Bobolinks

Long time readers of Viewpoint know that one of my enjoyments is admiring the birdlife in whatever part of the country or the world I happen to be in. Birds are beautiful and fascinating creatures, but they're not always easy to see. Good optics are helpful and, to really see them properly, essential.

Today, with the aid of a powerful scope I was able to observe a flock (not counting the females which look much different and more plain) of over forty of these beauties in a field not far from my home.

This bird is called a Bobolink because its song is alleged by some to sound like bob-o-link, although I must say, I don't hear that at all when I listen to them.

Anyway, Bobolinks are a grassland species which nests in the northern U.S. and Canada and are right now passing through my region on their spring trek to their breeding grounds. The Bobolink is one of the world’s most impressive songbird migrants, traveling some 12,500 miles (20,000 kilometers) to and from southern South America every year. Throughout its lifetime, it may travel the equivalent of 4 or 5 times around the circumference of the earth.

A migrating Bobolink can orient itself with the earth’s magnetic field, thanks to iron oxide in bristles in its nasal cavity and in tissues around the olfactory bulb and nerve. Bobolinks also use the stars to help them navigate.

Bobolink males are not only handsome, but their breeding plumage pattern is unique among North American songbirds. No other songbird species has a white back and a black front - a "reverse tuxedo."

Unfortunately, Bobolinks are declining because the hay fields in which they nest are being mowed earlier in the season and more often during the season, an agricultural practice which is fatal to young birds still in the nest.

Here's an interesting four minute video on the bobolink and some of the efforts being made to conserve them in their nesting range.

Which Came First?

One of the numerous thorny problems with naturalistic explanations of biological origins is what's called the chicken and egg problem: In order to get a chicken there must be an egg, but in order to get an egg there must be a chicken, so which came first, the chicken or the egg?

This may sound at first like a silly question, but biology is rife with similar examples of this circularity, and it's a perplexing problem for those who believe that the development of biological novelty in nature proceeded through purely naturalistic processes.

Brazilian biochemist Marcos Eberlin, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and author of over 800 scientific articles as well as the new book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, talks about several examples of this problem in an article at Stream.

Here are some excerpts:

A chick embryo’s development is a wonder to behold. So too is the egg in which it develops. The egg yolk and egg white contain just the right food the chick will need before it hatches. The eggshell also has microscopic pores that let air in so the chick can breathe. The developing bird then generates a network of capillaries to absorb oxygen from the air and release carbon dioxide.

Just before hatching, special membranes in the egg trap enough air so the chick can take its first breath before it leaves the shell.

The eggshell is hard enough to protect the developing chick, yet fragile enough for the full-grown chick to peck its way out. The shell and its contents are masterpieces of engineering that both nourish and protect the baby bird.

But there would be no egg without a chicken to produce it. Without an egg there can be no chicken, but without a chicken there can be no egg. How could the system have evolved one small functional step at a time? It’s an old question, one that Darwinists would like you to think they have answered satisfactorily, and long ago. They haven’t.

The chicken-and-egg problem is the archetypal example of causal circularity. To get A we need B, but to get B we first need A. We can’t have one without the other. To get both together, we need foresight — an engineer capable of planning for the future.

Eberlin argues that there are numerous examples of this kind of circularity in nature. Another example is the cell membrane which requires specialized proteins made only in the cell. Yet before the membranes existed to encase the cell there would have been no cells, but until there were cells there were no specialized proteins out of which to construct the membranes. So how did the cell ever come about?

Another example is the nucleic acid/protein complex. DNA and RNA manufacture proteins but in order for these nucleic acids to function they need a suite of proteins to assist them in their work, but the proteins are made by the nucleic acids. So how did the nucleic acids make proteins before there were proteins?

Eberlin argues that these circularities in nature can only be resolved by foresight and that foresight requires a mind:

First, we see many instances of causal circularity in biology. These pose engineering challenges whose solutions require on-time delivery of multiple, essential, and well-orchestrated parts.

Second, we know from our uniform experience that the ability to anticipate and solve such problems before they happen is a unique characteristic of intelligent minds.

Third, there are no demonstrated examples of unguided, mindless processes anticipating and solving problems that require a sophisticated orchestration of fine-tuned parts, all brought together for an origin event. Hand-waving references to cases that are assumed rather than demonstrated do not count.

