cross. White supremacist ideology is the work of the anti-Christ.

Yes, but if the authors are going to suggest that white supremacy is infecting the Church they need to do more than simply assert it. They need to offer some supporting evidence.

Of course, there are white supremacists outside the Church, just as there are black supremacists, and like the black variety some of the whites are horribly virulent, but do the authors mean to imply that President Trump is among them? On what basis do they make this implication? Is it based on the fact that he wants our laws to be enforced and our borders secured? Does that make him a white supremacist? If so, he's got quite a lot of company, including many blacks and Hispanics as well as former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

4. We reject nationalism’s claim that the stranger, refugee, and migrant are enemies of the people. Where nationalism fears the stranger as a threat to political community, the church welcomes the stranger as necessary for full communion with God. Jesus Christ identifies himself with the poor, imprisoned foreigner in need of hospitality. “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me” (Matthew 25:41-43).

So what's to be concluded from this? That we're not feeding, clothing, and providing drink for those who are here illegally? That's simply false. Or is it that we should open our doors to everyone in the world to come here and be fed, clothed and sheltered? If that's how we're to understand it, it's nonsense.

Again, it should be asked whether everyone who agrees with this letter has removed the locks from their homes, cars and businesses so that anyone in need can partake of whatever amenities they might find therein. If they really believed what they've signed on to in this letter then it seems hypocritical not to exemplify these ideals in their personal lives. To fail to do so is to suggest that their public approval of the contents of the letter is mere virtue preening.

5. We reject the nationalist’s inclination to despair when unable to monopolize power and dominate opponents. When Christians change from majority to minority status in a given country, they should not contort their witness in order to stay in power. The church remains the church even as a political minority, even when unable to influence the government or when facing persecution.

Yes, so what's the point? What does this statement have to do with our present circumstance? How is the church contorting its witness? The authors simply proclaim that it should not do it. Very well, but without some sort of explanation they may as well have proclaimed that neither should the church violate the ten commandments.

The letter suffers from such vagueness and nebulosity that it's really hard to tell exactly what the authors and signatories were trying to say. Without more specific explanation the letter is little more than an exercise in trumpeting the authors' moral superiority and is otherwise frivolous.

Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism

The recent controversy surrounding the proposed trip to Israel by Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib raised once again the question of the distinctions between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

One often hears that one can be a critic of Israel without being anti-Semitic. That's true. One also hears that one can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. That's not true.

Dennis Prager gives us a very helpful explanation of the nature of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism at PJ Media and why the latter really amounts to the former.

His essay opens with a thought experiment:

Imagine a group of people who work to destroy Italy because, they claim, Italy's origins are illegitimate. Imagine further that these people maintain that of all the countries in the world, only Italy is illegitimate. And then imagine that these people vigorously deny they are in any way anti-Italian. Would you believe them? Or would you dismiss their argument as not only dishonest but absurd?

Substitute "Israel" for "Italy" and "Jew" for "Italian" and you'll understand the dishonesty and absurdity of the argument that one can be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.

But that is precisely what anti-Zionists say. They argue that the very existence of a Jewish state in the geographic area known as Palestine -- there was never an independent country known as Palestine -- is illegitimate. They do not believe any other country in the world is illegitimate, no matter how bloody its origins. And then they get offended when they're accused of being anti-Semitic.

Prager then goes on to discuss five arguments commonly employed by anti-Semites, like Omar and Tlaib, who wish to mask their anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism. Here's the first:

They say it is unfair to charge those who merely "criticize" Israel with being anti-Semitic. But I don't know anyone who does that. It's a phony argument. Criticism of Israel is fine. Denying Israel's right to exist is not. Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israel. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Israel's existence.

Zionism is the movement for the return of Jews to their ancient homeland, Israel. Over the past 3,000 years, there were two independent Jewish states located in what is called Israel. Both were destroyed by invaders, and no Arab or Muslim or any other independent country ever existed in that land, which was only named Palestine by the Romans in an attempt to remove all memory of the Jewish state they destroyed in the year A.D. 70.

