Educated

Some time ago I read Tara Westover's autobiography titled Educated and thought of it recently when reading about how some students feel that coming from a disadvantaged background pretty much condemns them for life. Her story should serve as an inspiration to every young person who has been cheated out of an education by having attended a failing public school.

Westover was raised in a rural "survivalist" family in Idaho by a father who thought Armageddon was just around the corner and who was preparing for the day when the government would control every detail of every person's life.

Neither she nor her six siblings, at least most of them, ever went to a hospital, ever saw a doctor, ever got vaccinated, ever attended school and ever received a birth certificate. Whatever education she had - which consisted largely in midwifery and the manufacture and use of various home remedies - she picked up at home from her mother.

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

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

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

Nor does a dysfunctional home environment have to determine our destiny as adults. Tara and her six siblings were raised in poverty in an auto salvage yard run by her apparently bi-polar father and a timid, acquiescent mother.

The Westover siblings all had fairly similar backgrounds. Yet three of them eventually earned PhDs and managed to transcend their intellectually and socially disadvantaged childhoods.

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

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

Going Old School in Education

Often when the topic of improving education arises increased funding is claimed to be critically necessary, but having taught at the high school level for 35 years I never thought that the lack of money was really a primary requisite for fixing education.

I may have been mistaken, but in my opinion the three indispensible necessities for building a quality education were teachers who loved their students and their subject matter, administrators whose top priority was educational excellence, and high building-wide discipline standards. Any school that has these will perform well and none of those need place an intolerable burden on taxpayers.

Jeremy S. Adams is a man after my own heart. He's a high school and university teacher who has written a column for The Federalist in which he declares that it's "time to go old school in education."

Here's his lede:

Enough with the endless torrents of education reform and the modern obsession with infusing technology into every facet of the learning experience. Enough dumbing down of the curriculum, tolerating egregious student behavior, and politicizing the curriculum of the classroom. Enough self-censorship of America’s teachers and administrators who know deep down (but are often afraid to say out loud) their students are graduating with a depleted battery of skills and knowledge that would have been unrecognizable and unacceptable a generation ago.

Going “old school” is much more than a cranky trope or cantankerous canard extolling the “good old days” when kids worked hard and had respect for their elders. Going old school means recognizing that the solution to many of our problems does not require more money, more innovation, or elite schools of education promoting vogue (and usually leftist) notions of instruction and curriculum.

It’s time to bring back pencils and paper, teachers who lecture rather than largely facilitate class projects and online activities, discipline policies that actually discipline, and, most of all, adults who are ready to be in charge of the children they are educating.

While the headlines about education these days are often centered around the razzmatazz of critical race theory and the 1619 Project, the controversies of transgender bathrooms and sports, and the conferences of Moms for Liberty, they pale in comparison to the real crises in American education.

These topics certainly make for flashy television spots and viral op-eds, but the hardship for most teachers is rooted in a more banal reality: We ask little of our students and in return get even less from them. Many are borderline illiterate, can’t pull themselves away from their devices, and their attendance is spotty at best.

Here's one more excerpt:

While schools should certainly offer “wrap-around” services to support our most disadvantaged students, the solution to almost all of these problems is to look backward, to go old school. Schools should remember a time when they were more than counseling centers and places where breakfast and lunch are provided, a time when teaching was more academic than therapeutic, a time when highly objectionable student behavior (like cursing at a teacher) had serious consequences for student and parent alike, and a time when high expectations were considered a blessing, not a clandestine form of bourgeoise oppression.

In what areas of modern education would an old-school approach be preferable? A few.

Adams goes on to discuss those areas of education that would benefit from a return to the values and pedagogical methods commonly employed by schools two generations ago. If you're a teacher, an aspiring teacher or a citizen concerned with the quality of education your local school is delivering you should read the rest of Adams' column.

Ten Truths

Aside from Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis the rest of the GOP primary field seems to be languishing. One exception to this may be Vivek Ramaswamy a multimillionaire biotech entrepreneur who's showing signs of rising above the pack.

Ramaswamy recently articulated what he calls "10 Truths" about life, and they're bound to be a hit with conservative Republican voters looking for an alternative to Trump.

They're also a thumb in the eye of the progressive left which would strenuously object to most, if not all, of them. Here they are:

1. God is real.
2. There are only two genders.
3. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.
4. Reverse racism is racism.
5. An open border is no border.
6. Parents determine the education of their children.
7. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
8. Capitalism lifts people from poverty.
9. There are three branches of government, not four.
10. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.

I wonder, though, what Ramaswamy's concept of God is since he himself is a devout Hindu. There are many varieties of Hinduism, many of which are polytheistic and some of which are monotheistic, so where he stands will be of interest to many evangelical Christians.

Another difficulty, although many evangelicals may not be aware of it, is that in India Hindus are very intolerant and frequently persecute Christians so Vivek will have some questions from evangelicals to answer if he hopes to catch Trump.

But perhaps the chief question is whether a monotheist who is genuinely devout, moral and truly conservative will be more appealing to evangelicals than Donald Trump who is arguably none of those things.

The GOP Dilemma

The Republican party appears to be looking ahead to a very dispiriting fourteen months, faced, as they are, with several possible scenarios to the upcoming election season, all of which are bad. Here are three:

• Trump wins the nomination and many Republicans and Independents simply refuse to vote for him in the general, and the Democrats breeze to another four years, probably with control of both Houses of Congress.
• Trump loses the nomination and much of his base just sits out the general election while Trump trashes whoever the nominee of the party happens to be, and the Democrats breeze to another four years, probably with control of both Houses of Congress.
• Trump loses the nomination, but the winner of the primary vows, if he or she wins the presidency, to pardon Trump, relieve him of the his legal jeopardy, and thus gain Trump's enthusiastic support.

Surely the GOP pooh-bahs are hoping for this last outcome, but it strikes me as the least likely of the three. Trump appears to have a lock on the nomination so the first option is the most probable, but even if he should lose and not trash the winner, it's hard to imagine him enthusiastically campaigning for whomever the winner is. At least, it's hard to imagine him campaigning strenuously enough to persuade the millions of his adoring supporters to get excited for someone other than him.