He concludes, therefore, that the evidence points to the existence of an intelligent mind:

Our uniform experience provides us with only one type of cause with the demonstrated capacity to anticipate and solve such problems .... The evidence in biology for a designer with foresight is not merely apparent. It is insistently real.

Eberlin gives much more fascinating detail about the cell membrane and the nucleic acid/protein complex in the article, which is neither long nor technical. Check it out.

Nature's Designs

The BBC has a couple of short one to two minute videos that point, each in a different way, to intelligent design in nature.

The first video explains how the morphology and effectiveness of the beak of a bird called the kingfisher attracted the attention of Japanese engineers trying to solve a problem with their bullet trains. The fact that nature's designs solve human engineering problems is at least suggestive of something more than random chance and blind forces behind those designs.

Kingfisher

The second video illustrates what might be called supererogatory design, i.e. designed systems in nature that certainly give the appearance of being both unnecessarily elaborate and intentional. The video shows the amazing underground communication system employed by trees that allows them to assist as well as wage "war" on each other.

It's fascinating to be sure, but the question that comes to mind is how such a system would arise simply through undirected, mechanistic processes.

This is not to say that it couldn't have, of course. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, but it seems that very nearly every new discovery in the biological and cosmological sciences is more compatible with the hypothesis that the mind of an intelligent engineer is behind the phenomena we see than that these phenomena are all, in their billions and perhaps trillions of examples, just a lucky coincidence.

In fact, the conclusion that there's a mind responsible for it all would seem to be almost psychologically inescapable unless that conclusion were rejected a priori, but what rational grounds are there for ruling out an explanation just because one doesn't like its metaphysical implications?

Thanks to Evolution News for the tip and photo.

A Baker's Dozen Mysteries

If you're into science you might find this article by Michael Brooks at New Scientist interesting. Brooks lists thirteen mysteries that have (mostly) cosmologists and physicists baffled. To give you a sample here's #9:

It's one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."

One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short.

It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.

I suspect that cosmologists are much more confident that dark energy is the culprit behind the accelerating expansion of the universe than what this article suggests. Nevertheless, the most fascinating thing about dark energy, if it exists, is this:

Scientists have determined that the amount of dark energy present in the universe cannot vary from the actual value by more than one part in 10(120). That's a one with 120 zeros after it. If it did deviate from its actual value by more than this amount life would not be able to exist in the universe that would result. That is an incomprehensibly precise setting. It's the equivalent of the mass of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the mass of a single electron.

What an amazing thing it is that this dark energy is calibrated to just the right value to allow life to survive. What an extraordinary amount of blind faith it takes to think that it's just a lucky coincidence, especially when there are a couple dozen other forces and parameters of the cosmos which must also be set with similar precision in order for the universe to be life-sustaining.

The biggest mystery about dark energy, it seems to me, is not what it is but rather how it came to be so exquisitely calibrated. Or maybe that's only a mystery for materialists.

The Root of Our Modern Malaise

As a postscript to the series of posts on Judeo-Christian ethics I'd like to quote from a 1948 article in The Atlantic Monthly by philosopher W.T. Stace. Stace 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, though, 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 personal 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.

Judeo-Christian Ethics (Pt. III)

In the previous two posts we looked at some problems with any ethics based on a naturalistic worldview and the advantages and disadvantages of an ethics based on a theistic worldview, particularly what might be called the Judeo-Christian view.

But what specifically does the Judeo-Christian tradition have to say about ethics? How does someone who adheres to this tradition decide what is right and what is wrong? The very basic primer that follows represents my own opinion on this matter, and though I might be incorrect in this or that detail I think the general picture is accurate enough.

Simply put Jews and Christians both believe that there are two overriding commandments given us by God. The first bears upon our relationship to God and the second bears upon our relationship to others. The two are in some ways interdependent, but for simplicity's sake we'll focus on the commandment that bears upon our relationship to others since that puts us in the realm of ethics.

