Moral Paralysis

I've run the following post on moral relativism several times in the past, and having talked about that topic recently in my classes I thought it'd be appropriate to run it again, slightly edited:

Denyse O'Leary passes on a story told by a Canadian high school philosophy teacher named Stephen Anderson. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as human beings:

I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies — multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha (see below). Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital.

I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions, but I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff.” Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

While we may hope some are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is “never judge, never criticize, never take a position.”

This is a picture of Bibi Aisha. She was deliberately mutilated by her family because she did not want to stay in a marriage to which she did not consent and in which she was treated like livestock.

Anyone who would do this to another human being is evil. Any culture which condones it is degenerate, and any person who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this, or to sympathize with her suffering, is a moral dwarf.

The shocking prevalence of moral dwarfism in our culture should not surprise us, however. Once a society jettisons its Judeo-Christian heritage it no longer has any non-subjective basis for making moral judgments. Its moral sense is stunted, warped, and diminished because it's based on nothing more than one's own subjective feelings.

With no objective moral standard by which to judge behavior people lose confidence in their moral judgments. They doubt that their opinions are any more "right" than the opinions of the people who did this to Bibi Aisha, and so they say things like, "If it's right for them then it's right", or "It's wrong for us to judge others", or "If you say it's wrong that's just your opinion."

This is moral paralysis, and it's a legacy of modernity and the secular Enlightenment which, in their embrace of metaphysical naturalism, have pulled the rug out from under all objective moral standards and offered nothing that can take their place beyond a vapid subjectivism.

Human Equality

It's commonly assumed that our ideas of the worth of the individual, of human rights and human equality all arose out of the period roughly between 1650 and 1800 called the Enlightenment, but that's a mistaken assumption. An article by Cameron Hilditch in National Review helps to set the record straight.

He writes, "...the Enlightenment was much less of a break with what preceded it and much more indebted to centuries of ... moral osmosis: It was not a sudden kickstart of reason after ages of enforced ignorance."

Hilditch quotes scholar Brian Tierney:

... already by 1300 a number of rights were regularly claimed and defended...: “They would include rights to property, rights of consent to government, rights of self-defence, rights of infidels, marriage rights, procedural rights,” and also measures to make these rights enforceable against positive law.

But from whence did people living in the Europe of the late Middle Ages get this notion of rights? It certainly wasn't from the ancient Greeks and Romans whose concept of rights was extremely attenuated. The only people who had rights in ancient societies were those who were powerful enough to protect themselves and their property. Women, children and the average male had few rights. Slaves and aliens had none.

Somewhere along the line that began to change, and the change agent was Christianity.

Several doctrines of the early Christians were responsible for this revolutionary view of human beings. First among these was the belief that we are all made in the image of God. This by itself conferred enormous dignity on humanity. We aren't just beasts, we were made by the Creator of the universe just a little lower than the angels.

Second, was the belief that the incarnate God in the person of Jesus loves each individual enough to sacrifice His life for us on the cross. Thus, Paul could write, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” People who believed this could scarcely avoid thinking of all persons as equals in the eyes of God.

Third, the fact that Jesus spent His brief life ministering not to the rich and powerful but to the poor, the diseased and the suffering sent the message to all who followed Him that these individuals were the special objects of God's concern and compassion. To believe that was to realize that the most wretched soul was infinitely important to God and thus to be valued by those who sought to follow God's command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

Jesus' teaching on servanthood, that the first shall be last, inculcated into Christians that the lowly were every bit as important, if not more so than those exalted by the world. Christians couldn't very well claim to love God while despising those He loved.

As Hilditch observes,

It’s almost impossible for us to get a real sense of just how earth-shattering the millennia-long aftershock of Easter has been on our civilization. We are all in our moral sensibilities and basic worldview creatures of Christianity to such a great extent that we cannot see it from the vantage point of a pre-Christian society without tremendous imaginative effort.

We might say, as Tom Holland does in his book Dominion, that we're saturated in Christian assumptions to the extent that we're not even aware of it, nor of how historically unique those assumptions were.

The message of human equality and human rights didn't always sink in, of course. It didn't always find receptive soil, either in the hearts of men or in cultures, but over the centuries it continued to germinate until it eventually blossomed into a set of ideas about the human person that are today, at least in the West, taken for granted.

Hilditch writes:

The contingency of everything we think decent and valuable about ourselves and our society upon the sorrows and the triumph of this one man, in whose luminous shadow we have all lived for the last 2,000 years, consistently eludes us. We forget that in a historically demonstrable way, we in the West owe our sense of common universal humanity entirely to Jesus of Nazareth and his Church.

It is a great irony, and a great tragedy, that just as the ideas of human worth, dignity and rights have reached a historical apogee in the West, Westerners are rejecting the very source and foundation of those ideas. They think they can hold on to worth, dignity and rights while discarding the God who has bestowed those gifts and upon whom those gifts depend.

It won't work. Nothing else, neither reason nor ideology, can support and sustain them. If modern man succeeds in expunging God from his culture and institutions he will also succeed in plunging humanity into a terrifying darkness whose brutality and inhumanity will rival or surpass the horrifying regimes of the Nazis and the Stalinists.

Perhaps, though, it's not too late to reverse course and avert this looming catastrophe.

Gonzaga Won?!

A friend writes:

Congratulations to Gonzaga! Turns out those mail-in baskets that weren't counted until around 3 a.m. made all the difference. Sure am glad we got the right champion. 😉

Funny.

Brouhaha Over the Georgia Voting Law

It's astonishing to see how corporations, which just a decade or two ago were the boogeymen of Democrat mythology, have now become that party's BFFs. The Democrats have within the space of a few years become the fat cat party and Republicans are now the party of the working man.

Who'd have thought twenty five years ago that that would happen?

The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel describes a good example of obsequious corporate genuflection to the progressive agenda can be found in the behavior of Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian who has seized upon the Georgia voting reform legislation to ostentatiously place his moral virtue on public display.

Unfortunately for Mr. Bastian, as well as for Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Big Tech, all the way up to President Joe Biden, none of the folks condemning the Georgia law appear to know what they're talking about.

Strassel writes:

According to Delta CEO Ed Bastian, there is only one reason Georgia passed a voting reform: to suppress the votes of black Americans and other minorities. Georgia’s Republican Legislature used the “excuse” of voter fraud to “make it harder for many underrepresented voters” to “exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives,” Mr. Bastian wrote this week in a memo to employees.

Mr. Bastian has plenty of company in the C-suites. Some 72 black executives, including the CEO of Merck and a former CEO of American Express, signed an open letter calling on corporate colleagues to fight “undemocratic” and “un-American” GOP efforts across the states to “assault” the “fundamental tenets of our democracy.”

Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Apple chimed in, and dozens more are readying outraged press releases.

They're eager to voice their moral outrage at the Georgia legislature for their allegedly bigoted attempt to suppress the black vote, but their umbrage serves as a good lesson on why it's wise to check your facts before strutting your moral superiority for everyone to admire.