Read the rest at the link. The fourth and fifth are especially informative.

Omar and Tlaib, it should be noted, both support the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) directed against Israel. The tacit purpose of the BDS effort is to so weaken Israel economically that it can no longer resist those who would destroy it. That goal is both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.

The kind of hatred that drives the BDS movement should have no home in either political party and certainly not in the Congress of the United States.

The Eric Garner Decision

The police officer who killed Eric Garner five years ago has been dismissed from the force, and from everything I've seen about this tragic story he should've been. The officer's name was Daniel Pantaleo and the death occurred as he was trying to arrest Garner, a black man who was illegally selling cigarettes and refusing to cooperate.

Officer Pantaleo and Garner grappled during the confrontation and Pantaleo applied a choke hold the use of which, according to the police training manual, should have been terminated as soon as Garner was subdued. It was not. Garner protested that he couldn't breath, suffered a heart attack and died.

Garner should not have resisted, but Pantaleo had subdued him, had backup to assist him and was in violation of official procedures by unnecessarily continuing the deadly chokehold. Although I generally support the police as far as possible, and although I recognize that they have a very difficult job dealing with recalcitrants like Garner, I have to ask how I'd feel about what happened if Garner had been my own father or my son.

Applying that test, I have no doubt that I would think that but for the officer's lack of disciplined response my loved one would still be alive.

Having said all that, I also have to wonder what the motive of the national media has been in giving this case and others like it such prominence. Is the media trying deliberately to provoke racial antagonism and bitterness in this country?

The reason I ask is because there was another case of an officer killing an already subdued miscreant four years ago that no media people outside the local area showed any interest in at all, and in that case the officer wasn't even fired.

In the incident to which I refer the officer actually shot and killed the man being arrested as he lay on the ground, immobilized by the officer's taser (there's body cam video at the link for those who can bear to watch), so why have you probably never heard about this tragedy? Why didn't Al Sharpton rush to get himself in front of all the cameras on behalf of this victim?

Here's a possible answer: The officer was a white female, the man she killed was a white male fleeing from a traffic stop. No racial angle there. Nothing to inflame passions and stir up civil unrest. Nothing to stoke peoples' hatred for each other. Nothing to fit the narrative of "racist" cops. Ergo, this is a non-story as far as our national media are concerned.

What other reason could there be for the constant publicity for the Eric Garner death and the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, both of which involved the deaths of black men at the hands of white officers, and the total media indifference toward the case in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania?

Little wonder the national media is held in such contempt by so many Americans.

An Extraordinary Man

August 14th marked the anniversary of the death of an extraordinary man. He was born Raymond Kolbe in Poland in 1894. In 1910 he became a Franciscan and took the name Maximilian, eventually managing a friary outside of Warsaw which housed 762 Franciscans.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he committed his friary to sheltering thousands of Polish and Jewish refugees. The friars shared everything they had with the refugees. They housed, fed and clothed them.

In May 1941 the friary was closed down and Maximilian and four companions were taken to the death camp at Auschwitz, where they worked with the other prisoners.

On June 15, 1941, he managed to write a letter to his mother:

Dear Mama, At the end of the month of May I was transferred to the camp of Auschwitz. Everything is well in my regard. Be tranquil about me and about my health, because the good God is everywhere and provides for everything with love. It would be well that you do not write to me until you will have received other news from me, because I do not know how long I will stay here. Cordial greetings and kisses, affectionately. Raymond.

One day an SS officer found some of the heaviest planks he could lay hold of and personally loaded them on the Franciscan's back, ordering him to run. When he collapsed, the SS officer kicked him in the stomach and face and had his men give him fifty lashes.

When the priest lost consciousness the Nazis threw him in the mud and left him for dead. But his companions managed to smuggle him to the camp infirmary - and he recovered.

Prisoners at Auschwitz were slowly and systematically starved, and their pitiful rations were barely enough to sustain a child: one cup of imitation coffee in the morning, and weak soup and half a loaf of bread after work. When food was brought, everyone struggled to get his place and be sure of a portion.