That command is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Love, of course, expresses itself in a number of different ways, two of which are that we act justly toward others and that we demonstrate compassion to them. This, I would argue, sums up the entire ethical teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Indeed, Jesus himself states that the whole of the Hebrew scriptures' ethical teaching is summed up in the command to love one another (Matt. 22:36-40)

Everything else that is ethically proscribed, at least in the Christian scriptures, is forbidden because it is either unjust or uncompassionate. That is to say, people are harmed by it.

In fact, the word sin can be defined as that which harms, would harm or could harm oneself or another. It is a sin, for example, to irresponsibly place another person's life in jeopardy even if no harm actually comes to that person. A man who drives while intoxicated is irresponsibly placing others at risk and is therefore guilty of a sin. He's acting both unjustly and uncompassionately.

Something that would always be unjust or uncompassionate in any realistic circumstances is absolutely wrong, that is it's wrong always. For instance, it's always wrong to beat an infant with one's fists. Such an atrocity is, in any realistic circumstance, never just nor compassionate.

On the other hand, although lying is almost always unjust, the F.B.I. agent who must lie to infiltrate a terrorist cell to prevent a mass murder is acting both justly and compassionately. His deception is not wrong.

It is love - justice and compassion - which is the absolute imperative which governs our behavior in Judeo-Christian ethics, and all other moral rules, such as the last six of the Ten Commandments, are lampposts which illumine how a just and compassionate people live.

As a general rule we can tell whether we're acting in love by applying the Golden Rule to our action. If we would be willing to have it done to us, whatever it is, then it's probably just or compassionate, or both. The Golden Rule is not an absolute, but it is a handy litmus test of whether our behavior is loving.

Generally speaking, it's wrong to do anything to anyone else that we wouldn't want done to us. It's wrong to use another person as a means to our pleasure or our social advancement, or put another way, it's wrong to take advantage of others. We wouldn't want to be taken advantage of and doing so to others is neither just nor compassionate.

Moreover, our motives for our actions play a major role in determining the moral quality of the act. Two people may both perform some act of kindness, but the one who does the act in hopes that he'll derive some material benefit from it cannot claim to be doing a morally good act. It's not a wrong act, certainly; we can be glad he did it, but there's no moral goodness or credit in it.

Contrarily, the man who does the act simply out of a desire to help another person even if he gets no more benefit from it than the warm feeling of having done the right thing has done a morally good act.

The above is just a very brief overview of Judeo-Christian ethics, or at least my reading of it. There's much more that could be said, but two more points may suffice.

First, of all the ethical systems and views that philosophers have concocted over the last two thousand or so years, this is the only one that's directly based on actually loving other people.

Second, all the values that we cherish in the modern world - gender and racial equality, individual freedom, human rights, compassion for the poor and many others are all derived from the tradition we've just outlined.

Naturalism offers no basis for any of them. Rather than reexamine and question her naturalism, though, the naturalist simply poaches the values she likes from the Judeo-Christian tradition while simultaneously rejecting the legitimacy of that tradition. It's peculiar behavior, to say the least.

Judeo-Christian Ethics (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post summarized some of the shortcomings of any system of ethics or morality based on a naturalistic worldview. It would be a mistake to conclude from this discussion, however, that a person who embraces that worldview can't be a morally "good" person. That's demonstrably false.

Rather, the problem for the naturalist (one who believes that only nature exists - that there's no supernatural) is that the values they choose to live by are purely arbitrary and subjective. The naturalist may choose to be a kind, generous, honest individual, but had she chosen instead to be cruel, selfish or dishonest her choices wouldn't be wrong in any objective moral sense, they'd just be different.

So, if naturalistic ethics are unsatisfactory in the ways mentioned yesterday what's the alternative? What advantages, and disadvantages, does a theistic ethics offer?

Here are some advantages of theism-based ethics or what are usually called Divine Command ethics. I'll have particularly in mind the Judeo-Christian version of Divine Command ethics in what follows:

First, Judeo-Christian ethics supply us with a non-arbitrary source of objective principles of right and wrong grounded in a transcendent, personal moral authority. They provide a basis for both objective moral duties and moral absolutes. Right and wrong are not merely the subjective preferences of individual humans or of any society of humans, but are expressions of the nature and will of a perfectly good, omnipotent Being.

Secondly, Judeo-Christian ethics offer an answer to the egoist's challenge to anyone who advocates some ethical system to state a reason as to why and how it would be wrong to always place one's own interests ahead of the interests of others. It also provides a ground for rejecting the ethic of "might makes right."

