Theism, Naturalism and Universals

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems fairly clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It seems, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be.

For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed? In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God.

If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems to be the case that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would or could exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me.

If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing.

Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left.

Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

A Philosopher Considers Cosmic Fine-Tuning

The physicist Bernard Carr once declared that "if you don't want God you better have a multiverse." What he meant is that the fine-tuning of the force strengths and constants that comprise the fabric of our universe have to be calibrated with an astonishing precision or else life could not exist.

That dozens of these values should be so exquisitely fine-tuned as to permit life is such an astronomically improbable state of affairs if our universe is the only one that exists that the only way to avoid the conclusion that it was intentionally designed to be this way is to accept the idea that there are an incomprehensibly vast number of other universes beyond our own that are all different.

If that's so, then the existence of one as fine-tuned for life as is ours becomes almost inevitable, just as the odds of getting a royal flush if one is dealt enough hands of cards becomes inevitable.

Yet the multiverse hypothesis seems to be foundering, and Phillip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University, explains why in a recent article at The Conversation. Goff writes:

One of the most startling scientific discoveries of recent decades is that physics appears to be fine-tuned for life. This means that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall within a certain, very narrow range.

One of the examples of fine-tuning which has most baffled physicists is the strength of dark energy, the force that powers the accelerating expansion of the universe. If that force had been just a little stronger, matter couldn’t clump together. No two particles would have ever combined, meaning no stars, planets, or any kind of structural complexity, and therefore no life.

If that force had been significantly weaker, it would not have counteracted gravity. This means the universe would have collapsed back on itself within the first split-second – again meaning no stars or planets or life. To allow for the possibility of life, the strength of dark energy had to be, like Goldilocks’s porridge, “just right”.

This is just one example, and there are many others.

The strength of dark energy is said to be fine-tuned to within one part in 10^123. For a point of comparison there are "only" 10^80 atoms in the entire known universe. Goff continues:

The most popular explanation for the fine-tuning of physics is that we live in one universe among a multiverse. If enough people buy lottery tickets, it becomes probable that somebody is going to have the right numbers to win. Likewise, if there are enough universes, with different numbers in their physics, it becomes likely that some universe is going to have the right numbers for life.

Goff, though formerly a believer in the multiverse, has been persuaded that the multiverse hypothesis is based on a fallacy:

Suppose Betty is the only person playing in her local bingo hall one night, and in an incredible run of luck, all of her numbers come up in the first minute.

Betty thinks to herself: “Wow, there must be lots of people playing bingo in other bingo halls tonight!” Her reasoning is: if there are lots of people playing throughout the country, then it’s not so improbable that somebody would get all their numbers called out in the first minute.

But this is an instance of the inverse gambler’s fallacy. No matter how many people are or are not playing in other bingo halls throughout the land, probability theory says it is no more likely that Betty herself would have such a run of luck.

It’s like playing dice. If we get several sixes in a row, we wrongly assume that we are less likely to get sixes in the next few throws. And if we don’t get any sixes for a while, we wrongly assume that there must have been loads of sixes in the past.

But in reality, each throw has an exact and equal probability of one in six of getting a specific number.

Multiverse theorists commit the same fallacy. They think: “Wow, how improbable that our universe has the right numbers for life; there must be many other universes out there with the wrong numbers!” But this is just like Betty thinking she can explain her run of luck in terms of other people playing bingo.

When this particular universe was created, as in a die throw, it still had a specific, low chance of getting the right numbers.

Betty would be wrong to infer that many people are playing bingo. Likewise, multiverse theorists are wrong to infer from fine-tuning to many universes.

Goff then looks at the question whether there is scientific evidence for a multiverse and also examines a hypothesis called the "anthropic principle" which is another attempt to avoid the conclusion that fine-tuning points to an intelligent creator. You can read about that peculiar argument and also why there's only very tenuous scientific evidence for a multiverse at the link.

So, does Goff accept Bernard Carr's other option, that the universe we live in was created by God. Well, no. Instead he embraces the pantheistic idea that the cosmos is itself the intelligent, purposeful agent of its own creation:

[We] face a choice. Either it’s an incredible fluke that our universe happened to have the right numbers. Or the numbers are as they are because nature is somehow driven or directed to develop complexity and life by some invisible, inbuilt principle.

In my opinion, the first option is too improbable to take seriously. My book presents a theory of the second option – cosmic purpose – and discusses its implications for human meaning and purpose.

Evidently, any theory, no matter how bizarre or lacking in evidential support, is preferable to having to accept that the universe is the creation of an intelligent, personal and transcendent God. Why?

A Question Concerning Pro-Palestinian Demonstrators

Given that the official, elected government of the Palestinians in Gaza is Hamas, and given that it is Hamas's stated purpose to annihilate Jews and the nation of Israel, and given that the keffiyeh is worn as a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, how is parading in keffiyehs in support of the Palestinians, and thus Hamas, any different than Klansmen parading in white hoods in support of racial purity?

Both are symbols of hatred, the keffiyeh for Jews, the hood for minorities of any kind. Yet, although our media would be outraged if the Klan displayed their hatred for minorities by demonstrating on university campuses and in our cities, flaunting their hoods and robes, they seem to applaud Palestinian sympathizers displaying their hatred for Jews and Israel by flaunting their keffiyehs as they demonstrate in these same venues.

Someone may respond that support for the Palestinian people is not the same as support for Hamas, but that won't work. The Palestinian people have repeatedly elected Hamas to represent them and many of them cheered Hamas's barbaric butchery on October 7th. Indeed, many Palestinian citizens of Gaza participated in the slaughter, gleefully recording their atrocities on their cell phones, and even caught an escaped kidnap victim and returned him to Hamas.

Anyone who sports the keffiyeh today is choosing to identify with the perpetration of that horror. They're on the same moral plane, or lower, actually, as those who prance about in white robes and hoods applauding the lynchings of blacks and other minorities, and they're both a national disgrace.

The Limits of Free Speech

Steven Hayward at PowerLineblog argues that free speech is not an absolute right. The founding fathers never intended that speech that aims to destroy the nation should be granted the freedom to promote that cause.

Hayward writes that:

....it is perfectly reasonable to shut down Students for Justice in Palestine chapters on college campuses purely on the grounds that they abuse the principle of free speech because their success as a movement would end the right of free speech for Jews (not to mention end the lives of Jews). Any SJP support for Hamas is a secondary question.