Father Maximilian Kolbe however, stood aside in spite of the ravages of starvation, and frequently there would be none left for him. At other times he shared his meager ration of soup or bread with others. At night he moved from bunk to bunk, saying: "I am a Catholic priest. Can I do anything for you?"

A prisoner later recalled how he and several others often crawled across the floor at night to be near the bed of Father Kolbe, to make their confessions and ask for consolation. Father Kolbe pleaded with his fellow prisoners to forgive their persecutors and to overcome evil with good. When he was beaten by the guards, he never cried out. Instead, he prayed for his tormentors.

A Protestant doctor who treated the patients in Kolbe's block later recalled how Father Kolbe waited until all the others had been treated before asking for help. He constantly sacrificed himself for the others.

One doctor, Rudolph Diem, later recalled: "I can say with certainty that during my four years in Auschwitz, I never saw such a sublime example of the love of God and one's neighbor."

All this was extraordinary but what happened next was astonishing:

In order to discourage escapes, Auschwitz had a rule that if a man escaped, ten men would be killed in retaliation. In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped.

The other men of the bunker were lined up.

"The fugitive has not been found!" the commandant Karl Fritsch screamed. "You will all pay for this. Ten of you will be locked in the starvation bunker without food or water until they die." The prisoners trembled in terror. A few days in this bunker without food and water, and a man's intestines dried up and his brain turned to fire.

The ten were selected, including Franciszek Gajowniczek, imprisoned for helping the Polish Resistance. He couldn't help a cry of anguish. "My poor wife!" he sobbed. "My poor children! What will they do?"

When he uttered this cry of dismay, Maximilian stepped silently forward, took off his cap, and stood before the commandant and said, "I am a Catholic priest. Let me take his place. I am old. He has a wife and children."

Astounded, the icy-faced Nazi commandant asked, "What does this Polish pig want?"

Father Kolbe pointed with his hand to the condemned Franciszek Gajowniczek and repeated "I am a Catholic priest from Poland; I would like to take his place, because he has a wife and children."

Observers believed in horror that the commandant would be angered and would refuse the request, or would order the death of both men. The commandant remained silent for a moment. Amazingly, he acceded to the request. Franciszek Gajowniczek was returned to the ranks, and the priest took his place.

Gajowniczek later recalled:

I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Is this some dream?

I was put back into my place without having had time to say anything to Maximilian Kolbe. I was saved. And I owe to him the fact that I could tell you all this. The news quickly spread all round the camp. It was the first and the last time that such an incident happened in the whole history of Auschwitz.

For a long time I felt remorse when I thought of Maximilian. By allowing myself to be saved, I had signed his death warrant. But now, on reflection, I understood that a man like him could not have done otherwise. Perhaps he thought that as a priest his place was beside the condemned men to help them keep hope. In fact he was with them to the last.

Father Kolbe was thrown down the stairs into a bunker along with the other victims and simply left there to starve. Hunger and thirst soon gnawed at the men. Some drank their own urine, others licked moisture on the dank walls. Maximilian Kolbe encouraged the others with prayers, psalms, and meditations on the Passion of Christ.

After two weeks, only four were alive. The cell was needed for more victims, and the camp executioner, a common criminal called Bock, came in and injected a lethal dose of carbolic acid into the left arm of each of the four dying men.

Kolbe was the only one still fully conscious and with a prayer on his lips, the last prisoner raised his arm for the executioner. His wait was over. A personal testimony about the way Maximilian Kolbe met death is given by Bruno Borgowiec, one of the few Poles who were assigned to render service to the starvation bunker. He told it to his parish priest before he died in 1947:

The ten condemned to death went through terrible days. From the underground cell in which they were shut up there continually arose the echo of prayers and canticles. The man in-charge of emptying the buckets of urine found them always empty. Thirst drove the prisoners to drink the contents.

Since they had grown very weak, prayers were now only whispered. At every inspection, when almost all the others were now lying on the floor, Father Kolbe was seen kneeling or standing in the centre as he looked cheerfully in the face of the SS men.

