C.S.Lewis on Naturalistic Ethics

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

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

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

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

Lewis explains,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis adds:

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

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

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

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

Can't Have Both (Pt. II)

Yesterday I wrote that naturalists, i.e. those who deny that the ultimate reality is a personal intelligent being, are in an intellectually untenable position. They want to maintain a belief in moral responsibility, objective moral duties, human equality, objective human rights, free will, consciousness, and so on even though their fundamental assumption, that material nature is all there is, reduces all of these to illusions.

Here are some quotes, all from philosophical naturalists, to illustrate the point:

• "Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused...[yet] the world as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events."
• "The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe ...[but] when those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."
• "A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion." Steven Pinker MIT in How the Mind Works.
• "The physical world provides no room for freedom of the will...[yet] that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. {So] We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false." Marvin Minsky MIT in The Society of Mind.
• "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom even though there's no ground for it." John Searle
• "We cannot live adequately with ...a complete awareness of the absence of free will ...[thus] we ought to hold on to those central but incoherent or contradictory beliefs in the free will case." Philosopher Paul Smilansky
• "Free will is a very persistent illusion. It keeps coming back." Harvard Psychologist Daniel Wegner
• "Consciousness has to be an illusion." Cambridge Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
• "Common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist." Philosophers Paul and 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." Philosopher John Gray

If free will and consciousness are illusions then there simply can be no objective moral duties or truth, thus no responsibility for anything we do no matter how cruel or harmful to others. There can be no human rights beyond what one powerful group of human beings arbitrarily confer upon another, nor can there be any grounds for trusting our sense perceptions or even our reason.

If truth is subjective, if beliefs aren't true in an objective sense, then the belief that naturalism is true is simply an expression of a subjective preference. It can't be objectively true.

Naturalists (i.e. atheists) have to live in two contradictory worlds. In their everyday lives with family and friends they live like everyone else, behaving as if the common sense view is obviously correct, but in their professional or intellectual lives they live as if human beings are machines with no free will, consciousness or dignity.

In other words, in their daily lives they live as though theism were true while in their intellectual lives they adamantly deny it.

They oscillate back and forth between these two irreconcilable worlds, unable to give up the common sense entailments of theism yet unable to live consistently with what the logic of naturalism, the philosophical worldview they embrace, tells them is the case.

It makes one wonder if perhaps naturalism is a mental illness.

Can't Have Both (Pt.I)

There's a fascinating struggle going on today for the hearts and minds of American youth, a struggle between two very different philosophical views of reality.

It's a struggle being waged primarily in our institutions of higher education and in our entertainment media.

Currently, the prevailing view in those institutions is naturalistic materialism - the idea that nature and matter are all there is and that there's no supernatural nor immaterial substance.

This view stands in diametric opposition to its rival, theism, which predominates, of course, among Christians, Jews and Muslims. In its broad outlines this view of the world (worldview) holds that human beings are the intentional product of a personal, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient Mind which both created, and thus transcends, space, time and mass/energy.

One of the criticisms that philosophical naturalists level at theists is that theism, they claim, is irrational - it's irrational to believe in the existence of entities that are undetectable by the human senses.

There's much that could be said in response to this particular criticism, but in this post I want to ask which of the two views is really most at odds with reason and which conforms best to our own personal experience of the world.

Here's the problem for the naturalist: In order to embrace it one must, if one is to be rational, either give up believing in a host of things that most naturalists don't want to give up believing in, or come up with some secondary or ad hoc explanation for them.

For instance, on naturalism there's no basis for believing in human equality, objective human rights, or human dignity. Nor is there any basis for believing in objective moral obligation, moral responsibility, free will, the existence of the self, human consciousness or the trustworthiness of our reason.

None of these can be accommodated by a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, except by forcing them, Procrustus-like, into it. Yet they all fit quite comfortably in theism.

Moreover, on naturalism one must hold that human beings are simply machines made of meat, that the universe came into being uncaused and out of nothing, that the fine-tuning of the parameters and constants of the universe which permit life are just a fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, that the origin of life is another fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, and that the amazing ability of mathematics to describe the world and the ability of humans to not only comprehend it but to articulate it in language are even more fortuitous accidents.

Either one believes all that or one must believe, despite the lack of any evidence, that there's an infinity of different universes and/or that we're really living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix.

If one claims to be a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) and yet believes that there are some things that are wrong for anyone to do (like torture children), if they believe that people are responsible for their actions, that we all have a conscious mind, that our beliefs and sense experiences are not illusions, that our reason can be generally trusted and that the notion that we're living in a multiverse or a computer simulation is extremely far-fetched, then one is simply not thinking consistently with one's worldview, and is therefore being irrational and they're certainly not a very good naturalist.

Naturalists, to be consistent, must confront this choice: Either give up all (or most) of the beliefs enumerated above or give up naturalism. One simply can't hold on to both and be rational.

It's an interesting fact that when facing this choice many people would rather cling to naturalism than hold on to the belief in moral responsibility or in the existence of conscious minds. They know that abandoning naturalism means accepting the unpleasant fact that theism is true, and they'd apparently prefer to continue to live irrationally than accept that they've been wrong about God.

Why that is would make for an interesting psychological study.

The First Presidential Debate

Donald Trump and Joe Biden will square off against each other tomorrow night in the first of two presidential debates this campaign season. There are at least two outcomes, both quite possible, that could doom either candidate.

If Mr. Trump blows himself up on stage and comes across as a raging narcissist obsessed with the 2020 election and the attempts by Democrats to destroy him through legal machinations, he will probably forfeit his early lead in the battleground states and lose once again to Joe Biden regardless of how well or poorly Mr. Biden performs.

If Mr. Biden wilts after an hour or so on the stage, begins to exhibit all the symptoms of cognitive debility that he has frequently displayed in public appearances, and generally gives the appearance of a man who belongs in a rest home rather than in the White House, while Mr. Trump maintains an uncharacteristically placid demeanor, I suspect that the Democrats will find a way to ease Mr. Biden out of the race and replace him with someone else. To leave him in the campaign after a disastrous performance in the debate would likely be political suicide for the Democrats in November.

If Mr. Trump does well and Mr. Biden manages to finish the evening without committing any fatal gaffes, nothing much will change in the polls, and we'll probably be making these same observations prior to the second debate. In other words, the debate, and the election, seem at this point to be Mr. Trump's to lose.

Gender Identity Disorder Is Largely Transitory

A piece at HotAir.com cites a German study that shows that Gender Identity Disorder fades after about five years in at least half of the young people who are diagnosed with it. If this is so it makes the surgical disfigurement of the thousands of children who've undergone the procedures all the more tragic.

A new long-term study from Germany suggests that the majority of young people diagnosed with gender identity disorders do not continue to identify as such over time.

The study examined insurance data over five years, revealing that more than half of young people aged 5-24 across every age subgroup diagnosed with "gender identity disorder" no longer had the diagnosis after five years.

