Mr.Biden's Numbers

Hot Air's Allahpundit calls it the worst presidential poll he's ever seen. The New York Times/Siena poll found President Biden at 33% among registered voters nationwide.

More than three-quarters of registered voters see the United States moving in the wrong direction. More than two-thirds of independents also now disapprove of the president’s performance, and nearly half disapprove strongly.

Among fellow Democrats his approval rating stands at 70 percent, but even that's a fairly low approval for members of a president's own party, and it's belied by the fact that 64 percent of Democratic voters say they'd prefer a different candidate to run in 2024.

According to the poll not a single demographic in his party prefers Mr. Biden to be the Democratic nominee in 2024. Neither of two essential elements of the Democrat base, African-Americans and young voters, want him to run. African Americans split 43/47 on the issue, and 94% (!) of Democrats under the age of 30 want someone else.

A Civiqs poll is even worse. On that poll the president's overall approval is only 29%, with only 19% of Independents and 36% of Hispanics willing to say that he's done a satisfactory job.

Mr. Biden has managed to anger both the left and the right, for different reasons. His foot-dragging on packing the Supreme Court, doing "something" about abortion rights, pushing the Green agenda, etc. has the left stewing while his Afghanistan debacle, inflation, the border catastrophe and energy policy have outraged the right.

Despite his historically poor performance there is still a glimmer of hope for the Democrats. Remarkably, the NYT/Siena poll shows that Mr. Biden would still defeat Mr. Trump (44%/41%) were the election held today. I wonder if there are many Democrats actually hoping that Mr. Trump will run and win the GOP nomination. He may, after all, be the only GOP candidate against whom they believe they have a chance.

Nevertheless, as The Federalist's David Harsanyi observes:

It’s certainly entertaining watching partisans feign excitement over their mollycoddled candidate holding a 44-41 lead in a national poll against a guy who is accused of sedition on virtually every news channel daily. What do these numbers look like when Trump (or someone like Ron DeSantis) is reminding voters what gas prices and their 401(k)s looked like before Covid?

Indeed, the left is again convincing themselves that winning a national poll means something. (Siena, incidentally, had Clinton up 17 points in its final 2016 poll.) There is no popular vote.

Biden must win states. And the president is underwater in almost every one of them, on almost every issue, in almost every poll. I’m no prognosticator or election expert — Biden might well win reelection — but none of that could possibly be heartening news for Democrats.

What Mr. Trump will choose to do is yet to be determined, but it's not at all clear what Mr. Biden can do to rescue his presidency, other than reverse course and adopt the policies of his predecessor. Tasting that piece of humble pie, however, is probably out of the question.

Modern Science Is the Offspring of Christian Theism

One of the myths of our age is that science is antithetical to religion. This would come as strange news to the men who pioneered the scientific revolution. As Rodney Stark notes in his fascinating book For the Glory of God, “Not only were science and religion compatible, they were inseparable--the rise of science was achieved by deeply religious Christian scholars.”

He goes on to write:

The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century was the … result of [Christian scholarship] starting in the eleventh century… Why did real science develop in Europe … and not anywhere else? I find answers to those questions in unique features of Christian theology… The “Enlightenment” [was] conceived initially as a propaganda ploy by militant atheists and humanists [e.g. Voltaire, Diderot and Gibbon] who attempted to claim credit for the rise of science [through promulgating] the falsehood that science required the defeat of religion.

Stark notes that,"It is the consensus among contemporary historians, philosophers and sociologists of science that real science arose only once: in Europe."

Why? Because Europe was strongly influenced by Christian theology which held that the universe was intentionally created for man by a rational, logical God, and that it could yield up its secrets by rational inquiry. Since God was rational His creation was not chaotic or random, but like His will for mankind, it was lawful and orderly.

No other belief system, whether secular or religious, offered a ground for belief in an orderly universe that could be studied rationally.

Stark researched "scientific stars" from 1543 to 1680, the era usually designated as the scientific revolution, and came up with a list of the top 52. Fifty of the 52 were Christians, at least 30 of whom could be characterized as devout. One (Edmund Halley) was a sceptic and one (Paracelsus) was a pantheist.

Here's a short version (8 pages) of Stark's argument for those who lack the time to read his book. One of the most devout of the scientists who initiated the scientific revolution was also one of the greatest geniuses in the history of science, Isaac Newton. Newton actually wrote more on theology in his lifetime than he did on science. This short video from the John 10:10 project gives some insight into the man and his beliefs:

Is Society Devolving?

The headline caught my eye: Darwin’s Theory Upended? Natural Selection May be Making Society More Unequal. I clicked on it to read the article and found that, though the information in it was interesting, nothing in it supported the headline.

The opening paragraph made it clear that the writer, Matt Higgins, doesn't understand evolutionary theory. He writes:

Charles Darwin’s natural selection theory is being put to the test. Darwin’s theory expounded that organisms which can better adapt to their environment are more likely to survive and produce more offspring. However, a new study by British researchers reveals natural selection may be making society more unequal.

Mr. Higgins implies that Darwin's theory states that evolution should produce greater social equality, but the theory suggests no such thing. In fact, it arguably suggests the opposite.

Mr. Higgins nevertheless cites research that has produced the almost banal finding that the lower socio-economic classes are, in evolutionary terms, outcompeting the upper classes:

Researchers from the University of East Anglia find that natural selection is favoring poorer people with little education. The study “shows how natural selection effects are stronger in groups with lower income and less education, among younger parents, people not living with a partner, and people with more lifetime sexual partners.”

On the flip side, natural selection “is pushing against genes” associated with highly educated individuals, people who have more lifetime earnings, those who have a low risk of ADHD or major depressive disorders, and those with a lower risk of coronary artery disease.

In short, the study found that the poorer, less educated demographic have more children than those who are wealthier and better educated and concludes that natural selection is making society more unequal. This doesn't seem at all surprising, but there's nothing in the research that contradicts evolutionary theory, nor, as far as I could tell from Mr. Higgins article, do the researchers make such a claim.

In fact, Mr. Higgins seems to be under the misconception that natural selection should always lead to societies that enjoy greater degrees of social equality, but nothing in the theory suggests that that should be the case.

Evolutionary theorists maintain that natural selection, by a process called differential reproduction, leads to populations that are better suited for survival in their environment than were their predecessors.

If the poor are more reproductively successful than the wealthy it hardly follows that Darwin is being overturned. Nothing in the theory says that evolution should lead to greater social equality. Indeed, that notion smacks more of Marx than of Darwin.