You suffer much less embarrassment that way and don't look nearly as stupid:

Thus the sight of the nation’s top business leaders monotonously reciting a fact-free narrative. As they know, state legislatures are moving to reaffirm longstanding rules and restore confidence in electoral systems that were arbitrarily remade during Covid.

ID requirements are no more racist at the ballot box than on a Delta flight. Some 36 states have them, and they’ve been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Mr. Bastian’s moralizing memo fails to cite a single one of the supposedly “egregious measures” in the bill that will suppress the vote, although he does stress he hears his employees’ “pain.” The letter from the 72 executives misstates the Georgia rules, suggesting the only way to satisfy the ID requirement is with a driver’s license, even though “200,000 Georgians lack a license.”

In fact, voters can also use a free, state-issued nondriver ID, and those who lack one can fulfill the requirement with a Social Security number or even a copy of a “current utility bill, bank statement, government check, or paycheck.” The letter suggests the Georgia “playbook”.... is of a piece with “police dogs, poll taxes, literacy taxes.”

One can only hope Merck is more rigorous when conducting pharmaceutical trials.

When people in my state present themselves to receive the Covid vaccine they have to show proof of eligibility, and as far as I know no one has complained that that's racially discriminatory. Why then is it racially discriminatory to require proof of eligibility in order to vote?

If there's racism afoot in requiring an ID of some sort it's on the part of those progressives who think so little of minority voters that they don't believe them capable of mustering the wherewithal to secure a free ID.

And then there's Major League Baseball whose commissioner Rob Manfred was so outraged at this almost completely innocuous legislation that he's decided to punish many innocent Georgians, including a lot of black Georgians, by yanking the All-Star game from Atlanta. Mr. Manfred must figure that depriving average citizens of the 100 million dollars of income the game would've brought to their businesses is an effective way to show those Georgia legislators how awful they are and how righteous he is.

Unfortunately, President Biden has done nothing to help clarify what Georgia has actually done and has instead thrown gasoline on the fire by demonstrating that he either doesn't know what he's talking about (plausible) or that he's deliberately trying to deceive the American people (equally plausible).

In what appears to be a ridiculous pander to the far left-wing of his party, a wing which perhaps he finds more congenial than he let on during the election campaign, he repeatedly misrepresented the Georgia law and encouraged MLB, and by extension, all American corporations, to boycott Atlanta.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post (The Washington Post!) has in fact given Mr. Biden four "Pinocchios," the maximum possible, over his misrepresentations of the Georgia reforms. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air fills us in:

Here are the two Biden statements with which Kessler takes specific issue:

“What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It’s sick. It’s sick … deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work.” President Biden, in remarks at a news conference, March 25.

“Among the outrageous parts of this new state law, it ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over.” Biden, in a statement “on the attack on the right to vote in Georgia,” March 26

In fact, as Kessler explains, the bill does neither of those things. It doesn’t change the voting times at all on Election Day, which was 7 am – 7 pm before the new bill passed and will still be 7-7 afterward.

It doesn’t change the rule that people who get in line by 7 pm are allowed to vote even if polls close; that’s still the case, too. Some of those ideas were discussed, but none made it into the final version of the bill. Neither did ending early voting on Sundays.

Contrary to what Biden claims, the bill actually expands early voting time:

"One of the biggest changes in the bill would expand early voting access for most counties, adding an additional mandatory Saturday and formally codifying Sunday voting hours as optional. Counties can have early voting open as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at minimum.

If you live in a larger metropolitan county, you might not notice a change. For most other counties, you will have an extra weekend day, and your weekday early voting hours will likely be longer."

The previous version of the law set the times for early-voting locations as “normal business hours,” which was interpreted as 9-5. Counties now have to provide that at a minimum, but could choose to extend those hours as they see fit.

The biggest changes to Georgia law had nothing to do with polling times, but with the absentee-ballot process. Access to that did get significantly restricted on timing, but not on eligibility, although the law also puts new restrictions on third-party groups trying to register people for absentee voting

. Even those changes are hardly Jim Crow-esque, as Biden painted them in his presser:

Mail-in absentee voting will look the most different for voters, especially after 1.3 million people used that method in the November general election. Voters over 65, with a disability, in the military or who live overseas will still be able to apply once for a ballot and automatically receive one the rest of an election cycle. But the earliest voters can request a mail-in ballot will be 11 weeks before an election instead of 180 days — less than half as much time.

The final deadline to complete an application is moved earlier, too. Instead of returning an application by the Friday before election day, SB 202 now backs it up to two Fridays before. Republican sponsors of the bill and local elections officials say this will cut down on the number of ballots rejected for coming in late because of the tight turnaround....

State and local governments are no longer allowed to send unsolicited applications, and third-party groups that send applications have new rules to follow, too. Their applications must be clearly marked as being “NOT an official government publication” that it is “NOT a ballot,” and must clearly state which group is sending the blank request.

Plus, third-party groups are only allowed to send applications to voters who have not already requested or voted an absentee ballot. The groups potentially face a penalty for each duplicate sent.

In fact, as anyone who cares about the truth could easily ascertain, the Georgia law is less restrictive than the voting laws in very liberal New York and President Biden's home state of Delaware. Does Mr. Biden think the legislators of those states are sick bigots?

Moreover, the Georgia law is certainly less draconian than the voting laws in Communist China which President Biden's own State Department has accused of committing genocide against its Muslim Uighur population. So, will the president encourage a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics?

Of course not. But no matter. Mr. Biden may be a mendacious, hypocritical nincompoop, but he's not that nefarious Trump, and to our Democrat friends that's evidently all that matters.

Big Tech Book Burning

Josh Holdenried vice president and executive director of Napa Legal Institute, summarizes Big Tech's efforts to cancel organizations, authors and books which are grounded in a Christian worldview.

So far this year, Holdenreid tells us, religious groups and figures have been silenced by tech companies at a rate of about one a week.

LifeSiteNews, a popular religious news website had its YouTube channel permanently banned by Google in February. All its videos were deleted.

Google claimed its action was a response to Covid-19 misinformation but wouldn’t tell LSN which video had offended its standards. The tech giant had flagged LSN for a video of an American Catholic bishop criticizing vaccines developed with fetal cells. The website’s editor in chief said “our best guess is that the channel was taken down for our frank and factual discussion of the controversy around abortion-tainted medicines and vaccines.”

In January, Bishop Kevin Doran, an Irish Catholic, was banned from Twitter for tweeting, “There is dignity in dying. As a priest, I am privileged to witness it often. Assisted suicide, where it is practiced, is not an expression of freedom or dignity.” The company reversed its decision only after public opposition.

Then there was this:

The previous month, Twitter blocked a post from the Daily Citizen, which is run by Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian nonprofit, and suspended its account. The reason: a tweet that respectfully challenged the underlying premise of transgenderism.

Twitter made a similar move against Catholic World Report, though the company later said it had acted in error. Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center saw Amazon ban his book criticizing transgenderism, “When Harry Became Sally.” Amazon shows no signs of changing course.

Books from specific publishers are often targeted, such as Catholic TAN Books. One of its authors is Paul Kengor, who wrote an anticommunist tract called “The Devil and Karl Marx. ” TAN Books can’t advertise his work on Facebook, or that of Carrie Gress, who wrote a book on “rescuing the culture from toxic femininity.”

