The Fundamental Stuff of Reality

Materialists believe everything reduces to material stuff - atoms and the particles of which they are made. On this view, even phenomena like ideas and sensations are merely epiphenomena of the material brain. The brain, in other words, is all that's necessary to explain mental events. There is no mind.

This view is becoming increasingly untenable, however, as we learn more about the deep structure of living things. It certainly is beginning to look like matter is itself reducible to information and, since information lies downstream from mind, it would follow that immaterial mind is even more basic than matter.

The following video is a bit long, but it illustrates how the theory that matter is reducible to information plays out in biology. It's pretty good.

Perhaps the 20th century physicist Sir James Jeans was correct when he said that the universe is beginning to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.

An Election Day Prayer

Today is election day, or I should say it's the culmination of an election process that began weeks ago with mail-in balloting. I wrote to a friend of mine who was skeptical of Donald Trump that I think there's a spectrum along which both Trump supporters and Trump opponents lie.

At one end of the spectrum are those who don't care what Trump says or does, they love him. At the other end are those who don't care what Trump says or does, they hate him.

In between are three kinds of folks: There are those who consider Trump's personal behavior to lie along a range from unfortunate to odious but think the benefit of his policies to the nation supersedes the risk posed by his character flaws.

Another group consists of those who think his behavior is so bad that it overrides any benefit to be gained from his policies and who won't vote for him because of it.

A third group is comprised of those who dislike and reject his policies regardless of his behavior. As I see things, ... most Trump voters I know are in the first group. My friend, I assume, and most Never-Trump Republicans are in the second, and most Democrats are in the third.

In any case, it's my prayer that the person who wins this election is God's choice to lead our nation, that the election is not tainted by fraud, that whatever may be the result there is no consequent violence, and that whoever wins we still love and respect those who chose differently than we did.

The Electoral College

One of the many issues at stake in tomorrow's election is the fate of the electoral college. Democrats want to do away with it and Republicans want to keep it, but many voters, unfortunately, have no idea what the electoral college is and why it matters.

To help us understand this institution here's a short five minute video that explains how the electoral college works and why it's important. The video was originally made about ten years ago so some of the references to political figures may seem a little anachronistic, but that doesn't detract from its message.

It's disturbing that there's so much support on the left for abolishing the electoral college. One gets the feeling that those who wish its demise do so because it's an impediment to their own electoral success. If they can't win playing by the traditional rules then they want to change the rules.

That same sentiment is also at the root, it seems, of the desire among many Democratic leaders to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices and to grant statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

If a Democratic president was able to appoint two or four more progressive justices progressives would have a permanent majority on the Court which would allow them to circumvent Republican legislatures until a Republican president and Senate were eventually elected and added another two or four conservative justices of their own. This could theoretically continue until the Supreme Court had more members than the Congress.

If both D.C. and Puerto Rico became states the overwhelming likelihood is that they would elect Democratic senators which would give Democrats an almost invincible majority in the Senate for at least a generation.

So, there's quite a lot at stake in tomorrow's election.

Abetting Anti-Semitism

Is the leadership of the Democrat Party indifferent to anti-Semitism? It certainly seems so from a congressional report on the campus troubles of last spring.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce has produced a report on campus anti-Semitism which states, among other things, that campus anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic disturbances were "permitted to operate unabated, in flagrant violation of university policies, culminating in widespread encampments and pro-Hamas demonstrations."

The report details a meeting between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Columbia president Minouche Shafik in January in which Schumer, who's a Democrat, sought to reassure Shafik that she "didn't need to worry about pesky congressional investigations." He advised her to tell her administration to just "keep their heads down" and that the concerns being raised about her handling of the campus protests were "really only among Republicans."

The report also revealed that,

...in the wake of Oct. 7, Harvard's top administrators, including former president Claudine Gay, "excised language from a university statement that would have condemned Hamas's terrorist attack." Gay also privately urged Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker not to label the phrase "from the river to the sea" anti-Semitic, as doing so "would raise questions about why the University was not imposing discipline for its use."

"The report also shows that alumni wrote to Gay expressing concern in the wake of a Washington Free Beacon report about the assault of an Israeli student during an anti-Israel protest, noting, 'Harvard's tolerance of violent hate speech toward Jews versus likely reaction to such behavior directed at other ethnic groups.'

