Explaining Naturalism (Pt. III)

This is the third and final installment in our series of reflections on Alex Rosenberg's essay entitled The Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. Parts I and II can be found here and here. In this section Rosenberg argues that naturalism (actually materialism) entails that there is no need to posit the existence of a mind distinct from the brain. Mind is simply a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain, just as we use the word digestion to describe the functioning of the stomach.

This claim has some interesting consequences. If all we are is matter and the matter that makes us up is constantly changing, it follows that there is nothing about us that stays the same over time. In the final analysis human beings are reducible to little more than a constantly shifting and changing bundle of perceptions. Here's Rosenberg:

Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time.

There seems to be only one way we make sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change. This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads. Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but non-spatial, and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion consciousness foists on us.

What are the consequences of denying that there is an enduring self? One is surely the bizarre conclusion that we cannot be said to be the same person today that we were ten years ago. If we are in constant flux then we are different from the individual who went by our name in the past. Now, if this is true it would be unjust to be held responsible for anything that other person did. In the same way that it would be unjust to expect you to keep the promises made by another person, it would be unjust to expect me to keep promises made years ago by a person who had my same name. Marriage vows, for one example, would become worthless once people realized that it wasn't they who made them.

Furthermore, it would be unjust to punish criminals for a crime committed years ago because the person we're punishing is not the same person who committed the crime. For those of you familiar with the movie, we might ask this question: Is Jason Bourne responsible for that couple he killed in the Bourne Identity if he has no memory of killing them? Was it really he who killed them? Rosenberg would be hard pressed to explain how it would have been.

T.S. Eliot puts it like this: "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

This seems absurd, to be sure, but it is another of the consequences of naturalism that Rosenberg wants his fellow atheists to recognize and acknowledge. Little wonder that so many atheists are unwilling to stay with him on the atheism train all the way to it's logical endpoint. They can see that the tracks terminate at a precipice and that the train is going to hurtle over a cliff into the abyss of nihilism and so, still clutching their atheism, they jump off before it gets there.

This is, of course, irrational, but perhaps the most irrational thing they do after having jumped off the train, after having made a completely arbitrary, unwarranted, and irrational leap in order to avoid going over the cliff of their logic, they turn and point to the Christian (or other theist), whose worldview entails none of these problems, and tell them that it is they who have abandoned reason because they chose not to take the train at all.

One can only smile and shake one's head.

Telling it Straight

For those readers who've not yet heard of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, or who've heard of him but don't know why he's considered a rising star in the Republican party, I invite you to watch this video of Christie responding to claims by New Jersey teachers that plans to curtail their pension benefits are having a deleterious effect on the morale of students in the classroom:

It's so refreshing to hear a politician talk like this. Most pols are terrified of the possibility that they might offend a major special interest and thus look for ways to appease them. Christie just doesn't care. He says he's not interested in the presidency, but at the rate he's going he'd be a frontrunner for the nomination in 2012 or 2016 if he did want it. He's turned into something of an icon among conservatives.

All Things Considered

In all of the sturm und drang over the Christine O'Donnell win over Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP primary I wonder if anyone has mentioned perhaps the strongest reason not to have voted for the very liberal Mr. Castle.

People have noted that Mr. Castle is a credible threat to bolt the party once he got elected, but suppose his victory had given the Republicans 51 seats and thus the majority. He wouldn't have to defect to the Democrats in order to render the Republican advantage useless. All he'd have to do would be to threaten it, and he'd be holding the whole GOP caucus hostage to the Democrats' progressive agenda, an agenda which he largely supports.

The mere threat to switch parties, an act which would result in the Republicans losing their majority, and thus control, of the Senate would be enough to frighten his GOP colleagues into compromising and dithering where compromise and dithering were not necessary. What then would Republicans have accomplished by electing him to the Senate?

Christine O'Donnell has some ethical problems (although it's not clear how serious they are), but in an election like last Tuesday's what Republican voters need to ask is which candidate's votes in the Senate would be worse for the country? Here's a thought experiment for conservatives: Suppose Bill Clinton, a moderate-liberal with a lot of well-documented ethical shortcomings, were running against Barack Obama, a far-left radical, for the United States Senate. Which man should you vote for? I can't imagine any conservative answering that they would vote for Obama even if it were more likely that his election would produce a favorable majority in the Senate.

O'Donnell has nothing like the ethical baggage of Clinton, and she's more conservative. Mike Castle is pretty much an older version of Obama, at least in terms of his votes in Congress.

All things considered, it seems to me that Delaware Republicans made the right choice.

