18 Facts about Us and the World

One form of argument employed by investigators - whether police, scientists or philosophers - is called abduction or inference to the best explanation. When confronted by certain facts or evidence, the investigator asks which explanation, among the possible options, fits or explains these facts best with the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

That explanation is then considered the most probable, or best, of the alternatives, and it becomes a working hypothesis until further evidence arises which makes it less tenable.

Below are eighteen facts about the world, some of which are scientific and others of which might be called existential. There are basically two competing metaphysical explanations for these facts in Western culture - naturalism and theism. We must approach the evidence objectively, that is with no a priori assumptions about the truth or falsity of either explanation, and then ask which of the two explanations do these seventeen facts mesh with most comfortably.

Do they conform best with the view that everything is a product of blind forces and serendipity, or are they best explained by assuming the existence of a transcendent, intelligent agent?

Remember, no a priori assumptions about which of the two alternatives is correct are permitted.

Here are the eighteen with a brief elaboration on each:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning: What caused the universe to come into being when it did? Could it have "just happened"?
2. The fact of cosmic fine-tuning: Is it just a lucky accident that there are dozens of forces, constants and other parameters that are calibrated to within astonishingly precise limits such that were it otherwise either life or the universe itself could not exist?
3. The fact of the ubiquity of biological information: It's the uniform experience of human beings that information is the product of a mind. How, then, did the information in DNA and other macromolecules arise?
4. The fact of human consciousness: How does brain matter by itself generate meaning, sensation and awareness?
5. The fact that mathematics can explain much of the world and that we can comprehend math:
Is it just a coincidence that the world is explicable in the language of math? How did we evolve the ability to do higher math when such an ability had no survival value?
6. The joy we experience when we encounter beauty: Why does beauty, whether visual or auditory, affect us?
7. The fact that we believe human reason to be generally reliable: If reason evolved to aid in survival then it doesn't necessarily produce true beliefs, especially metaphysical beliefs, so why should we trust it?
8. Our sense that we have free will: If we're just a collocation of atoms governed by the principles of chemistry where does the powerful intuition that we're in some sense free to choose and responsible for our choices come from?
9. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions: Why would the evolutionary process produce in us a desire for answers which are completely unnecessary for survival?
10. Our sense of moral obligation: Where does our sense that we have a duty to do some things and to avoid others come from? Why do we think this sense of duty is somehow binding upon us?
11. Our sense of guilt/regret: If nothing is really right or wrong why do we have a sense of guilt when we engage in certain behaviors? Why do we feel guilt if we're not guilty and what does it mean to be guilty?
12. Our belief in human dignity: If we're just an animal, an ephemeral product of chance and physical law, from whence comes the notion that we have dignity?
13. Our belief in human worth: Ibid.
14. Our belief that there are basic human rights: Ibid.
15. Our desire for justice: Why have we evolved a desire for justice if there is no such thing, at least not in an ultimate sense?
16. Our need for meaning and purpose: Why, if we're the product of natural selection and genetic mutation, do we yearn for a deeper meaning to life beyond mere reproduction?
17. Our belief that we have an enduring self: If all we are is a "pack of neurons" (Francis Crick) what is it about us that makes us think we're something more, something that perdures through time?
18. Our desire to survive our own death: If death is just a natural part of life, why do we seek to do what we can to avoid it? Why do we have a desire for something more?

So, which worldview, in your opinion, is the best explanation of these eighteen facts?

Fundamentally Transforming the Country

Just a few years ago, students and young people in general faced a dismal job market upon graduation. Burdened with onerous student loan debt some despaired of ever finding a job that would allow them to pay it off, much less support a family, buy a home and embark upon a meaningful career.

If they were poor their outlook was especially bleak. There just were no jobs for the unskilled, our president was admonishing us that many good paying jobs had fled overseas and weren't coming back and that we all needed to get used to this "new normal."

Then came 2016 and the election of a man whom Matthew Continetti describes in a column at the Washington Free Beacon this way:

He brags, he intimidates, he pouts, he jokes, he insults, he is purposefully ambiguous, and he leaves no criticism unanswered. He is unlike any postwar American president, though he shares some qualities with LBJ and Reagan. He is frenetic and polarizing, a showboat and a salesman. His methods are over-the-top, combative, and divisive.

In place of the politics of consensus he adopts the politics of confrontation. Where others mindlessly repeat politically correct clichés, Trump unequivocally challenges them. He has ushered in a new era of American politics by dissolving the varnish that for so long obscured fundamental cultural divisions between and within the parties. He is president of a country that is wilder, zanier, and more unpredictable than before.

Yet he has done more to make the country stronger, to help the poor, and to offer a hopeful future to young people than any president before him, including Ronald Reagan. Wherever one looks - trade, judges, foreign policy, the economy, he is succeeding in doing what his predecessor also promised to do, i.e. fundamentally transform the country, but not in the way that President Obama had in mind.

Whereas Mr. Obama saw socialism as the future of the United States and did what he could to move us in that direction, Mr Trump is freeing markets to do what socialism can never do, create jobs and create opportunities for everyone to have a better life, including the poor.

Unemployment, both overall and for minorities, is at record lows, average family income is at record highs, the welfare rolls are shrinking and most college students can expect to find ample career opportunities awaiting them once they secure their diploma.

Mr. Trump has accomplished all this while being relentlessly hounded by a special prosecutor and a media which despises him and despite being opposed at every step by a Democratic party which perhaps sees their hold on the lower economic classes slipping from their grasp and their dreams of a burgeoning centralized government that has its fingers in every pie fading into oblivion.

