A Philosophical Argument for the Existence of the Soul

Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one the most prominent of contemporary philosophers. In his book, Are We Bodies Or Souls? he takes up Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul and amends it slightly to remove one of the classical objections philosophers have made to it.

The result is a succinct argument for the existence of the soul in human persons. His argument goes like this:

1. I am a substance which is thinking.
2. It is conceivable (i.e. logically possible) that while I am thinking my body is destroyed.
3. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that 'I am thinking and yet I do not exist.'
4. I am therefore a substance which, it is conceivable, can continue to exist while my body is destroyed.
5. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that a substance can lose all its parts simultaneously and yet continue to exist.
6. Therefore, I am a soul, a substance, whose only essential property is the capacity for thought.

A philosophical rule of thumb is that if a state of affairs contains a contradiction then it's said to be logically impossible. A square circle, for example, is inherently contradictory and cannot be imagined. It's therefore said to be logically impossible. If, however, a state of affairs contains no contradiction and can be imagined or conceived then it's said to be logically possible.* So, how does Swinburne's conclusion follow from the rest of his argument? According to 4. it's logically possible that I exist when my body ceases to exist, but according to 5. it's logically impossible that anything can continue to exist when every part of it is destroyed.

Therefore, there must be more to me than just my body. There must be something about me that can continue to exist even though every part of my body is destroyed.

That other part of me must be, from 1. and 2., that part of me which thinks, i.e. a soul (or mind), and which I identify as myself.

Swinburne gives a cogent defense of this argument in the book, which, though he claims it to be written for a broad audience, would be rather hard going for someone with little background in philosophy.

Nevertheless, in an age in which the reigning view on these matters is a philosophical materialism which denies the existence of a soul or mind, Swinburne's book is refreshing. * Not to go too far into the weeds on the notion of logical impossibility, there are two types of this. Strict logical impossibility occurs when a supposed state of affairs contains or entails a contradiction, e.g. a square triangle, a married bachelor, or living corpse. You cannot imagine or conceive of these. Broad logical impossibility, often called metaphysical impossibility, may not contain a contradiction and may be conceivable, but is nevertheless not capable of existing in the real world. Examples might include bringing about one's own existance, having color but not size, flying like Superman, or running a mile in zero seconds.

Slouching Toward Totalitarianism

In her magisterial 1951 work titled The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that totalitarian tyrannies grow out of the fragments of a highly atomized society comprised of lonely, alienated and isolated individuals who have lost faith in the institutions of their culture and who lack both a knowledge of, and appreciation for, their history.

Rod Dreher picks up on this theme in his book Live Not by Lies. He writes that our contemporary young, despite the superficial connectedness they may feel as avid consumers of social media, are largely unhappy and isolated to a historically unprecedented degree.

Their loneliness and ennui manifest themselves in epidemic rates of teenage depression and suicide which psychologist Jean Twenge says have placed us "on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades." Much of the deterioration in the mental well-being of those born since 2000, she claims, "can be traced to their phones."

Walk into a restaurant or any gathering place where you might find groups of young (and maybe not-so-young) people sitting together and it's not unusual to see each of them alone in their own world, staring at their phones, or wearing ear buds or head sets that exclude any meaningful interaction with others.

I've visited people in their homes who keep the television on so loud conversation is all but impossible, and, of course, lonely people congregate in night clubs where the music creates a din over which it's impossible to talk. Even in a crowd we're often functionally alone.

Dreher says that modern technology and social media are just two of the forces creating the conditions for what he calls a decadent, pre-totalitarian culture. Along with social atomization, widespread loneliness, the embrace of radical ideologies, the erosion of religious belief, and the loss of faith in our institutions leave society "vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation."

Totalitarian tyrants will do all they can to destroy a sense of community in the people they oppress because community is a support system that encourages resistance. It's much easier to control people when they lack the sense of identity that comes from belonging to something bigger than themselves.

Where in our modern society do we find community? The family is disintegrating, churches are empty, neighborhoods are populated by people who frequently move on after a few years, and during the Covid pandemic schools closed, sports teams disbanded and gatherings were restricted by the state to a couple dozen people. During the last decade it became harder than ever to feel a sense of belonging to something.

When people lack community, a sense of belonging, they'll crave the fellowship and identity that an ideological commitment provides. They'll sign on to any movement that gives them a sense of importance and fills their otherwise empty lives with meaning, even if that meaning is at bottom an illusion.

It is precisely this promise of a meaningful life that propelled the Bolshevik communists to power in an effete Russia after 1917 and enabled the rise of Hitler in a worn out Germany in the 1930s. It's at least one of the animating forces that drive young people to unite with groups like Antifa.

Could we, too, be slouching toward totalitarianism? If we think it couldn't happen here then perhaps we understand neither history nor human nature nor the parlous, fragile condition of our contemporary culture.

Are We Just Apes?

It's not uncommon to hear human beings referred to as hairless apes. We look a lot like apes, after all, and according to Darwinism apes and humans have descended from a common ape-like ancestor.

Nevertheless, neuroscientist Michael Egnor isunimpressed by the morphological similarities. According to Egnor,

We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm. It is obvious and manifest in our biological nature. We are rational animals, and our rationality is all the difference.

Human beings, Egnor argues, have mental abilities or powers, that animals simply do not.

Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man.

Nonhuman animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite.

Humans also have these same material powers, of course, but they have additional powers that are immaterial:

Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts.

A universal is an abstract concept like humanity or treeness to which particular humans or trees belong. Egnor continues:

Human beings are rational animals.

Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.

Universals can be represented in matter — the words I am writing in this post are representations of concepts — but universals cannot be instantiated in matter. I cannot put the concepts themselves on a computer screen or on a piece of paper, nor can the concepts exist physically in my brain.

Concepts, which are universals, are immaterial.

Nonhuman animals operate on the purely material plane. They experience sensations like hunger and pain, but they don't contemplate abstractions like the injustice of suffering or the meaning of their lives.

It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes, Egnor argues. It is a radical difference — an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference. It's a difference that creates the metaphysical chasm between humans and other animals.

Egnor concludes with this:

The assertion that man is an ape is self-refuting. We could not express such a concept, misguided as it is, if we were apes and not men.

Socrates

Socrates (470–399 BC) was one of the most influential philosophers in all of human history. He himself never wrote anything but his unique mode of discourse, which came to be known as the “Socratic method,” remains as one of the great teaching styles and modes of inquiry still in use today.

Dr. Paul Herrick writes a good overview of Socrates' style as well as the details of his trial and death at Philosophy News. Here are some excerpts from his discussion of the Socratic Method:

At some point around the middle of his life...Socrates became convinced that many people think they know what they are talking about when in reality they do not have a clue. He came to believe that many people, including smug experts, are in the grips of illusion. Their alleged knowledge is a mirage.

Similarly, he also saw that many believe they are doing the morally right thing when they are really only fooling themselves—their actions cannot be rationally justified.