If Darwinism is overturned it won't be by citing sociological examples of how it's actually being confirmed. It'll be by way of a paradigm shift triggered among younger theorists who've become disenchanted with the inability of the theory to explain the origin of life and the enormous evidence for purpose and intentional design in the biological world.

For the Young Intellectual

Writing at The Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti mentions that from time to time he's been asked by young men and women aspiring to become involved in the intellectual debates of our time what advice he would give to them.

He replies with a column titled "An Intellectual Starter Kit."

As you can imagine, he urges young intellectuals to read and to read voraciously. I personally don't see how it's possible to be an effective leader in any segment of our society that stresses ideas - whether politics, medicine, the military, the church, or anywhere - without being a reader, and I'm sure Continetti agrees.

He lists and explains five recommendations which I've given here along with my summaries of what he says in much more detail about them.

1. Be a generalist: Most of the noteworthy intellectuals of the twentieth century were well-rounded in philosophy, history, literature, politics and some science.
2. Don't skip the endnotes: There's often a treasure trove of information in the notes and they often suggest other books that are worth reading.
3. Explore the archives: This is advice geared more to those who'd like to work as writers for a journal and who want to absorb a journal's style.
4. Keep a notebook: Record quotes and passages that are specially noteworthy in everything you read. It can become a tremendous resource in one's own thought and writing.
5. Seek out educational opportunities: Seminars, lectures, online courses, etc. are excellent venues for sharpening one's own thinking.

For my part I think #1 and #4 are the two most helpful recommendations on his list. Read across a broad spectrum of disciplines, keep a record of the meaningful highlights of what you read, and, as C.S. Lewis and others have said, try to reread a book you read before in between new books.

When you reread a book it not only helps you to remember things about it you may have forgotten but you almost always see things in it that you didn't notice the first time around.

Check out the details of Continetti's advice for young intellectuals at the link.

A Caution about Consensus

We often hear nowadays that something is true because there's a consensus of experts who testify to its truth. Predictions of climate catastrophe, for instance, are sometimes reinforced by the claim that the vast majority of scientists believe we're headed for climate Armageddon.

Before we accept the consensus of the experts, though, it might be worth considering that some fifty former intelligence experts wrote in a letter that the Hunter Biden laptop story was probably Russian disinformation. As it turned out, however, the sordid and perhaps incriminating information on Hunter's laptop was actually put there by Hunter himself and the consensus of the experts turned out to be foolish and ill-informed.

When we're told that there's a consensus in favor of a certain claim we might reflect upon the words of the late Michael Crichton. Crichton was a science fiction writer (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain) of some renown and for whom there was little merit in the claim that "everyone knows that X is true." He writes:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks.

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Scientists operate in a "knowledge silo." They may be authoritative within the confines of their own silo, but when they jump into a different silo and speak on matters relevant to that other silo their authority is minimal.

We sometimes see such silo hopping when scientists opine on matters of ethics, religion and public policy. In such cases the scientist has wandered far from his area of expertise and his authority diminishes in proportion to his distance from his silo.

In any case, we'd do well to remember Crichton's admonition the next time we're told that there's a consensus among scientists about Covid, climate change, evolution, or whatever. The "experts" might all agree, but they may at the same time all be wrong. The history of science is littered with examples of a consensus that eventually came to grief.

One question we might ask is how many of these scientists have actually themselves studied the issue they're declaiming upon, and how many of them are just parroting what they've heard from others to whose authority they uncritically defer?

Naturalism's Conflict with Reason

Human reason poses an interesting problem for metaphysical naturalists of both a modern and a postmodern inclination. Metaphysical naturalists hold that only nature exists and that human beings are simply the product of impersonal forces. Naturalists who embrace a modern or Enlightenment worldview argue that reason is our most trustworthy guide to truth while postmoderns assert that reason is an inadequate guide to truth.

Yet both must employ reason in order to make their respective cases. The modern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to argue that it's trustworthy, which is surely question-begging, and the postmodern has to assume reason is trustworthy in order to conclude that it's not trustworthy at all, which is surely self-refuting.

In neither case can it be said that the modern or the postmodern is thinking rationally. We can have confidence that our reason generally leads us to truth, especially metaphysical truth, only on the assumption that God exists, is Himself rational, and has created us in his image.

If we join the naturalist in assuming God does not exist then we must conclude that our rational faculties are the product of processes which have evolved those faculties to suit us for survival, not for the attainment of true beliefs. As Harvard's Steven Pinker puts it, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not."

Here's philosopher Patricia Churchland on the same subject: "Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

And philosopher John Gray: "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."

Each of these thinkers embraces metaphysical naturalism, but on that view there's no basis for thinking that their reason is a trustworthy guide to truth which makes their claim that reason isn't a trustworthy guide to truth itself untrustworthy. What a muddle.

Anyway, a trio of philosophers discuss the conundrum in which naturalists find themselves in this video:

Atheist Backlash

An article by Kate Cohen in the Washington Post last week makes one wonder how well-informed a writer must be to work for the WaPo. Ms. Cohen is upset with the Supreme Court for several rulings this term which she alleges were based on religious, specifically Christian, bias and proposes an atheist "backlash."

Her opening sentences make clear her animus against religiously-motivated citizens:

With its ruling last week to retract federal abortion rights, the Supreme Court essentially declared it won’t protect Americans from a powerful minority who insist their God gets to make the rules for everyone. This week, it declared it will not protect students from the coercion inherent in official-led prayers to that same God.

It's odd that Ms. Cohen would think that Justice Alito's exceedingly well-argued opinion would be based on religious preference when there was no hint of religious belief anywhere in it or in any of the concurring opinions. Indeed, they could have all been written by atheists.

The Court also found, contra Ms. Cohen's mischaracterization, that the high school coach who prayed after games did not coerce his athletes to pray with him, rather they freely chose to join him. The Court's decision actually expands freedom rather than limiting it and protects the First Amendment rights of everyone.

Whereas many people see these rulings as a return to Constitutional sanity after fifty years of judicial activism untethered to the Constitution, Ms. Cohen sees them as an alarming intrusion of Christianity into our politics.

She evidently believes that only Christians think that Roe was bad law, even though the late pro-choice Justice Ginsberg thought it was ungrounded and arbitrary, as have many secular law experts since 1973. She also evidently believes that only Christians are pro-life even though there are many Jews, Muslims and atheists who believe it's wrong to kill unborn babies.