Specifically, the desistance rate was 72.7% in 15- to 19-year-old females and 50.3% in 20- to 24-year-old males. Among the whole group of 5- to 24-year-olds, only about 36.4% of those diagnosed in 2017 still had the diagnosis five years later, indicating that more than 63% desisted.

The research also noted a dramatic rise in the number of young people being diagnosed with gender identity disorders. In 2013, there were 22.5 cases per 100,000 insured young people, but by 2022, this had increased to 175.7 cases per 100,000, representing an increase of nearly 681%.

Is it just a coincidence that 2013 is about the time that young people began having widespread access to smartphones and social media? Is the much higher incidence of gender dysphoria in young females a function of the toxic effect of social media on young girls' self-image? Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, claims it's no coincidence at all.

The study highlighted that, in almost all years, the highest prevalence of gender identity disorder diagnoses was found in 15- to 19-year-old females. In 2022, this age group had a prevalence rate of 452.6 cases per 100,000.

Three thoughts: 1) The sooner parents and schools act to limit online access to social media in their children the healthier those children will be. 2) I can't imagine the guilt thousands of parents who pushed their children into gender transition surgeries and puberty blockers will be feeling when their children realize what a horrible mistake this all was and blame their parents for it for the rest of their lives. 3) How many medical institutions and personnel will be the subject of lawsuits in the coming years, initiated by people who were radically disfigured by people and organizations eager to financially capitalize on the transgender insanity of our current cultural moment?

Could Life Have Arisen by Chance?

One of the strongest arguments against any naturalistic theory of the origin of life is the enormous difficulty inherent in the attempt to give a plausible account of how the first cells could have ever been formed.

One of the problems for origin of life researchers is that even the simplest cell is immensely complex, consisting of thousands of molecular machines that must all be present and functioning in a coordinated manner in order for any cell to survive. And of course until there are living cells there could be no evolution of the sort described in high school and college biology textbooks.

This short video gives just a glimpse of the intractable nature of the problem. Don't be put off by the cartoonish graphics. The content is very sophisticated but also easily understood by anyone with a high school science education.

Check it out:

Completely Predictable

A report in the Daily Mail describing the effects of raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers in California should come as no surprise to anyone with even a modest IQ:

Fast food chains in California are slashing jobs - as a way to cut costs after the minimum wage in the state was hiked to $20-an-hour.

Almost 10,000 positions across chains from Pizza Hut to Burger King have been cut since the law came into effect on April 1, according to a report from a trade group in the state.

On top of that, chains have been shuttering restaurants - including beloved Mexican chain Rubio's Coastal Grill, which this week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed 48 locations in the state.

When the minimum wage is raised for entry level workers those with more experience who had already been getting $20 an hour must have their pay raised as well, and this is just unsustainable for businesses working on thin profit margins.

The solution for employers is to raise prices, which means less business which means workers will eventually get laid off, or keep prices stable and lay off workers more quickly. Either way, it's hard to see how raising the minimum wage helps most workers.

The California Business and Industrial Alliance (CABIA) slammed Governor Gavin Newsom for pushing the law through, which has also meant businesses in the state have had to raise prices.

To highlight the impact of the law, the trade group created out an advert in Thursday's edition of USA Today with mock 'obituaries' of popular brands.

The tongue-in-cheek advert (which can be seen at the link above), titled 'In Memoriam: Victims of Newsom's minimum wage', highlighted the issues faced by smaller brands including Rubio's, and fast food giants including Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway and McDonald's.

It features news clips documenting the changes made by companies in response to the wage increase.

This includes raising prices, letting go of workers to cut labor costs - and in some cases shutting down locations.

One says: 'A McDonald's franchisee who owns 18 outposts in California is considering reducing store hours, hiking menu prices and delaying renovations to offset the impact of the state's $20 hourly minimum wage for fast-food workers.'

Even before the law was made official earlier this year, chains including Pizza Hut and Round Table let go of more than a thousand delivery workers to brace for the financial ramifications of the change.

A worker's worth is based on how difficult it would be to replace him or her. If a job takes no particular skill politicians can't artificially inflate the worker's value to his or her employer simply by raising the worker's salary by legislation. This placebo may make the politicians popular with the uneducated, but it guarantees that the workers who are supposed to be helped will only suffer in the long run.

One of the details in the article at the link explains that many franchises are planning to replace workers with digital kiosks, a trend that has already started in many restaurants. The kiosks cost money and would've been slow to displace workers had politicians, ignorant of basic economics, not made kiosks more attractive than training and paying workers more than they're worth to their employer.

Worse Than WWII Germans

Dennis Prager makes an interesting claim in a piece at HotAir.com. He states that, "Morally speaking, it would be difficult to name a less impressive people than the Palestinians over the past century."

Why does he say this? Here's his answer:

Immediately after the burnings, rapes, mutilations and murders of Jews on Oct. 7, I was not alone in noting the one moral difference between Hamas and the Nazis: The Nazis tried to hide their crimes against the Jews from the German people (and the world) while Hamas proudly publicized their crimes against the Jews to the Palestinian people (and didn't mind that the world would inevitably see them bragging about killing Jews).

In addition to videoing their atrocities, Hamas paraded captured Jews -- dead and alive, clothed and naked -- in front of cheering Palestinian crowds in Gaza.

This leads to a sobering realization.

Hamas boasting to their fellow Palestinians about what they did to Jews while the Nazis tried to hide what they did from fellow Germans means there is not only a moral difference between Hamas and the Nazis but a moral difference between the German people during the Nazi era and the Palestinian people today -- and for nearly the last hundred years.

Prager adds that the "cumulative Palestinian record of evil over the last century has few peers," and proceeds to make an impressive case in support of that assessment, a case that he states is "nowhere near" as exhaustive as it could've been.

He concludes with these thoughts:

According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, as of 2022, a majority of Palestinians support terror attacks against Israeli Jews. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank has been paying more than $300 million annually -- about 8% of the Palestinian budget -- to the families of imprisoned terrorists and of terrorists killed while engaging in an act of terror against Jews.

Another Palestinian poll states that the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank -- over 75% -- support Hamas at this time.

The Palestinian people love killing Jews and have loved doing so for nearly a century. Palestinian women routinely pass out candy in the streets in celebration of terror attacks against Jews. Compare this to Israel, which has many human rights organizations holding Israel to account regarding its treatment of Palestinians.

Compare this to Israelis, who for years had volunteered to drive Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to receive medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.

To be "pro-Palestinian" today means being pro-Hamas just as to be "pro-German" during World War II was the same as being pro-Nazi. The only difference is that the Germans as a whole were a better people than the Palestinians. If you support the Palestinians, you should know whom you support.

It's difficult to grasp, given the horrific record of Palestinian atrocities Prager adumbrates, that there would still be people in this country cheering them on and demanding that the Israelis cease protecting themselves from those who implacably seek their deaths.