It could be that Trump wins the primary and also wins the presidency in November of 2024, but in order for that to occur something unforeseen has to happen. Perhaps a liberal third party candidate makes a significant dent in the Democrats' support. Perhaps Joe Biden somehow self-destructs just before the election and before the Democrats can come up with a substitute. Perhaps the economy goes into a nosedive.

But failing something like this transpiring it's hard to see at this point how the Republicans avoid self-immolation. Even so, I devoutly hope I'm wrong.

Atheism Is Cool?

A lot of young people seem to be under the illusion that it's somehow cool to claim to be an atheist. Belief in God, they think, is a superstition whereas science has proven there is no God. Atheism is intellectually sophisticated whereas belief in God is for ignorant rubes.

This is nonsense, but a lot of people who haven't really thought about it have been persuaded by somebody on YouTube or Tik Tok that it's true.

So far from having proven that there is no God, science has amassed an enormous amount of evidence in the last three decades that there is very likely a Creator of the universe and of life, and as for being intellectually sophisticated, few people base unbelief on intellectual reasons any more.

In fact, many atheists admit that their unbelief is a matter of the heart not the head. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche was ahead of his time in the 19th century when he wrote in his book The Gay Science that "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."

And contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel admits that,

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.

In other words, like Nietzsche, Nagel's unbelief is a matter of his will and/or desires, not the result of a rational investigation of the evidence.

But where would a rational investigation lead? What are the existential consequences of atheism? I'd argue, and a lot of atheist philosophers would agree, that the consequences of atheism are philosophically, psychologically and emotionally depressing.

They're not cool at all. Understand that atheism entails materialism - the belief that everything in existence is, or reduces to, material substance - and materialism entails that everything is subject to the laws of physics.

Thus,

• There's no self (no soul). We're just material bodies. There’s no “you” who has a body. Your body constantly changes so who you are today is not who you were yesterday or will be tomorrow. You have no real identity.

“Nobody ever had or was a self. Selves are not part of reality.” Philosopher Thomas Metzinger

• There's no free will. Our belief that we’re free to choose is an illusion. Our choices are produced by chemical reactions in our brains that are themselves the product of our genetic inheritance or environmental influences.

“A scientific account of mankind has no more place for free-will or the equal capacity of each individual to be good and act justly than it has for the soul.” Alisdair Palmer

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear ....There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…." Evolutionary Biologist Will Provine

• There's no basis for human dignity or human rights. If there's no God where do dignity and rights come from? Our right to govern our bodies, our right to be treated equally under the law are simply arbitrary legal conventions given us by the state, but they have no objective basis or reality.

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Cosmologist Stephen Hawking

"When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

• There's no basis for hope. There’s no explanation for evil. It’s just the way our genes have programmed us, but if that’s so then there’s no hope that we’ll ever change, and because we’re just physical beings, no hope of anything beyond our physical suffering and death.
• There's no ultimate justice. If physical death is the end of our existence, which it must be if we're just material bodies, then no one is ever held ultimately accountable for how he or she lives.
• There are no objective moral values or duties. If there's no moral standard beyond ourselves and we're just the product of physical forces, what makes our moral beliefs anything more than our subjective opinion? And, if all morality is subjective and arbitrary no one can say that anything or anyone is morally wrong. Every time an atheist says that something like racism, school-shootings or homophobia is morally wrong they’re acting as if there really is an objective right and wrong. They're free-loading on theism.

“There seems to me no doubt that our ethical judgments all claim objectivity but this claim, to my mind, makes them all false.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell

“There are no objective values.” Philosopher J.I. Mackie

In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. Biologist E.O. Wilson and Philosopher of Biology Michael Ruse

• There's no ultimate meaning to life. We're born, we suffer, we die and are extinguished. What's the point?

"Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre

"The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence." Psychologist Sigmund Freud

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Biologist Richard Dawkins

Each of the people quoted is, or was, an atheist. Their atheism, if it were followed to its logical conclusion, leads to nihilism, the view that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters. And that's anything but cool.

Why Is Inequality Wrong?

Some time ago the science magazine New Scientist ran a story (paywall) that was titled Inequality: How Our Brains Evolved to Love it, Even Though We Know it's Wrong. Because the article requires a subscription I didn't read it so it'd be unfair to assume too much about it, but the title itself is puzzling.

Even though I don't want to assume too much, I am going to assume that the editors of New Scientist, or at least many of their readers, lean metaphysically in the direction of naturalistic materialism. That is, I'm going to assume they hold to the view that nature is all there is and that all of nature is ultimately explicable solely in terms of matter and the laws which govern its behavior.

If I'm wrong in my assumption, I apologize at the outset. But assuming that I'm correct, I have a couple of questions for New Scientist's editors.

Doubtless they explain in the article what they mean by inequality, but whatever is meant by it, how do we know it's wrong? In order to know that X is wrong there must be some objective moral frame of reference to which we can compare X to see if it conforms to that standard.

On naturalistic materialism, however, there are no objective moral reference frames, there are only subjective preferences and biases.

On naturalism when someone says, for example, that racism, murder, or political corruption are wrong all they're doing is emoting. They're saying something like, "I really don't like racism, murder or political corruption."

Moreover, inequality is the natural, expected outcome of the evolutionary process. Evolution by its very nature generates inequalities of all sorts. Why should anyone think that one evolutionary by-product, inequality among humans, is any more or less wrong than any other unless those by-products are being compared to some higher level moral standard? How can we say that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong if both are simply the products of impersonal processes like random mutation and natural selection?

If oour brains' fondness for inequality is merely a product of evolution then to declare that it's wrong is a lot like declaring that our fondness for sweet foods is wrong. Nothing that has resulted from a blind, impersonal process like evolution can be either right or wrong. It just is.

