Living with the Incoherence

Readers of Viewpoint are doubtless well-aware that I think the question of how we ground our moral beliefs is of paramount importance.

They're doubtless aware, too, that we live in an era in which some secular folk are extremely judgmental of the behavior of others, to the extent that they're willing to destroy the careers of those who deviate from what the censorious deem morally acceptable opinions or behavior.

One of the ironies of this is that the most judgmental people in our society are often secularists or non-theists yet these are the very folks who should be the most non-judgmental of all.

I say this not because I think that non-theists (or naturalists) are more noble than others but because a naturalistic worldview, which naturalists presumably embrace, offers them no basis for making any judgment at all about the moral rightness or wrongness of other people's behavior.

Here's why:

Humanity, generally speaking, shares a basic moral understanding (i.e. that loyalty is good, betrayal is bad; kindness is good, cruelty is bad; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad, etc.). This understanding seems to be inherent in human beings as though it were somehow inscribed on our DNA.

Granting that this is so, how do we explain the existence of this basic moral understanding?

There are, it seems, two possibilities. Either we've acquired this understanding through an impersonal, unguided, naturalistic process like Darwinian evolution, or we've acquired it through the intentional act of a creator (i.e. God).

There's no plausible third option. It seems that naturalism and theism exhaust all the possibilities.

Suppose then, that the answer is that we've evolved this moral understanding naturalistically. If so, then what makes acting against this understanding "wrong"? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal processes like gene mutation, the accidents of genetic drift, and natural selection impose an obligation on us today to live according to a moral understanding that evolved to suit us for life in the stone age?

Moreover, if evolution is the source of our moral sentiments then it's also the source of our propensity for selfishness, violence, and tribal hatreds. That being so, if a propensity for kindness and a propensity for cruelty have both evolved in human beings, why should we assume that it's right to be kind and wrong to be cruel?

If we insist on making that assumption then we must be comparing kindness and cruelty to some higher standard that transcends our evolutionary history, but naturalism admits of no such higher standard.

On the other hand, if that moral understanding - call it conscience - is instilled in us by a perfectly good, all-knowing creator of the universe who both loves us and has the authority to insist that we act in accord with that moral understanding, and if that creator also possesses the power to hold us accountable for how we live, then we have a good reason for thinking that we have an objective duty to live according to what our conscience tells us is good and right.

On naturalism we can certainly intuit that we should be kind rather than cruel, selfless rather than selfish, but we have no obligation to follow those intuitions. Human nature being what it is we're often pulled and tugged in a direction opposite to what we think we should go, and in a naturalistic universe there's no compelling reason why we should resist those tugs. It's not morally wrong to yield to them.

In sum, if naturalism is true then ethics is just a bunch of socially fashionable and arbitrary conventions which have no real moral binding force.

If theism is true, though, there can be genuine moral right and wrong and genuinely objective moral obligations.

Anyone who believes that we have a moral obligation to do justice and to show compassion to the poor and oppressed should, if they're consistent, be a theist.

If they're a non-theist and nevertheless maintain that there are objective moral obligations they're irrationally importing those beliefs from an alien worldview (theism). Their own worldview offers no basis for them.

It's one of the more remarkable features of our times that so many secular people who pride themselves on their intellectual perspicacity either don't see this or don't mind living with the incoherence.

How to Wreck an Economy

Prior to the pandemic Americans were enjoying one of the best economic environments in our history. Then the plague hit and knocked everything cattywampus. Eventually, we started to climb out of the pandemic and the economy began to regain its footing. Then came the election of 2020 and economic progress came to a screeching halt.

Now it looks like we're headed for one of the worst economic periods in our history.

Our supply chain appears broken, store shelves are barren, employers can't find workers, and worst of all, inflation, all but negligible for the last decade, is skyrocketing, negating whatever wage gains workers have made over the last several years.

The Biden administration seems helpless to do anything to meliorate the situation and oddly determined to make the problem by worse by hamstringing the energy industry.

Tristan Justice at the Federalist comments:

From day one President Biden has done everything in his power to suppress home oil and gas production leading to the price shocks Americans are coping with today.

Biden took an axe to the Keystone XL Pipeline, put pressure on Wall Street to cease investment on new projects, banned drilling in the Arctic, and suspended new oil and gas leases on federal land.

At the same time, Biden gave the green light to a new Russian pipeline into Germany, repeatedly begged OPEC to raise output, and demanded American oil producers lower costs after the administration’s cascade of expensive regulation. It’s not that Biden has no plan to bring down power prices, it’s that Biden is implementing a plan to keep them going higher.

The administration admitted this week another pipeline supplying more than half of Michigan’s propane needs is on the chopping block, even as propane users face the steepest spike in heating prices this winter.

The United States was,just a year ago, a net exporter of energy. Now we're pleading with the Saudis to increase oil production.

National Review's Jim Geraghty asks how "a country that became a net-energy exporter in 2019 and 2020 and that had cut its dependence on foreign crude oil by more than 50 percent from 2016 to 2020, is reduced to pleading with OPEC to increase production."

A lot of Americans are also wondering "why an administration that so desperately wants other countries to produce more oil seems so implacably hostile to the U.S. producing more oil."

Geraghty elaborates:

More than a few observers have pointed out the irony that a president who campaigned on pledges that “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels,” and “We’re going to phase out fossil fuels” is now calling on Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, and the rest of OPEC to increase oil production.

And unsurprisingly, OPEC likes high prices and is in no rush to bring them down, as the Wall Street Journal reported. In fact, they think prices might go significantly higher by next summer:

Foreign producers are also benefiting from rising prices and fearful of oversupplying the market, giving them little incentive to cooperate.

“We must keep the price. Iraq needs the money . . . for its stability,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said in an interview last week. He predicted oil might go as high as $120 a barrel by next summer, up from about $80 currently.

It’s not just OPEC; Wall Street analysts such as those at Bank of America think gas prices will be 45 percent higher than now by June 2022. That would calculate out to a nationwide average price of about $4.94 per gallon.

$5.00 a gallon gasoline would be catastrophic for many Americans, especially those living on limited incomes. Not only would it affect personal transportation, but since everything we buy, including food, is brought by truck, and since trucks use gas, the price of everything is going to continue to rise.

Moreover,

... people don’t just use crude oil for their cars; home heating oil is another significant use. The EIA projects that “The 4 percent of U.S. households that heat primarily with heating oil will spend 43 percent more — 59 percent more in a colder winter and 30 percent more in a warmer winter.”

But don’t think you’re off the hook if your home uses natural gas or propane:

“We expect that the nearly half of U.S. households that heat primarily with natural gas will spend 30 percent more than they spent last winter on average — 50 percent more if the winter is 10 percent colder-than-average and 22 percent more if the winter is 10 percent warmer-than-average.”

The only homes not getting walloped by price hikes will be those using electricity for heat, but the EIA projects that even those homes will see a 4 to 15 percent price increase.

This is all a consequence of the president's wish to prove his green energy bona fides and appease the progressive wing of his party. He may succeed in getting a pat on the back from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, at least for a time, but he'll do so by devastating the financial well-being of millions of Americans.

Mr. Biden received the votes of more Americans than any candidate in American history, but I'm sure that very few of them thought they were voting to make the U.S. more like Venezuela.