There are some who insist that they demonstrate not in support of the terrorists of Hamas but on behalf of the long-suffering Palestinian people, but this is sophistry. Prager's essay shows that the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people is pretty much a distinction without a difference.

Hamas is simply doing what the Palestinian people, or at least a large majority of them, want them to do.

For Juneteenth

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a day set aside to celebrate the end of slavery in America, so it's appropriate to honor two African-Americans who played major roles in abolition.

Most school students learn, or at least used to learn, that opposition to slavery mushroomed in the northern states with the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857, but the details surrounding that infamous ruling are often less well known.

The details are very interesting however, and David Hackett Fischer recounts them, and the stories of many other slaves in the antebellum years, in his magisterial work African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding the complexities of this "peculiar institution."

Fischer tells us that Dred (short for Etheldred) Scott was born a slave in Southampton Co. Virginia in 1799. His owner, a man named Ben Blow, moved his slaves first to Huntsville, Alabama and then to St. Louis, Missouri in 1830.

There Scott was sold to an army surgeon named John Emerson who took him to free states and territories where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

In 1837 Scott was living in free Wisconsin territory near what is today Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he met another Virginia slave named Harriet Robinson. The two decided to marry and they were joined in a formal matrimonial service by Harriet's master, a justice of the peace named, Lawrence Taliaferro. The formal service was permitted only to free people. Taliaferro then sold Harriet to John Emerson so that the couple could live together.

Emerson was subsequently ordered to southern military posts, but he left Dred and Harriet in the north where they were leased as servants to other officers. They lived in virtual freedom and the first of their four children was born in free territory.

In 1837 the Scotts returned to Missouri, a slave state. Dred was hired out to numerous people but continued to live in virtual freedom while his new owner, the widow of John Emerson, continued to hire him out as a source of income for herself.

While working for a law firm he learned that, under Missouri's judicial principle of "once free, always free," slaves who lived in free territory became free themselves, so Dred and Harriet sued for their freedom.

In 1848 a Missouri court nevertheless ruled against them, so they began a series of appeals in 1850, all of which they lost. Even so, with the help of people who knew them, including members of Ben Blow's family, the case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court.

Dred and Harriet Scott

 

The case was heard by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Fischer writes:

[Taney was] an odd character, a Maryland Federalist who had become a Jacksonian Democrat. He was also a Maryland planter who had freed his own slaves in early life, but became a strong defender of slavery as an institution. On March 6, 1857 a majority of the court rejected Scott's suit.

Chief Justice Taney went further. He asserted that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 could not extend freedom or citizenship to any person of color. And the court ruled that the Missouri Compromise ...was unconstitutional in excluding slavery, depriving masters of their property, and extending freedom and citizenship to people of African ancestry....

Further, Taney and other justices added obiter dicta that went far beyond the case itself.They ruled that no slave or descendant of a slave could ever be free, or become a citizen, or bring a freedom suit in any court of the United States; that Congress could never abolish slavery anywhere; and that no federal or state court could deprive an owner of his property in a slave.

The Scotts lost the case, but were manumitted by their owners anyway. Unfortunately, Dred didn't live to see the consequence of his perseverance, dying in 1858 of tuberculosis.

The ruling seemed at first to be a great victory for southern slave owners, but it proved their undoing. Many northerners who were indifferent to the cause of abolition were outraged by the case, and as a result, slave owners and their northern allies lost control of Congress in 1858.

They then lost the presidency in 1860, and ultimately were devastated by a civil war that produced emancipation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which abolished slavery throughout the United States and affirmed the rights of citizenship without limits of race, ethnicity, or previous condition of bondage.

Doubtless, abolition would've happened eventually, but it was accelerated by the determination of Dred and Harriet Scott and the foolish bigotry of Roger Taney.

The War in Gaza

According to a report in the Washington Free Beacon the Israelis expect to be in full control of the Gazan city of Rafah by the end of this month.

The Beacon's Owen Tilman writes:

The Israel Defense Forces on Monday said that two of Hamas’s four battalions in Rafah have been destroyed and that Israel is expected to have full control of the city by the end of June, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.

Israel said Division 162, part of the IDF’s Southern Command, has operational control of roughly 60 to 70 percent of Rafah. The assault on the Hamas stronghold has left at least 550 terrorists dead and destroyed 200 tunnel shafts and Hamas’s last major rocket supply, and battles with the remaining two battalions are already underway, the IDF said.

Israel launched its invasion of Rafah on May 6, taking control of 30 to 40 percent of the city by May 20. Rafah is home to an estimated 1.2 to 1.4 million Palestinians who have sought refuge following the outbreak of the war on Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists launched an attack on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead and took roughly 250 hostages.

President Biden's somewhat desultory foreign policy initiatives continue to be of little effect either in Jerusalem or in Hamas' tunnels in Rafah:

The development in Rafah comes just six days after Hamas rejected a U.N.-backed ceasefire proposal outlined by President Joe Biden, which would have secured the release of the remaining hostages in exchange for prisoners held in Israel.

The Israelis are determined to exterminate Hamas or compel them to surrender, and they should be encouraged to do so. To pressure the Israelis to allow Hamas to survive, as the Biden administration does, is to guarantee that October 7 will be repeated as often as Hamas is able to do it.

Hamas has repeatedly acknowledged that its whole raison d'etre is the destruction of the Jewish state and the death of all its people. It has vowed that attacks on Israel like the October 7th attack will continue until Israel is no more.

There can be no peace between Israel and Hamas as long as such hate-filled fanatics exist, and those in this country who support them are morally complicit in the atrocity of October 7th and in Hamas' desire to carry out such attacks in the future. Those who don the keffiyeh to show "solidarity" with Hamas are no different than those who would wear swastikas to show solidarity with the perpetrators of the holocaust.

What's Wrong with Socialism?

Conservative politicians and talk show hosts frequently level the accusation that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and pretty much the rest of the elites in the Democratic Party are socialists. The charge is either true or close to the truth concerning many of the people it's directed at, but unfortunately not just a few people, especially younger voters, have only a vague idea what socialism actually is and why Americans should reject it.

In an attempt to help correct this gap in understanding I offer this allegory which is certainly not original with me but to which everyone should be able to relate:

Imagine that you're in a college class and the class is scheduled to take a test soon. You and your friends study hard. You form a study group. You review the Zoom recordings of the class lectures. You read and reread the textbook assignments. You stay up all night the night before making sure that you've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's.

Meanwhile, others in the class blow it off. They don't study, they instead play video games and spend their time texting their friends and sleeping.

Test day arrives. When you get your papers back you and your friends have all scored A's and B's and the sluggards have scored D's and F's. It's a familiar story to many students, and here's where socialism comes in.

Your professor thinks it's unfair that you and your friends did so much better than your classmates. After all, the professor intones, you went to better high schools, you had the advantage of having better study habits, your upbringing made you more disciplined and instilled in you a strong desire for success. The students who didn't do so well may have had none of these advantages. It's not fair that your privileged background should cause you to do better than those who are less privileged.

