God and the Intellectuals

Peter Savodnik's recent column on Substack is titled How Intellectuals Found God. It's a compilation of a number of interviews he did with writers, artists, techies, etc., and it causes one to wonder if perhaps there's a spiritual awakening happening in our culture.

Savodnik writes:

For more than a century, the people at the apex of the so-called thinking classes had insisted that, post-Enlightenment, it was impossible to believe in God. Not all of them put it as bluntly as Friedrich Nietzsche did in his 1882 work The Gay Science, in which he declared that “God is dead.” Nor did they attempt to dismantle the whole religious project the way philosopher Bertrand Russell did in his 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” arguing that religion is based “mainly upon fear.”

But that’s what it amounted to.

The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022.

By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States.

[But now] something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

What follows are excerpts from some of his interviews. For example, best-selling author Matthew Crawford after describing his own conversion says:

A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more. There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us. It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.

Here's an excerpt from the interview with Niall Ferguson:

You can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism. It’s fine for a small group of people to say, "We’re atheist, we’re opting out,” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart.

"The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Comedian Russel Brand comments:

I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.

Savodnik also quotes tech mogul Peter Thiel:

“God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

Even Elon Musk is included in Savodnik's essay:

“I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

Psychologist Jordan Peterson said this:

“I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting [his new] book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

Savodnik asks the question that others have been wondering about since these conversions, if that's what they are, started to become known to the public: Were these moves toward God, whether total or partial, genuine? Were these men and women genuine converts to Christianity, or at least to Theism, or was their embrace of the religious life a temporary blip in their otherwise secular lives?

Of course, it's just too soon to tell. Most of them have not been believers for more than a couple of years which makes it hard to assess how permanent the impact on their lives will be. Even so, it's remarkable that so many from among our "cultural elite" are openly turning to God and traditional expressions of religion to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

Here are a few more excerpts from Savodnik's essay.

Paul Kingsnorth: "When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a 'rational choice.' If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that. How does that happen?'"

He added that, “The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

Kingsnorth said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali told Savodnik that: “It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.... “I’m actually very grateful for whatever it was that was ailing me,” because it led her to God. “My life now is much richer, more fulfilling, than before.”

About tech billionaire Jordan Hall, Savodnik wrote: "That was when Hall knew his frantic casting about for meaning was finally over. He didn’t expect it. His mother was Jewish; his father, Catholic, but only technically.

"The emptiness he’d spent years fleeing was not just his emptiness, as far as he could tell. It was society-wide.

“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger. It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”

Savodnik says that Hall was referring to "plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. 'The horrifying brokenness of people.'”

What these and so many others are discovering is that if we're just the product of blind, impersonal forces that have somehow raised us up out of the primordial soup and that our lives are not much different, biologically speaking, than those of ants, then our existence is just a Shakespearean "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Some people, evidently, can live with the awareness that their existence is pointless, empty, and meaningless, but many other very thoughtful people are finding that they cannot.

A Historian Discusses Christianity

I recently came across a couple of interesting pieces on Substack. The first is a discussion with historian Tom Holland who had been an atheist but whose study of history was a catalyst for his return, or at least partial return, to Christianity. The interview is conducted by Bari Weiss who's a secular, lesbian Jew, but who seems not unsympathetic with what Holland has to say.

Here are a few excerpts from the conversation:

Bari Weiss: Your book opens with the crucifixion. Your argument is that the turning point is not Jesus’s birth, but his death, at 33 years old, at the hands of the Roman authorities. Why is this the pivotal moment?

Tom Holland: It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God. In the opinion of the Romans, crucifixion is the fate that should properly be visited on slaves. Not just because it is protracted and agonizing, but also because it is deeply humiliating.

When you die, you will hang there like a lump of meat. This is a demonstration, in the opinion of the Romans, that essentially their might is right. That if a slave rebels against his master, this is what happens.

I think what is radical about what Christians come to believe is not the fact that a man can become a god. Because for most people in the Mediterranean that is a given. What is radical is that the man Christians believe was divine was someone who had ended up suffering the worst fate imaginable—death by crucifixion—which, in the opinion of the Romans, was the fate visited on a slave.

The reason that Jesus suffers that fate is that he is part of a conquered people. He’s not even from Judea. He’s from Galilee. Galilee is not properly under the rule of the Romans. It’s franchised out to a client king. He is the lowest of the low. Even the Judeans look down on him.

The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all.

The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last....

BW: I've always been so interested in how Christianity goes from being the bane of the powerful to being the faith of the emperor. Constantine, the emperor who could have been a god, instead converts to the faith whose god died on a cross. How does that happen?

TH: Christianity spreads through most of the major cities of the empire. It’s not difficult to see what the appeal is. In a society without any hint of a welfare state, a state in which no value at all is put upon the weak or the poor or the sick, what the church offers is the first functioning welfare state.

If you are a widow or an orphan or in prison or hungry, the likelihood is that you will be able to find relief from the church. And that offers a kind of power because bishop literally means an overseer—the figure of a bishop who has charity to dispense. That’s quite something. You are in a position of authority that even your pagan neighbors might come to respect.

BW: To join a community not based on the lineage of your family or where you are born, but based on a belief—that still feels so radical to me, even in 2024.

TH: To the Romans, it’s bewildering. They are very puzzled. Who do the Christians think they are? They don’t have a land. They don’t have a mother city. Because they claim a universal identity, to the Romans, it seems they have no identity at all. This is a tension that runs throughout Christianity.