As this realization sank in, Socrates found his life’s purpose: he would help people discover their own ignorance as a first step to attaining more realistic beliefs and values. But how to proceed?

Some people, when convinced that others are deluded, want to grab them by their collars and yell at them. Others try to force people to change their minds. Many people today believe violence is the only solution.

None of this was for Socrates. He felt so much respect for each individual—even those in the grips of illusion and moral error—that violence and intimidation were out of the question. His would be a completely different approach: he asked people questions. Not just any questions, though.

He asked questions designed to cause others to look in the mirror and challenge their own assumptions on the basis of rational and realistic standards of evidence. Questions like these: Why do I believe this? What is my evidence? Are my assumptions on this matter really true? Or am I overlooking something? Are my actions morally right? Or am I only rationalizing bad behavior?

This may not seem like such a big deal but it is. Most of us have no desire to question our beliefs about important matters like religion or politics, and when someone does question us our response is often to get defensive and to just shout louder than the other person until the exchange ends in anger.

We see a form of this when college students shout down speakers with whom they disagree and refuse to let them speak (for a couple of examples see here and here).

Such behavior is not just rude and intellectually immature, it's a signal that the shouters have no good reasons for believing what they do and deep down realize that their beliefs can only prevail if the other side is denied a hearing. The cause of truth is ill-served by such tactics, but then the thugs who engage in this behavior aren't really interested in truth in the first place.

Herrick continues:

Looking in the mirror in a Socratic way can be painful. For reasons perhaps best left to psychologists, it is easy to criticize others but it is hard to question and challenge yourself. There are intellectual hurdles as well. Which standards or criteria should we apply when we test our beliefs and values?

Socrates, by his example, stimulated a great deal of research into this question. Over the years, many criteria have been proposed, tested, and accepted as reliable guides to truth, with truth understood as correspondence with reality.

These standards are collected in one place and studied in the field of philosophy known as “logic”—the study of the principles of correct reasoning. Today we call someone whose thinking is guided by rational, realistic criteria a “critical thinker.” Our current notion of criterial, or critical, thinking grew out of the philosophy of Socrates.

So, moved by the pervasiveness of human ignorance, bias, egocentrism, and the way these shortcomings diminish the human condition, Socrates spent the rest of his life urging people to look in the mirror and examine their assumptions in the light of rational, realistic criteria as the first step to attaining real wisdom. Knowledge of your own ignorance and faults, he now believed, is a prerequisite for moral and intellectual growth.

Just as a builder must clear away brush before building a house, he would say, you must clear away ignorance before building knowledge. As this reality sank in, his conversations in the marketplace shifted from the big questions of cosmology to questions about the human condition and to that which he now believed to be the most important question of all: What is the best way to live, all things considered?

Socrates’s mission—to help others discover their own ignorance as a first step on the path to wisdom--explains why he expected honesty on the part of his interlocutors. If the other person does not answer honestly, he won’t be led to examine his own beliefs and values. And if he does not look in the mirror, he will not advance. For Socrates, honest self-examination was one of life’s most important tasks.

When our most deeply-held beliefs are at risk, when we're confronted by compelling challenges to those beliefs, honesty is often difficult. Not only are our convictions at stake but so is our pride.

It's humbling to have to acknowledge that we've been wrong about a belief we've held. We resort to all manner of diversion, obfuscation and fallacy in order to escape the conclusion our interlocutor's argument may be leading us toward. We resist it, we refuse to believe it, regardless of the price we must pay for that refusal in terms of our intellectual integrity.

There's an old ditty that captures the psychology of this well: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

Socrates himself encountered this resistance to having one's beliefs challenged and paid with his life for having discredited the certainties of very proud and vain men. You can read about what happened to him in Herrick's column at the link.

Superfandom

Note: Today's Viewpoint is a guest post from Mike Mitchell, a friend who blogs at Underground Insight:

A pitiful state of affairs is gleefully described in a recent Wall Street Journal piece by Rachel Feintzeig: “What Superfans Know That the Rest of Us Should Learn.” The gist is that many superfans can teach the rest of us how to live a fulfilling life by filling the void left by an absence of religion with obsessions for Star Wars, Taylor Swift, Disney, or Harry Potter.

As Feintzeig explains,

From the outside, it’s easy to roll our eyes at devotees of everything from Taylor Swift to ‘Star Trek.’ We deem them nerdy or frivolous, judge their costumes, the time they waste on Reddit, the money they spend on concert tickets.

What if they’ve figured out something the rest of us haven’t?

After all, so many of us lack community. Data from Cigna finds 58% of Americans are lonely. Religion is fading. Work doesn’t love us back. Maybe letting ourselves be obsessed with that highly specific and possibly weird thing we love is the answer.

She tells the story of a couple who had a Star Wars themed wedding on May the fourth, “exiting the ceremony to music from the original 1977 film, under an arch of glowing lightsabers held aloft by their guests.” Not surprisingly, the photo of the couple leaving the wedding chapel shows a wall bereft of any religious imagery behind the presiding minister (rather, galactic emperor).

Then there is, “May Naidoo, a British Ph.D. student and content creator, traveled to Japan, Paris and Chicago as part of his quest to see real-life versions of famed artworks featured in his favorite Nintendo game, ‘Animal Crossing,’” and Tara Block who was so infatuated with Harry Potter books that she got a Harry Potter tattoo and took flying broomstick lessons at a castle in England.

This made me realize that the twenty-something and otherwise businesslike man I recently saw with a Pokemon tattoo covering his forearm was much more normal than I took him to be (and here I mean “normal” in the most discouraging sense).

Under the heading “Hobbies Overtake Religion,” Feintzeig goes on to explain,

More than six in 10 Americans said hobbies or recreational activities were extremely or very important to them, according to a 2023 poll from Gallup. That’s up from 48% in 2001 and 2002. Meanwhile, the share of people who said the same about religion dropped 7 percentage points, to 58%.

One point worth noting about the difference between superfandom and religion is that religion does enable people to align their beliefs and lifestyles with what is actually true, beautiful, and just. This can be appealing for those eccentrics who have an interest in that kind of thing.

Toward the end of the article an insight is given as to why adult people choose to anesthetize themselves with infantile fandom, but the insight is given (unintentionally) in the form of an Orwellian truth inversion:

And yet joining in requires vulnerability. Fandom asks us to latch ourselves to something outside of us, to allow a person or object we don’t have control over to become part of our identities. How much easier to stay cool and removed, rather than risk having our enthusiasm batted down or betrayed.

The kind of fandom in question does not ask us to latch ourselves to anything outside our ourselves. It is pure self-indulgence, demanding nothing from a person that isn’t fun and reassuring. On the other hand, the pursuit of truth about God and real purpose is difficult and demanding. It causes tension, within one’s self and occasionally with others. And unlike God, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter will never make burdensome demands on a person’s spending habits or sex life.