Father Kolbe never asked for anything and did not complain, rather he encouraged the others, saying that the fugitive might be found and then they would all be freed. One of the SS guards remarked: this priest is really a great man. We have never seen anyone like him.

Two weeks passed in this way. Meanwhile one after another they died, until only Father Kolbe was left. This the authorities felt was too long. The cell was needed for new victims. So one day they brought in the head of the sick-quarters, a German named Bock, who gave Father Kolbe an injection of carbolic acid in the vein of his left arm.

Father Kolbe, with a prayer on his lips, himself gave his arm to the executioner. Unable to watch this I left under the pretext of work to be done. Immediately after the SS men had left I returned to the cell, where I found Father Kolbe leaning in a sitting position against the back wall with his eyes open and his head drooping sideways. His face was calm and radiant.

The date of his execution was 14 August, 1941 at the age of forty-seven years.

Ironically, the escaped prisoner was later found drowned in a camp latrine, so the terrible reprisals had been exercised without cause.

Father Kolbe's body was removed to the crematorium, and without dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow.

The cell where Father Kolbe died is now a shrine. Maximilian Kolbe was beatified as Confessor by Paul VI in 1970, and canonized as Martyr by Pope John Paul II in 1981.

Franciszek Gajowniczek died on March 13, 1995, at Brzeg in Poland, 95 years old - and 53 years after Kolbe had saved him. But he was never to forget the ragged monk.

After his release from Auschwitz, Gajowniczek made his way back to his hometown, with the dream of seeing his family again. He found his wife but his two sons had been killed during the war.

Every year on August 14 he went back to Auschwitz. He spent the next five decades paying homage to Father Kolbe, honoring the man who died on his behalf.

It's an amazing story about an exceptional man. To give one's life for a loved one is poignant. To give one's life for a stranger is more than human, it's divine.

Atheism and Moral Duties

Lincoln Mullen wrote a review, a couple of years back, of Peter Watson's The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.

In the course of his review, Mullen makes a point which I think needs to be clarified. He writes that:

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals.

He might be correct that this is a common charge, but even so, the moral problem that Christians (and theists in general) have with atheism is not that atheists don't have moral values but rather that they have no ground for making moral judgments beyond their own subjective preferences.

Take a concrete example: A tobacco company lies about the danger its product poses to the consumer. A theist would say that such deception is objectively wrong because it violates the will of the Creator who commands that people be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness - a command that imposes a clear moral duty not to harm people.

The atheist may also be outraged that the tobacco company has lied to people about the hazards of using its product, but the only reason they could have, if atheism is true, for condemning the company's behavior is that they simply don't like it. If an atheist were to respond to this by insisting that it's just wrong to hurt people, the question then needs to be asked, "Why is it wrong?"

If atheism is true then we are here as a result of a blind, impersonal, evolutionary process, and blind, impersonal processes cannot impose a moral duty on anyone to do anything. Nor can such processes prescribe or proscribe behavior, nor pronounce a behavior wrong in any meaningful moral sense.

Lots of thoughtful atheists have admitted this. Consider a few quotes from thinkers, all of whom are, or were, atheists:

• What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. ~ Richard Dawkins
• What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after. ~ Ernest Hemmingway
• This philosopher (Joel Marks is speaking of himself) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. ~ Joel Marks
• Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs....The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways. ~ Margaret Sanger
• For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel. ~ Richard Rorty.
• The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower. ~ Leo Tolstoy
• Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. ~ Karl Marx
• One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best. ~ Charles Darwin
• As evolutionists, we see that no justification (of morality) of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place. ~ E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... ~ Will Provine
• I would accept Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that if you do not believe in God, you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do. ~ Richard Rorty

So, the problem atheism has with morality, as the theist sees it, is not that atheists can't choose to adopt the sort of values of which society approves. Of course, they can. The problem is that they wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense had they chosen to adopt completely opposite values. Their choice is purely a matter of personal preference, like choosing to paint their house brown instead of green.