Setting aside the Constitutional argument, though, she is correct that many who believe a woman should have the right to kill her unborn baby are not religious, and there's good reason for this. If one has no belief in any transcendent moral authority then morality reduces simply to whatever I want. It's not immoral, if there is no moral authority, for me to kill a baby in the womb if I don't want it.

The only moral imperative is to look out for #1. The only question that governs one's moral decision-making is "What's in it for me?"

In any case, Ms. Cohen proposes an atheistic "backlash" against Christian influence, such as it is.

She begins with a gratuitous swipe at those who are alarmed at some of what's happening in our society:

Some people work up a good backlash using bogeymen and lies. They invent a completely fictional world of child grooming, elementary-school CRT classes and sports teams overrun by transgender girls. For our backlash, we don’t need to make anything up. To demonstrate the looming threat of theocracy, we can (as atheists tend to do) stick to the evidence: actual laws passed, platforms approved and rulings handed down.

If Ms. Cohen really believes that these are "completely fictional" concerns she's deluding herself, but set that aside. Her response is to recommend that people shout their atheism, so to speak:

So, if you haven’t done so already, now would be an especially good time to say, “You know what? I’m an atheist.” You could call yourself an “agnostic” if you want, a “nonbeliever” or a “humanist.” But a good backlash should pack a punch, and nothing punches like the word atheist.

Tell someone you’re an atheist. Start with yourself if you need to. Tell your spouse, your kids, your parents, your pastor, your political representatives. And if pollsters come calling, definitely tell them.

For someone who recommends sticking to the evidence, proclaiming one's atheism seems an odd tactic. After all, what is the evidence that atheism is true? There just aren't any compelling arguments in support of atheism and certainly no evidence that there is no God.

Sophisticated atheists recognize this and find themselves reduced to attacking reasons put forward by theists for believing that there is a God. Having little or no evidence in their favor they can only argue, feebly, in my view, that theists' arguments are unconvincing.

Ms. Cohen closes with this:

Make it clear that, to you, no legitimate public policy can be based on the supposed wishes of a supernatural being. Right-wing politicians will have to find some other moral justification for forcing women to bear children they don’t want, keeping students from getting the education they need and withholding health care that might save children’s lives while protecting the guns that might end them.

This is disturbing. She's explicitly stating that no one motivated by religious belief should be able to contribute to the shaping of public policy. This is pure bigotry. Why should religiously motivated citizens be excluded from the public square? What's the Constitutional warrant for relegating Christians to second-class status? Would she make the same claim about Muslims or, for that matter, atheists?

Moreover, her demand that "Right-wing politicians find some other moral justification" for their policies is just silly given that that's exactly what happened in the SCOTUS cases that inspired her column. In a free society citizens' motivation can be whatever it happens to be, religious or otherwise, but their public arguments should be grounded in the Constitution.

Indeed, conservatives, many motivated by a belief that all life is precious and that killing innocent babies is immoral, have based their public arguments for fifty years on the secular claim that there was no right to abortion anywhere in the Constitution.

Her demand is also silly for the reason mentioned above that insistence upon a moral justification rests ultimately on the belief that morality is grounded in a transcendent moral law-giver. Take that away and there's no "moral justification" for anything. Morality becomes nothing more than egoism and emotivism.

The Politics of Outrage

In the 60 days since the Dobbs decision leaked to the press there've been at least 92 instances of vandalism and violence against pro-life churches and crisis pregnancy centers.

As I mentioned in a previous post the reaction to the overturn of Roe is not producing rational defense of Roe and logical criticism of Dobbs. There's no obvious attempt show how Dobbs was wrongly decided, only anger at having what people thought had been a constitutional right shown not to have been a right at all.

Anger can be healthy, but it's not conducive to reasonableness, and over the past few years it has caused us to become more polarized, perhaps, than at anytime since the Civil War.

Anger generates antipathy for the people one sees as "the enemy," and it's a short step from antipathy to hatred and from hatred to violence.

Jonah Goldberg writes at The Dispatch about the baleful effects that anger has on a society and notes that traditional rules of conduct are guardrails against the excesses of outrage:

[A]cross the political spectrum, combatants are arguing as much from anger as from reason. The ubiquitous cultivation of rage in our politics is a siren song to venture off the path; to disregard the norms; to shout, “Screw the rules!”

It’s a calling to take a shortcut on the mistaken belief that the rules are for suckers and that the enemies’ rule-breaking is a justification for your own.

...Wisdom, if it tells us anything, tells us that the rules matter more for the hard cases, when passions are high and the shortcut to victory seems obvious. Indeed, we have rules for the hard cases precisely because it takes no courage to follow the rules when it’s easy.

When we let our anger control our behavior, when we rationalize disregarding the rules and allow our behavior to be governed by our hatreds and passions we're setting wisdom aside and putting our basest instincts in the driver's seat. This is invariably foolish:

There’s a reason we tell people to sleep on big decisions rather than making a choice when they’re overcome with emotion, because intense emotions can seduce us into making bad decisions.

But everywhere you look, politicians, activists, and rabble-rousers tell us you’re not angry enough. These days, “mobilize” is just a political consultant’s term to get our voters as [angry] as possible.

This is unsustainable. It is dangerous. And it will not lead to permanent victory, but permanent political warfare and the law of unintended consequences.

Anger has its place, but if it causes us to dehumanize others, to strip them of their dignity as persons, to damage, destroy and harm others and their property, then our anger has crossed the line and become evil.

Goldberg concludes:

Human nature—and conservatism itself—stands athwart all of this folly, shouting, “Stop!” Permanent political warfare need not stop at being merely political, and a people in a constant state of rage cannot be free.

“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things,” Edmund Burke writes, “that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

As the Greek philosopher Plato noted over two millenia ago, a people who can't subordinate their politics to a higher rationality and morality, who can't govern their social passions, is not fit for self-governance, and will ultimately find themselves ruled by a tyrant.

Happy Birthday America (Whatever's Left of You)

A Theory in Trouble

A long column by Stephen Buranyi at The Guardian gives us a peek at the loss of confidence among some scientists of the once unquestioned theory of Darwinian evolution.

Buranyi starts off with a clear and concise summary of the development of the modern Neo-Darwinian synthesis in the first half of the 20th century, culminating in the centenary in 1959 of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.

