Who's the Aggressor in the Culture War?

For the last fifty years or so the left has been employing an interesting strategy in what has come to be called the culture war. The left attacks and undermines some traditional institution of the culture - marriage, abortion, sexual practices, gender, free markets, religious freedom, Christmas etc. - and when people try to resist these encroachments upon these long-held ways of doing things the left complains, indignant that anyone could be so divisive and confrontational.

It's like a man about to be slapped in the face throwing up an arm to ward off the blow and then being criticized for unwarranted aggressiveness and violence because he resisted.

It's hard to believe that the tactic has worked so well for so long, but it has, largely because the general public seems indifferent to what's going on in the culture until it's too late to do anything about it.

Emily Jashinsky, the culture editor at The Federalist, has a column on this in which she writes that,

By the essence of their mission and the definition of their moniker, progressives are on offense. There would be no cultural battles were it not for changes demanded by the left. Those of us so-called “culture war-stoking” conservatives in media are on defense. Almost always.

We focus heavily on culture because it’s what our audience finds useful. It’s what our audience finds useful because they, too, are on defense—and that’s because the left is focused even more heavily on culture. This kind of coverage is entirely a response to the left’s broad and deliberate cultural offensive, which honest progressives should fully own. The left raises proposals (or demands, more often) for cultural change. In response, we stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” (Or we’re supposed to, at least.)

Of course, media conservatives are blamed for stoking the flames of a culture war because center-left elites wouldn’t dare admit their own hands have been dirtied by something so asinine and lowbrow. Yet, curiously, they own all of these politicized initiatives to alter the culture. But you can’t have it both ways.

She's right about this as well as the rest of what she says in the piece. The "culture war" is a war of aggression and attrition waged by the left on much that America has traditionally valued. To the extent that anyone, conservative or even liberal, seeks to offer resistance to the left's ideological scorched earth march through the institutions, they can hardly be called "culture war-stokers," at least not by any honest observer.

Extraordinary Evidence and Belief in the Multiverse

Physicist and writer Brian Greene does a fine job of explaining the concept of the multiverse in a column at The Daily Beast which appeared some years ago.

In the piece he quotes the late Carl Sagan reminding us that in science extraordinary claims must be supported by extraordinary evidence and then tacitly acknowledges that there's not much evidence for the multiverse theory, so we're left to wonder why it has enjoyed so much popularity among some cosmologists.

Perhaps one reason is that our universe is comprised of forces and constants whose values are calibrated with unimaginably exact mathematical precision.

If any of dozens of forces, like gravity, for instance, deviated in their strength from the tiniest amounts - one part in 10^60 in the case of gravity - the universe could not exist, or if it did it would not be the sort of place where living things could emerge.

It's mind-bendingly improbable that such precision would have emerged by sheer chance and there are thus only two viable explanations for it. Either the universe is the product of an intelligent engineering process or there are so many different universes, an infinite number, that one like ours would have to exist as a consequence of sheer probability.

Just as the probability of a blind-folded rifleman hitting a postage stamp half a mile away is increased as the number of bullets fired increases, so, too, the chance of a universe as improbable as ours increases as the number of different universes that exist increases toward infinity.

It seems odd that scientists would posit an explanation which requires the existence of so many entities for which there's so little evidence, but consider that the only viable alternative is that the universe is the creation of an intentional agent, a God, and it's easier to understand why they do so.

It is, at least for some of them, an act of metaphysical desperation.

As physicist Bernard Carr once put it, "If you don't want God you better have a multiverse." They're the only two live options.

Anyway, it would be good to read Greene's article. It's written by a physicist who's sympathetic to the multiverse theory, and, like much of his work, it's very lucid and accessible to the layman.

No Longer Playing the Game

Many of his opponents are fond of trying to make everyone believe that Donald Trump is a raging anti-semite. Well, the raging anti-semite recently drove yet another nail deep into the coffin of that allegation.

A couple of weeks ago President Trump upended forty years of American policy vis a vis Israel by recognizing Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

People can debate the wisdom of this move, but coming on the heels of Trump's recognition two years ago of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and his more recent recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights last March, added to the fact that his daughter Ivanka married a Jewish man, Jared Kushner, one might think those who have accused him of anti-semitic bigotry would be a bit chagrined by all the counter evidence.

From the first link above:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. will no longer view Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as "inconsistent with international law." This effectively means the US will no longer adhere to a 1978 State Department legal opinion issued under the administration of former President Jimmy Carter, which determined the settlements violated international law.