... the principle is seldom better expressed than by David Lowenthal in his 1998 book No Liberty for License: The Forgotten Logic of the First Amendment:

Citizens may ... find themselves asking whether our founding fathers, known for their prescience and realism, meant the First Amendment to protect those who would use freedom for the destruction of freedom. Was this keystone of the Bill of Rights really intended to guarantee the freedom of expression and organization to the enemies of freedom? . . .

Some will protest that the First Amendment guarantees freedom even to those who would destroy freedom, that it guarantees freedom to those who would counsel, urge, or even incite to the violation of the law. Such cannot be the case if the First Amendment is intended, above all, as an instrument of republican government, a way of ensuring that the national government is responsive to citizens, so that their rights may be kept secure.

Only if it can be shown that a [violent organization] contributes to republican ends can a case be made through the First Amendment for permitting it legal status. Otherwise, such groups are all legally and prudently shorn of this status from the outset, and not only without violating any part of the Constitution, but in keeping with its positive injunctions.

Does the First Amendment guarantee a right to promote the death and destruction of others? Does it guarantee the right to express public hatred for a particular group?

Isn't it ironic that we make hateful thoughts an exacerbating circumstance when committing a crime, but public manifestations of hate are supposed to be acceptable?

If someone chose to burn the Quran would those demonstrating on behalf of Hamas see the act as a legitimate expression of free speech? Are not those who protest in favor of an organization like Hamas, whose sole purpose is the eradication of Israel and the Jews who live there, doing the same thing as one who burns a Quran? Why do such people have any more right to free speech than does someone who publicly advocates political assassination or public lynchings?

It's a bit perverse that free speech is granted to those who hate this country, who hate Jews and Christians, who even hate the idea of free speech itself. It's astonishing that we grant free speech to the haters who deny the same right, via "cancel culture", to those who love this country and wish to see its people thrive and prosper by returning to the principles that made the U.S. the greatest nation in human history.

Maybe it's time to rethink the meaning and limits of freedom of speech.

A Follow-up Christmas Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out three years later.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century ….

They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.

A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look.

They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon.

A Modest Christmas Gift Proposal

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a tense crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our nineteen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars.

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

The Pilgrims' Voyage

Every year since 1961 the Wall Street Journal has been running an account of the departure of the Pilgrims from Holland for the New World where they believed they could be free to worship without being threatened by an oppressive state church.

The recorder was a man named Nathaniel Morton, and he introduces his history with these words:

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

What follows is Morton's recollection of the Pilgrims' departure:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them.

One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears.

But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

They originally departed in two ships but one leaked badly and they had to turn back to England.

The leaking ship was found to be unseaworthy so some of the pilgrims abandoned the idea of trekking the ocean and returned to Holland. The rest, plus some others who wanted to accompany the pilgrims, boarded the one remaining ship, the Mayflower, and finally set sail six weeks after leaving Leyden.

One hundred and two men, women and children plus 30 crew made the voyage. They originally intended to land in northern Virginia and make their way to the Hudson river valley, but landed first near Provincetown on Cape Cod and later moved inland to establish their colony.

Morton goes on to write about what the company found upon their arrival in the New World:

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

These were doughty men and women. It's hard to imagine what must have gone through their minds when they faced the prospect of winter in a land where they had to start a civilization almost from scratch.

The hardships they endured seem almost unimaginable to those of us accustomed to the comforts of modern life, comforts which we take for granted and for which we should be thankful to God.

On Gratitude

The Thanksgiving holiday which Americans observe tomorrow is a beautiful celebration, not least because it reminds us of the importance of gratitude in our lives - gratitude to God, family, friends, neighbors, and country.

It's been said that gratitude is the most fragrant of the virtues and ingratitude one of the ugliest of character defects, and that certainly seems true. One of the most unpleasant aspects of critical theories and cancel culture is the complete lack of any trace of gratitude and grace.

Those who are grateful for what others have done for them have about them a sweetness and loveliness not exuded by any other personality trait, while those who take all their blessings for granted, or think of them as things to which they're entitled, or who are otherwise unappreciative for what others have done for them, project a self-centeredness or ignorance that's thoroughly unpleasant to be around.

Anyway, here are a few quotes for your contemplation that reinforce the significance of gratitude:

• “Entitlement is such a cancer because it is void of gratitude.” — Adam Smith
• “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.” — Cicero
• "It's not happiness that brings us gratitude, it's gratitude that brings us happiness." - Anonymous
• “Showing gratitude is one of the simplest yet most powerful things humans can do for each other.” — Randy Rausch
• “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” — William Arthur Ward
• “Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.” — Aesop
• “The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.” — Mary Davis
• “When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.” — Elie Wiesel
• “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you'll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you'll find that you have more of it.” — Ralph Marston
• “In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I hope that for all our readers (including even those outside the U.S. who don't celebrate the holiday) tomorrow will be a day filled with gratitude, love and joy.

Just War Theory

Given events in Israel and the controversy over Israel's conduct of its war against Hamas I thought it it might be useful to rerun a post from about a year ago in which I wrote about the war in Ukraine in terms of what philosophers and theologians call Just War theory:

From the time of Augustine (c.400 A.D.) many Christian philosophers and theologians have thought about the question of the demands and restrictions the Judeo-Christian tradition imposes on the use of force.

One result of that thinking has been several somewhat different lists of criteria that must be satisfied in any situation in which force, particularly military force, is contemplated. This is called jus ad bellum (justice in going to war).

Most lists generally include the following criteria:

1. Just cause. Examples of a just cause for the use of force include: Defense against an unjust invader; Protection of family, home, or other innocent victims from direct harm; Recovery of goods unjustly taken; Protection of constitutional rights and liberties from government encroachment; Defense of allies who have been unjustly attacked, etc.

2. Just intent. The purpose of the war must be to establish peace or to protect the innocent. Hatred, economic gain, or the exercise of power are all illicit reasons for using force against another.

3. Legitimate authority. The war must be declared/waged by a legitimate government authority. A war declared by a terrorist organization like ISIS is by definition unjust.

4. Reasonable prospect of success. Deliberately protracted wars or wars initiated with no reasonable hope of success are unjust.

5. Last resort. When it's clear that no measure short of the application of force will avail, or that an attack upon one's nation is imminent, war is justified provided the other criteria are met. This requirement is problematic in that it's always possible to imagine yet another set of peace talks, etc. that could be embarked upon and which would delay war indefinitely.