Harvard never took disciplinary action against the students captured on video accosting their classmate, though the Suffolk County District Attorney's office has slapped two of them with criminal charges — an investigation the university has not cooperated with."

The full story is at the link and it's replete with interesting details.

Evidently, the highest echelons of the Democrat Party as well as the administrators of these universities, who are probably themselves all Democrats, see no problem with the harassment of Jews and explicit support for one of the most horrible terrorist organizations of the 21st century.

One can only marvel at the moral vacuity displayed by the contemporary left in general and these individuals in particular.

Cleaning Up the Mess

So President Biden pretty clearly called Trump's supporters "garbage" (see yesterday's post), whether he intended to or not, and the Democrats are scurrying about trying to clean up the mess he created.

Andrew Stiles and Thaleigha Rampersad at the Free Beacon describe the Democrats' efforts:

Doing what comes naturally, mainstream journalists and other partisan Democrats rushed to Biden's defense, denying reality out of fear that the hateful comment could damage Kamala Harris's campaign in the final days before the election.

The White House insisted—contrary to the available evidence—that Biden was referring to a single Trump supporter, Tony Hinchcliffe, the off-color comedian who described Puerto Rico as a "floating island of garbage" during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden over the weekend.

Axios reporter Alex Thompson asked the White House to clarify how it came to that conclusion, but he did not receive a response.

Stiles and Rampersad write that some in the media have blamed Biden's gaffe on his childhood stutter. Others have tried to convince us that Biden was describing the sort of thing Trumps' supporters said, not the supporters themselves.

Numerous media outlets actually faulted Republicans for "seizing on the gaffe" for political gain. Other commenters simply bit the bullet and acknowledged that our superannuated Chief Executive said it and ought to have the integrity to own it.

See the Free Beacon article for details and links to the above summary. For her part Ms. Harris dissociated herself from all criticism of people based upon whom they support:

Vice President Kamala Harris said she spoke with Biden on Tuesday night following her primetime address on the National Mall, where she denounced Trump as a "petty tyrant" whose election would incite "chaos and division."

Biden's "garbage" remark did not come up during the conversation, Harris told reporters on Wednesday. "First of all, he clarified his comments, but let me be clear, I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for," she said.

What's amusing about all this is that Democrats have accused Trump supporters of being racist, sexist, antisemitic fascists and Nazis, but now the Democrats are emphatically denying that the President labeled Trump supporters "garbage." And Kamala Harris who has herself called Trump a fascist, "a petty tyrant," and a "dictator" nevertheless "strongly disagrees" with criticizing people she believes are okay with Trump being a Nazi and who will do their best to see that he gets elected?

If you or your colleagues have called Trump - and, by extension, his supporters - all those other names why shrink from the accusation that the President has also called them garbage?

Calling Half the Country "Garbage"

Donald Trump's rhetoric is often coarse, insulting, and indefensible. His opponents have seized on it as perhaps the main reason, along with abortion rights, voters should elect Democrats in 2024. Yet, when it comes to insults and disgusting rhetoric the Democrats play a pretty good game themselves.

Barack Obama demeaned conservatives by referring to them as "bitter clingers," clinging to their guns and Bibles. Hillary Clinton displayed her contempt for many Trump supporters by calling them "deplorables" and declaring them "irredeemable." Now President Biden has said what a lot of Democrats evidently believe by labeling Trump supporters "garbage."

“Donald Trump has no character," quoth the president. "He doesn't give a damn about the Latino community…just the other day, a speaker at his rally called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage?…The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

You can watch the man who once promised to bring us all together deliver himself of this assessment here:

The Democrats, including both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, have been calling Trump and anyone who thinks he'd make a better president than Harris "fascists" and "Nazis" for a couple of weeks now, and President Biden's outburst fits right in with this view of their political opponents.

Their rhetoric is incendiary, hateful, and irresponsible. If one's opponents are Nazis and garbage then it's a logical next step to think that one is justified in using violence against them to prevent them from achieving political power.

It's certainly rational, given the pervasive moral relativism of our age, to believe that one is justified in engaging in electoral hanky-panky to keep the garbage out of the White House.

