Nonsense on Stilts

A recent column by Gary Abernathy in the Washington Post informs us that the reason a lot of Republicans are eager to reopen the economy during the Covid-19 pandemic is because the Republican party is made up largely of evangelical Christians who believe in an afterlife and who thus minimize the importance of this life.

It's nonsense, of course, but Abernathy isn't the only one who believes it. Here's the gravamen of his column:

This literal belief in eternal salvation — eternal life — helps explain the different reactions to life-threatening events like a coronavirus outbreak.

Among those who hold literal biblical interpretations is the certainty that waiting at the end of this terrestrial journey is eternal life in Heaven.

As far as many evangelicals are concerned, life passes quickly, suffering is temporary and worrying solves nothing. That’s not a view that comports well with long stretches of earthly time spent waiting out business closures or stay-at-home orders. It should be no surprise that a person’s deepest beliefs about the world influence how they measure the risks they’re willing to take.

This is misleading because there are many non-evangelicals, both Christians and members of other religions, who believe that life is eternal, but Abernathy's faulty theological understanding is not my concern in this post.

Springboarding off Abernathy's column MIT professor Steven Pinker recently tweeted that “Belief in an afterlife is a malignant delusion, since it devalues actual lives and discourages action that would make them longer, safer, and happier. Exhibit A: What’s really behind Republicans wanting a swift reopening? Evangelicals.”

Steven Pinker is a very bright man, a cognitive scientist, as a matter of fact, but very bright people often say very dumb things. This is one of those times. Glenn Stanton at The Federalist writes:

There should be an algebraic equation to calculate something we experience far too often in the public square today. It would determine the ratio between a person’s absolute brilliance in one arena – their uncontested expertise – and their regularly articulated ignorance in others.

This would then be multiplied by the confidence with which they say such things. It would be applied to things like Stephen Hawking’s pontifications on subjects such as religion being, which he called “a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark.”

What about the charge that belief in heaven is not only unsophisticated, but inherently malevolent? Does belief in heaven really diminish the value of life? Is it a death wish?

Stanton renders the Pinker/Abernathy argument as follows:

1. Re-opening our nation from lockdown will kill people.
2. Republicans are the ones calling for reopening.
3. Evangelicals who have their eyes set on heaven are the primary drivers of the Republicans.
4. Therefore, Evangelicals, and thus Republicans, don’t care if people die.

It doesn't take someone with training in logic to see that this conclusion is completely unrelated to the premises. It also, doesn't take much insight to recognize that premise 1 is trivially true - allowing people to fly on airplanes, drive their cars or swim in the ocean will also kill people - and that premise 2 is a partial truth. Democrats, too, want to be able to get back to work.

Stanton continues,

Essentially, believing in heaven makes those evangelicals impatient with life, eager for death. If you’re inclined to judge this reasoning as dumb on stilts, remember really smart people said it. They are right. You are wrong. 

Regardless, there is a spectacular demonstration of ignorance at work here. Ignorance in science. Ignorance in sociology. Ignorance of any type of entry-level understanding of Christianity. Ignorance of basic linear logic. 

Stanton teases out some examples of the ignorance he's talking about, but let's just consider the claim that Christians are so focused on the life to come that they don't care about the life they're living.

That's not only a silly libel, it's also perniciously false because it misleads the uninformed about the nature of Christianity and Christians. 

Stanton helps us to see this more clearly:

It doesn’t even seem worth the time to ask whether a serious belief in and hope of heaven translates into desire for an early death. But for those like Abernathy and Pinker who believe it does, consider this little thought game.

Think of those in your city who provide free clothes, shelter, food, medical help, vocational training, and substance abuse assistance, day-in and day-out for all who need it. Why do they do this difficult, costly, and often unrewarding work? They want to help people live “longer, safer, and happier lives,” to quote Pinker’s tweet.

Now ask who these people are and what’s the belief system that drives them in this work? Place a hundred bucks on whether these services are run by serious Christians because of their faith or by secular humanists. Pinker and Abernathy know which answer will lose them money.

The idea that the Christian belief in heaven is a death wish is dramatically contrary to the plain evidence of what Christians do every day in every city they inhabit around the world. It doesn’t take a rocket — or cognitive — scientist to understand this.

There's much more in Stanton's piece that's worth reading, but I'll just add that it's only because people in the West have for two thousand years believed that this life mattered because it mattered forever that all the progress we've made in our moral, scientific and medical understanding has occurred. 

It's only because brilliant thinkers throughout the last two thousand years have been influenced by the Christian worldview, including belief in an eternal existence, that we developed a concept of human rights, human dignity and human worth. Other than the Jews, no pre-Christian or non-Christian civilization, certainly not the Greeks and Romans, had any such concepts. 

This was historian Tom Holland's main point in his 2019 best-seller Dominion. As atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas puts it,

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

If Professor Pinker would bestir himself to read a little bit on the subject on which he's chosen to pontificate he wouldn't come across as such a benighted ignoramus.

We're Not All in This Together

One of the more irritating aspects of the television commercials during the pandemic is the incessant message of the advertisers seeking to convince us that "we're all in this together." That claim and others like it is either a mindless feel-goodism or it's an arrant lie. 

In either case, it's simply not true that we're all in this together. The statewide shutdowns have actually divided us into basically two groups of people. There are those who have suffered no, or little, loss of income since last March, and those who have suffered the loss of their jobs, their businesses and their dreams. For members of the first group to claim that they stand together in fellowship with the second group in the struggle against the virus, as though they were somehow just as valorous as those in the second group, is, at a minimum, laughable. 

There are other ways in which we're plainly not "in this together."  There's a large number of people who want to protect the elderly and at the same time allow those who desire to return to their normal lives to do so, and there's another group of people who want everyone to be treated the same way that we treat those most at risk, i.e. hunkered down in their homes. This second group is comprised of folks who would prohibit healthy adults and teens from swimming in the ocean because the very old and the very young could easily drown in it.

Moreover, many members of both groups despise the members of the other group. Those who want the right to return to the status quo ante are roundly mocked and calumniated in the liberal news media and on Twitter - not the sort of treatment one would expect from those who consider themselves fellow comrades in the struggle against the virus. 

Those who want to continue the lockdowns as long as possible, who believe that we must do everything possible to save lives (an absurd assertion that recently appeared in my local newspaper), are derided by those who want to open the economy back up as "pants wetters."