There's much more at Substack. The next to the last question Weiss asks is what brought Holland back to Christianity. You can read his answer at the link.

I'll discuss the second article tomorrow.

The Soul (Pt. III)

There are two more questions about the soul that I want to address in this series of posts (scroll down for the first two posts on this topic). The first is the question of how two completely disparate substances, one material (the brain) can interact with another that's immaterial (the mind or soul).

In philosophy this is called the Interaction Problem, and has been said by some philosophers to be the most overrated problem in all of philosophy.

The first thing to say about it is that the fact that we cannot explain how something happens is not a reason to think that it does not happen. Isaac Newton could not explain how gravity worked but that didn't deter him from believing that it did.

Likewise, contemporary physicists may not be able to explain certain quantum phenomena like superposition or quantum entanglement, but they can show in their labs that these phenomena occur.

In the same way, the difficulty in explaining mind/brain interaction is not a sound reason for rejecting the claim that these substances do interact.

Perhaps an analogy can be found in the interaction between the information stored on a hard drive and the image on your monitor. Although information is stored in a pattern of zeroes and ones, the information is not the pattern, nor is it material. Yet somehow the material computer is able to convert this immaterial information into a physical image - which is material - on the screen that has meaning - which is immaterial - to the viewer.

Another analogy: When you inadvertently stub your toe an electrical (material) impulse travels along the nerve fibers in your leg to the brain. In the brain this electricity generates a series of electrochemical reactions (material) that result in the sensation of pain (immaterial). How the immaterial sensation arises from molecules of chemical compounds reacting with each other no one knows, but it's obvious that it happens.

The second question I'd like to consider is this: What difference does it make in my life or yours whether we believe we have souls or not?

One way to approach this question is to point out that if we believe that we are fundamentally an immaterial soul or mind it makes several other beliefs much easier to hold. For example:

It's very difficult to maintain a belief that we have free will if all we are is matter. Matter is subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, and if we're solely material beings then our choices are all the product of those laws. Any control we think we have over them is an illusion.

Furthermore, if we have no free will, if all our choices are determined by our brain chemistry, then there's really no moral right or wrong. Morality depends upon the ability to make genuine choices, and if we can't make genuine choices, if our choices are determined for us by factors over which we have no control, then we're not much different than animals and the concept of human dignity has no purchase.

If, though, we are an immaterial soul, then perhaps it's this soul that's the seat of our free choice.

If we have a mind we not only have an answer to the question of why we believe we're a self but also an answer to the further question of what makes us the same self over time.

If we're just matter then there's nothing significant about us that does not change with time. Our appearance, our personality, our memories all change, so if our material bodies make us who we are we're confronted with the fact that we're in a state of constant flux, we're a different person from year to year.

If that's so, how can I be held responsible for things someone else who had my name but was not me said or did a decade ago? On the other hand, if we are an immaterial soul, then perhaps it's this soul that gives us continuity and makes us the same person over time.

Moreover, if we believe that we are a soul that possesses a body it's much easier to also believe that we survive the death of our bodies. If our bodies are all there is to us then life after bodily death becomes much harder, if not impossible, to account for. If there is life after death then this life takes on meaning and significance that it would not otherwise have if we are simply annihilated at the conclusion of this existence.

And, of course, if in the world there are immaterial substances like mind or soul then it's easier to believe that other immaterial minds, such as God, exist.

So, ideas have consequences. The consequences of believing that we are souls are profound.

The Soul (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post concluded with this series of questions:

"But why think we have a soul or mind in the first place? Why not apply Occam's razor and assume that we are merely physical beings made of matter and that there's nothing non-physical about us? Why not assume that our brain accounts for the entirety of our cognitive experience and that what we call a mind is simply the functioning of the brain, much like what we call digestion is simply the functioning of the stomach? And how would an immaterial substance like soul or mind interact with the material substance of the physical world, anyway?"

I'll tackle the question of evidence for the soul today and hold the question of how disparate substances like mind and matter can interact with each other for later.

One evidence for the existence of the soul is that we have a sense of being a self, of being something other than our body. My body is not me. I have a body. So who or what is this me that has a body?

A person could theoretically lose much of his or her body, but still have a sense of being the same self. Persons retain that sense of personal identity even though their body changes, perhaps drastically. Someone who undergoes a sex change operation emerges from it with a sense of being the same self with a different body. So if our body can change while our sense of self remains, the self is not the same as the body.

Further evidence for the soul is found in Near Death Experiences (NDEs). As the ability to resuscitate patients who have flat-lined has improved over the last three decades, credible accounts by medical personnel of patients who describe having had verifiable out of the body experiences have rapidly increased. There are hundreds of such reports in the medical literature.

I've given some examples of these in other posts two of which can be read here and here.

A third group of evidences for a soul (or mind) are the phenomena of consciousness. Those who believe that we are just material beings, i.e. materialists, usually argue that our brains can account for all of our cognitive experience, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

On materialism, the brain is like an advanced computer made of neurons which converts electro-chemical inputs into the outputs of thought, memories, and sensations like pain and pleasure. This analogy to a computer, however, fails to fully capture what's going on in human experience. There are a host of cognitive capabilities and experiences of which humans are capable but computers are not.