We like to think, of course, that the evolution of sympathy or kindness is good and the evolution of greed, racism and aggressiveness is bad, but how can we justify such an assessment in the absence of an objective moral standard? And, to repeat, on naturalism there is no higher moral standard.

At bottom, everything is just atoms jiggling in the void, and jiggling atoms are neither moral nor immoral.

Conscious but Comatose

Anyone who has had a family member in a coma from a brain injury has probably wondered whether their loved one could hear them and wondered what it must be like for someone to be conscious but completely unable to express themselves. We've discussed this on VP on several occasions in the past, but whenever I come across an article on the topic, I feel like I should mention it again.

In a partial transcript of a podcast interview with neuroscientist Michael Egnor, Egnor elaborates on the work of Adrian Owen who discovered about fifteen years ago that many comatose patients were capable of thinking and could hear what was being said to them.

Subsequent research has determined that in a significant number of cases, as high as 40%, comatose patients are indeed able to hear what is being said to them and, with modern MRI techniques, even able to respond.

Here's part of Egnor's discussion of Owen's work:

Owen took a woman who was in a persistent vegetative state—she’d been in a car accident and had severe brain damage, and she’d been in this state for several years—and he put her in an MRI machine and did what’s called a functional MRI test. A functional MRI test looks at changes in blood flow in the brain that we believe correspond to activation of parts of the brain. So you can kind of tell what’s going on inside the brain during the time they’re in the machine.

So he put her in the machine and he put headphones on her and he asked her to think about things. Now remember, she’s a woman who, supposedly, is the deepest level of coma, just a hair above brain dead. And he said, “Imagine you’re walking across the room.” “Imagine you’re playing tennis.” “Think of things.” And he found activation in her brain.

Even though she had massive brain damage, there were patterns of activation.

So he then took fifteen normal volunteers, put them in the machine, and asked them the same questions. And her patterns of activation were identical to theirs. So he said, well, to a first approximation, it looks like she can think just like they can think.

But, he said, you know, maybe the activation that we are seeing in the brain isn’t because she understands. Maybe it’s just the brain’s reaction to sound. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand, maybe just the noise from the headphones is causing this activation.

So he scrambled the words so, instead of saying, “Imagine walking across a room” he would say “across walking imagine room your”. So it made no sense. And the activation went away in her brain and in the volunteers’.

So he showed that the only time she had activation in her brain was when what was asked of her made sense. And her activation was completely indistinguishable from the activation of completely conscious people. So he concluded that she was able to understand and think about things that he was asking her to understand and think about, even though she was in the deepest level of coma.

This alone is astonishing, but there's more:

His research has been repeated by a number of other laboratories on many, many patients with persistent vegetative state. And about forty percent of people in persistent vegetative state show high levels of intellectual functioning even in deep coma.

There are ways of conversing with people in deep coma where you can, for example, look at the activation state representing "Yes" and the activation state representing "No" and you can ask them questions. You know, “Are you lonely?” “Do you wish your mother were here?” “Would you like something to eat?”, stuff like that, and they can answer you, with these brain states.

In addition, some people can do mathematics in a coma. You can ask them “Is the square root of 25, 6?” and they do a "No." And “Is it 5?” and they do a "Yes." So there can be very high levels—not in all patients that we have found—but in many patients, forty percent, at least—of mental function in profoundly damaged brains. To the point where the medical profession has actually added a category to this list of ways you can be in a coma, and this is called minimally conscious state.

So patients who have evidence of intellectual functioning in deep coma are called “minimally conscious,” although, frankly, they’re not really minimally conscious, they’re quite conscious.

I've always wondered whether the comatose patient was in pain but unable to communicate their suffering to anyone. If so, it would be hellish. These sorts of developments give hope that medical professionals will be better able to care for and comfort those who appear to be unconscious but aren't.

The Mystery of Enucleation

Reading a few books on evolution and Intelligent Design inspired me recently to browse through some old posts on the topic, and I stumbled upon this one. It recounts an interview with geneticist Michael Denton who discusses one of the strangest phenomena in cell biology and a huge problem for Darwinian explanations of the evolution of the cell.

Denton is the author of several outstanding books, including Evolution: A Theory in Crisis which explains many of the shortcomings of Darwinian explanations of life and Nature's Destiny which addresses how the laws of physics and chemistry and the properties of water and carbon dioxide are all precisely suited to make the world an extraordinarily fit place for the emergence of higher forms of life.

He's interviewed at a site called The Successful Student and the interview is a must read for anyone interested in how discoveries in biology consistently refute the Darwinian paradigm.

Here's just one of the problems he discusses, a problem I confess I had never heard of before reading the interview:

At King’s [College in London] the subject of my PhD thesis was the development of the red [blood] cell and it seemed to me there were aspects of red cell development which posed a severe challenge to the Darwinian framework. The red cell performs one of the most important physiological functions on earth: the carriage of oxygen to the tissues. And in mammals the nucleus is lost in the final stages of red cell development, which is a unique phenomenon.

The problem that the process of enucleation poses for Darwinism is twofold: first of all, the final exclusion of the nucleus is a dramatically saltational event and quite enigmatic in terms of any sort of gradualistic explanation in terms of a succession of little adaptive Darwinian steps. Stated bluntly; how does the cell test the adaptive state of ‘not having a nucleus’ gradually? I mean there is no intermediate stable state between having a nucleus and not having a nucleus.

This is perhaps an even greater challenge to Darwinian gradualism than the evolution of the bacterial flagellum because no cell has ever been known to have a nucleus sitting stably on the fence half way in/half way out! So how did this come about by natural selection, which is a gradual process involving the accumulation of small adaptive steps?

The complexity of the process — which is probably a type of asymmetric cell division — whereby the cell extrudes the nucleus is quite staggering, involving a whole lot of complex mechanisms inside of the cell. These force the nucleus, first to the periphery of the cell and then eventually force it out of the cell altogether. It struck me as a process which was completely inexplicable in terms of Darwinian evolution — a slam-dunk if you want.