Moreover, Judeo-Christian ethics tells us that we're accountable to God for how we live, that our lives will be judged. Only if such is the case can there really be any moral obligation to live one way rather than another. If death is the end of our existence, as it is on naturalism, then the choices we make in this life have no ultimate moral significance.

Judeo-Christian ethics also affords a basis for believing that human worth, dignity, and rights are not mere illusions or fictions but actually exist. Judeo-Christian ethics are predicated on the doctrine that we are created by God in His image and that we are loved by Him. Our rights and worth flow from this relationship, a relationship affirmed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence where he wrote that, "all men are created equal," and that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights..."

Of course, despite these advantages there are difficulties with Judeo-Christian ethics as well.

For instance, they would have no purchase with someone who rejects the idea that there exists a perfectly qualified source of moral truth and obligation, a personal Deity who has the power to hold us accountable. If someone is skeptical of the existence of a Divine Commander Divine Command ethics will not appear to be a compelling option.

Another problem with Judeo-Christian ethics is that they're based on the assumption that God has revealed moral truth to us and has told us how we are to live. One could, perhaps, believe that God exists but be dubious that God has revealed moral truth to us.

Even if we accept that there is such a revelation from God - scripture or conscience, for example - we have to assume that we're interpreting correctly what that revelation tells us about morality.

Finally, the most popular objection to Divine Command ethics, whether Christian or any other sort, is something called the Euthyphro Dilemma. I've written about this argument elsewhere and explained there why I (in the company of many philosophers of religion) think it fails, so I won't go into an analysis of it here. Readers who may be interested in the topic can find my three part discussion here, here and here.

It must be kept in mind in all this that even if someone believes that there is a God it doesn't follow that he or she will know what's right, and even if one does know what's right it doesn't follow that he or she will do what's right.

But the point that needs to be stressed is that there can be objective moral right only if there is a God. If there is no God then philosopher our moral judgments are merely expressions of our own personal taste or, as philosopher A.J. Ayer said, “[S]entences which simply express moral judgments do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood.”

Tomorrow I'll share some cursory thoughts on what I think we can infer about the nature of moral right and wrong from Judeo-Christian ethics.

Judeo-Christian Ethics (Pt. I)

It's been a major theme at Viewpoint over the years that metaphysical naturalism has serious weaknesses when it comes to the matter of ethics.

We've argued, for instance, that no naturalistic ethics can give a satisfactory answer to the egoist who asks why he should care about the interests or well-being of other people, and why it would be wrong to put his own interests ahead of the interests of others.

A corollary of this is that the naturalist cannot gainsay the man who believes that might makes right. On naturalism there's no answer to the question why anyone who has the power to do whatever he wants would be morally wrong to do so.

Naturalists will claim that reason gives us answers to these questions but there are at least three reasons for doubting this: First, human reason is just the product of chemical reactions in the brain causing some neurons to fire which causes other neurons to fire, producing, somehow, a moral principle. But if reason is simply the result of impersonal chemical reactions, the whizzing about of electrons in the brain, then why should we grant it any authority in our lives.

Secondly, even if reason is to be trusted, reason tells us to look out for #1, to place the greatest importance on our own welfare, far more emphatically than it tells us to care about the interests of others.

Thirdly, on naturalism reason is a product of blind evolutionary forces that have given rise to faculties that suit us for survival. If so, there's no basis for thinking that reason leads to truth, especially metaphysical or moral truth. Survival can as easily depend on self-deception as it can on objective truth. As MIT philosopher Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth."

We've also argued that no naturalistic account of morality can explain why human beings have dignity, rights and worth. If we are simply the products of chance evolutionary forces, if we are, as Francis Crick put it, ultimately "just a pack of neurons," or as Stephen Hawking put it, just "a chemical scum on a moderate sized planet" all alone in the cosmos, then where do human rights and dignity come from?

We've also pointed out that no naturalistic ethics, which by its nature excludes ultimate accountability, can have any binding force. It cannot impose objective duties or obligations. An objective duty can only be imposed by an authority beyond oneself, and a moral duty can only be imposed by a moral authority that is itself both morally good and which has the power to hold all people accountable.

