It's Odd to Deny Free Will

Jerry Coyne is a University of Chicago biologist and a philosophical materialist. This means that he believes that everything that exists is reducible to material stuff and that there are no immaterial substances like minds or souls. If it's true that we're solely made up of matter then it's very difficult to see how we could have free will since matter is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Coyne recently gave a talk at Williams University in Maryland where he elaborated on this consequence of a materialist worldview. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor comments on Coyne's views in a piece at Mind Matters where he opens his critique with this:

When the history of modern materialism is written, it will be a catalogue of almost incomprehensible folly. The striking irony is that many of the most strident claims by materialists are not merely empirical and logical nonsense; much of materialism is self-refuting.

It's self-refuting, Egnor argues, because if all that's going on when we think or when we choose is electrochemical processes in the neurons in our brains, how can those processes be true or false? A chemical reaction is neither true nor false, it has no truth value at all.

Thus the claim that "materialism is true" is nonsense. It's what philosophers call a category mistake. Truth is a property of propositions, not chemical reactions.

Egnor employs this same criticism against Coyne's claim that our choices are not free but are determined by physical causes:

[T]he assertion that materialism is true is the implicit denial that materialism, or anything else, can be true.

Coyne’s assertion—determinism is true and free will is an illusion–is a proposition. That is, he has made a statement that can be true or false. If Coyne is right, then his own denial of free will is wholly the product of physical and chemical processes—action potentials, neurotransmitters, and the like. But physical processes are not propositions.

The secretion of dopamine at a synapse is neither true or false. It is merely a secretion of dopamine.

Thus, Coyne’s claim that his own ideas are wholly determined by physical and chemical processes is inherently a claim that his ideas have no truth value—they are neither true nor false. Coyne himself, and his (material) “ideas,” are just chemicals in motion.

So when Coyne denies free will based on his belief in determinism, he is telling us that his claim lacks truth value. And in that, and that only, he is right.

It might be more correct to say that if a materialist claims either that materialism is true or that determinism is true, the objective truth value of the claim is purely coincidental, arising as it does from a neurochemical matrix in the brain which does not possess the ability to intentionally generate truth claims. In other words, it might actually be a true description of the world, but if so, it's just a lucky coincidence that it's true.

Whether anyone in Coyne's audience was persuaded to believe that it's true or not is not because Coyne's claim corresponds to the way the world is but because the neurochemical matrix in the listener's brain produced a decision to believe or disbelieve.

In any case, there's something peculiar about a university professor presenting a lecture in which he implicitly asserts that the position for which he's arguing, the claim he wants his audience to believe, is really neither true nor false, yet that's pretty much what Coyne and other determinists do.

The Most Important Speech of the 21st Century

Thomas Jefferson once observed that no nation can expect to remain ignorant and free. He might have added, were he inclined that way, that neither can a nation expect to reject its Judeo-Christian heritage and remain free. Tragically, rejecting that heritage is exactly what's happening in Europe and the U.S.

Attorney General William Barr addressed this melancholy historical development and the baneful consequences it's having in a remarkable lecture at the Notre Dame school of law last October. What he said is so important that it should be read in its entirety - several times - but I'll just mention a few excerpts in this post.

Here are a few of the many pearls in his talk:

In the 20th century, our form of free society faced a severe test. There had always been the question whether a democracy so solicitous of individual freedom could stand up against a regimented totalitarian state. That question was answered with a resounding “yes” as the United States stood up against and defeated, first fascism, and then communism.

But in the 21st century, we face an entirely different kind of challenge. The challenge we face is precisely what the Founding Fathers foresaw would be our supreme test as a free society.

They never thought the main danger to the republic came from external foes. The central question was whether, over the long haul, we could handle freedom. The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.

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By and large, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the classical Christian tradition. These practical statesmen understood that individuals, while having the potential for great good, also had the capacity for great evil.

Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large. No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

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Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground. In 1965, the illegitimacy rate was eight percent. In 1992, when I was last Attorney General, it was 25 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. In many of our large urban areas, it is around 70 percent.

Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.

As you all know, over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses. That is more casualties in a year than we experienced during the entire Vietnam War.

I will not dwell on all the bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery. And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.

Among these militant secularists are many so-called “progressives.” But where is the progress?

We are told we are living in a post-Christian era. But what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is a system of values that can sustain human social life?

The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.

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We have all thought that after a while the “pendulum will swing back.” But today we face something different that may mean that we cannot count on the pendulum swinging back.

First is the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.

One of the ironies, as some have observed, is that the secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion, including inquisitions and excommunication.

Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake – social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns.

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Part of the human condition is that there are big questions that should stare us in the face. Are we created or are we purely material accidents? Does our life have any meaning or purpose? But, as Blaise Pascal observed, instead of grappling with these questions, humans can be easily distracted from thinking about the “final things.”

Indeed, we now live in the age of distraction where we can envelop ourselves in a world of digital stimulation and universal connectivity. And we have almost limitless ways of indulging all our physical appetites.

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In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct becomes so high that society ultimately recoils and reevaluates the path that it is on. But today – in the face of all the increasing pathologies – instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have the State in the role of alleviator of bad consequences. We call on the State to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.

So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children.

The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on which we depend.

There's so much more to what Barr said that I encourage you to read the whole thing. His address may well be the most important speech thus far in the 21st century, this century's version, perhaps, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's commencement address at Harvard in June of 1978 which it would also be worthwhile to read.

The Man Who Saved 62,000 Jews

Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and this week is a good time to learn a little bit about some of the brave men and women who undertook to rescue Jews from the Nazis bent on exterminating every man, woman and child of them.

Names like Raoul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler, Corrie Ten Boom, Maximilian Kolbe, Irena Opdyke and so many more come to mind, but one man and his wife with whom I was not familiar was the subject of an article in The Federalist written by Amy Lutz.

The couple was Carl and Trudi Lutz (no relation to Amy), and they're credited by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. with having saved over 62,000 people during the war. Carl was a Swiss-American who worked for the Swiss diplomatic corps prior to WWII.

I encourage you to read the full article at the link to learn his background, but he was posted to Palestine before the war and then during the war to Budapest, Hungary. Here's the account of what he did once he found himself in Budapest:

[An] incident occurred during Lutz’s time in Palestine that would forever alter his perception. One day while standing on the roof of their apartment, Lutz and his wife Trudi saw four Jewish men lynched in the street. The next day, Lutz wrote a letter to his brother in which he said the following, “As I swore to the victims, as they suffered hits and stabs, that one day I would speak up for them.”

That opportunity would come soon enough. In 1942, Lutz transferred to Budapest, where he resided when the Nazis arrived in Hungary in March 1944. Lutz recalled the protective papers he used to assist German Jews in Palestine and determined they could be used to protect Hungarian Jews from being sent to Auschwitz. While it was unlikely anyone could find a way from Budapest to Palestine in the chaos and terror of 1944-1945, those holding the protective papers were considered to be under Swiss protection and exempt from deportation.

Lutz procured 8,000 protective “units” but realized his efforts would be for naught if he did not ensure that the Nazi forces ruling Hungary would honor them. He scheduled a meeting with a high-ranking Nazi official who had just arrived in Budapest, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann, one of the Third Reich’s leading facilitators of the Holocaust, was a bit taken aback by the request from the well-dressed, albeit soft-spoken diplomat. He even used their initial meeting as an opportunity to mock Lutz, comparing him to Moses attempting to rescue his people. However, Eichmann did pass along the request. Soon after, Lutz received word that Germany would authorize the 8,000 protective papers, in part because of Lutz’s previous work in Palestine [on behalf of German civilians trapped there when hostilities broke out].