To pretend that there's some sort of solidarity, some brotherhood of the courageous, between these two groups is ridiculous.

Indeed, the pandemic has doubtless exacerbated the divisions between us. In any event, it would be a blessing to have no more treacle from advertisers telling us to ignore what we see with our own eyes and to delude ourselves into thinking that we're all arm in arm in the war against Covid-19. 

We surely are not.

How to Leave Poverty Behind

Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers some advice to anyone who truly wishes to rise up out of poverty into the American middle class:

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families. Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind. Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law.

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.

There's much more worth reading in Haskins' essay and readers interested in the plight of the poor are urged to check it out. Here are a couple of suggestions, in addition to the three mentioned above, that Haskins is perhaps alluding to when he mentions other influences, but doesn't make explicit:

1. Get married before you have children.
2. Stay away from drugs, alcohol and pornography.
3. Strive to be the best employee at your workplace.
4. Never stop learning.
5. Limit your time on social media.

Sound too preachy? Consider #1 about which Haskins offers some statistics:

Today, more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage. This unprecedented rate of non-marital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood — and for a considerable number of these, all of their childhood — in a single-parent family.

As hard as single parents may try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty. In turn, poverty is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes in children, including school dropout and out-of-wedlock births.

Sure, it's harder for some than it is for others, given the circumstances of their lives, to rise into the middle class, but someone who wants to do it can certainly make it much less difficult by following Haskins' advice.

How Did Enucleation Ever Evolve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's all very fascinating stuff.

Time to Return to Work

The Center for Disease Control has come out with some interesting numbers. According to the CDC the actual death rate from covid-19 is about .26%, a bit higher than the seasonal flu which is around .1%. If the CDC's figures are accurate one wonders what the justification is for continuing to keep states in various stages of shutdown.

Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review writes:

The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%.

Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.

More importantly ... the overall death rate is meaningless because the numbers are so lopsided. Given that at least half of the deaths were in nursing homes, a back-of-the-envelope estimate would show that the infection fatality rate for non-nursing home residents would only be 0.1% or 1 in 1,000. And that includes people of all ages and all health statuses outside of nursing homes. Since nearly all of the deaths are those with comorbidities.

The CDC estimates the death rate from COVID-19 for those under 50 is 1 in 5,000 for those with symptoms, which would be 1 in 6,725 overall, but again, almost all those who die have specific comorbidities or underlying conditions. Those without them are more likely to die in a car accident. And schoolchildren, whose lives, mental health, and education we are destroying, are more likely to get struck by lightning.

When this disease first broke, and we didn't know what we were dealing with, when we saw people in Italy and elsewhere dying in droves, and there was a legitimate fear that our medical facilities and resources were going to be overwhelmed, it made sense to close down schools and businesses.

But then we discovered that a vast majority of the deaths were among nursing home patients and folks with comorbidities. At that point, the sensible thing to do would've been to insure the protection of elderly patients, tell those with comorbidities to stay home and allow everyone who wished to return to work to do so.

The rationale for the shutdown was, after all, to "flatten the curve" and to insure that hospitals were not swamped. Well, the first has been accomplished and the second never happened, but governors in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan and California, among others, are unmoved. They've kept their states shut down at enormous cost in human suffering, putting 36 million people out of work and causing the shuttering of over 100,000 businesses which will never reopen.

This histogram shows daily deaths from covid-19 in Pennsylvania. Despite the death rate having dropped to the same level as the very earliest days of the plague, the governor still has not permitted a complete restart of the economy in any part of the state.

The effect of all this on the mental health of those most affected by the economic shutdown is reflected in increase domestic abuse and skyrocketing suicide rates in some states.

Covid-19 has been a massive tragedy, but much of the tragedy has been brought on by our response to it. President Trump has declared that if there's a second wave of the contagion in the Fall there'll be no second national shutdown. That's a relief to hear.

On Memorial Day

Memorial Day is a day to remember those who paid the ultimate price in combat for our country, but perhaps I can take a little license and also praise the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq. Some of them never came home, but all of them deserve our gratitude and admiration:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized.... There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its year-long mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers, Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God. And for those who never made it back we should ask God's richest blessing on their souls.

Believing Reade, Voting for Biden

One thing the Biden campaign has managed to do, inadvertently, to be sure, is rip the mask off the hypocrisy of the #MeToo movement.

People who, until Tara Reade emerged to tell her sordid tale of a traumatic hallway encounter with then Senator Joe Biden, insisted that women don't make up these stories of harassment and assault, and that every woman who makes such allegations should be believed, are now implicitly asserting that, well, every woman who accuses a Republican should be believed.

Moreover, feminists on the left justified their attempted destruction of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's reputation and career by declaring that the mere accusation that he had made unwelcome and aggressive advances upon a young woman, though he was at the time a teenager, rendered him unfit to serve on the nation's highest court.

Then came former Biden staffer and current Bernie Sanders supporter Tara Reade with allegations of having been pinned against a wall and "digitally penetrated" by Joe Biden for whom she worked as a staffer while Mr. Biden was serving in the Senate in the 1990s. Her account may be true or it may not be, but it's far more credible than that of Christine Blasey Ford, Brett Kavanaugh's accuser, and besides women just don't make this stuff up.

So what are we hearing from the women who were outraged that anyone would be skeptical of Ms Ford's testimony against Mr. Kavanaugh?

One feminist author, Linda Hirshman, acknowledges that, well, she believes Tara Reade, but she'll vote for Biden anyway. Apparently, sexual assault is only disqualifying when the perpetrator was a teenager presently seeking a seat on the Supreme Court and not when he's a fifty-something U.S. Senator presently seeking to be president of the United States.

Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar, all of whom skewered Kavanaugh and all of whom hope to be Biden's choice for running mate, have said essentially the same thing. So has Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein who was a fierce denouncer of Brett Kavanaugh simply on the say-so of Christine Blasey Ford who testified with no supporting evidence that a young Mr. Kavanaugh wrestled her to a bed and momentarily climbed on top of her at a party now claims not to believe Tara Reade's account of what happened to her in a senate corridor. Ms. Feinstein evidently has amended the "Believe All Women" slogan to read "Believe Some Women When it Suits Our Purposes."