"Calling the establishment of civilian settlements inconsistent with international law has not advanced the cause of peace," Pompeo said on Monday. "The hard truth is that there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace."

Pompeo is surely right about this. No matter how many concessions Israel makes to the Palestinians, no matter how far backwards the United States bends to get the Palestinians to simply admit Israel's right to exist, nothing ever comes of it except more Palestinian hostility toward Israel.

If the Palestinians aren't interested in peace with Israel then the United States may as well stop trying to be a neutral broker and start showing the Palestinians that their obduracy is not in their best interests and that we're no longer going to play their game.

Even so, whether recognizing the legality of the settlements is good or bad policy, calling Trump and anti-semitic bigot is surely one of the most ridiculous libels his opponents have tried to tarnish him with.

Meaning and Atheism

Richard Weikart is professor of history at California State University who wrote a piece for the Federalist a year or so ago in which he discusses the question of whether there can be meaning in life in a world without God.

Many atheists themselves tacitly acknowledge that the answer to that question is no. Here's Weikert:

[P]rominent atheist thinkers, such as Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, have insisted that because there is no God, there is also no cosmic purpose, no objective morality, and no transcendent meaning to life. The atheistic Duke University philosophy professor Alex Rosenberg dismissed meaning and morality as an illusion in a 2003 article, “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life.”

Some atheistic thinkers insist that the question of meaning is itself meaningless:

The prominent atheistic evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne has also expressed dismay that anyone would dare suggest that atheists don’t have any meaning in their lives. But if you dig deeper—for example, by actually reading the empirical study—you find that atheists who insist that non-religious people can find meaning in life have changed the meaning of the word “meaning.”

When theists talk of meaning and purpose they generally refer to an objective meaning and purpose, but atheists often take the question of meaning to refer to that which one arbitrarily invents for oneself. Weikert sees a problem with this:

If one can find meaning in life by creating one’s own meaning, then one is only “finding” the product of one’s own imagination. One has complete freedom to invent whatever meaning one wants.

This makes “meaning” on par with myths and fairy tales. It may make the non-religious person feel good, but it has no objective existence.

An invented meaning is like a child's imaginary friend. It's "real" to the child, but objectively speaking, it doesn't really exist. Nor, for that matter, do objective moral obligations:

In 2015 the online periodical BuzzFeed interviewed atheists about how they found meaning. While they uniformly denied that there was any overarching meaning to life or the universe, they insisted that they find meaning and significance in their own personal lives. Many also implied that certain moral positions are objectively better than others, even though they presumably do not believe in objective morality.

The denial of objective moral duties sometimes gets atheists mired in a bog of muddled thinking. Weikert quotes atheist scientist Nan Arney:

People tell religious fairy stories to create meaning, but I’d rather face up to what all the evidence suggests is the scientific truth – all we really have is our own humanity. So let’s be gentle to each other and share the joy of simply being alive, here and now. Let’s give it our best shot.

This is a non-sequitur. If all the evidence suggests that all there is is the natural world, how does it follow that we should be gentle with each other. It reminds me of the parody of humanist thinking by Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev: "Man has descended from apes, therefore we must love one another."

The unfortunate truth is that there's not much gentleness in nature, nor, if nature is all there is, is there much warrant for humans to repress their baser instinct for aggression and be gentle with each other.

The late atheist biologist Will Provine was much more consistent when he declared,

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….

Or as British atheist philosopher John Gray once put it, “Human life has no more meaning than that of slime mold.”

If naturalism is true it's hard to see how either Provine or Gray is wrong, which is why naturalism leads anyone who wishes to be logically consistent ultimately to embrace nihilism. That being so, the naturalist has three choices, 1) embrace nihilism, 2) pooh pooh logical consistency and simply follow one's subjective feelings, or 3) reconsider his or her naturalism.

The first puts one on a dehumanizing "highway to hell," the second is irrational and the third is psychologically wrenching, but there don't seem to be any other alternatives.

Looking at the Bright Side

Michael Stanton Gives us a dose of optimism in an essay at NRO. He writes that despite the doom and gloom we're constantly exposed to in much of our news, life in America keeps getting better.

Here's a summary of his argument:

For those of us who spend far too much time following the news these days, it is easy to feel that everything is falling apart. Regardless of your political ideology, there is no doubt that this country is politically divided and facing serious challenges. To make matters worse, we are entering an election season. Politicians will be trying their best to convince us that we are one vote away from choosing between Nazi Germany and Venezuela.