For example: Human beings are aware, they know, they have beliefs, doubts, regrets, hopes, resentments, frustrations, worries, desires and intentions. They experience gratitude, boredom, curiosity, interest, pleasure, pain, flavor, color, warmth, compassion, guilt, grief, disgust, pride, and embarrassment. None of these, as far as we can tell, are possible of machines made of silicon.

In addition, humans appreciate beauty, humor, meaning, and significance. They can distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong. They can apprehend abstract ideas like universals or math. They’re creative.

They have, as we mentioned above, a sense of being a self, they have memories which seem to be rooted in the past, either of recent or more remote origin. They have a sense of past, present and future. They have ideas and understand those ideas. Computers do none of this.

There's a vast chasm separating physical matter and conscious human experience. The robot Sonny in the movie I, Robot notwithstanding, computers don't feel. A computer can be programmed to tell you it loves you but it doesn’t feel love.

And, we might point out that there's a vast chasm between the capabilities of a living human being and a dead brain. If the brain is like a computer, a dead brain is like a computer with the power cord unplugged. It has no capabilities at all. What fires up the computer is electricity. What fires up a brain is mind.

Moreover, if the brain were all that's involved in thinking and our sensations of color, sound, fragrance, pain, etc. it should be theoretically possible for a researcher to peer into a subject's brain and witness the subject's thoughts and sensations. Yet no matter how thoroughly a brain is examined all that a researcher would find are electro-chemical reactions occurring along neurons, but electrical pulses moving along a nerve fiber are not the same thing as a memory, or the sensation of red, or of pain, or the thought of sending a text to a friend.

In order to get from the electro-chemical phenomena to the experience of a particular thought or sensation something else must be involved, just as something else must be involved besides just the television in producing the visual image on the screen. The television is somewhat like the material brain. What's done to the television - changing the channel, adjusting the volume, etc. - affects the visual and auditory experience of the viewer, but the television alone cannot produce those experiences. In addition to the tv there has to be an electromagnetic signal for the tv to interpret, and altering the television does nothing to alter the signal.

Furthermore, if there's no signal there won't be anything on the television screen, but even if the television is destroyed, the signal, with the information it carries, still exists.

In a somewhat analogous way the mind or soul is a necessary component of the thoughts and sensations we experience. Our brains would be dead without the mind, yet the mind continues to exist even if our brains do not.

But what difference does it make in my life or yours whether we believe we have a soul or don't believe it? I'll address that question and the question of how a soul could interact with a material body tomorrow.

The Soul (Pt. I)

People speak of having a soul, but often their concept of the soul - what it is, what it does, etc. - is vague. In what follows I lay out how I think of the soul. I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself and I recognize that some of these ideas may not be entirely consistent or orthodox. I'm also not sure how much clarity this will bring to the concept, but even so, here goes:

First, I use "soul" and "mind" synonymously. We are souls, we have bodies (cf. I Cor. 15:45). The soul is immaterial. It's not just a gossamer substance like cartoonish depictions of ghosts. Only material substances have parts so the soul, being immaterial, has no parts, it's what's called a simple substance.

Being immaterial, souls are invisible, non-spatial, and non-localizable. They may not actually be within us in any ordinary sense.

Evidence from Near Death Experiences (NDEs) suggests that souls can exist and function to some extent independently of bodies. They can think, perceive, and perhaps communicate with each other, but to fully interact in a causal way with the physical world they must be embodied.

Moreover, souls can be thought of as the essence of a person. A person's essence is an exhaustive description of that person consisting of every true proposition about that person. Thus, the soul is information, but information must be stored in some medium like a data base, hard drive, book, or a mind. The only data base which could adequately contain all true propositions about every person who has ever lived is the mind of God, so we might think of every individual soul as a discrete "file" in the Divine "database."

If this is correct, if each soul exists as a person's essence in the mind of God, then we can assume that that person is indestructible, immortal, unless God were to choose to "delete" the file, in which case the person would be annihilated and cease to exist.

Since souls must be embodied to function fully they must interface with a physical body.Thus, at some point after the death of our present body God "uploads" the file of information or rather a portion of it, into another body (I Cor. 15:40-42).

Perhaps God withholds that portion of the description of us which would diminish our experience of this new condition so that we are not, for example, beset by chronic illness or certain physical limitations or unsettling memories.

But why think we have a soul or mind in the first place? Why not apply Occam's razor and assume that we are merely physical beings made of matter and that there's nothing non-physical about us? Why not assume that our brain accounts for the entirety of our cognitive experience and that what we call a mind is simply the functioning of the brain, much like what we call digestion is simply the functioning of the stomach? And how would an immaterial substance like soul or mind interact with the material substance of the physical world, anyway?

I'll attempt to answer these questions over the next two days.

O Holy Night

I thought it fitting as we approach Christmas Eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

After you watch, I highly recommend listening to the Bonner family sing O Holy Night. It's spectacular:

An Incomprehensible Birth

If Christians are correct about what happened on that first Christmas day it's an event of such magnitude as to be incomprehensible. If what the Gospel writers tell us is true then the child who was born in a stable that day was not just a special baby, it was the incarnation, the incorporation, of the very creator of the universe!

This is such a breathtaking thought that it's humanly impossible to get one's mind around it. The God who created us and all the galaxies in the cosmos deigned to make Himself like one of us in order to share in the pains and sorrows of being human, being willing ultimately to suffer an excruciating death, all so that our death need not be the end of our existence.