Perhaps the prize for most egregious expression of support for Biden no matter what he did, or does, goes to a columnist for the far-left journal The Nation named Katha Pollitt. Ms Pollitt declared recently that she "would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them." Another political Progressive, casting all moral principle and common sense to the wind, promised that he/she "would vote for Biden even if he raped 100 women at gunpoint."

It was only a few short years ago that the left was excoriating Trump voters, especially Christian Trump supporters, for lacking all principles. How soon they forget their own outrage.

In any case, when people on the left express moral outrage over some issue or other you can pretty much bet that their outrage, like Florida's Lake Okeechobee, is miles wide and only inches deep. These are not people of principle, they're political opportunists who wield outrage as a convenient weapon for intimidating others into giving them their way.

They can turn it on and off at will.

Biden may be guilty or he may be innocent, but it's blatant hypocrisy to ignore the allegations against him after having savaged Brett Kavanaugh for having done less than the molestation of which Mr. Biden is accused. And it's worse than hypocrisy to admit that they believe that he probably did what he's accused of, but even if he'd done worse, even though it would've disqualified Kavanaugh, it doesn't change their support for Biden.

Biological Devolution

One fairly recent development in evolutionary biology that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of Darwinism (or Neo-Darwinism, if the reader prefers) is the discovery that evolution is, so far as researchers have been able to ascertain, a process which proceeds from the top down rather than from the bottom up.

In other words, change occurs when pre-existing genes are blunted or broken, not newly created by genetic mutation. As Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe explains in his book Darwin Devolves the variation we see in living things is the result of a devolutionary process. Mutations only rarely create new genes, rather, they break old ones, a process which causes new traits to appear.

A recent paper by Andrew Murray at Current Biology confirms Behe's thesis. Murray writes this:

In laboratory-based experimental evolution of novel phenotypes [structural appearance] and the human domestication of crops, the majority of the mutations that lead to adaptation are loss-of-function mutations that impair or eliminate the function of genes rather than gain-of-function mutations that increase or qualitatively alter the function of proteins. Here, I speculate that easier access to loss-of-function mutations has led them to play a major role in the adaptive radiations that occur when populations have access to many unoccupied ecological niches.

The standard naturalistic Darwinian theory holds that life originated as a primitive self-replicating cell and over the eons evolved, by creating genes through the process of mutation, into the grand diversity of living things we see today.

On the contrary, the devolutionary theory implies that the genetic material was present at the outset, that many kinds of organisms already existed, and that through a process of genetic deterioration those primitive kinds devolved into the even more diverse array of different species that we see today.

The significance of this is that if this devolutionary theory continues to gain traction among researchers it would inevitably raise the question of how the pre-existing genome, from which descended all the various kinds of plants and animals, came to be in the first place.

That question has not only immense biological significance but equally immense philosophical and theological significance since it would not only turns the standard Darwinian view on its head, it would also dramatically conform to the view of an initial creation by an intelligent agent.

You can watch a series of five short (6 minutes or so) easy to follow videos on this new development in biology by going here. Here's the trailer for the series:

A Steep Psychological Hill

It's an interesting fact that many very intelligent people acknowledge that the Christian worldview is superior in almost every respect - if not every respect - to its naturalistic rivals, yet they refuse to accept it.

French philosopher Luc Ferry, for example, in his 2011 book A Brief History of Thought an atheist and secular humanist, but one unusually sympathetic to Christianity, wrote this:

...compared to the doctrine of Christianity - whose promise of the resurrection of the body means that we shall be reunited with those we love after death - a humanism without metaphysics is small beer. I grant you that amongst the available doctrines of salvation, nothing can compete with Christianity - provided that is, that you are a believer. If one is not a believer - and one cannot force oneself to believe or pretend to believe - then we must learn to think differently about the ultimate question posed by all doctrines of salvation, namely that of the death of a loved one.

A couple of pages further on he writes:

I find the Christian proposition infinitely more tempting - except for the fact that I do not believe in it. But were it to be true I would certainly be a taker.

Ferry sounds like a man who wishes he could believe in the Christian narrative because nothing else offers a solid basis for meaning, morality, human rights, human equality and hope. Yet he does not believe. Why not? Unfortunately, he doesn't say.

In an article entitled The Secular World Has a Christian Foundation, political commentator and atheist Chris Berg says this about the impact of Christianity on the Western world:

The contemporary atheist movement has a scorched earth strategy – chop down Christianity, root and branch. I don’t believe in God either, but this strategy is entirely counterproductive.

Not satisfied to point out that elements of Christian belief are historically implausible, or that religion is scientifically unsubstantiated, the New Atheist movement wants to prove something more. That Christianity has been a force for bad, that there is something fundamental about religious belief that holds back progress, approves of oppression, and stokes hatred.

Berg doesn't specify which elements of Christian belief are implausible or how, exactly it would be scientifically substantiated or why it even needs to be. But this is not what's most interesting about his essay. The interesting part follows:

Yet virtually all the secular ideas that non-believers value have Christian origins. To pretend otherwise is to toss the substance of those ideas away. It was theologians and religiously minded philosophers who developed the concepts of individual and human rights. Same with progress, reason, and equality before the law: it is fantasy to suggest these values emerged out of thin air once people started questioning God.

He goes on to make a strong case that our modern concept of human rights is rooted in a Christian understanding of the human being and that even the doctrine of separation of church and state is a Christian idea.

Even so, he personally rejects Christianity.

Even though a world in which Christianity never arose would look a lot like ancient Rome in which a Darwinian struggle for survival made life nasty, brutish, short and cheap, still thoughtful people like Ferry and Berg cannot bring themselves to embrace it.

They may argue that they're waiting for proof before they'll believe, but there are few things in life that we believe because they've been proven. It seems more likely that they resist because to accept the claims of Christianity on one's life is to admit that one has been wrong about this matter for one's entire adult life and to recognize the need for both a sincere repentance and a humbling reorientation of one's priorities.

For some that amounts to a psychological hill too steep to climb.

Pascal's Wager

Imagine that you're a contestant on a rather odd game show on which the game consists of having a sealed box placed in front of you and being told that the box contains either $1,000,000 or $1. There's a 50/50 chance, you're told, of either the fortune or the dollar being in the box.

You have to guess which it is, and if you choose correctly you get to keep whatever it is that you guessed. Suppose further that refusing to guess at all is the same as guessing $1.