Why subject one’s self to the demands of study, prayer, debate, and contemplation in pursuit of the true purpose of life when you can have a Star Wars marathon or make snacks from the Hogwarts cook book? The path out of the cave of ignorance into the light of reality is difficult, so some judge that it’s best not to take it. The super fans described in the article seem to be living illustrations of Chesterton’s famous quip that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried.

I’m all for having fun with hobbies, and I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy stories, but obsessing over these as a substitute for religion is like obsessing over the silouette of palm trees printed on a ticket to Hawaii instead of actually boarding the plane to go there. Fantasy stories are valuable because they stoke in us a desire for the ultimate realities for which those stories are sign posts. What a pititful thing it is when people are satisfied with the sign posts with no concern for the destination.

A Solution to the Mystery

The third version of Feder and Zimmer's fine-tuning argument for intelligent design and thus for the existence of an intelligent designer is essentially an inference to the best explanation for the apparent arbitrariness of the 25 fundamental constants that regulate the physics of our universe.

The fact that these constants evidently could have had any value but had to have the precise values that they do if a life-sustaining universe would be possible is a mystery that has baffled scientists for over a century.

Richard Feynman spoke about this in 1985. He picks out just one constant, called the coupling constant - which is related to the force between two bodies subject to gravitational or electrostatic attraction or repulsion - and marvels at its seeming randomness:

There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant…It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won’t recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.)

Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It’s one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.

You might say the “hand of God” wrote that number, and “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.” We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don’t know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!

Feder and Zimmer add,

Feynman’s great mystery of the constants is: How could 25 seemingly arbitrary numbers truly be fundamental? And if they aren’t fundamental, how could physicists possibly find a deeper theory that would explain the values of the constants?

Notice that the mystery of the constants has absolutely nothing to do with fine-tuning, but is rather an intrinsic mystery that lies at the heart of physicists’ dream of discovering the most fundamental reality of the universe.

Given this conceptual backdrop, we can see how the discovery of fine-tuning is scientific knowledge — it provides a significant clue about the constants. We now know that the constants aren’t truly arbitrary but are fine-tuned in order to bring about a complex, ordered, and structured universe.

Here I have a quibble. I think it's not quite correct to word this the way the authors did. To say that scientists know that the constants "are fine-tuned in order to bring about a complex, ordered, and structured universe" seems to assume that creation of a universe like ours is the reason the constants are fine-tuned. I think there are probably a lot of scientists who would deny that the constants were purposefully selected.

It might be better to say that the fine-tuning of the constants, however it came about, is such that a life-permitting universe is possible. At any rate, Feder and Zimmer then argue that intelligent agency is the best explanation for this phenomenon: We can now ask: What does the scientific discovery of fine-tuning tell us about the cause of the constants?

Using the definition of intelligence as the ability to select one option from among many for the purpose of achieving a particular objective, the straightforward conclusion is that constants were selected by an intelligent cause for the purpose of bringing about a universe with atoms, molecules, planets, life, stars, and galaxies.

The authors go on, then, to discuss weaknesses and strengths of this version of the fine-tuning argument for intelligent design of the universe. Whether one finds their last version more compelling than the elimination formulation or the version based on probabilities, it seems to me that taken together the three of them add up to a very powerful argument for the conclusion that the universe is intelligently engineered and that it's therefore much more likely that there's an enormously capable Mind behind it all than that it's just an incredibly fortuitous fluke of nature.

The Probability Argument for the Intelligent Design of the Universe

Continuing our discussion of the series of articles by Elie Feder and Aaron Zimmer on the various formulations of the argument for design of the universe based on cosmic fine-tuning, we turn today to the authors' summary of the formulation based on probabilities.

Feder and Zimmer use philosopher/physicist Robin Collins's version as representative of this approach. Collins's argument is succinct and relies on what he calls the Prime Principle of Confirmation which states that “whenever we are considering two competing hypotheses, an observation counts as evidence in favor of the hypothesis under which the observation has the highest probability (or is the least improbable).”

In other words, we should always favor the hypothesis which is most probable over competitors that are less probable. Thus, Feder and Zimmer write:

• Premise 1. The existence of the fine-tuning is not improbable under theism.
• Premise 2. The existence of the fine-tuning is very improbable under the atheistic single universe hypothesis.
• Conclusion: From premises (1) and (2) and the prime principle of confirmation, it follows that the fine-tuning data provides strong evidence in favor of the design hypothesis over the atheistic single-universe hypothesis.

His [Collins's] justification for premise 1 is that “since God is an all good being, and it is good for intelligent, conscious beings to exist, it is not surprising or improbable that God would create a world that could support intelligent life.”

His justification for premise 2 is the incredibly small likelihood of the constants having the proper values necessary by chance alone. Putting these together, he argues that fine-tuning strongly supports the hypothesis that an intelligent cause set the values of the constants.

Feder and Zimmer go on to mention a few difficulties:

Since we don’t know the probability distribution of each constant, it would seem that we can’t truly compute the relevant probabilities. This problem is addressed by Collins, Barnes, and multiverse scientists (who believe that the constants are set by chance).

They use plausible upper and lower bounds for the constants and then assume the probability distribution for the constants is linear. Though these seem to be reasonable assumptions, the objection still carries some weight.

The second problem they discuss seems to me to be less weighty:

A second problem with this formulation is, do we really know the probability that God would want to create a complex universe with intelligent, conscious, moral agents?

While this approach only needs the supposition that this probability is larger than the vanishingly small probability of fine-tuning assuming no intelligent cause, it could nevertheless be argued that God’s will is inscrutable and positing any knowledge about what God should do is engaging in a form of “divine psychology.”

Intelligent design theorists could obviate this difficulty, however, by restating the version of the argument given above this way:

• Premise 1. The existence of the fine-tuning is not improbable under the hypothesis that the universe is intentionally designed.
• Premise 2. The existence of the fine-tuning is very improbable under the naturalistic single universe hypothesis.
• Conclusion: From premises (1) and (2) and the prime principle of confirmation, it follows that the fine-tuning data provides strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the universe is intelligently designed.

By not specifying the designer the argument avoids the theological problems Feder and Zimmer cite. To get an idea of the staggering significance of a fine-tuned universe I suggest this post and this video:

Next time we'll look at the third version of the argument for design based on fine-tuning. It's the argument that Feder and Zimmer themselves favor.

The Elimination Argument for Intelligent Design of the Universe

Yesterday I began a discussion on the series of articles on Evolution News by Elie Feder and Aaron Zimmer on the three formulations that the Fine-Tuning argument for the existence of intelligent design of the universe takes. In the second article in the series the authors explain the argument by elimination popularized by philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig.

Craig lists three live possibilities for the fine-tuning of the constants, forces, and parameters of the universe: He argues that this cosmic fine-tuning is due either physical necessity, chance, or design.

Feder and Zimmer write:

The first possible explanation for fine-tuning is physical necessity. This means that either the constants are necessary, brute facts of reality or that they deterministically derive from a deeper necessary law of physics.