Yet, as we gather with friends and family this Thanksgiving, it is worth remembering that, beyond the headlines, things are actually pretty darn good. As both individuals and a country, we really have more than enough to be thankful for.

Stanton then goes on to note that our economy is doing great. Unemployment is at record lows, including minority unemployment, and earnings are up.

Inequality still exists but poverty is down. Last year, Americans donated $427 billion to charity, and more than 63 million people gave their time and talent to help others — over 8 billion volunteer hours.

Also down is crime, both property crime and violent crime, and prisoner incarceration rates are down 100,000 persons over the last decade.

Americans are healthier than ever. Americans are exercising and eating better, and smoking is at the lowest level since 1965. Race relations are improving as well as reflected in the growing number of interracial marriages and multi-racial children.

Stanton has the details to all this in his article at the link. He finishes with this:

Politics are not our life. The people we love, our faith, our families, the things we do that bring our lives joy and meaning — these things are far more important than politics. As George Will has pointed out: There are 357 million Americans; 350 million of them did not watch cable news or listen to talk radio yesterday.

Christmas Gift Idea

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out four years ago.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

A Black Friday Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our fifteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. it's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

How Thanksgiving Came to be a National Holiday

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. On September 28th, 1863, a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, however, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, this proclamation was actually written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things.

They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads as if it could have been written today.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving day.

The Sweetest Virtue

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans will observe tomorrow is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to family, friends, neighbors, and God.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the importance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) tomorrow will be a day filled with gratitude, love, and joy.

Near-Death Experience

A discussion at Mind Matters between Robert Marks and Walter Bradley, both of whom are scientists, focuses on the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and contains some interesting insights into these events.

The term "Near Death" seems to be misleading. Scientists have documented over 3500 cases over the past several decades in which people have been not just near to death but completely, clinically dead - no heartbeat or brain waves - but from which they returned to life.

More astonishing, upon regaining their life they were able to relate to their medical staff what had happened while they were dead.

In the past, these sorts of accounts were dismissed as hallucinations, wishful thinking or even fabrications, but so much evidence in support of their veridicality has accumulated over the last thirty years that they're being taken much more seriously today. The question contemporary researchers are trying to answer is not whether the experience is genuine but rather what exactly is going on when someone has one of these.

So far any natural, physical explanation has proven elusive. NDEs remain a mystery.

To the extent that NDEs are indeed genuine, they constitute a powerful argument for two claims that are incompatible with materialism. First, if someone is having an experience which includes thoughts, sensations and recall while his or her brain is completely shut down - dead - it strongly suggests that more than the brain is involved in thinking, sensing and remembering. NDEs are an emphatic pointer to the existence of an immaterial mind or soul.

Second, NDEs offer a compelling reason to believe that physical death is not the end of our existence, that there's more beyond this life and that death is a bridge to that further existence, much, perhaps, like childbirth is a bridge between two separate existences.

This short video offers a fascinating example of an NDE. A woman born blind lost her life, temporarily, in an accident and recounts what happened in the hospital. If she's telling the truth, and her account seems to be empirically verifiable, then it certainly detracts from the credibility of materialism's claim to be an adequate account of what it is to be a human being:

A Short Argument for the Existence of Mind

The following argument comes to us courtesy of philosopher Jay Richards at Mind Matters. It's an argument for the proposition that in addition to our material brain we also have an immaterial mind involved in our cognitive experience.

Here goes:

Imagine a scenario where I ask you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae, while a doctor does an MRI and takes a real-time scan of your brain state. We assume that the following statements are true:

(1) You’re a person. You have a “first person perspective.”
(2) You have thoughts.
(3) I asked you to think about eating a chocolate ice cream sundae.
(4) You freely chose to do so, based on my request.
(5) Those thoughts caused something to happen in your brain and perhaps elsewhere in your body.

Thinking about the sundae causes patterns of brain waves, but brain waves are simply electrochemical goings-on in the brain. They're not the same thing as your thoughts. They're not about anything, but your thoughts are. They're about the sundae.

Richards goes on:

We have thoughts and ideas — what philosophers call “intentional” states — that are about things other than themselves. We don’t really know how this works, how it relates to the brain or chemistry or the laws of physics .... But whenever we speak to another person, we assume it must be true. And in our own case, we know it’s true. Even to deny it is to affirm it.