The Case for Traditional Marriage

The editors at National Review make an excellent argument in favor of maintaining the traditional view of marriage and rejecting the arguments proffered on behalf of same-sex marriage. Here's an excerpt:

Both the fact that we are debating same-sex marriage and the way that debate has progressed suggest that many of us have lost sight of why marriage exists in the first place as a social institution and a matter of public policy. One prominent supporter of same-sex marriage says that the purpose of marriage is to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults; another says that its purpose is to make it more likely that people will have others to give them care in sickness and old age.

So at the risk of awkwardness, we must talk about the facts of life. It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage.

The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment.

If you're chary of same-sex marriage but not sure how to best respond to those of your friends who challenge you on the issue, this article is a must-read.

Hey, Let's Make 'em Vote

The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart offers a typically liberal solution to the problem of voter apathy: Compulsory voting. Pass a law that would require everyone to submit a ballot every election. With compulsory voting, Beinart argues, the Democratic base, normally torpid during mid-term elections, would be compelled to vote for whomever their political overseers instruct them to support, and we wouldn't be getting all these right-wing extremists winning elections. It would increase civic involvement, and given the edge enjoyed by Democrats in voter registration, ensure Democratic hegemony until, well, until the eschaton.

Great idea. Force people to vote. More state coercion. Less individual freedom. More corruption of the election process. More people voting who haven't a clue whom they're voting for or why. This is an idea to make a liberal's heart thrum with excitement and make everyone else wonder how a guy like this gets anyone to read him.

Internecine Squabble

Conservative pundits are all atwitter at the rift that has opened in the movement between those who are angry that Christine O'Donnell has won the Republican primary for the senate seat of Joe Biden in Delaware and those who think it's outrageous that so many are pummeling a fellow conservative selected by the people.

The former group argues that the candidate she defeated, a notorious liberal named Mike Castle, was a shoo-in to win the November election, and that O'Donnell, because she has a history of difficulties in her personal finances (who hasn't?) is an almost certain loser. Thus people like Karl Rove, Charles Krauthammer, and The Weekly Standard folks, among others, are angry that GOP voters have diminished their chances of wresting control of the Senate from Harry Reid's Democrats in November by nominating a weak candidate.

The latter group, comprised of people like Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin and most of the conservative radio talkers argue that whether O'Donnell wins or loses in November, it's time conservatives stopped basing their vote on political expediency and started basing it on principle. It's time to send the good ol' boys at the top of the party that the country doesn't need or want any more RINOs (Republican In Name Only) like Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, or Susan Collins.

I'm with the latter group, but not just for the reason stated above. I think O'Donnell can win, I think she's basically a good person who made some bad judgments, and I think her ethical difficulties are less serious than those of the average Democrat in Congress (e.g. Charlie Rangel, Harry Reid, Dianne Feinstein, Al Franken, Maxine Waters, et multi alia). And there's one other thing that I haven't heard many commentators mention: If Mike Castle were elected to the Senate it would not necessarily help Republicans gain control of that body because Castle's ideological home is on the Left. There's a very good chance that he would succumb to efforts to persuade him to jump parties, like Arlen Specter and Jim Jeffords did, and then all that the GOP would have accomplished would be the election of one more liberal Democratic senator.

It's time for Castle's GOP backers to realize that the chances Castle would bolt the party once elected are at least as good as the probability that O'Donnell will lose in November. I'd prefer to take my chances on an O'Donnell win than on Mike Castle staying in the GOP and voting for all of the Democratic party's agenda.

Explaining Naturalism (Pt. II)

This post is Part II (See Part I below) of our look at Alex Rosenberg's paper titled A Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. In this section Rosenberg considers whether the universe and life reflect a purposeful design. In other words, is there any purpose to either the cosmos or to human existence? Rosenberg's answer is, no:

[A]ll of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.

He goes on to tackle the question whether morality can exist in a naturalistic world. He titles the section, Nice Nihilism: The Bad News About Morality and The Good News. I quote from it at length because it's unusual to find such an explicit statement of the consequences for morality entailed by atheistic naturalism:

If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.

There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem. The only way all or most normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population.

If our universally shared moral core were both the one selected for and also the right moral core, then the correlation of being right and being selected for couldn’t be a coincidence. Scientism doesn’t tolerate cosmic coincidences. Either our core morality is an adaptation because it is the right core morality or it’s the right core morality because it’s an adaptation, or it’s not right, but only feels right to us. It’s easy to show that neither of the first two alternatives is right. Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right.