Here are some of the ways Continetti sees President Trump transforming the country:

TRADE: Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced it had reached an agreement with both Mexico and Canada to revise and rebrand the North America Free Trade Agreement as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. This announcement fulfills one of President Trump's key pledges on the campaign trail while benefiting constituencies in important states such as Michigan (autos) and Wisconsin and Minnesota (dairy). Trump also renegotiated the Korea Free Trade Agreement and has made progress with the Europeans as well as the Japanese.

ECONOMY: The Trump Bump continues, with overall unemployment at its lowest level since 1969. Consumer confidence is high, and data from the manufacturing and service sectors indicate continued growth. No president is responsible for the state of the American economy, but fiscal and regulatory policy help, and presidents take credit or receive blame in any event.

JUDGES: Judge Brett Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court will secure a five-vote majority of originalist and textualist judges on the high court for the first time in modern memory. Such a transformation of the federal judiciary has been a goal of Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. The fact that it will be Donald J. Trump who will cement this victory is no small feat. On the contrary, it may turn out to be his greatest and longest-lasting achievement.

FOREIGN POLICY: President Trump is slowly and steadily re-orienting U.S. foreign policy to face the central challenge of the twenty-first century: the rise of China to great power status. Beginning with the national security strategy released at the end of 2017...Trump has accomplished the "pivot to Asia" that the Obama administration so often talked about. What the pivot looks like is a policy of containment—one that should have been pursued decades ago. Trump has made this move while sanctioning Russia, getting tough on Iran, ending the farcical Middle East "peace process," and attempting to defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Mr. Trump is not without his faults, but what he has done for the workers of this country and for the future of our young people is unprecedented. Those who oppose him do so not because of his failures but because of his successes. They don't want to see capitalism succeed inasmuch as it'll make it that much harder for them to regain power and to implement the socialist policies they believe to be the only just economic system.

Nor do they want to see him succeed in appointing judges and Justices who will interpret the law rather than legislate from the bench because it's a lot easier for the left to get their way when they can do it through the courts rather than having to go through the people's representatives in the legislature.

No one has a crystal ball, of course, and the trajectory of the country could change overnight, especially if Mr. Trump's political opponents regain the House and Senate in November, but if you care about jobs, if you care about the poor, if you care about our young people's future, and if you care about the rule of law, you have to be gratified with the overall direction we're moving in today.

Time for Dems to Disavow Alinsky

I commented yesterday on the deplorable state of our political rhetoric, a state that fell to a new nadir with the Kavanaugh hearings. With the elections looming in November and so much riding on the outcome, it's unlikely that our discourse is going to become less toxic anytime soon.

Even so, one step that may go some distance toward a more cordial and civil polity would be for responsible people on the left to repudiate and renounce the malign influence that Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1971) has had on left-wing political activism. They don't have to renounce the whole book. Not everything in it is corrosive, but certainly it would be a salutary development if more of them would distance themselves from Alinsky's rules #5, #11, and #13.

Here are the rules I have in mind:

5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." There is no defense. It's irrational. It's infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. "If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive." Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Alinsky's book has been something of a catechism for left-wing activists throughout the almost fifty years since it first came out, whether those who employ Alinsky's methods are aware of it or not, but a book that urges its disciples to ridicule their opponents, to provoke their opponents to violence, and to personalize disagreements by insult and isolation, is not likely to bring people together or to enhance comity. Indeed, Alinsky promotes polarization in #13.

Some of the remainder of Alinsky's thirteen rules are also of dubious value if we're serious about improving the quality of our political discourse. #4, for example, says that the activist should,

"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

Notice the language. Those who disagree aren't just "opponents," they're "enemies." Enemies.

Moreover, the goal is to make people who may be decent, sincere human beings vulnerable to a phony charge of hypocrisy. Throughout the book Alinsky urges that activists discredit and smear, not just their opponents' ideas, but the opponents themselves. People who stand in their way don't just need to have their ideas defeated, they need to have their reputations ruined and their careers destroyed just as this writer for the Colbert show tweeted the other day:

Appropriately enough, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer. Ever since its initial publication those who live by it have had a divisive, malign effect upon our society. Division is what the book advocates and it's what its votaries want, but if they're serious about cleansing the political environment of the toxicity that currently permeates it, they'd do well to unambiguously renounce Alinsky and his book.

Rock Bottom

If there's truth to the aphorism that people are known by the company they keep then rank and file Democrats must be feeling a bit uneasy and embarrassed by the sheer wickedness and lunacy of some of the people who vote the way they do.

There are, of course, awful people on both sides of the political spectrum, but no prominent Republican has said or done anything as remotely vile as have some prominent Democrats.

To be sure, Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who brought the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that when they were at a high school party he forced her into a bedroom and then jumped on top of her (she claims to have escaped from the room before anything else happened and none of the people she names as witnesses have corroborated her story), claims now to be receiving death threats. If this is true it's absolutely disgusting and contemptible, but as of yet there are no records of the threats and we have no idea who might be doing this.

Yet, in terms of sheer hatred, cruelty and verbal violence, from people who are in the public eye and can be counted among the elite in our society, it's hard to match what we're seeing from some on the left.

Consider just two recent examples. Georgetown University Professor C. Christine Fair, who, according to a piece in The Daily Caller, has a sordid record of vulgar and hateful rhetoric, tweeted recently:

“Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement.”

“All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps,” Fair wrote. “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

A second example of the left's moral dwarfism comes to us from a writer for the Stephen Colbert show named Ariel Dumas who tweeted on Saturday before the Kavanaugh confirmation vote that, "Whatever happens, I'm just glad we ruined Brett Kavanaugh's life."