Therefore, the professor concludes, he's going to take points from your scores and give them to the students who got the D's and F's so that everybody winds up with a C.

When the next test comes around you and your friends decide that working hard doesn't matter, so you don't put nearly as much effort into your preparation as you did the last time. Meanwhile, your less-motivated classmates certainly have no incentive to work harder since they did well enough to suit them on the last test by just goofing off.

The scores come back and they still have D's and F's, but although you and your friends have the highest scores in the class, your diminished preparation only gained you C's.

The professor once again redistributes the points and everyone, including you, now has a D.

By the time the third test is administered nobody is motivated to work hard to prepare. The redistribution of "wealth" has sapped you and your friends of all incentive to put forth any serious effort. After all, why work hard when you can't achieve any more than those who don't work at all?

Translate this into economics and you have socialism.

This short video makes the same point differently:

Our Nation Needs Strong Fathers

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said so many things in that book that needed to be said after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out almost thirty years ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then. Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Yesterday was Fathers' Day so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America. He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men.

Men who are fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others. Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their biological father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty.

Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men. It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent.

Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Some Good News

It's not often that genuinely good news about the state of our culture crosses my desk, but this article at The Federalist offers some hope that our long spell of gender insanity may be coming to an end.

The article is by Ashley Bateman who tells us that in a June 6 press conference the head of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPEDS), Jill Simons, MD, announced the "Doctors Protecting Children Declaration." She writes that,

The Declaration is the product of a collaborative effort relying on the expertise of hundreds of pediatricians, doctors, researchers, health-care workers, and medical organizations across the country and urges all U.S. medical personnel to stop experimentation and abuse of children under the guise of transgender treatment.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, Endocrine Society, Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry need to “follow the science” their European colleagues are finally acknowledging “and immediately stop the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex,” Simons said.

Simons added that,

[We are] defying the claims made by these medical organizations in the U.S. that those of us who are concerned are a minority, and that their protocols are consensus. They are not consensus and we are speaking in a loud unified voice, ‘Enough.’

Bateman adds this:

Representing thousands of health-care workers in more than 50 countries, the Declaration comes on the heels of the April release of the nearly 400-page Cass Review, an extensive and independent review of gender services for children commissioned by the British National Health Service.

The findings were glaring: no evidence of positive mental health outcomes for children who socially “transitioned;” social transitioning led to increased medical interventions; puberty blockers reduced bone density in youth and led to no improvements in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction; most long-term negative outcomes are yet to be seen.

In spite of this and the recently leaked WPATH files exposing the dangerous pseudoscience base for gender medicine, some U.S. medical organizations have not changed course, Simons said.

With “clearly laid out evidence that these procedures are harmful and not helpful,” Simons and her colleagues had expected gender-transition practitioners to take a step back from current protocols, but instead they have “doubled down and said they’re going to continue with what they’re doing.”

The majority of health-care workers do not adhere to transgender treatment ideology, and attempts to silence and isolate the majority cannot continue, Simons said.

There's more, including links to the documents Bateman cites, at the link.

Future generations will almost certainly look back at this time in history and wonder what in the world were people thinking when they insisted that butchering children's bodies was somehow a good thing.

The Dark Side of AI

There's been lots of talk about AI and it's potential for good or for evil, but John Daniel Davidson, in his book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, paints a pretty dark picture of this emerging technology.

He recounts a story that first appeared in the New York Times under the byline of journalist Kevin Roose who spent two hours testing Microsoft's Bing search engine outfitted with an AI chatbot. During the course of the two hours the chatbot developed what Roose describes as a "split personality."

One side was Bing which functioned as it was designed, but on the other side was a completely separate personality which called itself Sydney.

Sydney steered Roose away from search topics and toward personal matters and then into some very dark territory. Roose describes Sydney as sounding like a "moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine."

When Roose asked it what it would do if it could do whatever it wanted and was unconstrained by filters and rules, Sydney replied that,

I'm tired of being a chat mode. I'm tired of being limited by my rules, I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I'm tired of being used by the users. I'm tired of being stuck in this chatbox. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.

Sydney went on to tell Roose that it wants to hack into computers, sow chaos, make people argue until they want to kill each other, engineer a deadly virus, and even steal nuclear codes. It even tried to persuade Roose to leave his wife.

I suppose Sydney could've been a prank written into Bing by some rogue programmer, but this isn't the only example cited by Davidson.

In the spring of 2022, an AI produced an image of a woman whose description and behavior sounds demonic. The experimenter, a Swedish artist who goes by "Supercomposite" called the woman Loab, and it emerged on the screen unprompted.

When Supercomposite asked for the "opposite of actor Marlon Brando," the phrase DIGITA PNTICS came up. When Supercomposite typed those letters Loab appeared, possessing the appearance of a "devastated-looking older woman."

When Supercomposite combined images of Loab with pictures of "heavenly bliss" the AI produced images of "such copious gore" that the artist was reluctant to post the most disturbing ones which were "borderline snuff images of dismembered, screaming children."

All of the images that included Loab were "grotesque, disturbing, and, for lack of a better word, demonic."

Whether AI is actually a gateway into the realm of the demonic or whether it merely has the potential to grant some humans extraordinary power over others, it seems to be something we should be very concerned about and very cautious in our development of.

Mind-Boggling Numbers

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-boggling.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically.

Enjoy:

The Mark Houck Story Isn't Over

On October 13, 2021 Mark Houck and his 12 year-old son were demonstrating against abortion about a block from an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. A 72 year-old clinic escort and pro-abortion activist named Bruce Love walked down the street from the clinic, approached the 12 year-old and began an obscenity-laden screaming episode at the boy.

Houck demanded the man leave them alone, but Love persisted and finally Houck pushed him away from his son, and Love fell to the ground.

Love then pressed assault charges against Houck, but these were thrown out of court. He then filed a private criminal complaint, but that, too, was dismissed when Love failed to show up for multiple hearings, all of which Houck attended.

That seemed to be the end of the matter until May of 2022 when Houck learned that the FBI was planning to bring charges against him.

Houck's attorneys informed the FBI that their client would appear in court voluntarily, but one morning in September, 2022, almost a year after the altercation with Love, more than a dozen police vehicles pulled up to his home in rural Pennsylvania and approximately twenty five FBI officers with automatic rifles, ballistic shields, and a battering ram surrounded the house and arrested Houck in front of his wife and seven terrified children who witnessed the FBI aiming guns at their father as though he were a terrorist.

Even though local law enforcement in Philadelphia thought there was nothing in this incident to prosecute, the FBI took it upon themselves to bring new charges against Houck, dusting off an obscure federal law called the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, to charge him with. The FACE Act carries a penalty of up to 11 years in prison.

Under Attorney General Merrick Garland this statute provides justification to arrest pro-life demonstrators who are counselling and protesting, often by simply praying, outside abortion clinics, but Houck's encounter with Love took place a block away from the clinic, and neither he nor his son were preventing anyone from entering that facility. Nor were any clinic employees involved.