Advice for Millennials and Gen Zers

In a column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Mary Eberstadt claims that Millennials and Generation Zers have been robbed. They've been bamboozled by our progressive elites into believing that their country is "an irredeemable cesspool of racism and bigotry."

Consequently, only a third of Millenials and Gen Zers will acknowledge that they're "extremely proud" of their country. She invites these Americans to ask themselves why.

Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our families. Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our neighborhoods. Think about that the next time someone trash-talks your national home and neighborhood, your country.

One such figure, impresario of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” says she has never regarded herself as “particularly patriotic.”

Another, whose sulfurous racialism permeates elite education, says that he has never felt free in the U.S., even as his every grievance is celebrated and subsidized. If they have such a low opinion of America, what makes you think they care about Americans—including you?

This is particularly ironic given that the United States is by almost any measure not only the greatest country in the history of civilization, but it's the greatest country in history in which to be a minority. There's never been any other place in the world where minorities have more opportunity to flourish than they do here.

It's why tens of thousands of Central Americans, Haitians and others from around the globe risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.

Eberstadt continues, arguing that today's younger Americans have also been robbed of two great sourcees of immaterial wealth, "the consolations and joys of family life" and the rich benefits that accompany religious belief:

Generations of thinkers have disparaged the family as the enemy of utopian schemes. In their depictions, home and hearth amount to a slaughterhouse of dreams and aspirations, especially for women. To the contrary: Unprecedented rates of abortion, fatherlessness and divorce, far from liberating you, have subtracted actual and potential loved ones from your lives. No wonder surveys show that young people are the loneliest Americans....

...[Moreover, religious belief has inspired] the greatest art and science, architecture and music and human creation at large that our species has ever devised. Permanent membership in “none of the above” secularism risks relinquishing your own cultural inheritance: Western civilization.

"This brings us," she declares, "to the political choice before you. Today’s neo-Marxism and identity politics seek to co-opt your youthful energies into a lifetime of performative rancor. Is that what you want?"

Good question. To be permanently angry, to be permanently focused on racial, sexual or LGBTQ identity is to dissipate one's human potential by expending it on relative trifles. It's to spend one's life judging books by their dust jackets.

Eberstadt concludes with this:

Young people are designed by nature to love and to be loved with energy and magnanimity.

Today’s misanthropes tell you the opposite: that humanity is a toxin on the planet, unworthy of reproduction. This counsel couldn’t be more wrong—especially for you. If loneliness is the problem, putting more people in your lives with marriage and children is the self-evident solution.

The left tells you that your fellow citizens are racists, fascists, sexists, bigots and haters. This relentless negativity obliterates youthful hopes. It shrivels the youthful imagination. Worst of all, it shrinks your hearts.

When young people have it constantly drilled into them that their fellow Americans are the odious individuals they're often portrayed as, it makes despising them seem appropriate. So far from treating them with dignity, respect and kindness it becomes much easier to treat them with self-righteous contempt and hatred. Sadly, though, people who choose to live this way will find that Eberstadt is right.

A life spent judging others on the basis of what one perceives to be their politically incorrect sins, a life lived in a semi-permanent state of anger, bitterness, hostility and contempt, is a life in which happiness will prove very elusive.

To Vaxx or Not to Vaxx

Now that vaccines have been approved for children many parents are faced with a difficult decision: Should they get their child vaccinated?

Two eminent physicians, Nicole Saphier and Marty Makary, offer parents some helpful information in a Wall Street Journal (subscription required) article.

Dr. Saphier is an assistant professor at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College. Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and editor-in-chief of MedPage Today. They begin with a few interesting facts:

If you’re agonizing about whether to have your young child vaccinated against Covid-19, be reassured: The risk is extremely low either way. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 42% of U.S. children 5 to 11 had Covid by June 2021, before the Delta wave—a prevalence that is likely greater than 50% today.

Of 28 million children in that age range, 94 have died of Covid since the pandemic began (including deaths before newer treatments), and 562 have been hospitalized with Covid infections.

Five hundred and sixty two hospitalizations and 94 deaths are tragic, but out of a population of 28 million it's statistically miniscule. The risk is so low that it causes one to wonder why, if we're "following the science," children in schools across the country are required to wear masks all day and why the Biden administration hasn't ruled out a mandate that children be vaccinated before they can come to school.

The authors of this op-ed aren't opposed to vaccinating children. In fact, they state that "If your child has a medical risk factor for Covid illness (including obesity), or lives with someone who does, the vaccine’s benefit outweighs the risk." What they argue is that there's no scientific basis for mandating vaccination of children.

Nor is there need to vaccinate the 50% of children who've already had Covid:

If a child already had Covid, there’s no scientific basis for vaccination. Deep within the 80-page Pfizer report is this crucial line: “No cases of COVID-19 were observed in either the vaccine group or the placebo group in participants with evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

That’s consistent with the largest population-based study on the topic, which found that natural immunity was 27 times as effective as vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic Covid. Natural immunity is likely even more robust in children, given their stronger immune systems. An indiscriminate Covid vaccine mandate may result in unintended harm among children with natural immunity.

In any case, unless children have a medical risk factor there seems to be little reason for elementary school children to be subjected to some of the measures that adults are imposing upon them.

Speaking of the vaccine, there's a good short video going viral (no pun intended) on twitter that shows how they work. You can watch it here.

White Mythologies

Katherine Timpf wrote a brief piece for NRO a couple of years ago that was so good it's hard to decide what to excerpt and what to leave out.

She described a phenomenon which at the time was incubating in the spawning grounds of ludicrous ideas, i.e. university campuses, which holds that “objectivity” and “meritocracy” are examples of “white mythologies” and have no real existence. They're merely “social constructs.”

This is presumably the sort of thing one must believe nowadays if one is to be a progressive in good standing, but it really is quite silly.

Timpf describes a course that was to be offered at several colleges the following year (2019) in which students will be taught about "white mythologies" which are defined as "long-standing, often implicit views about the place of White, male, Euro-American subjects as the norm against which the peoples of the world are to be understood and judged.”

The class is titled “White Mythologies: Objectivity, Meritocracy, and Other Social Constructions."

She tells us more:

Students [in the course] will explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race, and as justifications for colonial interventions, slavery, and the subordination of women.

It's hard to take this seriously. Why is the word logic in the above quote cast in the plural? Are "logics" like geometries which can be different depending on whether the surface is a plane or a sphere?

Is there a logic in which the principle of non-contradiction doesn't hold? Is there a logic in which it's not fallacious to beg the question or deny the antecedent of a hypothetical syllogism?

Are the creators of this course suggesting that logical thinking is a talent that only white males can master? If so, isn't that itself a racist assumption?

Timpf continues:

As crazy as this story may sound, this is far from the first time that we’ve seen this kind of thinking on a college campus. In April of 2017, a group of students at Pomona College wrote a letter to the school’s outgoing president claiming that “the idea that there is a single truth . . . is a myth and white supremacy.”

Also last year, a professor at Pennsylvania State University–Brandywine argued that “meritocracy” is a “whiteness ideology.” This year, two University of Denver professors claimed that scientific objectivity works to “spread whiteness ideology.”