Lutz immediately launched a plan to rescue far more than 8,000 people. While Eichmann assumed the 8,000 “units” Lutz requested meant 8,000 individuals, Lutz instead determined that “units” meant “families,” thereby increasing the number of people he could protect. He immediately began to disseminate the papers throughout Budapest.

Forged Swiss protective documents also began to appear in the city, but Lutz looked the other way. He also placed 76 buildings under Swiss diplomatic protection, where he was able to house thousands of Hungarian Jews who had lost their homes and property. Lutz frequently stepped in to rescue individual Hungarian Jews, once jumping in the Danube river to rescue a Jewish woman shot by fascist militia.

Eichmann eventually discovered Lutz’s deception in late 1944. Instead of refusing to authorize any neutral protective papers, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators hatched a devious plan. They brought Carl and Trudi Lutz to a brickyard, where Hungarian Jews were kept prisoner before deportation to Auschwitz. The authorities forced the Lutzes to identify forged Swiss protective papers, and they complied to preserve the authority of the legitimate papers.

While the couple attempted to falsely validate the more convincing forgeries, they could not do so for all the papers. Hungarian Jews with documents that could not be validated were no longer protected from deportation and were sent to their death. The experience haunted Carl and Trudi Lutz for the rest of their lives.

In a 1949 report, Lutz summarized his motivations behind his rescue efforts, writing that he did not consider himself a “Christian in name only” and therefore found it a “matter of conscience” to rescue the Hungarian Jews “condemned to die.”

Carl Lutz  in 1944

There's more to their story which you can read at the link. Carl and his wife divorced after the war, and he died in 1975 largely unknown and forgotten.

Naturalism, Morality and C.S.Lewis

A student linked me to a post by historian Alan Snyder who highlights some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on metaphysical naturalism in his famous book On Miracles. Snyder writes:

In his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis takes aim at “naturalists” who say that there is no “outside” reference [i.e., God] for calling anything good or evil.

When men use the words, “I ought,” Lewis notes, they are saying something about the essence of right and wrong that is built into the universe. In fact, naturalists should never use such terminology: “But if Naturalism is true,” he writes, “‘I ought’ is the same sort of statement as ‘I itch’ or ‘I’m going to be sick.'”

On naturalism there are no moral obligations and thus the word "ought" has no moral significance. If there are no moral duties then there's nothing anyone "ought" to do, at least not in the moral sense of the word "ought."

Lewis explains,

The Naturalist can, if he chooses, brazen it out. He can say . . . “all ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer world by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this.

There’s a slight problem, though, for those who attempt to explain good and evil in this way:

But then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though inconsistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusions, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. . . . They write with indignation like men proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like men recording that they personally like mild beer but some people prefer bitter.

Of course, if good and evil are illusions then there's certainly no reason why we should be concerned with either the illusion of good or the illusion of evil.

To use such terms when the user knows they don't refer to anything is a form of social coercion. Naturalists who employ the rhetoric of good and evil are simply attempting to compel, or trick, others into behaving in ways the naturalists prefer by calling their actions good or evil when in fact they're neither good nor evil - no more than are the actions of a wolf or falcon or any other predator.

When one gull steals a morsel of food from another we don't call the gull or its behavior evil. Likewise, if we're just animals, if there's no transcendent moral order, why do we call an act like robbing an elderly lady evil?

Lewis adds:

Do they remember while they [naturalists] are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better world” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn?

Yet, as Snyder points out, the naturalist, unless he's also a nihilist, doesn't live consistently with his own professed ideology. Snyder concludes with another quote from Lewis:

My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like men.

Yes, they do, but when they do they tacitly admit the failure of their naturalism. A worldview with which people can't live consistently is seriously flawed.

Most Pro-Life President in History

I have a friend, a pro-life Christian, who despises President Trump. When I ask him why, he cites Trump's dishonesty and bad manners. Well, I reply, it's true that Mr. Trump is given to playing fast and loose with facts, and that he often would be better advised to resist the temptation to tweet, but what, I ask my friend, is the alternative for someone who holds the views he does?

Would he rather we have a president, like, say, Hillary Clinton, who appoints judges who would restrict religious freedom, who would continue to strip away protections for the unborn and who would continue to send millions of taxpayer dollars to organizations like Planned Parenthood that promote "a woman's right to choose"?

Given the choice between a president whose promiscuous taradiddles are sometimes embarrassing and one who would continue the annual destruction of over a million unborn babies, most of them either black or female, how could a pro-life Christian like my friend wish for the latter?

But would Mr. Trump actually be any better on this the most salient human rights issue of our time than Ms. Clinton or any of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination in 2020?

Well, according to some of the folks who took the trouble to attend Saturday's March for Life (You didn't know there was such a march? You must get your news from CNN.) Mr. Trump is the most pro-life president in our history. He's certainly done more for the cause than any other president in the last fifty years, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Mr. Trump hasn't always aligned himself with pro-lifers, however. In his previous life he was pro-choice, but becoming president has wrought a transformation in the man.

Whether or not the transformation is a political ploy, as his detractors allege, is really quite irrelevant. By appointing judges to both the federal bench and the Supreme Court who have a jaundiced view of the constitutionality of current abortion jurisprudence he has done more to reverse the tide on abortion than anyone else in his office has ever done.

He also, by appearing in person at Saturday's March, became the first president ever to have done so. It was a dramatic expression of solidarity with the movement.

Ben Domenech at The Federalist writes:

Trump spent most of his career as a limousine liberal on the issue of abortion. With some rare exceptions, his entire public history on the issue was pro-choice. His attitude largely seemed to disregard the matter, subsidiary to his more consistent interests in trade policy and the like. But since his election, it is impossible to say he has been anything less than the most successful pro-life president in the nearly half a century since Roe v. Wade.

Instead of trying to find the middle path as George W. Bush did on stem cells, instead of having any reluctance for defunding Planned Parenthood via the Reagan rule, Trump has viewed this as a binary process without any gray area. Either we fund abortions or we don’t. Either we name pro-life judges or we don’t. Either we call it like it is or we don’t. In each case, Trump’s tendencies toward shocking the polite conventions of politics has served pro-lifers well.

An abortion law regime that did represent the country would allow for legal bans after the first trimester as well as requirements for informing parents, and a variety of other limitations. This is the reality in most of Europe – in fact, their restrictions start even earlier. But the holy nature of Roe reduces this argument to the margins. This has to end.

It is the most fundamental question for us, whether the preborn lives that take root here are unique persons, with the right to draw breath and live, or whether they are non-persons, “lives unworthy of life”, “human weeds” as Margaret Sanger called them, whose destruction is a public good.

Tristan Justice, also at The Federalist, writes about how Trump has won over the skeptics in the pro-life movement:

“I was a little skeptical at first,” said rally attendee Ken Berman sporting a pro-Trump hat, but added that after three years of Trump in the White House, his concerns have largely been abated by the appointment of conservative judges.

Donald Sweeting, the president of Colorado Christian University which brought about 200 students to the march, also said he was skeptical but that Trump had earned his trust on abortion.

“There’s never been a president to challenge the abortion industry quite like Trump,” Sweeting said.

Marjorie Dannenfelser president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group endorsing pro-life candidates for office.