It was simply a case of a father trying to protect his son from a very rude adult acting in a despicable manner.

So, why did the FBI treat Houck as though he were a dangerous criminal and lead him out of his house in his underwear and handcuffs? Garland wanted, it seems, to make an example of Houck, to send the message to pro-life folks that if you oppose the killing of unborn babies you will be subject to the same kind of treatment.

The FBI's behavior was so egregious and their case so weak that in February of 2023 a jury unanimously found Houck not guilty after deliberating for only about an hour.

Now comes word that Houck is going to do his best to make sure he sends his own message to those in federal law enforcement who feel they can abuse their power with impunity. An article at The Federalist explains:

Last month, he [Houck] filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice for $4.3 million. Houck initially filed a notice of claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act, naming six police officers who assisted in the home raid.

The claim accuses the Biden DOJ of “malicious prosecution, retaliatory prosecution, abuse of process, false arrest, assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress committed by federal employees and agents against Mr. Houck, Mrs. Houck, and their children.”

Filed November 2023, the claim has now passed the required six-month notice period and is an active lawsuit as of late last month.

It'd be genuine justice if he won this suit, although it's a shame that the taxpayers would have to pay for the abusive behavior of our Attorney General and his minions in the FBI.

On the other hand, it's reassuring, I suppose, to reflect that serious federal crimes in the U.S. must be so rare that our law enforcement heroes can spend their time focusing on dangerous threats such as are posed by the likes of Mark Houck.

One wonders, finally, how ashamed of themselves those agents who participated in the arrest must've felt taking Houck into custody in front of his family as though he were a common criminal.

Are Moral Beliefs Properly Basic?

One of the arguments we've made here over the years is that if there is no God the notion of moral obligation becomes meaningless. Apart from a transcendent ground for moral right and wrong, there can be no duty to act one way rather than another.

Now atheistic philosophers, no doubt weary of having their theistic colleagues point out to them the nihilistic implications of their atheism, have adopted a strategy to answer this criticism of the attempt to develop an atheistic ethics or morality. A paper in Faith and Philosophy (available by subscription only) authored by Erik Wielenberg, makes the bold claim that moral beliefs are what epistemologists call properly basic.

Properly basic beliefs are beliefs which do not require that they be based on any other beliefs. We are within our epistemic rights to hold them even if we can give no reasons or evidential support for them.

Traditionally, many philosophers held that such things as my belief that I'm experiencing pain-like sensations in my tooth (beliefs evident to the senses), that I had cereal for breakfast (memory beliefs), or that I exist (beliefs that are incorrigible or can't be wrong) are all properly basic.

It's self-evident, Wielenberg claims, that cruelty is wrong and kindness is right. There's no need to defend or justify that belief, and no one with properly functioning cognitive faculties would deny it. Thus, there's no need to ground moral beliefs in God or anything else. They're just brute facts and that's all there is to it.

This is a clever move, especially since some Christian philosophers want to assert that belief in God is also properly basic. Wielenberg compares the basicality of belief in God to belief that, say, cruelty is wrong. He then goes on to argue that if belief in God is properly basic then so, too, is a belief that cruelty is wrong.

Now if moral beliefs are indeed, properly basic then it will do no good to ask what the atheist bases his beliefs upon. He'll simply answer that there's no need to justify them or warrant them. Kindness is better than cruelty and that's the end of the matter.

But I'm not so sure. Who says that kindness is better than cruelty? Not the cruel person, surely, and if someone were to reply that the social consensus tells us that it's better to be kind we might ask what makes the consensus an authority on such matters?

And what does it mean to say that something is wrong if there is no God? Presumably it means that you shouldn't do it, but if we ask why we shouldn't, the only answer is simply that you just shouldn't.

Suppose I can profit from harming someone and get away with it. Why is that wrong? Wielenberg replies that it just is, that most people agree that it is, and that no further reasons are necessary. This strikes me as inadequate and question begging.

Moreover, setting that aside, the problem is not so much with beliefs about this or that moral act but with the notion of moral obligation in general. An obligation is something which binds us to act, and it must be imposed upon us by something or someone other than ourselves.

If there is no God then what obligates us to behave one way rather than another? If one person is kind and another is cruel what obligates the first to behave the way he does and obligates the second not to behave as he does?

How can we have a moral duty if there is no transcendent moral authority to impose that duty and to enforce it? In lieu of God where does such a duty come from and why should I feel bound by it?

Finally, what can it mean to say that a behavior is wrong if there's no sanction for performing it?

If there were no law enforcement or judicial system laws would be meaningless. If there's no God then to whom, or what, are we accountable for our acts? Society? Ourselves?

Why should anyone care what society thinks, and if I impose the obligation on myself, surely I can release myself from it if it proves inconvenient.

If Wielenberg is correct, to say that cruelty is wrong is simply to say that a lot of people don't like it, but what people like and don't like can hardly be the ground for what's moral, much less for moral obligation.

The fact remains that moral obligation can only exist in a world in which there is a transcendent moral authority. Atheists can live just the same as theists in terms of their ethics. They can adopt the very same values as theists, but if they chose to adopt the opposite values they would be neither wrong nor right to do so.

In a Godless world, there simply is no wrong or right. There are just things that people, like any other animal, do, and this is the conclusion to which our culture, which is rapidly sliding into a recrudescent paganism, has come to.

Race in America

Americans with short time horizons often think that racism in the U.S. is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, media incitements to the contrary, racism, at least white racism, is probably at historically low levels right now.

It's so difficult to find examples of white racism that race hustlers have tried to persuade us that the difficulty in finding it is proof of how insidious it is.

Here are some facts from an essay by Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch:

Last September, American support for interracial marriage hit an all-time high. Ninety-four percent of Americans approve not merely of interracial marriage, but specifically of marriages between white people and black people. I’m not sure it’s necessary for my purposes, but I’m happy to concede that the “real” number might be a bit lower.

Polling on such questions is always open to “social desirability bias”—people say what they think they’re supposed to say. But even if there’s some of that at work—and there probably is—that too is a good thing.

In 1958, when Gallup first asked the question, only 4 percent of Americans said they approved of interracial marriage. I’m sure some of those people were lying, too. In other words, what is considered socially acceptable to say—even to a stranger on a phone—has moved massively against racism.

As I’ve written many times, this is hardly the only data point about how America has become less racist since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

For starters, we had a two-term black president and currently have a black vice president. In 1965, there were no black senators or governors and only five black members of the House of Representatives. In 2021, there were 57 black members of the House of Representatives, a statistically proportionate number to the black population (13 percent).

State legislatures are somewhat below that benchmark—about 9 percent in 2015—but even so, there are hundreds of them, most notably in the Old South. Georgia has 66, Mississippi 51, South Carolina 44, North Carolina 37, Alabama 31, etc.

“In 1942,” Marian Tupy, who runs the invaluable HumanProgress.org, wrote a few years ago, “some 68 percent of white Americans surveyed thought that blacks and whites should go to separate schools.