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

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

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

This is, broadly, the argument proposed by the brilliant French physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century that's come to be known as Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's version the choice is between believing God exists and committing one's life to Him or declining to believe He exists. As with the box and the fortune, Pascal says that if you believe and you're wrong you lose relatively little, but if you believe and you're right you gain an immeasurable benefit.

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

In other words, the skeptic who "bets" that God does not exist is the one who is being irrational. The theist stands to gain an immeasurable treasure and stands to lose relatively little. The skeptic has relatively little to gain and an immensity to lose, so whose position, Pascal might ask, is the more rational?

This argument has triggered a lot of reaction, some of it negative. There are a number of objections to it, and although most of them are pretty weak, some are not. Susan Rinnard, a philosopher at Harvard, did a video on Pascal's argument which does a pretty good job in just a few minutes of explaining the Wager and which offers a version of the argument that avoids some of the pitfalls of the original:

For those interested in reading an excellent treatment of the Wager with responses to the major objections Michael Rota's book Taking Pascal's Wager is one of the best resources out there. It's certainly a much more serious and thoughtful treatment of the Wager than a lot of what one finds on YouTube.

The Faith Required by Naturalism

One of the most serious scientific threats to the belief of many moderns that the natural world is all there is (i.e. Naturalism) is the problem posed by trying to explain how life could have arisen on this planet through purely natural, unguided, random processes. The problem is daunting as the video below illustrates.

Once living cells appeared on the earth, the naturalist can argue, reproduction and natural selection can be invoked to account for the diversification of life into all the forms of living things we see in our world today, but how did those initial cells arise in the first place? Genetic mutation and natural selection, the traditional mechanisms of evolution, can only operate on reproducing populations of organisms, but until you have reproducing cells with something like genes that can mutate you can't have evolution.

Trying to explain how those original cells arose is like trying to explain how the laws of chemistry and physics could have organized a pile of atoms into a functioning computer complete with an operating system without any input from an intelligent engineer.

A living cell consists of hundreds of different proteins all serving different functions in the cell. This video explains the difficulties involved in the chance production of just a single functional protein.

Even if somehow those odds were overcome an unimaginable number of times and all the requisite proteins were somehow available to form a cell, how did they manage to randomly integrate themselves into an organized, functioning entity? Where did the information come from that directed these proteins to work together to perform specific tasks? How did the information arise that choreographed the proteins' ability to reproduce themselves and that choreographed the cell's ability to reproduce itself?

Despite assurances in the 20th century that scientists were on the cusp of elucidating how all this came about on the primeval earth, the problem has proven intractable. The origin of life is perhaps one of the three most perplexing problems in biological science today, along with the puzzle of how consciousness could have evolved out of inanimate matter and the problem of explaining the provenience of the biological information which programs cellular structures to perform the myriad functions and activities they carry out twenty four hours a day.

Conscious beings only seem to arise from other conscious beings. Information, such as is found in books or in computer operating systems, is only generated by minds. It may be that someday scientists will produce life from non-living matter in the laboratory, but if so, they will have only demonstrated that life, too, can be produced by the effort of conscious minds.

The problem of how the first life can be accounted for in a naturalistic ontology will still remain, and it will still require an heroic exertion of blind faith to believe that against incomprehensible odds, somehow, in ways we can't even as yet imagine, life appeared.

It requires more faith to believe this, actually, than it does to believe in miracles. With miracles, after all, there's an intelligent, conscious Agent responsible for the miracle. On Naturalism there's nothing but blind, unguided accident.

Either Materialism or Logic

Michael Egnor at Mind Matters makes the incisive point that to reject free will is to implicitly reject the laws of logic as well. The rejection of free will is part of the creed of materialism so Egnor extends his argument to show, in essence, that one can have materialism or one can have logic, but one can't have both. Materialism entails a denial of the laws of logic.

This goes a long way, no doubt, toward explaining the irrationality that has beset us in this postmodern era. In any case, Egnor prefaces his argument with this:

Free will is a devilish problem — for materialists. Dualists have no similar difficulty; they assume that some aspects of the mind, such as intellect and will, are immaterial and thus not determined by matter. This belief in libertarian free will is common across cultures and is correct.

But for materialists, free will is the Great White Whale that has, metaphorically, bitten off their legs at the knee — and, like Captain Ahab, they are incessantly stalking it for revenge. After all, we all (even materialists) have an almost undeniable sense that we make real choices. If our intuition is correct, then the materialist superstition that we are machines made of meat falls apart.

If we can genuinely make choices — if we genuinely have free will — then we are more than collections of atoms. But materialists cannot accept the immateriality of the human soul. They propose to hunt and harpoon it, once and for all.

The materialist denial of free will is generally based on physical determinism. Physical determinism is the belief that the laws of physics fully account for all that we do. We are mere bodies governed by physics and if the laws of physics are deterministic, then we cannot have free will in any meaningful sense.

Egnor goes on to consider an argument for determinism made by physicist Sean Carroll and stresses that materialist scientists assume dualism in the very science that they spend their lives doing. This is itself interesting, but the argument that forms the topic of this post comes next:

In order to make the argument that man is determined by physics and lacks free will, Carroll must use logic. All propositions in the form of arguments are predicated on logic, deductive or inductive. Logic entails many different rules, analogous to (but not identical with) the mathematical laws that describe physical processes.

But the problem for the materialist is that physics and logic don't overlap in any way. Physics uses logic, but logic is not derived from physics. The laws of logic, such as the law that states that no proposition can be both true and false at the same time (the law of non-contradiction), cannot be derived from the laws of physics. So,

If Carroll is right that man is governed entirely by the laws of physics, without remainder, then where do the laws of logic come from?

Carroll falls prey to the materialists’ Achilles’ heel: if the materialist argument is taken seriously, it is merely a physical event, not a proposition based on logic. If materialists are right, they cannot rationally claim to be right. If we are just meat, we can’t argue that we are just meat because meat isn’t the kind of thing that can make actual arguments.

So here is the surprising result: Materialists implicitly demand that, at least when they argue, we suspend belief in materialism.

Carroll’s argument that man is wholly governed by physics is self-refuting. Because physics and logic share no commonality, materialists like Carroll implicitly assert that their own arguments lack logic. One might say that the only thing materialists get right is that their ideas are nonsense. If man is all physics, he can have no logic.