He follows this history with a description of how developments in molecular biology in the 1960s began to undermine that synthesis, particularly the discovery that natural selection did not play the crucial role it had been thought to play.

As one scientist put it:

The genes were changing – that is, evolving – but natural selection wasn’t playing a part. Some genetic changes were being preserved for no reason apart from pure chance. Natural selection seemed to be asleep at the wheel.

This realization threatened to undo the modern theory. If natural selection wasn't the driving force of evolutionary change what was?

Evolutionary biologists were stunned. In 1973, David Attenborough presented a BBC documentary that included an interview with one of the leading modern synthesists, Theodosius Dobzhansky.

He was visibly distraught at the “non-Darwinian evolution” that some scientists were now proposing. “If this were so, evolution would have hardly any meaning, and would not be going anywhere in particular,” he said. “This is not simply a quibble among specialists. To a man looking for the meaning of his existence, evolution by natural selection makes sense.”

Where once Christians had complained that Darwin’s theory made life meaningless, now Darwinists levelled the same complaint at scientists who contradicted Darwin.....

Other assaults on evolutionary orthodoxy followed....

Perhaps the biggest change from the theory’s mid-century glory days is that its most ambitious claims – that simply by understanding genes and natural selection, we can understand all life on earth – have been dropped, or now come weighted with caveats and exceptions. This shift has occurred with little fanfare.

The theory’s ideas are still deeply embedded in the field, yet no formal reckoning with its failures or schisms has occurred.

To its critics, the modern synthesis occupies a position akin to a president reneging on a campaign promise – it failed to satisfy its entire coalition, but remains in office, hands on the levers of power, despite its diminished offer.

Today the unity and optimism of 1959 has dissipated and biologists have become a fractious lot. One of the many findings that have thrown the discipline into turmoil is the discovery of the amazing phenomenon called plasticity.

This is the ability of some organisms to develop new or modified anatomical structures more rapidly than Darwinian gradualism allows:

Descriptions of plasticity are startling, bringing to mind the kinds of wild transformations you might expect to find in comic books and science fiction movies.

Emily Standen is a scientist at the University of Ottawa, who studies Polypterus senegalus, AKA the Senegal bichir, a fish that not only has gills but also primitive lungs. Regular polypterus can breathe air at the surface, but they are “much more content” living underwater, she says.

But when Standen took Polypterus that had spent their first few weeks of life in water, and subsequently raised them on land, their bodies began to change immediately. The bones in their fins elongated and became sharper, able to pull them along dry land with the help of wider joint sockets and larger muscles.

Their necks softened. Their primordial lungs expanded and their other organs shifted to accommodate them.

Their entire appearance transformed. “They resembled the transition species you see in the fossil record, partway between sea and land,” Standen told me. According to the traditional theory of evolution, this kind of change takes millions of years. But, says Armin Moczek, an extended synthesis proponent, the Senegal bichir “is adapting to land in a single generation”.

Senegal bichir

Buranyi gives other examples of plasticity and discusses the tension between traditionalist Darwinians and those who think it's time to move on from Darwinisn and the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the last century.

The point, though Buranyi doesn't explicitly state it, is that naturalistic evolution is a theory that seems to be suffering the erosion of the most crucial element of any scientific theory - explanatory power. As scientific discovery continues apace the ability to explain what's being discovered in naturalistic terms seems to be diminishing.

These words serve as a suitable conclusion to the essay although they come early on:

Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute.

“If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”

Perhaps the day is coming when among "other forces that may be at work" biologists will seriously consider an intelligent mind.

Pascal's Wager

Imagine that you're a contestant on a game show and that the game consists of placing a sealed box in front of you and being told that the box contains either $1,000,000 or $1. There's a 50/50 chance of either. You have to guess which it is, and if you choose correctly you get to keep whatever it is that you guessed. Suppose further that refusing to guess at all is the same as guessing $1.

Those are the terms of the game. What would you do? Would you play? Which option would you choose?

Suppose you were told that the odds were not 50/50 but rather 100 to 1 that there was $1 in the box. Which option would you choose then?

The reasonable thing to do, of course, is to guess that there's a fortune in the box regardless of the odds. If you're right you gain $1,000,000, and if you're wrong you lose almost nothing. If, on the other hand, you bet that there's $1 in the box and you're right you gain very little, but if you're wrong you lose out on a fortune. To bet on the $1 seems irrational and foolish.

This is, broadly, the argument proposed by the brilliant French physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century that's come to be known as Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's version the choice is between believing God exists and committing one's life to Him or declining to believe He exists.

As with the box and the fortune, Pascal says that if you believe and you're wrong you lose relatively little, but if you believe and you're right you gain an immeasurable benefit.

By "believe" Pascal doesn't intend a simple intellectual assent but rather he means a placing of one's trust in the one in whom he believes. Nor is Pascal offering this argument as a "proof" that God exists. Nor does he assume that one can simply choose to believe or even should choose to believe as a result of a calculation of the benefits and liabilities. What he's saying is that belief, if one has it, makes perfect sense.

In other words, the skeptic who declares theistic belief to be irrational is simply wrong. The theist has everything to gain and relatively little to lose. The skeptic has relatively little to gain and everything to lose, so whose position, Pascal might ask, is the more rational?

This argument has triggered a lot of reaction, both positive and negative. There are a number of objections to it, and although most of them are pretty weak, some of them merit consideration.

Susan Rinnard, a philosopher at Harvard, did a video on Pascal's argument which does a good job of explaining the Wager in just a few minutes and which presents a version of the argument that avoids some of the pitfalls of the original:

For those interested in reading an excellent treatment of the Wager with responses to the major objections Michael Rota's book Taking Pascal's Wager is one of the best resources out there. It's certainly much better than most of the stuff one finds on YouTube.

Is SCOTUS Illegitimate?

One tactic progressives are trying out in their frustration with the eminently reasonable Dobbs decision which sent abortion back to the states is to declare the Court "illegitimate."

Over the weekend Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez opined that the Court has created a crisis of legitimacy because Clarence Thomas' wife sent tweets on January 6th expressing her concerns about the November election.

Senator Elizabeth Warren tied her conclusion that the Court is illegitimate more directly to the Dobbs decision. Her solution was to make the Court truly illegitimate in the eyes of the public by packing it with additional left-wing Justices.

On what grounds do these and other Democrats argue that the Court is illegitimate? There are several.