It evidently doesn't matter to these people that Kavanaugh might well be innocent. It doesn't matter that even if he did try to force himself on a woman while intoxicated 36 years ago that he may be a man of completely different character today.

It doesn't matter that both of these women doubtless voted for Bill Clinton, a man credibly alleged to have been a serial sexual assaulter and both presumably would have supported Ted Kennedy, who was not only renowned for his sexual improprieties but was actually responsible for the death of a young woman.

Indeed, it wouldn't have mattered whatsoever if the allegations had never been brought against Judge Kavanaugh. No one in the Senate would have voted any differently than they did vote.

Fairness and logical consistency are irrelevant when one is consumed by hatred to the point that the most important thing is ruining someone's life or gloating over the prospect of their murder and mutilation.

Also embarrassing for Democrats must be the behavior of protestors in the Senate gallery as the vote was taken on Saturday. Women screamed, screeched and howled like inmates in an asylum. These are the people who want to determine who runs the country? These are the people who demand that we listen to them? Why on earth should we?

Perhaps those who belong to the same party as these women are outraged at the black eye their party's being given. Perhaps they're asking themselves what it is about their candidates that appeals to people like these, and perhaps they're asking themselves whether they really want to be associated with individuals who give so much evidence of being mentally and/or morally sick.

If they're not perhaps they should be.

The Demise of Science (Pt. II)

I suggested in the previous post that science would deeply harm itself if it abandoned the distinctive criteria that set it apart from other intellectual pursuits. Today I'd like to consider another reason science is jeopardizing its own fruitfulness, and it's a consequence of the naturalism (i.e. the view that the natural, physical world is all that exists) that led to the problems discussed yesterday.

This additional way in which naturalism and its adherents may be bringing about the demise of the scientific enterprise is highlighted in a piece at Stream.org. Here's an excerpt:

In his profound book The Death of Humanity, Richard Weikart documents how self-appointed spokesmen for “Science” such as “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins — and thousands who follow his lead — reject the idea of objective morality, free will, and the meaningfulness of life.

Instead they blithely insist that everything — every single thing — in human nature can be traced to natural selection and blind variation. Religious impulses, altruism, friendship, love, even scientific curiosity, must all be explained away as the purposeless side-effects of mutations.

Human consciousness itself is a purely chemical, deterministic process entirely driven by the firing of neurons in the brain — which means that it is impossible to describe knowledge as objective, or any statement as really “true.”

The perception each of us has that a proposition is provable, or an experiment is conclusive, is no guarantee of anything in external reality; instead it is the outcome of subatomic dominoes falling in random patterns. How can science continue if even scientists start to believe this about their minds?

The answer is that it cannot. The death of humanity which Weikart describes will also be the death of science. We are already seeing state attorneys general trying to prosecute scientists who question the political orthodoxy of climate activists, federal regulations overriding the medical judgments of doctors treating “transgender” patients, and a dogmatic refusal on the part of many well-educated people to admit that a human embryo is either living or human, or that physical sex (gender) exists.

In other words, science is naturalism's summum bonum, but naturalistic assumptions are corrosive, if not fatal, to science. Science arose and flourished in the Christian culture of the West, a culture that took it for granted that the world was the product of a rational, logical God who created man in the image of himself.

Being the creation of a rational being the world was thus assumed to be orderly and law-like and could be expected to yield its secrets to logical inquiry by men who were its divinely appointed stewards.

Early philosophers and scientists believed that because the Creator was rational there was a reason why everything happened and that those reasons could be uncovered by rational investigation.

Naturalism, though, rejects the notion of an intelligent, personal Creator without realizing that everything else that it wants to hold on to is contingent upon the conviction that the world is the product of such a being as they deny. In the absence of God, belief in an objective, law-governed universe discoverable by human reason crumbles like very old paper as soon as it's touched.

Naturalists, ironically, exalt science without realizing that science and naturalism are fundamentally incompatible and cannot indefinitely co-exist.

The Demise of Science (Pt. I)

Science has flourished for three hundred years in the West, and has been in many ways a marvelous blessing to the world, but it may nevertheless soon find itself on life support. Ironically, the agent of its potential senescence is the rejection of a couple or three metaphysical assumptions that many credit with having given it its robust vigor and success in the first place.

The assumptions I refer to are these: 1. The conviction that science should limit itself to the study of natural, physical causes, and 2. that the theories it propounds should be based on physical, empirical evidence. Those theories, moreover, should 3. have the quality of being in principle falsifiable - that is, there should be a way to test the theory and a conceivable result of that test which, if it obtained, would show the theory to be false. Whatever hypotheses cannot meet these criteria - e.g. religious, ethical, epistemological, or aesthetic theories - belong to philosophical inquiry and reside outside the boundaries of science.

That's been the prevailing view ever since the Enlightenment, but there's sympathy in some scientific and philosophical precincts today for quietly doing away with both the need for empirical evidence as well as the falsifiability criterion, and the reasons for this, or at least a couple of them, are interesting.

Some scientists, for instance, think these criteria are too confining and, worse, they lead to unhappy metaphysical conclusions about the existence of God.

Specifically, some (many?) philosophers and scientists want desperately to legitimize multiverse hypotheses as legitimate science because if our universe is the only one that exists the conclusion that it is intentionally designed becomes virtually inescapable.

As one might imagine, this ineluctability makes metaphysical naturalists (atheists) quite uncomfortable. As Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London puts it, it's either the multiverse or God. Those are the only two live options.