Dannenfelser admitted that she too, was skeptical at first of Trump’s commitment to pro-life issues and actually opposed Trump in the beginning. Four years ago, Dannenfelser even wrote a letter to Iowa voters urging Iowans “to support anyone but Trump,” in the 2016 Republican caucus because when it came to abortion, “Mr. Trump cannot be trusted.”

“He was my last choice until he became my first choice,” Dannenfelser told The Federalist, but said she came to “completely embrace” Trump through the election after extracting “concrete commitments.”

Since Trump was sworn into office, the president has held up his end of the bargain, championing pro-life policies and appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices offering pro-life activists hope that the days of Roe v. Wade could be numbered.

Meanwhile, Democrats have become increasingly radical on the issue of abortion:

For example, Democrats in the Virginia statehouse are currently considering a bill that would amend the Virginia Constitution to make abortion access a permanent legal right. Last January, they presented a bill that would repeal restrictions on abortion, allowing terminations up until the moment of birth, which Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam also backed.

Last year, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the “Reproductive Health Act” into law, a similar bill allowing late term abortion.

During the November Democratic debate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who supports few restrictions if any on abortion said there was no room for pro-life Democrats in the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, Ms. Warren's intolerant and exclusionary views haven't yet reached my friend's ears. I wonder what he'll say when they do.

A Few Good Questions

Elizabeth Warren has never declined an opportunity to pander to any group she thought the tactic might influence to vote for her, but it caught up with her the other day in an encounter with an angry dad that might plague her for the rest of the campaign.

According to PJ Media,

Elizabeth Warren was confronted at an Iowa town hall event by a voter who wanted to know if he could get back the money that he paid for his daughter's college education since Warren's running on forgiving student loan debt. "My daughter is in school," he said. "I saved all my money just to pay student loans. Can I have my money back?" Warren replied, "Of course not!"

The man continued to push Warren for an explanation for why some people can have a free education while others have to pay. "So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?" he asked. "My buddy went out and bought a car and went on vacation, but I didn't. I saved my money. He made more than I did. I worked a double shift...so you're laughing at me," he said to Warren, who seemed to be smiling.

She denied laughing but didn't seem to have an answer to the perfectly logical question the voter had. Warren's only response was "I appreciate your time."

The man walked away in disgust as well he might've. Warren's debt forgiveness "plan" is a fraud. It only applies to current loan debt. Students who borrow money for college in the future will not be covered. In other words, Warren is trying to bribe the current crop of college students into voting for her with a promise to wipe away their debt.

The dad asked a very good question, of course, and it's one that goes beyond just college tuition. Legal immigrants to this country are asking the same question of Democrats who want to grant amnesty to those who came here illegally.

How is it fair to those who waited for years and did everything the right way to have others do everything the wrong way and be declared legal? How is it fair to those who are still waiting for their applications to be adjudicated to have people by the thousands jump ahead of them in line, like so many fare-jumpers on the New York subway, and still be let in ahead of those who are waiting?

Why doesn't the media ever ask a Democrat this question?

Speaking of questions the media chooses not to ask, here's another one: Up until this election cycle the Democrats never passed up an opportunity to condemn big money in politics and to criticize the Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, which permits it. Big money was corrupting the political process, they insisted, but that was until Democrat billionaires Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg got into the race and began spending their fortunes on ads castigating Donald Trump.

Bloomberg has promised to spend a billion dollars to defeat Trump even if he's not the nominee.

Suddenly, there was total silence about big money in politics from Democrat politicians and the media as their erstwhile criticisms just evaporated like morning fog.

So here's the question: Where are all those principled Dems who argued that it was crucial to the survival of our democracy to get big money out of politics now that big money is being used to help them get elected?

It's a funny sort of principle that only applies in cases where it doesn't harm one's own interests.

A Universal Cancer Cure?

Researchers at Cardiff University report a very encouraging discovery in cancer research which they believe has "enormous potential" for curing a broad array of cancers.

The Cardiff team discovered a particular type of immune cell in the body, called a T-cell, that could find and kill a wide range of cancerous cells in the lab, including lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells, without harming normal tissues.

This is marvelous news because although T-cells are already being used against certain specific types of cancers, this new find would make it possible to develop T-cells that could potentially be employed to kill many cancer types that current T-cell technology is not very effective against. Current treatments are not very successful, for example, against cancers that form tumors.

What makes the Cardiff team's discovery a great advance is that they were able to isolate a receptor on a T-cell that can identify and bind with many different types of cancer cells and which would act something like a missile guidance system that would direct the T-cell to the cancerous cell and destroy it.

The way T-cell cancer treatments work is that a blood sample is taken from a cancer patient and the T-cells are extracted. A virus carrying the gene for the cancer-finding receptor molecule would then be used to insert that gene into the T-cell.

The genetically modified cells are then grown in vast quantities in the laboratory and put back into the patient where the T-cells go to work hunting down and killing cancer cells in the patient's body.

Unfortunately, the research has only been tested in animals and on cells in the laboratory, and more safety checks would be needed before human trials could start.

Nevertheless, if the trials are successful, it could be that in a few years far fewer people will be dying from cancers for which there currently is no good treatment.

Why Deny That Consciousness Exists?

Philosophical materialism is the view that everything that exists is reducible to material stuff. Energy, for example, is reducible to matter, and no independent immaterial substances like minds or souls exist, at least not in this universe.

Most materialists are such because they also embrace atheism (or philosophical naturalism) - the view, essentially, that nature is all there is - and they believe that atheism is most compatible with materialism.

One very perplexing difficulty with materialism, however, is posed by human consciousness. To simplify, when we have the experience of seeing the color red it's hard to explain how this phenomenon can be reduced to the material atoms and nerve fibers in the brain. There's nothing about atoms that can give rise to a sensation.

Sensations, or what's called phenomenal experience, seem to be both immaterial and inexplicable in terms of the material processes of the brain.

As Dutch philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup writes:

Phenomenal consciousness is seen as one of the top unsolved problems in science. Nothing we can — or, arguably, even could — observe about the arrangement of atoms constituting the brain allows us to deduce what it feels like to smell an orange, fall in love, or have a belly ache.

There's a vast gap between what we know about matter and what we experience when we see red, or feel pain or taste sugar. So, how does a materialist handle the difficulty? Kastrup explains:

Remarkably, the intractability of the problem has led some to even claim that consciousness doesn’t exist at all: Daniel Dennett and his followers famously argue that it is an illusion, whereas neuroscientist Michael Graziano proclaims that “consciousness doesn’t happen. It is a mistaken construct.” Really?

The denial of phenomenal consciousness is called — depending on its particular formulation — ‘eliminativism’ or ‘illusionism.’

Kastrup struggles to understand why someone would deny that they're really conscious:

[W]hat kind of conscious inner dialogue do these people engage in so as to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue? Short of assuming that they are insane, fantastically stupid or dishonest — none of which is plausible — we have an authentic and rather baffling mystery in our hands.

So, the materialist seeks to explain conscious experiences like seeing color, hearing music, smelling perfume, feeling pain, etc. either by denying that consciousness exists (eliminativism) or declaring them to be illusions (illusionism).

Kastrup examines the arguments for these ideas in his article to which the interested reader is referred, but I think there's at least a partial answer to Kastrup's "baffling mystery" that we can mention here.

Perhaps otherwise sensible people deny that they're conscious for the same reason that some embrace the strange idea of a multiverse. If we really do have a conscious mind that's not reducible to the material brain or if this exquisitely fine-tuned universe in which we live is the only one which exists, then the likelihood that materialism is wrong increases dramatically.