It's not just logic that materialism cannot account for, however. As we've often argued here on VP, materialism cannot plausibly account for logic's offspring - human reason - nor can it account for the existence of objective moral values, nor the origin of life, nor the fine-tuning of the cosmos.

Indeed, for human beings thirsting for the soul-satisfying waters of the Good, the Beautiful and the True, materialism is like a bottle of sand offered to the parched seeker. There's nothing about it that can satisfy the deepest yearnings of the human soul. It's embraced only because of a perverse psychological necessity to avoid the alternative - the belief that the universe is created and governed by a God.

Does Our Existence Have Any Meaning? (Pt. II)

This is the second of two posts on an article by former pastor and now atheist Ryan Bell on his claim that God is not necessary for our lives to be meaningful. In yesterday's post (scroll down to view) it was observed that not only do most theists disagree with him but so, too, do a lot of notable atheists. Today's post continues the discussion:

I have a friend who is a talented illustrator and also a high school biology teacher. He draws wonderful pictures with colored marker pens on his whiteboard - pictures of living creatures of all sorts that are so well drawn it can take your breath away to look at them. Then, when the lesson is over, he takes a rag and erases the board and it's as if those beautiful works of art were never there. On atheism death is like that rag. It's the big eraser that blots out all that we've done in this life and renders it all nugatory.

Bell, of course, doesn't see it that way:

Popular Christian theology, on the other hand, renders this life less meaningful by anchoring all notions of value and purpose to a paradise somewhere in the future, in a place other than where we are right now. Ironically, my Christian upbringing taught me that ultimately this life doesn't matter, which tends to make believers apathetic about suffering and think that things will only get worse before God suddenly solves everything on the last day.

This is simply incorrect. It's remarkable that he grew up believing that this life doesn't matter. In Christian theology everything one does in this life has implications for the next. Nor are Christians apathetic about suffering. Indeed, Christians believe that there's meaning to suffering. Such a belief is alien to atheism, however, which sees suffering as the pointless consequence of living in a cold, impersonal world. Here's atheist biologist Richard Dawkins on the subject:

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

Bell continues:

It struck me this year that nihilism is a disease born of theism. Some people have been taught to expect meaning outside of this world beyond our earthly experiences. When they come upon the many absurdities of life and see that it's "not as advertised," an existential despair can take hold.

But if this is true why does that existential despair afflict atheists but not theists? Theists do not succumb to that despair because the absurdities of life, on theism, are the result of man's repudiation of God. Life is indeed absurd for the atheist. It's a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. But for the theist there's a theme to history, a denouement. God has a plan, the theist believes, and in the end all will be made clear, it will make sense. The atheist believes that there is no God and none of it makes sense:

• "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…." – biologist Will Provine
• "What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?" - Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy describing the thoughts that plagued him in his atheist years.

"The problem is not solved by inventing a God in which to place all our hopes," Bell adds, "but rather, to face life honestly and create beauty from the absurd."

The solution Bell urges upon us is to just make the best of an inexplicable existence and then die. This is a prescription for hopelessness in the face of the absurdity of life. One way to frame the absurdity is to understand Bell's advice as enjoining us to live as if God existed even though he doesn't.

He concludes with these thoughts:

Without dependency on a cosmic savior who is coming to rescue us, we are free to recognize that we are the ones we're waiting for. If we don't make the world a fair and habitable place, no one else is going to do it for us. Our lives matter because our choices affect others and our children's future.

Life does not need a divine source in order to be meaningful. Anyone who has seen a breathtaking sunset or fallen in love with another human being knows that we make meaning from the experiences of our lives; we construct it the way we construct any social narrative.

Free from false expectations we are free to create purpose, share love, and enjoy the endless beauty of our world. We are the fortunate ones. There is no need for fear to have the last word.

This is all difficult to understand. How does the fact that our choices affect others and our children's future make them meaningful in any but a trivial sense? They're no more meaningful than the decision by the band on the Titanic to keep playing while the ship sank.

Woody Allen was quoted in an article in Time magazine as he reflected on the question of the meaning of life:

"Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless … I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker." If anything, there's something refreshing in [Allen's] resistance to the platitudes about simple things making life worthwhile that so often pass for philosophy. It's not that Allen is unable to enjoy himself; it's that he's convinced the moments don't add up to redemption. "You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing," he says. "But it doesn't accrue to anything."

Unless what we do matters forever, it doesn't really matter at all. If the existence of humanity has no meaning then it's hard to imagine how the existence of individual human persons can have meaning. As the novelist Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:

If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus an individual's] life has no meaning.

These are gloomy ruminations, but if atheism is true so are Maugham's words. The atheist can refuse to think about it or pretend, like Bell, that it's not so, but both alternatives seem to be examples of what Sartre calls bad faith. They're forms of self-deception. The thoughtful, honest atheist is in an awkward position since he really should be hoping with all his heart that he's wrong.

Does Our Existence Have Any Meaning? (Pt. I)

Since ancient times philosophers, poets, and other thinkers have pondered the question of what purpose there is, if any, to human existence, what meaning there is to individual human lives.

Meaning is a difficult notion to define. We usually think of it as a purpose or significance that endures and gives us satisfaction. If that's a helpful description then perhaps we can think of meaning as either proximal or ultimate. Watching daytime television may provide the viewer with a temporary or proximal purpose and satisfaction but it's ultimately empty.

The important question is, can there be ultimate meaning if death terminates our existence? Both theistic and atheistic thinkers have tended to reply in the negative. Both agree that if there is no God then there's no ultimate meaning to life. They differ, though, in that theists tend to think that if there's no ultimate meaning then the proximal meanings we impart to life are, at bottom, illusory. Unless what we do matters forever, the theist argues, it doesn't really matter at all.

A lot of atheists agree with this, but not all. Some atheist thinkers want to assert that even if there's no ultimate meaning to our lives we can still have a satisfying life while we're here, and that's meaning of a sort, indeed it's all the meaning they need.

An example of this view can be found in a column by a former Seventh Day Adventist pastor by the name of Ryan Bell who discusses why he gave up belief in God and why he's convinced that one can have a meaningful life without God. I'd like to examine Bell's reasons for his latter claim in this and the next VP posts.

Bell writes:

One question I've been repeatedly asked is how my life has any meaning without God. While I had heard dozens of Christian apologists claim that meaning cannot be found without God, I had a curious experience. My appreciation for life and its potential increased when I stepped away from my faith.