This sounds very much like an unintentional rationalization for the dominance of whites (and Asians?) in the sciences. It also sounds ludicrous. Is it part of "whiteness ideology" to insist that earth's gravity objectively accelerates all falling objects at 9.8 m/s2 regardless of whether one believes that it does, or likes the fact, or thinks it's unjust, or believes that there could be lots of differing opinions on the matter?

It's an objective fact, i.e. a truth, that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate (neglecting factors like air resistance, location on the earth, etc.), and you don't have to be white in order to understand this.

Timpf again:

The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Objectivity isn’t a myth.

For example: In case you didn’t know, water is objectively wet, and that has nothing to do with “whiteness,” or with anything else. Objective truth absolutely does exist — and something that is an objective truth isn’t just dissimilar to a myth, it’s the exact opposite of a myth.

That’s not even just my opinion; that’s an absolute fact based on what words mean.

Things that are objectively true are not made more or less true by factors such as race or sex or class or anything else — they just are; the fact that some things are objectively true is not made more or less a fact by factors such as race or class or sex or anything else — it just is.

The next time you're told by a progressive that the left is the party of science, that progressives live in the world of fact-based reality, ask your interlocutor whether what he/she just told you is objectively true.

People who deny that there is objective truth and argue that, in fact, objective truth is only a "whiteness mythology," are surely not representing the "party of science." They're representing the party of delusion.

Why Not Defend It?

Last month I did a post on Critical Race Theory, a "theory" which has come to be a flash point in schools around the country. CRT, which was originally a purely academic exercise, has in the popular mind become an umbrella term for a number of identity politics offshoots.

Defenders in the media deny that CRT is being taught in schools, which causes one to wonder how that's something these media folks could possibly know, but nevertheless the concern is not whether a topic labeled CRT appears in school curricula but whether the ideas that have spun off from CRT are being taught, officially or unofficially, in the classroom.

The ideas found in books written by people like Robin D'Angelo and Ibram X Kendi include the view that America is racist and oppressive to the core, that the idea of a "color blind" society must be rejected, that objective truth, standpoint neutrality, logical reasoning and fairness are all "white values" and as such are suspect.

They also include the belief that any disparity between whites, Asians and blacks is ipso facto proof of racism, that whites are by nature racist and that ideals such as freedom of speech and blind justice are means by which "white supremacists" keep minorities oppressed.

Further, anyone who benefits from the "structural racism" that pervades the institutions of society is a racist, even if inadvertently, and if you're not actively seeking to topple these racist structures and institutions, you're also a racist.

Folks like D'Angelo and Kendi argue that anyone who benefits from the norms, values and structures of society, regardless of the beneficiary's skin color. If you're black, and you integrate into the white status quo, then you're actually "white" regardless of how much melanin your body produces.

For more read the post at the link and watch the video, but the purpose of this post isn't to reiterate that earlier one, but rather to highlight a question posed by John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist.

Davidson asks, if progressives really believe all this, why are they denying that it's being taught when the evidence seems overwhelming that it is? Why are they acting as if they're embarrassed by these ideas and don't want people to know that they're being promoted in schools? If they really believe that these ideas have not infiltrated our schools why don't they say something like, "This stuff isn't being taught, but it certainly should be."

Instead, they respond to parents who object to what's being served up to their children by either denying that schools are teaching this stuff or insulting parents and others by suggesting that they're racists for objecting to having their children learn about slavery.

Here's Davidson:

By now, most Americans know that critical race theory is real and that it’s being taught widely in public schools. This isn’t a semantics debate. Students are being taught racial hierarchies, along with the idea that the United States was founded on white supremacy, and that the U.S. Constitution, our legal system, and American ideals like freedom and equality all work to perpetuate and sustain systemic racism.

There are mountains of evidence of this. The work of Christopher Rufo and others has exposed critical race theory’s many manifestations, not just in public schools but inside major corporations and even the U.S. military. Yet the left has refused to debate critical race theory on the merits.

Instead, the corporate press, Hollywood, and woke Twitter bluechecks keep insisting that it doesn’t even exist, it’s just a fantasy conjured up by racist Trumpers trying to scare white voters into electing Republicans.

Just look at the left’s response to the historic Republican sweep of Virginia on Tuesday. Glenn Younkin’s campaign, their theory goes, falsely claimed that critical race theory was being taught in Virginia public schools. Racist white Virginians, terrified at the idea their kids would have to learn the truth about slavery and racism in America, elected Youngkin, who is also a racist.

(That these same voters also made history by electing Winsome Sears, a black woman, as lieutenant governor, and Jason Miyares, an Hispanic man, as attorney general, is conveniently ignored in this narrative.)

Their key talking point is that critical race theory isn’t even taught in Virginia schools. Cable news talking heads like MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace incessantly dropped it into her election-night commentary, saying critical race theory, “which isn’t real,” swung the suburbs 15 points to the “Trump insurrection-endorsed Republican.”

Julian Castro called it a “fantasy world.” Larry Sabato called it a “phony issue.” Joy Reid called it a “coded boogeyman.”

The claim that CRT isn't being taught is disingenuous. Just because the exact words "Critical Race Theory" don't appear in a syllabus it doesn't follow that the ideas aren't being purveyed by classroom teachers. Too many students have reported that their teachers are indeed attempting to inculcate these ideas to think that it's a "phony issue."

So why the denials? Do these people not want the public to know what's being taught because they realize that most Americans would find the ideas lumped under the rubric of CRT to be pernicious, corrosive and divisive? Davidson thinks so:

So here’s my question: why doesn’t the left just debate critical race theory on the merits? People like Joy Reid and Wajahat Ali clearly agree with its central tenets. They obviously think America was founded on white supremacy, and that racism pervades our civic life and public institutions.

Why not just come out and say, “You know what? Critical race theory should be taught in public schools, because it’s the best way to expose kids to the truth about America.”

Why pretend something that you fervently agree with doesn’t exist? Why play shell games about how to define critical race theory? Why not just take the broadest definition that all sides can agree to and go from there? Why not make the case for why we should base school curricula on it, why corporations should train their workforces in it, why it should be the legal basis for racial reparations and the mass redistribution of wealth?

If people are confused about what critical race theory is, why not explain what it really is? Why argue that its attendant ideas and policy prescriptions are correct and desirable, and make the case for why they will make America a better, more peaceful, and just society?

These are all good questions. Here's Davidson's answer:

Leftists won’t do that because they know that most Americans find the ideas at the heart of critical race theory repulsive, and rightly so.

This is also why the left never openly debates the merits of, say, mass illegal immigration, which they obviously support. Instead, they pretend to oppose it, or argue that the border isn’t really in crisis. Same with the Black Lives Matter riots last summer, the effects of pandemic lockdowns, the dangers of transgender ideology and bathroom policies.

Whatever the issue, they pretend the thing they support isn’t even real, then call their opponents racists and bigots for insisting that it is.

That tactic didn't work very well for them in Virginia last week. Perhaps they'll abandon it before next November, but if not it's not likely to work for them then either.

Moral Education

High school teacher Paul Barnwell had an article in The Atlantic a couple of years ago in which he expressed deep concern for the lack of moral education in today's public schools.