The reason the multiverse seems necessary to save naturalism is that cosmic fine-tuning is so compelling (see video below), and the probability of a universe as incredibly fine-tuned as ours existing is so infinitesimally tiny, that if one wishes to avoid the conclusion that a supernatural Designer exists, or even the weaker but still important conclusion that the universe affords much evidence that such an intelligence exists, one has to hold that there's an infinite array of worlds in which every possible universe is actual.

If so, then in an infinity of worlds every possible world has a probability of one, including our world. This would mean that the cosmic fine-tuning may be no big deal.

Thus, the multiverse is seen as the best way on offer to rescue naturalism from the theists. But the problem is there's no physical evidence that such a plethora of worlds really does exist, only that their existence is possible, nor is there any way to test or falsify the claim that this ensemble of worlds exists. Thus, many philosophers and scientists argue, the multiverse theory is not a scientific hypothesis at all. It's metaphysics, just like religion, ethics, aesthetics, etc.

This "reduction" of the stature of the theory won't do, however, because if it's not a "scientific" theory it won't have any particular authority or claim on people's minds, so what's the solution? If the hypothesis doesn't meet the criteria of science then one solution is to discard the inconvenient criteria altogether so that science becomes simply whatever it is that scientists do.

But this makes science something other than what it's been for three centuries. It robs it of its distinctive character and, let's repeat, transforms it into an exercise in metaphysics, just like religion.

There's another way science seems to be losing its distinctive character, and we'll look at that in the next post.

How Much Evidence?

The famous atheist philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was once asked to suppose that he'd died and found himself face to face with God who asked him to account for his lack of belief. What, Russell was asked, would he say? Russell's reply was a curt, "Not enough evidence."

This has been a common response to similar questions for centuries. The unbeliever argues that the burden of proof is on the believer to demonstrate that God does exist. Failing that, the rational course is to suspend belief.

In the lapidary words of 19th century writer William Clifford, "It is always wrong, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence." Of course, Clifford would presumably want to exempt this his own statement for which there's no evidence whatsoever.

In any case, a claim for which there was no conceivable empirical test was considered meaningless by many philosophers since there was no way to ascertain its truth or falsity. This evidentialism or verificationism, as it was called, enjoyed considerable popularity back in the 1930s and 40s among those who wanted to make the deliverances of science the touchstone for meaningfulness, but it eventually fell into disfavor among both philosophers and scientists because, rigorously applied, it excluded a lot of what scientists wanted to believe were meaningful claims (for example, the claim that life originated through purely physical processes with no intelligent input from a Divine mind).

But set the verificationist view aside. Is there, in fact, a paucity of evidence for the existence of God or at least a being very much like God? It hardly seems so. Philosopher William Lane Craig has debated atheists all around the globe using four or five arguments that have proven to be exceedingly difficult for his opponents to refute. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga expands the menu to a couple dozen good arguments for theism.

So how is this plenitude of evidence greeted by non-believers? Some take refuge in the claim that none of these is proof that God exists, and until there's proof the atheist is within his epistemic rights to withhold belief, but this response is so much octopus ink. The demand for proof is misplaced. Our beliefs are not based on proof in the sense of apodictic certainty. If they were there'd be precious little we'd believe about anything. They're based rather on an intuition of probability. The more probable it is that an assertion is true the more firmly we tend to believe it. Indeed, it's rational to believe what is more likely to be true than what is less likely.

Could it be more likely, though, that God doesn't exist? There really is only one argument that can be adduced in support of this anti-theistic position, and though it's psychologically strong it's philosophically inconclusive. This is the argument based on the amount of suffering in the world. When one is in the throes of grief one is often vulnerable to skepticism about the existence of a good God, but when emotions are set aside and the logic of the argument is analyzed objectively, the argument falters (see here and here for a discussion).

This is not to say that the argument is without merit, only that it doesn't have as much power to compel assent as it may appear prima facie to possess. Moreover, the argument from suffering (or evil) can only justify an atheistic conclusion if, on balance, it outweighs in probability all the other arguments that support theism, but this is a pretty difficult, if not impossible, task for an inconclusive argument to accomplish.

Actually, it seems likely that at least some who reject the theistic arguments do so because they simply don't want to believe that God exists, and nothing, no matter how dispositive, will persuade them otherwise. Even if God were to appear to them, a phenomenon some skeptics say they'd accept as proof, they could, and probably would, still write the prodigy off as an hallucination, a conjuring trick, or the consequence of a bad digestion. In other words, it's hard to imagine what evidence would convince someone who simply doesn't want to believe.

I'm reminded of something the mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal said some three hundred and fifty years ago. He was talking about religion, but what he said about religion is probably just as germane to the existence of God. He wrote in his Pensees that, "Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true."

The "not enough evidence" demurral is in some instances, perhaps, a polite way of manifesting the sentiment Pascal identified.

It's also profoundly ironic that some folks who demand overwhelming evidence for the existence of God before they'll commit themselves to believing it, are nevertheless willing to whole-heartedly commit themselves to believing the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh despite the fact that there's no evidence whatsoever that he did any of the things he's accused of.

It seems that some people are highly selective about the matters upon which they insist that evidence is required to justify their belief.

Would the Democrats Confirm This Man to SCOTUS?

As perhaps you've heard by now, Judge Kavanaugh's enemies have developed a new line of attack against him. Corroborating evidence for the accusations of sexual impropriety has not materialized, but no matter, there are other salacious allegations, as yet unsubstantiated, that can be mustered into the mission of destroying Mr. Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court. One of these is the claim that as a student Kavanaugh drank beer before attaining legal age and got himself mixed up in a few shameful brawls.