Atheists are often accused of being nihilists or absurdists. Absurdism is a school of thought arguing that humanity's effort to find inherent meaning in life is futile. Nihilism goes further and in doing so becomes a mood or a disposition as well as a philosophical frame of mind. Nihilism says that nothing matters at all.

"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose," writes William Lane Craig, a Christian apologist.

Craig is a Christian and might be expected to hold this view, but there are dozens of thoughtful atheists who have voiced essentially the same melancholy sentiments. Here, for example, is Czech writer Milan Kundera:

A life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible or beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.

Nor is Kundera an isolated example. A sampling from the pens of other atheist writers could include the following:

• "Life is a short day’s journey from nothingness to nothingness." – Ernst Hemmingway
• "The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless." - Woody Allen, filmmaker (Hannah and Her Sisters)
• "The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life." – Theodosius Dobzhansky, biologist
• "Our only significance lies in the fact that we can look out on the universe and it can’t look back on us." – Will Durant, historian
• "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher
• "Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful." Albert Camus, novelist
• "Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness." – Clarence Darrow, lawyer
• "Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose." – Bernard Rensch, biologist
• "I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher (Nausea)
• "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence." Sigmund Freud, psychologist

So how does Bell respond to such depressing views held by his fellow atheists? He writes:

But my experience is that acknowledging the absence of God has helped me refocus on the wonderful and unlikely life I do have. This realization has increased my appreciation for beauty and given me a sense of immediacy about my life. As I come to terms with the fact that this life is the only one I get, I am more motivated than ever to make it count.

I want to experience as much happiness and pleasure as I can while helping others to attain their happiness. I construct meaning in my life from many sources, including love, family, friendships, service, learning and so on.

Yet if atheism is true the things he lists are nothing more than electro-chemical reactions occurring in his brain. How can chemical reactions generate true meaning rather than just the illusion of meaning? Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick seks to disabuse us of our pretensions that our feelings and emotions are in any important sense meaningful:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

Moreover, if death is the end, the most that the things Bell mentions can provide is some sort of proximal meaning, they cannot give our lives ultimate meaning. On atheism the universe is a random whirl of impersonal and purposeless atoms, but nothing comprised solely of the impersonal and purposeless, such as are we on this view, can have any purpose or significance.

Conscious beings can while away the hours engaged in diversions like work, collecting stamps, gardening, doing crossword puzzles, loving our families, or learning about how the cosmos works, but it's hard to see how any of it matters much if the footprints we make in life get washed away by the tide of death, as they assuredly do if death is the complete annihilation of the conscious self.

It's perhaps fitting to close with a quote from philosopher Bertrand Russell who wrote about this stark truth in an apologetic for his atheism titled A Free Man's Worship:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

So far from life being meaningful, Russell argues that, in the absence of God, our lives are built on a foundation of despair.

More on this tomorrow.

The Iranians

First the Iranians mistakenly launched an antiaircraft missile at a Ukrainian airliner taking off from Tehran's airport and killed 290 people. Now they've mistakenly hit one of their own naval vessels with a missile killing 19 and injuring 15.

This is the government with which President Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry made a deal in 2015 that would've allowed them within a decade to start producing nuclear missiles.

No wonder President Trump called it a "horrible" agreement and promptly withdrew from it. One can scarcely imagine what a nation that has sworn to exterminate Israel as soon as it has the capability and which clumsily shoots airliners out of the sky and blows its own ships out of the water would do if it had nuclear missiles to play with. No one would be safe from these incompetent nincompoops, least of all the Iranian people themselves.

No Hard Problem?

Central to the debate between those who believe that everything is explicable in terms of matter and energy (materialists) and those who believe that in addition to our material selves there's also an immaterial substance that's essential to our cognitive experience (substance dualists) is human consciousness. The phenomena of conscious experience are very difficult to explain if we limit ourselves to just the matter and chemistry of the human brain.

So difficult to explain are these phenomena - sensations like pain, color, sound, flavor, fragrance, etc. - that the task has been dubbed by philosopher of mind David Chalmers the hard problem of consciousness.

An article at Mind Matters examines the solution to the problem offered by philosopher David Papineau, a materialist and professor of philosophy at King’s College, London.

Papineau argues that all that's involved here are brain processes that "feel like something." For Papineau,

Conscious states are just ordinary physical states that happen to have been co-opted by reasoning systems. Consciousness doesn’t depend on some extra shining light, but only on the emergence of subjects, complex organisms that distinguish themselves from the rest of the world and use internal neural processes to guide their behaviour.

Papineau's solution, then, is simply to restate the materialist position. There really is no hard problem, he insists, there are just electrochemical goings-on in the brain. The solution to the hard problem is to affirm that there is no hard problem.

That's not a very convincing argument.

What the materialist needs to do is provide a plausible theory as to how mental phenomena like the sensation of sweet or pain are generated solely by neurochemical processes in the brain, and this no one has been able to do.

Imagine a miniature scientist inserted into a person's brain in order to discover the location of sweet when the person tastes sugar or the location of pain when the person strikes his thumb with a hammer.

The scientist will never find sweet or pain, only electrons whizzing about and molecules bonding and breaking apart, but these phenomena aren't sensations anymore than touching a sugar cube to one's tongue is the sensation of sweet. So where in all of that welter of neurochemical activity is the sweet or the pain? And what exactly are these phenomena anyway?

They're not the chemical reactions that produce them, they're something more than those. The gap between the material processes associated with these sensations and the sensations themselves is called an "explanatory gap."

The Mind Matters article quotes a commenter at Reddit Philosophy named Etherdeon who explains that,

...dualism is a proposed response to materialism’s inability thus far to account for the explanatory gap. What a lot of these materialist thinkers fail to understand is that the hard problem is hard because we cannot even begin to conceptualize a possible solution.

That’s what makes it different from most of the other unresolved issues in science. For example, we don't currently have a universally accepted unified theory of quantum gravity, but we can imagine what it would look like (tiny particles that can interact with gravity that we just haven't discovered yet). Meanwhile, we cannot even think of a materialist proposal that would explain a causal chain that starts with interacting particles and ends in qualitative experience.

Literally all it takes to solve the hard problem is a sound hypothesis, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been able to come up with one. You can’t just say “consciousness refers to brain processes that feel like something” and call it a day. We know that already, it’s a strawman argument. The real question is how are those brain processes able to feel like something?