Thus, it's puzzling when atheists adopt the view that they hold to a superior morality than that of Christians as Mullen asserts in a later passage:

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

The most the atheist can claim, however, is that, on the Christian's own assumptions, the atheist's views on these issues might be closer to what God wills than are the Christian's views, but in order to make this claim the atheist has to piggyback on the theist's belief that both God and objective moral duties exist.

Moreover, the atheist cannot say that the theist is wrong in holding the views on these issues that perhaps he does. The most the atheist can say is that the theist's views are inconsistent with what he professes to believe about God's moral will.

Of course, it may be true that the theist is not acting consistently with his fundamental moral assumptions, but that doesn't make those fundamental assumptions wrong, and it certainly doesn't make them inferior to the atheist's values which are grounded in nothing more authoritative than his own tastes.

This is the point I seek to make in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss. An atheist, if he's to be consistent, can either give up the pretense of holding to some non-arbitrary moral standard and admit that he's just making his morality up as he goes along, or he can admit that he believes that right and wrong are not merely matters of subjective preference but are real, objective features of the world. If he admits that, however, then, to be consistent, he'd have to give up his atheism and become a theist.

He has to do one or the other, or he could simply do neither and admit that he prefers to live irrationally, which is the option many atheists apparently settle upon.

Alternative Reading Frames

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each. Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence.

The only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be. But why decide that? What reason can be adduced upon which such a decision might be based? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is that they have a strong preference that no such being exist and they allow their preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Gauger doesn't address that question, but her article is still very good.

Trump/Hitler

The progressive left often signals desperation when they stoop to comparing their political enemies to Adolf Hitler and throwing around labels such as "Nazi" and "fascist." PJ Media lists seven times (!) when talkers on just a single network, MSNBC, made the Hitlerian comparison in the solitary month of July, and the person being analogized to Hitler was, of course, the nefarious Donald Trump.

There may well be people in this country who deserve to be compared to Hitler. There may be people in this country who are genuine fascists, but almost certainly the majority, if not the totality, of such people in this country are on the ideological left. Nazism and fascism are ideologies of the left, not the right, although ever since Stalin the left has tried to convince the world that the truth is otherwise.

In his excellent 2007 book Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg elucidates the nature of fascism and Nazism and shows beyond any reasonable doubt that these two statist, totalitarian ideologies both fall on the left end of the political spectrum and in fact have much more in common with American progressivism than they do with whatever political philosophy informs Mr. Trump's thinking.

And certainly, Mr. Goldberg argues, neither Nazism or fascism bears any similarity at all to conservatism.

To understand the absurdity of the Trump/Hitler nexus it's helpful to understand that, according to Goldberg, Hitler was driven by four main ideas: 1) power concentrated in himself, 2) hatred of the Jews, 3) faith in the racial superiority of the German people, and 4) the employment of war to secure the other three.

There's no evidence that Trump has any of these traits and much evidence that he has none of them. Taking them in turn, a man who wishes to concentrate power in himself would not undo Obama's executive orders, deregulate industry and appoint constitutionalist judges and justices. Indeed, it's because President Trump is dismantling the consolidation of power that has accrued to the executive and judicial branches of government over the last couple of decades that accounts for the left's virulent hatred of the man and their desperation to get him out of office.

Nor is there a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump is anti-semitic. An anti-semite would not have moved our embassy to Jerusalem, would not tolerate a Jewish son-in-law, nor would an anti-semite have such a close relationship with Israel and look with such favor on that nation. For genuine anti-semitism one has to look at certain congressional Democrats and the left's BDS movement which flourishes on American university campuses.

Some have accused the president of Hitlerian racism because he's been critical of political opponents who happen to be people of color. The charge is ludicrous inasmuch as in order for it to be at all credible one has to assume that it's an act of racism to criticize anyone who happens to be a member of a minority race. If this assumption is seen for the absurdity that it is then none of the allegations of racism made against Trump make any sense.