And there’s another catch: the ultimate catch perhaps? Is an enucleate red cell adaptive? Because birds, which have a higher metabolic rate than mammals, keep their nucleus. So how come that organisms, which have a bigger demand for oxygen than mammals, they get to keep their nucleus while we get rid of ours?

And this raises of course an absolutely horrendous problem that in the case of one of the most crucial physiological processes on earth there are critical features that we can’t say definitively are adaptive.... Every single day I was in the lab at King’s I was thinking about this, and had to face the obvious conclusion that the extrusion of the red cell nucleus could not be explained in terms of the Darwinian framework.

And if there was a problem in giving an account of the shape of a red cell, in terms of adaptation, you might as well give up the Darwinian paradigm; you might as well "go home." .... It’s performing the most critical physiological function on the planet, and you’re grappling around trying to give an adaptive explanation for its enucleate state. And the fact that birds get by very, very well (you can certainly argue that birds are every bit as successful as mammals). So, what’s going on? What gives? And it was contemplating this very curious ‘adaptation’ which was one factor that led me to see that many Darwinian explanations were “just-so" stories.

Denton also talks about another fascinating development in biology - the growing realization that everything in the cell affects everything else. That even the shape, or topology, of the cell determines what genes will be expressed and that the regulation of all of the cellular activities is far more complex than any device human beings have ever been able to devise.

Denton's books should be read by every science major or person interested in science. They include, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Firemaker, The Wonder of Water, Children of Light and The Miracle of Man.

Peter Kreeft's Intro to Philosophy

The Federalist's Casey Chalk reviews Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft's new four volume introduction to philosophy titled Socrates' Children and it sounds excellent.

I've read a number of Kreeft's works in the past and always thought it was a worthwhile use of my time. He has a very winsome manner and always speaks and writes at a level any reasonably intelligent person can understand.

You can watch the video below of an excellent recent commencement speech Kreeft gave as a sample of his style. The speech was titled Ten Lies of Contemporary Culture.

Here's how Chalk begins his review:

I’m always surprised by the reactions I get when I tell people my interest (and sincere trust) in philosophy as a means of understanding the world and getting at the real truth. A lawyer friend told me an introductory university philosophy class convinced him there are no objective truths (that’s the same conclusion Steve Martin drew from his college philosophy courses).

A former colleague disparaged Aristotle — one of the greatest philosophers, and the originator of syllogistic logic — as absurd because of the Greek philosopher’s flawed physics.

Sadly, contemporary philosophy does the discipline few favors. The academy has made philosophy about as arcane as possible, persuading many that it is impractical and irrelevant for everyday purposes.

The philosopher of public imagination is a pretentious, condescending windbag, enamored with his own supposedly clever use of six-syllable words; or, perhaps, more charitably, a well-intentioned ideological zealot who believes it her mission to regularly remind everyone that they have terribly misunderstood themselves, each other, and the world.

It’s all too bad, really. Our society, government, and economy, not to mention every single human institution, all exist, function, and perpetuate themselves based on various philosophical premises — whether about ourselves, the natural order, or how we acquire knowledge.

We’re all doing philosophy (either well or poorly) all the time: every time we articulate an argument, conduct research, or even weigh options for spending our money. So it would certainly be nice if someone could help us better appreciate the connection between philosophy and our actual everyday experiences.

Thankfully, venerable philosophy professor and prolific author Dr. Peter Kreeft has done just that with his new four-volume series, Socrates’ Children: An Introduction to Philosophy from the 100 Greatest Philosophers.

I encourage you to read the whole column. It may even make you want to order the set.

Bidenomics

News that the House Oversight Committee has discovered that Hunter Biden received some $20 million dollars from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs for doing nothing while his father was vice-president gives new meaning to the term "Bidenomics."

Incredibly, some in the media are still insisting that there's no proof that any of this money benefited Joe Biden in any way. These folks could look at the sky on a clear day and still not see the sun.

Democrats have been at pains to demand that conservative Supreme Court justices are culpable of failing to avoid the very appearance of impropriety by taking trips with wealthy supporters, but they're twisting themselves into knots to convince us that, although Hunter's conduct is regrettable, his father has been beyond reproach.

Set aside the testimony of Hunter's business associate Tony Bobulinski that Joe was getting a cut of the take, set aside the millions of dollars of income on Joe's 2017 tax returns whose provenience is questionable, set aside Hunter's own claims on his laptop that he was contributing to his father's support, the fact is that it's delusional to think that the people paying Hunter millions of dollars were doing it because they thought Joe's crack-addled son was such a good guy. They expected access to Joe himself and were getting it through Hunter.

In other words, the vice-president of the United States appears at the very least to have been colluding with his son in a massive bribery operation.

Anyone who wishes to pooh-pooh this and claim that this is jumping to unwarranted conclusions need only ask him or herself whether they'd have the same response were the people involved named Donald Trump and his son Don, Jr.

Biden's Shameful Betrayal

Noah Rothman at National Review wrote recently about the testimony given this week by Gold Star families of servicemen and women killed in the disgraceful rush to exit Kabul, in Afghanistan in August of 2021.

The seven bereaved family members spoke at an event convened by GOP Rep. Darrell Issa and testified about both their grief and Washington’s negligent conduct during and in the wake of the evacuation. Rothman writes:

[Their witness was] profoundly poignant. Their testimony has far-reaching implications, too, because the more we learn about the events that culminated in the attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate, the more it looks like the Biden administration has whitewashed one of the deadliest days for American troops in their 20 years on the ground in Central Asia.

Recall what happened on August 26th, 2021. Learning that the Americans were precipitously pulling out of the country, terrified Afghans descended upon Karzai airport in a panicked attempt to get aboard one of the departing planes. The scene was chaotic:

At the time, President Joe Biden assured nervous observers of the disorder that the Taliban, which had recaptured Kabul just eleven days earlier, would provide security for the evacuees. Those guarantees proved insufficient to prevent one of the worst-case scenarios.