And if materialism turns out to be wrong then a major metaphysical prop holding up atheistic naturalism collapses. That's an outcome that must be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of denying that human beings are actually conscious.

How Fish Find Their Way Home

Ever wonder how spawning fish can return to the precise stream from which they emigrated years before? It's an astonishing feat made possible by an extraordinarily complex olfactory system that allows the fish to detect stream-specific chemicals in the water.

Somehow, pelagic species of fish like the sockeye salmon detect these chemicals in the ocean and follow them back to the stream in which they hatched.

This video uses computer animation to explain a little bit about the microscopic olfactory system that enables salmon to accomplish their amazing journey.

Of course, salmon aren't the only creatures with such a highly sophisticated sense of smell. Many insects are equally as gifted.

Whether in fish or in insects there are really just two live options for explaining how such systems arose: Either they're the product of thousands (millions?) of lucky and highly improbable genetic mutations over eons of time, or these receptor systems and neuronal circuits were somehow intentionally engineered.

Of course, we have no evidence that blind, purposeless mechanistic processes can produce systems like this by chance, but we do have lots of evidence right in front of us (our computers) and all around us (the wiring in our houses) that intelligent agents can do it.

As the great skeptic David Hume argued, we should always base our beliefs on our experience. If we have a uniform experience of a phenomenon occurring through natural mechanisms then we should be extremely reluctant to attribute the occurrence of such a phenomenon to non-natural processes.

Hume was arguing here against belief in miracles, but if his principle is sound it surely has broader application. We have a uniform experience of systems and circuits similar to those illustrated in this video being the work of minds but no indubitable, non-question-begging experience of such contrivances occurring through undirected processes.

Thus, an intelligent agent, an electrical engineer of sorts, would seem to be the most probable and thus the most reasonable explanation for the salmon's wonderful olfactory capacities.

For the biologically-minded there's more on the research into the salmon's abilities here.

Homologous Structures and Darwinian Evolution

One of the classic arguments on behalf of the theory that various taxa have evolved one from another is what biologists call homologous structures. Homologous structures are structures which are similar, have a similar origin in the embryo but which serve different functions in different animals. A good example is the pectoral fin of a fish, the foreleg of a horse, the arm of a human and the wing of a bird.

In each of these cases the skeletal structure is almost identical, but the appearance and function of the structure is quite different in each organism. This is assumed to be a strong evidence that these structures have evolved either from each other or from a common ancestor.

There are, however, problems with this idea.

This clever 8 minute video explains what homology is and why using homology as evidence for common ancestry is actually an instance of circular reasoning. It also does a good job of explaining why, despite its persistence in many high school and college textbooks, biologists are giving up on homologous structures as an argument for Darwinian evolution.

Thanks to Evolution News for putting us on to the video.

A Meditation on Martin Luther King's Birthday

Like many consequential leaders, Martin Luther King was complex. He was a man of enormous courage, almost preternatural vision and marvelous eloquence, but also vulnerable to some of the same failings that have beset many of the great men in our culture.

On the day we celebrate his birthday, however, we'd do well to focus on his virtues. King was a man resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America.

His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's a great sadness that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his hope for racial harmony has not, or rather not completely.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that today the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to progressive identity politics.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Unfortunately, it may not be a stretch to say that people seem to be judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character as much today as at any time in our national history.

Nor do I think King would've been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it somehow stood apart from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of the American story. The civil rights movement was, after all, not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded.

It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God who created us all in His image.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely upheld these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good, indeed, to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to realize that racism is a sin to which all races are prone and is not exclusive to the majority race.

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and our minds, and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.

Philip Goff's Panpsychism

Philosopher Philip Goff has gained some notice as an advocate of a view of reality called panpsychism, the theory that everything in the universe is comprised of particles which have rudimentary consciousness. When those particles arrange themselves in particular ways, such as in a brain, the thing which they comprise has conscious experience to a greater or lesser degree.

Goff talks about this idea in an interview with Gareth Cook published in Scientific American he discusses what this means.

Here are some excerpts:

GC: Can you explain, in simple terms, what you mean by panpsychism?

PG: In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it.

This doesn’t mean that literally everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality — perhaps electrons and quarks — have incredibly simple forms of experience. And the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.

It might be important to clarify what I mean by “consciousness,” as that word is actually quite ambiguous. Some people use it to mean something quite sophisticated, such as self-awareness or the capacity to reflect on one’s own existence. This is something we might be reluctant to ascribe to many nonhuman animals, never mind fundamental particles. But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.

Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe.

GC: You write that you come to this idea as a way of solving a problem in the way consciousness is studied. What, in your mind, is the problem?

PG: Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.

GC: How does panpsychism allow you to approach the problem differently?

PG: The starting point of the panpsychist is that physical science doesn’t actually tell us what matter is. That sounds like a bizarre claim at first; you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all kinds of incredible things about the nature of space, time and matter. But what philosophers of science have realized is that physical science, for all its richness, is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter, what it does.

Physics tells us, for example, that matter has mass and charge. These properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself.

What this offers us is a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, of marrying what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about matter from the outside.

There's much more from the interview at the link.

As crazy as his theory may sound, he might be onto something, but I think he nevertheless places himself in unnecessary metaphysical handcuffs.

Goff is a naturalist. His ontology doesn't allow for anything "supernatural" in or beyond the universe.

This is an unfortunate restriction, in my opinion, because his theory raises several questions which would seem to be unanswerable in a naturalistic framework. For example, where does consciousness in the universe come from? How did it emerge out of the Big Bang? Is the universe as a whole a conscious entity? If so, is not panpsychism really just pantheism?

If, on the other hand, the universe and every particle in it is more like an idea in the mind of God, as the philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) believed, then there would potentially be a unified answer to the above questions.

The consciousness in, or of, the universe would be the product of a conscious God. Each subatomic particle might then be viewed as something like a pixel of mind or consciousness which make up our reality somewhat like the pixels on a computer screen make up various images.

In other words, Goff's panpsychism may give us an interesting glimpse of reality, but his naturalism seems to place an unnecessary constraint on its fruitfulness.

Defending Sanders

I'm not a fan of Bernie Sanders. Indeed, I'm quite sure that Mr. Sanders, a Marxist socialist of the sort whose ideology has wrecked Venezuela and numerous other nations where it has been implemented, would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States were he to be elected president.

Yet I feel compelled in the name of fair play, reason and simple common sense to come to his defense in the contretemps over his alleged "sexism." His rival in the race for the Democratic nomination, Elizabeth Warren, has accused Mr. Sanders of the sin of sexual bigotry on the basis of an alleged remark he made to her in a private conversation two years ago.

Ms. Warren's surrogates are claiming that Mr. Sanders opined to Ms. Warren, whose ideology is much the same as Mr. Sanders' and which would have much the same baneful effects were she to become president, that "a woman could not be elected president in the United States."

When Ms. Warren's supporters alleged earlier this week that Mr. Sanders was a shocking bigot the progressive media went into a tizzy, wondering if the old socialist war horse really was as awful a human being as the allegation made him sound. It's hard to believe that these folks in the media often esteem themselves the intellectual elite of our society because even if Senator Sanders had actually made this remark - he denies having done so - it is on the face of it, perfectly innocuous.