As physical necessity is not a very good theory to begin with (it doesn’t seem plausible that physicists will be able to derive the precise values from a deeper theory) and, more importantly, it doesn’t explain why the constants are fine-tuned (this just remains an immense coincidence), it’s reasonable to discard physical necessity as an explanation of fine-tuning.

In other words, there doesn't appear to be any reason why the constants have to have the values they do. Nothing necessitates those values. The second possibility in Craig's schema is chance about which they say this:

The second possible explanation for fine-tuning is chance. If there is only one universe, physicists calculate that it would be incredibly unlikely that the values of the constants would be in the small range that would allow our complex universe to exist. Chance only becomes plausible if there are a tremendous number of alternate universes with different values of the constants — a multiverse.

They point out that the multiverse hypothesis is beset by numerous difficulties among which is that it's "an untestable speculative theory of an infinite number of observable universes [which] is a clear deviation from the tried-and-true scientific method." Moreover, it's an extraordinarily unparsimonious idea. Why postulate an infinity of unobservable worlds to explain why our world has just the properties it does when postulating a single intelligent agent would suffice?

The elimination of physical necessity and chance leaves intelligent agency as the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe since it's our uniform experience that wherever we find fine-tuning it's always the product of a mind. The only reason to exclude mind as the source of the fine-tuning we see in the universe is an apriori prejudice against any non-physical explanation, but apriori prejudices should be excluded by all open-minded thinkers.

They conclude the piece with a few seemingly minor criticisms of Craig's argument which you're invited to check out for yourself.

Tomorrow we'll look at the argument for fine-tuning based on probability. Meanwhile, if you didn't watch the video on Craig's elimination argument at yesterday's post I invite you to watch it. It's only five minutes long.

Three Versions of the Fine-Tuning Argument for the Intelligent Design of the Universe

Elie Feder and Aaron Zimmer have a four-part series of short columns at Evolution News in which they lay out their reasons for thinking that the Fine-Tuning of the cosmos is the strongest argument for the existence of God. They base their argument on the seemingly arbitrary nature of the 25 constants that govern everything from the gravitional pull of the sun to the formation of atoms. They write:

For example, we can quantify the strength of the attraction caused by gravity or the strength of the repulsion caused by electromagnetism. These strengths, together with other quantities built into the laws of nature, are expressed by 25 or so fixed numbers called the fundamental constants of nature.

For example, physicists have made many measurements and determined that the electromagnetic force between any two electrons is about 1042 times stronger than the gravitational force between them; or, that every electron has a mass of 9.109×10−31 kg.

What determines these fixed values? No one knows. That’s why they’re called fundamental constants. Physicists can’t derive them from anything else — they simply measure them.

Would it matter if the values of the constants were different? That’s where fine-tuning comes in.

Scientists have discovered that for many of these constants, if they were changed even a small amount (sometimes a few percent bigger or smaller), the complex universe as we know it wouldn’t exist. In other words, without the constants being precisely fine-tuned, there would only be fundamental particles — they wouldn’t come together to form atoms, molecules, planets, stars, galaxies, or life.

In the first installment Feder and Zimmer summarize three ways the fine-tuning argument has been formulated:

The difference between the three formulations is how you get from the problem presented by fine-tuning, something largely accepted by leading physicists, to the conclusion that their values were set by an intelligent cause.

The first approach to fine-tuning (by William Lane Craig) argues by elimination: after excluding all poor explanations for fine-tuning, the only reasonable explanation that remains is an intelligent cause. The second approach to fine-tuning (by Robin Collins, Luke Barnes, and others) argues from probabilities: it’s far more probable that the fine-tuned values of the constants were set by an intelligent cause than by a naturalistic theory.

The third approach to fine-tuning (by Elie Feder and Aaron Zimmer) argues that fine-tuning isn’t the problem but is the clue to solving the great mystery of the constants — and this solution points directly to an intelligent cause.

Over the next couple of days we'll look at what Feder and Zimmer have to say about each of these versions of the fine-tuning argument. Meanwhile, you can get an idea of what they mean by William Lane Craig's elimination version by watching this short video:

Five Things Naturalistic Science Can't Explain

In his book Scientism and Secularism, philosopher J.P.Moreland lists and discusses five phenomena that naturalistic science cannot account for nor explain but which fit comfortably into a theistic worldview. The five are these:

1. The Origin of the Universe: That the universe had a beginning is the consensus view among cosmologists, but if it had a beginning what could have caused it. If the universe encompasses all of space, time and mass-energy then all of this exists only when the universe comes into being, which means that the universe came into being out of nothing. How? The answer to this question lies outside the purview of science.

2. The Origin of the Laws of Physics: As with the universe in general, the fundamental laws of physics exist only insofar as the universe does. Apart from a universe there are no such laws. An explanation of why just these laws exist and have the properties that they do is not an explanation that science is equipped to provide. Science can only tell us what the laws are and what they entail. It can't tell us why they are.

3. The Fine-Tuning of the Cosmos: As we've written on VP numerous times in the past the fundamental forces, parameters and constants which form the fabric of the universe are calibrated to unimaginably precise values such that an infinitesimally tiny deviation in the settings of any one of several dozen examples would make either the existence of the universe impossible or the existence of any kind of significant life impossible. Possible explanations for this extraordinary state of affairs, such as the multiverse hypothesis, even if credible, are metaphysical conjectures which lie outside the realm of science.

4. The Origin of Consciousness: Mental states such as holding a belief, understanding a joke, doubting a proposition, feeling pain, sensing red, and recognizing the meaning of a text are phenomena which defy a scientific explanation. On the scientific view there was nothing but atoms, molecules and chemical compounds for eons of time until one day a completely different phenomenon, consciousness, emerged. How does physical matter produce conscious experience? Science has no plausible answer.

5. The Existence of Objective Moral Laws: Science can tell us what is the case in the natural world, but it cannot tell us what ought to be the case. It can explain why people have subjective moral sentiments, perhaps, but it cannot explain how objective moral duties could arise, where they would've come from, why they're binding upon us, and so on. Indeed, any such explanation, even were one possible on naturalism, would be philosophical, not scientific.

These five phenomena come from Moreland's book, but the summaries of them are mine. Moreland's treatment of each is much more detailed than what I've provided here, and he argues that each of these is more compatible with a theistic ontology than any of them are with naturalism.

I enthusiastically recommend his book to anyone interested in the philosophy of science, the explanatory limits of science, and/or the interface of science and theism.

Epistemological Perversity

One of the most distressing idiosyncrasies of our post modern era is the loss of belief in objective truth.

To say that truth is objective is to say that the truth doesn't depend upon what we think about it, whether we like it, or how we feel. It's independent of us.

Today, however, we often hear people say things like, "We live in a post-fact world" or "What's true for you isn't true for me," or "Truth is whatever works."