All this should be pretty disturbing to those atheists who want to hold on to moral obligation while denying any transcendent ground for it. It's also precisely correct given Rosenberg's atheistic starting point.

Thus far Rosenberg has drawn the proper conclusions from his naturalism, but then he says something odd. Having denied any ground for distinguishing between right and wrong, he says this:

This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbearers in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions. We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.

What does Rosenberg mean here by imposing a value on niceness, cooperation, and altruism? Would someone who was not nice or cooperative be wrong? A naturalist like Rosenberg cannot say he would, nor do I think he would try to say that. Such judgments of moral value are completely unwarranted on naturalism except as expressions of personal taste.

Even more problematic is his claim that evolution has selected "in the main" for niceness, etc. I don't think this is true at all. Certainly this claim runs counter to human experience. There's just as much meanness and cruelty in the world as there is niceness. That being the case, evolution must have selected at least as much for meanness as for niceness, and an atheistic naturalist simply has no grounds for saying that one is right and the other is wrong. The most he can say is that he likes one more than he likes the other, but right and wrong are not established by our likes and dislikes.

More later.

Explaining Naturalism (Pt. I)

Alex Rosenberg is an atheistic naturalist [One who holds that nature is all there is, there is no supernature] who seeks in this essay to provide an overview of what it is that naturalists believe. He begins with this preface:

This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.

Rosenberg wishes to draw "the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position," as Sartre put it in describing existentialism. He will have none of the namby-pamby naturalism of those atheists, like Hitchens and Dawkins, who think they can reject God and still cling to belief that life is meaningful, that morality exists, and that truth can be known. Rosenberg's is a full-blooded naturalism that recognizes that all of those things are contingent upon the existence of a transcendent moral authority. Rosenberg's essay is a call to his fellow atheists to "man-up" and disabuse themselves of their comfortable illusions. No God, he avers, means no genuine meaning to life, no non-arbitrary morality, and no objective truth.

He divides his essay into eight topics, some of which will be addressed here at Viewpoint over the next couple of days. His first topic is headed, Why Leave Life’s Persistent Questions to Guy Noir? and is an explication of "scientism," a term that is in some disrepute but which Rosenberg wants to resuscitate. Here's an excerpt:

We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address. But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science....Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality. You don’t have to be a scientist to be scientistic.

Scientism is the view that answers to all important questions can be provided through scientific investigation. This is because everything that exists is simply some combination of matter and energy [This is a view called materialism]. Since science investigates matter and energy it will eventually find the answers to all our questions. If one embraces naturalism [the belief that nature is all there is] then one is likely also to embrace scientism.

Rosenberg's claim here that science can answer all the important questions is surely wrong. It can't, for example, answer the question whether we have a soul, whether there's life after death, whether altruism is morally superior to selfishness, whether God exists, or a host of other very important matters about which human beings frequently wonder. At least, it can't give answers to those questions which are any more authoritative than are, say, the answers provided by religion or philosophy.

In the next topic, titled The Nature Of Reality? Just Ask Physics Rosenberg gives a pretty clear statement of what materialists believe about the world:

What is the world really like? It’s fermions and bosons [subatomic particles], and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if ... there are other ones.

Ideas have consequences. If Rosenberg is right in saying that all that exists is matter, energy and the forces between them then several conclusions inevitably follow. Those conclusions are the topic of the remaining sections of his paper. We'll reflect upon them over the next several days.

The End of the Revolution?

Camille Paglia is as ardent an advocate of the sexual revolution as you're likely to find this side of the Playboy mansion so when she talks about the revolution's demise it catches one's eye. In the U.K. Sunday Times Paglia points to the exotic and beguiling Lady Gaga as exhibit A in her case that the social revolution in sexual mores which began after WWII has run its course. I'm not nearly as educated on these matters as is Ms Paglia, but nevertheless I'm not so sure that Western society could be so fortunate. In any event, here's a bit of what Paglia has to say about Ms Gaga:

Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

Actually, I doubt it. That "blazing trajectory" which has left so much pain, heartbreak, and shattered lives in its wake won't be over until the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, recognize that sexual license causes far more hurt and suffering than it does pleasure. It has certainly been lethal to families and destructive of young lives, particularly those of women, especially minority women, and their children. Sexual liberation created a culture of death, represented by the abortion industry, fed an explosion in the rate of divorce, and an increase in the incidence of STDs. It could be argued that the only people who have really benefited from the revolution are pornographers, doctors, lawyers, therapists and abortionists.