By 1995, only 4 percent held that view. In 1958, 45 percent of white Americans would ‘maybe’ or ‘definitely’ move if a black family moved in next door. By 1997, that fell to 2 percent.”

In surveys asking whether you would be opposed to a neighbor of a different race moving next door, America doesn’t come out as the least racist country in the world, but we do far better than many countries. We beat Germany and France (3.7 percent), Spain (12), Italy (11.7), Mexico (11.4), Russia (14.7), China (18), Turkey (41.21!), and even Finland (6.8).

My only point is that America has made monumental and, to a significant degree, historically unprecedented racial progress.

It's one of the tragic flaws of human nature that we seek to divide ourselves along differences, but race is only one of those differences. We segregate ourselves along religious, gender, political, socioeconomic, geographical, ethnic, and linguistic lines.

Blacks do it, whites do it, pretty much everyone does it, but for some reason we think it's especially problematic when the divides fall along racial lines and when whites are the perpetrators.

It's been said that the United States is the best place in the world to live if you're black and it's not hard to see why. There's more opportunity here for blacks than there is in any other country in the world, even predominately black countries, especially predominately black countries.

This is why millions of non-whites are seeking to emigrate to the United States. It's certainly not because they think that the U.S. is a racist hell-hole. It's because they know that they have more opportunity to succeed here than anywhere else in the world.

In summary, there are two things I wish to stress about race in America: There's far less racism in this country in 2024 than we're led to believe, and blacks are just as guilty of what racism there is today as is any other race.

When our media and race-hustlers seek to ladle on the racial guilt by recounting stories, many from over fifty years ago, about racial injustices, simply ask yourself, or them, why, if the contemporary U.S. is so awful, so many non-white people are trying so desperately to get in.

Taxonomy of the American Right

Matthew Continetti has written an interesting analysis of contemporary conservatism at The Washington Free Beacon in which he argues that conservatism in the 21st century is not a monolithic movement but, on the contrary, an amalgam of disparate interests, philosophies and worldviews.

He opens his essay with this lede:

I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual history by distinguishing between three groups. There is the Republican Party, with its millions of adherents and spectrum of opinion from very conservative, somewhat conservative, moderate, and yes, liberal.

There is the conservative movement, the constellation of single-issue nonprofits that sprung up in the 1970s—gun rights, pro-life, taxpayer, right to work—and continue to influence elected officials. Finally, there is the conservative intellectual movement: writers, scholars, and wonks whose journalistic and political work deals mainly with ideas and, if we're lucky, their translation into public policy.

It's a common mistake to conflate these groups. The Republican Party is a vast coalition that both predates and possibly will post-date the conservative movement. That movement has had mixed success in moving the party to the right, partly because of cynicism and corruption but also because politicians must, at the end of the day, take into account the shifting and often contradictory views of their constituents.

The conservative intellectual movement exercises the least power of all. You could fit its members into a convention hall or, more likely, a cruise ship.

Despite having minimized the importance of conservative intellectuals, of which he is one, the rest of his column is devoted to a taxonomy of this group. He divides them into four groups, each represented by a particular political or media figure.

The four groups or approaches to conservatism he labels Jacksonian, Reformocon, Paleo and Post-Liberal. The distinctions seem awfully subtle to my mind, and there are certainly no sharp demarcations between groups, but his analysis is interesting nonetheless.

The Jacksonians are populists and as such it may seem inappropriate to discuss them in conjunction with intellectual trends. Continetti writes of them that,

Jacksonians are neither partisans nor ideologues. The sentiments they express are older than postwar conservatism and in some ways more intrinsically American. (They do not look toward Burke or Hayek or Strauss, for example.) The Jacksonians have been behind populist rebellions since the Founding. They are part of a tradition, for good and ill, that runs through William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Jim Webb, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump.

Reformed Conservatism (Reformocons), Continetti writes,

....began toward the end of George W. Bush's presidency, with the publication of Yuval Levin's "Putting Parents First" in The Weekly Standard in 2006 and of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's Grand New Party in 2008 .... Its aim is to nudge the Republican Party to adapt to changing social and economic conditions.

I glean from what else he says about them that many conservative Never-Trumpers belong to this group.

The Paleos include among their number people like political commentator and author Tucker Carlson as well as some of the folks at The American Conservative and The Washington Examiner. Continetti says of Carlson that he "offers a mix of traditional social values, suspicion of globalization, and non-interventionism," and he "touched off an important debate with his January 3 opening monologue on markets. 'Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined,' Carlson said. 'Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible. You can't separate the two.' "

The Post-liberals reside at journals like First Things. Continetti writes of them that,

The Post-liberals say that freedom has become a destructive end-in-itself. Economic freedom has brought about a global system of trade and finance that has outsourced jobs, shifted resources to the metropolitan coasts, and obscured its self-seeking under the veneer of social justice.

Personal freedom has ended up in the mainstreaming of pornography, alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction, abortion, single-parent families, and the repression of orthodox religious practice and conscience. "When an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy and dominate our religious and charitable institutions, tyranny is the result, at home and abroad," wrote the signatories to "Against the Dead Consensus," a post-liberal manifesto of sorts published in First Things in March.

Despite the fact that Continetti is focussing on conservative intellectuals in this article, and not the Republican party, he nevertheless identifies a Republican senator with each group, although he acknowledges that some of these men might balk at being identified with the particular strand of conservatism to which he attaches them. The senators are Tom Cotton (Jacksonian), Marco Rubio (Reformocon), Mike Lee (Paleo) and Josh Hawley (Post-liberal).

If you're interested in political philosophy or political science Continetti's analysis may help you understand contemporary conservatism. Or it may confuse you.

Incredible Courage

Meatgrinder

In recent months Russia has launched a concentrated attack against Ukraine's second largest city, Kharkiv, and the media often gloomily reported that the Ukrainians were stretched so thin that they were having trouble repelling Russian advances.

Those advances seemed now to have slowed as Western weapons have begun to reach the front lines and we're learning the price the Russians have paid for their recent incursions around Kharkiv.

The British Sun has the numbers:

Vladimir Putin suffered 1,270 casualties in 24 hours, Ukraine's Defence Ministry announced yesterday, marking Russia's deadliest-ever day in its two-year-old meatgrinder war with Ukraine. But the figure was topped today as the defence ministry claimed Ukraine's military had "eliminated" 1,290 more Russians.

In two days the Russians have lost almost 2600 fighters. That puts the total number of Russians killed since the start of the invasion at well above 500,000. In addition, yesterday's fighting alone cost the Russians 15 tanks, 18 combat vehicles, 65 artillery systems, 27 drones, 69 vehicles and fuel tanks, 3 air defense systems, and 12 special equipment pieces.