This has elicited gasps of horror from media fainthearts who insist that such a man is simply too odious, violent and unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. Indeed, Senator Mazie Hirono is scandalized to learn that in one such altercation the young Mr. Kavanaugh is actually alleged to have thrown ice cubes at an antagonist in a tavern.

Moreover, I have it on good authority that he also pulled Suzie's pigtails when he was in kindergarten.

Anyway, if the leftist progressives in the Democratic party and the media are apoplectic at the mere thought of a Justice Kavanaugh what would they say and do if President Trump were to nominate a man to the highest court in the land who publicly described his younger self as a "thug" who got into a lot of fights, who regularly drank to excess and did illegal drugs while not taking school seriously. In fact, imagine that this nominee admitted to occasionally drinking a six pack of beer before going to class.

Given their revulsion at Brett Kavanaugh's alleged behavior they'd surely be appalled by this nominee and regard him as manifestly unsuited to be elevated to such an estimable position. They would surely reject his nomination out of hand, smear him, devastate his family and destroy his reputation and career. Late night hosts would make him the object of incessant ridicule and cable news talking heads would be shaking their heads and wagging their fingers at the very thought that such a man could aspire to a seat of power and prominence.

This is, after all, how they've treated Kavanaugh, so our hypothetical nominee could certainly expect no less and could, perhaps, expect to be treated even worse.

Except the man in question is not hypothetical. He actually did aspire to a position of power and prominence and he achieved it. More than that, the left deified him, idolized him, and worshipped him and his family. His past thuggery and druggery were of no moment to them. They couldn't care less what he did as a young man, all that mattered to them was who he is now.

The man, of course, was Barack Obama, and you can watch him acknowledge his youthful transgressions and indiscretions in an interview here. He also wrote about them in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father.

It's amazing that the standard to which the left wishes to hold Brett Kavanaugh seems to have been invented just for him. It certainly didn't exist in 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was running for the most powerful office in the world, but then Mr. Obama was a progressive Democrat and Kavanaugh is a judicial conservative.

That probably explains quite a lot, don't you think?

A Warning from Ancient Rome

Here are words of a man who lived over two thousand years ago in circumstances not too dissimilar from those we find ourselves in today. His words might cause us to pause and reflect. The man is Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the chief citizens of Rome in the first century B.C. and one of the most famous of all Romans. He writes:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

I hope Cicero was right that a nation can survive fools and the ambitious. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure he's right that a nation cannot survive corruption that starts and spreads from within. When the pillars of society, the institutions that bind us together and strengthen us as a people, are undermined we become like a massive tree that's hollowed out by years of internal decay and which crashes to the ground in the next strong wind.

When people are conditioned by those who want to see us fall to lose trust in their government, their courts, the news organizations and the free market, when our citizens are encouraged to no longer value family, church, school and the Constitution, when everyone is propagandized to believe that all that matters is their own personal happiness and that the way to achieve that is through accumulating consumer goods, entertainment and pleasure, then we, like that tree, like ancient Rome, will be too corrupt to withstand stresses imposed from outside.

When a people abandons the principles that made it free - the principle, for example, that a conclusion of guilt must be supported by evidence and that a simple accusation of guilt is insufficient to warrant that conclusion - then the rot is very far along, indeed.

One way to avoid that fate is to recognize that there are many voices out there whose rhetoric is designed to erode our confidence and faith in the institutions that made America great (I apologize if that sounds Trumpian. I don't mean it to.). The second thing is to stand up to those voices or stop listening to them altogether. The third thing is to get about the business of repairing the damage that has been done to those "pillars of the city."

If enough people commit themselves to this project then perhaps we can avoid the fate that Rome suffered. If not, if we lose the will to resist, as Cicero puts it, then how will we keep the human wolves at bay?

Reason vs. Emotion

Robert Tracinski at The Federalist observes that the Kavanaugh hearings were largely about appeals to feelings rather than appeals to reason. He writes:

But evidence and logic are not what we heard about in most of the reactions to the hearings. What we heard about is how the testimony made people feel.

The attack on logic began before the hearings, with commenters pointing to quotes saying the case against Kavanaugh is “plausible” and “believable”—but providing no actual evidence that it actually did happen—then describing this as “compelling.” But “plausible” is the opposite of compelling.

Direct evidence compels belief, logically speaking. Someone’s speculations about what might have happened have no logical standing and compel nothing.

Or consider the phrase you probably heard a thousand times today: that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because he is “credibly accused.” What does that mean? What makes the accusation “credible,” and what evidentiary status does that give it?

A vague accusation with no independent corroboration from the very people the accuser herself described as witnesses doesn’t sound all that credible to me.

But you will look in vain for any clear standard of what is “credible.” It is not an evidentiary term but an emotional one. All it means is “this is something I feel like believing.”

People are not judging credibility based on evidence. They are judging based on how the two witnesses made them feel, which is to say that they base it on a purely emotional reaction—a reaction heavily influenced by partisan loyalties that prejudice you for or against the two witnesses.

So we get pure appeals to emotion like this one: “I can’t imagine how many thousands of women, around the world, are in tears as they listen to Christine Blasey Ford’s voice cracking.” Kavanaugh’s voice cracked, too. Does that mean we should also embrace his side of the story?

Judge Kavanaugh was in a no-win situation on Thursday. If his accuser choked up it was said to be because she was reliving her trauma. If he choked up it was said to be "scripted." If he got angry it showed he lacks a calm judicial temperament or that his anger showed him to be just the sort of person who would've assaulted a girl when he was 17.