Richards next observes that there's no dispute about points (1) through (5). They're common sense.

In other words, everyone who hasn’t been persuaded by skeptical philosophy assumes them to be true. But it’s not merely that everyone assumes them. They are basic to pretty much any other intellectual exercise, including arguing.

That’s because you have direct access to your thoughts and, by definition, to your first-person perspective. You know these things more directly than you could conclude, let alone know, any truth of history or science. You certainly know them more directly than you could possibly know the premises of an argument for materialism.

That matters because (1) through (5) defy materialist explanation.

So how might a materialist respond?

The materialist will want to say one of three things to avoid the implication of a free agent whose thoughts cause things to happen in the material world:

A) Your “thoughts” are identical to a physical brain state.
B) Your “thoughts” are determined by a physical brain state.
or
C) You don’t really have thoughts.

And if any one of (A), (B), or (C) is true, then most or all of (1) through (5) are false.

Richards concludes with this:

So here’s the conclusion: What possible reason could we have for believing (A), (B), or (C) and doubting (1) through (5)? Remember that if you opt for (A), (B), or (C), you can’t logically presuppose (1) through (5).

Surely this alone is enough to conclude that we can have no good reason for believing the materialist account of the mind.

Educated

I recently finished Tara Westover's autobiography titled Educated and thought that her story should serve as an inspiration to every young person who has been cheated out of an education by having attended a failing public school.

Westover was raised in a rural "survivalist" family in Idaho by a father who thought Armageddon was just around the corner and who was preparing for the day when the government would control every detail of every person's life. Neither she nor her six siblings, at least most of them, ever went to a hospital, ever saw a doctor, ever got vaccinated, ever attended school and ever received a birth certificate. Whatever education she had - which consisted largely in midwifery and the manufacture and use of various home remedies - she picked up at home from her mother.

Despite these disadvantages, despite her father's recklessness, paranoia and general whackiness, despite being terrorized by a psychopathic older brother, despite her mother's extraordinary submission to her husband's will, even to the point of allowing her children to suffer both physical and psychological harm at the hands of the older brother, Tara managed to get accepted at Brigham Young University, and within about a decade she had earned a PhD at Cambridge University.

Notwithstanding her lack of even the most rudimentary background knowledge - she had never heard of the holocaust and had no idea what it was when she entered BYU - she was like a dry sponge soaking up knowledge, teaching herself math, writing and history, eventually achieving her doctorate in history and writing a best-selling book of her own.

It's an incredible story and one from which young people can take the lesson that a weak educational background doesn't have to condemn one to a life of ignorance. It's possible through hard work to compensate for the learning and social skills one never received growing up.

Nor does a dysfunctional home environment have to determine our destiny as adults. Tara and her six siblings were raised in poverty in an auto salvage yard run by her apparently bi-polar father and a timid, acquiescent mother. The Westover siblings all had fairly similar backgrounds. Yet three of them eventually earned PhDs and managed to transcend their intellectually and socially disadvantaged childhoods.

It seems nearly miraculous, but it's apparently true, and what she and her siblings accomplished can also be accomplished by others who have the will and determination to surmount the environment into which they were born and reach their fullest potential as human beings.

Tara Westover's story is an inspiration, but one hopes that the scars of her childhood and the trauma of being estranged from her family, as she subsequently has been, don't prevent her from enjoying healthy relationships with others in the years ahead.

Weird Physics

Why do some physicists think that the material universe is dependent upon mind? Why do they think that an observation somehow creates a reality which didn't exist prior to the observation?

The following video illustrates a classic experiment that some say proves that materialism, the belief that matter is the fundamental reality, is false. The experiment is compatible with the view that mind is the most fundamental substance and that matter is a product of an observing mind.

One commenter at the Youtube site for this video asserts that all the theories seeking to explain the existence of the universe distill to three possibilities:

1. Either the universe(s) has always existed in one form or another and thus never needed creating because it always existed.

2. Or the universe(s) created itself from nothing where nothing previously existed.

3. Or that a divine entity has always existed and created it through an act of will.

He goes on to say that:

Each of these alternatives is equally outrageous and impossible to believe but one MUST be true. I like to think the first one is true.

I don't think I agree that these are all equally hard to believe. I think the second is much harder to believe than the other two. Be that as it may, the commenter favors the first as a matter of metaphysical preference which is another way of saying that he doesn't really want the third option to be true.