At 5:50 p.m. local time, a suicide bomber waded through the crowd at Abbey Gate and detonated an explosive belt, killing 13 American soldiers and wounding 45 more U.S. personnel. At least another 170 Afghan civilians also died in the attack.

Our government, in another of its steps toward destroying whatever credibility it has with the American people who pay their salaries, claimed that the attack was inevitable and unpreventable:

The Biden administration has affirmed in a variety of retrospective reports on the incident that it was little more than an unavoidable tragedy. An “After Action Review” released by the State Department in June conceded, “The airport gates were filled with potential dangers due to large, uncontrolled crowds and constant threats from ISIS-K and the Taliban,” and rather unhelpfully added that the deadly terrorist event those conditions facilitated only “underscored how dangerous the situation was.”

The danger, of course, was a direct consequence of the Biden administration's decision to abandon Kabul to the Taliban.

This assessment does not improve on the Pentagon’s assertion in February 2022 that the attack at Abbey Gate was inevitable. “Based upon our investigation, at the tactical level this was not preventable,” Brigadier General Lance Curtis told reporters.

The Gold Star families who spoke at Issa’s event this week were having none of it:

“To say it’s time to move on and there’s nothing more to be said as to the planning and the execution of how our country wrapped up a two-decade war, is an insult to all of us,” said the mother of Marine corporal Hunter Lopez.

“When our leaders, including the Secretary of Defense and our commander in chief called this evacuation a success, as if there should be celebration, it is like a knife in the heart for our families and for the people who came back and for every service member that served over this 20-year war,” Marine sergeant Nicole Gee’s grieving mother-in-law told attendees.

“I want the answers,” Marine corporal Humberto Sanchez’s mother demanded. “I want the truth. I want to go to sleep knowing my son did not die in vain. I want to know that this failure will not happen again.”

Were the deaths of Americans inevitable? Could it have been prevented? Certainly if the military was allowed by the Biden administration to keep sufficient forces in Afghanistan and allowed to use Bagram airbase instead of the indefensible Karzai airport in Kabul the outcome would've been much different, but Biden was in a hurry to evacuate our personnel, no matter how unwise his means of doing so, and consequently ignored the advice of his military commanders.

The Pentagon’s exculpatory final report contradicts the assessments offered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time of the attack at the gate. Fewer than 24 hours prior to that deadly bombing, Austin instructed Defense Department leaders to prepare for an imminent “mass casualty event.”

That heightened state of alert was justified by what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said was “significant” intelligence indicating that Afghanistan’s ISIS affiliate had prepared to mount a “complex attack” on NATO forces and their Afghan allies.

“I don’t believe people get the incredible amount of risk on the ground,” Austin said at the time.

On March 8 of this year, House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul led hearings into the events that culminated in the attack at Abbey Gate. Marine sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews testified at that hearing, and he told the committee that he believes the attack that took two of his limbs may not have been as unavoidable as the Pentagon claims.

“Countless Afghans were murdered by the Taliban 155 yards in front of our position,” Vargas-Andrews said of the conduct in which the Taliban was engaged just feet away from U.S. soldiers.

“We communicated the atrocities to our chain of command and intel assets, but nothing came of it.”

On August 22, 2021, Vargas-Andrews said he told his superiors that he observed enemy assets conducting a test run of an IED attack on the airport.

He said he later received intelligence relating to IED threats and a description of an aspiring suicide bomber and his associate — a description that precisely matched two figures whom Vargas-Andrews encountered hours before the fateful attack on August 26.

Vargas-Andrews was in a position to kill the men he was quite sure were suicide bombers, but his superiors would not allow it:

He requested permission to engage the targets. “The response,” he said, was that “leadership did not have the engagement authority for us. [They told us], ‘Do not engage.'” The suspect individuals soon disappeared in the crowd.

“To this day, we believe he was the suicide bomber,” Vargas-Andrews lamented. “Our expertise was disregarded. No one was held accountable for our safety.”

Vargas-Andrews’s allegations are serious, and they remain unaddressed by the Pentagon or the State Department. Vargas-Andrews and his fellow service personnel have every right to be frustrated with the Biden administration’s senior leadership, particularly given the flippancy with which they have regarded the notion that anything could have been done differently to prevent this disaster.

"Frustrated" seems a rather euphemistic adjective, especially as it applies to the Gold Star families. They should be irate at everyone in the chain of command who was responsible for this debacle, including the officer who refused Vargas-Andrews' request to take out the suspects, all the way up to the Commander in Chief.

Of course, the disaster that occurred on August 26, 2021, was preventable. As Army Command sergeant major Jacob Smith told House investigators, the soldiers and civilians who died at Abbey Gate would have survived that day if the Biden administration had not made the incomprehensible decision to reduce America’s footprint in Afghanistan down to a skeleton force such that it could no longer hold Bagram Airbase.

“The events that happened at Abbey Gate, I believe that would not have occurred at Bagram,” Smith said in June. “The defenses that Bagram held [with] the ability to see for hundreds of meters and the defense in depth of its control points — I do not believe the result would have been the same.”

That’s the long and short of it. Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence on maintaining as small an American presence as possible in Afghanistan ahead of the withdrawal date his White House negotiated with the Taliban created the conditions for a national humiliation culminating in the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers.

It was a preventable debacle, and there has not yet been a full public accounting of on-the-record claims that the suicide bomber who killed scores of Americans and Afghans could have been neutralized.

“These deaths were preventable,” Sergeant Gee’s mother-in-law mourned. “My daughter could be with us today.” America deserves to know for certain if she is right.

But as long as our media sees itself as an extension of the Democrat Party no one will ever be held accountable for what happened that day. As it is, despite this enormous "national humiliation", no one has lost his or her job. That's a symptom of an administration that just doesn't really care about the lives lost in our unseemly retreat from Kabul, and the thousands of Afghans subsequently tortured and murdered by the Taliban for cooperating with the U.S.

Biden's disgraceful retreat deserves to go down in American history as one of the most shameful acts of treachery and betrayal ever committed by an American president.