Facebook has also banned ads for Kimberly Cook’s book, “Motherhood Redeemed.” The offending ad called it “a book that challenges feminism in the modern world.”

Holdenreid concludes with this sage and important admonition:

It seems likely that religious groups and individuals will face mounting threats from tech companies. Their views on marriage, sexuality, life and other moral issues are unpopular among the Silicon Valley set. Religious groups should refuse to silence themselves, change their views, or otherwise back down.

Censorship is a symptom of a national collapse in civic culture. Curing the deeper disease will take all the courage and conviction we can muster.

Tyrants and totalitarians always ban ideas. They realize at some level that their movements are built on lies and that the free exchange of ideas disinfects their lies. They understand that as long as people have access to contrary ideas their nonsense will be exposed and never prevail, but if their views are the only ones ever heard or read then they'll seem compelling and people will accept them, like people accept a current fashion, in order to demonstrate their own moral and intellectual sophistication.

Thus, our high tech, elite barbarians ban books and cancel people. Given the power they'd be happy, if necessary, to eliminate altogether both the books and the people who write and read them.

John Updike on the Resurrection of Jesus

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but despite his flaws he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively, literally, physically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes to all my readers for a very meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

A Good Friday Meditation

As Christians observe this the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday, it might be helpful for both Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on Golgotha.

It might be good today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and who those people on the train were and are.

The Miracle of Easter

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from a circularity. He seems to base the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident.

They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that it's possible that there are an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist. The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it's not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well? If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead. After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

The Evil Men Do

As the Christian world prepares to remember again this Friday the torture and cruel execution of Jesus some two thousand years ago, it would be good to be reminded that Christians still suffer today, often in horrific ways, for their devotion to Him.

In his book Live Not by Lies Rod Dreher takes us back to the Eastern Europe of the 1940s and 1950s and cites a number of examples of the suffering Christians experienced at the hands of the Communists in those years. He writes:

The Romania that Soviet troops occupied at the end of World War II was a deeply religious country. After Romanian Stalinists seized dictatorial control in 1947, among the most vicious anti-Christian persecution in the history of Soviet-style communism began.

From 1949 to 1951, the state conducted the “Piteşti Experiment.” The Piteşti prison was established as a factory to reengineer the human soul. Its masters subjected political prisoners, including clergy, to insane methods of torture to utterly destroy them psychologically so they could be remade as fully obedient citizens of the People’s Republic.

Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand, held captive from 1948 until he was ransomed into Western exile in 1964, was an inmate at Piteşti. In 1966 testimony before a US Senate committee, Wurmbrand spoke of how the communists broke bones, used red-hot irons, and all manner of physical torture.

They were also spiritually and psychologically sadistic, almost beyond comprehension. Wurmbrand told the story of a young Christian prisoner in Piteşti who was tied to a cross for days. Twice daily, the cross bearing the man was laid flat on the floor, and one hundred other inmates were forced by guards to urinate and defecate on him.

Then the cross was erected again and the Communists, swearing and mocking, “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it.

Wurmbrand asked the priest how he could consent to commit such sacrilege. The Catholic priest was “half-mad,” Wurmbrand recalled, and begged him to show mercy. All the other prisoners were beaten until they accepted this profane communion while the communist prison guards taunted them.

Wurmbrand told the American lawmakers: "I am a very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the 20th century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes."

After his release, Pastor Wurmbrand, who died in 2001, devoted the rest of his life to speaking out for persecuted Christians. “Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”

Historian Hannah Arendt, in her magisterial work The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote of both the Communists and the Nazis that "It is because men lost their belief in a final judgment that they became monsters. The best had no hope and the worst lost all fear." When men no longer believe there's any accountability for how they behave they're capable of the most monstrous behavior.

Lurking in the heart of every man is a capacity for unimaginable evil. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent years suffering in the Soviet prison camps called the Gulag, observed that "“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts."

In his book Tortured for Christ, Wurmbrand echos Arendt. He writes,

When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man. The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish." I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I do not believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

Here's an excerpt from his book:

A pastor by the name of Florescu was tortured with red hot iron pokers and with knives. He was beaten very badly. Then starving rats were driven into his cell through a large pipe. He could not sleep because he had to defend himself all the time. If he rested a moment the rats would attack him.

He was forced to stand for two weeks, day and night. The Communists wished him to betray his brethren, but he resisted steadfastly. Eventually they brought his fourteen year-old son to the prison and began to whip the boy in front of his father, saying that they would continue to beat him until the pastor said what they wished him to say.

The poor man was half-mad. He bore it as long as he could, then he cried to his son, "Alexander, I must say what they want! I can't bear your beating anymore!"

The son answered, "Father, don't do me the injustice of having a traitor as a parent. Withstand! If they kill me I will die with the words, 'Jesus and my fatherland.'" The Communists, enraged, fell upon the child and beat him to death, with blood spattered over the walls of the cell. He died praising God. Our dear brother Florescu was never the same after seeing this.

Handcuffs with sharp nails on the inside were placed on our wrists. If we were totally still they didn't cut us. But in the bitterly cold cells, when we shook with cold, our wrists would be torn by the nails.

Christians were hung upside down on ropes and beaten so severely that their bodies swung back and forth under the blows. Christians were also placed in ice-box "refrigerator cells," which were so cold that frost and ice covered the inside. I was thrown into one while I had very little clothing on. Prison doctors would watch through an opening until they saw symptoms of freezing to death, then they would give a signal and guards would rush in to take us out and make us warm.

When we were finally warmed, we would immediately be put back into the ice-box cells to freeze. Thawing out, then freezing to within minutes of death, then being thawed out - over and over again! Even today there are times when I can't bear to open a refrigerator.

We Christians were sometimes forced to stand inside wooden boxes only slightly larger than we were. This left no room to move. Dozens of sharp nails were driven into every side of the box, with their razor-sharp points sticking through the wood. While we stood perfectly still, it was all right. But we were forced to stand in these boxes for endless hours; when we became fatigued and swayed with tiredness, the nails would pierce our bodies.

If we moved or twitched a muscle - there were the horrible nails.

What the Communists have done to Christians passes any possibility of human understanding. I have seen Communists whose faces while torturing believers shone with rapturous joy. They cried out while torturing Christians, "We are the devil!"

Some like to think that human beings are basically good, but history doesn't offer much support for that belief.

Around the world today, particularly in many Muslim countries and Communist countries like China and North Korea, Christians still suffer because they seek to model their lives after that of their Master whose own torture and death is commemorated on Friday. Voice of the Martyrs, the organization founded by Pastor Wurmbrand in 1966, is a good resource for those wishing to learn about the nature and extent of that suffering today.

Return of the God Hypothesis

Today is the day that philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's latest book is to be released. It's titled The Return of the God Hypothesis, and according to the reviewers it promises to present a very powerful argument in favor of the idea that the universe and life are the product of an intelligent, transcendent creator - either the God of traditional theism or something very much like God.