One is that because the Court hands down rulings that they don't like that makes it illegitimate. This is, of course, absurd. The Court is not a legislature. It doesn't, or shouldn't, bend to the popular will. It's role is to assess whether a given statute is consistent with the Constitution as well as determine whether rights that are claimed by plaintiffs really are granted by the Constitution.

Popularity should have nothing to do with these judgments. As others have pointed out the IRS is not popular but it's not for that reason "illegitimate."

Jim Geraghty notes the irony that if someone were to claim that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president "many Democrats will react with outrage and contend that this belief is an attack on democracy and the American government itself. But if you argue that the Supreme Court is illegitimate, you are qualified to be a leader in the Democratic Party."

Another reason some Democrats are proffering for declaring the Court illegitimate is that several of the nominees who voted to overturn Roe allegedly lied to Senators during the confirmation process. According to this allegation they told Senators that they would not overturn Roe and then they did.

Did they lie? According to the Wall Street Journal that's very unlikely:

Perhaps the most unfortunate claim is that the Justices in the Dobbs majority lied during confirmation hearings. The charge is that they suggested that Roe v. Wade was a precedent that couldn’t be overturned.

Coaxed on the point on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this is grounds for impeachment, and don’t be surprised if other Democrats pick up that cudgel.

Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin said Friday they feel Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch deceived them on the precedent point in testimony and in their private meetings with the Justices. We weren’t in those meetings, but we’d be stunned if either Justice came close to making a pledge about Roe. The reason is that the first rule of judging is that you can’t pre-judge a case. Judges are limited under Article III of the Constitution to hearing cases and controversies, and that means ruling on facts and law that are specific to those cases.

No judge can know what those facts might be in advance of a case, and judges owe it to the parties to consider those facts impartially. A judge who can’t be impartial, or who has already reached a conclusion or has a bias about a case, is obliged to recuse himself. This is judicial ethics 101.

There's no transcript, as far as I know, of those private meetings, so it's hard to tell if perhaps the senators misunderstood what they were being told, but the question came up in public hearings and there was no ambiguity in the candidates' answers:

Here’s Justice Gorsuch: “Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. . . . So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”

He added that “If I were to start telling you which are my favorite precedents or which are my least favorite precedents, or if I viewed precedent in that fashion, I would be tipping my hand and suggesting to litigants that I have already made up my mind about their cases.”

And here’s Justice Kavanaugh: “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed many times. It was reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. . . . So that precedent on precedent is quite important as you think about stare decisis in this context.” He made no specific pledge about either case that we have seen.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressly rejected the idea that Roe was a super precedent.

In other words, those three nominees all granted that Roe was an important precedent, but they did not say that that made Roe immune from reconsideration.

I think there's a lot of truth in the WSJ's conclusion:

The fury of the left’s reaction isn’t merely about guns and abortion. It reflects their grief at having lost the Court as the vehicle for achieving policy goals they can’t get through legislatures.

The cultural victories they achieved by judicial fiat will now have to be won by persuading voters.

That's how a representative democracy is supposed to work. The people decide through their elected representatives what the laws will be in their states and the Supreme Court ultimately decides whether those laws are compatible with the Constitution.

By overturning Roe, a case in which a right to abortion was declared to exist that actually doesn't exist anywhere in the Constitution, SCOTUS returned abortion to the states for the people to determine what they want the law to be where they live.

Unfortunately, that exercise in genuine democracy seems to have outraged the left.

Dumping Mr. Biden

Many Republicans were willing to tolerate Mr. Trump's boorishness, at least until after January 6th, because his policies were putting the country back on the right track.

He appointed constitutional conservatives to the courts, stemmed the tide of illegal immigration, had the lowest minority unemployment in history, facilitated a rapprochement in the Middle East between Israel and its Arab neighbors, presided, until the pandemic, over a healthy economy, and once the pandemic struck implemented Operation Warp Speed to bring a vaccine to market in record time.

If, after the 2020 election, Mr. Trump had gone gently into temporary retirement and conducted himself with unwonted class he'd be a lock to regain the White House in 2024.

Alas, such was not in the man's character and so the question for Republicans after this November's midterm elections is whether they can produce a presidential candidate who will possess Donald Trump's virtues without his many manifest flaws.

The question for the Democrats, on the other hand, is how they can dump Joe Biden without winding up with Kamala Harris.

But why would they wish to dump Mr. Biden? Historian Victor Davis Hanson enumerates some of the reasons among which is Biden's chronic dishonesty:

Walking back Biden’s absurdities has become the nonstop, tiresome task of many on the Left. As they face a midterm disaster in November, many no longer see any compensating reasons not to drop Biden....

Unlike Trump’s art of the deal, exaggerations and distortions, Biden says things that are not simply untrue, but abjectly preposterous – such as the United States currently has a lower inflation rate than major European industrial powers.

In Biden’s world, there were no COVID-19 vaccinations until he took the oath of office. Russian President Vladimir Putin, or the oil companies, or the refiners, or Trump are responsible for the historic crippling gasoline price hikes he caused by canceling drilling and pipeline projects.

Biden claims his negative-growth, hyperinflating economy is not disastrous but strong.

He serially lies that he drove a semi-truck. He has not been to the Middle East 38 times. He never received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Nor was he a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The MAGA movement is not the “most extreme political organization in American history.”

In other words, Biden reveals the same fantasies and plagiarism that ended his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

His penchant for the whopper is troubling enough, but there's more. Mr. Biden has a history of making maladroit racial remarks that would outrage Democrats were they made by a Republican:

On matters of race and sexuality, Biden is the epitome of that for which the Left, supposedly, has zero tolerance. Biden was infamous for damning with praise candidate Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” African American presidential candidate.

In a fake patois, Biden once warned an audience of black professionals that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden derided a black journalist as a “junkie” and lambasted a radio host and his audience with the claim “you ain’t black” if they didn’t support his candidacy.

Spinning racialist fables like Biden’s “Corn Pop” stories would brand any conservative politician as a racist. As president, Biden still uses the term “negro,” and he called an African American adviser “boy.”

Then there are his dubious sexual antics and alleged transgressions. When Trump was accused of having an affair with porn "actress" Stormy Daniels or was discovered on tape boasting about groping female admirers inappropriately, the uproar nearly cost him the presidency in 2016. Yet Biden has a history that's arguably even more sleazy than Trump's:

After the Justice Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the nation was lectured that “women must be believed.” But it was the Left who attacked former Biden aide Tara Reade who surfaced in 2016 to accuse then Senator Biden, her former boss, of sexually assaulting her.