Why he's averse to that alternative, he doesn't say, but I think a lot of people, whether theists or naturalists, share his basic outlook. What they believe about the universe, their fundamental worldview, is not a matter of logic or compelling reasons. It's more a matter of taste, or subjective preference, or aesthetics.

The atheist Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledges this in his Gay Science where he writes that, "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."

It's very difficult, especially in this pragmatic, postmodern age, to persuade someone whose belief is based on a matter of personal preference to abandon it for an alternative. People tend to believe what they most want to be true and are not easily persuaded by reason and logic to believe otherwise. Indeed, they're often not even open to reason and logic.

Common Good Capitalism

In the last few years GDP and financial sector profits have soared due to the salutary effects of free market capitalism. As President Trump has cut taxes and removed the burdensome regulations imposed on business by the Obama administration the economy has taken off and unemployment is at record lows, especially for minorities.

But, as Emile Doak observes in an article in First Things, there's a downside to our prosperity. As the economy has been thrumming along we're also experiencing a continuing plague of drug dependence, suicide and other deaths of despair. Here's Doak:

It’s against this backdrop that another ambitious GOP politician, Sen. Marco Rubio, is thinking beyond mere macroeconomic metrics to place human dignity at the core of America’s political economy. In a speech at the Catholic University of America yesterday, Rubio...outlined an economic philosophy that departs significantly from [the typical capitalist] laissez-faire approach.

“The primary purpose of capitalism is to provide for human dignity,” Rubio proclaimed.... “We don’t need socialism, [but we also] don’t need simply to say ‘the market will take care of it by itself.’ What we need is to restore common good capitalism.”

...Rubio seeks to reclaim a holistic disposition that recognizes the members of the U.S. economy as human persons, not simply scientific datum. Conservatives are turning against outsourcing—both of American jobs to China and of economic thought to libertarians.

Rubio said that economic growth is an inadequate indicator of economic health: “Economic growth and record profits alone will not lead to the creation of dignified work.” He argues for placing human dignity at the center of the economy. “Does our country exist to serve the interests of the market? Or does the market exist to serve the interests of our nation?”

Doak goes on to list some of Rubio's specific policy proposals and interested readers are urged to read the original article at the link.

Doak concludes with this:

At its core, Rubio’s common good capitalism represents a more authentically Christian approach to political economy than anything either major party has put forth in recent memory. It balances the legitimate interests of businesses and workers. It respects the rights of shareholders, CEOs, and employees alike, while emphasizing the corresponding obligations they have to one another and to the country that made their success possible....

The path forward requires recalibrating our nation’s economic priorities, reemphasizing the dignity of work and he who provides it, and reintroducing the language of national interest and the common good. The common good capitalism Rubio outlined at CUA is the place to start.

I am certainly all in favor of reemphasizing the dignity of work, but at the risk of sounding churlish I don't know how we can do that in a society that implicitly denies, in ways both great and small, the even more basic dignity of human beings.

It's interesting that Rubio is offering a proposal that grows out of a Christian worldview because on a secular worldview it's very hard to see how human beings, which are in that view nothing but machines made of meat, can have any intrinsic worth, and without intrinsic worth, human dignity, to the extent it exists at all, is simply an illusion we foist upon ourselves to stroke our egos.

If you doubt that secularists really think like this consider the words of the early twentieth century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes:

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 consider the more recent claim by the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking:

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.

  And, of course, if we humans are just baboons and chemical scum then our work can hardly be imagined to rise to the level of "dignified activity."

I applaud Senator Rubio, but I think the cause of our distress, the cause of the mounting deaths of despair, lies at a much more fundamental level. We need to reemphasize not only the dignity of work but also the dignity of human beings and that will require simultaneously a persistent assault on the secular claim that we're no more than animals and a persistent reaffirmation that we are, in fact, created in the image of God and loved by Him.

Only if that is true can human beings lay any claim to dignity.

Who's Happier?

A column at The Federalist by Senior Editor Glenn Stanton takes to task Garrison Keillor, of all people, for what must be either his malevolence or gross ignorance.

Stanton quotes Keillor: “Liberalism is the politics of kindness.” Liberals “stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, [and] the defense of the weak against the powerful.” In...contrast, the “people who call themselves conservatives stand for tax cuts, and further tax cuts, annual tax cuts, the only policy they know. [They] use their refund to buy a gun and an attack dog” to keep everyone away who is not like them.