There's more on this at the link. As the evidence in favor of dualism continues to mount and the corresponding confidence in materialism begins to wane it seems that the only reason anyone has to cling to it is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism from which materialism is often, though not necessarily, inferred.

Four Things the Media Should Explain

Here are four aspects of the current covid situation the media could do a better job of addressing:

1. The media publish data that show that confirmed cases of the disease are increasing, but don't explain that that's perhaps entirely a function of increased testing. The more tests we give the more cases we'll find. The increasing number of cases doesn't mean that the situation is worsening, but that's the impression the failure to explain this gives the general public.

2. They tell us how many total cases there are but don't tell us how many of those cases are active. How many people included in the number of confirmed cases are now recovered? By only giving the number of confirmed cases and omitting the context they make it seem as if the numbers of victims is rising when in fact there may be fewer people suffering from the disease now than there were a few weeks ago.

3. Nor does the media ever seem to ask this question: In Pennsylvania where the stay at home order has just been extended to June 4th, 69% of the deaths from covid are in nursing homes, either patients or staff, so why doesn't the governor, Democrat Tom Wolf, direct resources to protecting those who live and work in these facilities and let everyone else go back to work? Indeed, early on in the crisis the Wolf administration required that infected patients from nursing homes who'd been sent to hospitals for treatment be returned to the nursing homes. Is it any wonder that the virus has spread through the occupants of these care facilities like a fire through dry straw?

4. Nor does the media seem eager to tell us that whatever argument is made to justify the stay at home order and keep people from working could be made with equal cogency for banning motor vehicles, but, so far at least, no one has proposed we do that. Every year in this country 38,000 people die in traffic accidents and 4.4 million are seriously injured. If we banned motor vehicles we'd save all those lives, but, those who impose the stay at home orders might retort, we can't ban cars and trucks because doing so would destroy the economy and throw millions of people out of work. People have to be allowed to risk getting behind the wheel.

Precisely.

How's That for Precedent?

During a private phone call to former staffers in his administration president Barack Obama weighed in on the DOJ's decision to not press charges against Michael Flynn. The contents of the call were leaked, and it turns out that Mr. Obama delivered himself during the call of some embarrassing asseverations.

In the first sentence of the following excerpt he says three things that according to law professor Jonathan Turley are patently false:

And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.

Turley responded on Twitter with this bit of acerbic analysis:

President Obama is being quoted on Flynn, saying "There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free." It is a curious statement. First and foremost, Flynn was not charged with perjury...

That's true. He was accused of lying to the FBI which is a crime, but it's not perjury unless he was under oath which he wasn't (See https://jonathanturley.org/2020/05/05/did-the-mueller-team-violate-brady/here for Turley's analysis of the Flynn case). Moreover, it apparently slipped Mr. Obama's mind that Bill Clinton managed to get off scot-free after committing perjury.

Anyway, Mr. Flynn was accused of violating the Logan Act about which Turley states,

Second, we now know Obama discussed charging Flynn under the Logan Act which has never been used successfully to convict anyone and is flagrantly unconstitutional. Third, this reaffirms reports that Obama was personally invested in this effort. Finally, there is precedent [for dismissing cases like Flynn's]

There is a specific rule allowing for this motion under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a). There are specific Supreme Court cases like Rinaldi v. United States addressing the standard for such dismissals....

The Justice Department has dismissed cases in the past including the Stevens case. That was requested by President Obama's own Attorney General Eric Holder for the same reason: misconduct by prosecutors. It was done before the same judge, Judge Sullivan. How is that for precedent?

In other words, Mr. Obama simply doesn't know what he's talking about. I am not trying to be unkind, but Mr. Obama would do well to retire to his family room and watch ESPN reruns or leaf through old copies of Sports Illustrated, two of his favorite pastimes, even while president. When he ventures to speak out on public affairs he just causes people to wonder how he ever got to be a professor of law, much more president of the United States.

Chasing the Roadrunner

Matt Margolis has a column at PJMedia in which he asserts that there are at least five things that President Trump did or said for which he took criticism from the media, but about each of which he was correct and the media was wrong.

Here are the five are with excerpts from Margolis' explanations:

1. Mr. Trump correctly claimed that we rely too much on China. Margolis writes, "Trump’s “America First” foreign policy was called protectionist, isolationist, and even xenophobic. His trade war with China was mocked. China may have offered cheap labor, but the coronavirus pandemic has shown us just how deadly our dependence on China really is."

2. Mr. Trump correctly claimed that the Obama administration botched their response to the H1N1 epidemic. Obama waited months after the World Health Organization declared H1N1 a global pandemic to declare a national emergency. By then, millions of Americans were already infected, and over a thousand had died. President Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency two days after the WHO declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, and had been aggressively responding to the outbreak before most Americans were even paying attention to it.

I might add here that this is especially ironic in light of polls showing that nearly 50% of Americans believe Obama would've handled the current pandemic better than Trump.

3. Mr. Trump (probably) correctly claimed that the fatality rate for Covid19 is likely under 1%. When the World Health Organization estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was 3.4 percent, Trump was skeptical. “Well, I think the 3.4 percent is really a false number," he opined in an interview. "Now, and this is just my hunch, and — but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor."

4. Mr. Trump correctly claimed there was no ventilator shortage. Remember when states were requesting ventilators in huge numbers? Governor Andrew Cuomo alone requested 40,000 ventilators and blamed Trump for not providing enough. “You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die,” Cuomo dramatically said during a press conference.

Trump didn’t believe he needed 40,000. “I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to need,” President Trump said. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”

Trump’s belief that states drastically overestimated their needs proved right. Despite claims from the media, there was no ventilator shortage.

5. Mr. Trump correctly claimed that travel bans work. In January, President Trump took the bold step of banning travel from China back in January. The World Health Organization said it wouldn’t work. Joe Biden called it xenophobic. Others joined in on the criticism. But, a month later WHO experts conceded that it worked and it saved lives.

While Trump was widely criticized for his travel bans, his critics have largely flip-flopped on the issue. Even Joe Biden has flip-flopped on this; he now supports the travel ban with China after previously calling it “xenophobic.” Other former critics of the ban would later claim the ban didn’t go far enough and should have been implemented earlier.

In each of the cases Margolis cites the media excoriated the president, and in each case the media was shown to be wrong and the president right. Even so, each time he's proven to be correct it seems to just deepen the media's hatred and contempt for him and to strengthen their resolve to humiliate him over the next thing he says.