The Significance of Beauty, Morality and Reason

Biologist Ann Gauger, in an article at Evolution News, discusses three aspects of the world that C.S. Lewis thought eluded any naturalistic explanation or account.

The first of these is beauty. She writes:

Why should there be beauty? What is it for? We find joy in beholding something truly beautiful, a sense of awe even. And we never grow tired of that beauty, unless some spiritual sickness has entered and sapped us of all capacity for joy. Even more strange, it is a great pleasure to participate in the creation of something beautiful, something that moves other people, that brings joy to them.

Why should this be, that there is joy for the creator in the creative act and joy for the audience also?

Scientifically speaking, does beauty indicate design or un-design? The answer is this: there is no reason to expect random mutation and selection to produce beauty, and no particular reason for us to find certain things beautiful. Functional, yes. But the beauty we see does not necessarily correlate with safety or suitability for eating or mating. It has no particular survival value. Instead, beauty is a lovely surprise that points toward the transcendent Something that is the source of beauty.

The second aspect of the world that Lewis believed could not be adequately explained within a naturalistic framework is morality. Here's Gauger:

As [Lewis] observed, when people quarrel, they often appeal to moral standards: “You promised,” or “You shouldn’t treat people that way.” They appeal to these standards expecting to be understood.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Or even our belief that there is such a thing as right or wrong?

There are certain acts that are universally acknowledged to be morally wrong, such as the killing of innocent human beings. Where does such objective certainty come from? If someone says, “Well, we evolved that view,” then there is no reason to suppose it has any basis in objective truth. Any moral view selected for its survival value loses any claim to objective truth. Should it not be just as moral, if not more so, to kill innocent humans if it benefits you, under that scenario?

On the other hand, if we concede that we didn’t evolve morality, a lot of people then default to the position that there is no objective basis for morality. We must define it for ourselves. Why, then, do most people still choose to adopt the moral precept that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings?

All this argues for the objective reality of moral values, and for our innate sense of them, sometimes called the natural law. And the existence of objective moral law points toward a designer who set this law into our hearts.

Lewis' third point is the existence of human reason. Gauger explains:

The fact that we reason at all, and that our reason corresponds with reality, is a remarkable thing. Have you never thought that it should be surprising that our minds are capable of probing the deep things of the universe, and that the universe is constructed in such a way as to be discoverable? That it should be founded on laws that we can grasp and that surprisingly find a match with our abstract mathematics?

Ape brains that evolved to hunt prey and run from lions should not be expected to do higher-order mathematics or particle physics. Yet our brains are fitted for the task, as deep as we need to go. Our brains and our abilities go so far beyond what survival requires that no evolutionary explanation could possibly account for the things we can do.

If evolution is all there is, then rationality hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Natural selection may favor the fastest or strongest or most fertile, but it doesn’t care about syllogisms or propositions or inferences. And if all we have is an evolved feeling that our minds are trustworthy, then our minds aren’t trustworthy.

She quotes Lewis:

All possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really “must” be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them — if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work — then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

Her argument is that "naturalism has cut itself off at the knees." She adds that,

Naturalism depends on the idea that science has discovered the truth about the world — what the world really is — namely, that it is nothing but matter and energy, particles in motion, and neurons firing, with consciousness an epiphenomenon and free will an illusion. But see — on what basis do they claim to know? Science is supposed to be a logical enterprise that interrogates the natural world and discovers its hidden reality using reason and logic, which naturalism cannot justify as being reliable.

Just so. We can add to what Gauger wrote the words of atheist philosopher John Gray who stated that,

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.

And in his book On Miracles Lewis wrote this:

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.

It's a marvel that a worldview, naturalism, that's so intellectually thin would nevertheless be so attractive to so many intelligent people.

Fortuitous Accident or Intentional Design?

When Charles Darwin first propounded his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859 he had no idea that biological cells were so astoundingly complex. He thought they were just tiny globs of undifferentiated protoplasm, and with that understanding Darwin didn't foresee any difficulty in cells arising mechanistically in "some warm little pond."

Throughout the 20th century, however, great strides were made in understanding the structure and function of the enormous diversity of cellular components, among which are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny molecular machines made of proteins. As biologists elucidated one cellular subsystem after another it became increasingly difficult to believe that life was the product of blind, purposeless chance, even though many scientists, clinging to their faith in metaphysical naturalism, insisted that it was.

That this is an act of faith is clear from the fact that no one today has any idea how the first cells from which all other living things are believed to have evolved ever originated.

An example of the sheer difficulty in explaining how cells could've formed essentially by chemical accident is given to us by the motor protein called kinesin.

As you watch this video keep in mind that no one knows how such a remarkable system on such a miniscule scale could have ever come about through purely natural, unintelligent processes. It would be like trying to imagine how a functional computer could be assembled by the random mixing of its component parts.

Among the many questions this video raises is, how does the kinesin "know" to carry the vacuole and "know" to carry it in only one direction?

Watch the clip and be amazed at this incredible machine:

It's Different When Trump Does it

The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel is always worth reading and her recent column on Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment of Donald Trump is no exception.

She writes (subscription required):

Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country.

Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.

Consider how many politicians might already be doing time had prosecutors applied this standard earlier.

Both Al Gore and George W. Bush filed lawsuits in the 2000 election that contained bold if untested legal claims. Surely both candidates had advisers who told them privately that they may have legitimately lost—and neither publicly conceded an inch until the Supreme Court resolved the matter.

Might an ultimate sore winner have used this approach to indict the loser for attempting to thwart the democratic process?

And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation.

It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments.

What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021.

The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosi said.

Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop.

Ms. Strassel goes on to give a number of other examples: Stacey Abrams falsely disputed her loss in the Georgia Governor's race in 2018. Rep. Adam Schiff and a host of FBI fabulists and prevaricators tore the country apart with the Russian collusion hoax they foisted on us for four or five years.