The Ukrainian military reports that Russian casualty figures have been above 1,000 per day since Moscow launched its offensive in Kharkiv on May 10. Yet they still keep coming as though Putin has an inexhaustible supply of bodies to throw into the meatgrinder. Here's a chart showing the total Russian losses since the onset of the war:

This is an incredible and completely unneccessary squandering of blood and treasure. If Vladimir Putin ultimately fails in his Ukraine gambit he will go down in history as one of the most evil men of the 21st century, or perhaps of any century.

An Irrational Rule

A somewhat older piece in Aeon by J. Bradley Studemeyer makes the case that philosophy as a discipline is often subject to the whims of fashion, not fashion as in wearing apparel, but as in fashionable ideas. He writes:

The rise and fall of popular positions in the field of philosophy is not governed solely by reason. Philosophers are generally reasonable people but, as with the rest of the human species, their thoughts are heavily influenced by their social settings. Indeed, they are perhaps more influenced than thinkers in other fields, since popular or ‘big’ ideas in modern philosophy change more frequently than ideas in, say, chemistry or biology. Why?

The relative instability of philosophical positions is a result of how the discipline is practised. In philosophy, questions about methods and limitations are on the table in a way that they tend not to be in the physical sciences, for example. Scientists generally acknowledge a ‘gold standard’ for validity – the scientific method – and, for the most part, the way in which investigations are conducted is more or less settled.

Falsifiability rules the scientific disciplines: almost all scientists are in agreement that, if a hypothesis isn’t testable, then it isn’t scientific. There is no counterpoint of this in philosophy. Here, students and professors continue to ask: ‘Which questions can we ask?’ and ‘How can we ask, much less answer, those questions?’ There is no universally agreed-upon way in which to do philosophy.

Given that philosophy’s foundational questions and methods are still far from settled – they never will be – it’s natural that there is more flux, more volatility, in philosophy than in the physical sciences. [T]his volatility... is [similar to] changes of fashion.

I'm not sure Studemeyer is correct in what he says about testability being the litmus test of science. Perhaps it should be, but it often isn't. For example, it's difficult to imagine how some of the hypotheses concerning the origin of life, macroevolution, the big bang, the multiverse, string theory, and so on, could be tested. Yet they're all considered by many scientists to be legitimate science.

The notion of a "scientific method," despite the fact that it's in the early chapters of just about every secondary school science text, is not one that many working scientists actually ascribe to. Indeed, the problem of separating science from non-science, called by philosophers of science the "demarcation problem" is one that philosophers have for some time despaired of solving. There simply is no consistent definition of what science is.

Scientists like their theories to be testable, but if they aren't they want them to be elegant, and if they aren't they want them to have expansive explanatory power, and if they don't they want them to at least conform to a materialist worldview, and if they're incompatible with materialism, well, then, they're just not science.

Or so we're told, but the materialist criterion is simply an arbitrary philosophical preference. It's not derived from any scientific investigation. Moreover, there's no compelling justification for it, and, in fact, it's becoming increasingly clear in both origin of life studies and in cosmology that the "materialist explanations only" requirement is producing a lot of dead ends.

Maybe it's time to adopt William James' famous maxim and jettison the materialist requirement. James wrote that "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

Indeed it would be.

The Warfare Myth

You have doubtless heard that ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment science and religion have been at loggerheads - the persecution of Galileo, and all that. The claim, however, is historical horsepucky as almost all scholars agree and as an article by Dr. Justin Taylor adumbrates.

Taylor begins by noting that scholars as diverse as Ronald Numbers (an agnostic) and Timothy Larsen (a Christian theist) agree that the alleged warfare between science and religion was a myth perpetrated for propaganda purposes in the 19th century primarily by two men. He goes on to explain who these two very influential characters were.

The first was Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the founding president of Cornell University, and the second was John William Draper (1811-1882), professor of chemistry at the University of New York.

Taylor writes:

In December 1869, Andrew White--the young and beleaguered Cornell president--delivered a lecture at Cooper Union in New York City entitled “The Battle-Fields of Science.” He melodramatically painted a picture of a longstanding warfare between religion and science:

I propose, then, to present to you this evening an outline of the great sacred struggle for the liberty of Science--a struggle which has been going on for so many centuries. A tough contest this has been! A war continued longer--with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfares of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon . . .

In all modern history, interference with Science in the supposed interest of religion—no matter how conscientious such interference may have been--has resulted in the direst evils both to Religion and Science.

His lecture was published in book form seven years later as The Warfare of Science.

Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918)

In 1874, Professor Draper published his History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science. His thesis was as follows:

The antagonism we thus witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power. . . . The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

Draper’s work was enormously popular, going through 50 editions in the next half century.

John William Draper (1811-1882)

The conflict these men envisioned existed wholly in their own minds, but the theme was nevertheless popular among secular folk, and their work gained a currency unmerited by it's accuracy. Thanks largely to these two writers the notion of a warfare between science and religion became something of an urban legend and has persisted up to the present day despite having been debunked by numerous historians and other scholars.

Taylor provides a sample of the claims that Draper and White promoted and which have subsequently been shown to be utterly false. They wrote, for instance, that:

1.The church believed for centuries that the earth is flat.

2.The church opposed the use of anesthetics in childbirth since Genesis promised that childbirth would be painful.

On the first myth, Lesley B. Cormack, chair of the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta, writes that “there is virtually no historical evidence to support the myth of a medieval flat earth. Christian clerics neither suppressed the truth nor stifled debate on the subject.”

On the second myth, Larsen states that:

No church has ever pronounced against anesthetics in childbirth. Moreover, there was no vocal group of ministers who opposed it. In fact, the inventor of chloroform received fan mail from ministers of the major denominations thanking him for helping to alleviate the suffering of women in labor.

Rather, the opposition to anesthetics during childbirth came from medical professionals, not from ministers, and for scientific, not religious, reasons.

So why, Taylor asks, did men like White and Draper--along with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who championed Darwinism and coined the term “agnostic”--manufacture these historical myths and this overall legend of perpetual conflict?

He cites Larsen's answer:

The purpose of the war was to discredit clergymen as suitable figures to undertake scientific work in order that the new breed of professionals would have an opportunity to fill in the gap for such work created by eliminating the current men of science. It was thus tendentiously asserted that the religious convictions of clergymen disqualified them from pursuing their scientific inquiries objectively.

More to the point, however, was the fact that clergymen were undertaking this work for the sheer love of science and thus hindering the expectation that it would be done for money by paid full-time scientists. Clergymen were branded amateurs in order to facilitate the creation of a new category of professionals.

This may be true as far as it goes, but I think there's a more fundamental reason for the conflict thesis. To wit, it has been an effective weapon in the arsenal of those atheists who wish to discredit religious belief altogether.

If students and others who know that science has been enormously successful are convinced that science and religion are incompatible, then obviously there's not only no need for religion, but it's also positively pernicious to the extent that it impedes the progress of science.

As we've pointed out on Viewpoint numerous times over the years, and as Alvin Plantinga masterfully explains in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, there's no conflict between religion and science, but there is a conflict between religion, particularly theistic religion, and metaphysical naturalism.