No matter what Judge Kavanaugh said or did the minds of many people were made up apriori, based upon nothing more than his and his accuser's respective genders. The whole affair is reminiscent of the 2006 Duke lacrosse team case (see here and here) in which several white lacrosse players were accused by a black "exotic dancer", who offered no corroborating evidence, of having assaulted her at a party.

The boys' lives were ruined until it turned out that they were innocent after all. They were privileged white males accused by a relatively poor, black female, and that was enough to establish the boys' guilt in the mind of the prosecutor, the Duke administration and much of the liberal faculty, as well as leftist progressives everywhere.

For those who wish to block Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court evidence doesn't matter. His accuser presented no evidence to corroborate her allegations, but she doesn't need to. In our postmodern, post-fact environment the accusation itself is all the evidence one needs.

Some women were citing their own personal experience with sexual assault as proof that Kavanaugh was guilty. Their reasoning seems to be that they were assaulted by a man, Kavanaugh is a man, therefore Kavanaugh is guilty of assault.

There's more from Tracinski about the irrational nature of these proceedings at the link, but the most a reasonable person can conclude is that in the absence of evidence he is entitled to the presumption of innocence and that it's an execrable act of moral depravity to destroy him and his family the way the Democrats are seeking to do.

When the mere allegation, unsupported by any evidence, is enough to destroy a man's reputation and career and devastate his family, then we're no longer the America most of us grew up in. We are the Soviet Union of the 1920s to the 1980s. We are the France of 1793-1794.

We are every tyranny which has ever blighted the face of the earth.

Wishful Thinking

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair. The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism is wrong. Why that belief should be thought to be "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are very good reasons for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true. Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

Political Taxonomy

The election season is once again heating up so to help readers understand some of the terminology that's being thrown around, I thought it might be helpful to rerun the following post. It's one that's been featured on VP during other election seasons, and it explains some basic differences between the various political ideologies:

Probably one reason a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological itself) to be confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry, but they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean. This post will try to correct that omission so that as we roll deeper into the campaign season readers might have a somewhat better understanding of what they're reading and hearing.

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

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

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

I have one quarrel, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, as did Occupy Wall Street, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except when necessary to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts.

Senator Rand Paul who was an early candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is perhaps the most well-known libertarian writer.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to be libertarians, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the central, federal government and giving it back to the states and localities.

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

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. They also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive.

They generally oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Senator Ted Cruz is perhaps the most well-known contemporary conservative politician, and the late William F. Buckley is the most well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They tend to be non-ideological (although their opponents often interpret that trait as a lack of principle). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate journalist.

Liberalism: Liberals endorse an expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the Founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those impediments. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor.

They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Bill Clinton was an example of a liberal politician.

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

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

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. Former President Barack Obama and former candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives.

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

Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Senator Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist and Venezuela is an example of a socialist country.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was in fact the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, but the state maintains ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights.

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

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme brand of socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it doesn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation. Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of Barack Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

I hope this rather cursory treatment of the various points on the political spectrum will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what you're seeing, hearing and reading in the runup to the election this November.

Journey into the Cell

A video titled Journey Inside the Cell narrated by Dr. Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, gives a glimpse of a small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell.

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

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

Nevertheless, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this: Only material, physical processes can be considered in science. Enormously complex structures like cells exist. Therefore these structures must have been produced solely by physical processes.

The error here, of course, is confusing what science has limited itself to considering with what the best explanation for biological entities might be. Just because some people think that science should be restricted to allowing only physical causes to play a role in their explanations it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

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

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

Yet many scientists do say this, but when they do they're not speaking as scientists, they're speaking as philosophers making metaphysical pronouncements.

Kavanaugh's Predicament

Today is media feeding frenzy day. President Trump's Supreme Court nominee will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee once again, this time to answer allegations that he tried to force himself upon a girl when he was a 17 year-old high school student.

His accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, now a university professor, is seeking to derail Mr. Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court by dredging up from some 35 years ago an event for which she has as yet presented no evidence and no corroborating witnesses.

Whether Judge Kavanaugh actually did what he's accused of or not I, unlike so many others who have commented on this sordid affair, have no idea, but I do have a few thoughts in addition to those I shared in this space last week.

We live in a culture that has largely bought into the postmodern notion that there's no such thing as objective truth. Truth is whatever wins the approbation of one's community or peer group. Objective facts don't matter, for indeed, there are no objective facts. There are only subjective feelings which are themselves self-validating.

In a post-fact world a mere accusation from a member of an "oppressed" group (women) against a member of an oppressor group (wealthy, white male Republicans) is sufficient to establish guilt because the accusation resonates with and reinforces the suspicions and resentments of the "oppressed" group.

This is why so many are claiming to believe Ms. Ford without having heard any evidence. She claims that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her at a party, therefore that's her truth, and, since she's a victim, in a postmodern world she deserves to be believed.

Moreover, since her accusation advances the destruction of Mr. Kavanaugh's candidacy, a desideratum among many postmodern progressives, that's all the more reason to embrace it. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a perhaps charming but obsolete anachronism from a bygone era.

This is, of course, no way for a society to practice justice. When justice is no longer about objective, demonstrable facts, but is instead a power game between one group playing by the rules of evidence and rationality and another group for whom truth is whatever works to secure the ends they seek, a group willing to spurn the demand for evidence, shout down opponents and threaten them with violence if they don't get their way, then our democracy is teetering on the brink of chaos.

This is, in fact, the choice we are faced with in November's election. We can vote for the party which still believes in rules, process and judicial fairness or we can vote for the party which harbors and enables those whose behavior would bring the entire system of justice crashing down upon our heads.

It's an immensely serious choice.