Thus, governments have to exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether they have actually exhausted all practical options and have been left with no realistic alternative to war.

Just War theory also requires that wars not only be warranted by these stringent criteria (jus ad bellum) but that when fought they be conducted according to certain guidelines (jus in bello - justice in fighting war). The two chief criteria of jus in bello are:

1. Discrimination. Civilians should never be deliberately targeted. This follows from the Christian imperative to be compassionate and merciful. It entails that prisoners not be mistreated and that property and livelihoods not be unduly or unnecessarily damaged.

2. Proportionality. The means employed must be no more brutal or violent than what is necessary to secure victory. It would be unjust to slaughter defeated and retreating enemy soldiers if they no longer pose a threat. It would be a disproportionate response, and therefore unjust, to respond to a cross-border raid with nuclear weapons.

As is no doubt obvious, the heat and stress of actual war or incipient war may create a lot of gray areas for those seeking to hold to the criteria of Just War, and there's often much room for differences in interpretation. Nevertheless, those who wish to wage war justly will strive to hew as closely to these principles as the exigencies of war permit.

Even so, I think it's clear to anyone who's been following the war in Ukraine that Russia is waging an unjust war. They fail the jus ad bellum test, particularly criteria #1,2 and 5, and they also fail the first criterion of the jus in bello test. The response of the Ukrainians is compatible with criteria #1,2,3, and 5 of the jus ad bellum test and #1 of the jus in bello test.

None of the other criteria really apply to their struggle.

The Russians from Vladimir Putin on down to those infantry troops who are shooting, torturing and raping civilians are war criminals, and one hopes that the world will not forget their crimes and return to the status quo ante once this conflict is over.

Those responsible for the death, terror and destruction visited upon the Ukrainian people should remain international pariahs as long as they live and as long as history is written.

Regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it's clear that Hamas has violated most of the jus ad bello criteria and both of the jus ad bellum criteria. Whether Israel has also violated any of these may not be known for sure until after the war is over, if ever. Nevertheless, it's incumbent upon anyone who makes the claim that Israel is indeed waging an unjust war to give convincing evidence as to why this is so.

One final point. A number of philosophers have expressed serious doubt that the criteria of just war are applicable in modern conflicts in which combatants mix with civilians and use civilian homes, hospitals and schools to such an extent that it's very difficult to apply the jus in bello criteria. Even so, it's an ideal to which civilized nations must strive.

Gen Z and Our Expanding Moral Vacuum

What's going on with our young people?

For a month now we've watched as thousands of students and others in their age cohort have demonstrated all across the country in thinly veiled support of a terrorist organization that had just slaughtered 1200 people.

Following hard after is news that a host of social media "influencers" are actually commending and excusing Osama bin Laden, the man chiefly responsible for the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9/11.

National Review's Jim Geraghty elaborates:

TikTok users are approvingly quoting a 2002 letter from al-Qaeda terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, and insisting that bin Laden makes a lot of legitimate points, is the sort of thing that makes you wish gullible young people would go back to eating Tide Pods.

You might have thought that the minds of America’s young people would not be so malleable that they could perceive one of the most notorious mass murderers of Americans in history as a justifiable critic of American policies, but here we are. For those of us of a certain age, this development is a difficult reminder that the unforgettable events of our younger years, the ones that shaped us and the world we live in, are just dry pages in a history book to the younger generation.

Is Generation Z so morally unmoored that they can't distinguish between good and evil? They talk of injustice but what is their concept of justice? What is justice grounded upon? Is justice simply a matter of their own personal feelings? Geraghty excerpts from an article in Newsweek:

A decades-old document allegedly written by Osama bin Laden and titled “Letter to America” recently went viral on TikTok, with some young Americans believing that the al-Qaeda founder made valid points about their own country.

The two-page document, which was published by The Guardian, is a letter Bin Laden wrote in 2002 as a polemic against the U.S. and an explanation of the ideology that led him to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. . . .

“It’s wild and everyone should read it,” said one TikTok user, warning that the letter had left her “very disillusioned” and “confused.” Another user talked of having an “existential crisis” after reading the document and having her entire viewpoint on life changed by it. . . .

“The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq,” bin Laden wrote. “This is why the American people cannot be innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.”

Slate has this:

In what may be the most stunning case of antisemitic distortion and disinformation in the last six weeks—a very high bar, given the slew of such cases since the terrorist assault on Israel—hundreds of TikTok videos have cropped up praising excerpts of a letter written by Osama bin Laden in 2002 that allegedly explains (and, to many social media readers, justifies) al-Qaida’s attack on Sept. 11, 2001, and by extension, Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

“If you haven’t, you have to go read Osama’s letter to America,” one user who posted it wrote. “Then you’ll see what this has to do with us. They have lied to us more than enough. Reading that was honestly life changing. My bond with this conflict”—presumably Hamas’ conflict against Israel—“is unshakable.”

Another user said, “So I just read ‘A Letter to America’ and I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same.” The video lured 1.2 million views in less than 24 hours.

Does it occur to young people reading this that there might be very good reasons why our military has had to fight in these far off cesspools? Do they think that other young men and women actually want to have themselves burned and disfigured and killed fighting against people who glory in death and violence?

Have young people become so indoctrinated with critical theory that they now sympathize with mass murderers like Hamas and bin Laden? Have they swallowed the absurd claim of the critical theorists that anyone who is of darker complexion is oppressed and anyone who is paler is an oppressor and that whatever the oppressed do to the oppressor is ipso facto justified?

It seems that many of those marching in the streets and chanting for the annihilation of Israel are victims of a horrible moral inversion where evil is embraced as good and good is regarded as evil.

Why has this come about? Perhaps part of the reason is that too many young people know too little history. They don't know the history of the 1300 year war between Islam and the West nor do they know what has transpired over the last century in Palestine.

Add to that the fact that many of our young are growing up in a moral vacuum created by a secular, materialistic worldview that cuts out from under them any objective basis for moral judgment, a worldview in which right and wrong are simply whatever makes them feel good or bad, and you wind up with young adults on Tik Tok saying the sorts of things that we read in the above excerpts.