He noted that, among other things, the emphasis on preparing students for standardized tests has squeezed out opportunities for the addition of ethical instruction to the curriculum, and that the results are reflected in dispiriting attitudes among students toward matters like cheating, bullying, stereotyping, etc.

He wrote:

As my students seemed to crave more meaningful discussions and instruction relating to character, morality, and ethics, it struck me how invisible these issues have become in many schools.

By omission, are U.S. schools teaching their students that character, morality, and ethics aren’t important in becoming productive, successful citizens?

Barnwell goes on to lament that schools are almost devoid of any formal moral instruction, a consequence, no doubt, of the fear of treading into the domain of religion.

Indeed, religion in public schools is taboo, as is any topic that merely hints at having theistic implications. But how can one teach ethics unless one is free to answer the question that inevitably arises in the minds of at least some of the more perceptive students: Why?

For example, a teacher can present to her students the utilitarian concept of maximizing human flourishing, but what does she say when the student asks why he should care about the flourishing of anyone but himself, or in what sense would it be wrong for someone to impede the flourishing of another, or how does his cheating on a test impede another person's flourishing anyway, or what makes humans special that we should maximize human flourishing and not the flourishing of all living things?

As soon as those questions are raised, the discussion is effectively at an end because the only answer that avoids an eventual appeal to one's emotions and feelings - which itself leads to the conclusion that everybody should just do whatever feels right to them - is that there must be a transcendent moral authority whose very nature serves as an objective moral standard for right and wrong and which has the character, power and authority to hold us accountable for breaching that standard.

But that answer, the only answer which could possibly have purchase in a teenager's mind, is the very answer that our courts have forbidden be presented to our young people.

Yet, if there is no such authority then, as the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky asserts several times in his marvelous novel The Brothers Karamazov, everything is permitted. If there is no such authority then there's no ultimate accountability for our behavior, the word "wrong" has no objective meaning, and the only ethical principle is, practically speaking, do whatever you can get away with.

Even if the existence of such an authority is offered to students they still may not know what's right to do, they still might not do what is right, but at least they have an answer to the ultimate question of whether there actually is an objective right and a wrong.

By banishing not only explicitly religious ideas but also any ideas which have religious implications from our public schools we've essentially neutered those schools in terms of what they can do to formally instill in students a sense of virtue and moral character. Then we wring our hands when we read about cyber bullying, violence, cheating, drug use and sexual promiscuity among the young.

Why are we dismayed? What did we expect?

Our Modern Moral Crisis

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?”

The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here. He writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.”

The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution. We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

People have always flouted moral standards, but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, yet that's where large segments of our culture seem headed in these postmodern times.

Toner continues:

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime. The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter.

The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.”

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.

If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.

A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.

Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever it suits us.

In other words, unless there's a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there's no such thing as a moral obligation.

As Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

Part of the price of living in the present secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.

It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas meant when he wrote the following:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner concludes with this:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power."

You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality of the PDF isn't good.

Why the Dems Took a Beating

A lot of commentary about the drubbing the Democrats took in last Tuesday's elections has focused on the electorate's rejection of Democrat priorities and a concern that the issues of most concern to the average voter aren't of particular interest to Democrats.

Indeed, many voters seem to think that the Democrats are actually exacerbating the problems average folks are facing.

For instance, the Democrats' priorities seem to be:

• Climate change
• Universal preschool
• LGBTQ rights
• Weakening law enforcement
• Passing a massive spending bill that the country can't afford
• Forcing everyone to get vaccinated
• Limiting individual freedoms
• Racial hypochondria/Identity politics

Whereas the average voter is probably much more concerned with:

• What their children are being taught in school
• The price of gas and food
• Empty store shelves and understaffed stores and restaurants
• The chaos on our southern border
• Crime in the streets
• Protecting freedom of speech, religion and the right to bear arms

As long as the Democrats continue to obsess over issues that seem irrelevant or threatening to most Americans they can probably expect the electorate in 2022 to treat them just as rudely as they were treated last Tuesday.

The Left Eats Its Own

When the late Arizona senator John McCain bucked his party he was called a "maverick" and feted by the progressive media, but when one of Arizona's current senators, Kyrsten Sinema, bucks her party she's called every name in the left's very thick thesaurus of insults.

Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) provides the details:

Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children. And like clockwork, the progressive mob has set on Kyrsten Sinema. Next time the left lectures on unity, women’s rights or Joe Biden’s decency, lock your door.

The Arizona senator continues to infuriate her fellow Democrats, who are frenzied to impose their $3.5 trillion social revolution. Ms. Sinema reportedly has issues with the cost of the package as well as its tax proposals and some programs.

She’s conducted dozens of meetings with the White House and key players, though has also made clear she won’t be jammed and won’t negotiate with the public. Her refusal to bow to the left’s price tag and timeline has incensed colleagues and activists alike.

So the party member has now officially been declared an enemy of the party cause—fair game for the tactics the left long ago honed for use against the right.

What are some of those tactics?

"We’re committed to birddogging” Ms. Sinema, vowed Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese to Politico this week. “We’re going to make her life unpleasant or uncomfortable” until she follows orders.

The group—which spun out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign—gathered shock troops this week outside Ms. Sinema’s Phoenix and Tucson offices to make a start on that threat. Only the left gets away with warnings like this. Suburban parents who grump at school boards are labeled (by the same progressives) “domestic terrorists.”

The Arizona Working Families Party and the Sunrise Movement arrayed Monday at the Boston Marathon with plans to accost the senator as she ran (an injury prevented her from taking part). An activist confronted her on a flight to Washington. Progressives stalked her after she landed, hounding her for responses.

This was after activists at Arizona State University chased her into a bathroom and videotaped her there. Liberal groups are running ads in Arizona trashing her. Democratic operatives last month launched the Primary Sinema PAC (using “primary” as a verb).

The press—which spent several years worrying that MAGA hats were triggering — has licensed and encouraged the mob. “What’s Wrong With Kyrsten Sinema?” demanded the New York Times. The Nation called her the “Senate’s newest super villain,” while the New Republic branded her a “traitor.” Jezebel, the “feminist” blog, tweeted: “Absolutely Bully Kyrsten Sinema Outside Of Her Bathroom Stall.”

"Until she follows orders"!? Aren't United States senators supposed to do what they genuinely believe to be best for the country? Wasn't McCain a hero to the left for refusing to "follow orders"? (Well, he was a hero until he ran against Barack Obama in 2008.)

One might expect that Sinema's female colleagues would express outrage at the treatment being meted out to her by the very folks who profess to champion independent women and who in other cases condemn the harassment of women.

Yet the party’s women have been largely silent—never mind the outrage if any group dared similar moves against, say, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (AOC once even objected to Nancy Pelosi’s mild, private rebuke of the Squad, saying it amounted to “singling out” “women of color,” which could inspire “death threats.”)

And about the only male Democratic senator willing to say anything about Ms. Sinema was Mr. Sanders—who accused her of “sabotage.” Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan sneered that he was waiting for Ms. Sinema to show the party “something other than a designer purse.”