Somehow, though when Trump lies it's different. Strassel adds this:

The press is rooting for the special counsel to go after Republican lawmakers who on the basis of Mr. Trump’s claims objected to slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021.

Let’s line them all up, including dozens of Democrats who objected to slates in 2001, 2005 and 2017—on the basis of lies and with the purpose of conspiring to obstruct (as the Smith indictment puts it) “the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified.”

Of course, doing so would cross a line that separates mature republics from third world authoritarianisms, but that's where the Democrats and the leftist media appear intent on taking us. They don't seem to care if they devastate what has become the greatest social, political and military experiment ever to exist in the history of civilization, in fact many of the leftmost of their number would dearly love to see it, as long as they wield the power in whatever manages to emerge from the ashes.

The Mystery of Social Justice

As anyone who has spent much time on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of many young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain.

In that respect it's much like "systemic racism" or just plain "racism". The terms are easy to wield as rhetorical weapons, but they're not so easy to define.

So what exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers a succinct explanation in a brief video at Prager U. which you can watch here:

Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name.

Indeed, at least one of the founders of the social justice organization Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, has acknowledged that she and her fellow organizers are communists steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology.

What's sought by these people is not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard his whole life to attain and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all, but that's the logic behind social justice nostrums such as racial reparations.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the Christian says "All that's mine is yours." The socialist says "All that's yours is mine."

One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if points were subtracted from their grades and awarded to students who didn't do as well so that everyone got a C.

Seizing the Tiger By Its Tail

Law professor and liberal Democrat Alan Dershowitz has an interesting take on the recent indictment of Donald Trump by federal prosecutor Jack Smith.

Dershowitz argues that if Mr. Smith loses the case he's bring against Mr. Trump he will himself be vulnerable to being charged with conspiring to punish Mr. Trump for exercising a right, free speech, guaranteed by the Constitution.

If Trump is found to have had a legal right to say the things he said on January 6th, whatever one thinks of the wisdom of his speech, then Smith will be ipso facto guilty of conspiring to "injure" Trump by sending him to jail for it.

Here's an excerpt from the linked article:

Let me explain to you why [Smith is taking a huge risk],” Dershowitz said. “The [Constitution is violated when] two or more persons conspire to injure and deny somebody the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured him by the constitution.

What if a court ultimately rules that Donald Trump had a right under the First Amendment to make his Jan. 6 speech and to do what he did?

Then Jack Smith will have conspired to deny him of that right. That’s how serious this is.”

Dershowitz continues his criticism of Smith's indictment:

“Jack Smith … deliberately, willfully and maliciously leaves out the words that President Trump spoke on Jan. 6 in his terrible speech. which I disagree with, but what he said was, ‘I want you to assemble peacefully and patriotically,’”

Dershowitz added, “Jack [Smith] leaves that out. That is a lie, a lie, an omission lie and if you’re going to indict somebody for telling lies, don’t tell lies in the indictment.

If you’re going to indict somebody for denying people their constitutional rights, don’t deny them their constitutional rights by indicting them for free speech. That’s how hypocritical this is.”

The potential violation of Mr. Trump's First Amendment rights isn't the only danger for Smith:

Dershowitz earlier said that Smith’s indictment targeted Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel, by naming attorneys who represented Trump as unindicted co-conspirators....

“So ... this is a very, very dangerous indictment, dangerous to the First Amendment and also dangerous to the Sixth Amendment because it directly goes after Trump’s lawyers, names them as unindicted co-conspirators without giving their names, but basically says they’re criminals for giving him advice on how to challenge the election.”

So, Smith better win his case against Trump or else he may find himself prosecuted for serious crimes against Trump and his attorneys. This hazard certainly makes his allegations against Trump an example of grabbing hold of a tiger by its tail.

You can see the video of Dershowitz making his argument at the link. The video makes it pretty clear that Jack Smith's case is exceedingly weak.

A New Cancer Cure May Be in the Pipeline

It'd be great if this actually develops into something. The UK Daily Mail reports that researchers have developed a drug that kills all solid tumorous cancer cells while leaving other cells unharmed.

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

The new molecule targets a protein present in most cancers that helps tumors grow and multiply in the body. It is significant because this protein - the proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) - was previously thought to be 'undruggable'.

The drug was tested on 70 different cancer cells in the lab - including those derived from breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin, and lung cancer - and was effective against them all.

The pill is the culmination of 20 years of research and development by the City of Hope Hospital in Los Angeles, one of America's largest cancer centers.The medicine is code-named AOH1996 after Anna Olivia Healy, who died in 2005 from a deadly childhood cancer aged nine.

The researchers found the pill prevented cells with damaged DNA from dividing and from making a copy of faulty DNA, causing cancer cell death, known as apoptosis, but it did not interrupt healthy stem cells.

The results will now need to be replicated in people. The drug is currently being tested on humans in a Phase 1 clinical trial at City of Hope.

Assuming the clinical trials show no serious side-effects and successful destruction of tumor cells this drug has enormous life-saving potential considering all the types of cancers that it's believed to be effective against.

What an amazing blessing it would be if it works on humans!

Joe Biden and the Burisma Tarbaby

Mollie Hemingway tells us why Devon Archer's testimony before the House of Representatives is another nail in the coffin of Joe Biden's reputation and possibly his presidency. She writes:

Devon Archer, a longtime business partner and close friend of Hunter Biden’s, told congressional investigators Monday that at a meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015, top executives of Ukrainian energy concern Burisma asked Hunter Biden and himself for help from D.C. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden’s dad, Joe Biden, was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president as well as his point person on Ukraine.

Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, a Burisma executive, wanted to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired as he was investigating the company for corruption, Archer told members of Congress.

At the time Archer and Hunter Biden were being paid $83,000 a month to sit on Burisma's board and do nothing. Neither man had any expertise in energy production, but both, especially Hunter, had valuable influence in Washington.