Biden himself had a creepy history of invading the private space of young women – inappropriately kissing them, hugging and squeezing them, and smelling and blowing into their hair and ears.

Finally, Biden was forced to apologize – sort of – by claiming he belonged to an earlier generation when such aggression was simply normal behavior. It was not then or now.

The latest controversies whirl around the British tabloid Daily Mail’s publication of the diary of Biden’s own daughter.

From the Mail’s lurid reporting, Ashley Biden seems to suggest that she showered with her father at an age when “showers w/ my dad (probably [were] not appropriate).” And she seemed to connect Biden familial inappropriateness with her regret over being “hyper-sexualized (at) a young age.”

Add to all this Mr. Biden's terrible poll numbers, his failure to do much of anything that makes the country recognizably better, and the coming, if the GOP controls the House in 2024, congressional investigations into his and his son's questionable financial arrangements, and the Democrats will be in a very difficult and embarrassing spot over the next two years.

Their challenge will be to finesse dumping both Mr. Biden, whom few Democrats really want as their president for eight years, as well as Kamala Harris who's as embarrassing in her own way as Mr. Biden and whom they don't want to succeed him.

It'll be interesting to see how they do it.

How to Spot a Homeschooler

From the satirical website the Babylon Bee: How to Spot a Homeschooled Child:

As a college instructor who has enjoyed having had many homeschooled kids in his classes over the years I can testify to the truth in the Bee's humor.

One of the criticisms that has been levelled at homeschooling over the last couple of decades is that students are deprived of interaction with others which stunts development of their social skills. If that's true it's hardly obvious in the students I've taught.

On the other hand, the students I've been fortunate to work with have been invariably personable, bright, well-educated (although maybe not up on the latest doings of the Kardashians) and academically disciplined and motivated.

The resort to online "learning" during the pandemic revealed a lot of unsavory stuff going on in some of the classrooms across the country, and the tardiness with which schools reopened in the wake of the Covid subsidence inspired a lot more parents to tackle homeschooling for themselves.

I suppose that many more will turn to this option in the future, or, if they can afford it, to private schooling. The infiltration of progressive ideology into public school classrooms has rendered them to toxic for a lot of parents, especially those who desire an education for their children that's not going to undermine their faith or their values.

When my generation went through high school most educators saw it as their personal and professional obligation to transmit the values and traditions of their communities to their charges. Today, too many educators, at all levels of education, see it as their mission to upend those values and traditions and to set their students at odds with their parents.

It's a good sign that parents are fighting back by recalling school board members and/or removing their children from offending schools. Perhaps as more parents hold their public schools accountable for what goes on in the classroom, private schools and homeschooling will become less necessary, but until then they're an attractive alternative.

Why Your Gas Is So Expensive

The energy policy put forward by this administration defies comprehension.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared on CNN's State of the Union Sunday show that “we need to have increased [petroleum] production, so that everyday citizens in America will not be feeling this pain that they’re feeling right now.”

Mr. Biden himself will be visiting with the Saudi's, whom he evidently no longer regards as international pariahs, to coax them to increase their oil production so that our domestic gas prices will subside.

When Mr. Biden took office we were a net exporter of petroleum and natural gas and regular blend gas at the pump was averaging around $2.33 a gallon. Today, eighteen months later, it's hovering around $5.00/gallon and Mr. Biden wants to import from the Middle East to increase supply. What happened?

The President likes to blame Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but as Karl Rove points out in a column at The Wall Street Journal (subscription) 56% of the price increase occurred before Putin launched his invasion.

Though the administration is loath to talk about it what happened is that, as Rove writes, "Since taking office, Mr. Biden has labored hard to make American fossil-fuel production more costly so green energy alternatives become more attractive. He succeeded, and the result is record prices."

What, exactly, did the Biden administration do? Rove explains:

On his first day in office, Mr. Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and halted new leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A week later, he banned new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, and in June he shut down exploration on existing leases in ANWR.

In October, he increased the regulatory burdens on building pipelines and other infrastructure.

This February he limited leasing in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. At every turn Team Biden has worked to restrict and reduce domestic oil and gas production.

Almost a year after a federal judge enjoined the White House from implementing its pause on leases in federal lands and waters, the administration in April finally offered 144,400 acres for exploration—only 20% of the acreage originally slated for this tranche of leases.

The administration also raised the federal royalty by 50%, increasing the cost on American consumers. It nominated regulatory officials hostile to fossil fuels and issued climate disclosure rules that made lenders skittish about providing capital.

Team Biden got what it wanted: Daily U.S. oil production dropped from 12.29 million barrels in 2019 to an estimated 11.85 million in 2022, well after demand had rebounded from the pandemic.

Given this environment it's little wonder that oil companies are reluctant to invest in upgraded refining capacity. Why should they spend millions, or even billions, of dollars on refineries when the administration has made it clear that they want to put petroleum companies out of business?

Mr. Biden is demanding that oil CEOs increase production while he has both hands around their throats strangling them to death. Not content with what he's done so far to throttle the industry he's now...

...threatening a windfall-profits tax, even though oil and gas production saw only a 4.7% net profit margin last year. Compare that with Microsoft’s 39% net margin, Facebook’s 33%, Google’s 30% and Apple’s 27%. Yet Mr. Biden won’t confiscate tech company profits.

Nothing the president has done to alleviate the burden on consumers has, or will, accomplish anything substantial or permanent. Neither releasing a few million gallons from the petroleum reserve or declaring a moratorium on the federal gas tax will result in a significant or lasting reduction in the price of gasoline nor the price of everything else that's manufactured and brought to market by gasoline.

Here's Rove:

If Mr. Biden were serious about lowering fuel prices, he’d follow the advice of President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who suggested Sunday “an all-in more-energy-supply approach that emphasizes freeing up fossil fuels.”

That means undoing all of Mr. Biden’s earlier decisions that pushed oil and gas prices up. It’s important to start now. It took a year and a half of bad actions to get here; it’ll take time to increase supply and thereby produce downward pressure on prices.

Rove offers some specifics:

To begin, Mr. Biden should stop the Environmental Protection Agency’s assault on small U.S. refineries, which produce roughly 30% of America’s gasoline and diesel.

Longstanding EPA regulations require them to blend renewable fuel into their product or purchase special credits in a marketplace, but most can’t blend in ethanol because it’s too corrosive to be moved through pipelines. The EPA has long solved this problem by routinely granting these refiners exemptions if no credits are available, as provided by law.