Easy access to sexual gratification has led to the devaluation of marriage and a disinclination on the part of men to make a commitment to one woman for a lifetime. It has been something less than the blessing its proponents were promising back in those heady years of the late fifties and early sixties when women were encouraged to loosen their inhibitions and men were urged to act pretty much like a buck in rut.

Lady Gaga is not, in my opinion, a symptom of the revolution's demise so much as a symptom of it's weariness. When society wearies of sex, when sex begins to cloy, people don't lose interest. They turn instead to ever more bizarre, destructive, and violent means of gratification. If Ms Gaga's peculiar persona is a manifestation of sexual ennui then it's also a sign of even more perverse expressions of sex to come.

Lucky us.

Coping with IEDs

Strategy Page has an interesting piece on how the military is minimizing the threat of IEDs in Afghanistan. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The tactics and equipment that neutralized IED (Improvised Explosive Device, a roadside, or suicide car bomb) in Iraq, have arrived in Afghanistan. There are now 12,000 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles in Afghanistan, and they have played a major part in reducing NATO casualties there. In Iraq, the use of a similar number of MRAPs, reduced casualties from IEDs by over 60 percent. In Afghanistan, the math is similar. While 80 percent of hummers or trucks hit with IEDs result in one or more passengers killed, that only happens in 15 percent of MRAPs hit with IEDs. A year ago, About two-thirds of all casualties in Afghanistan were from roadside bombs. Thus these vehicles reduced overall casualties by about a third, and now IEDs create less than half the casualties.

Over the last year, the U.S. has been hustling to get MRAP vehicles to Afghanistan. At times, over 500 a month were arriving. Most of those coming in are the M-ATV model, designed for use in Afghanistan. A B-747 freighter can carry five M-ATVs per trip, but larger An-124s are also being used. The vehicles are moved by ship to a European or Persian Gulf port, to shorten the flight time (and enable a fully loaded B-747 to make it in one jump from the Gulf.)

In addition to many more MRAPs going to Afghanistan, the supply of explosives (nitrate based fertilizer) has been reduced by mandating the use of non-explosive fertilizers in Afghanistan. The U.S. also transferred its bomb detection techniques, and equipment, to Afghanistan, along with its methods of identifying and hunting down the teams that manufacture and place the bombs. These tactics greatly reduced the number of bombs being placed, and the MRAPs made those that did get used, much less effective. In some parts of Afghanistan, the use of IEDs has already declined enormously. This is usually due to finding the specialists who build the IEDs (and killing or capturing them) and destroying the workshops and supplies of bomb components.

I think the Obama administration seriously blundered by announcing a withdrawal date from Afghanistan, but other than that they seem to be doing all they can to protect our troops and to bring that conflict to a reasonably successful conclusion. Who'd have thought during the 2008 campaign that Mr. Obama would turn out to aggressively prosecute a war?

The New Literature

At Patheos Robert Velarde writes that film and tv are the new literature:

The Western world has, by and large, shifted from what Neil Postman called the Age of Exposition to the Age of Entertainment (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985). Contemporary culture has in many respects left behind the scholarly engagement of literary ideas and displaced them with film and television. We have shifted from a "Have you read?" mentality to a "Have you seen?" perspective.

While I firmly believe that literary people will always exist, they are now in the clear minority. This is unfortunate, since the great ideas of history are most commonly discussed in depth not on screen, but in print. Nevertheless, thoughtful films can indeed offer much to ponder philosophically and theologically, while even poorly constructed films can provide us with opportunities to discuss meaningful ideas.

Velarde is right, of course. Film affords us a rich mine of ideas, illustrations, and metaphors to aid us in bridging the social chasms that have opened up between people who live in different cultural worlds and hold to completely disparate worldviews.

Pundits often lament that our nation has become increasingly divided over the last couple of generations, that we don't really talk with each other so much as at each other, and that when we do talk it's as if we're broadcasting over a radio on one frequency while their "receiver" is set at a different frequency.

The medium of film (and music) can give a powerful assist to our attempts to communicate to our friends our own thoughts and convictions, and it has this critical advantage: It's a lot easier today to persuade someone to watch a film than it is to read a book.

Check out the rest of Velarde's column at the link.

Beware the Tea Party Terrorists

It's a measure of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left that they so frequently resort to such laughable tactics as seeking to discredit their opposition by conflating in the public mind the Tea Party with all sorts of nefarious far-right organizations. The Daily Caller, for instance, tells us that:

Tea Party leaders say a series of reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) attempting to connect the Tea Party movement with domestic terrorists in the militia movement shows how desperate the left has become trying to stop the political juggernaut.