If her female colleagues won't defend her one might think President Biden, who was elected largely because many voters thought he'd bring decency to the Oval Office, would tell his party to back off. But in his only public comment on the matter, Mr. Biden delivered himself of a lapidary bit of callousness, shrugging that the treatment of Sinema is just "part of the process."

None of this behavior is a surprise to the right. The left more than a decade ago began embracing intimidation as a basic political tool.

Think of the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative nonprofits, or Barack Obama browbeating the Supreme Court, or activist boycotts of companies that supported Republicans. By giving license to this behavior, senior Democrats allowed it to escalate dramatically in the Trump years.

Remember Rep. Maxine Waters cheering when White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was run out of a restaurant and telling followers to do the same to others, to “create a crowd” and “tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Ms. Strassel concludes with this:

If leaders think these kinds of campaigns will stop at the doors of “centrists” like Ms. Sinema or Sen. Joe Manchin, they need to crack the history books. An unleashed progressive left will use the same tactics against anyone unwilling to bend to its rule—right, center, left, far left. Revolutions eat their own. And this revolution is now headed toward Democrats themselves.

She's right. Left wing revolutions going back to the French Revolution in 1789 were usually led by idealists, but once the revolution succeeded the idealists were deemed no longer useful to the ruthless tyrants in the movement. The idealists were soon shunted aside or, more often, sent to the guillotine, the firing squad or the gulag.

The left always seems to wind up eating its own.

Odd, Dumb or Both

Perhaps you've heard that Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia on Tuesday in a huge upset victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Perhaps you've also heard, if you listen to NBC, MSNBC or CNN that Youngkin's victory was handed him by "white supremacists" and other racial bigots in Virginia.

Youngkin ran on a number of issues. McAuliffe ran on one, the assertion that Youngkin was just a nicer version of Donald Trump.

One of the issues that Youngkin ran on was his determination to get Virginia public schools to stop teaching racially divisive content, particularly that all whites are ineradicably tainted by racism and are racial oppressors. This is what McAuliffe and the media have seized upon to justify their allegations that Youngkin was elected by a bunch of white supremacists.

Apparently, if one objects to having one's children taught that they're inherently evil by virtue of being white one is ipso facto a white supremacist.

The claim is odd, if not plain dumb, for several reasons, but it's become the standard response from progressives who are bereft of ideas and unable to mount an intelligent analysis of an election. Indeed, whenever the left encounters opposition to their ideas they start promiscuously tossing about the "R-word" as if they had an uncontrollable tic.

Here are a few examples from yesterday of this standard reaction:

Former ESPN sports reporter Jemele Hill tweeted, that "This country simply loves white supremacy.”

Joy Reid on MSNBC declared that white parents concerns about education are a kind of code for white parents who don’t like the idea of their children being taught about race. "You have to be willing," she opined, "to vocalize that these Republicans are dangerous.”

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, in the words of Sanford Horn at The Federalist, "piled on with a lie that has been running rampant in progressive circles, that 'critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points.' ”

"Of course, critical race theory is real," Horn continues, "and Virginia schools have boasted about teaching it. But not for long, should Youngkin fulfill his promise of banning the racist ideology designed to conquer and divide school children into indelibly permanent classes of victim and victimizer."

Perhaps the main reason for my assertion that accusing the Virginia electorate of racism is odd if not plain dumb is this: There were three major offices at play in the Virginia election - governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. They were all won by Republicans. Youngkin, who is white, won the governorship. The lieutenant governor's race was won by a former Marine, a woman named Winsome Spears.

Here's Spears' picture from Tuesday evening's victory celebration:

Spears with her husband, who is also a Marine, and two adult daughters.

The attorney general's race was won by Jason Miyares who is Hispanic. Ms Spears, who received over 1.66 million votes from all those Virginian white supremacists, will become Virginia's first African American lieutenant governor, and Miyares will be the state's first Hispanic attorney general.

Here's another reason the condemnation of those who elected Youngkin and Sears is odd. The outgoing governor, Democrat Ralph Northam and his attorney general Mark Herring both appeared in blackface when they were young men.

When the news came to light in 2019 the left actually excused them, but now they're telling us that a vote for a white businessman, a black woman and a Hispanic politican is somehow indicative of a strain of evil racial bigotry running through the body politic.

Like I said, the accusation that Virginia citizens who voted Republican were largely racists is either odd or dumb, but actually it's hard not to think it's both.

Does Belief Always Require Evidence? (Pt. II)

I closed yesterday's post with the assertion that just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

Yet the alleged lack of evidence for theism has long been one of the most popular reasons adduced for the refusal to accept it. As the 20th century philosopher Bertrand Russell famously said when asked what he would tell God were he to stand before Him after his death and be asked why he never believed, Russell declared that he would simply tell God that "there wasn't enough evidence."

The 19th century writer W.K. Clifford insisted that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” and the 20th century philosopher Antony Flew, before his conversion to theism, wrote that,

If it is to be established that there is a God then we have to have good grounds for believing that this is indeed so. Until or unless some such grounds are produced we have literally no reason at all for believing; and in that situation the only reasonable posture must be that of either atheism or agnosticism.

Theists contend that notwithstanding the skeptic's claim that there's not enough evidence to support a belief in God, the evidence is substantial and indeed, overwhelming.

It's not to the purpose of this post to recount that evidence here, but doubters are urged to read philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's latest book Return of the God Hypothesis to get an idea of why many theists believe the evidence is indeed dispositive for anyone who's not already dead set against it.

What is to the purpose in the present post, though, is to show that the demand for evidence before belief is warranted is very selective. What I mean is that skeptics often believe a lot of things for which they not only don't have evidence but for which evidence may not even be theoretically possible.

Here are some examples:

1. Memory beliefs (I believe I had a dream last night.)
2. Belief that we have (or don't have) free-will.
3. Belief that logical axioms are true and self-evident (If A then not ~A.)
4. Belief that there are an infinity of other universes.
5. Belief that every event has a cause.
6. Belief that nothing can cause itself.
7. Belief that life arose in some "warm little pond." (Darwin)
8. Belief that life is the product of material causes only.
9. Belief that justice is right and cruelty is wrong (What evidence justifies this or any moral belief?)
10. Belief that there is a past, present, or future.
11. Belief in the principle of cause and effect.
12. Belief that "the cosmos is all there is, ever was, or ever will be" (Carl Sagan).
13. Belief that evidence is necessary to warrant belief (Is there any evidence to support this belief?)

If skeptics hold these beliefs even though there's no empirical evidence for any of them, why is it thought to be a legitimate criticism of theists that they believe in the existence of God, especially since, as I mentioned above, there's lots of evidence that God exists?

Does Belief Always Require Evidence? (Pt.I)

It's not uncommon to hear religious believers criticized for holding beliefs they can't empirically demonstrate to be true, or at least probably true. The critic assumes that if no scientific evidence can be adduced in support of the belief then it's mere superstition.

This was in fact a popular view among skeptical philosophers from about 1870 to about 1980, and is still trotted out and dusted off every so often today. It's a view called evidentialism, and philosopher Alvin Plantinga has a great deal of fun dismantling it in his book titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Indeed, since Plantinga's book came out philosophers are much more shy about using this argument against religious believers, but others unfamiliar with the philosophical literature are not so reticent.