Comatose but Conscious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, he said, you know, maybe the activation that we are seeing in the brain isn’t because she understands. Maybe it’s just the brain’s reaction to sound. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand, maybe just the noise from the headphones is causing this activation. So he scrambled the words. Instead of saying, “Imagine walking across a room” he would say “across walking imagine room your”.

So it made no sense. And the activation went away in her brain and in the volunteers’.

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

This alone is astonishing, but there's more:

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

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

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

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

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

Getting at the Truth

A friend recently emailed me with a concern about the difficulty of judging the reliability of various news sources that report on casualties and possible war crimes being committed in the war between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. Maybe you'll find what I wrote back to him to be helpful as you try yourself to decide what to believe:

I agree that it's sometimes difficult to know who or what to trust, but there are a couple questions that I think are helpful when I read anything that makes Israel look villainous. The first is the lawyer's question, cui bono? For example, when it's reported that Israel has bombed a hospital or fired on ambulances I have to ask why would they do something like that intentionally?

In war, accidents happen. Sometimes there's bad intelligence. But how does it help Israel to deliberately or indiscriminately attack civilians? How does it benefit them to have the world despise them even more than it already does? The Israelis aren't cold-blooded killers like the Russians in Ukraine, nor are they stupid.

They have nothing to gain from purposely killing civilians so I'm very skeptical of any reports that suggest that they did.

The second question I ask is what's the track record of the source? For instance, a news organization that rushed to report that Israel had bombed the Al Shifa hospital when in fact all the evidence eventually showed that it was an errant Islamist rocket that hit the hospital parking lot has eroded their credibility.

Or consider a newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post that buried on page 20 the news that several hundred thousand people turned out in D.C. on Tuesday to rally in support of Israel appears to be playing favorites and has thus diminished their reliability with me.

I'm also skeptical of almost any news report having to do with casualties. The latest report is that there are 11,000 fatalities among Palestinians, mostly women and children, but this doesn't really tell us much. How many of those 11,000 are Hamas fighters? How many of the "children" are between 12 and 18 and fighting on behalf of Hamas? How many of those who are truly innocent were killed by Hamas either deliberately or accidentally or indirectly because Hamas used them as human shields?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions but in lieu of those answers no one can draw any firm conclusions from the casualty figures.

War With Iran Is Inevitable

News reports tell us that President Biden has just unfrozen another $10 billion dollars for the Iranians. This is an unfathomable move given that Iran will almost certainly use the money to further their nuclear weapons development program and to build up organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, that is if Hamas survives their war with Israel.

Meanwhile, Tom Holsinger, writing at Strategy Page, declares that war with Iran is inevitable. Here's an excerpt:

The major effect of Hamas’ attack on Israel is that it makes an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran inevitable, at least against Iran’s nuclear weapons program and probably also its oil export facilities. This will happen when Iran gets close to developing nuclear weapons carried by ballistic missiles.

Given that Gaza’s Iranian proxy nutball Hamas regime just made a suicidal attack on Israel with Iran’s help, Israel simply cannot chance Iran’s equally nutball mullah regime making its own suicidal nuclear attack on Israel as soon as it has the means to do so. A single nuclear airburst over an Israel city could kill several hundred thousand Israelis.

Even if Israel doesn’t pre-emptively nuke Iran, Israel certainly will if Iran nukes Israel first. It’s really a question of who nukes who first. Israel lacks the non-nuclear means to prevent Iran from developing such weapons. Iran’s nuclear program is now too widespread and dug in.

So, if Israel is going to preempt an Iranian nuclear attack against Israel they have to use nuclear weapons themselves since their conventional arsenal is inadequate to the task. The U.S. could destroy Iran's nuclear weapons facilities with conventional weapons, but Holsinger doubts that we'd ever do it, at least not as long as there's a Democratic administration in the White House.

But an Israeli nuclear attack would spark world-wide nuclear proliferation, which is close to a worst-case scenario for America’s own security.

But, Holsinger writes, a nuclear-armed Iran would cause the same rampant nuclear proliferation even apart from attacking Israel. He's very pessimistic about the future and the wisdom of pouring billions of dollars into Iran:

The open favoritism and funding of Iran by the Obama and Biden administrations, particularly including the latter’s recent easing of oil sanctions on Iran, has created an impending disaster for America’s national security.

The Biden administration exacerbates this by calling on Israel for a cease-fire in Gaza. Nothing could more convince Israel that it must rely only on its own strength concerning the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran.

How would Iran react to an attack against it by Israel? Iran’s reaction to any major military action against it will be to launch thousands of guided missiles at the oil infrastructure of every other country in the Persian Gulf, excepting possibly Qatar, mining the Persian Gulf, and attacking shipping there. This threat has definitely deterred attacks on Iran so far, but now Israel’s survival depends on nuking Iran before Iran has the capability of nuking Israel.

So, if there is a real good chance that Iran will attempt to stop everyone else’s exports from the Persian Gulf anyway, the downside from anyone else attacking Iran first is diminished.

He thinks the only way to avoid this calamity is for the U.S. to act first:

The United States could avert an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran, and thereby also the ensuing rampant nuclear proliferation, by itself pre-emptively attacking Iran using only conventional weapons.

No Democratic administration would do this because, for them, Iran’s nutball mullah regime are “misunderstood friends” who provide lucrative income opportunities. But a Republican administration might.

What would an American attack look like? It'd almost certainly involve destroying the Karg Island oil depot:

98% of Iran’s oil exports flow through the one port of Karg Island. Iran’s other oil ports lack even 10% of Karg Island’s capacity. Two American cruise missile submarines, carrying 154 non-nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles each, could completely knock out Karg Island for months, and its production could not be significantly restored in a year.

Iran’s oil income would pretty much cease for long enough that its mullah regime would be overthrown by their own people. And their nuclear weapons program would cease for lack of funding.

Karg Island is the strategic center of gravity in any conflict with Iran. Israel would certainly nuke it in the process of destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Iran would then take down as much of the entire Persian Gulf’s oil production as possible but, if the US launches a preemptive attack, a significant portion of that damage could be reduced by other non-nuclear attacks on Iranian naval forces and missile bases.

And Iran will try this if significantly attacked by anyone, which is pretty much guaranteed given that Israel is as determined to preempt Iran’s nuclear capability as it is to exterminate Hamas in Gaza.