There's a vast difference, as anyone floating about in the intellectual cream of society should know, between saying that a woman could not be elected president, and saying that a womanshould not be elected president. The former is a purely sociological observation, the latter is a statement that would indeed reflect a bias against women on the part of the one who makes it.

If what Mr. Sanders said, assuming he said it at all, is that a woman could not be elected president and meant it in the same sense that someone back in the fifties might've asserted that an African-American, or a gay, or a bachelor, or a Catholic could not be elected president, it suggests a prejudice on the part of the electorate, perhaps, but not on the part of the person making the observation.

For Warren's supporters to seek to make hay over what appears to be a manifestly innocent claim is, if not merely stupid, then really quite nefarious. It's dishonest and unfair to Mr. Sanders, but, then, after the way he was treated by the Democratic party in 2016 he's probably used to being unfairly treated by his Democratic colleagues.

Ethics Without God

A commenter at Uncommon Descent, in defense of the view that morality has no objective grounding since it's rooted in our evolutionary development, delivers himself of this head-scratcher:

Since the moral fabric is man-made, all we are doing is seeing it change, as it has done over the centuries. Sometimes history shows that the change has been for the good, and sometimes for the bad. But since civilization is thriving, it is reasonable to conclude that we have had more wins than losses.

What's puzzling about this is that if morality is man-made then what's the standard by which we can tell whether any change is good or bad? Doesn't this comment tacitly assume that there's an objective reference point, a moral horizon, as it were, by which we can tell whether we're flying upside down or right side up?

On evolutionary terms, of course, there is no objective referent. About that the commenter is correct. If human beings are the product of an unguided evolutionary process then morality is all man-made and therefore purely subjective.

If it's claimed that civilizational thriving is a measure of whether practices are good or bad we might ask whether the Aztecs and other civilizations which presumably thrived for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years after they introduced human and child sacrifice were doing something good.

The post at the link cites Lewis Vaughn's Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues which provides an excellent explanation of the differences between relativism, which Vaughn avers can be subjective or cultural, and emotivism. Some might want to quibble with his terminology, but it's very helpful nonetheless:

Subjective relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one approves of it. A person’s approval makes the action right. This doctrine (as well as cultural relativism) is in stark contrast to moral objectivism, the view that some moral principles are valid for everyone.

Subjective relativism, though, has some troubling implications. It implies that each person is morally infallible and that individuals can never have a genuine moral disagreement.

Cultural relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one’s culture approves of it. The argument for this doctrine is based on the diversity of moral judgments among cultures: because people’s judgments about right and wrong differ from culture to culture, right and wrong must be relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles.

This argument is defective, however, because the diversity of moral views does not imply that morality is relative to cultures. In addition, the alleged diversity of basic moral standards among cultures may be only apparent, not real.

Societies whose moral judgments conflict may be differing not over moral principles but over non-moral facts.

Some think that tolerance is entailed by cultural relativism. But there is no necessary connection between tolerance and the doctrine. Indeed, the cultural relativist cannot consistently advocate tolerance while maintaining his relativist standpoint. To advocate tolerance is to advocate an objective moral value. But if tolerance is an objective moral value, then cultural relativism must be false, because it says that there are no objective moral values.

Like subjective relativism, cultural relativism has some disturbing consequences. It implies that cultures are morally infallible, that social reformers can never be morally right, that moral disagreements between individuals in the same culture amount to arguments over whether they disagree with their culture, that other cultures cannot be legitimately criticized, and that moral progress is impossible.

Emotivism is the view that moral utterances are neither true nor false but are expressions of emotions or attitudes. It leads to the conclusion that people can disagree only in attitude, not in beliefs. People cannot disagree over the moral facts, because there are no moral facts. Emotivism also implies that presenting reasons in support of a moral utterance is a matter of offering non-moral facts that can influence someone’s attitude.

It seems that any non-moral facts will do, as long as they affect attitudes. Perhaps the most far-reaching implication of emotivism is that nothing is actually good or bad. There simply are no properties of goodness and badness. There is only the expression of favorable or unfavorable emotions or attitudes toward something.

I'd probably want to say that all three of these are subsumed under the heading of subjectivism, i.e. the view that moral judgments are based on individual preferences and feelings and that cultural relativism is simply subjectivism writ large. Even so, the important point is that any moral assertion not based on an objective foundation is purely illusory. It's just a rhetorical vehicle for expressing one's individual tastes and biases and has no binding force on anyone else.

Moreover, there can only be an objective moral foundation if there is a moral authority which transcends human fallibility and weakness. In other words, unless there is a God there can be no objective moral values or obligations on anyone.

This is why moral claims made by non-theists don't make sense. They wish to deny the existence of God and yet implicitly hold views about morality that can only be true if God does exist. This video makes the point in an easy to follow manner:

A Physicist Talks ID

There's an interesting nine minute video of physicist Brian Miller being interviewed by a Polish think tank called En Arche in which Miller answers some questions about Intelligent Design and why he thinks what we know about science points strongly toward an intelligent engineer of life and the universe.

Miller focuses primarily on two phenomena, genetic mutation in living things and the origin of the first living cell, and gives succinct reasons for being skeptical both that mutations can produce large-scale changes in organisms and that a functioning, reproducing cell could've arisen from non-living chemicals at some time in the ancient past. Both phenomena, he implies, defy just about everything we know about science.

About the the possibility that genetic mutations, coupled with natural selection, could've produced large-scale changes in the architecture of an organism, he says this:

All mutations which have been observed which are non-harmful only allow for small-scale change while all mutations which could potentially change the architecture [of an organism] have been shown to be harmful.

Miller also explains in the video why the accumulation of small genetic changes cannot produce large changes in the phenotype of an organism.

It might be mentioned parenthetically that Michael Behe's recent book Darwin Devolves makes a compelling case for the hypothesis that most phenotypical changes (changes in the physical appearance of an organism) can be attributed to the loss of function in genes that already exist, not to the evolution of new genes.

As for the actual origin of living cells Miller says this:

Nothing in nature will ever simultaneously go to both low entropy and high energy at the same time. It’s a physical impossibility. Yet life had to do that. Life had to take simple chemicals and go to a state of high energy and of low entropy. That’s a physical impossibility.

Entropy is a measure of the level of disorder in a system. A low entropy system is one that is highly ordered or organized. What Miller is saying is that in nature high energy systems such as a functioning cell don't simultaneously become highly organized all by themselves, but that's what a living cell would've had to achieve if it was produced with no intelligent input or guidance.

Despite appearances the video is in English:

Thanks to Evolution News for the link.

The Strange Concept of Infinity

The following is excerpted from the book Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng. In this very interesting excerpt Cheng, who is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield, U.K., and is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explains why infinity is not a number in the ordinary sense and why we have to be careful in how we talk about it.

The passage begins with Cheng asking us to think about what we mean when we talk about infinity:

Mathematics is all about using logic to understand things, and we’ll find that if we’re not careful about exactly what we mean by “infinity,” then logic will take us to some very strange places that we didn’t intend to go....In the previous chapter I listed some beginning ideas about infinity.

Infinity goes on forever.

Does this mean infinity is a type of time, or space? A length?

Infinity is bigger than the biggest number.

Infinity is bigger than anything we can think of.

Now infinity seems to be a type of size. Or is it something more abstract: a number, which we can then use to measure time, space, length, size, and indeed anything we want? Our next thoughts seem to treat infinity as if it is in fact a number.