Plantinga asks,inter alia, why our beliefs should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Why should beliefs not be counted innocent until proven guilty?

He wonders, too, why a person of sound mind, convinced in her heart that God exists, and who has never been confronted with an antitheistic argument that she found compelling, should be required nevertheless to suspend her belief until she has acquired overwhelming evidence that her belief is true.

Suppose, for instance, that you were accused of a crime. There's substantial evidence against you and little that you can offer to offset it. Even so, you're convinced you're innocent. You know you're innocent. You can't explain the contrary evidence, but it doesn't matter. You just know you didn't commit the crime. Should you, despite this assurance, acknowledge anyway that you're guilty because you can't present an argument to explain why you're certain of your innocence?

Many people believe in God on the basis of a totally subjective experience that they can't document or prove but which leaves them with an assurance that they could not deny even were they so inclined. The experience of former atheist Kirstin Powers, a liberal journalist, provides us with a good example. She writes:

Then one night in 2006, on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, "Here I am." It felt so real. I didn't know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn't shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

You can read her full account of her experience at the link.

There's a scene in the movie Contact, which was based on a book by atheistic astronomer Carl Sagan, in which the character played by Jodie Foster, a scientist named Ellie Arroway, is part of an experiment in which she's transported to the center of the galaxy. However, upon her return she's unable to offer any evidence that she actually left earth.

None of the data collected by her colleagues from her transporter confirm that the experiment worked. Yet she's convinced that she actually experienced all that she claims to have experienced.

Is she justified in holding that belief? If her belief is the product of properly functioning cognitive faculties belonging to an accomplished scientist not given to imaginative flights of hysteria, is what she says in the following exchange with an interrogator discredited by her inability to present empirical evidence?

Michael Kritz: "Wait a minute, let me get this straight. You admit that you have absolutely no physical evidence to back up your story."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that you very well may have hallucinated this whole thing."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that if you were in our position, you would respond with exactly the same degree of incredulity and skepticism!"
Ellie Arroway: "Yes!"
Michael Kitz: [standing, angrily] "Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony, and concede that this "journey to the center of the galaxy," in fact, never took place!"
Ellie Arroway: "Because I can't. I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish... I... could share that... I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish."

Ellie Arroway, in Sagan's telling of the tale, had what amounts to a religious experience. Sagan clearly wants us to believe that her experience was veridical and that she's warranted in believing her experience was veridical despite the lack of proof, or even of any objective evidence.

But if that's so, why are Christians faulted, by folks just like Sagan, for believing in God on the basis of a subjective assurance similar to that possessed by Arroway?

Indeed, far more people have had an experience like Kirstin Powers had than have had an experience like Ellie Arroway. If Arroway is justified in believing that she actually encountered a different world why would people like Powers not be similarly justified?

Just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

More tomorrow.

The Multiverse and Hilbert's Hotel

Cosmic fine-tuning is so astonishing that numerous philosophers and scientists have remarked that it provides extraordinary evidence that the universe has been intelligently designed. Others have sought to evade that conclusion by suggesting that there are an infinite variety of universes comprising what's been called the multiverse.

Watch this video for a quick explanation of both fine-tuning and the multiverse hypothesis:

The reasoning behind the multiverse hypothesis is that if there are an infinity of universes all with different laws and parameters then a universe that's just right to support life, as astronomically improbable as it may be, just has to exist.

In other words, in an infinite array of disparate worlds every possible world must exist and since a world like ours is obviously possible, it's existence isn't so remarkable after all.

There are lots of problems with the multiverse idea, not the least of which is that there's no evidence for its existence, but Robert Marks explains in an article at Mind Matters that even if there were an infinite ensemble of worlds, it doesn't follow that every possible world would exist.

Can anything happen if there are an infinite number of universes each with an infinite number of possibilities in each? ....The answer is no. In a nutshell, the reason is that some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

The number of points on a line segment from, say zero to one, is a bigger infinity than the number of counting numbers {1,2,3,…}. We can label the infinite number of universes in the multiverse as universe #1, #2, #3, etc. Because they can be counted, this infinity is said to be countably infinite.

This looks to be the smallest infinity. (“Smallest infinity” sounds like an oxymoron but isn’t.)

The number of points on a line segment — the bigger infinity — can be referred to as a “continuous infinity.” The points on a line are too many to count. They can’t be ordered as points 1,2,3, etc. Given any point on a line, for example, there is no closest point.

No matter how close a point is chosen to a given point, there will be a closer third point midway between the first two points.

This situation is not true for the countably infinite. Given any number, say 112, the numbers 111 and 113 are the closest numbers. Not so with the set of numbers on the line segment from zero to one. Consider the midpoint ½ =0.5. Is 0.501 the closest number to 0.5? No. 0.5001 is closer and 0.50001 even closer.

This can go on forever, getting closer and closer. But there is no closest number to 0.5.

How does this apply to claims that there is an infinite number of universes where — as a result — anything can happen?

If there is a countably infinite number of possibilities (e.g. we have three eyes in one universe, two in another), then the infinity of universes must be continuous in order to include all possibility combinations. (The proof is here.)

In order to have every possible set of forces and parameters represented in the multiverse there would have to be not merely a countably infinite ensemble of worlds but rather a continuous infinity of worlds. It would far exceed 10^1000 which is usually stated as the upper bound for countable universes in the multiverse:

The universes in the multiverse cannot therefore be counted but would correspond rather to a smear on the number line. Such a multiverse is inconceivable.

Such observations are fun, but stories about a multiverse look more and more to be fairy tales. There is no experimental proof of parallel universes and many, including me, feel the infinite multiverse hypothesis is a fantasy built on soft sand by imaginative minds and speculative mathematics.

No physical proof exists.

Moreover, the notion of infinity creates all manner of absurdities. Mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943) imagines a hotel, Hilbert's hotel, in which there are an infinite number of rooms:

Hilbert’s hotel has an infinite number of rooms labeled 1,2,3, etc. There is no vacancy in the hotel. All the rooms are occupied. Nevertheless, a room can be made available by moving the lodger in room 1 to room 2, the lodger in room 2 to room 3, 3 to 4, etc.

Doing so leaves room 1 unoccupied for a new guest. In Hilbert’s hotel, there is literally always room for one more.

In fact, a hundred rooms can be vacated in Hilbert’s fully occupied hotel. Move the occupant of room 1 to room 101, the occupant of room 2 to 102, 3 to 103, etc. Doing so vacates the first 100 rooms.

But here’s the real surprise. A countably infinite number of rooms can be vacated in Hilbert’s fully occupied hotel.

Every occupant looks at their room number, doubles it, and moves to that room. So room 1’s occupant is moved to room 2, room 2’s occupant is moved to room 4, room 3 to room 6, 4 to 8, etc. This leaves all of the odd numbered rooms, (1,3,5,…), empty so Hilbert’s hotel, despite being totally full, can still accept a countably infinite number of new guests!

Hilbert wrote that, “… the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought…”

Nevertheless, as the British mathematician and astronomer Bernard Carr once said, “If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.” There will always be those so determined to avoid the God hypothesis that they'll embrace any alternative no matter how bizarre, even the belief that the cosmological equivalent of Hilbert's hotel actually exists.