Well, that may be Keillor's point of view, but it turns out that serious scholarship has shown that none of this is true and is, in fact, the very opposite of the truth. According to the research,

Conservatives have happier families, find more meaning in life, are generally happier overall, and donate far more money and time to the needy than their liberal peers.

Also, it’s not just general conservatism per se that makes the difference. The more socially conservative people are, the happier and more content with life they are. And party affiliation matters significantly. Conservative Republicans outpace conservative, moderate, and liberal Democrats. When picking your neighbors, regardless of your politics or beliefs, conservative Republicans are who you want.

Stanton doesn't explain this, but it's probably the case that it's conservative values that foster contentment and Republican conservatives are generally more conservative than their Democratic counterparts. Stanton goes on:

Forty-one percent of both liberals and moderates report being “completely satisfied” with their family lives, while 52 percent of conservatives do.

Conservatives are also vastly more likely than liberals to believe marriage is essential in creating and maintaining strong families. They are also much more likely to actually be married, 62 versus 39 percent, thus benefiting from all the ways marriage improves overall well-being and contentment, personal happiness, economic security, long-term employment, longevity, better physical and mental health, and more.

Being a conservative increases the odds of being “completely satisfied with family life” by 23 percent. Married men and women who believe “marriage is needed to create strong families” have 67 percent greater odds of being completely content with their own family life than married couples who do not believe this.

Not only are they more satisfied with their family life but according to the research conservatives are just happier overall:

A much larger body of research has long demonstrated that, all things being equal, conservatives tend to be happier overall than their liberal neighbors are. This is truer for social conservatives than for fiscal conservatives, and the more conservative a conservative is, the happier he or she seems to be.

A massive study published earlier this year, involving five different data samples from 16 Western countries spanning more than four decades, adds more meat to this topic. These scholars from the University of Southern California found, as they put it, “In sum, conservatives reported greater meaning in life and greater life satisfaction than liberals.”

Conservatives experience greater meaning in life across their lives generally, but also daily and at most given moments throughout the day. The researchers conclude these findings are “robust” and that “there is some unique aspect of political conservatism that provides people with meaning and purpose in life.”

Multiple studies consistently show this difference in overall happiness and contentment is not affected by whose party or ideological partisans are in the seats of power in the White House or Congress. It seems as if the beliefs themselves matter most.

Since conservatives tend to be more religious than liberals the following is not surprising:

Likewise, regular church attenders are nearly twice as likely to say they are “very happy” than those who seldom or never attend, and this is consistently well-founded in a vast body of literature. So church-going, Republican conservatives are just some of the happiest, most contented folks around.

It seems reasonable to believe that happiness is correlated with generosity and this, too, is borne out by the research:

Finally, if you had to guess who are more generous with their money and volunteering their time to help those in need, would you guess Democrats or Republicans? ... Conservative Republicans are consistently more generous than their Democratic neighbors. This is true among all income levels, including the wealthiest. Republican millionaires give more of their money away to the needy than Democratic millionaires.

The data is so strong that even New York Times columnist Paul Sullivan admitted the “more Republican a county is, the more its residents report charitable contributions.” His colleague at the Times, Nicholas Kristof ... laments that his clan doesn’t fare so well on kindness in the form of real dollars:

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

In his excellent book Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, Arthur C. Brooks presents what he describes as “a large amount of data all pointing in the same direction.” ... He says, “People who favor government income redistribution are significantly less likely to donate to charity than those who do not.”

He perceptively notes that for a certain type of ideological American, “political opinions are a substitute for personal checks, but people who value economic freedom, and thus bridle against forced income distribution, are far more charitable” to those in need.

Stanton elaborates on all this in the article and offers links to the studies.

One thing I wondered as I read his piece is whether people were happier because they were religious and conservative or whether happier people just tend to gravitate toward those particular beliefs.

In any case, there's doubtless a moral in all this. In the universal human search for happiness in life, we'd do well to seek it where it's most likely to be found and not waste time looking for it where it's less likely to be found.

Relying on AI

There's lots of talk nowadays about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how computerized robots will eventually reach a stage of development in which they are essentially human, but much smarter.

Whether that future will ever be realized or not I doubt that anyone knows, though I confess to being skeptical that the characteristics of consciousness will ever be replicated in a machine. Nevertheless, I admit I could be wrong.

One thing that seems certain, however, is that AI has not yet arrived at that future. Robert Marks, Director and Senior Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence in a piece at Mind Matters, lists several events that illustrate that the abilities of AI are still dependent upon the abilities of human programmers.