Hanging Baubles on Skyhooks

Steven Pinker is an exemplary modern thinker. A naturalist enamored of reason's power to lead us to truth about the grand metaphysical questions concerning life's meaning, moral conduct and human rights, Pinker lays out his views on these critical questions in his recent work, Enlightenment Now. I'm afraid, however, that his faith in enlightenment reason and, even more, his faith in it's hold on the thinking of moderns, is seriously misplaced.

For example, Pinker claims that "liberal values are on a long term escalator" with each generation "more tolerant and liberal" than its predecessor.

I wonder what Bret Weinstein, an erstwhile biology professor at Evergreen College or Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, would think of that, given that both of these academics have had very unpleasant encounters with the "more tolerant and liberal" current generation. Nor have their experiences been outliers.

Tolerance and a respect for liberal values has died in many precincts of our culture and is on life support in many others. For many progressives today tolerance means agreeing with them about race, gender, abortion and sexual issues. If we agree with progressive orthodoxy on these matters, well, then, we're "tolerated." But those who disagree find themselves shouted off the stage, fired from their jobs, smeared in the media and refused service in restaurants. Such is the nature of tolerance in much of 21st century America.

Even odder is Pinker's claim that "humans are sentient, possessing of dignity and rights and infinitely precious." [emphasis mine] We are? Pinker's a metaphysical naturalist. How does human dignity derive from a metaphysics that tells us that we're just globs of protoplasm? How does naturalistic evolution, a theory predicated on survival of the fittest, ground human rights? And what on earth could possibly make us "infinitely precious"? To whom, exactly, are we precious? The State?

Pinker's just hanging these rhetorical baubles on skyhooks. Given his naturalism there's no basis for thinking we have any special dignity, no reason to think that human rights are anything more substantial than words on paper, and certainly no warrant for thinking of ourselves as infinitely precious (infinite, no less).

On the contrary, reason leads us to recognize that human beings are simply one kind of animal among others, that we have no free will, that morality reduces to egoism, or even nihilism, and that our only value is whatever value is placed on us by the collective, i.e. those in power.

What Pinker is doing, in these passages, at least, is what moderns have often done. He's deftly pilfering from a traditionally theistic worldview, plagiarizing the notions of dignity and rights - which we possess solely because we're creatures created in the image of God and loved by Him - and the notion that we're infinitely precious, which can only be true if we're precious to an infinite being. And he's pulling all these rabbits out of his hat while insisting that there is no such being.

It's a remarkable piece of philosophical legerdemain he has performed for us, but to anyone paying attention to what he's saying it's the purest flummery.

Nietzsche's Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a man before his time. He was an atheist who saw clearly that atheism entailed far more than just the "death of God." Nietzsche saw that when modern men pushed God out of their lives they created a vacuum, an emptiness from which meaning, morality, and hope had all been swept out.

The "murder" of God meant that man was left to create his own meaning, his own morality, and to learn to live without hope. Man's existential predicament would inevitably lead him to despair.

Nietzsche foresaw all this, but most men of his age did not. In their exuberance and rejoicing over their "assassination of God" and the liberation they were sure their deed had brought them, they failed to grasp that when God "died" with Him died any hope of transcendent purpose and any solid ground for right and wrong.

Nietzsche expressed this failure in a parable he included in his book The Gay Science. It's called the Parable of the Madman:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition?

Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

The madman carried a lantern in the daylight because darkness was imminent. Man has become unmoored, like the earth unchained from the sun. Cold despair settles upon us as we plunge in all directions, adrift in nothingness. We are haunted by the sense that all is becoming colder.

Nietzsche's lantern-carrying madman is an interesting and perhaps intentional counterpoint to another lantern-carrier depicted c. 1854 by the artist Holman Hunt. Hunt's lantern-carrier, unlike Nietzsche's, did not bring despair, but hope. He did not wipe out the horizon we use to navigate through life but rather gave life direction and meaning. Nor did he set us adrift in an infinite nothingness, but set our feet on the solid ground of objective, transcendent reality:

We might suppose that Nietzsche's lantern-carrier was driven mad by the consequences that he foresaw following from the murder of Hunt's lantern-carrier.

In Hunt's portrayal the lantern-carrier stands at the door and knocks, but significantly the door has no latch. It can only be opened from the inside.

How We Got Here

Philosopher W.T. Stace writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1948 gives a concise summary of how we came to be where we are in the modern world, i.e. adrift in a sea of moral subjectivism and anomie. He asserts that:

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.

On one point I would wish to quibble with Stace's summary. He writes in the penultimate paragraph above that, "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."

I think, however, that if our moral rules derive from the universe they're no more binding or authoritative than if they are our own inventions. The only thing that can impose a moral duty is a personal being, one that has both moral authority and the power to hold us accountable for our actions. A being which would possess that kind of authority and power, the power to impose an objective moral duty, would be one which transcends human finitude. Neither the universe nor any entity comprised of other humans qualifies.

In other words, unless God exists there simply are no objective moral duties. Thus, if one believes we all have a duty to be kind rather than cruel, to refrain from, say, rape or child abuse or other forms of violence, then one must either accept that God exists or explain how such obligations can exist in a world where man is simply the product of blind impersonal forces plus chance plus time.

Put simply, in the world of Darwinian naturalism, no grounds exist for saying that hurting people is wrong. Indeed, no grounds exist for saying anything is wrong.

It's not just that modernity and the erosion of theistic belief in the West has led to moral relativism. It's that modernity and the concomitant loss of any genuine moral authority in the world leads ineluctably to moral nihilism.

This is one of the themes I discuss in my novel In the Absence of God which you can read about by clicking on the link at the top right of this page.