Truth, to paraphrase the late postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty, is nothing more than whatever people will let you get away with saying.

Thus, our politicians don't see themselves as doing something so crude as lying when they tell us that men can be women, or that a child in the womb is not "alive," or that 3.5 trillion dollars in spending will cost nothing. As long as their peer group will let them get away with it - and the media is certainly eager to help them promote the nonsense - then their claims are true.

The New York Times' 1619 Project can be riddled with historical errors but if the errors are your truth, well, then, they're true.

Columnist Dan Henninger wrote about this phenomenon in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) some time ago:

Mr. Biden recently said: “Every time I hear, ‘This (his 3.5 trillion dollar spending bill) is going to cost A, B, C or D,’ the truth is, based on the commitment that I made, it’s going to cost nothing.” .... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who, while repeating it days later, held up her hand to form a zero. Some journalists then wrote elaborate explanations of how Mr. Biden was correct that his trillions in new spending would “cost nothing.”

All the time now, one hears people say, “I don’t know what’s going on anymore.” Or: “Maybe it’s me, but I just don’t get it.” They don’t mean only in Washington. They mean everything. We’re in a crisis of consciousness.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that we're in a crisis of epistemological perversity. We've adopted the Nietzschean notion that truth is just a matter of one's perspective. Different people look at things differently and thus have different truths, we think, and the advantage of wielding power is that it enables one to impose his or her particular perspective on everyone else.

Here are some more examples provided by Henninger:

Washington ... has become a round-the-clock supplier of manufactured realities. Many Americans, for instance, watch scenes on television of thousands of migrants crossing the Rio Grande River into the United States. Nonetheless, Mr. Biden’s secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, says the border is “closed” and “no less secure than previously.”

Mr. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, said in August the evacuation of Kabul couldn’t be called “anything but a success.” Ms. Psaki’s skill at reordering reality for Mr. Biden is mesmerizing, and I say without irony that she will be seen as an important figure in the transformation from believing what is real to believing what we’re told is real.

Reality resets have become commonplace. In Chicago some days ago, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx declined to prosecute any of the gang members who staged a broad-daylight shootout in a residential neighborhood. Among the reasons her office gave for not bringing charges was that the gangs were engaged in consensual “mutual combat,” like in the movie “Fight Club.”

The relevant point here is that in our time more and more people—and not just in politics—think they can say anything. We’re living in a Peter Pan world: “You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.” The credibility cost is zero.

I wonder how many of the folks who scoff at the idea of objective facts, who believe that reality is whatever feels right to them, would buy a car from, or trust their finances to, someone who shares that epistemological perversity with them.

When the masses of people come to believe that truth is whatever feels right to them, whatever fits their own preconceived notions of the way things are or should be, then our society will be ripe for the ascension to power of any totalitarian tyrant who can most effectively appeal to our biases and prejudices.

The conviction that truth is objective is a prophylactic against the virus of tyranny. The erosion of that conviction bodes ill for our future.

Not Voting for Trump

A friend sent me this piece by an unknown author, and I thought I'd share it on Viewpoint because it expresses how a lot of Trump voters feel, especially those who voted for someone other than Trump in the primary round. I've edited it somewhat:

That moment when someone says, "I can't believe you would vote for Trump.” I simply reply, “I'm not voting for Trump.”

I'm voting for the First Amendment and freedom of speech and religion.
I'm voting for the Second Amendment and my right to defend my life and my family.
I'm voting for the next Supreme Court Justice(s) to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I’m voting for the continued appointment of Federal Judges who respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
I'm voting for freedom and against communism and socialism.
I'm voting for reducing inflation and the continued growth of my retirement.
I'm voting for a return of our troops from foreign countries and the end of America’s involvement in foreign conflicts.
I'm voting for the police to be funded and respected once again and for keeping criminals off of our streets.
I'm voting for keeping our jobs in America and not outsourced all over the world. I want goods made in the USA.
I'm voting for secure borders and for legal immigration.
I'm voting for doing away with all of the freebies given to people who broke the law to get here while the needs of American citizens often go unmet.
I'm voting for the military and the veterans who fought for this country to give the American people their freedoms.
I'm voting for the unborn babies who have a right to live.
I'm voting for peace in the Middle East.
I'm voting for those victimized by sex trafficking and other forms of human trafficking.
I'm voting for the right to speak my opinion and not be censored.
I'm voting for teaching our children basic academic disciplines instead of indoctrinating them into Woke ideology.
I'm not just voting for a person. I'm voting for the future of my children and my country, and I believe that Trump and Vance are the best means by which all of the above gets accomplished.

Maybe the person who wrote this is wrong. Maybe Harris and Walz are more likely to deliver on these desiderata than are Trump and Vance, but, if so, I wish the public would be shown what in the record of the Democratic candidates justifies confidence that that is so.

Forcing Others to Think Like You

In the last decade or so our culture has been plagued by people who think it their duty to compel uniformity of thought and speech and to "cancel" anyone who deviates from what these folks believe to be acceptable.

Attempts to control speech are essentially attempts to control thought and anyone who values the freedom of either speech or thought should be appalled by this.

In Louis Menand's 2002 best-seller titled The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual history of 19th century America, there's a passage on Civil War veteran and future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that's apposite to our current condition.

Menand wrote:

The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. This is a proposition that has an easy application and a difficult one. The easy application is to ideologues, dogmatists, and bullies - people who think their rightness justifies them in imposing on anyone who does not happen to subscribe to their particular ideology, dogma, or notion or turf.

If the conviction of rightness is powerful enough, resistance to it will be met, sooner or later, by force. There are people like this in every sphere of life, and it is natural to feel that the world would be a better place without them.

Those who seek to punish those with whom they disagree, either economically, or through social media or through the courts, are precisely the sort of people Menand has in view in this passage. Later in life Holmes wrote that he detests a man who "knows that he knows," and, Menand continues,

[Holmes] had a knee-jerk suspicion of causes. He regarded them as attempts to compel one group of human beings to conform to some other group's idea of the good, and he could see no authority for such attempts greater than the other group's certainty that it knew what was best. "Some kind of despotism is at the bottom of seeking for change," he wrote in a letter...

By this Holmes meant seeking to compel others to change, to compel others to accept one's own point of view and certainties. Menand quotes Holmes:

I don't care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different than what they do - even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.

There's much here for people like our contemporary censors who run the social media giants Google, Facebook and (formerly) Twitter - and who censor political figures they dislike and ban political or religious speech and ideas of which they disapprove - to take to heart.

The Ideological Landscape

An important election is about twelve weeks away and we'll probably be hearing a lot of talk about liberals and conservatives, socialists and libertarians. Unfortunately for those new to the political scene or just casual observers the terms are rarely defined so their meanings are often poorly understood.

I thought it might be helpful to correct this lack of understanding by rerunning a post (slightly edited) that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and which explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean.