In the not-too-distant future Iran will almost certainly attack or be attacked. If Israel attacks Iran they'll use nuclear weapons and break the tacit global prohibition of the use of these weapons. The Russians will probably then use them against Ukraine, the Chinese will use them against Taiwan, North Korea will use them against Seoul, and Pakistan and India will use them against each other.

It'd be better if the U.S. did the dirty work employing non-nuclear weapons, but it's doubtful that there's a will in Washington for such decisive action.

Refuting the Fine-Tuning Argument

Over the years I've put up numerous posts on what's called cosmic fine-tuning, i.e. the idea that the forces, parameters and constants that make up the fabric of our universe must be exquisitely fine-tuned to unimaginable precision in order for the universe to be life-permitting.

The fact of fine-tuning is such strong support for the belief that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer that those who wish to evade that conclusion have been forced to come up with some pretty desperate counter hypotheses to rebut it.

One of these is the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinity of other universes, all different from each other. Given the assumption then a universe like ours, no matter how improbable, must exist. See here and here)

Another response to the fine-tuning phenomenon is what's called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP).

WAP proponents argue that the fine-tuning of the cosmos isn't anything to marvel at since if the cosmos wasn't fine-tuned no life would exist and we wouldn't be here to observe it. This argument sounds very peculiar, but it may be difficult to see exactly what's wrong with it. In fact, a number of very bright people have embraced it, but its popularity began to wane once philosophers began to give it some thought.

This eight minute video by Inspiring Philosophy explains why the WAP is more like a scientific card trick than a plausible scientific theory:

It does seem fair to say the WAP has faded in popularity over the past decade and other objections to the cosmic fine-tuning argument haven't fared much better. After watching the video you can see why.

Could the Universe Have Come from Nothing?

It turns out that the answer to the question posed above is no and yes.

This 12 minute video from Inspiring Philosophy addresses two questions about the origin of the universe. The first is whether the universe could've arisen out of nothing naturalistically, that is without any input from anything non-spatial and immaterial. The second is whether there's a reality more fundamental than the space-time cosmos we find ourselves in.

Most philosophers find the first claim as proposed by physicist Lawrence Krauss to be incoherent since Krauss' "nothing" is not really nothing.

The second question is leading a lot of philosophers and scientists to the same conclusion that George Berkeley arrived at, namely, ontological idealism. These thinkers believe that the fundamental reality is not matter but information, but if that's so, then that would presuppose a pre-existent mind.

Watch the video and see what you think:

The Singularity and Model Collapse

Casey Luskin has an interesting piece on artificial intelligence at Evolution News.

Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, futurist, top Google engineer, and arguably the greatest prophet of AI to ever span the mainstream academic and tech worlds.

At a recent conference Kurzweil predicted that by 2029 AI will pass the Turing test, and by 2045 it will reach a “singularity.” If you’re not familiar with AI, both concepts probably require a little explaining.

The Turing Test is a test developed by Alan Turing that would show whether an artificial intelligence had reached human levels of intelligence.

The "singularity" is the point at which AI becomes so powerful that it acquires superhuman intelligence, and is capable of growing and expanding on its own. This is “runaway” AI where we lose control and AI begins to train itself and act as a truly sentient, independent entity.

This sounds frightening but Luskin says that Kurzweil isn’t worried:

In Kurzweil’s future, “as medicine continues to merge with AI, it will progress exponentially” and potentially help us solve “every possible human disease.” If Kurzweil is right, by 2029 AI will give humanity the gift of “longevity escape velocity,” where AI-based medicine adds months to our lives faster than time is going by.

While Kurzweil promised that AI will effectively cure aging, he cautioned that doesn’t mean we’ll live forever because you could still die in a freak accident.

But even here AI might come to our rescue, with AI guiding autonomous vehicles that will reduce crash fatalities by 99 percent. AI will further yield breakthroughs in manufacturing, energy, farming, and education that could help us end poverty.

In the coming decades, he predicts that everyone will live in what we currently consider “luxury.”

We’ll also be living in the luxury of our minds. In the coming decades, he expects our brains will “merge with the technology” so we can “master all skills that every human being has created.”

For those hesitant to plug technology into your skull, Kurzweil claims AI to enhance our brains will be no different, ethically speaking, from using a smartphone. At this point, Kurzweil proclaimed AI will be “evolving from within us, not separate from us.”

In other words, under Kurzweil’s transhumanist vision of the future, AI promises us superhuman capabilities complete with heaven on earth and eternal life — what science historian Michael Keas has termed the “AI enlightenment myth.” While Kurzweil framed everything in terms of scientific advancement, it’s easy to envision how this could inspire new religions.

There are skeptics. The power AI would give to whomever could seize it would be enormous and human nature being what it is the people most likely to saeize it are precisely the people we wouldn't want to have it.

Moreover, some experts predict what they call "model collapse."

In short, AI works because humans are real creative beings, and AIs are built using gigantic amounts of diverse and creative datasets made by humans on which they can train and start to think and reason like a human. Until now, this has been possible because human beings have created almost everything we see on the Internet.

As AIs scour the entire Internet, they can trust that virtually everything they find was originally made by intelligent and creative beings (i.e., humans). Train AI on that stuff, and it begins to appear intelligent and creative (even if it really isn’t).

But what will happen as humans become more reliant on AI, and more and more of the Internet becomes populated with AI-generated material? If AI continues to train on whatever it finds on the Internet, but the web is increasingly an AI-generated landscape, then AI will end up training on itself.

We know what happens when AIs train on themselves rather than the products of real intelligent humans — and it isn’t pretty. This is model collapse.

Some experts in AI have warned that we’re at the edge of available training data for AI — essentially we’re hitting the limits of what we can feed AI to make it smart. Once AI runs out of training data, what will it do? Will it implode?

As one put it, "After we’ve scraped the web of all human training data” then “it starts to scrape AI-generated data” because “that’s all you have.” That’s when you get model collapse, and we might be getting close to it.

2029 is only a few years off so we should soon know whether Kurzweil or the skeptics are correct. Meanwhile, there's a lot more on this at the links given above. Checkj them out if you're interested in your technological future.

Israel's Tunnel Strategy

Israel is facing a daunting challenge in defeating and eliminating Hamas in Gaza. In addition to the terrorists' use of hospitals and schools as cover for their operations they have over the years constructed hundreds of underground tunnels with the financial support that Western nations have sent to be used for humanitarian relief of the Gazan people.