Finally, Mr. Trump has been the least hawkish president we've had since Jimmy Carter. He has repeatedly shied away from the use of military force even when he could've justified its use, such as when the Iranians shot down our drone in international waters. It's absurd to identify a man so averse to military adventures with the man who wallowed in them.

The left has always accused their opponents of the same sins of which they themselves are guilty, and in the attempt to identify Trump with the erstwhile leader of the Nazi party they present us with another instance of this tactic.

The Nazis under Hitler were, like the left, revolutionary, not conservative; they came to power exploiting a socialist, anti-capitalist platform; they emphasized environmentalism, health food and exercise; they sought to diminish or eradicate the influence of Christianity, transcend notions of class and were masters of the practice of identity politics.

They favored universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the elderly, expropriation of land and industry, and state health care.

Moreover, their ethics, such as they were, were entirely pragmatic. Whatever worked to achieve their goal was ipso facto the right thing to do. Like postmodern progressives they believed that truth and falsehood were arbitrary terms, that the "truth" of an idea lay in its power to inspire the people. It mattered very little whether the idea was actually true or false.

The only real differences between the Nazis and the communists of the 1930s and their progressive contemporaries and their descendents was that the Nazis were nationalists and the communists/progressives were internationalists. The Nazis divided people by race, the communists/progressives divide them by class. Hitler hated the communists of his day, not because he disagreed with them on economics, he didn't, but because in his paranoia he believed they were a Jewish conspiracy to take over Europe.

So, when progressives hurl the Hitlerian epithet at Donald Trump, they're showing not only an astounding ignorance of who Hitler was and what he believed, they're also revealing an astounding ignorance of their own history and current ideological kinship to the people they claim to deplore.

More on the Mind/Body Problem

Yesterday's post closed with the question of what's at stake in the debate between materialists and dualists. Materialism is the belief that human beings are comprised solely of material stuff and that everything about us can, in theory, be explained in terms of matter (and energy).

Dualists maintain that human beings display certain traits that cannot even in principle be explained in terms of material, physical causes, among which are the phenomena of consciousness. This fact leads them to conclude that there must be something else about us that's involved in our mental life. This something else must somehow be integrated with the material brain yet immaterial and non-spatial and not reducible to the brain.

This something else has traditionally been called the mind or soul.

So why does it matter? Well, if materialism is correct several consequences follow that many consider to be hard to reconcile with our human experience.

For example, if we're just material beings completely in thrall to the laws of physics it's hard to see how there could be anything like free will. All our choices must be the consequence of prior events occuring in our brains over which we have no real control.

But if that's so then we're not really responsible for our choices, in which case there's really no such thing as morality. For morality and moral responsibility to exist individuals must exert some control over the choices they make.

Also, if we have no free will it's hard to see how the notion of human dignity can be anything more than a pleasant illusion. We're just animals like any other. Yes, we have the ability to reason and speak, but some animals have the ability to fly or swim. Why is rationality and speech to be privileged over flight or grace under water?

And if we're just animals what exactly do we mean when we talk about human rights or human equality? Are animals all equal? Do animals have rights? If so, where do they come from?

Moreover, if we're merely a particular arrangement of carbon and assorted other atoms it's very hard to say what we mean when we talk about the self. Can there be a self, an I, if the atoms that comprise our bodies are constantly being replaced by other atoms and the contents of our brains are constantly changing?

We are no more the same self over time than the image of a kaleidoscope is the same image over time.

Finally, if materialism is true and there is no mind or soul it becomes much more difficult to believe that anything about us survives the death of our bodies. The notion of an afterlife becomes increasingly tenuous as does belief that there exists an immaterial being or mind called God.

Ideas have consequences. If we choose to believe the idea that we are purely physical matter then it's hard to see how we can avoid accepting all of implications listed above, and indeed most materialists do accept all of those implications.

If, on the other hand, we believe we're not just a material body but also an immaterial mind then those difficulties evaporate.

Which view, then, conforms most comfortably with our experience of life, a view which entails a denial of free will, moral responsibility, human dignity, human rights, human equality, the self and the hope of God and an afterlife, or a view which is compatible with all of these?