Marks discusses a half dozen or so examples, but here are two of the more interesting - and tragic, even near catastrophic - failures of AI that he mentions:

An Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian in 2018: “According to data obtained from the self-driving system, the system first registered radar and LIDAR observations of the pedestrian about six seconds before impact, when the vehicle was traveling at 43 mph… As the vehicle and pedestrian paths converged, the self-driving system software classified the pedestrian as an unknown object, as a vehicle and then as a bicycle with varying expectations of future travel path.

At 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision.” By then, it was too late.

This next one occurred when AI could be said to have been in its infancy, but it's nonetheless frightening to think how close we came to a world-wide holocaust due to our reliance on machines:

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union constructed Oko, a system tasked with early detection of a missile attack from the United States. Oko detected such an attack on September 26, 1983. Sirens blared and the system declared that an immediate Soviet retaliatory strike was mandatory.

A Soviet officer in charge felt that something was not right and did not launch the retaliatory strike. His decision was the right one. Oko had mistakenly interpreted sun reflections off of clouds as inbound American missiles. By making this decision, the Soviet officer, Lt. Col. Stanislov Petrov, saved the world from thermonuclear war.

Of course, when mistakes and oversights are discovered programs can be rewritten so as to avoid them in the future, but, as Marks observes,

The cost of discovering an unexpected contingency can, however, be devastating. A human life or a thermonuclear war is too high a price to pay for such information. And even after a specific problem is fixed, additional unintended contingencies can continue to occur.

He notes that there are three ways to minimize unintended consequences:

(1) use systems with low complexity, (2) employ programmers with elevated domain expertise, and (3) testing. Real world testing can expose many unintended consequences but hopefully without harming anyone.

For AI systems, low complexity means narrow AI. AI thus far, when reduced to commercial practice, has been relatively narrow. As the conjunctive complexity of a system grows linearly, the number of contingencies grows exponentially. Domain expertise [on the part of the programmers] can anticipate many of these contingencies and minimize those which are unintended.

But, as the examples he gives in his column illustrate, even the best of programmers can't anticipate everything. The greatest threat, Marks concludes, "is the unintended contingency, the thing that never occurred to the programmer."

Rolling the Dice

From time to time we've talked about the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time"). Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of faith. The discussions are almost always pleasant, informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually what such conversations should be like, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here. For those readers who might prefer a slightly more elaborate explication try this post and the debate it links to.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. III)

In the previous two posts I argued that Philosopher Peter Atterton failed in his attempt to show that there's a contradiction between God's goodness and the evil in the world and that the theist's concept of God is therefore incoherent.

Atterton is not finished, however. He next turns his attention to one more alleged contradiction, the alleged incompatibility between God's omniscience and His moral perfection:

What about God’s infinite knowledge — His omniscience? Philosophically, this presents us with no less of a conundrum.

Leaving aside the highly implausible idea that God knows all the facts in the universe, no matter how trivial or useless (Saint Jerome thought it was beneath the dignity of God to concern Himself with such base questions as how many fleas are born or die every moment), if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.

But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?

There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy.

But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.

Atterton is here committing the fallacy of equivocation, slyly using the word "know" in two different senses.

He first uses "know" propositionally, e.g. as someone might "know" who won the 1980 World Series, but then he gives the word an experiential meaning, as in one may "know" the pleasure of a fine wine.

When philosophers talk of God's omniscience they're speaking of propositional knowledge. God knows all true propositions. Omniscience doesn't entail that God knows what something like guilt or lust feels like experientially.

Nevertheless, I'd argue that it certainly seems possible that God knows very well what lust feels like without himself ever having experienced it, just as he can know what sweetness is like without ever having tasted anything sweet or what red would look like before he ever created light or eyes to see it with.

After all, if God designed and created man's emotions and sensations it's reasonable to think that He has an exhaustive understanding of what he has created even if he himself never has the experiences that give rise to those sensations in humans.

If this is possible then Atterton has not demonstrated a contradiction between God's omniscience and moral perfection and has therefore failed to show that there's an incoherence in the theist's concept of God. His argument is very unpersuasive.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we discussed an attempt by philosopher Peter Atterton to show that God's goodness is incompatible with the evil we find in the world. He concludes that this incompatibility renders the concept of God held by most theists incoherent.

Atterton concedes that moral evil can be explained by God having granted human beings free will, but, he insists, human free will cannot account for natural evils such as result from tsunamis, disease, etc.