As the campaign winds to a close we can only hope and pray that the whackos out there choose not to take the Democrats' logic to either of those next steps.

What's Wrong with Evangelicals Who Support Trump?

In the wake of the 2016 election in which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton historian John Fea, an evangelical Christian, wrote a book in which he criticized his fellow evangelicals for supporting Trump. Aside from the fact that the Democratic candidate today is Kamala Harris and not Hillary Clinton, much of his critique is being repeated among liberal evangelicals today so I thought I'd rerun my response to Fea's book here:

Historian John Fea has written a book titled Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump in which he seeks to understand why so many people who call themselves evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump and at the same time chastise them for doing so.

Fea is himself an evangelical Christian who teaches at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, but he's "shocked", "saddened", "frustrated" and "angry" that 81% of his fellow Evangelicals pulled the lever for a man whose moral character should've disqualified him among voters who believe that the nation's leaders should be above reproach.

Fea is rightly critical of Christian "leaders" who, in one way or another, sought during the campaign to excuse Mr. Trump's well-documented prevarications, debaucheries, and vulgarities. He also offers some interesting, although perhaps not entirely relevant, historical insight into the oft misunderstood role of Christianity in the nation's founding, as well as the sometimes embarrassing relationship between Christian leaders and the White House.

In assessing the book these can all be set on the positive side of the ledger. On the negative side, unfortunately, there's much in Fea's book that I think is unfair to those in the 81% who, distressed by the choice between two very flawed candidates, chose to vote for the one whose political promises most closely aligned with their own hopes.

On page 73 he relates an incident in which a lady approached him after a lecture on this topic and said that she herself was a member of the 81% and she wanted Fea to tell her, given what we knew about the moral shortcomings of both candidates, how an evangelical could select between them if character was to be the deciding factor.

This was, I think, the salient question facing many Christians in November of 2016, and for reasons I elaborated upon in a couple of posts written around the 2016 election (See here and here), many saw the moral issue as a wash and chose instead to cast their ballot for the candidate whose policies were, if implemented, most likely to lead the nation out of the morass, both social and economic, it had fallen into during the previous decade.

Fea seems to recognize this motivation but chose to give it little attention, perhaps because he doesn't believe it's the chief reason why so many evangelicals lent their support to Trump. He may be right about that, but to lump those for whom it was a major consideration with those for whom it wasn't strikes me as somewhat simplistic and unfair.

In any case, he writes on page 7 of the Introduction that:

For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain that 81%.

In succeeding chapters he unpacks these three ideas in a way that sometimes makes them seem ignoble or unseemly motivators for Christian action. He suggests, for example that fear - of change, of the future - belies a lack of trust in God's providential control over the doings of men. "Fear," he quotes author Marilynne Robinson, "is not a Christian habit of mind."

Be it as it may that fear shouldn't be a mental habit, it's nevertheless difficult to agree with Fea that fear, in the sense I understand him to be using the word, is always an unbecoming motive for a Christian or an indicator of a lack of trust in God. In fact, I suspect, that Fea doesn't think this either.

After all, he himself must've been fearful - fearful for the future of the country - when he realized on election night that Trump was going to prevail. Otherwise, why be frustrated and angry with the 81% of evangelicals who voted for the president-elect? In fact, why else write such an impassioned book if not motivated by fear for what Christian support for Trump was doing to the church's witness?

Fea says that fear has no place in the life of one who trusts God, but if he truly believes that then when he realized on election night that Trump was winning why did he not just trust that this was God's will and that He had everything under control? Why get angry with those Christians who gave Trump his victory? There seems to me a dissonance between his standard for the 81% and his own reaction to Trump's election.

Fear, though it shouldn't control us, is nevertheless a perfectly reasonable and appropriate response to certain threats. The question is whether a particular threat or set of threats justify a fearful response. The 81% saw the threats posed by liberal progressivism, some of which Fea himself agrees are ominous, as ample justification for their fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Fea disagrees, though, that the threat reached a sufficiently high level of seriousness to warrant support for Trump, but he doesn't satisfactorily explain why a Clinton presidency should not arouse fear among Christians while the threats he believes to be posed by a Trump presidency should.