This post will try to correct that omission so that as we get closer to the election readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

For starters, let's define a political ideology as the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. It's a kind of political worldview. All the terms mentioned above denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different understanding of the role of government in our lives and a different understanding of the rights citizens possess vis a vis the state.

I have one quibble, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate or they morph into communism or fascism.

With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace.

They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. The late Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is a well-known libertarian novelist.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to lean toward libertarianism in some respects, particularly in their belief in free markets, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the federal government in Washington and giving it back to the states and localities.

They're reluctant to change the way things are done unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is intended to address.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are judicial conservatives.

Conservatives also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis is a contemporary conservative politician, and many of the commentators on the Fox News Network are conservatives.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better.

They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan would be an example of a moderate journalist.

In my opinion, Donald Trump falls in this slot although, as I’ll note a bit further on, he’s often hard to categorize. Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today.

They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those constraints. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes in order to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Joe Biden presented himself as a liberal in his 2020 campaign although he moved considerably further to the left during his presidency.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like CNN and MSNBC. Progressives often tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress.

Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would probably consider themselves to be progressives.

Socialism: As suggested in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in an earlier presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to transfer wealth to poorer communities and reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor.

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Vice-president Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are examples contemporary socialists and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party).

Fascism is socialist in that while fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are, unwittingly perhaps, adopting fascistic tactics.

Paradoxically, so is Antifa, which is shorthand for "anti-fascist."

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything.

Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it traditionally didn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today, though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea may be the only thoroughly communist nation left.

Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

Senator Bernie Sanders denies being a communist but he has throughout his life been sympathetic to communist governments, even spending his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union.

Moreover, many of those who would label themselves progressives or socialists are said by their detractors to be sympathetic to communist principles.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading over the next month and a half.

Are You Better Off Today Than Four Years Ago?

Got this in my inbox today:

I'm not sure how the inflation rate was calculated for this graphic, but I suppose the Trump figure is the sum of the annual rates over the four years of his presidency and the Biden figure is the sum of the annual rates over the four years of his presidency.

In any case, it's difficult to see how anyone could think that the economy is in better shape today than it was four years ago.

Gratuitous Beauty

One characteristic of living things that has thrilled everyone who has ever considered it is the astonishing level of beauty they exhibit. Consider, as an example, this bird of paradise:

or this blue dachnis:

Why are living things like birds and butterflies so beautiful? Darwin thought that females selected mates based on their fitness and that this sex selection caused beauty to evolve as a by-product. This is still the reigning explanation today (although it doesn't explain the beauty of flowers), but as an article by Adrian Barnett at New Scientist explains, not everyone is on board with this explanation, maybe not even Darwin himself. Here's an excerpt:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail… makes me sick,” wrote Darwin, worrying about how structures we consider beautiful might come to exist in nature. The view nowadays is that ornaments such as the peacock’s stunning train, the splendid plumes of birds of paradise, bowerbirds’ love nests, deer antlers, fins on guppies and just about everything to do with the mandarin goby are indications of male quality.

In such species, females choose males with features that indicate resistance to parasites (shapes go wonky, colours go flat if a male isn’t immunologically buff) or skill at foraging (antlers need lots of calcium, bowers lots of time).

But in other cases, the evolutionary handicap principle applies, and the fact it’s hard to stay alive while possessing a huge or brightly coloured attraction becomes the reason for the visual pizzazz. And when this process occasionally goes a bit mad, and ever bigger or brasher becomes synonymous with ever better, then the object of female fixation undergoes runaway selection until physiology or predation steps in to set limits.

What unites these explanations is that they are all generally credited to Darwin and his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Here, biologists say, having set out his adaptationist stall in On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed female choice as the driving force behind much of the animal world’s visual exuberance.

And then along comes Richard Prum to tell you there’s more to it than that. Prum is an ornithology professor at Yale University and a world authority on manakins, a group of sparrow-sized birds whose dazzling males perform mate-attracting gymnastics on branches in the understories of Central and South American forests.

Years of watching the males carry on until they nearly collapsed convinced him that much of the selection is linked to nothing except a female love of beauty itself, that the only force pushing things forward is female appreciation. This, he says, has nothing to do with functionality: it is pure aesthetic evolution, with “the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty”.(emphasis mine)

As Prum recounts, this idea has not found the greatest favour in academic circles. But, as he makes plain, he’s not alone. Once again, it seems Darwin got there first, writing in Descent that “the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose”. The problem is, it seems, that we all think we know Darwin.

In fact, few of us go back to the original, instead taking for granted what other people say he said. In this case, it seems to have created a bit of validation by wish fulfilment: Darwin’s views on sexual selection, Prum says, have been “laundered, re-tailored and cleaned-up for ideological purity”.

The difficulty here, at least for me, is that it doesn't explain why animals would have developed a sense of beauty in the first place. Pair-bonding and reproduction certainly don't require it, obviously, since many organisms, including humans it must be said, successfully reproduce without benefit of physical attractiveness.

So why would some organisms evolve a dependence upon it, and what is it in the organism's genotype that governs this aesthetic sense?

Could it be that animals, or at least some of them, are intelligently designed to just delight in beauty?

Why You Should Vote Democratic

Evidently, it has come to this. Could it be that the best candidate to lead our country for the next four years is a narcissistic septuagenarian with the emotional maturity of a thirteen year-old? Well, what's the alternative?

If you wish to be governed by people ...

• who propped up a feeble-bodied, feeble-minded man whose finger was on the nuclear trigger, who intentionally hid this man's debility from us in order to hold on to their own power and who claim he's fit to serve as president for four more months but not for four more years;
• who have allowed fentanyl, potential rapists, murderers, and terrorists to continue to pour across our borders almost completely unchecked;
• who believe men can get pregnant, who want to put tampons in men's restrooms, who demand that men be able to compete against your daughters in sports and share locker rooms and showers with them;
• who want to make pedophilia just another sexual orientation, who think it's a positive good that gender-confused children are chemically and genitally mutilated and/or exposed to men flouncing around in women's clothing shaking their male genitalia in the face of children at "Drag Queen Story Hours;"
• who think it's a positive good to allow, even celebrate, unborn children being killed up to the moment of birth and perhaps even after;
• who think it's proper to mobilize federal law enforcement and the judiciary against political enemies; who think it's good for a president to flout Supreme Court rulings and weaponize the judicial system and law enforcement to harass and intimidate everyday citizens - concerned parents at school board meetings, pro-life advocates, grandmothers praying at the Capitol on January 6th, and political critics like Tulsi Gabbard while letting street criminals off with a slap on the wrist;
• who think it's a good thing that our energy production be curtailed making us more dependent again on foreign oil, and forced to drive electric cars that few people want;
• who turn a blind eye to Christians and Jews being harassed and threatened in the courts and on our campuses;
• who think you should need an ID for almost everything you do in life, including getting into their campaign rallies, but that it's bigoted to require an ID to vote, and who think non-citizens should have the right to vote;
• who want to take billions of dollars from people who never had anything to do with slavery or Jim Crow and give it to people who never experienced either of these themselves;
• who think our Afghanistan pullout was a great success, that hamstringing both Ukraine and Israel is good foreign policy;
• who think more racial division is somehow good for the country, and that DEI and Critical Race Theory will somehow unite us, and who raised money to bail out rioters who did millions of dollars in property damage in the wake of George Floyd's death;

Then by all means you should vote Democratic this November.