A piece at Strategy Page discusses the difficulty the tunnels pose and the strategy the Israelis will probably employ to neutralize them:

Urban fighting is bad enough, especially in Gaza with scores of thousands of booby traps in buildings and tunnels, but the tunnels particularly will make it far worse than any urban combat in history.

Israel casualties could easily exceed the 11,000 of the Yom Kippur War but for one particular innovation – the “sponge bomb”, a variety of rapidly expanding foam plastic that hardens to concrete consistency, and is delivered by anything from a man-portable grenade or an engineering-type large foam sprayer.

The grenade-type device would create a temporary tunnel barrier a meter thick while the engineering devices could form 5-10 meters thick semi-permanent barriers.

These almost instantly effective sprayable tunnel barriers, if they work, will be crucial because they allow the Israelis to use standard urban combat tactics of slow, methodical advances to isolate small chunks of areas, clear those, and do this repeatedly.

Gaza’s network of tunnels (people can probably move underground from any 3+ story Gaza building to any other 3+ story building) would allow Hamas to constantly infiltrate more fighters behind the Israelis. Sprayable tunnel barriers will prevent that. Israel can take small bites above and below ground simultaneously.

While Hamas does have engineers who can clear such barriers, they simply don’t have anywhere near enough, while the required explosives would be so noisy that the Israelis would know when and where the clearing was being done, and kill the Hamas engineers.

With that in mind, and the fact that Israel has obviously prepared years for such an offensive, the conquest of northern Gaza, including its tunnels, might take 9 Israeli infantry brigades, with lots of engineers, as little as 10-14 days @ 300 casualties a day. Assuming 1500 infantry in the rifle companies of each brigade totaling 13,500, that would be 3000-4200 casualties or about 22-31% of the force involved. That’s enough to put them out of action for months.

Nine more, fresh infantry brigades would be required to conquer Gaza’s second half, so Israel is looking at 6-8 thousand casualties total.

When Israel is ready to conquer Gaza’s southern half, they will order civilians there to move to tent cities in adjacent areas of southern Israel. An Israeli general announced this several weeks ago.

Hamas is unlikely to allow this, which will be tough for the civilians but some will probably survive and be cared for by Israeli medics and civil affairs personnel. The US did the same concerning stay-behind German civilians in the 1945 Battle of Aachen, and stay-behind Sunni Arab civilians in the 2004 second battle of Fallujah.

All of the bloodshed and destruction that is, and will be, taking place in Gaza has been brought on the Palestinian Arabs by Hamas whose sole reason for being is to kill Israelis. They're a death cult and their own deaths are condign punishment for their murderous savagery over the last fifteen years.

No one except American leftists will miss them.

Eternal Life, After a Fashion

David Goldman, writing at PJ Media, makes an interesting point. Some of the same secular folk who scoff at the Judeo-Christian concept of a God-granted immortality of the soul nevertheless believe that such immortality is possible through technology, and they're excited by the prospect.

He introduces his thoughts by referencing the belief of ancient elites, particularly in Egypt, that they'd live forever:

What was the upshot of Egyptian idolatry? The ruling elite wanted to live forever, and enslaved my ancestors to build grand tombs in which their mummified bodies would migrate to another life, surrounded by their wealth and some conveniently dead servants. A remarkably large part of Egypt’s economic output fed the fantasies of the pharaohs, at which we laugh today.

The desire for eternal life is not new, and hardly unique to Jews or Christians. Neanderthals buried their dead with grave gifts. Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero, set out to find eternal life. The pharaohs built pyramids with [Jewish] sweat and blood.

Contemporary secular elites are too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Their belief in eternal life relies on advances in technology, but it turns out to be at least as "faith-based" as some traditional views:

Today our progressive opinion-makers ridicule the concept of an eternal God and a world to come, but they believe that we soon will upload our minds to the Internet where our consciousness will continue intact.

We laugh at the idea that the blessed would spend eternity strumming harps while seated on clouds, but enlightened opinion now believes that we shall maintain our conscious minds in Google’s cloud. Add to this a robotic body, and supposedly we can live forever. A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires take this seriously, apparently.

According to Wikipedia, mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: Copy-and-transfer or gradual replacement of neurons. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by copying, transferring, and storing that information state into a computer system or another computational device.

The biological brain may not survive the copying process. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively the simulated mind could reside in a computer that is inside (or connected to) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological body.

That is not science, but science fiction. The urge to escape death, though, remains as powerful today as it was when Moses confronted Ramses.

A tech startup now offers a method to preserve the chemical arrangement of your brain until such time as it can be uploaded, with the minor side-effect that you will have to die in the process.

It's not uncommon to hear materialists declare that they're satisfied with the one life they have and have no desire to live on forever. What they apparently mean is that they have no desire to live forever if that means that they must come to terms with God. If eternal life can be accomplished otherwise, then they're all in.

If they're promised that they can bypass God and find eternal life through technological advances they'll grab hold of that shred of possibility like a drowning man grasping at a piece of flotsam.

There's more in Goldman's article, but this, I think, is noteworthy. Comparing our modern elites to the ancient pharaohs who expended huge quantities of both money and human life to achieve immortality for themselves he writes:

Our new pharaohs believe in methods to achieve immortality as silly as the old ones. And they entertain such fantasies for the same reason: They want to make themselves into immortal gods who have no more constraint on the satisfaction of their appetites than the rapacious, concupiscent and murderous gods of ancient paganism.

Yes, as long as none of it involves the God of Judeo-Christian belief.

How Does a Brain Understand?

One major controversy in the philosophy of mind is driven by the claim that computers can think, or will soon be able to. If that claim is true then it makes it a lot easier to assume that the brain is a kind of computer and that what we call mind is simply a word we use to describe the way the brain functions.

Or put another way, mind is to brain what computer software is to the computer's hardware. This view is called "functionalism."

In 1980 philosopher John Searle published an argument that sought to show that functionalism is wrong and that there's more to our cognitive experience than simple computation. His argument came to be known as the Chinese Room argument and neuroscientist Michael Egnor has a helpful discussion of it at Evolution News. Egnor describes the argument as follows:

Imagine that you are an English speaker and you do not speak Chinese. You've moved to China and you get a job working in a booth in a public square. The purpose of the booth is to provide answers to questions that Chinese-speaking people write on small pieces of paper and pass into the booth through a slot. The answer is written on a small piece of paper and passed back to the Chinese person through a separate slot.