But if we treat infinity like a normal number we get contradictions:

If you add one to infinity it’s still infinity. This is saying

∞ + 1 = ∞

which might seem like a very basic principle about infinity. If infinity is the biggest thing there is, then adding one can’t make it any bigger. Or can it? What if we then subtract infinity from both sides? If we use some familiar rules of cancellation, this will just get rid of the infinity on each side, leaving

1 = 0

which is a disaster. Something has evidently gone wrong. The next thought makes more things go wrong:

If you add infinity to infinity it’s still infinity. This seems to be saying

∞ + ∞ = ∞

that is,

2∞ = ∞

and now if we divide both sides by infinity this might look like we can just cancel out the infinity on each side, leaving

2 = 1

which is another disaster. Maybe you can now guess that something terrible will happen if we think too hard about the last idea:

If you multiply infinity by infinity it’s still infinity. If we write this out we get

∞ x ∞ = ∞

and if we divide both sides by infinity, canceling out one infinity on each side, we get

∞ = 1

which is possibly the worst, most wrong outcome of them all. Infinity is supposed to be the biggest thing there is; it is definitely not supposed to be equal to something as small as 1.

What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be.

You can read more of Cheng's thoughts on infinity here.

Sometimes scientists trying to avoid the fine-tuning problem or an initial origin event of the cosmos say things like there's an infinite number of universes in the multiverse or that the cosmos is infinitely old. Cheng shows that we have to be very careful about such uses of the word.

In fact, one argument against the universe being infinitely old is that if it is infinitely old then there has been an infinite number of moments of time. But if so, then there was no first moment, because if time is infinite in the past whichever moment one designates as "first" will always have been preceded by an earlier moment, and, if there was no first moment there could have been no second, or third moment, etc. The consequence of this is that if there were no first, second, third etc. moments then we could never have arrived at the present moment. But, of course, we have arrived at the present moment, which means that the universe must not be infinitely old. It must have had a beginning, a first moment.

This, then, provokes the question, "If the universe had a beginning, what caused it?" Whatever the cause, it must have been outside of space, outside of time (because these are components of the universe), very powerful and very intelligent.

In other words, the cause must have been something like God.

Five Messes Mr. Obama Left Us

Young people tend to think that Barack Obama was a great president, maybe the greatest in American history, but this judgment is apparently based more on subjective reasons - his race and personal eloquence and charisma, etc. - than on objective evidence.

If one sets aside one's ideological and personal sympathies and looks objectively at the record of the Obama administration, as PJ Media's Matt Margolis does with just the administration's foreign policy, a quite different picture emerges.

Margolis discusses five foreign policy messes that Obama either caused or exacerbated and left for his successor to clean up. Here are the five with a summary of Margolis' comments about them and a couple of parenthetical comments from me:

1. Appeasement of Russia: Obama’s version of improving relations with Russia enabled annexation of Crimea, increased presence in the Middle East and propping up both the Assad regime in Syria and the Iranian mullahs, amongst other things.

Not even our own country’s national security was safe from Obama’s capitulation to Russia.The Obama administration bizarrely approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s Uranium mining capability to Russia, and utterly ignored Russian attempts to interfere with the U.S. election in 2016.

In fact, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice gave a “stand-down” order in response to Russian cyberattacks in the summer of 2016.

2. Backing down from his Syrian Red Line: In August 2012, Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria would cross his “red line.” Almost exactly a year later, more than 1,400 Syrian people were killed by the regime with sarin gas. The red line was crossed, and Obama backtracked, playing down his “red line” comment, and trying to pass it off as not really his own red line, but the international community’s.

While Obama failed to enforce his line and hold the regime accountable, President Trump did not. When a major chemical attack occurred on his watch, Trump responded. Had Obama followed through on his red line, it’s likely that thousands of lives would have been saved.

Obama didn’t want to face the music with Syria, because he was hoping to reset relations with Russia — which was supporting the Assad regime.

3. Allowing the rise of ISIS: To say Barack Obama dropped the ball by failing to address the rise of ISIS is an understatement. Despite being warned in his daily intelligence briefings, he was quick to dismiss ISIS as a “jayvee team” in order to perpetuate the myth that he had contained the terrorist threat in the Middle East. (He was also cautioned that withdrawing our troops from Iraq was leaving a vacuum that bad guys like ISIS would quickly fill, which they did. RLC)

Obama’s misjudgment resulted in ISIS expanding its territory, taking control over large portions of Iraq, Syria and Libya. ISIS still remains a threat, but instead of expanding, they've been hit hard and lost territory and, thanks to a drastic change in strategy under President Trump, we've seen “100 percent” defeat of the ISIS caliphate in just two years.

4. War in Libya: President Obama decided to start an illegal war with Libya. They hadn’t attacked us or threatened us, but nevertheless, Obama, with the approval of Congress, sent troops to take part in what was a civil war.

(Margolis is being a bit unfair here. The Gaddafi regime was about to commit genocidal war against its domestic opponents which is why Obama sent troops and air power against him. That was a mistake, however, since other avenues were available to Obama short of military attack. His administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton simply wanted to get rid of Gaddafi so they were reluctant to pursue policies which allowed him to remain in power. RLC)

Libyan Muammar Gaddafi was by no means a good guy, but he voluntarily got rid of all of his weapons of mass destruction in December 2003 in response to the war in Iraq, and he was essentially contained. His death in that conflict resulted in the country’s destabilization and enabled the growth of ISIS in the region.

Obama’s Libya policy was a total quagmire, and even Obama described Libya as the "worst mistake" of his presidency for his failure to plan for a post-Gaddafi Libya.

5. The Iran nuclear deal: To be sure, the United States and Iran haven’t been on good terms for over forty years. That said, Obama’s appeasement of Iran, a terror state determined to destroy Israel and the West, made the situation much worse. President Obama claimed his nuclear deal with Iran would make America safer, but it was in fact a massive bribe in which the U.S. gave Iran billions of dollars of frozen assets in return for empty promises that did little to slow Iran's development of ballistic missiles and their nuclear program.

The deal was so bad that Obama didn’t even attempt to get Senate ratification for it. Multiple violations of the deal were ignored, Iran was never held accountable for those violations, and the money kept flowing. Obama was so desperate to achieve the deal that not even an attempted bomb plot on American soil earned a reprisal from the Obama administration. Violations continued under Trump, who ultimately got us out of the deal and restored sanctions.

These are only President Obama's foreign policy missteps. His domestic and economic measures only managed to make the picture of his tenure in office look bleaker.

It's Trump's Fault?!

Over the last couple of days we've been treated to one of the most ludicrous arguments ever advanced in the history of American politics. In the wake of the drone strike on Iranian terrorist leader Qasam Soleimani, recall, the Iranians launched a missile barrage against American targets in Iraq. The attack was deliberately intended to harm no one, but the Iranians were prepared for an American response nonetheless.

When a Ukrainian airliner with 176 people aboard took off from Tehran airport a couple of hours later, Iranian anti-aircraft batteries evidently mistook it for an American cruise missile or bomber and shot it down. At least this is where the evidence so far seems to point. All 176 passengers and crew were killed.

It was a tragic error, but in the hours and days since that disaster President Trump's critics (see here and here) have advanced the thesis that it is he who is responsible for the shootdown, or that he at least bears partial responsibility for the deaths of those people. This is so risible an allegation that one wonders how it is that anyone can make it and keep a straight face.

It's Trump's fault, his detractors claim, because by killing Soleimani he initiated an exchange with Iran that led to heightened tensions and the hair-trigger response of a poorly prepared Iranian missile crew.