Rare Earth

An article at Salvo (subscription required) drives a spike into the notion that the galaxy, and perhaps the universe, are filled with habitable planets and that intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos is an inevitability.

The article, by astronomer Hugh Ross, observes that the conviction that there simply must be life out there somewhere and that our earth is not unique in being fit for sustaining life is based on four assumptions:

1. The density and kinds of planets throughout our galaxy and all other galaxies in the universe are roughly the same as what we observe in the vicinity of our solar system.
2. About 20 percent of all planets are habitable.
3. Life inevitably will arise on all habitable planets.
4. The probability of a technologically advanced civilization arising from simple life-forms is better than one chance in 10 billion.

Each of these assumptions, especially #3, is deeply problematic, but Ross focusses in this article on #2.

The belief that 20% of all planets are habitable is based on the fact that of the 3000+ planets discovered so far, 20% of them lie at a distance from their star that would permit water to exist in the liquid state. Since water is a necessary condition for life, it's assumed that these planets could sustain living things.

Ross points out, however, that though water is a necessary condition for life, it's not a sufficient condition. There are, in fact, nine different "habitable zones" and all nine must overlap in order for life to exist on a planet.

In addition to the water habitable zone there are also the following:

1. Ultraviolet habitable zone
2. Photosynthetic habitable zone
3. Ozone habitable zone
4. Planetary rotation rate habitable zone
5. Planetary obliquity habitable zone
6. Tidal habitable zone
7. Astrosphere habitable zone
8. Electric wind habitable zone

Ross explains each of these zones in his recently released book Improbable Planet, but in the Salvo article he simply observes that:

Typically, these zones do not overlap. For example, the distance a planet must be from its host star so that it receives enough ultraviolet radiation to enable the synthesis of many life-essential compounds, but not so much as to kill living things, is rarely the same distance that a planet must be from its host star for liquid water to possibly exist on its surface.

For 97 percent of all stars, the liquid water habitable zone does not overlap the ultraviolet habitable zone.

Thus,

A planet is a true candidate for habitability only if it simultaneously resides in all nine habitable zones....So far, astronomers have measured the characteristics of 3,484 planets. Only one of all these 3,484 planets resides in all nine known habitable zones. That one is Earth.

For all we know there may be other habitable zones in addition to these nine, but there are in any case several conclusions to be drawn from the information Ross provides us. First, the principle of mediocrity - the principle, held by many naturalistic scientists, that the earth is not exceptional in any significant way - is ludicrous.

Second, the notion that residence of a planet in the water habitable zone is sufficient to justify hopes that life could exist on that planet is naive.

When the necessity for all nine habitable zones overlapping is combined with the dozens of other parameters that any planet must possess in order to be suitable for life suggests that life-sustaining planets are probably extremely rare.

In fact, if it turns out that such planets are not rare that finding in itself would be so astonishing as to point to intelligent, purposeful engineering of the universe.

The Tyranny of Crowds

Robert Kaplan, writing for the Wall Street Journal, discusses a 1960 book by a scholar named Elias Canetti who, Kaplan says, "may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years."

The book is titled Crowds and Power, and it discusses among other things the role of technology in accelerating the decline of the West.

Kaplan points out that the mass movements of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, would've been impossible without the technological advances that made mass communication possible:

It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.

Kaplan then notes that,

The mass ideologies of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, represented a profound abasement of reason. Yet those ideologies reveal more than we’d like to admit about our own political extremes....Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity.

In addition to Nazism and communism Kaplan might have added Islamism. In any case, condemning others, destroying others, compensates for one's own inadequacies and spiritual impoverishment. It fulfills one's need for power, self-importance, self-righteousness, and purpose. It's a need that the individual is unable, by himself, to gratify but which can be satisfied by one's participation in "the crowd."

Here's Kaplan:

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.

Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”

There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own.

Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology — first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook — has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.

Social media amplifies the individual's sense of power. It amplifies all the worst characteristics of crowds (or mobs) which no longer need to be comprised of people physically present to each other as they did in the previous century. By folding solitary persons into a like-minded mass of anonymous individuals modern social media enables the otherwise impotent individual to slake his thirst for significance and meaning.

It also enables him to manifest his bitterness and vent his hatreds in politically effective ways.

Kaplan again:

There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.

But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies.

In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.

The need to parade one's own "virtue" is a major impetus behind "cancel culture." To condemn the sins of others, to humiliate them for their transgressions, is a means of drawing attention to one's own moral superiority. Social media mobs offer unprecedented opportunities for moral preening.

The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.

This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in the introduction to his book The Dying Citizen:

...everything that we once thought was so strong, so familiar, and so reassuring about America has been dissipating for some time....Contemporary events have reminded Americans that their citizenship is fragile and teetering on the abyss....

If we soon tumble over the edge of that abyss it'll be hate-filled crowds of shrivelled souls on social media who'll be largely responsible.

What's the Difference?

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, but his explanation also just pushes the problem back a step or two, as we'll see:

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.

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 - aliens which seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace, but it leaves unanswered the question how this advanced technological civilization came to be. Are these superintelligent, superpowerful designers self-existent creatures like the Judeo-Christian God? If so what's the difference between these beings and God?

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.

So why the 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 positing unobservable aliens 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 but who still requires an explanation for its existence, and a necessarily existing God who does the same?

It seems that a scientist can offer any explanation for the existence of the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. It seems, too, that scientists have great difficulty escaping the need for a cosmic designer, but they steadfastly refuse to allow that the designer is the God of theism. We might well ask what lies behind their obduracy.

The Argument Clinic

Why is it that we can't have disagreements about politics, religion, whether to get vaccinated or not, climate change, evolution or a host of other topics without people losing their tempers, and not uncommonly, their minds? Why is it that disagreements ruin friendships and split families?

I know of one married couple who divorced over a political disagreement, and I'm sure there are other couples who've experienced serious tension in their marriage over politics and/or religion.

It seems that it'd be good for those of us who enjoy the to and fro of engaging with friends, family and acquaintances around ideas that are important to us to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling, and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are discussing. A winsome approach, full of humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with polemical rabbit punches.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we love the person with whom we're engaged in conversation than that we "win" an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing the discussion under those circumstances anyway?

If we can love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining those views a serious hearing.

Political, philosophical and religious differences are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Folks on social media often don't treat each other that way, but we should.

It's also important to remember that an argument is not a shouting match or an insult fest. An argument is simply an attempt to defend what one believes to be the truth of some matter by putting forth reasons for believing it and countering objections.