The Marvel of Migration

Bird migration is one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature, but since it happens largely at night most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring all around them in the spring and fall each year.

To help give a sense of the movements of many species of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales and numerous other creatures, ever evolve through random mutation and natural selection? How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it?

It truly is a marvel.

Harmful Rhetoric

In yesterday's post on "White Guilt" I discussed a few reasons why I think it's a mistake for young people today to think that they have what they have, only, or primarily, because of white privilege. Today I'd like to explain why I think the rhetoric of white privilege is actually harmful both to minorities and to society as a whole.

One problem with the emphasis on white privilege in the academy is that it's divisive and breeds resentment and bitterness among both blacks and whites. When people are taught that one group, of which they're not a member, has advantages that they'll never have simply because of their race it fosters bitterness among the "disadvantaged" group and generates resentment toward those who are perceived to have the unfair advantage.

This causes us as a society to be further divided into us/them categories which I think is exactly what we don't need.

It also breeds resentment and bitterness among those in the "privileged" group because they bristle at being made to feel guilty simply because of their skin color.

Not only does talk of "white privilege" encourage these undesirable effects, I think it's psychologically harmful to blacks and other minorities in that it's dispiriting for people to believe that no matter how hard they work they'll always be at a relative disadvantage. Furthermore, the belief is not just dispiriting, but it's also manifestly false. Too many minorities have done well in this country to think that being a member of a minority group ipso facto puts success out of one's reach. Those who promote the white privilege meme are, whether they realize it or not, handing those who never succeed because they never try a convenient rationalization for their failure both to succeed and to try. As such, it's insidious.

It's insidious, moreover, because it's so divisive. When people who've worked hard to achieve are told that they succeeded largely because of their race it can cause them to feel either enormous guilt or enormous resentment. The first is socially and psychologically crippling while the second creates a lot of social animosity. Indeed, one reason Donald Trump is president today is because many people resent having to apologize for things for which they bear no personal responsibility.

Some might say that if white privilege exists then we should talk about it regardless of the consequences, but I don't think those who'd say this really mean it. If they did then they'd have to apply across the board the principle that no racial issues should be quarantined because of their consequences, and that would mean that the question of relative intelligences among the races would be open for discussion, but it clearly is not.

Anyway, it's past time to relegate talk of "white privilege" to the trash bin of "very unhelpful ideas." Talking about it does no good and does much harm.

White Guilt

I once received a poignant e-mail from a student who expressed her desire to give back to those who have so little something of the abundance with which she was blessed. Her wish to help others is wonderful, and I was deeply impressed with this young woman's commitment to the poor and the marginalized.

There was one thing she said in her missive, however, which is evidently a common sentiment on her campus and one which I asked her to reconsider. She felt, or at least seemed to have felt, that part of her obligation to help the poor arose from the fact that she's "a white, middle class, educated female with a tremendous amount of undeserved privilege."

I know students are sometimes encouraged by their professors to think that one's race or gender confer upon one a large measure of unmerited advantage, but to tell the truth I think they're just wrong about this. The idea of white privilege is a shibboleth that is too often used to evoke in whites a sense of racial guilt. In my response to this young woman I tried to explain why I think the guilt she seemed to feel is actually a derogation of the choices and sacrifices made by her grandparents, parents, and herself.

Here's what I wrote to her:

Dear S_,

Yours is a lovely e-mail, and I think it's wonderful that you want to give of yourself to those who subsist on the margins of society. I wish you well and pray God's richest blessing on your efforts.

I do want to urge you, though, to consider something. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into what you say, but you seem to suggest that your status in society is somehow an undeserved privilege. If that is what you're saying I don't think you should see it that way.

You are what you are and have what you have for a couple of reasons, neither of which you should feel guilty about. First, your parents and/or your grandparents worked very hard, sometimes twelve or more hours a day, I'll bet, to provide you with an opportunity to get an education.

Your status is largely the fruit of their toil, as well as dozens of other important and wise choices they made in life, and it's not something you should feel guilty about. Indeed, I think it diminishes their efforts to think of your status as a consequence of your race. So far from feeling that your privilege is undeserved I think you should be proud of the people who made it possible and grateful for their sacrifices and the choices they made.

The second reason you enjoy the status you do is because, once given the opportunities your parents and grandparents worked so hard for, you had the moral character to make the most of them. You took advantage of the opportunity to get an education, you held yourself to high standards through your teen years, and you had the wisdom to not squander the opportunities you were given.

None of this is a result of your race. I know that some of your instructors think that being white somehow confers an unfair advantage over others in society, but I think that's mistaken. It was doubtless true historically, but it hasn't been the case in the U.S. for a long time. No one has been legally denied opportunity in this country simply by virtue of his or her race for well over fifty years. If people in this country - white, black or brown - languish in poverty it's often because of the choices both they and their parents have made, not the color of their skin.

The fact is that there are lots of African and Asian-Americans who are successful in this society, but no one talks about their "privilege." Instead they talk, as they should, about how hard their parents worked and the ordeals their parents endured in order to give their children a chance to make it in the world. Contrarily, there are whites, blacks and Asians who enjoy historically unprecedented opportunities to make a positive mark in life but fail to do so because they lack the character it takes to make something of themselves.

In other words, you enjoy the status you do, S_, not because you're privileged by your race but because you're privileged to have the parents and virtues you do. It's wonderful to want to "give back," but don't let anyone imply that you should do so out of guilt over your race or class. Your motivation should be your love for God and the conviction that he wants you to be an instrument to help others become what you are.

Perhaps you disagree with what I wrote to this student, but if so, what specifically do you disagree with?