On naturalism there is no such authority. Neither society nor humanity in general qualify. If they did then whatever society condones would be good and right, which means that slavery, infant sacrifice, female genital mutilation, rape, honor killings, genocide and a number of other horrors perpetrated by societies throughout history would be morally right and even obligatory.

Finally, we've argued that no naturalistic ethics can give a plausible explanation of what it means to say that a particular behavior is morally wrong. If there is no moral authority higher than the human individual then the term moral wrong is empty of any content. The most it can mean is that some people don't like it and would rather it not occur.

Thus, for the naturalist moral talk is simply so much hand waving and obfuscation. To be consistent a naturalist should simply adopt Wittgenstein's dictum that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent" and refuse to engage in any moral discussion or use any moral language.

This, however, is intolerably stifling so, in a form of moral plagiarism, what they often do is poach ethical values from the Judeo-Christian moral tradition with one hand while scoffing at the validity of that tradition with the other.

We'll talk about that tradition a bit more tomorrow.

Materialism, Theism and Universals

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, borrowing from a book by philosopher Ed Feser, argues that the reality of universals poses a serious problem for metaphysical materialism. A universal is an abstract idea, a pattern that particular objects share in common.

For example, there are probably thousands of different species of trees, but there's something about each particular tree, something we can call "treeness," that all of them share in common and by which we distinguish a tree from, say, a bush. "Treeness" is the universal manifested by particular trees.

Egnor writes that universals - abstract thoughts like treeness, or redness or circularity - are not material yet they exist, but according to materialism everything which exists, including "minds," must be material or at least completely reducible to material stuff. The materialist holds, therefore, that abstract ideas must be the product of a material brain.

Egnor argues that triangularity, the quality of having three straight sides and three angles, would exist even if there were no triangular objects and would exist even if there were no material brains to conceive it.

Here's the nut of his argument:

There are four general ways that philosophers have tried to explain universals, and they may be termed Platonism, Aristotelianism, Conceptualism, and Scholasticism. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism assert that universals are real, in one sense or another.

Conceptualism asserts that universals exist only as constructs of the mind, and have no existence outside of the mind. Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Scholasticism are realist/dualist views of nature, and are consistent with a dualist view of the mind. Conceptualism, while not requiring a materialist perspective, is consistent with materialism and is the understanding of universals generally (and necessarily) taken by materialists.

Platonism, following Plato but developed in greater depth by the Platonists of the early first millennium AD, is the view that universals exist in a pure realm of Forms, and that we intuit copies of these Forms in the natural world. Platonic realism has a number of well-known problems (including problems of infinite regress: is the theory of Forms a Form? is the theory that Forms are a Form, a Form?).

Aristotelianism is the view that universals exist in particular objects, not in a separate realm, and are abstracted from the particular object by the active intellect when the universal is contemplated.

Scholasticism is in some sense a synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian views: it is the view that universals exist first in the Mind of God, and are instantiated in particular created objects and are abstracted by the mind by the active intellect.

Conceptualism is the denial that universals have any real existence apart from concepts in the mind. It is derived from Ockham’s theory of Nominalism, which is the assertion that universals are merely names we give to categories of particular objects, but that universals themselves have no real existence at all.

It seems fairly clear that realism (whether Platonic, Aristotelian, or Scholastic) is true and that Conceptualism/Nominalism is false. A number of arguments demonstrate this. It seems, for example, that “triangularity” doesn’t exist wholly in any particular object. Nothing in the real world is “triangularity,” in the sense that nothing has three closed perfectly straight sides with internal angles summing exactly to 180 degrees.

All real triangles are imperfect instantiations of triangularity, yet triangularity is something real in a meaningful sense. We are talking about it, and if we and all triangular objects ceased to exist, triangularity — closed three straight-sidedness with 180 degrees interior angles — would still be a thing.

Triangularity is more than merely conceptual; it's real in a meaningful sense, independent of the mind, and it is not perfectly instantiated in any particular object.

Realism is the only coherent view of universals. Universals are real, and not merely mental constructs.

Very well. I'm inclined to agree that universals are real and independent of matter, but I wonder whether it's as easy to demonstrate this as Egnor's argument makes it out to be.