Hunter Biden put Zlochevsky and Pozharski on a call with “D.C.,” and although Archer clarified that he was not part of the phone call so couldn’t possibly know for sure who was on the other end of the line, he also admitted that Joe Biden did meet and speak more than 20 times with various business associates who were paying for access to the Biden family.

Anyway, not long after that call Shokin was fired, and Hemingway marvels at what an amazing coincidence it would be if it weren't Joe Biden to whom that call was made.

Mr. Biden even bragged that he was personally responsible for getting the prosecutor fired. In fact, he claimed he had bullied the Ukrainian government into firing the investigator by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he got what he wanted.

Here's what he said publicly:

And I [Joe Biden] was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president.

The president said — I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired.

Burisma wanted Shokin fired. Hunter arranged a phone call to "D.C." and a few months later Joe Biden is boasting that he got Shokin fired.

Here's a question that might be asked of our Democrat friends who may be determined to defend Joe Biden against the allegation of corruption: "What would you be saying about this set of facts if the man doing the boasting was Donald Trump and the son being payed $83,000 a month was Don, Jr.?

Would you not be saying that the evidence of criminality was overwhelming? If so, and you know you would, why are you unwilling to draw the same conclusion about Joe Biden? And if your only answer amounts to some version of "Biden is a Democrat and Trump is a Republican," why should your opinion on anything else carry any weight with anyone ever again?

You've demonstrated, after all, that you have no more intellectual integrity than the Bidens have moral integrity.

Why the Universe Has to Be as Big as It Is

There's an article at Salvo by astronomer Hugh Ross that should fascinate anyone interested in chemistry, biology or the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe that makes life on earth possible.

It begins with a challenge frequently leveled at those who believe the universe is intentionally engineered by an intelligent agent to permit life to exist. If so, some who dissent from this view ask, why is the universe so vast? Why are there so many galaxies? Isn't such a huge universe wasteful when a much smaller universe would suffice?

Ross explains that a smaller universe would not have sufficed, and that the universe has to be as large as it is and as massive as it is in order for carbon-based life to exist anywhere in it. Ross' article can be summarized as follows:

In order for life to exist, at least life as we know it, there has to be carbon and oxygen, and in order for these elements to exist there had to be a very precise amount of mass to the universe in its early stages of development. Here's why:

At the beginning of the universe, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was rapidly expanding. Since mass exerts gravitational pull, the rate at which the universe expanded was determined by how much gravity there was acting as a drag on the expansion and this was determined by the amount of mass.

As the universe expanded it cooled. At one point the cooling reached the temperature range in which hydrogen atoms, the only atoms that existed in the early universe, began to fuse together to form other elements. This temperature range is between 15 million and 150 million degrees Celsius.

How long the expanding universe remained in this temperature range depended on how much matter there was to slow down the expansion. Too little matter and the universe would have passed through this range too quickly to form much else besides helium. Too slowly, and all the hydrogen would have fused into elements heavier than iron. Carbon and oxygen would have been very scarce.

In other words, to get the elements necessary for life, specifically carbon and oxygen, the expansion rate had to be just right, which means that the gravitational pull slowing the expansion had to be just right, which means that the amount of matter in the universe had to be just right. That amount of matter happens to be precisely the amount of matter bound up in the stars and galaxies we see in our telescopes.

In order to allow time for the production of carbon and oxygen, but not too much time, the expansion rate had to be calibrated to the astonishing value of one part in 10^55.

To get an idea of how precise this is imagine a dial face with 10^55 calibrations (one with 55 zeros). Now imagine that the dial has to point to exactly one of those calibrations for the universe to have carbon and oxygen. If the dial deviated by just one increment no carbon and oxygen would form. That's breathtaking, but in order to achieve that degree of precision of the expansion rate the universe had to have just the amount of matter that is today bound up in stars and galaxies that it in fact does have.

Indeed, the total amount of matter in the universe had to itself be fine-tuned to an astonishing precision of one part in 10^59.

So, the universe has to be as big as it is and as massive as it is in order for us to be here in this little corner of a galaxy located in an even smaller corner of the universe. Little wonder that many people conclude that it can't all just be a cosmic accident, that there must be an intelligent mind behind it all.

Ross goes on to explain how the amount of carbon we find on earth is also fine-tuned. Just a bit more or a bit less carbon and life on earth would not exist, at least not life forms higher than bacteria. The article is not long and it's very much worth reading in its entirety.

Meanwhile, check out this video to get an idea of how big the universe actually is and how small we are. Each circle represents 10x the diameter of the previous circle:

Why Aren't People Having Kids?

A one minute excerpt from a discussion between Tucker Carlson and author Eric Metaxas (back when Tucker was still at Fox News) dovetails so nicely with what my students and I will be talking about in class in a few weeks that I thought I'd share it.

The topic of their conversation was why Americans aren't having more children, and the whole six minute segment is worth watching, but at the 1:50 mark Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life [if people don't want to have children and families]? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?”

Metaxas' answer is, I think, exactly right:

Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it.

But what we do is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”

In other words, given the lurch toward metaphysical naturalism in the Western world, there's really no reason to think it's wrong to just live for oneself, to put one's own interests first, to seek to squeeze as much personal enjoyment out of this otherwise pointless existence as possible before we die.

Carlson responds to Metaxas' analysis with this,

But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it to Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.

True enough, but when they're alive and in the full bloom of life people often do think that the more things they can accumulate, the more sights they can see, the more pleasure they can experience the more meaningful their life will be. Carlson says that they're believing a lie.

Here's the video of the exchange:

Metaxas is, of course, not the first person to say what he says here. Philosophers, including atheistic philosophers, have been making this same observation about the emptiness of modern life for decades. Two twentieth century French thinkers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, can serve as examples.

Sartre wrote that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal," and Camus declared that, "...for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

Multitudes of moderns have concluded that if that's the way things are then we may as well just live for ourselves and make the best of a bad situation. What sense does it make, they reason, to sacrifice the only life we have for other people, for kids and a family?

Their conviction is that what matters is personal prosperity, power and pleasure and anything that interferes with the acquisition of those, including kids, is best avoided.