This is what the Gospel narratives insist actually, literally happened, and if they're correct, if they're only approximately true, they surely recount the greatest, most astonishing, story ever told.

This three minute video beautifully illustrates the point:

As we go about making our Christmas preparations this year, it'd be good to keep in our minds the literal wonder of what it is we're preparing to celebrate.

Three Christmas Symbols

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. The X is actually a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X (Chi) to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin it has signified the opposite of an attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word really is.

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A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree to represent the stars on the night Jesus was born. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

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No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held to be important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney) thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (The name "Santa Claus" is from the Dutch for Saint Nicholas) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

The Christmas Guest

To help put you in the proper frame of mind for Christmas here's a lovely poem by Helen Steiner Rice (1900-1981) titled "The Christmas Guest," recited by the late, great Johnny Cash (1932-2003):

What Are the Odds?

What are the odds that all the parts that comprise an automobile could be manufactured out of their raw materials and assembled to form a fully functional automobile solely by exposing the parts to the forces of nature like sun, wind, lightning, etc.? You might expect that it would never happen but according to scientists working in what's called Origin of Life research something like that must've happened to form the first living thing.

This life form was a cell with a cell membrane and which could metabolize and replicate itself. This cell would've been at least as complex as a 1940s automobile, so what are the odds that something like that cell could've formed by pure chance and the laws of chemistry and physics?

An article by Otangelo Grasso at Evolution News explores the probabilities. I'll skip the math, but you can check it out at the link. Grasso's calculations show that the odds of a cell containing just 438 proteins, which is probably the minimum for a functioning cell, are the equivalent of winning the Powerball Jackpot 12,996 times in a row.

And that's just the probability of coming up with the proteins that make up the cell. There's much, much more to a viable cell than just the proteins.

Grasso goes on to remark that,

This estimate does not include the fact that multiple copies of proteins would likely be required. It also leaves out the DNA required to manage the production and maintenance of proteins, and the need to interconnect proteins properly.

This astronomically large number illustrates the extreme improbability of such a complex system arising by chance alone. It highlights the challenges in explaining the origin of life through purely random processes.

We can express the argument this way: A minimal functional cell requires a specific set of integrated proteins. The probability of this specific set of proteins forming spontaneously is astronomically low (equivalent to winning the Powerball lottery 12,996 times in a row). Therefore, the spontaneous formation of a minimal functional cell through random processes is virtually impossible.

The astronomical improbability of the spontaneous formation of even a minimal set of functional proteins necessary for life presents a significant problem for purely naturalistic explanations for the origin of life. We can see, then, why researchers in the field are, as Rice University chemist James Tour has put it, “clueless” about how life’s origin came about.

When we are faced with such daunting improbability, it is reasonable to consider alternative explanations. Most scientists seeking a resolution of the puzzle don’t want to go there, whether for reasons of philosophical outlook, peer pressure, or personal preference. However, when examining highly specified and complex systems that appear to be fine-tuned for function, especially when the probability of their chance occurrence is vanishingly small, the inference to design becomes a logical possibility, at the very least.

The argument for design is strengthened by the observation that living systems exhibit characteristics often associated with designed objects — such as information content, goal-directed processes, and interdependent parts functioning as a whole. The minimal cell, with its precisely coordinated set of proteins and genetic instructions, bears hallmarks of purposeful arrangement rather than random assembly.

And, of course, purposeful arrangement requires an intelligent arranger. So, at the beginning of life there was a mind designing it for a purpose. Some seek to answer the question as to who or what such a designer would be by suggesting that life was engineered by some denizen of another world and was somehow seeded on earth, but that just puts the question back a step. How did life in this other world begin?

Since the universe had a beginning the regression of designers can't go on forever, it has to stop at some point with a mind that did not emerge as the creation of any other being, a mind not contingent upon any other mind, a mind very much like what people think of as God.

C.S. Lewis On the Three Versions of Christmas

C.S. Lewis once wrote an amusing piece on the three types of Christmas. For your enjoyment I've posted it here:

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is a religious festival. This is important and obligatory for Christians; but as it can be of no interest to anyone else, I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second (it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn’t go into them) is a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality.

If it were my business to have a ‘view’ on this, I should say that I much approve of merry-making. But what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs.

But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everyone’s business. I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingley Dell; the reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk; lovers sent love gifts; toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers.

Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it on the following grounds.

1. It gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously try to ‘keep’ it (in its third, or commercial, aspect) in order to see that the thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25th everyone is worn out — physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them.

They are in no trim for merry-making; much less (if they should want to) to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.

2. Most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter-box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?

3. Things are given as presents which no mortal every bought for himself — gaudy and useless gadgets, ‘novelties’ because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

4. The nuisance. For after all, during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do, and the racket trebles the labour of it.

We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed of the world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things.

I don’t know the way out. But can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If the worst comes to the worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write if off as a charity. For nothing? Why, better for nothing than for a nuisance.

How Many Galaxies Are There?

Our sun and the planets it holds in thrall, including our earth, reside in a small corner of a vast galaxy called the Milky Way, a swirling mass of dust, gas and billions of stars. The Milky Way is so huge that it takes light, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, 100,000 years to get from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Yet, as huge as it is, our galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies strewn across an incomprehensibly big universe. This short video explains how we know this:

Relative to all this our planet is an infinitesimally tiny speck and the inhabitants of our planet - us - are even tinier. It's no wonder that some philosophers have concluded that human beings and the quotidian pursuits in which we engage have no more significance than motes of dust bouncing around in a shaft of light.