For instance, if universals are independent of matter would universals still exist if there were no universe, i.e. if there were nothing at all. How could anything, even immaterial concepts, exist if nothing existed? In other words, it seems to me that the only way universals could exist apart from a universe containing both matter and human brains would be if they existed in the mind of God.

If so, the realist must presuppose that God exists in order to make the case that universals are independent of matter.

In other words, it seems to be the case that universals exist, but whether they're ontologically distinct from matter and would or could exist if no physical, material stuff existed is not so clear, at least not to me.

If God exists then universals could certainly exist in God's mind. If God doesn't exist then universals would seem to be somehow ontologically dependent upon particular material objects and physical brains, and materialism would thus be correct.

Therefore, the debate between materialism (matter is the only substance) and dualism (mind and matter are two disparate substances), like many philosophical debates, is ultimately a debate between naturalism and theism.

Egnor adds this:

So how is it that the reality of universals demonstrates the immateriality of the human intellect? Since universals cannot exist wholly in particular things, universals as objects of thought can’t exist wholly in brain matter. A “concept of a universal” — a concept of redness or triangularity or whatever — must be an immaterial concept, because a universal cannot be a particular thing.

Particular things can be instances of a universal, but the universal itself, and any concept of it, is immaterial. Abstract thought, such as thought of universals, is inherently immaterial. Materialism fails to account for concepts that abstract from particular things.

If one accepts this argument the conclusion that the human intellect or mind is immaterial pushes one in the direction of theism. If, however, one rejects theism a priori then materialist conceptualism seems to be the most plausible option left.

Why, though, would anyone reject theism a priori?

Metaxas on Meaning

A one minute excerpt from a discussion between Tucker Carlson and author Eric Metaxas dovetails so nicely with what my students and I had been talking about in class last week that I thought I'd share it.

The topic of their conversation was why Americans aren't having more children, and the whole six minute segment is worth watching, but at the 1:50 mark Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life [if people don't want to have children and families]? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?”

Metaxas' answer is, I think, exactly right:

Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it.

But what we do is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”

In other words, given the lurch toward metaphysical naturalism in the Western world, there's really no reason to think it's wrong to just live for oneself, to put one's own interests first, to seek to squeeze as much personal enjoyment out of this otherwise pointless existence as possible before we die.

Carlson responds to Metaxas' analysis with this,

But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it to Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.

True enough, but when they're alive and in the full bloom of life people often do think that the more things they can accumulate, the more sights they can see, the more pleasure they can experience the more meaningful their life will be. Carlson says that they're believing a lie.

Here's the video of the exchange:

Metaxas is, of course, not the first person to say what he says here. Philosophers have been making this same observation about the emptiness of modern life for decades. Two twentieth century French thinkers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, serve as examples.

Sartre wrote that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal," and Camus declared that, "...for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."

If that's the way things are, multitudes of moderns have concluded, then why not just live for oneself and make the best of a bad situation. What sense does it make, they reason, to sacrifice the only life we have for other people, for kids and a family.

Their conviction is that matters is personal prosperity, power and pleasure and anything that interferes with the acquisition of those is best avoided.

The Eroding Consensus

One of the numerous developments that our mainstream media finds it convenient to ignore is the eroding confidence among scientists and philosophers of the explanatory adequacy of the standard evolutionary model, i.e. the model that seeks to account for the amazing diversity of living things in terms of descent from a common primordial ancestor via natural selection, genetic mutation and genetic drift.

What used to be an overwhelming consensus in favor of the Neo-Darwinian view has shrunk to the point where it seems the only thing holding it up is the lack of any plausible naturalistic alternative.

There has always been dissent from the standard neo-Darwinian model among creationists of various stripes, of course, as well as intelligent design theorists (Some ID theorists are creationists, but many are not. ID is not the same thing as creationism), but, as Dierker notes, "...the growing discontent in academia is from secular naturalists."

Benjamin Dierker writes about this eroding consensus in a piece at The Federalist. Here's an excerpt of the heart of his essay:

While Christians have long challenged Charles Darwin’s theory of undirected evolution, few appreciate the true extent of the challenge beyond the church. Current estimates are that approximately one-third of professional academic biologists who do not believe in intelligent design find Darwin’s theory is inadequate to describe all of the complexity in biology.