Perhaps our media people would benefit from spending a little time watching some old Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons. Just like the coyote they just never seem to learn.

Spring Migration

One of the most astonishing phenomena in nature is occurring this week across much of the United States, but since it happens largely after dark most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring in the skies above them most nights at this time of year.

I'm referring to the movement of millions of birds from their winter haunts in Central and South America to their breeding territories in North America. The migration involves birds of all types, hundreds of different species, navigating their way north to find a mate, establish a territory, breed and return south again in the Fall.

To help give a sense of the movements of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales, dragonflies and numerous other creatures, ever evolve through random mutation and natural selection? How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it?

It truly is a marvel.

Cape May Warbler

Make the Lockdown Permanent

The satirical Babylon Bee reports on the next brilliant idea by some state governments to save lives:

Many states have begun extending their lockdowns permanently in a bid to end traffic deaths for good.

States found that as they locked everybody in their homes, car accidents virtually disappeared. So they did the obvious thing and decided the lockdowns should be made permanent.

"A million people die in auto accidents every year, and if you want people to be able to go outside, you obviously want all these people to die," said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. "Why do you hate people so much, anti-science bigots? I'll wait for an answer."

Cuomo then just stood there, arms folded, waiting for an answer, but since it was a live stream, he stood for hours before aides finally cut the feed off.

Scientists believe the lockdown can also end all deaths from various other sources:

• Shark attacks
• Falling into the Grand Canyon
• Getting crushed by a falling pine tree
• Being mauled by a grizzly bear
• Skydiving
• Getting run over by a steam roller

"Together, we can defeat death itself," said California Governor Gavin Newsom as he announced the state would be under lockdown permanently. "O traffic deaths, where are your sting?"

Unfortunately, new projections indicate the number of people who will die of starvation and other lockdown-related causes may offset the decrease in traffic deaths.

And so they would. Here's another, more serious, piece that's apparently been making the rounds on the web, sent to me by a friend:

• When the State tells you it’s safe to go to Home Depot to buy a sponge, but it’s too dangerous to go to a florist and buy flowers—it’s not about your health.
• When the State shuts down millions of private businesses but doesn’t lay off a single government employee—it’s not about your health.
• When the State bans dentists because it’s unsafe, but deems abortion visits safe—it’s not about your health.
• When the State prevents you from buying cucumber seeds because it’s too dangerous, but allows in-person lottery ticket sales—it’s not about your health.
• When the State tells you it’s too dangerous to go golf alone, fish alone or be in a motorboat alone, but the Governor can get his stage make- up and hair done for 5 TV appearances a week—it’s not about your health.
• When the state puts you in jail for walking in a park with your child because it’s too dangerous but lets criminals out of jail for their health—it’s not about your health!
• When the state tells you it’s too dangerous to get treated by a doctor of chiropractic or physical therapy treatments yet deems a liquor store essential—it’s not about your health!
• When the State lets you go to the grocery store or hardware store but is demanding mail-in voting, it's not about your health!

It's hard to argue with the logic of this, or, for that matter, with the logic of the plan to eliminate traffic deaths by making the lockdown permanent. To see the sense of it one need only think like a government bureaucrat.

Student Attitudes Toward Free Speech

Yuichiro Kakutani at The Federalist discusses a recent poll of 3,319 college students from 24 different schools who were queried on their views of campus free speech and related matters.

The poll, conducted by Gallup and the Knight Foundation, produced both good news and bad news.

First the good news. Fully 97% of the students polled believe that free speech is an essential pillar of American democracy. Moreover, a majority of students (58%) support the Trump administration's decision to ban federal funding for colleges that do not protect free-speech rights, and more than four-in-five students prefer a campus environment that exposes students to all types of speech.

Kakutani quotes Evette Alexander, director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation, who said that survey respondents felt greater pressure from their peers, rather than their professors, about voicing their dissenting opinions:

We understand that [pressure] mostly comes from peers. The professors would be open to hearing different thoughts, but the people who feel uncomfortable usually have a point of view that doesn't align with the most vocal students in the room. And so they feel like by speaking up, they would expose themselves to retaliation.

All of that is cause for hope that a majority of students and a lot of faculty still hold to the value of open discussion that have traditionally prevailed on college campus until political correctness managed to co-opt so many administrations and faculty. But the poll also revealed some bad news, not least of which is that, as noted in the above quote, students who hold unpopular opinions are afraid to voice them for fear of their peers. In fact:

Sixty three percent of students feel that their campus climate deters students from expressing themselves openly, up from 54% in 2016. The students say that conservative students experience greater barriers to openly expressing their opinion in public, with Democrats feeling more comfortable than Republicans about sharing dissenting views in class.

This is disturbing but not surprising. Part of the reason for this is that students on the left are often uninterested in a calm discussion of differences. Their preferred mode of argument is the ad hominem abusive or the "shout them down" technique.

Also disturbing is the finding that 17% of pupils would impose restrictions on the distribution of Christian pamphlets on campus. Why? Would those 17% of students be willing to impose similar restrictions on Muslims?

In any case, 78% of students also want "safe spaces" on their campuses that are free of "threatening actions, ideas, or conversations." More than 80% favor the establishment of a "free-speech zone" where preapproved protests and the distribution of literature are permitted. Yes, but why shouldn't the entire campus be a "free-speech zone"?

Kakutani quotes Spencer Brown, a spokesman for Young America's Foundation, a conservative activism group, who noted that universities often create safe spaces explicitly to shut down viewpoints that break from liberal orthodoxy:

In almost every case, safe spaces are set up in response to a conservative speaker visiting campus. The powers that be at a given school issue trigger warnings to spook students, offer them a safe space to hide from harmless words, and ensure that the coddled minds of impressionable youth don't hear a conservative idea that, God forbid, might make them reconsider the leftist ideas they're all too often force-fed in the classroom.

The only safe space in an intellectually vibrant community, such as a university should be, is a student's own dorm room. The idea that students need to be protected from ideas which may challenge their firmly-held convictions is not only a capitulation to their psychological fragility, it also stifles their intellectual development. The only way to grow one's mind is to sharpen one's ideas on the whetstone of contrary opinions.

To deny students this opportunity, to actively encourage them to shun it, is pedagogical malpractice.