Fea strongly and, to a large extent, rightly criticizes Christians for aspiring to positions of power within the current administration. This aspiration can certainly be both disreputable and dangerous. It has seduced some evangelical "leaders" into excusing or rationalizing some of Mr. Trump's egregious behavior, behavior that should never be excused and which was rightly and roundly condemned by these same "court evangelicals," as Fea aptly labels them, when similarly engaged in by President Clinton.

In pointing out this hypocrisy Fea is excellent, but his analysis of "power seeking" when applied to the broader mass of the 81% is vague, and his use of the word "power," at least when applied to the hopes of the majority of Christian Trump voters, is unfair and gratuitously pejorative. "Influence" would've been a more charitable word choice, I think.

In other words, setting aside the court evangelicals - the handful of prominent leaders who have in some cases sold their souls for a mess of pottage - the average evangelical voter, like everyone else, hoped to gain some influence over the policies issuing forth from Washington, and surely there's nothing dishonorable with wanting to influence today's leaders, any more than there's anything dishonorable with wanting to teach history and write books to influence tomorrow's leaders.

Indeed, if the desire for influence is somehow nefarious then no Christian should ever run for political office, but surely Fea would not endorse such a principle.

The Trumpian slogan "Make America Great Again" is Fea's springboard for his critique of evangelical nostalgia. He focuses on the word "again" and rightly points out that any past era to which one directs one's gaze may have been "great" for some but not so great for others. As much as whites might pine for the "good old days" of the fifties, Fea observes, most African Americans would not be particularly nostalgic for those years, nor wish to return to them.

True enough, but I think this misses the point. It's not a particular era to which anyone wants to return in toto, it's rather particular qualities of the past that many, both blacks and whites, would like to recover while retaining the best of the present.

For instance, there was a time, prior to the 1960s, when for both blacks and whites families were stronger, neighborhoods were more secure and more communal, drugs were a much less serious problem, public education (even in segregated schools) was in many ways better, movies and music were less coarse and vulgar, babies in the womb were safer, the economy was sound, and religious liberty was not under assault.

When candidate Trump spoke of making America great again a lot of evangelicals reflected on how far we'd strayed from this historical reality and saw in Trump a hope that we might get some of it back. To suggest that MAGA was a "dog whistle" or "code" for reinstituting Jim Crow or undoing all the salutary social progress that's been made in America over the last fifty years, as some of Trump's critics have done, is simply specious and unfair.

Finally, Fea approvingly cites University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter's call for Christians to refrain from becoming activists in the culture war. In his introduction, he writes that, "Christians were never meant to change this world; instead they are called to .... [be] a 'faithful presence' in their local communities and neighborhoods."

This sounds a lot like a veiled call to Christians to surrender meekly to the forces of cultural decay and degeneration sweeping over our society. I wonder whether Fea would've urged William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect to abstain from fighting for the abolition of slavery, or for Martin Luther King and others in the American civil rights movement to have declined to fight for the right to vote for politicians who would advance the cause of racial justice, or for Christians today who fight on behalf of immigration reform or environmental causes to desist from their protests and political efforts.

I doubt it, but surely these are all as much cultural issues as are abortion, pornography and gay marriage.

I'm quite sure that Christians who campaigned for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not seen by Professor Fea as doing anything untoward. Why is it that it's only when Christians involve themselves in what are seen as conservative political or social issues that they're accused of bringing disrepute to the name of Christ? Why is it only conservative Christians who are called upon to be conscientious objectors in the culture wars?

Fea argues that had evangelical Christians spent as much money on simply being a faithful witness for the sanctity of human life rather than dirtying themselves in the political mud pit by seeking to elect politicians who would overturn Roe they'd be a lot more effective and compelling ambassadors for Christ, but this is a false alternative. There's no reason Christians shouldn't do both, and indeed they are doing both.

There's nothing wrong with Christians working to overturn unjust laws and to scrub some of the social toxins from our culture, but, to be sure, this is a task that must be undertaken as irenically and with as much integrity, civility, and winsomeness as possible.

If the world remains nonetheless repelled by such activism and advocacy then that's the world's problem, not the church's. So, too, was the world repelled by the ancient prophets.