A controversial letter to Nature in 2014 signaled the mounting concern, however slow and cautious, among thoughtful professional biologists. Other works by atheist authors like “What Darwin Got Wrong” and “Mind and Cosmos” find “fatal flaws” in the theory and assert it is “almost certainly false.”

The important note is that these are not ideologues or religious zealots, nor do they propose a god or biblical solution. Rather, they find problems with the explanatory value of Darwin’s theory in light of modern understanding of mutation, variation, DNA sequencing, and more. These expressions of doubt do not reject naturalism or evolution per se, but the rigor of the Neo-Darwinian model for explaining the development of life.

In fact, they want to help Darwin, not tear him down. That he needs help is news to the academy.

The leading critics have been intelligent design supporters, who are looked down on by naturalists. But as each group adds to the scientific literature, certain critiques and findings inevitably bolster or redirect the research of the other.

The effects go at least one way. Following work and theories of Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Denton helped shape a generation of skeptics with his 1985 book “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.” An evolutionist and agnostic, Denton has continued his criticism.

In the past decade, the works of professor Michael Behe, Steven Meyer, and others have given more life to the debate on the national stage. In “Darwin Devolves,” Behe points to the process of mutations to describe the inadequacy of an unguided materialist process to add information. Meyer explores the Cambrian explosion and the complexity of the cell to show the biodiversity and complexity we observe, and notes that natural processes have never been observed to produce such results.

Importantly, these two men, and many others, believe in the standard multibillion-year timeline for the Earth and make their findings based on deduction of natural evidence rather than starting from authority in scripture or elsewhere. The growth of the intelligent design community is noteworthy, but not as interesting as those who are apart from it, secular, and nonetheless find Darwinian evolution to contain serious flaws.

Behe explained that, “Based on conversations with my own colleagues at Lehigh [University], dozens of other biologists, and news stories in journals I would guesstimate that a third or more of biologists are quite skeptical that Darwin’s theory explains all of biology.” The growing literature speaks for itself.

There's more at the link. When students hear that there's no doubt among biologists that the Darwinian explanation of life is at least a close approximation of the truth, when their teachers or the media tell them that there's no controversy among scientists about the basic truth of Darwinian paradigm, students should be more than a little skeptical.

What most commenters mean when they give these sorts of assurances today is that some naturalistic explanation, whether Darwinism or something else, must be true. The discerning student, however, will recognize this as an assertion of metaphysical faith, not a scientific claim. It simply reflects the speaker's philosophical commitment to naturalism.

Unfortunately, too many people who make such pronouncements dress them up in a white lab coat and give the impression that naturalism has been scientifically proven - a feat, were it possible, would be the most spectacular accomplishment in the history of science.

Our Fascinating Universe

Have you ever wondered how big the universe is or how small the smallest things are? Actor Morgan Freeman takes us on a journey in this eight and a half minute video to plumb both the vastness of space and its incredible minuteness.

Take a look:

Some insist that our universe is all a grand fluke, an accident, others insist it's intentionally designed. Some believe that there are a near infinite number of universes (the multiverse), others argue that ours is the only one for which we have any evidence.

Most scientists agree, though, that the universe described in this video started out as a point-like object which contained within its tiny circumference all the mass-energy the universe now possesses.

This miniscule point, called a singularity, expanded with unimaginable rapidity at the moment of the universe's origin in an event that has come to be known as the Big Bang, and it's still expanding today.

It's all very fascinating.

The Continuing Holocaust

The recent massacre of over 250 worshipping Christians by Muslim terrorists in Sri Lanka is a reminder that the slaughter of Christians is by far the greatest human rights atrocity of our time, and strangely, one about which much of the American media is silent.

About five years ago I posted a piece about this on VP based around a column by Kirsten Powers that, in the wake of last weekend's horror in Sri Lanka, is worth posting again. Here it is:

Kirsten Powers, writing at The Daily Beast, reminds us of the slow-burning holocaust occurring today around the world but particularly in Muslim and atheistic countries. It's the oppression, torture and murder of tens of thousands of Christians whose only crime, like the Christians in ancient Rome, is that they refuse to accept the religion of those in power.