Those philosophers are right - unless the universe was intentionally created and we were purposefully put here for a reason.

Intolerant Tolerance

There's lots of talk nowadays about "tolerance," although the conversation has morphed quite a bit from what it was just a couple of years ago. It used to be that we were enjoined by progressives to be tolerant of those who disagreed with us, who held political or religious opinions at variance with our own or who adopted a lifestyle that others may have thought immoral.

Now the talk in progressive circles is all about what Herbert Marcuse back in the 60s was promoting as "repressive tolerance." Marcuse argued that tolerance and freedom of speech should not extend to those who hold retrograde political views, views that other groups find offensive or harmful. He insisted that freedom of speech was a subterfuge that elites employed to enable them to maintain power and as such should not be accorded the cherished status that has traditionally been conferred upon it.

In the educational sphere, in particular, Marcuse wrote that measures of repressive tolerance,

...would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, if you believe in maintaining a strong military defense, if you believe that America is the greatest country ever to grace the planet, or if you disagree that social security should be increased or perpetuated, you should be denied the ability to voice your views.

This, in good Orwellian fashion, Marcuse labels genuine freedom of thought. He goes on to write that,

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual...the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin...with stopping the words and images which feed his consciousness.

To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

So, if tolerance means that people should be allowed to argue against what Marcuse thought to be a better form of life, in his case Marxism coupled with sexual freedom, then those arguments should be repressed. People must not be exposed to well-reasoned arguments if those arguments may be so cogent as to persuade the hearer to reject the ideology of the left.

Marcuse made this case in 1965 in an essay titled Repressive Tolerance, but it's bearing fruit today in social media, the academy, and news organizations like the New York Times where any opinion that wanders beyond the bounds of acceptable progressive orthodoxy is quashed.

One of the arguments that the progressive left makes in support of "repressive tolerance" - which is, ironically, a fascist notion - is based on a misuse of a footnote in philosopher Karl Popper's famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. John Sexton at HotAir.com explains that the footnote, which some leftists have seized upon to promote repression of deviant ideas and street violence, is being abused:

[Popper's] idea was pretty simple: If society is completely tolerant, then the intolerant will rule society because there will be no one willing to stand up to their intolerance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a tolerant society to be intolerant toward those who are themselves intolerant.... You can probably see how this plays into certain Antifa arguments about “punching Nazis” and using street violence against the intolerant.

Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Popper added, however, that,

In this formulation, I do not imply...that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

In other words, as long as people are willing to debate and discuss and have conversations about their disagreements, as long as they don't seek to impose their views by violent means, we must insist on tolerance and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. It's only when people opt for violent coercion that tolerance comes to an end.

Here's Popper:

But we should claim the right to suppress them [those who eschew dialogue and resort instead to force] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

The fascist left, including Antifa, seizes on this as a justification not only for suppressing contrary ideas but also for violence, yet it's pretty clear that Popper was claiming that resort to violence is justified only when the other side refuses to engage in fair debate and chooses instead to substitute "fists and pistols" for reason and logic. It's also pretty clear that it's the extremists on both left and right in our current social landscape who fit the profile of those of whom Popper was speaking.

The extremist rejects argument because at some level he knows that neither facts nor reason are on his side. He senses the rational inadequacy of his position so he rejects reason and rationality rather than give up his position or subject it to rational scrutiny.

The only truth he recognizes is whatever he feels most strongly to be true, and since his feelings are self-authenticating and self-validating there's no point in debating them. He needs only to force you to accept his "truth," and if you refuse then you must be compelled, with violence, if necessary, to submit.

After all, if you disagree with the progressive left then you must be a racist bigot, and you should be silenced or have your face smashed. If you disagree with the extremist right then you must be part of the conspiracy to undermine America and you deserve to get stomped on.

That's unfortunately where we are today in America.

Rodion and Luigi

Richard Fernandez, at PJ Media, writes an interesting essay on Luigi Mangione while only mentioning Mangione once and that in a quote from another piece.

Instead, Fernandez treats us to an overview of the 1866 novel

Crime and Punishment

by Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He focuses on the main character of the novel, a young man named Rodion Raskolnikov who believes himself superior to the bourgeois moral values of society and whose conviction of his own moral superiority leads him to murder an old hag of a woman whom he thought detestable. In the course of committing the crime, though, he also finds it necessary to murder the old woman's sister.

In any case, Raskolnikov's rationale seems not too unlike that of Luigi Mangione who murdered health care CEO Brian Thompson last week.

Here's Fernandez:

When Feodor Dostoevsky wrote the novel "Crime and Punishment" in 1866 to describe a world made possible by Russian nihilism, he was describing not only a literary character, Rodion Raskolnikov, but a whole future philosophical point of view. Raskolnikov, who regards himself as a well-educated and superior but powerless person, asks himself: “Why not kill a wretched and ‘useless’ old moneylender to alleviate human misery?”

What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? … One death, and a hundred lives in exchange--it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm.

He convinces himself the answer is "nothing" prevents such an act. It surely cannot be God (who does not exist) nor conventional morality (which is humbug) that forbids killing the moneylender. The only problem is how to escape detection for the "crime." As Dostoevsky formulated the situation in another novel, "Brothers Karamazov," those of great will and intellect can do whatever they can get away with....