There are at least three problems with this:

1. The claim that Mr. Trump started hostilities completely ignores the reason why Soleimani was targeted in the first place. It ignores the fact that intelligence revealed that he was planning attacks on Americans in Iraq and Syria. It ignores the fact that six hundred servicemen were killed and thousands of others were maimed in the aftermath of the Iraq war by roadside bombs supplied by Soleimani for precisely that purpose. It ignores the recent attack on our embassy in Iraq and ignores the fact that Soleimani was in Iraq illegally.

It ignores the fact that last month, a U.S. defense contractor was killed and others were wounded in an Iran-linked rocket attack in northern Iraq. In response, the U.S. military carried out “precision defensive strikes” in Iraq and Syria, on sites housing Kataeb Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. The strikes killed 25 fighters.

Days later, hundreds of protesters, including members of Iranian-backed militias, stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad—one of the most heavily fortified U.S. diplomatic missions in the world. The attack raised the specter of the 2012 Benghazi attack in which four Americans died.

2. The responsibility for the deaths of those airline passengers and crew rests solely with the Iranian military. They made the decision to fire the rocket without confirming the identity of the airplane. President Trump had nothing to do with it.

3. The critics' are making an argument the logic of which is of this sort: A thug threatens to shoot a pedestrian on a city street. A policeman in defense of the pedestrian shoots the thug who staggers to his car, gets behind the wheel and promptly collides with another vehicle causing injury and death in the other vehicle. According to President Trump's critics the cop is responsible for those deaths because he shot the thug. If he hadn't shot him, the critic argues, there would've been no collision.

According to this reasoning criminals on the streets and terrorists around the world should be able to work their despicable deeds with impunity because if we defend ourselves against them, who knows what harm may ensue?

It's depressing that we live in a time when not only does an attack on the world's top terrorist need to be defended (By the way, did Obama have to defend killing Osama bin Laden? Why not? How was killing Soleimani more egregious than killing bin Laden?), but also in a time when Americans are more interested in blaming their president for a tragic mistake made by another country than they are in condemning that nation's government for creating a climate of terrorism and instability which leads to such mistakes being made.

Why Delay?

A quick thought on the impeachment delay. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is refusing to pass the articles of impeachment along to the Senate so the Senate can begin a trial of the President. She states that she will not send the articles to the Senate until she's assured that the trial will be fair.

A lot of commentators have pointed out the hypocrisy in this. The House Democrats told us repeatedly that they had to rush the hearings through and draft the articles of impeachment because this president was such a threat to the nation and the world that there was no time to waste.

They couldn't even wait for the courts to decide if the witnesses they wanted to call were required to appear before Adam Schiff's committee.

But now that the House has voted to impeach Mr. Trump Ms. Pelosi feels comfortable in taking her good old time advancing the articles of impeachment along to the Senate. Why?

She has stated that she will not send the articles over to the other branch until she's convinced that the trial will be "fair," whatever that means.

But suppose Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't give her the assurances she's seeking. Does that mean that she'll never send the articles of impeachment to the Senate? If so, what does that do to the Democrats' argument that this is a matter of the gravest urgency? And if she will eventually send the articles, even without those assurances, then why wait?

None of what she's doing makes sense, at least not on the surface. Perhaps she's gambling that delaying the trial will somehow persuade a few Republican senators to agree to her insistence that witnesses - witnesses that the House refused to call or refused to wait until the courts ordered them to appear - be called by the Senate.

Maybe, but the longer she waits the more likely it is that impeachment gets overtaken by other events, like the Iran business, and the American public loses interest in it altogether.

Will Religious Liberty be at Risk if Secular Democrats Gain Power?

Casey Chalk at The Federalist cites a Washington Post op-ed by a scholar named Paul Djupe in which Professor Djupe asks why white evangelicals fear that atheists and Democrats would strip away their religious rights.

The reasons Djupe gives to account for this "fear" - conservative propaganda and psychological projection of what evangelicals would do to atheists had they the power - are unconvincing. The simplest explanation is that the last decade or so has provided us a track record that gives disturbing insights into the thinking of secularists who wield political power.

Chalk mentions several examples:

1. The Department of Health and Human Services, as part of the Affordable Care Act, mandated in 2011 that certain employers provide all FDA-approved contraceptives, including abortifacients, in their health insurance plans. The narrow religious exemption did not include religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns that manages homes for the elderly poor across America, nor businesses such as Hobby Lobby.

A district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled against the Little Sisters of the Poor, and it was only in 2016 that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the lower court and secured the liberties of the religious order. Hobby Lobby won in a separate 2014 case.

2. Over the last decade and a half, a number of jurisdictions, including the state of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have targeted Christian adoption agencies that refuse to place children with same-sex or unmarried couples. Many of these adoption agencies have since closed.

3. The pro-choice organization NARAL, a prominent supporter of Democratic candidates, opposes conscience laws that allow medical practitioners to exempt themselves from activities, such as abortion or euthanasia, that violate their religious beliefs.

4. Several Democratic presidential candidates have declared their support for legislation that would prohibit employers — including Christian schools or organizations — from maintaining rules about their employees’ sexual behavior. When the media reported that Vice President Mike Pence’s wife Karen had taken a position at an evangelical Virginia school that prohibits employees and students from homosexual behavior, left-leaning secular media ruthlessly attacked her.

Also, a cake baker in suburban Denver, despite the U.S. Supreme Court upholding his religious liberty in 2018, is still facing harassment by the state of Colorado because he refuses to participate in a gay wedding.

Djupe references research he conducted which found that atheists were more likely than evangelicals to agree that groups with which they disagree should still be permitted to exercise various liberties, but this finding is unpersuasive.

The question is not how the average neighborhood atheist would respond over the phone to a pollster's question probing his or her degree of tolerance, but rather what this same individual would be willing to go along with should more radical fellow unbelievers accede to power.

The record of the last decade shows that evangelicals may well have legitimate cause for concern.

Hitler's Ethics

About ten years ago Richard Weikart published a study on the roots of the moral thinking of Adolf Hitler, a review of which is posted at Evolution News and Views. Here's an excerpt:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.

Darwinists went apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Darwin by showing the way that Hitler and German scientists and physicians used evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race.

Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

It's hard to see how anyone can deny that the attempt to base an ethic on naturalistic Darwinism can lead to anything but a "might makes right" ethic. If what's right is what has evolved in the behavior of the human species then whatever human beings do - rape, violence, theft, bigotry - all must be right, and if they are, then whoever is the strongest gets to impose his will on all others. That's exactly what the Nazis thought and practiced.

Either morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being or there's no objective moral standard at all. If evolution is to be our standard then we are left with the ethic of the barbarian and savage - what's right is whatever feels right to me. This is egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism, of course, leads inexorably to the ethic of "might makes right."

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a personal God. Hitler was who every atheist would also be if he/she a) had the power and b) were logically consistent.

Thankfully, few of them are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot in addition to Hitler were all atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview.

The consequences were as horrific as they were predictable.

Why the Universe Has to Be Big

Astronomer Hugh Ross has an article at Salvo 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 levelled 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. The 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 tiny corner of a galaxy located in a tiny 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:

The Soleimani Affair

For years Qassam Soleimani has been sowing death across the Middle East. His Al Quds Force, a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Army, has been responsible for developing and supplying the explosive devices planted along roadsides that claimed over 600 American lives and hundreds maimed during the Iraq war and its aftermath. He was recognized as perhaps the world's leading terrorist, and had the blood of thousands on his hands.