Earlier this month, the EPA announced it is essentially ending exemptions and punishing refiners by retroactively denying exemptions back to 2016, requiring the industry to pay billions.

Even the EPA admits consumers will have to cover these costs. Industry leaders fear some refineries won’t be able to operate under the new regime and will instead shut down, reducing the supply of gasoline and diesel still further.

Mr. Biden and his progressive allies wanted to crush the fossil fuel industry. Everything they're doing is to that end and they're succeeding.

Perhaps those who voted for them are delighted every time they pull into the gas station, but I doubt the rest of us are.

Two Questions

SCOTUS, as expected, has overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) as well as Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992). Also, as expected, there's been a lot of outrage on the left and the outrage will probably grow over the weekend.

Amidst all of it people would do well to look for one thing. They should look for any actual argument on the part of those who oppose the Court's Dobbs decision which attempts to show that the Court wrongly decided this case.

Are those who object to Dobbs willing to defend either Roe or Casey as being properly grounded in the Constitution? Is there any Constitutionally based error in the Dobbs opinion written by Samuel Alito or in the concurrence written by Clarence Thomas?

If not, then the majority was correct to overturn the precedents, and all the anger and threats from those who object to the decision are actually demands that the Court abandon its proper role as an adjudicator of the Constitution and take on the role of a legislature.

Whether or not one thinks abortion should be legal everywhere and at any time throughout a pregnancy, if the Constitution does not contain a right to an abortion, if earlier Courts in deciding Roe and Casey manufactured Constitutional rights that don't exist in the document itself, then we have to acknowledge that the current Court, or at least five of its members, did their job.

It's not the responsibility of the Court to do what's popular. It's not the responsibility of the Court to make laws.

It's the responsibility of the Court to ascertain whether a law is compatible with the Constitution, and, on some occasions, to determine whether an earlier ruling was wrongly decided, and then let the political chips fall where they may.

Those who wish the Court to be a legislature actually wish for the United States to turn itself into a third world autocracy. Those who believe that the Constitution means something and that our nation needs to be governed in accord with it have reason today to be grateful.

Misunderstanding Intelligent Design

In a long essay at Skeptic titled Why Christians Should Accept the Theory of Evolution political science professor Larry Arnhart gives a couple of paragraphs to a critique of Intelligent Design (ID) and one of its most prominent advocates, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer.

His article is interesting and covers a lot of important ground, but it's marred, in my opinion, by misunderstandings of ID in the paragraphs I've excerpted below:

To all of this, the intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer responds by arguing that although he personally believes in biblical revelation, he sees that the case for an Intelligent Designer as an alternative to materialist natural science is best made on purely scientific grounds without any appeal to biblical authority.

He claims that the evidence of science based on our natural observations of the world point to the existence of an Intelligent Designer to explain the appearance of design in the natural world that cannot be explained plausibly by Darwinian evolutionary science.

Meyer’s argument suffers, however, from a fundamental sophistry.

Intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the Intelligent Designer.

There are at least two errors in the preceding paragraph. First, Meyer has long been at pains to make clear that the argument for ID is not an argument based on what we don't know but rather is an argument based on what we do know.

To take just one example, what we do know is that blind mechanistic processes do not produce complex specified information such as is found in the molecular machinery and genetic code of living things, but that minds can and frequently do.

Secondly, Meyer, as far as I know, has never said that the inability of evolutionists to demonstrate how living forms arose "proves" that "life must be caused by an Intelligent Designer."

What he and other ID proponents have argued is that the totality of evidence makes ID a more plausible hypothesis than naturalistic evolution. Intelligent agency is, they maintain, the best explanation for the evidence that we see in biology and cosmology.

Arnhart adds this:

This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design are offering no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer miraculously caused these forms of life.

Meyer insists that the proponents of evolutionary science satisfy standards of proof that he and his fellow proponents of intelligent design cannot satisfy, because his sophistical strategy is to put the highest burden of proof on his opponents, while refusing to accept that burden of proof for himself.

This is misleading. ID proponents don't demand that naturalistic theorists explain, for instance, when, where and how abiogenesis occurred. What they do ask for is some plausible explanation of how undirected mindless processes could have accomplished it. That challenge has never really been met.

Nor does the inability to explain when, where and how an intelligent agent acted count against a theory that claims that the universe and life are intelligently designed.

As philosopher of science Del Ratszch once wrote, if an exquisitely-shaped titanium obelisk were discovered by the first explorers on Mars none of them would think that because they had no idea who designed it or how, or how it got there, that therefore it wasn't intelligently designed.

The recognition of intelligent agency doesn't require that we know how the agent worked.

I'm frankly surprised that Arnhart raised the objections to ID that he did, given that they've been answered so often by ID proponents in the past.

Hissy Fits

Last week I wrote about Ryan Grim's Intercept article which described the toxic atmosphere that prevails at so many progressive workplaces.

More recently Josh Barro focused specifically on the Washington Post where the atmosphere apparently has reporters at each other's throats.

Barro begins his piece with a discussion of the problem in general:

You may have noticed a bizarre trend at organizations whose staffs are full of younger liberals: Internal disputes aren’t kept internal anymore but are aired in public, on social media or in the press, with rampantly insubordinate staff attacking their colleagues or decrying managerial decisions in full public view — and those actions apparently tolerated from the top.

In the most extreme cases, you get meltdowns like the one at the Dianne Morales campaign for mayor of New York, where staff went on strike to demand, among other things, that the campaign divert part of its budget away from campaigning into “community grocery giveaways.”

But it’s especially a problem in the media, where so many employees have large social media followings they can use to put their employers on blast — and where those employers have (unwisely) cultivated a freewheeling social media culture where it’s common for reporters to comment on all sorts of matters unrelated to their coverage.

Barro then follows with a blow-by-blow description of the infighting at the Post which sounds like nothing so much as a bunch of middle school mean girls throwing tantrums because they don't get their way. You'll have to read the details at the link.

Meanwhile he closes with this interesting remark:

Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one.

And this phenomenon extends well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals — and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause so much trouble inside and outside the organization.

Fixing this sort of culture isn’t just necessary for making these organizations less miserable places; it’s necessary for building an effective political movement. That’s why, if you’re a liberal, you should care about toxic, anarchic work cultures, even if you don’t personally work at an organization with one.