If doing this devolves into people yelling at each other then it's no longer an argument, it's a quarrel or a verbal brawl.

Anyway, writing this post brought to mind an old Monty Python skit titled The Argument Clinic. It's pretty funny:

How Does the Brain Do It?

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something non-physical left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

Critiquing Christian Nationalism

With an election approaching, and with Donald Trump's support among evangelical Christians seeming to be inexplicably high, both Christian and non-Christian writers are again trotting out their criticisms of what's been called "Christian Nationalism" or "White Christian Nationalism." I responded to one example of this criticism in the journal Commonweal back in 2019, and thought I'd rerun the response todaay for readers who might not be clear as to what they should think about these criticisms: The journal Commonweal has published an open letter ostensibly in response to a similar manifesto which appeared in the March issue of First Things. Commonweal so strongly agreed with the letter that they chose to run it even though their staff was not involved in its composition.

At any rate, the signatories are concerned by a "disturbing rise of nationalism, especially among some Christians, in the United States" which they espy in the First Things missive.

It's hard to say what in the First Things piece was so objectionable, but apparently there was enough there to animate the letter published by Commonweal and from which the following excerpts are lifted. I'd like to offer some critical reflections on the excerpts and will begin in the middle of the letter where the authors contrast nationalism with patriotism:

To be clear, nationalism is not the same as patriotism. Nationalism forges political belonging out of religious, ethnic, and racial identities, loyalties intended to precede and supersede law. Patriotism, by contrast, is love of the laws and loyalty to them over leader or party. Such nationalism is not only politically dangerous but reflects profound theological errors that threaten the integrity of Christian faith. It damages the love of neighbor and betrays Christ.

This seems a tendentious definition of nationalism. I would suggest instead that nationalism "forges political belonging" out of a shared national identity. As such it seems to me to be both salutary and innocuous, but having said that, what seems to be happening in this country is more in line with the authors' definition of patriotism. That is, what we're seeing unfold is a frustration with the failure of our political leaders to uphold the laws of the land, especially with respect to immigration, despite a patriotic desire on the part of many Americans to remain faithful to those laws, a desire that transcends party affiliation.

American Christians now face a moment whose deadly violence has brought such analogies to mind. Again we watch as demagogues demonize vulnerable minorities as infesting vermin or invading forces who weaken the nation and must be removed.

Who demonized vulnerable minorities as "infesting vermin?" It would be very helpful if the authors would quote the relevant claims rather than tacitly expecting us to simply trust them to have quoted the "demagogues" correctly. And why is it inaccurate to characterize tens of thousands of people storming across our borders illegally as an "invasion?"

Without answers to these questions the above paragraph is completely unhelpful.

Again we watch as fellow Christians weigh whether to fuse their faith with nationalist and ethno-nationalist politics in order to strengthen their cultural footing. Again ethnic majorities confuse their political bloc with Christianity itself.

This may in fact be happening although to what extent it's happening is certainly unclear. Even so, the authors are correct to deplore anyone confusing Christianity with a particular political party. The disconcerting thing about this concern, however, is that liberal Christians, like those in the black church and those on staff at journals like Sojourners and Commonweal have been acting like the religious arm of the Democratic party for decades and other liberal Christians have been indifferent or even supportive of their efforts. How is this significantly different from the complaint voiced in the preceding paragraph?

It seems that it's only when conservative Christians start to confuse politics and the gospel that folks like the letter-signers become alarmed.

Then follow five aspects of what the signatories perceive to characterize our present moment and to which they express their disapprobation:

1. We reject the pretensions of nationalism to usurp our highest loyalties. National identity has no bearing on the debts of love we owe other sons and daughters of God. Created in the image and likeness of God, all human beings are our neighbors regardless of citizenship status.

True enough, but how is insistence upon border security and an orderly process of immigration unloving? The signatories don't say. One wonders whether they themselves lock the doors to their homes and cars when they leave them or whether they lovingly welcome anyone who wishes to avail themselves of their houses and vehicles to do so whenever they please.

2. We reject nationalism’s tendency to homogenize and narrow the church to a single ethnos. The church cannot be itself unless filled with disciples “from all nations” (panta ta ethné, Matthew 28:19). Cities, states, and nations have borders; the church never does. If the church is not ethnically plural, it is not the church, which requires a diversity of tongues out of obedience to the Lord.

Why this appears in this manifesto is a head-scratcher. To the extent that there's anything non-trivial here who disagrees with it?

3. We reject the xenophobia and racism of many forms of ethno-nationalism, explicit and implicit, as grave sins against God the Creator. Violence done against the bodies of marginalized people is violence done against the body of Christ. Indifference to the suffering of orphans, refugees, and prisoners is indifference to Jesus Christ and his cross. White supremacist ideology is the work of the anti-Christ.

Yes, but if the authors are going to suggest that white supremacy is infecting the Church they need to do more than simply assert it. They need to offer some supporting evidence.

Of course, there are white supremacists outside the Church, just as there are black supremacists, and like the black variety some of the whites are horribly virulent, but do the authors mean to imply that President Trump is among them? On what basis do they make this implication? Is it based on the fact that he wants our laws to be enforced and our borders secured? Does that make him a white supremacist? If so, he's got quite a lot of company, including many blacks and Hispanics as well as former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

4. We reject nationalism’s claim that the stranger, refugee, and migrant are enemies of the people. Where nationalism fears the stranger as a threat to political community, the church welcomes the stranger as necessary for full communion with God. Jesus Christ identifies himself with the poor, imprisoned foreigner in need of hospitality. “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me” (Matthew 25:41-43).

So what's to be concluded from this? That we're not feeding, clothing, and providing drink for those who are here illegally? That's simply false. Or is it that we should open our doors to everyone in the world to come here and be fed, clothed and sheltered? If that's how we're to understand it, it's nonsense.

Again, it should be asked whether everyone who agrees with this letter has removed the locks from their homes, cars and businesses so that anyone in need can partake of whatever amenities they might find therein. If they really believed what they've signed on to in this letter then it seems hypocritical not to exemplify these ideals in their personal lives. To fail to do so is to suggest that their public approval of the contents of the letter is mere virtue preening.

5. We reject the nationalist’s inclination to despair when unable to monopolize power and dominate opponents. When Christians change from majority to minority status in a given country, they should not contort their witness in order to stay in power. The church remains the church even as a political minority, even when unable to influence the government or when facing persecution.

Yes, so what's the point? What does this statement have to do with our present circumstance? How is the church contorting its witness? The authors simply proclaim that it should not do it. Very well, but without some sort of explanation they may as well have proclaimed that neither should the church violate the ten commandments.

The letter suffers from such vagueness and nebulosity that it's really hard to tell exactly what the authors and signatories were trying to say. Without more specific explanation the letter is little more than an exercise in trumpeting the authors' moral superiority and is otherwise frivolous.