The group says individuals such as Glenn Beck, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann — all regulars at major Tea Party gatherings — have given widespread visibility for ideas espoused by the militia movement, or the “Patriot movement” as SPLC calls it.

According to SPLC, the Patriot movement — largely comprised of white supremacists — was animated in the 1990s by a shared view of the federal government as the enemy and a belief the Federal Emergency Management Agency secretly runs concentration camps.

“The ‘tea parties’ and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism,” Mark Potok, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, wrote in a piece titled “Rage On The Right: The Year In Hate And Extremism” from the group’s Spring 2010 edition of its Intelligence Report.

Yes, indeed. There's even photographic evidence of some of those hate-filled bigots and potential terrorists plotting violent revolution at one of their insidious rallies:

Beware.

Honoring Our Heroes

Today is a day to remember those who died on this date nine years ago as well as to honor the men and women who have been fighting ever since against the people who launched the 9/11 attacks and their allies. The Washington Post has an account of one such young man. It begins with this:

Under a bright Afghan moon, eight U.S. paratroopers trudged along a ridge in the Korengal Valley, unaware they were walking right into a trap. Less than 20 feet away, a band of Taliban fighters executed the ambush plan perfectly, enveloping the paratrooper squad in an explosion of bullets and grenades.

Salvatore Giunta, a 22-year-old Army specialist from Hiawatha, Iowa, was knocked flat by the gunfire; luckily, a well-aimed round failed to penetrate his armored chest plate. As the paratroopers tried to gather their senses and scramble for a shred of cover, Giunta reacted instinctively, running straight into the teeth of the ambush to aid three wounded soldiers, one by one, who had been separated from the others.

Two paratroopers died in the Oct. 25, 2007, attack, and most of the others suffered serious wounds. But the toll would have been far higher if not for the bravery of Giunta, according to members of his unit and Army officials.

Read the rest of the story of Giunta's bravery here.

The Post article goes on to tell us that President Obama will award Giunta the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor, and that will make him the first living recipient of the medal who has served in any war since Vietnam.

This is hard to believe. There've been so many stories of incredible bravery emerging from the wars of the last nine years that the military bureaucracy must be a very stingy bunch to find none of them deserving of its highest award. What Giunta did was extraordinary and merits the Medal of Honor, but so do the actions under fire of these and many other Americans who are risking and giving their lives every day to keep us safe from the barbarian hordes who want to kill us and our children and return the world to the 7th century.

The Amoralist

Joel Marks is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut who writes for the blog Philosophy Now. He's an atheist and has come to realize that attempts by atheists to defend their belief in the validity of moral obligation in a Godless world are futile. Rather than retain his belief in moral obligation by accepting the existence of God, however, Marks chooses to retain his belief in atheism by rejecting morality. Marks explains his decision to become an "amoralist":

In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.

How I arrived at this conclusion is the subject of a book I have written during this recent period (tentatively titled Bad Faith: A Personal Memoir on Atheism, Amorality, and Animals). The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it.

Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it.

The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort?

In sum, while theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, i.e., God, I now take the non-existence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, i.e., morality.

Give Marks credit for finally seeing what Christians have been telling atheists for decades if not centuries: Take away God and you take away any ground for moral judgment. As I mentioned in a post last week the atheists that Marks refers to as soft atheists live in an unsustainable tension. They want to hold on to moral judgment while also holding on to their atheism. As Marks has realized, it can't be done. Unfortunately, of the two solutions available to him - reject atheism or reject morality - Marks has chosen the latter which, although consistent, strikes me as almost perverse.

The rest of the post is interesting, and I invite you to read it. Meanwhile, I wonder now whether Marks, having claimed to be an amoralist (one who rejects the view that there are moral duties), will be able to refrain, as he must, from making moral judgments. I wonder, for example, whether he really will be able to say that kindness is no more "right" than cruelty, that selflessness is no more right than selfishness, or that there's no obligation to help the poor. I wonder whether he'll now say that torture is neither right nor wrong, and that acts like murder, though they may be unpopular, are not really morally wrong. I wonder if Marks even realizes that he's going to have to answer these questions.

Which Year Is It?

As Tony Blankley observes there are two ways of seeing the growing crisis in Iran. Some people see it through the lens of 1964 and some through the lens of 1938. Blankley explains:

Neoconservatives, Reaganites and other militarily assertive factions in the United States are sometimes accused of thinking it is always 1938 (Britain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich) -- that there is always a Hitler-like aggressor being appeased and about to drag the world into conflict. There is sometimes merit in that charge.