Meyer founded and heads the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. He has a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England and is the author of two previous books that are essential reading in the scientific debate about evolution. The first, Signature in the Cell, examines the role of DNA and the cellular-level evidence for intelligent design.

The second, Darwin’s Doubt, shows how the explosive origin of animal life in the Cambrian era makes a case for intelligent design (ID).

Darwinians have been flummoxed by the arguments in both books and have apparently realized that the best response is to simply pretend they don't exist.

Meyer did an interview recently with World magazine. You can read the whole interview here, but one part of it was particularly interesting to me. Meyer is reportedly taking the debate about intelligent design to the next level. Heretofore, ID theorists were careful to avoid claims about who they thought the designer was, how long ago the designer acted, and so forth.

They simply argued that life showed ample evidence of having been intelligently engineered and that the naturalistic theory which asserts that it's the result of blind, purposeless processes is intellectually unsupportable.

In The Return of the God Hypothesis Meyer makes the case for explicitly identifying the designer with the God of theism. Toward the end of the interview he's asked this (The interviewer's remarks are in boldface, Meyer's reply follows):

Critics of intelligent design have accused the ID movement of secretly pushing creationism. You and your allies have insisted ID is a legitimate scientific inquiry that stops short of trying to identify the designer. Now you’re making the case for His identity. Could this book give fuel to your critics?

I’m sure it could, but that’s not an evidential objection. That’s an accusation as to motive. It is irrelevant to the merits of the argument itself.

The argument we’ve made is that nature points to a designing agent. In biology, we see evidence of design in the digital code that’s present in the DNA molecule. We know from our uniform and repeated experience that information in a digital or alphabetic form—what we call sequence-specific—invariably arises from an intelligent source.

If we’re trying to reconstruct what happened in the past, we want to consider what we know about cause-and-effect patterns in the world around us. The same method of reasoning Darwin used has led us to a non-Darwinian conclusion: If there’s a program, then there’s a programmer. Now, I’m looking at a broader range of evidence to answer: “Who is the designer?”

This then is something new in your quest.

In making the original case for design in biology, I left unspecified whether the designing intelligence was a transcendent designer or an immanent designer, a designer within the cosmos or a designer that transcended matter, space, time, and energy, what we call the universe.

In this new book, what I’m doing is simply looking at a broader range of evidence to answer a question that’s been posed to me, which is, “What can we say from science about the identity of the designer? Is it more likely to be an alien or a god, and immanent or transcendent?”

And you’re seeing ... The designer must have preceded the universe, because the fine-tuning was established at the very beginning of the universe. No immanent intelligence, no space alien designer within the cosmos, can account for the laws of physics upon which its very life depends and which preceded its existence.

The fine-tuning problems point to a transcendent design that preexists matter, space, time, and energy.

Of course, the identity of the designer has been implicit in the fine-tuning argument from the beginning. Anything responsible for the universe had to be extremely powerful, extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgeable and had to transcend the universe it created which means it couldn't be spatial, temporal or material. This sounds very much like the God of theism.

Intelligent Design theorists, however, have for much of the last several decades focused on the biological rather than the cosmological evidence for design so they rarely "officially" drew this inference. Meyer's book evidently takes the next step and fuses the biological evidence with the evidence from physics, chemistry, and cosmology to present a unified philosophical and scientific argument for the existence of God.

I urge you to read the rest of the interview - it's not long - and if you're interested in getting a copy of The Return of the God Hypothesis you can order it from the good people at my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds. It's a small independent shop standing athwart the Amazonian goliath and the big box stores. I encourage you to check them out and give them your support.

Why Is It?

Why is it that conservatives are accused of being divisive but liberals almost never are? Conservatives find themselves today on defense against an onslaught of liberal attempts to "fundamentally change the country," as former president Barack Obama famously put it. They're like the guy being pushed and punched by an assailant, who puts up his arms to ward off the blows and is then accused of provoking his attacker because he tried to protect himself.

Our liberal friends evidently think it's divisive to believe that we have inalienable constitutional rights to free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion and freedom to bear arms; to believe that the breakdown of the traditional nuclear family has been a social disaster; to refuse to pretend that biological men are really biological women; to think that traditional marriage shouldn't be tinkered with; to believe that killing unwanted babies is a bad thing; to believe that people who come into this country should do so legally and that immigration should be controlled and orderly; and to believe that before we commit to bankrupting the country to address climate change we should be given some solid evidence that the climate is actually changing, profoundly and irrevocably, that the change is caused by human activity and is not part of a natural cycle and that the change is, on balance, a bad thing.

Liberals call conservatives divisive because conservatives refuse to just give in and accept their view of things. For liberals, bipartisanship and comity are only achieved when everybody agrees with them.

Here are several other questions we might ponder:

Why is it that President Biden wants to impose stricter gun laws on lawful citizens while his own son has apparently broken one of the gun laws already on the books but will almost certainly not be prosecuted? It's clear that Hunter Biden lied when applying for a firearm in 2018. His offense is a felony carrying a sentence of up to ten years in jail, but no one thinks he'll face charges let alone go to prison.

I'm not saying that Hunter should be punished, but I am asking why the president thinks it's a good idea to promulgate more laws restricting gun ownership if we're not going to enforce the laws we already have?

And speaking of firearms, why is it that progressives want to make owning a firearm as difficult as possible but casting a vote as easy as possible? Doesn't our Constitution grant us the right to do both? And speaking of making it easy to vote, why is it that it's widely considered racist to require people to produce proof of eligibility in order to vote but no one considers it racist to be required to produce a proof of eligibility, an ID, to get the Covid vaccine?

Finally, why is it that the media relished "fact-checking" President Trump's various departures from the truth, and roundly mocked him for them, but after President Biden served up a farrago of falsehoods and deceptions in his recent press conference the mainstream media pretty much decided that it's no big deal?

If Trump's uneasy relationship with objective truth was really all the justification one needed for despising him what must those who voted for Biden because of Trump's prevarications be thinking right now?

A liberal acquaintance of my wife's wrote to her shortly after the election saying, "Isn't it refreshing to have Joe Biden in the White House? No more lies." I hope she wasn't watching that press conference. It would've been a deeply disillusioning experience for her.

That is, if it really is a president's lies that repulse her.

Consciousness and Evolution

One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists, there is no supernature) is the difficulty of explaining how consciousness could have evolved. Natural selection acts on physical bodies, but consciousness seems to be something altogether different from physical, material body.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent highlights the problem when he writes:

Consciousness could not have evolved from “simpler” states of matter, because it is not a state of matter. To say that consciousness evolved from matter is like saying Newton’s theory of gravity evolved from apples.

Even if for the sake of argument one concedes that natural selection might account for the development of a material body, consciousness remains a mystery. There is still a vast uncrossable gulf between the physical body and mind.

In other words, the difference between body and mind is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t get an immaterial mind no matter how many slight successive modifications of the body there may have been.

Naturalist philosophers, of course, don't regard the mind as "a thing" like the brain. Rather they think of "mind" as simply a word we use to describe one of the functions of the brain, sort of like we think of digestion as the function of the stomach.