Inside the booth with you is a very large book. The book contains every question that can be asked and the corresponding answer -- all written only in Chinese. You understand no Chinese. You understand nothing written in the book. When the question is passed through the slot you match the Chinese characters in the question to the identical question in the book and you write the Chinese symbols corresponding to the answer and pass the answer back through the answer slot.

The Chinese person asking the question gets an answer that he understands in Chinese. You understand neither the question nor the answer because you do not understand Chinese.

Searle argues that you are carrying out a computation. The booth is analogous to a computer, you are analogous to a CPU, and the information written in Chinese is analogous to the algorithm. The question and the answer written on the paper are the input and the output to and from the computer.

In other words, the computer, like the person in the booth, has no understanding of what it's doing. As Egnor says: "Thought is about understanding the process, not merely about mechanically carrying out the matching of an input to an output according to an algorithm."

Searle's argument denies that computers "think." They simply follow an algorithm. Since humans do think, however, and do understand, either our brains are not computers or functionalism is not true.

Searle points out that the computation performed by the booth and its occupant does not involve any understanding of the questions and answers provided. His point is that computation is an algorithmic process that does not entail or require understanding, but since we do understand when we perform a computation, human cognition is something qualitatively different from mere computation.

This leads to the question of how a material chunk of meat, the brain, can generate something as mysterious as understanding. If all the material that makes up a brain were placed in a laboratory flask would the flask understand? Would it be conscious?

If you could peer into someone's brain while they were thinking would you see "understanding" somewhere in the brain or would you see only electrochemical reactions occurring along neurons? And if the latter is what you would observe how do these reactions produce an understanding? What exactly is understanding anyway?

That human beings are capable of such marvels as conscious understanding is evidence that there's more to our cognitive abilities than just our material brain. Perhaps that something more is an immaterial mind or soul that's cognitively integrated with the material brain and which the brain cannot function without.

Journey Inside the Cell

A three and a half minute video titled Journey Inside the Cell, narrated by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis, gives us a glimpse of a very small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell.

As Meyer's Signature in the Cell makes clear the process is much more complex than what the video shows, but even so, the video does a nice job of illustrating why so many people today have trouble believing the materialist dogma that the astonishing complexity of the cell is solely a product of blind chance and natural selection.

If you don't know the biology the video illustrates, don't worry. Just get a sense of how complex the process is and bear in mind that, if naturalism is true, it's a process that must have emerged almost instantaneously early on in the history of life. It can't be the product of gradual evolution since until this process or one like it was in place evolution couldn't even get underway.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be produced by intelligent minds. To think that such information could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that some bright people are convinced that that's what happened.

Nevertheless, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this:

• Only material, physical processes can be considered in science.
• Enormously complex structures like cells exist.
• Therefore these complex structures must have been produced solely by material, physical processes.

The error here, of course, is in the first premise. It imposes an arbitrary limitation on scientific explanation that potentially rules out explanations for biological complexity which might be true. Just because some people think that scientific explanations should be restricted to physical causes it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

Nor does any scientist who insists on dealing exclusively with physical causes - and not all scientists think this is wise - have any business ruling out intelligent causes.

The most a materialist scientist can say is that he chooses not to theorize about causes that can't be observed or measured. He cannot say that such causes don't exist or haven't operated in the world or can't be inferred from what we are able to observe and measure.

Yet many scientists do say this, but when they do they're not speaking as scientists, they're speaking as philosophers making metaphysical pronouncements that go well beyond what a materialist scientist can affirm.

Boycott Jews?

There's a piece making the rounds on the internet which highlights the problematic nature of BDS campaigns and recent calls for Muslims in Philadelphia to boycott anything Jewish.

In response, Meyer M. Treinkman, a pharmacist, out of the kindness of his heart, offered to assist them in their boycott as follows:

Any Muslim who has syphilis must not be cured by Salvarsan discovered by a Jew, Dr. Ehrlich. He should not even try to find out whether he has syphilis, because the Wasserman Test is the discovery of a Jew. If a Muslim suspects that he has gonorrhea, he must not seek diagnosis, because he will be using the method of a Jew named Neissner.

A Muslim who has heart disease must not use Digitalis, a discovery by a Jew, Ludwig Traube. Should he suffer with a toothache, he must not use Novocaine, a discovery of the Jews, Widal and Weil.

If a Muslim has diabetes, he must not use Insulin, the result of research by Minkowsky, a Jew. If one has a headache, he must shun pyramidon and antypyrin, due to the Jews, Spiro and Ellege.

Muslims with convulsions must put up with them because it was a Jew, Oscar Leibreich, who proposed the use of chloral hydrate.

Arabs must do likewise with their psychic ailments because Freud, father of psychoanalysis, was a Jew.

Should a Muslim child get diphtheria, he must refrain from the “Schick" reaction which was invented by the Jew, Bella Schick.

Muslims should be ready to die in great numbers and must not permit treatment of ear and brain damage, work of Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Baram.

They should continue to die or remain crippled by infantile paralysis because the discoverer of the anti-polio vaccine is a Jew, Jonas Salk.

Muslims must refuse to use Streptomycin and continue to die of tuberculosis because a Jew, Zalman Waxman, invented the wonder drug against this killing disease.

Muslim doctors must discard all discoveries and improvements by dermatologist Judas Sehn Benedict, or the lung specialist, Frawnkel, and of many other world-renowned Jewish scientists and medical experts.

In short, good and loyal Muslims properly and fittingly should remain afflicted with syphilis, gonorrhea, heart disease, headaches, typhus, diabetes, mental disorders, polio convulsions and tuberculosis and be proud to obey the Islamic boycott.

And don't call for a doctor on your cell phone because the cell phone was invented in Israel by a Jewish engineer.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of these claims but readers are welcome to check them out and email me. I'll be happy to post any corrections.

Proving Chesterton Right

Mind Matters has an interesting piece that addresses an article at Scientific American written by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Loeb states that all the theories which seek to explain the origin of our universe without positing an intelligence are inadequate.

In his Sci Am article Loeb writes:

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

Loeb's objection to each of these explanations is that they simply push the problem back a step or two or are otherwise unsatisfactory. He argues that the best explanation is that our universe resulted from the intentional efforts of an intelligent agent or agents:

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

There's more to Loeb's hypothesis at the link, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on what he's proposing in what's been quoted above. He's arguing that intelligent beings of some sort created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, and designed it to produce civilizations driven by Darwinian natural selection:

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

This hypothesis is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian creation story except that Loeb substitutes some sort of hypothetical superintelligent, superpowerful extra-cosmic aliens for a creator God, but these aliens seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace.