Much of the world, certainly Middle Eastern governments, are grateful that the American military has taken him out, even though they may for domestic political reasons not feel it safe to publicly say so. The Iranians, meanwhile, are threatening the United States with retaliation despite the fact that killing Soleimani was itself a retaliation for recent rocket attacks on an American base in Iraq that killed one American civilian and injured several military personnel.

The Iranians apparently believe that they should be able to kill Americans with impunity and are outraged if an American president disagrees.

In any case, the Iranians are in a bit of a bind. If they harm American citizens or interests they risk an overwhelming response from the American military, so whatever they do, it would seem, must be done in such a way that they have plausible deniability. But a retaliation which Iran denies perpetrating will not satisfy the hotheads and fanatics in Iran who want their government to strike hard at the Great Satan. But if to appease the fanatics Iran hits back in such a way as to make their responsibility obvious then they're inviting massive punishment from the U.S.

Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online has a piece titled So Far Iran Is Making All the Blunders in which he analyzes the situation as it stands at the moment.

Here are a few excerpts:

For all the current furor over the death of Qasem Soleimani, it is Iran, not the U.S. and the Trump administration, that is in a dilemma. Given the death and destruction wrought by Soleimani, and his agendas to come, he will not be missed.

Tehran has misjudged the U.S. administration’s doctrine of strategic realism rather than vice versa. The theocracy apparently calculated that prior U.S. patience and restraint in the face of its aggression was proof of an unwillingness or inability to respond. More likely, the administration was earlier prepping for a possible more dramatic, deadly, and politically justifiable response when and if Iran soon overreached.

To retain domestic and foreign credibility, Iran would now like to escalate in hopes of creating some sort of U.S. quagmire comparable to Afghanistan, or, more germanely, to a long Serbian-like bombing campaign mess, or the ennui that eventually overtook the endless no-fly zones over Iraq, or the creepy misadventure in Libya, or even something like an enervating 1979-80 hostage situation.

The history of the strategies of our Middle East opponents has always been to lure us into situations that have no strategic endgame, do not play to U.S. strengths in firepower, are costly without a time limit, and create Vietnam War–like tensions at home.

But those wished-for landscapes are not what Iranian has got itself into. Trump, after showing patience and restraint to prior Iranian escalations, can respond to Iranian tit-for-tat without getting near Iran, without commitments to any formal campaign, and without seeming to be a provocateur itching for war, but in theory doing a lot more damage to an already damaged Iranian economy either through drones, missiles, and bombing, or even more sanctions and boycotts to come.

If Iran turns to terrorism and cyber-attacks, it would likely only lose more political support and risk airborne responses to its infrastructure at home.

Iran deeply erred in thinking that Trump’s restraint was permanent, that his impeachment meant he had lost political viability, that he would go dormant in an election year, that the stature of his left-wing opponents would surge in such tensions, and that his base would abandon him if he dared to use military force.

We are now in an election year. Iran yearns for a return of the U.S. foreign policy of John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, the naïveté that had proved so lucrative and advantageous to Iran prior to 2017.

The Iranians could agree to act like a civilized nation and return to meaningful nuclear disarmament talks, but that would be a humiliation. Alternatively, they could bide their time and wait for a less resolute administration in Washington, but the sanctions are bleeding them, and the longer they go on the more unstable the regime in Tehran will become.

In fact, as Hanson points out, they have no good options. Their miscalculation was to think that they could, through terrorist attacks, make it so uncomfortable for the U.S. to stay in Iraq that we'd just give up and go home. They didn't expect Trump to respond to their fatal rocket attack in any significant way.

Hanson has more on the Iraqi options, none of them good, at the link. He concludes with this:

In sum, a weaker Iran foolishly positioned itself into the role of aggressor, at a time of a shot economy, eroding military strength, waning terrorist appendages abroad, and little political leverage or wider support. China and Russia are confined to hoping the U.S. is somehow, somewhere bogged down. Europe will still lecture on the fallout from canceling the Iran Deal, but quietly welcomes the fact that Iran is weaker than in 2015 and weaker for them is far better. China wants access to Middle East oil. Russia has never objected to a major producer having its oil taken off the world market. Moscow’s Iranian policies are reductionist anti-American more than pro-Iranian.

The current Iranian crisis is complex and dangerous. And by all means retaliation must be designed to prevent more Iranian violence and aggression rather than aimed at a grandiose agenda of regime change or national liberation. But so far the Iranians, not the U.S., are making all the blunders.

Philosophy Is Crucial

Philosopher Robert Pasnau penned an entertaining column at The Stone a number of years ago in which he discussed the low esteem in which philosophy is held in some academic precincts.

Here's his lede:

Morale these days has fallen pretty low along the corridors of philosophy departments. From one side, we get the mockery of the scientists. Freeman Dyson calls philosophy today “a toothless relic of past glories.” According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, majoring in philosophy “can really mess you up.” Stephen Hawking declares that “philosophy is dead.”

From another side, we have to cope with the apostasy of our own leading figures. John Searle describes the field as being in “terrible shape.” Peter Unger says that philosophers are “under the impression that they’re saying something new and interesting about how it is about the world, when in fact this is all an illusion.”

What’s going on? Has philosophy gone horribly amiss? Or are there broader cultural factors at work, perhaps something to do with a general decline in respect for the humanities?

Philosophers have always been the subject of ridicule, both from within and without.

René Descartes thought the entire discipline — up until his arrival, at least — had failed to make any important progress. A century later, David Hume wanted to take most of what philosophers had written and “commit it to the flames.” Such scorn goes all the way back to the origins of the subject.

Thales, who many consider the first Western philosopher, was reputed to have been so distracted while out on his evening walk that he once fell into a well. Falling to the bottom of a well is presumably no laughing matter, even when it happens to a philosopher. But the Thracian servant girl who discovered him is said to have reacted not with concern but scorn; she ridiculed him for being so oblivious.

Thales, as it happens, was a founding figure not just for philosophy but also for science. Indeed, the usual reason given for his fall is not that he was ogling the girl (as some readers today might suspect of a philosopher) but that he was studying the stars.

For the next 2,000 years, the sciences were assumed to be a part of philosophy — indeed, what the philosopher mainly did was to pursue science. And that is precisely what they were mocked for: always pursuing and never attaining.

Pietro Pomponazzi, a Renaissance philosopher, cautioned his students that their field would be the greatest of careers but for two things. One, of course, was that philosophy did not pay. The other was that it constantly failed to achieve results, and so rather than being a serious discipline, it was more like “playing with toys.”

Several centuries later, Charles II is said to have himself toyed with the philosophers, asking them to explain why a fish weighs more after it has died. Upon receiving various ingenious answers, he pointed out that in fact a dead fish does not weigh anything more.

One aspect of philosophy that makes it unpopular with some academics is that it tends to impose boundaries on them. It seeks to draw lines of demarcation separating science from non-science, right from wrong, beautiful from non-beautiful, knowledge from non-knowledge, justice from injustice, truth from falsity, meaningfulness from nonsense.

This is a problem because practitioners in other disciplines don't like non-practitioners calling them out for transgressing boundaries set by the non-practitioners. Yet without this service rendered by philosophers no discipline could function, no progress could be made and every pursuit would be reduced to intellectual chaos and nihilism.

Philosophy is absolutely crucial to the life of the mind and indeed to the achievement of any kind of advanced civilization.