Perhaps conservatives are on average more mature, better adjusted and less self-absorbed, I don't know, but NRO's Jim Geraghty weighs in with this observation:

But if, as it seems, organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have employees that are generally better team players, we have a fascinating inversion of the expected dynamic.

In a workplace full of folks who classify themselves as rugged individualists, those folks are in fact willing to put aside their personal desires and feelings from 9 to 5 or so, for the sake of participating in a smoothly running, effective organization.

Meanwhile, the workplace full of self-professed collectivists, who believe the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, is increasingly debilitated by runaway narcissism, petty infighting, and self-absorbed grievance-mongering.

It makes one wonder how "collectivist" these people are, how much they actually care about the masses, when their behavior suggests that what they really think is that everything is "all about me."

Why Is Belief in God Fading?

Yesterday's post left off with this question: If the evidence for the existence of God is stronger today than ever before why is theism, i.e. the belief that there is a personal creator of the universe, declining, especially among the young?

Here are a few possible reasons:

1. Bad experience with one's father.
As Freud observed the relationship one has with one's father often affects the relationship one has with other father figures like God. A disastrous father/child relationship often makes it very difficult for the child to ever see God as a loving, forgiving father.

Bitterness and resentment toward a biological father can stifle any desire on the part of the child, once grown, to embrace anything suggesting a father, and there's probably never been a time in our history when young people, people under 40, have been more estranged from their fathers.

2. Bad experience with a church, or
3. The doctrine of Christian exclusivism. These two, although they may be offered as reasons for one's atheism are, in fact, not very good reasons to reject theism. They may partially account for one's disbelief in Christian theism, but they're very weak reasons for rejecting even that. A bad experience with a church is self-explanatory.

Christian exclusivism refers to the doctrine held by many Christians (although far from all) that only Christians will be granted eternal life. Some find this doctrine intolerably narrow and chauvinistic and conclude that therefore there is no God.

4. The belief that science disproves God's existence.
This one is ironic since of the fifty or so men who initiated the scientific revolution from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries almost all of them were theists. It also reflects a misunderstanding of what science is.

There's no conflict between science and theism. There is indeed a conflict between theism and naturalism, the belief that only nature exists and that there is no supernature, but this is a metaphysical belief, not an essential part of science.

Naturalism may be the preferred metaphysics of a majority of scientists, especially in the biological sciences, but metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, not science.

5. The fact of human suffering.
Many people find it difficult to reconcile the existence of God with the horrific suffering that exists in the lives of so many people. I offer a series of three posts explaining this problem and why I don't think it works as a logical argument against theism. The interested reader can find them here, here and here.

6. God's "hiddenness."
Some non-believers doubt that there could be a good God who chooses not to reveal Himself in a fashion that would remove all question about His existence. Why, they ask, does God remain silent if He cares about the chaos, terror and pain in the world? This is an objection to theism similar in some ways to #5. Here's a post offering a response to it.

7. The deep desire that theism not be true.
In my opinion this is the main reason why most people who disdain theism do so, but it's not just my opinion. Consider these quotes from some famous atheists:

Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in his book The Last Word: "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Friedrich Nietzsche says in The Gay Science: "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."

Aldous Huxley, in his book Ends and Means, admits that: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know."

It's interesting that none of the great atheistic thinkers of the 19th or 20th centuries ever offered a compelling argument for the non-existence of God. Neither Freud, nor Marx nor Sartre ever put together a logical rationale for their unbelief. They simply assumed that theism was no longer a viable hypothesis.

In other words, most people who don't believe in God don't do so because of argument or evidence but for emotional reasons.

Unbelief is, in many cases at least, an act of Freudian wish fulfillment.

Belief in God Is at Its Lowest Point Ever

A recent Gallup poll finds that belief in God is at a historic low in the U.S. Although believers still constitute a majority (81%) that figure is down six percentage points since 2017.

Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God. In the 1950s and 1960s those claiming to believe in God were consistently at 98%. By 2011, 92% of Americans still said they believed in God.

Actually, the 81% who claim to believe is misleading since it appears to conflate theists, who believe that God is a personal being who can and does intervene in history, and deists who believe that God is impersonal and/or unable or unwilling to intervene in the world.

In fact, according to the poll only 42% of all Americans would qualify as theists. Of the remainder of those polled who said that they believed in God 28% of them hold that God hears prayers but cannot intervene, while 11% think God does neither (17% of respondents say they do not believe in God and would be considered atheists).

In other words, 39% of Americans believe in the existence of a deity which is largely irrelevant to their lives other than, perhaps, to hold people accountable for their mode of life after their death and/or to serve as some sort of guarantor of eternal life.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, belief in God has fallen the most among young adults and people on the left of the political spectrum (liberals and Democrats). These groups show drops of 10 or more percentage points from the average of the 2013-2017 polls.

Most other key subgroups have experienced at least a modest decline, but it's perhaps noteworthy that conservatives and married adults have had essentially no change.

The groups with the largest declines are also the groups that are currently least likely to believe in God, including liberals (62%), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%).

Slightly more than half of conservatives and Republicans are theists, but only 25% of liberals, 32% of Democrats and 30% of young adults are (Check out the charts which display this data at the link).

There's a real irony in all of this, in my opinion. Belief in a personal God seems to be waning at a time when the case for the existence of a personal God has never been stronger. Almost every new discovery in cosmology and biology either supports, or at least doesn't conflict with, the belief that an intelligent, purposeful agent is behind the creation and architecture of the cosmos and of life.

The ubiquity of talk of human rights, justice and moral duties in our contemporary culture necessarily assumes some transcendent ground for these. Apart from any such foundation this talk is sheer emotivism.

The existential yearning for meaning and the desire to live beyond physical death, all impress upon us the conclusion that either these things have no real satisfaction, in which case life truly is a Shakespearian tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, or they do have an ultimate satisfaction, in which case there is very probably a personal God.

The phenomenon of human consciousness, which seems inexplicable on any naturalistic, materialistic hypothesis, is a flashing neon sign telling us that we're not just material beings.

There are additional reasons to think that theism is true and that it's a much more powerful explanation of what we experience in and of the world than is naturalism. I explored some of those reasons in a series of five posts in November of 2020. The first is here and the rest appear on subsequent days.

I also explained why I believe Christian theism in particular is reasonable in a pair of posts from last January. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

So, if I'm right about this why is theistic belief trending downward? Surely there are numerous reasons, most of which have nothing at all to do with the plausibility or rationality of theistic belief. I'll consider some of what I think to be the chief reasons tomorrow.