The brain itself is regarded as a computer made of meat, but the problem with this is that there are so many mental characteristics that are completely inexplicable as products of a lump of material neurons.

If we entertain for the sake of discussion the claim that the brain is analogous to a computer we might ask what computer can give meaning to the words it generates on the monitor? Can a computer convert electrochemical impulses into the sensation of color, or flavor, or sound or pain? What exactly are these sensations anyway?

Does a computer experience boredom, frustration, pleasure, guilt or regret? Does it have wishes and hopes, beliefs and doubts? Do computers understand what they're doing?

The fact that human beings do all these things is a serious problem for naturalism because most naturalists hold that naturalism entails physicalism (i.e. the view that physics fixes all the facts about the world), as well as materialism (the view that all of reality is reducible to matter).

Conscious experience, however, does not seem to be something explicable in terms either of physics or matter, which means that it is a prima facie defeater for naturalism.

Naturalists can avoid this unpleasant implication of their metaphysics by conceding that both physicalism and materialism are false and trying somehow to enfold consciousness into a naturalistic ontology, but this would be an accommodation most naturalists would find devastating and repugnant.

To grant that there's more to reality than just physical matter and energy is to open the door not only to the existence of immaterial, non-physical human minds, but a forteriori to the possibility of a transcendent Mind and that's a possibility that most naturalists want to avoid at all costs.

Naturalism dominated philosophy for the two centuries from about 1790 to 1990, but it appears that work being done in the last couple of decades in both neuroscience and the philosophy of mind is bringing an end to the hegemony it once enjoyed and making it increasingly difficult to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist," as atheist biologist Richard Dawkins once put it.

Either Luck or Design

Yesterday's post discussed the very narrow range of values to which the masses of subatomic particles must be restricted in order for a universe that can give rise to living things to exist.

Today's post addresses just a few of the amazing facts about the earth and our solar system that have to be almost precisely what they are in order for life to exist on earth.

The improbability of a planet having so many of these properties is so high that some scientists have speculated that life, at least complex life, might exist nowhere else in the universe no matter how many other planets are out there. This is the thesis of such books as Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards.

Here are just a few of the parameters a planet must satisfy in order to be able of giving rise to, and sustaining, life:

1. A life-bearing planet has to located in a region of the galaxy not too close to the center nor too far from the center, and where there aren't too many other objects that could collide with the planet.This is called the galactic habitable zone.
2. A life-bearing planet has to orbit a central star of just the right age, size, and energy output and at just the right distance so that the planet is not too hot or too cold (the circumstellar habitable zone).
3. A life-bearing planet has to be the right size, with the right period of rotation so that nights don't get too cold nor days get too hot.
4. A life-bearing planet has to have a large moon to stabilize its wobble on its axis and protect it from meteoric bombardment, it has to have a magnetosphere to protect it from cosmic radiation and it has to have plate tectonics to recycle minerals.
5. A life-bearing planet must have a lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans of a particular size and chemical composition.

There are many more such conditions that a planet must meet to be life-bearing, but here's one that's particularly interesting because we might never have suspected it. New Scientist reported on some research that shows that, as strange as it may seem at first, the orbit of Saturn has to be almost exactly as it is for life to exist on earth:

Earth's comfortable temperatures may be thanks to Saturn's good behaviour. If the ringed giant's orbit had been slightly different, Earth's orbit could have been wildly elongated, like that of a long-period comet.

Our solar system is a tidy sort of place: planetary orbits here tend to be circular and lie in the same plane, unlike the highly eccentric orbits of many exoplanets. Elke Pilat-Lohinger of the University of Vienna, Austria, was interested in the idea that the combined influence of Jupiter and Saturn – the solar system's heavyweights – could have shaped other planets' orbits. She used computer models to study how changing the orbits of these two giant planets might affect the Earth.

Earth's orbit is so nearly circular that its distance from the sun only varies between 147 and 152 million kilometres, or around 2 per cent about the average. Moving Saturn's orbit just 10 percent closer in would disrupt that by creating a resonance – essentially a periodic tug – that would stretch out the Earth's orbit by tens of millions of kilometres. That would result in the Earth spending part of each year outside the habitable zone, the ring around the sun where temperatures are just right for water [to exist in a liquid state].

Tilting Saturn's orbit would also stretch out Earth's orbit. According to a simple model that did not include other inner planets, the greater the tilt, the more the elongation increased. Adding Venus and Mars to the model stabilised the orbits of all three planets, but the elongation nonetheless rose as Saturn's orbit got more tilted. Pilat-Lohinger says a 20-degree tilt would bring the innermost part of Earth's orbit closer to the sun than Venus.

In other words, our solar system is like a delicately balanced ecosystem, all the parts of which seem to be important in making earth the sort of place where life can arise and be sustained. The odds of such a system existing elsewhere in the universe would seem to be very small.

It might be mentioned in passing that it's not just Saturn's orbit that makes life possible on earth. Scientists have shown that massive outer planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune act as gravitational vacuum sweepers sucking up a lot of debris that would otherwise invade the inner reaches of the solar system and threaten earth with constant collisions.

It really is astonishing how many factors must all be just right for life to exist on this one little planet. We're either unimaginably lucky or we're the product of intelligent engineering.

The Tiny Life-Permitting Range of Values

I've frequently referred on VP to the phenomenon of cosmic fine-tuning as a powerful argument in support of the claim that the universe was intelligently engineered by a transcendent mind, but have often felt the difficulty of conveying how amazing this phenomenon is.

However, back in 2015 Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes wrote an article for the New Atlantis in which he gives an excellent explanation of what scientists mean when they talk about fine-tuning and what the implications and possible explanations for it are.

His column is a little long, but it does a wonderful job of making the ideas comprehensible to readers with a modest understanding of physics. If this is a topic that interests you I urge you to read Barnes' entire column, since I can only give you a slight taste of it here.

He talks about how the universe consists of numerous physical constants which are numbers which must be plugged into equations in order for the equations to accurately describe phenomena. For example, the gravitational attraction between the earth and the moon can only be calculated if we insert into the equation which describes this attraction a number called the gravitational constant.

There are dozens of such constants that comprise the fabric of the universe. Barnes writes:

Since physicists have not discovered a deep underlying reason for why these constants are what they are, we might well ask the seemingly simple question: What if they were different? What would happen in a hypothetical universe in which the fundamental constants of nature had other values?

There is nothing mathematically wrong with these hypothetical universes. But there is one thing that they almost always lack — life. Or, indeed, anything remotely resembling life. Or even the complexity upon which life relies to store information, gather nutrients, and reproduce.

A universe that has just small tweaks in the fundamental constants might not have any of the chemical bonds that give us molecules, so say farewell to DNA, and also to rocks, water, and planets.

Other tweaks could make the formation of stars or even atoms impossible. And with some values for the physical constants, the universe would have flickered out of existence in a fraction of a second.

That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.

He goes on to give us some examples:

Let’s consider a few examples of the many and varied consequences of messing with the fundamental constants of nature, the initial conditions of the universe, and the mathematical form of the laws themselves.