A world where you can enact your own morality is one in which superior people are all-powerful. Getting caught is all you have to worry about. One only has to fear the mindless wrath of the cops. But the superior men, the men like you, will understand that killing the moneylender was a cool thing and give you their tacit, coded approval.

Dostoyevsky could've been writing about the events in the wake of Thompson's murder. The last paragraph included. One of the sickening aspects of this crime has been the reaction of some on the left who have actually applauded and laughed about Thompson's murder. These people's behavior is beneath contempt, but it's not surprising that a secular society produces such soulless individuals.

Fernandez mentions Piers Morgan's interview of Taylor Lorenz, a former Washington Post and Daily Beast reporter, who was on the show to defend controversial social media posts that appeared to celebrate the killing of Thompson. Lorenz, now a podcaster for Vox Media, admitted on the panel that her reaction to the killing was “joy.”

It's astonishing that the New York Times had to bring in an ethicist to write a column declaring that killing Thompson, who left behind a wife and two small children, was wrong. Why do we need a philosopher to tell us that? The crux of his argument is that murder is wrong, therefore, if killing Thompson was murder then it was wrong.

Have we sunk so far into moral illiteracy that we need to be told this? Apparently the NYT thinks we have and they're probably right.

After all, as has been argued on this site for over twenty years, a society that has abandoned God no longer has any basis for distinguishing between right and wrong. Indeed, the ethicist might well be asked why anyone in our relativistic society should accept the first premise of his argument. Why is murder wrong? The ethicist simply assumes we all agree that it is, but as Fernandez notes, in another novel by Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov - the atheist Ivan Karamazov declares that if there is no God, everything is permitted. There's no objective moral wrong.

Ivan Karamazov was right. If there is no God then what Mangione did was legally wrong but not morally wrong. If there is no God there just is no moral wrong. There are just behaviors of which some people approve and others disapprove.

On the Nature of God

One of the questions people sometimes pose to theists goes like this: If God created everything then what created God? The questioner is sometimes trying to force the theist into admitting an infinite regress of Creators and thereby illustrate the absurdity of saying that God created everything - to wit, if A is created by B then what created B? Was it C? If so, what created C? Was it D? etc. ad infinitum.

This line of questioning, however, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between contingent and necessary being as well as a misunderstanding of the nature of God.

The nine-minute video below explains why the questions are based on a confusion and also explains the theological doctrine of aseity. If you're interested in philosophical theology you'll want to give it a look:

Four Questions about Free Will

An article at Mind Matters a few years ago lists and discusses four questions concerning free will that often arise in conversations on the topic.

Here are the four with a brief summary of the discussion. For the complete discussion see the article:

1. Has psychology shown that free will does not really exist? No, in fact the experiments of Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) show just the opposite. We've discussed these experiments on VP in the past, for instance here.

2. Is free will a logical idea? Yes, in fact denying it is often illogical. If all our decisions and beliefs are determined then our denial of free will is the inevitable product of our genes and childhood influences of which we may be only dimly, if at all, aware. We may think we have good reasons to disbelieve in free will, but whatever those reasons are they likely play a very minor role in our disbelief.

3. Would a world without free will be a better place? No, it'd be a dystopia in which there's no guilt, no moral obligation, no human dignity and in which people would inevitably come under the tyranny of totalitarian "controllers."

4. Are there science concepts that support free will? Yes, the concept of information is one. Check out the original article to see why.

It's interesting that the conviction that we're free seems almost inescapable. Even people who are determinists can't shake it.

Philosopher John Searle, for example, writes that, "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."

John Horgan, a writer for Scientific American, states that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will."

So why do many people deny that we're free? Perhaps the overriding reason is that they have embraced a metaphysical materialism that eliminates from their noetic structure anything that can't be explained in terms of the laws of physics. Since those laws are strictly deterministic (setting aside the laws governing quantum mechanics), our intuition that we're free must be an illusion.

The next question we might ponder is why should anyone embrace materialism? Perhaps the answer to that is that the alternative, the belief that there are immaterial substances such as minds, puts one on a slippery slope which too easily leads to belief in supernatural entities like God and that belief is just not tolerable for many moderns.

Better to deny that we have free will, the thinking goes, than to open the door of our ontology to supernatural entities, especially God.

The Majority/Minority Myth

The following post was written in the wake of the 2020 election, but everything in it is just as true, or more true, today as it was then. I did change the date in the fourth paragraph from 2020 to 2024 to highlight the post's relevance for today.

It's often been claimed that whites will find themselves in the minority in the U.S. by sometime around 2045 having been demographically eclipsed by members of black, brown and yellow races. A corollary to the claim is that being thrust into the minority will spell political doom for a GOP dominated by whites.

An essay at The Federalist, however, written by Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution challenges this conventional wisdom.

The belief that the "browning of America" entails permanent political exile for white Republican voters and office-holders is based on two questionable assumptions: First, that rising minorities would continue to favor the Democrats in their voting, and, second, that increased Democratic support from rising minorities would not be offset by falling support among the declining white population.

The 2024 election should give pause to those who hold the first assumption. Blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump in record numbers and, although it's true that a more traditional Republican may not have generated as much enthusiasm among this demographic as did the president, the fact remains that many more members of these groups are willing to abandon their traditional fealty to the Democratic party to vote for Republican candidates than ever before. This is especially true among Hispanics.