As, likewise, there is sometimes merit in the charge against isolationists and other doves that they always see 1914 (start of WWI) or 1964 (beginning of escalation of troops in Vietnam) -- the imminent and foolish entry into or escalation of a war that can't be won -- or even if victory were to be gained, it would be Pyrrhic.

[T]hose for whom it is now 1938 make a number of assumptions: 1) The Iranian regime intends to develop nuclear weapons; 2) once it has them, being fanatics, they may actually use them against Israel, as they have repeatedly threatened; 3) even if they don't use them, it will change the dynamics of the Middle East by inducing a nuclear arms race between Sunni Muslim countries and Iran, and by giving Iran a huge capacity to intimidate and dominate the region; 4) both Europe and the United States will eventually fall within the missile shadow of a nuclear Iran -- thus giving Iran capacity to be a world player and possible precipitator of nuclear war even beyond the Middle East; 5) the regime is inherently hostile and aggressive, particularly against the U.S. and Israel, and will keep pushing until pushed back; and 6) even tough sanctions will not deter Iran -- moreover, Russia is too invested in Iran to truly cooperate with us, and even Europe will not enforce tough sanctions.

The 1938'ers further believe -- or claim to believe -- that while Iran can create havoc in response to our military action (threaten oil transport out of the Gulf, terrorist attacks in the Middle East, Europe and probably the United States, further harm to our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan), they would be even more dangerous -- and just as ill intentioned -- if nuclear armed.

On the other hand, there are those, many Obama people among them, who see the world through the lens of 1964. They hold vastly different assumptions. They argue that:

1) Iran may actually not want nuclear weapons. 2) If they do want them, Russia will help us stop them. 3) If we settle the Israeli/Palestinian dispute that will reduce any nuclear aspirations Iran may have. 4) If we were to attack Iran, Iran could create more chaos than we can manage. 5) But if Iran did develop their nuclear weapons, we can deter their use by providing a nuclear umbrella for both Arab and Israeli. And, factually, they assume the danger is off by at least a year -- and that Iran is running into technical problems.

Blankley thinks this view is much too pollyannish. I think he's right. The advantage possessed by those who see the world through the lens of 1938 is that it is based on historical experience and not wishful thinking. There have always been and are today lunatic, power-mad dictators out there ready to destroy the world in order to gain it. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad certainly has all the field marks to identify him as one of these.

President Obama has been trying without much success to appease the Iranian leader while not giving the appearance of appeasing him. The problem is that, just as Neville Chamberlain learned to his everlasting shame with Hitler, what Ahmedinejad wants the United States can't give him, and what we can give him he doesn't want, at least not as much as he wants to destroy Israel.

No Need for God

Our post on Stephen Hawking's new book in which he apparently claims that all that's necessary to account for the existence of the universe is a force like gravity, and that there's no need to posit a role for God, reminded a reader of this old joke:

God was sitting in heaven one day when a scientist said to Him, "God, we don't need you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing - in other words, we can now do what you did in the beginning."

"Oh, is that so? Explain..." replies God. "Well," says the scientist, "we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man."

"Well, that's very interesting... show Me."

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil into the shape of a man. "No, no, no..." interrupts God, "Get your own dirt."

This is precisely the problem Hawking has. Where does the dirt - the energy as well as the dozens of laws and forces that comprise the universe - come from in the first place? What determines that these essential components of the cosmic structure will have the precise values they do such that had the value of any one of them deviated by as much as the mass of an electron compared to the mass of an aircraft carrier, the universe would not have formed?

What Hawking wants us to believe is the equivalent of asserting that an aircraft carrier could have been built such that had its mass varied by as much as an electron, had its height been off by as much as the thickness of an atomic nucleus, had its width fallen short by the width of a razor blade, had its color been any shade but precisely the one it is, had the friction in the propeller shaft been different by the weight of a mosquito, had any of these and more been the case the carrier would have collapsed in the drydock and never made it to sea. Then Hawking serves up the pièce de résistance by assuring us that these extraordinarily exacting specifications notwithstanding, blind, purposeless forces just accidentally managed to pull all the requisite parts together and perform the dazzling feat of arranging them with such astonishing precision that those specifications would be satisfied and the ship would be launched.

And then he and his fellow atheists scoff at Christians for believing in miracles. Pretty funny.