You are made of cells; cells are made of molecules; molecules of atoms; and atoms of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons, in turn, are made of quarks. We have not seen any evidence that electrons and quarks are made of anything more fundamental.

The results of all our investigations into the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy are summarized in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is essentially one long, imposing equation. Within this equation, there are twenty-six constants, describing the masses of the fifteen fundamental particles, along with values needed for calculating the forces between them, and a few others.

We have measured the mass of an electron to be about 9.1 x 10-28 grams, which is really very small — if each electron in an apple weighed as much as a grain of sand, the apple would weigh more than Mount Everest. The other two fundamental constituents of atoms, the up and down quarks, are a bit bigger, coming in at 4.1 x 10-27 and 8.6 x 10-27 grams, respectively.

These numbers, relative to each other and to the other constants of the Standard Model, are a mystery to physics....we don’t know why they are what they are.

However, we can calculate all the ways the universe could be disastrously ill-suited for life if the masses of these particles were different. For example, if the down quark’s mass were 2.6 x 10-26 grams or more, then adios, periodic table! There would be just one chemical element and no chemical compounds, in stark contrast to the approximately 60 million known chemical compounds in our universe.

With even smaller adjustments to these masses, we can make universes in which the only stable element is hydrogen-like. Once again, kiss your chemistry textbook goodbye, as we would be left with one type of atom and one chemical reaction. If the up quark weighed 2.4 x 10-26 grams, things would be even worse — a universe of only neutrons, with no elements, no atoms, and no chemistry whatsoever.

Considering that we know of no reason why the masses of these particles couldn't have had a broad range of values these are incomprehensibly tiny differences - on the order of a decimal point followed by 25 zeroes and a 1. To give us an idea of how narrow the range of masses these particles must reside in if they're to build a universe that would have chemistry, Barnes invites us to,

Imagine a huge chalkboard, with each point on the board representing a possible value for the up and down quark masses. If we wanted to color the parts of the board that support the chemistry that underpins life, and have our handiwork visible to the human eye, the chalkboard would have to be about ten light years (a hundred trillion kilometers) high.

And that's for the masses of just two fundamental particles:

There are also the fundamental forces that account for the interactions between the particles. The strong nuclear force, for example, is the glue that holds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms. If, in a hypothetical universe, this force is too weak, then nuclei are not stable and the periodic table disappears again.

If it is too strong, then the intense heat of the early universe could convert all hydrogen into helium — meaning that there could be no water, and that 99.97 percent of the 24 million carbon compounds we have discovered would be impossible, too.

And... these forces, like the masses, must be in the right balance. If the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for the attraction and repulsion of charged particles, is too strong or too weak compared to the strong nuclear force, anything from stars to chemical compounds would be impossible.

Stars are particularly finicky when it comes to fundamental constants. If the masses of the fundamental particles are not extremely small, then stars burn out very quickly. Stars in our universe also have the remarkable ability to produce both carbon and oxygen, two of the most important elements to biology. But, a change of just a few percent in the up and down quarks’ masses, or in the forces that hold atoms together, is enough to upset this ability — stars would make either carbon or oxygen, but not both.

Here's a chart that shows the delicate balance that must exist between just two fundamental forces in order for carbon-based life to exist.

Barnes is himself persuaded that cosmic fine-tuning points to the conclusion that our universe has been designed by an intelligent agent, although many other physicists resist that conclusion. They hold out hope that some other explanation for this amazingly precise calibration of constants and forces will emerge.

Maybe so, but what we know right now about the universe does not engender optimism that their hope will ever be justified.

Crisis and Hypocrisy

Our border is being flooded by a tsunami of migrants seeking to enter the country. The Border Patrol has no place to put them while they're being processed so they're being packed into holding pens, sometimes at many times the capacity of the facilities. One facility built to hold 250 people is now custodian to 3,889 migrants, meaning it is currently at 1,556 percent capacity.

Others are being shipped to hotels, and still others are being simply let go into the country. We don't know who they are, whether they've got any diseases or criminal record. Our Border Patrol is overwhelmed and can't handle the influx.

The crisis is a direct result of President Biden's decision in the early days of his tenure to dismantle almost all of President Trump's immigration measures, including finishing the border wall, requiring people seeking asylum to apply in their home countries, and requiring others to remain in Mexico until their cases had been adjudicated.

These measures had slowed the tide of illegal immigration to a relative trickle, but Mr. Biden did away with all that and hordes of Central Americans and others from around the world are now pouring across our borders.

The facilities in which they're being housed are deplorable, although the media are loath to point this out after having spent several years of the Trump administration castigating the president for keeping "kids in cages."

                          A photo released by Congressman Henry Cuellar's office

So here's a modest proposal for solving, at least partly, the housing problem: Every person who voted for Joe Biden, including Mr. Biden himself, should offer to open their homes to house and care for one or more immigrants. Mr. Biden owns several capacious houses, and should be happy to open them to the immigrants who came here because they thought he'd welcome them.

The people who voted for him, who professed compassion for the huddled masses and voted Mr. Biden and open borders, can hardly now object that they only favor open borders unless that includes the borders of their own property.

Folks who voted to open the gates of the country to the rest of the world can not reasonably slam shut the doors to their own homes and lock their cars, can they? That would be, well, hypocrisy.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the Democratic leadership in the Senate is seriously considering changing some of the traditional Senate rules, the filibuster and the reconciliation rules, to name two. They want to do this so that they'll be able to ram through enormous spending bills as well as bills that would change voting procedures nationwide so as to make it much easier to vote, and, it should be noted, to commit voter fraud.

Yet it wasn't too long ago that many Democrats were opposed to tinkering with the rules. For example, can you guess which Democrat Senator once said this?

I’ve been in the Senate for a long time, and there are plenty of times I would have loved to change this rule or that rule to pass a bill or to confirm a nominee I felt strongly about. But I didn’t, and it was understood that the option of doing so just wasn’t on the table.

You fought political battles; you fought hard; but you fought them within the strictures and requirements of the Senate rules. Despite the short-term pain, that understanding has served both parties well, and provided long-term gain.

Adopting the “nuclear option” would change this fundamental understanding and unbroken practice of what the Senate is all about. Senators would start thinking about changing other rules when they became ‘inconvenient.’

Instead of two-thirds of the vote to change a rule, you’d now have precedent that it only takes a bare majority. Altering Senate rules to help in one political fight or another could become standard operating procedure, which, in my view, would be disastrous.

If you guessed Senator Joe Biden you guessed correctly. So where does Mr. Biden stand now? We'll soon see.

Does He Still Have a Job?

A writer for a conservative media outlet recently posted the following on his website:

Blackness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people—white people and people who are not black, my mom included. There will be people who die, in 2050, because of Black Lives Matter decisions from 2020.

Blackness is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

He had much else to say, but you get the picture. This man is clearly a racist, a hater, and is promoting murder. Actually, he's promoting genocide. I would hope all Americans would join me in deploring, not only what he said but also the fact that the media has been uncommonly silent about this public advocacy of the violent extinction of a race of people he despises.

I'm quite sure that everyone who has read this feels disgust that anyone would think as this man does, and perhaps you wonder, too, why he's not being more widely censured. Indeed, you might be wondering, in light of the vigilance of our cancel culture in sniffing out racism, whether he still has a job.