Here's his argument:

However, this [human free choice] does not explain so-called physical evil (suffering) caused by nonhuman causes (famines, earthquakes, etc.). Nor does it explain, as Charles Darwin noticed, why there should be so much pain and suffering among the animal kingdom.

Actually, however, the Judeo-Christian theological tradition does explain it. According to this tradition the world and all that is in it was created good and given to Man as a gift for him to superintend, much like a husband might out of love build a house as a gift to his new bride.

God was in some sense present in this "home," and His presence acted as a governor on the laws of nature, holding them in check, overriding them and restraining them from producing the cataclysmic events which cause the awful pain and suffering we see today.

Man, however, chose to rebel against God in an act of cosmic betrayal akin to a much-loved wife cheating on a good and faithful husband. That act of infidelity resulted not only in the estrangement of Man from God but also the estrangement of Man's world from God.

The Fall of Man corrupted everything associated with Man and consequently the goodness of creation was distorted and altered. God withdrew from the home He had built for Himself and Man, the laws of nature were no longer restrained, and the world became a much less hospitable place.

Pain and suffering in both the moral sphere as well as in the natural world are, according to this view, a consequence, ultimately, of Man's free choice. The fault lies with Man, not God.

Now one may believe that this tradition is wrong. One may believe that nothing like it ever happened, but the starting point of Atterton's argument is the stipulation that God created the world. If that stipulation is accepted then something very much like this narrative is possible.

Moreover, if this account of the Fall of Man is approximately correct, then it's possible that the world as we find it today is not at all the world that God originally created. The present suffering of the world, given this scenario, is a result of Man's betrayal, not God's will, and there's therefore no contradiction between God's goodness and human suffering.

And if there's no demonstrable contradiction then, pace Atterton, there's no demonstrable incoherence.

More tomorrow.

Is the Concept of God Incoherent? (Pt. I)

Peter Atterton, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, had a column in the New York Times last spring in which he argued that the concept of God as held by most theists is incoherent and thus not credible.

Atterton is not the first to advance this argument, it's been around for a long time despite the fact that it fails to establish what it claims to establish.

In order to show that a concept is incoherent there has to be an explicit or implicit contradiction in the concept. For example, the concept of a square circle is incoherent since a figure cannot be both square and circular at the same time.

Here are some excerpts from Atterton's argument in the Times:

I’d like to focus on a specific question: Does the idea of a morally perfect, all-powerful, all-knowing God make sense? Does it hold together when we examine it logically?

You’ve probably heard the paradox of the stone before: Can God create a stone that cannot be lifted? If God can create such a stone, then He is not all powerful, since He Himself cannot lift it. On the other hand, if He cannot create a stone that cannot be lifted, then He is not all powerful, since He cannot create the unliftable stone. Either way, God is not all powerful.

Surprisingly, Atterton admits that there's a possible solution to the paradox, but why mention the stone paradox as an objection to the coherence of theism if there's a plausible solution to it?

The way out of this dilemma is usually to argue, as Saint Thomas Aquinas did, that God cannot do self-contradictory things. Thus, God cannot lift what is by definition “unliftable,” just as He cannot “create a square circle” or get divorced (since He is not married). God can only do that which is logically possible.

Having answered his own argument Atterton then says that, well, there are other difficulties which make the concept of God incoherent:

[E]ven if we accept, for the sake of argument, Aquinas’ explanation, there are other problems to contend with. For example, can God create a world in which evil does not exist? This does appear to be logically possible.

Presumably God could have created such a world without contradiction. It evidently would be a world very different from the one we currently inhabit, but a possible world all the same. Indeed, if God is morally perfect, it is difficult to see why he wouldn’t have created such a world. So why didn’t He?

This is not much of an argument. It certainly doesn't show that there's a contradiction between God's attributes of omnipotence and goodness. Atterton is asking the question, if God could do something that He might've been expected to do, why didn't He do it? To which the answer is simply that He evidently had good reasons for not doing so.

As long as it's possible that God had sufficient reason not to create the world Atterton envisions then he has failed to show a contradiction in God's attributes. What Atterton needs to do to show a contradiction is to demonstrate that it's impossible or at least unlikely that God could've had good reasons for allowing evil to exist, and this would be a very difficult philosophical task. After all, how could anyone know such a thing?

The rest of his attempt to find a contradiction between the attributes of God fares little better. We'll look at another of them tomorrow.