The second assumption is rendered dubious by the gains Republicans have made in recent years among traditional Democrat loyalists like blue-collar union workers.

But Fiorina's main point is that the projections of a majority of minorities by mid-century are themselves questionable. They're predicated on misleading data culled from the 2010 census.

Question 8 on that census form (and on the 2020 census) asks about Hispanic ancestry. Those who report any Hispanic ancestry on this question are placed into the minority category, regardless of their responses to question 9 which asks the respondent to state their own race.

Fiorina explains:

Non-Hispanics who check the “white” box on question 9 go into the white category, of course — unless they write in anything else. Should they wish to claim, say, an American Indian ancestor (a fairly common impulse), they again fall into the minority category despite their white self-categorization. In both cases, descendants stay in the same category — minority — as the parent, if they acknowledge the parent’s ancestry.

So, someone as white as Senator Elizabeth Warren, and all of her subsequent descendents, would be considered minorities as long as they continue to maintain that they have a single Native American ancestor three or four generations, or more, ago. As Fiorina puts it:

The census projections reflect a “one-drop” rule akin to that used in the Jim Crow South. The white category consists only of people who are 100 percent “non-Hispanic white.” If one adopts a more expansive definition of "white," the projection of a majority-minority nation disappears.

If everyone who checked the white box on question 9 were actually to be classified as white the nation would still be three-quarters white in 2060, according to Fiorina. He goes on to say that,

On first hearing about the projected nonwhite majority, many people probably form a mental image that looks roughly like this: 4 whites, 2 Hispanics, 2 blacks, 1 Asian, and perhaps one “other.”

As the preceding discussion explains, however, the picture is much more complex. The majority of minorities will not consist of people who are 100 percent Latino, 100 percent Asian, 100 percent black, 100 percent Native American, or 100 percent Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (the official census categories).

Rather, the majority of minorities will include people of numerous shadings of color.

The United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, not only because of the changing relative sizes of the five large groups but also because of the growing internal diversity within each group as the sizes of their [racially] mixed portions swell. Diversity is increasing within individuals as well as among groups.

In other words, what will happen as we approach mid-century is that categories like white, Hispanic, African-American and Asian will be increasingly blurred as inter-racial marriages continue to increase and more citizens are able to claim mixed-race status.

One of the positive benefits of all this is that identity-based politics, at least as it's practiced by the left today, will become increasingly irrelevant as a greater percentage of future generations' racial identity is "all of the above."

A Christmas Light Show

At Christmas time people like to bedeck their homes with - sometimes very elaborate - light displays. It's hard, though, to surpass the display that nature puts on at the earth's poles. It's gorgeous, as this short, Christmas-themed video demonstrates:

What We Stand to Lose

Secularists of various stripes applaud the decline of Christianity in the modern era, but should they? Set aside the question whether Christianity is true and ask instead the question what will be lost when Christian influence is all but gone?

Put the question this way: What are the values that Western democracies cherish? At a minimum they would include:

1. Human equality (including that of women and minorities) under the law
2. Tolerance of dissent
3. Separation of church and state
4. Social Justice (charity, concern for the poor)
5. Freedom of speech
6. Freedom of religion

There are others, but just limiting ourselves to these, what other comprehensive belief system or worldview offers a ground for these values? Certainly not Islam which rejects all of them with the possible exception of #4 (but even here concern for the poor often extends only to other Muslims of one's own sect).

Nor does naturalism (the worldview held by many secularists that says that the natural world is all there is) offer any support for any of these. On naturalism we are the product of blind, impersonal forces that have shaped us to survive competition with our competitors. There is nothing in this process which in any sense mandates any of the values listed above. There's no reason, on evolutionary grounds, why any society should value any of them over their contraries.

But, it might be argued, evolution has equipped us with reason, and reason dictates that these values afford the best way to order a society. We don't need Christianity to instill or ground these values, according to this argument, reason can do the job.

This, however, is simply not true. Reason can perhaps help us find the best way to exemplify these values, but it cannot decide whether or not a society should incorporate them. To prefer a society which upholds them over and against one which does not is simply an arbitrary preference. It is to say that a society which exhibits these values is better than alternative polities because, well, most of us just happen to have a fondness for these values.

Moreover, aside from providing a solid grounding for those political values, Christianity bestowed additional blessings on the West. There's a consensus among scholars that the vast majority of the world's best art and music has been inspired by Christian assumptions. These also furnished the motivation for the development of schools, orphanages, hospitals and charitable organizations throughout Europe and North America and provided the fertile philosophical soil in which modern science could germinate and thrive.

To the extent that other worldviews have inspired their followers to notable cultural achievements, generally speaking they have neither amounted to much nor been sustained for long without somehow piggy-backing on Christianity.

Naturalism and Islam may some day succeed in extirpating Christian influence, but the world they would create will look very much like either the Stalinist dystopia of Orwell's 1984 or the Islamic dystopia of ISIS. It might not happen abruptly - an airliner can glide a long way after having exhausted its fuel, and the higher its altitude the longer it can remain aloft before crashing to earth - but it won't remain airborne indefinitely.

Similarly, one or the other of these two bleak dystopias represents the future that awaits us a generation or two after the fuel of Christian assumptions has finally been drained from the West.

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities with the movie are purely coincidental, although the similarities with my novel Bridging the Abyss, are not.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him.

Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

An Unlivable Worldview

In Alex Rosenberg's The Atheist's Guide to Reality the author unabashedly promotes a scientistic view of knowledge. "Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it describes a view based on "scientism" which is the view that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not something we should even believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism."

Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, truths about justice, rights, beauty, and morality, for example, but Rosenberg thinks it's neither good science nor good epistemology to hold beliefs about these things.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor morally "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unrelentingly dark world and even this little glimmer is beset with problems.

Here's one: If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved behaviors that are not "nice." If we're the product of evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and nothing which is wrong to do.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to bravely and honestly face up to these consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in both of my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (See the links at the top of the page) that the consequences outlined in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism. The atheist who lives as if none of these consequences exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief or a worldview that entails conclusions one cannot live with, however, stands in serious need of reexamination.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. II)

In yesterday's Viewpoint post I argued that sensations like color, sound, taste, fragrance, pain, etc. are not objectively real but are rather the products of the interaction of electrochemical stimuli with the brain/mind complex.

In other words, were there no perceivers with sensory organs, a brain, and a mind, there'd be no color, just as there'd be no color if there were no light. We create the sensation of red out of the electromagnetic energy that impinges on our retinas. Red doesn't exist independently of someone seeing it.

But why posit a mind as part of the apparatus responsible for these phenomena of our daily experience? Why not just attribute them to our physical senses working together with our brains?

After all, we know that if a brain ceases to function, as in death, we cease to have sensory experience. Moreover, we know we have brains, we can see them, measure them, observe various parts of them become active on brain scans. But why think we also have a mind that can't be observed, can't be described and can't even be located?

The answer is that the material, physical brain, taken alone, seems to be an inadequate explanation for certain facts about consciousness, among which are the sensory experiences we talked about in the first paragraph above and in the previous post.

The problem is that the brain is material, the processes that occur in the brain are chemical or physical, but the sensations we experience are immaterial. There's no known bridge between an electrical impulse generated between neurons and, say, the taste of sweet. How does an electrochemical reaction among molecules produce the experience of sweetness or the sensation of sound or color or pain?

It's not just that no one knows how these amazing events happen, it's that no one knows how it even could happen. A miniature scientist traveling throughout someone's brain while the person was looking at a red car would not see red anywhere in the brain, or the image of a car, for that matter. Where does the red come from? What exactly is it? How does a chemical reaction produce the immaterial sensation of red in a person's brain?

The apparent inadequacy of matter to explain the immaterial phenomena of our experience is one piece of evidence - there are others - that something immaterial is involved in the creation of these phenomena. This immaterial entity is what philosophers call the mind or soul.

Of course, many philosophers, those called materialists, resist the idea that we have an immaterial mind separate from, and in some ways independent of, the brain. They resist the idea because they're wedded to the conviction that all that exists in the universe is matter and energy. Their ontology doesn't allow for mysterious immaterial entities that play a role in thinking and experiencing.

Once such entities are admitted, the materialist fears, the door will be open to other such mental entities like souls and ultimately, God.

In order to keep the Divine Mind from intruding Itself into the world, the materialist believes, all independent immaterial entities, especially those such as minds which are conscious and intelligent, must be excluded, but then we're left with what seems to be an insoluble mystery. How does a material brain generate the immaterial sensations we experience every moment of our waking lives and what exactly are those sensations?

Answer those questions and you'll win a Nobel Prize.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. I)

In my classes we discuss the question of what we mean when we say that something is real. One aspect of the question we specifically address are sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, sound, and so on.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and a tree falling in the forest makes a sound whether or not there's anyone around to hear it.

But is it true that the phenomena of our senses are objectively real? Consider this description of how music is downloaded to a computer and then transferred to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made inside us by our brains/minds.

If there's no ear to capture the energy, no brain/mind complex to interpret that energy, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves are picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses are converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals are compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code is written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructs the bits in their proper sequence and transmits them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relays the file to a router where the file is packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembles the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embeds the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, access by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converts the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy traveling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all, just electrochemical energy. The music is created by our brain/mind and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation, and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

One last question: Why do I refer to the brain/mind? Why not just assume that the brain is solely responsible for the sensations we experience? I'll consider that question tomorrow.

From Malawi to Minnesota

Socialism is a seductive idea. It attracts many of those who yearn for a narrower gap between rich and poor, but the reality is that capitalism has lifted far more people out of poverty than has socialism. Because of capitalism there are fewer poor in the world today, as a percentage of global population, than at any time in history. Many of those who still live under socialism, however, still struggle for life's basics.

Martha Njolomole's story is quite amazing. John Hinderaker at Powerline blog introduces her to us:

Martha Njolomole was born in Malawi, one of the poorest nations in Africa, and a country where pretty much all economic activity is controlled by the government. She grew up in a household that had neither running water nor electricity. Nor did her family own any books. Through a combination of talent and extraordinary diligence, Martha won a scholarship to study in the United States. She was stunned by what she found here.

Today Martha is an accomplished economist and author of several important papers. She tells her story in this Prager U video:

Hinderaker adds this,

Martha has come a long way from the days when she carried water in buckets on her head, and scrounged for thrown-away scraps of newspaper on which she could practice reading. That distance is, really, the distance between socialism and free enterprise. No one is better qualified than Martha to explain that to America’s young people.

It'd be helpful if people like Martha Njolomole didn't have to do the job that America's college professors are being paid to do.

Another Christmas Gift Suggestion

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

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

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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