Well, perhaps if I confess to a bit of chicanery you'll understand perfectly why our media has ignored this cancerous blight in our social body. The author of this ugly rant is not a conservative writer.

He's a black man named Damon Young who writes for a black-oriented commentary site, and everywhere in the quoted passage where the words "black" or "Black Lives Matter" appear Mr. Young referred to "white," or "whiteness" or "white supremacy" (You can read the entire article here).

The sentiments he expresses would be justly considered despicable were they penned by a white racist as I originally rendered them, and they're no less odious when penned by a black man. So why does Mr. Young get a pass from the media? Would similar hate-mongering by a white racist have been greeted with almost complete indifference by our media?

If a white writer had called for the extirpation of all blacks, or Jews, or Asians, what would the media reaction have been, do you suppose? Yet, like many on the left, our media seems to take no notice of minority racism, no matter how vicious. In their cockamamie way of seeing the world it's okay to be a racist if one is non-white, but a paramount evil if one is white.

There's a lot of talk currently about racial "equity." Well, one place equity is desperately needed is in our discussion of the phenomenon of racism. The idea that only white racism is evil or that only whites can be racist is not only ludicrously stupid, it's also terribly divisive and counterproductive.

It's counterproductive, that is, if our goal is racial harmony. If the goal is racial division and hostility then screeds like Mr. Young's are extremely efficacious.

Scorched Earth

There's been much talk among Democrats about eliminating the Senate filibuster which they rightly see as an impediment to enacting much of their agenda. The filibuster is a Senate rule that requires a supermajority of 60 votes to pass any legislative bill.

Since the Senate is evenly split 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats (the Vice-President can cast tie-breaker votes), the Democrats would need ten Republican senators to pass their legislation, and given the radical nature of much of that agenda ten GOP votes are going to be very hard to come by.

Thus, the talk about quashing the filibuster so that they can pass bills with a simple majority (all 50 Democrats plus the Vice-President).

But what would happen if the Democrats eliminated the filibuster. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell promised a "scorched earth" Senate, the Senate would look like “100-car pileup—nothing moving,” but what does that mean? Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) provides the details for us:

...there are 44 standing rules of the Senate; the filibuster is but one....To the extent the Senate functions at all ... it is only because senators willingly relinquish those prerogatives. Mr. McConnell on Tuesday described a world in which they don’t, which he called a “scorched-earth Senate.”

It’s a world without “unanimous consent,” in which a senator asks all 99 colleagues to give up their right to object to a proposal. Senate leaders rely on unanimous consent dozens of a times a day. You need consent to open the Senate before noon, to dispense with the reading of the preceding day’s journal, to move to business, to avoid reading out loud the text of every amendment and resolution, to avoid roll call votes. The Senate functions because most consent requests are granted.

When they aren’t? It takes only one Republican to object to a request but a majority to overcome most objections. Mr. Schumer [The Democratic Leader in the Senate] might at any time need all 50 of his members—and the vice president—on the floor to move things along. Likewise to override a flow of “points of order.” All day, every day.

Republicans could flit in and out, and it would only take a handful of members to force roll calls for all these votes, eating up more hours. Democratic senators and Kamala Harris would essentially live at the Capitol, constantly on call. If even one was absent at a crucial moment, the Senate would essentially shut down.

Now add in “quorum” calls. Any senator can question, pretty much any time, whether the Senate truly has 51 senators on the floor (the vice president doesn’t count). It’s unclear whether a lone Republican could issue a quorum call, flee and stymie Senate business until the sergeant of arms rounded him back up. But even if that lone Republican stayed, quorum calls would eat up hours. The Senate secretary is required in each case to call the roll, of all 100 senators.

Anyone who has ever watched C-Span 2 knows this takes ages.

There are even more creative ideas, but these tools alone would be enough to paralyze the institution. The Senate convenes. Quorum call. The presiding officer asks for consent to forgo reading yesterday’s journal. Republicans object. Roll call vote. The officer asks for consent to speed through “morning business.” Republicans object. Democrats move to get on an issue. Point of order. Roll-call vote. Quorum call. Republicans object to the motion. Roll-call vote. A speech. Quorum call. Etc., and so on, until adjournment.

The irony here is that the Democrats anticipate that by eliminating the filibuster the Biden agenda could more easily pass through the Senate, but if they do abrogate the filibuster rule the result would be that nothing would get through the Senate.

The Democrats seem to have failed to learn a lesson they should've learned over a decade ago. Back then they were in the majority and were trying to get President Obama's left-wing federal judges confirmed, but the Republicans were loath to seat radical judges and used the filibuster rule, which back then applied not only to legislation but also to approving federal judges and Supreme Court Justices, to block their appointments.

The Senate Majority Leader at the time, Harry Reid, decided that, very well, he would eliminate the Senate filibuster as it applied to federal judges, and they were thus able to get Obama's appointees through.

At the time Senator McConnell warned that toying with the filibuster would someday come back to haunt the Democrats, and it did. When Donald Trump became president he had the opportunity to appoint several Supreme Court Justices.

The Republicans were now in the majority in the Senate so the Democrats planned to block Trump's appointments with the filibuster which still applied to Supreme Court nominees, but McConnell said that since the Democrats had removed the filibuster for federal judgeships there was no logical reason for keeping it in place for Supreme Court nominees, so he eliminated the rule for SCOTUS justices, and as a result Trump was able to get three conservative justices confirmed to the Supreme Court on simple majority votes.

Moreover, since the Democrats had already removed the filibuster as a barrier to federal judgeships, President Trump was also able to appoint a record number of conservative judges to the federal bench with simple majorities in the Senate.

If the Democrats continue to manipulate the Senate rules by eliminating the legislative filibuster, assuming that they have the votes to do it, they will once again rue their short-sightedness, and McConnell will once again see to it that they do.

What Are Memories?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things.

Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face.

As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain. But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored.

It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself.

The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face." But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face?

Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? The memory of where the key is stored must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory.

And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties, but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us.

Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of remembering in particular and the phenomenon of consciousness in general. That something else, many philosophers believe, is an immaterial mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of every aspect of the human species?

How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences?

It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Concerning White Privilege

A number of years ago I received a beautiful e-mail from a student who expressed her desire to give back to those who have less than she does something of the abundance with which she has been blessed. This young woman's wish to help others is wonderful, and I was deeply impressed by her commitment to the poor and marginalized.

There was one thing she said in her missive, however, which is a common sentiment on her campus and one which I asked her to reconsider. She stated that part of the obligation she feels to help the poor is a result of the fact that she's "a white, middle class, educated female with a tremendous amount of undeserved privilege."

I know students are encouraged by liberal professors to think that one's race or gender confer upon one a large measure of undeserved privilege, but to tell the truth, I think my colleagues are wrong about this.