The Determinist's Argument

In an article at Mind Matters neurosurgeon Michael Egnor discusses the debate between determinists (those who believe that there's no free will) and libertarians (those who believe we have free will). Egnor writes:

In a previous post, I argued that if determinism is true, we cannot have free will. That is, if everything we do is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry, there is no room for genuine freedom. In that respect, I am an “incompatibilist”—I don’t believe that free will is compatible with determinism.

What do I mean by determinism? Determinism, in the scientific sense intended here, is the view that for every moment in time, the state of the universe is completely determined by the state that immediately precedes it.

If you knew all of the details of the universe — the location and state of every particle — at any given moment, you could know with certainty what comes next. Determinism is more or less the view that nature is a machine. If we know the position of the gears, we can know the future with certainty.

The basic argument for the belief that our choices are not free goes something like this:

1. Every event in the physical universe is the inevitable consequence of prior causes (i.e. every event is physically determined).
2. Our choices are events in the physical universe (i.e. they occur in the material brain).
3. Therefore, our choices are the inevitable consequence of prior causes (i.e. they're determined by our strongest motives)

This is obviously a valid argument. If each of the premises is true then the conclusion follows, but it's not clear that either of the two premises is true, and the first premise seems, in fact, to be false. Here's Egnor:

In 1964, Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990) published a paper titled “On the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen Paradox”. In it, he observed that there is a way to test determinism at the quantum level by measuring the ratio of quantum states of particles emitted by radioactive decay.

Bell’s experiment has now been done many times, and the answer is unequivocal: determinism at the quantum level is not true. Nature is not deterministic.

The experiments showed that every quantum process entails some degree of “indeterminism”; that is, there are predictable probabilities but there is never certainty. If we knew the exact state of the universe at any given moment, we could still never know with certainty what would happen next.

Determinism in nature has been shown, scientifically, to be false. There is no real debate about this among physicists. So the question as to whether determinism, if it really existed, would be compatible with free will is merely an academic question, an interesting bit of metaphysical speculation.

If all this is true, then the first premise in the above syllogism is false and the entire argument collapses.

It may still be that our choices are not free, of course, but, if so, some other argument is going to have to be employed to demonstrate that.

Where's the Outrage?

William Trachman makes a trenchant observation at The Federalist. He notes that in the wake of new voter integrity laws promulgated this year in both Georgia and Texas there was much virtue preening by our corporate CEOs and outrage from the left over what they characterized as even worse, in the words of President Biden, than the historical racial segregation in the deep South, commonly referred to as Jim Crow.

Trachman notes that,

Democrats and leaders of global corporations ... struck back, even convincing Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred to take away the All-Star game from Atlanta. Biden unequivocally supported moving the game out of Georgia. The move sadly cost businesses in Atlanta millions of dollars in revenue. For Major League Baseball, though, that price wasn’t too high to pay in order to make their point.

When Georgia passed its voter reforms last March failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams even called for a boycott of her state, and there was a great deal of indignation expressed by our corporate big wigs:

Corporations based in Atlanta, like Delta, Coca-Cola, and ViacomCBS, publicly opposed the bill. A large virtual meeting was attended by more than 100 corporate CEOs, some of whom were coincidentally in Georgia for the Masters golf tournament which carried on as usual.

Evidently, the CEOs weren't going to allow something like moral punctilio to interfere with their golf outing.

Similarly, in Texas, Democrat state legislators fled the state to try to stop the state’s voting bill; the method temporarily succeeded by depriving the legislature of a quorum.

The legislators instead fled to Washington, D.C., by private jet to lobby for the passage of sweeping federalization of voting laws — embodied in a bill commonly referred to as H.R.1 — which would have required every Democratic senator to vote to end the filibuster. They failed.

But now, as it happens, both Texas and Georgia have teams playing in the World Series and it seems someone must've pulled the plug on the outrage machine. There are no calls to boycott the series or to have the games played elsewhere. No corporate CEOs are threatening to move their headquarters to other states. Delta isn't blustering about cancelling flights to Houston or Atlanta.

It's as if all of the indignation over the allegedly atrocious voter integrity laws simply evaporated like a fad that consumes the popular interest for a moment and then suddenly disappears.

Trachman raises the relevant questions:

And where does that leave President Biden and all the other critics of Georgia and Texas? If the state-based voter integrity laws are truly worse than racial segregation ... it hardly makes sense for critics to stay silent as these teams host the World Series. Why should a boycott stop at the All-Star game, for instance, if the dire warnings of voter suppression and racial discrimination were accurate?

The question is whether Biden, Abrams, and Manfred have the courage of their convictions. Why didn’t they call for the World Series to be moved to a location outside of either Georgia or Texas?

Why hasn’t Manfred boycotted the games? Instead, he’s been attending them in person.

The answer, of course, is that they knew all along that their dire warnings were mere partisan rhetoric.

"Partisan rhetoric," we may suppose, is intended by Trachman as a euphemism for contemptible dishonesty.

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. II)

Yesterday I laid out an argument to the effect that one is not rational to believe that naturalism, i.e. atheism, is true and finished with some quotes, mostly from naturalists themselves, acknowledging that, in the words of J.B.S. Haldane, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

Nor, if one's mental processes are in fact the result solely of an evolutionary process that selects for survival rather than truth, does one have epistemic justification for believing that naturalism is true.

So how does the naturalist get around this apparent difficulty? Philosopher Jay Richards summarizes one common response:

If [the Darwinian natural selection] story is roughly correct, then there would seem to be a survival advantage in forming true beliefs. Surely our ancestors would have gotten on in the world much better if they came to believe that, say, a saber-tooth tiger, is a dangerous predator. And if they believed that they should run away from dangerous predators, all the better.

In contrast, those early humans who had false beliefs, who believed that saber-tooth tigers were really genies who would give three wishes if they were petted, would tend to get weeded out of the gene pool.

So wouldn’t the Darwinian process select for reliable rational faculties, and so give us faculties that would produce true beliefs?

On this account evolution would produce a propensity for holding true beliefs solely as a coincidental by-product of the process of selecting for behaviors that are likely to increase the chances of surviving. There are several problems with this argument, however.

One is that it assumes as a matter of faith that a non-rational process like natural selection can produce the rational faculties exhibited in human reason. What justifies the belief that rationality can arise from the non-rational?

But the bigger difficulty, as Richards writes, is that:

....there are millions of beliefs, few of which are true in the sense that they correspond with reality, but all compatible with the same behavior. Natural selection could conceivably select for survival-enhancing behavior. But it has no tool for selecting only the behaviors caused by true beliefs, and weeding out all the others.

What Richards is getting at might be illustrated by a hypothetical example: Suppose two prehistoric tribes both encouraged the production of as many children as possible, but tribe A did so because they believed that the gods would reward those who produce many offspring with a wonderful afterlife.

Imagine also that tribe B had no belief in an afterlife but did believe that the more children one has the more likely some would survive to adulthood to care for the parents in their old age.

Natural selection would judge both of these tribes to be equally "fit" since the "goal" of evolution is to maximize reproductive success. Natural selection would only "see" the behavior, it would be blind to the beliefs that produced it. Thus, true beliefs would have no particular survival advantage over false beliefs, and cognitive faculties that produced true beliefs would not be any more likely to be selected for than faculties which produced false beliefs.