He Wants Your Money

Jason tells me that this film is being made by a writer from MAD magazine. I wonder if it's not really about a government that writers from MAD might have dreamed up had they been in a malicious mood:

Decapitation Strategy

Strategy Page gives us an update on military operations in Afghanistan. Here's part of it:

Between April and July of this year, U.S. and allied (including Afghan) special operations forces killed nearly 400 Taliban leaders, and arrested another 1,400 Taliban. All this was mostly done via night operations by commandos (mainly U.S. Special Forces and SEALs) and missile attacks by American UAVs. This is part of a trend.

This “decapitation” campaign was successful in Iraq, and earlier, in Israel (where it was developed to deal with the Palestinian terror campaign that began in 2000.) Actually, the Americans have used siimilar tactics many times in the past (in World War II, 1960s Vietnam, the Philippines over a century ago and in 18th century colonial America.) But the Israelis developed decapitation tactics customized for use against Islamic terrorists.

In some cases, the Special Forces efforts have been so successful that the Taliban has been unable to get anyone to take the place of dead leaders. In some cases, the Taliban have called on friend and kin in the Afghan government, to try and get the Americans to stop. This puts these Afghan officials in a tight spot. While they are officially on board with this campaign against the Taliban, they also have members of their tribe, or even close relatives, who are in the Taliban. That’s not unusual in Afghanistan, where even the most pro-Taliban tribes have members who are not only pro-government, but actually work (most of the time) for the government. That’s how politics works in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the major media rarely report any of this stuff. Listening to the evening news one would think that all is doom and gloom in Afghanistan and that U.S. forces are on the verge of being run out of the country by the Taliban with their tail between their legs. Of course, this is how they reported on Iraq, too. It seems that when it comes to American efforts abroad the media can't help but focus on the clouds and ignore the wide swaths of blue sky.

Polyamory and Gay Marriage

Over the last few days we've commented a couple of times on an article in Scientific American by research psychologist Jesse Bering. In the essay Bering makes this assertion:

...human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out ‘extra-pair copulatory partners’—having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes—then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

Let us for the sake of discussion grant that human beings, at least male humans, are not naturally monogamous (I happen to believe that that's true. Men have to be taught to value monogamy). What are the implications of this for the future of marriage once we remove the legal barrier to homosexual marriage? If the natural state of humans is polyamory and if in our enlightened times we decide that the gender of the individuals entering into marriage no longer matters, what reason could there possibly be for saying that the number of people in the marriage matters?

Bering gives us a peek at the future debate. It will go something like this: Polyamory is a natural urge. To stifle peoples' natural urges is oppressive. Therefore it is oppressive for a society to deny people the right to form unions of any number of people they wish.

Once we've accepted the proposition that the gender of the married persons doesn't matter there'll be no basis for resisting the argument that the number of people in a marriage shouldn't matter either. And once we acknowledge that polyamorous marriages should be permitted for those who desire them, marriage will cease to have any real meaning or significance and will probably cease to exist.

Bering doesn't think that people will really want to form group marriages because, human nature being what it is, jealousy will obtrude forming an insurmountable obstacle. This is, in my opinion, naive. Polyamory has existed in various permutations throughout human history, and there will certainly be those who will wish to have it legitimated by the state once the philosophical and religious objections have been bulldozed out of the way by same sex marriage. Whatever people can do some will surely do. To think otherwise seems to reflect an inadequate understanding of human nature, and I'm surprised that a research psychologist doesn't recognize this.

Re: Whites Need Not Apply

A number of students replied to the recent post titled "Whites Need Not Apply" which addressed the racial discrimination being experienced by whites and Asians from admissions offices at major universities. Many of the responses were interesting and thoughtful and some were sad. Here are excerpts from five of the many that were received:

Buchanan wishes to express the huge injustice going on at these universities, but is it injustice or are the roles simply being reversed. He states that minorities have a huge competitive advantage because of not being white. Yet, I wonder if he has even taken the time to see why these particular minorities score so low on their SATs. Did he take into account the preparation (to be more specific; the rigorous curriculums) needed to even score high on the SATs? Maybe here is where they (colleges) make up the difference.

Buchanan also states that whites are a minority and are being discriminated against at these Ivy Leagues. If this were the case, then perhaps he should go to an HBCU where he could in fact receive admittance and a scholarship for truly being a minority. Make the system work for you. I must ask the question is he angry because he was denied admittance into an Ivy League school (where upon graduating, you will leave with a prestigious reputation and degree) or was he truly aggrieved at the injustice he received. I can agree with him till a certain extent.

Yes more and more schools are admitting more minorities than whites. With that said I do not believe that colleges (Ivy Leagues included) will admit any “run of the mill” minority student just because they want money. Their SAT score may not be the highest but they may offer something more than just a score or sport. Perhaps they have potential unseen by others.