The idea of white privilege is a shibboleth that's too often used to evoke in whites a sense of racial guilt. In my response to this student I tried to explain why I think her acceptance of this guilt actually diminishes the choices and sacrifices made by her grandparents, parents, and even herself. Here's what I wrote:

Dear S_,

Yours is a lovely e-mail, and I think it's wonderful that you want to give of yourself to those who subsist on the margins of society. I wish you well and pray God's blessing on your efforts.

I do want to urge you, though, to consider something. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into what you say, but you seem to suggest that your status in society is somehow an undeserved privilege. If that is what you're saying I don't think you should see it that way.

You are what you are and have what you have for a number of reasons. First, your parents and grandparents stayed married and worked very hard, sometimes 12 or more hours a day, I'll bet, to provide you with an opportunity to get an education. Your status is largely the fruit of their toil, as well as dozens of other important and wise choices they made in life, and it's not something you should feel guilty about.

Indeed, I think it diminishes their effort to think of your status as largely a consequence of your race. So far from feeling that your privilege is undeserved, I think you should be proud of the people who made it possible and grateful for their sacrifices and the choices they made.

A second reason you enjoy the status you do is because, once given the opportunities your parents and grandparents worked so hard for, you had the character to make the most of them. You took advantage of the opportunity to get an education, you held yourself to high personal and academic standards through your teen years, and you had the wisdom to not squander the heritage handed down to you.

None of this has much to do with your race. I know that some instructors on your campus think that being white somehow confers an unfair advantage over others in society, but I think that's mistaken. It was true historically, of course, but it hasn't been the case in the U.S. for a long time. No one has been legally denied opportunity in this country by virtue of his or her race for well over fifty years.

If people in the U.S. languish in poverty it's often - though of course not always - because of the choices both they and their parents have made, not the color of their skin.

The fact is that there are lots of African and Asian-Americans who are successful in this society, but no one talks about black privilege or brown privilege. Instead they talk, as they should, about how hard the parents of those people worked and the ordeals their parents endured in order to give their children a chance to make it in the world.

Contrarily, there are whites, blacks and Asians who enjoy historically unprecedented opportunities to make a positive mark in life but fail to do so because they lack the character it takes to make something of themselves.

In other words, you enjoy the status you do, S_, not because you're privileged by your race but because you're privileged to have the parents and virtues you do. It's wonderful to want to "give back" but don't let anyone imply that you should do so out of guilt over your race or class. Your motivation should be your love for God and the conviction that he wants you to be an instrument to help others to live a better life.

There are three or four things that people can do to lift themselves out of poverty and none of them have much to do with their race: 1. Stay in school and graduate, 2. Get married before having children and stay married afterward, 3. Be a solid, dependable employee at whatever job they get, and 4. Stay away from drugs, alcohol and pornography.

Few people who do these things are poor, and one doesn't have to be "privileged" in order to do them.

There's nothing more lethal to the aspirations of those born into poverty than the claim that they can't make it out of their circumstances because of their race, that the deck is stacked against them. That falsehood seeps into the psyche of a man or woman and becomes an excuse for failure and a rationalization for not trying.

Nor does it ennoble the efforts of those who choose to do good work among the poor to be motivated by a mistaken need to expiate some false sense of racial guilt.

If the Multiverse Exists So Does God

As Denyse O'Leary explained in a column some years ago at Evolution News cosmic fine-tuning presents a profound difficulty for any naturalistic view of cosmic origins. The term fine-tuning refers to the exquisitely precise calibration of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of parameters, constants and forces that comprise the fabric of the universe.

If any of these were set at values only slightly different than they are either the universe couldn'texist or it wouldn't be the kind of place where life could exist.

According to many scientists there are only two possible realistic explanations for this astounding state of affairs. Either the universe was created by an intelligent supernatural agent, i.e. God, or there is in fact an infinite array of universes, like bubbles in a bubble bath, each one possessing different physical properties. This is what has come to be called the multiverse hypothesis.

If there are indeed an infinity of different universes then one like ours, as improbable as it would be if it were the only universe, must exist since in an infinite series of possibilities anything that's possible to exist must actually exist. In other words, the multiverse hypothesis evades the problem of our universe's astronomical improbability by making the universe statistically necessary.

O'Leary gives us a couple of examples of scientists clearly acknowledging these two alternatives. Science writer Marcus Chown at New Scientist magazine writes:

Should the fine-tuning turn out to be real, what are we to make of it? There are two widely-discussed possibilities: either God fine-tuned the universe for us to be here, or there are (as string theory implies) a large number of universes, each with different laws of physics, and we happen to find ourselves in a universe where the laws happen to be just right for us to live. After all, how could we not?

Elsewhere in the same magazine the editors tell us that,

But the main reason for believing in an ensemble of universes is that it could explain why the laws governing our Universe appear to be so finely tuned for our existence … This fine-tuning has two possible explanations. Either the Universe was designed specifically for us by a creator or there is a multitude of universes — a multiverse.

The multiverse hypothesis has been embraced by those - scientists, philosophers and laypersons alike - who hold to a naturalist worldview because that worldview has no room for the alternative that the universe is the product of an intelligent creator. There are, notwithstanding its appeal to these thinkers, numerous problems with the multiverse hypothesis, not the least of which is that there's no empirical evidence for it.

The multiverse idea is also extraordinarily unparsimonious, positing a virtual infinity of universes in order to avoid positing a single creator. It also merely pushes the problem of fine-tuning back a step since whatever is generating all those universes must itself be extremely fine-tuned.

One other difficulty for the hypothesis, at least as a means of avoiding God, is that it actually dovetails with a version of what philosophers call the ontological argument for the existence of God. I've never seen the argument worded quite like this so if there's a flaw in it the fault is with me and not with the ontological argument itself. The argument goes like this:

1. It's logically possible that there exists a being that is the self-existent creator of all else that exists. By logically possible is meant that the idea doesn't entail a contradiction like, say, the idea of a square circle does. There's no contradiction in the concept of a self-existent creator of all else that exists.
2. If the existence of such a being is logically possible then there is a logically possible world (i.e. universe) in which a self-existent creator of all else that exists is part of the description of that world. In other words, there's a possible world in which a self-existent creator of all else that exists is the creator of that world.
   Note: A possible world is simply the way the actual world could've been. It's possible that the Kansas City Chiefs won the last Super Bowl so there's a possible world in which the Chiefs are the current Super Bowl champions. As another example, there's a possible world in which Covid-19 never created a pandemic. Possible worlds are conceptual, they don't actually exist.
3. But, if all logically possible worlds do actually exist, as posited by some multiverse scenarios, then there must be some actual world in which it is true to say that a self-existent creator of all else that exists actually created that world.
4. If it is true to say of some actual world that it was created by a self-existent creator of all else that exists then a self-existent creator of all else that exists must itself actually exist.
5. If a self-existent creator of all else that exists does itself exist, then by definition it must have created every world that exists. If there were some world which this being did not create then it wouldn't be the creator of all that is, which is a contradiction.
6. Therefore, our world must have been created by the self-existent creator of all else that exists.

In simpler terms, given the fine-tuning of the universe either God exists or there's a multiverse, but, as the preceding argument shows, if there's a multiverse then God exists. So, given cosmic fine-tuning, either God exists or God exists.

It seems God's existence is inescapable.