Why this puzzling aversion to identifying the designer as God? What is it about the concept of God that repels our naturalist friends like Dracula from a crucifix? One gets the feeling that were it to be somehow discovered that there really was a heaven and a hell awaiting the departed that our contemporary secularists would insist that these had in fact been established by aliens and that there's no reason to suppose that a God had anything at all to do with it.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that when men no longer believe in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Loeb’s suggestion is a confirming instance of Chesterton’s claim. Unwilling to attribute the universe to God, he posits creatures whose existence not only lacks any unwelcome religious implications and overtones, but also lacks any supporting evidence.

The universe, Loeb acknowledges, is the product of intelligent design, but the designer need not be anything so rebarbative as the God of traditional theism. Yet the unobservable aliens hypothesis is not in any way testable or scientific, so what advantage does one gain by positing such beings?

What's the practical difference, after all, between a transcendent superpowerful, superintelligent alien who brings about the creation of the cosmos out of nothing and a God who does the same?

It seems like a scientist can offer any explanation for the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. We might well ask why that is.

Israel Must Be Allowed to Win

Writing in the Washington Free Beacon Matthew Continetti lays out the case for ignoring, and denouncing, the many calls for "pause" and "cease-fire" coming from the left and letting Israel win their war with Hamas. He argues that calls for a ceasefire reward barbarism, and he's right.

The world imposes a double standard on Israel. Israel is expected to act with "restraint", but no such expectation attaches to the Arab Muslims. Here's Continetti:

The usual double standard is hard at work: Hamas terrorists spent years planning the murder of more than 1,400 Jews on October 7, and Hamas terrorists continue to hold hundreds of captives, including Americans, while shelling Israel with indiscriminate rocket fire. Yet it is somehow Israel's responsibility to exercise self-restraint.

This interpretation of the situation is entirely backward. Hamas could end all this tomorrow if it released the hostages, put down its arms, and surrendered. Hamas, not Israel, is the aggressor. Hamas, not Israel, is the "occupier" of the Gaza Strip. Hamas, not Israel, rejects international law. Hamas, not Israel, steals food, fuel, and water from civilians. And the fact that these words need to be written at all is evidence that the culture-producing institutions of the West—the media, the universities, cultural and political celebrities—are irreparably broken.

A ceasefire would be worse than useless. If Israel were to end combat operations now, with Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and captives hidden in the maze of tunnels known as the Gaza Metro, then the terrorists will score a remarkable victory. Harassment and attacks on Jews worldwide will surge.

The West has flooded Gaza with millions of dollars in aid but Hamas steals it from the Palestinian people for whom it's intended and uses it to build hundreds of miles of underground tunnels in which to launch their terror attacks against Israel.

Continetti points out that if Israel halts its campaign to destroy these tunnels and Hamas' organization with them then the terrorists will just reorganize and rebuild:

Hamas will regroup. Its strategy of using civilians as pawns in a chess match for global opinion will have proven effective once again. Its ranks will swell. It will plot its next move.

"The Al-Aqsa Deluge"—Hamas's name for its October 7 crime against humanity—"is just the first time," Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas factotum, said on Lebanese television the other day. "And there will be a second, a third, a fourth [until Israel is annihilated]."

Hamad's words reinforce the lesson of October 7: You cannot maintain a ceasefire against homicidal maniacs with genocidal intent. Since 2007, Israel believed that Hamas could be bought off, that the price of détente was rocket fire and intermittent conflict to "mow the lawn" of terrorists.

Détente was an illusion. Hamas used the pause between wars to plan the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history. Hamas will do so again if given the chance.

Someone once noted the truth that if the Arabs would lay down their arms there'd be no more violence in the Middle East. If the Israelis were to lay down their arms they'd cease to exist.

The pressure on Israel to abandon its war of survival is global and intense and the pressure on President Biden to force Israel into a cease-fire is causing him to waver:

The cretins at the United Nations want a ceasefire. So-called peace activists have similar demands. American campuses are rife with pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic voices. The socialist "Squad" of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives defame AIPAC and the pro-Israel community while regurgitating Hamas propaganda.

Bureaucrats in the State Department and the White House are livid at President Biden for supporting a democratic nation's right to self-defense. Democratic strategists worry that Biden's commitment to Israel might cost him votes in Michigan, throwing the election to Donald Trump.

And Biden is starting to crack.

At an event in Minnesota on Wednesday, a deranged heckler screamed at Biden to impose a ceasefire. Biden could have stayed silent. He could have told off the heckler by detailing Hamas's evil—yes, evil—acts and by saying America will stand with Israel in this existential struggle. Instead he told the crowd that "I think we need a pause. A pause means give time to get the prisoners out."

Continetti points out what should be obvious to anyone who has observed the Israeli/Palestinian conflict over the past fifty years - a pause simply won't work.

There have been pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. Hamas steals the aid and uses it for its war machine. There have been pauses to let civilians in Gaza evacuate to the southern part of the Strip or, in select cases, transit the Rafah crossing into Egypt. Hamas won't let people leave. Since October 7, Hamas has released five hostages. Hundreds are still in captivity—including 32 children. The youngest is nine months old. Nine months.

Hamas doesn't need a pause to "get the prisoners out." It needs a conscience. And it needs to pay.

Read the rest of his column at the link. He closes with this:

Why not try a different strategy? Why not say that Israel has every right to protect itself, that Hamas is responsible for every life lost, and that America will stand with Israel until the job is done? No more equivocation. No more dithering. No more obedience to the politically correct. Let Israel win.

If Naturalism Is True We Have No Reason to Trust Our Reason

In past VP posts (see here for example) I've written that the metaphysical doctrine of Naturalism and the biological doctrine of Evolution cannot both be true. It may be that one or the other is true, but they can't both be true.

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic materialist has no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in his book Where the Conflict really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” - Atheist philosopher Patricia Churchland.

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. - Atheist philosopher John Gray

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.- Atheist biologist Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them in his book On Miracles where he writes:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought.

But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E. This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out.

The naturalist is faced with a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false. On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

To loosely cite Craig again:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet, despite all this, the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.