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What happened to equality? These application “boosts” don’t promote equality at all. A girl in my high school was born in Africa but she is white. She was in the same academic classes with me and several other white males and females. However, she was lucky enough to have the ability to put down African American on all her applications for scholarships, colleges, and any other applications. Because of that distinction, she received the majority of the scholarships available and made it into the honors programs at all her college choices.

I do not doubt the fact that she was smart. However she wasn’t at the top of our class, yet she managed to beat out more qualified students based solely on where she was born. Since when does judging one’s mental capabilities and intelligence depend on their race? If the point of applications is to sift through students to find the best on that class, shouldn’t they be compared to each other on even ground? The students aren’t being compared to each other at all; they are merely being exposed to the discrimination of race. So despite all the actions to stop inequality, the problem remains, only this time the targets have been changed.

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I am a Sergeant in the United States Army Reserve and the effect of this racism has even entered our military. Over my six years in the Reserve’s I have often seen African American and Hispanic soldiers promoted over a white soldier just because of the soldier’s race. I have witnessed this happen on occasions when the white soldier was much more qualified for the promotion, had more experience, more time in service, and had better leadership skills. This not only kills white soldiers’ morale but weakens our military.

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My mother is white and my father is black, creating a beautiful mix of culture and history in my life. I have always loved American history and I have always enjoyed hearing my dad talk about stories from growing up in Louisiana, discussing how his life changed as America became more integrated and accepting of color.

I know that affirmative action was created to allow underrepresented races a chance to be more accepted in the educational setting, as well as when dealing with employment, and at the time it was brought about it was necessary and many benefited. I feel, though, that this article has proven that it has now gone too far and that those in the minority position are being given almost too much of an advantage and I might even go on to say that it is insulting.

I thoroughly understand that there are a lot of differences when it comes to those of different races, social economic levels, and gender. No two lives are the same and because of the differences listed above, individuals will live very different lives and be given different opportunities. I feel though that Harvard has gone too far to make such a blatant difference between SAT scores based on race.

I understand there may be honest intentions behind it, but it could also be seen as though those who are minorities do not have the ability to get the kind of results as those who are white or Asian. I also think that it is very stereotypical to think that whites and Asians are the "smarter" races and that there scores must be that high in comparison to "lower" races.

We are in a new time, a new decade, and the playing field has been leveled so to speak. Yes, there is still discrimination and bigotry but I believe that that will always exist. It would be wonderful to know that when someone looks at me, my intelligence level is not automatically assumed because of the color of my skin.

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I completely and utterly agree with this viewpoint post! I can personally relate to this testimony. This past fall, I applied for guaranteed acceptance to Hershey Medical School. I was born for this program; it was suited to absolutely every aspect of my future career goals. This program started with 200 invited applicants and I was one of the lucky ten selected for an interview. When I walked into the room full of other interviewees, I noticed that [there were few] Caucasian people there. All of the applicants represented all of the possible races and genders. It was obvious to me right away that I had no chance of getting into this program.

Every other applicant in that room had an advantage over me because they were minorities. Each of the students I met that had been previously elected into this program were all minorities: one was Jewish, one was Indian, one was Muslim, one was African American, and so on. I had one reassurance because I was the only student there that seemed 100% dedicated to the intention of the program… to become a rural primary care doctor. All of the others expressed interest in other fields of medicine, and clearly were not meant for the program.

Six weeks after my interview, I made a phone call and found out I was not selected. Hershey neglected to even call me and tell me I did not make it. So much of my time, energy, and money were wasted on this failed attempt to fulfill my dreams. They told me I was an excellent candidate and they would love to have me, but in the end they could only pick two people… two very non-Caucasian people.

I am a humanitarian. I wholly believe in equality. I believe that minorities (African Americans, Asians, Hispanics) are equivalent in every way to the Caucasian majority. In addition, I do not believe that sex differentiates anything other than reproduction. I believe everyone should be treated with fairness and equality; everyone should be given the same opportunities as the next. Everyone in this world should be placed on an even playing field, despite race, gender, or religious beliefs.

People like myself have worked for so many years to bring equality to minorities. I find it disturbing that people like myself are now being punished for the selfless work they have done for minority rights. The flaws in our society regarding inequality have been excessively overcome--the majority is now the minority. The system has reversed itself. Today the majority can not succeed because the minority is being given special preference and special treatment.

Someone, somewhere is no doubt saying that all this is somehow fair and just, but it's a strange notion of fairness and justice that one has to hold in order to think so.