Richards concludes,

So if our reasoning faculties came about as most naturalists assume they have, then we have little reason to assume they are reliable in the sense of giving us true beliefs. And that applies to our belief that naturalism is true.

Put differently, the naturalist cannot rationally justify his belief in naturalism. He can only maintain his belief that naturalism is true by an act of blind faith.

Naturalism and Reason (Pt. I)

One of the major difficulties with the naturalistic worldview is that it must explain how belief that naturalism is true is not self-refuting. For the purposes of this discussion naturalism, atheism, and materialism may all be considered synonyms. The argument which concludes that naturalism is self-refuting goes something like this:

On atheism there is no God. Thus, our reasoning powers must be the product of a purposeless evolutionary process that was geared to survival, not for discovering truth.

If that's the case, if we can't trust our reasoning powers to lead us to truth, especially the truth about metaphysical questions, then we have no grounds for believing that atheism is in fact true.

So, although atheism may be true, one cannot rationally believe that it is. This is ironic since most atheists argue that atheistic materialism is rational and theism is irrational, but, in fact, the opposite is actually the case.

Theism is a rational worldview since the belief that we are endowed with a trustworthy reasoning faculty which can reliably lead us to truth only makes sense if theism is true. Thus, the theist has grounds for believing that reason is trustworthy and is therefore rational in trusting his reason to lead him to truth, whereas the naturalist is irrational to believe that naturalism is true since she has no grounds for trusting her reason to lead her to truth.

Numerous naturalists have acknowledged in one way or another that this is a problem. To illustrate the point here's a baker's dozen of quotations culled from philosophers and scientists, the majority of whom, so far as I know, are atheistic materialists:

• "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Steven Pinker
• Evolution selects for survival and 'Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.' Patricia Churchland
• "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." John Gray
• "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." Francis Crick
• “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Charles Darwin
• “Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum
• “According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman
• "We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin
• “[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich
• “We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins
• “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.” Lisa Feldman Barrett
• “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” J.B.S. Haldane
• "Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." C.S. Lewis

So how does the naturalist address this apparent difficulty? We'll look at the most popular counter argument in tomorrow's VP.

Bad Moon Rising

Jim Geraghty writes in National Review Online that we're headed for some very difficult times and that much of our media is burying its head in the sand.

The media's disinterest notwithstanding the evidence pointing to a coming U.S. recession is starting to pile up:

At 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, October 28, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis will unveil the Gross Domestic Product numbers for the third quarter of fiscal year 2021, which covers July, August, and September.

Economists expect the third-quarter GDP to be a significant drop from the previous few quarters: “Buffeted by the delta variant, supply shortages and inflation, the world’s largest economy is projected by economists to have expanded by an annualized 2.8 percent, amid a sharp slowdown in spending by American consumers.

That’s less than half the 6.7 percent gain of the previous three months.”

Less than 3 percent growth would be pretty lousy for an economy that is supposed to be rebounding out of a pandemic. But it sounds as if Hassett [Kevin Hassett, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers],thinks it could be even worse, and he’s not alone: “IHS Markit, the gold standard among Wall Street forecasters, estimates GDP is on track to grow just 1.5 percent.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow forecast is even weaker: 0.5 percent.”

Those projections are perilously close to zero growth in the third quarter!

We should also expect worse in the fourth quarter that we’re currently in. Businesses can’t find workers — we have 10.4 million unfilled jobs. You’ve probably noticed that everything you buy seems to be getting more expensive, and every time you fill up your car, you wonder if they’re making gasoline out of diamonds these days.

Those GDP numbers would be bad enough. Coupled with inflation they're even worse. Geraghty notes that,

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted a few days ago that “Hyperinflation is going to change everything. It’s happening.” And when one respondent referred to how Nigerians experienced 16 percent inflation, Dorsey responded that, “It will happen in the US soon, and so the world.”

Sixteen percent inflation? The U.S. inflation rate was only at 5.4 percent in September. For inflation to skyrocket like that, someone would have to dump tons of money into a U.S. economy that already had too few goods and services to purchase — something like . . . er, $2 trillion in a “Build Back Better” bill and a separate $1 trillion in an infrastructure bill?

That's not all:

The supply-chain problems are just catastrophic: There are more than 100 cargo vessels now anchored off the California coast, waiting to unload their goods — about 200,000 20-foot containers, according to CNN. Factories are temporarily shutting down because of a lack of supplies.

As if oblivious to this perilous situation the Biden administration is planning to fire any employee of a federal contractor who refuses vaccination:

The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, an influential trade group that represents an industry with nearly 6 million workers, is pleading with the administration to delay a December 8 deadline for employees of federal contractors to get vaccinated.

“If tens or hundreds of thousands of employees are terminated just two weeks before Christmas . . . the result could be nothing short of catastrophic for the newly unemployed and their families and for the US economy,” Eric Hoplin, the NAW’s president and CEO, wrote in a Wednesday letter to Biden.

The trade group’s members include grocers, lumber, florists, beer, wine and various other distributors.

Read the rest at the link. Americans under the age of fifty are too young to remember the 1970s with their miles long gas lines and roaring inflation, but it did happen, and something like it could happen again. I doubt that this is what the majority of voters thought they were voting for last November, but here we are.

Proving Chesterton Right

Mind Matters has an interesting piece that addresses an article at Scientific American written by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Loeb states that all the theories which seek to explain the origin of our universe without positing an intelligence are inadequate.

In his Sci Am article Loeb writes:

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

Loeb's objection to each of these explanations is that they simply push the problem back a step or two or are otherwise unsatisfactory. He argues that the best explanation is that our universe resulted from the intentional efforts of an intelligent agent or agents:

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

There's more to Loeb's hypothesis at the link, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on what he's proposing in what's been quoted above. He's arguing that intelligent beings of some sort created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, and designed it to produce civilizations driven by Darwinian natural selection:

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

This hypothesis is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian creation story except that Loeb substitutes some sort of hypothetical superintelligent, superpowerful extra-cosmic aliens for a creator God, but these aliens seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace.

Why this puzzling aversion to identifying the designer as God? What is it about the concept of God that repels our naturalist friends like Dracula from a crucifix? One gets the feeling that were it to be somehow discovered that there really was a heaven and a hell awaiting the departed that our contemporary secularists would insist that these had in fact been established by aliens and that there's no reason to suppose that a God had anything at all to do with it.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that when men no longer believe in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Loeb’s suggestion is a confirming instance of Chesterton’s claim. Unwilling to attribute the universe to God, he posits creatures whose existence not only lacks any unwelcome religious implications and overtones, but also lacks any supporting evidence.

The universe, Loeb acknowledges, is the product of intelligent design, but the designer need not be anything so rebarbative as the God of traditional theism. Yet positing unobservable aliens is not in any way testable or scientific, so what advantage does one gain by positing such beings?

What's the practical difference, after all, between a transcendent superpowerful, superintelligent alien who brings about the creation of the cosmos out of nothing and a God who does the same?

It seems like a scientist can offer any explanation for the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. We might well ask why that is.