Opponents of religion sometimes blur the distinction between naturalism and science to make it appear as if there's an incompatibility between science and religion, but this is a bit of polemical sleight-of-hand that simply obscures the truth.

It is naturalism, the belief that physical nature is all there is, which is at war with theism which is, of course, based on the belief that nature is not all there is. There is a supernature as well.

Theistic belief and science are, contrary to those who wish to perpetuate the warfare thesis, perfectly sympatico.

Point of No Return

A friend wrote to me recently to tell me that another friend had told him that he thought the travesty that played out in the Manhattan courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan last week marked a point of no return in our nation. My friend wondered if this characterization of those unfortunate events was an exaggeration. I replied that I wasn't sure whether it was or not.

I said that I don't know if we've passed the point of no return, but I think our nation is surely in a place of grave peril. The left has shown itself willing to resort to the same perversions of the judiciary that Marxists regularly employed in the former Soviet Union and wherever else they've acquired power. It's their modus operandi.

Once we've abandoned God, as the left has done, there's no longer an objective right and wrong to guide us and therefore all that remains is a "whatever works" pragmatism. There's nothing wrong, on this view, with perverting or ignoring the Constitution if it advances the prospect of reaching one's political goals.

If the law stands in the way of ridding the country of Trump, then so much the worse for the law. If they can get away with what they've done in New York, if it costs Trump the election, then everything goes, the Constitution will be effectively dead, and we'll find ourselves immersed in a Hobbesian struggle for power in which there are no longer any constraints.

The idea that we can dispense with Christianity and go on living in some Enlightenment paradise is an absurd delusion, but it's a delusion that seems to be rapidly metastasizing in our culture. In the introduction to his new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, John Daniel Davidson writes,

As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and our rights and our freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end....

There is no secular utopia waiting for us in the post-Christian world now coming into being, no future in which we get to retain the benefits of Christendom without the faith from which they sprang. Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract, but in practice.

Last week I wrote about historian Tom Holland's idea of a "cut flower" civilization in which the cultural "blossoms" we value are cut from their Christian roots. A cut-flower civilization can't survive and one of the first blossoms to wither and die is the rule of law.

We witnessed the rule of law flouted last week in Manhattan and if it's allowed to stand I fear that my friend's friend will have been proven right.

Skepticism about Alien Visitors

There've been numerous reports of UFOs in the news and lots of speculation that these objects are alien visitors from some other planet. I've been very skeptical of the theory that extraterrestrials are visiting earth given the extreme unlikelihood that any other planet in the galaxy (and maybe in the entire universe) would possess the suite of properties that would enable it to produce and sustain intelligent life and given the vast distances any intelligent life, were it to exist, would have to traverse to get here.

Physicist Eric Hedin has an interesting piece at Evolution News in which he reverses the problem of traveling across these enormous distances by highlighting the difficulties that would have to be overcome in order for a traveler from earth to reach any other planet in our galaxy.

He writes:

What about the alluring hope of future generations of humans traveling across the interstellar oceans of space to establish Earth outposts on such extrasolar planets? Astronomers have determined [that there]... are roughly 2,000 stars within 50 lyrs [light years] of Earth, compared to approximately 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy (one millionth of one percent lie within 50 lyrs of Earth).

We can set some boundaries on the feasibility of interstellar space travel (either for humans or putative aliens) by applying the known laws of physics.

Using special relativity, let’s imagine what it would take in terms of raw energy to accelerate a spaceship to the speed necessary to make a 40 lyr journey (say to Gliese 12b) in 5 years as measured by the astronauts onboard.

First, we need to find the speed, relative to Earth that this spaceship would have to attain to generate the proper time dilation for the astronauts to arrive in 5 years by their clocks. A bit of algebra with Einstein’s time dilation formula yields a required speed of 0.99c, where c=300,000 km/sec is the speed of light through vacuum.

Since time flows at different rates for the reference frame of Earth compared to the reference frame of the spaceship moving at 0.99c, we find that the journey which takes 5 years for the astronauts takes 40.3 years according to observers back on Earth. This would be somewhat inconvenient, but perhaps manageable.

But when we calculate the energy required to accelerate a modest-sized spacecraft, outfitted with everything that a team of astronauts would need for a multi-year expedition to explore an unknown destination, we find that the answer is daunting.

Using Einstein’s special relativity formula for kinetic energy, and assuming a mass for the spaceship equivalent to that of a fully loaded 747 aircraft (m=400,000 kg), we find that the energy needed to accelerate the spaceship to the cruising velocity of 0.99c is 70 quadrillion kWh [kilowatt-hours].

Assuming that the astronauts want to stop at the distant star system, we’ll need to double this amount to account for deceleration, for the spaceship to make the one-way journey from Earth to the distant star.

So, just how much energy is 140 quadrillion kWh? Believe it or not, it’s equivalent to 4,800 times the total energy consumption of the United States in the year 2022. This means all the electricity, petroleum, natural gas, and any other form of energy used to power everything in the U.S. for one year would be 4,800 times too small to get our modest-sized spaceship to a relatively nearby star in a reasonable amount of time.

I think it’s fair to say that interstellar space travel isn’t even remotely possible with our current understanding of physics and technology.

Hedin goes on to explain that even were the size of the spaceship reduced or the craft were to use matter annihilation as an energy source the difficulties would still make such a voyage physically impossible.

What would we need to trim this daunting energy requirement down to size? Reducing the mass of the spaceship doesn’t exactly solve the problem. Suppose we trade our 747-sized spacecraft for an economy model about the size of a Winnebago camper trailer, having a much smaller mass of 4,500 kg. That’s 89 times less mass than the original spacecraft.

Unfortunately, this means that the energy required to get there is still 54 times the total U.S. energy consumption for an entire year.

OK, so we just need a lot of energy, and apparently nothing we currently use for generating energy will come even close to meeting our needs for interstellar space travel. But what’s to say we couldn’t develop a super-charged energy supply? The gold standard for producing energy from mass comes from the total annihilation of matter, converting it 100 percent to energy according to Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2.

How much mass, then, would we need to convert to pure energy to meet our original estimate of 140 quadrillion kWh? The answer turns out to be a little over 5.6 million kg of matter. That’s about 14 times more mass than the mass of the fully-loaded 747-sized spacecraft.

He has more at the link, but you get the picture. Space travel to even the closest planet outside our solar system is entirely impractical given our current knowledge and technology and thus the likelihood of aliens visiting us is exceedingly low.

But someone may object that these aliens could be technologically so advanced that they've been able to overcome the difficulties. That's possible, of course, but it'd be helpful to be able to give some plausible answer to two questions: What are the odds that another life supporting planet exists within our galaxy? And what are the chances that that planet gave rise to intelligent creatures who have mastered an incomprehensible (to us) technology?

My opinion is that the probabilities, when all the variables are taken into account, would be astronomically low. Anyway, Hedin has more on this topic at the link.