The details are horrifying. It's perhaps the greatest human rights crisis of the last sixty years, but the Obama administration seems to have little to say about it.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from Powers' essay:

Some of the most harrowing stories about how Christians are persecuted have come from the African country of Eritrea, which Open Doors lists as the twelfth worst country in the world for Christian persecution. In his 2013 book, The Global War on Christians, reporter John L. Allen Jr., writes that in Eritrea, Christians are sent to the Me’eter military camp and prison, which he describes as a “concentration camp for Christians.”

It is believed to house thousands being punished for their religious beliefs.

Prisoners are packed into 40’x38’ metal shipping containers, normally used for transporting cargo. It is so cramped that it’s impossible to lie down and difficult even to find a place to sit. “The metal exacerbates the desert temperatures, which means bone chilling cold at night and wilting heat during the day....believed to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit or higher,” Allen writes. One former inmate...described [it] as “giant ovens baking people alive.” Prisoners are given next to nothing to drink so “they sometimes end up drinking their own scant sweat and urine to stay alive.”

The prisoners are tortured, sexually abused, and have no contact with the outside world. One survivor of the prison described witnessing a fellow female inmate “who had been beaten so badly her uterus was actually hanging outside her body. The survivor desperately tried to push the uterus back in” but couldn’t prevent the inmate’s excruciating death.

The situation is different but no less horrific in North Korea and Syria. Read about it at the link. Powers closes her piece with this:

At a December 2013 speech to a conference organized by Georgetown’s Religious Freedom Project, Allen told the audience, “I always ask Christians in countries [where persecution occurs], what can we do for you? The number one thing they say is, “Don’t forget about us.”

It would certainly be welcome if our leaders in Washington would show the world that they haven't forgotten these wretched martyrs and that they care as deeply for them and their circumstances as they do for, say, immigrants seeking to enter our country illegally.

No Culture Is Better Than Another

Are all cultures equal or are some cultures superior to others? The question is difficult to answer without clarifying what is meant by "equal." Usually what's referred to are the values of a particular society, and the assertion that all cultures are equal is equivalent to saying that all values are equal.

This would seem to be a very difficult claim to defend, but it's popular today among those who call themselves "multiculturalists."

Multiculturalists are generally ethical relativists who believe that moral right and wrong, good and bad values, are determined by the time and the culture in which people live and that no culture's views on these matters is superior or "better" than any other culture's views. They're just different.

It follows, then, that a culture that produces hospitals, charitable organizations, modern science and technology, women's rights, Bach and the Chartres Cathedral is no "better" or "worse" than a hunter-gatherer culture that produces nothing at all or a culture that condones and practices slavery, wife-beating, female genital mutilation, honor killing and infant sacrifice.

This is certainly counterintuitive, but it follows from the postmodern denial that there exists any objective moral standard. If right and wrong are simply arbitrary cultural conventions, like a preference in food or dress, then how can one group claim their conventions to be superior to another group's?

Dinesh D'Souza argues against the multicultural view in this short video from Prager University. See what you think:

Intellectual Honesty

Anyone who engages in public commentary and debate is often tempted to color facts to better fit his position, to overstate his case, or to do something which might be intellectually not-quite-honest.

Some ten years ago a blogger who called himself Mike Gene did a post titled Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty in which he listed ten good rules to follow when participating with others in dialogue.

Since the link to his post no longer works I'll take the liberty to list his ten rules along with his explanations (slightly edited). They're very much worth heeding for anyone who wishes to participate in the debates occurring in our contemporary public square.

Here they are:

1. Do not overstate the power of your argument. One's sense of conviction should be in proportion to the level of clear evidence assessable by most. If someone portrays his opponents as being stupid or dishonest for disagreeing, intellectual dishonesty is probably in play. Intellectual honesty is most often associated with humility, not arrogance.

2. Show a willingness to publicly acknowledge that reasonable alternative viewpoints exist. The alternative views do not have to be treated as equally valid or powerful, but rarely is it the case that one and only one viewpoint has a complete monopoly on reason and evidence.

3. Be willing to publicly acknowledge and question one's own assumptions and biases. All of us rely on assumptions when applying our worldview to make sense of the data about the world, and all of us bring various biases to the table.

4. Be willing to publicly acknowledge where your argument is weak. Almost all arguments have weak spots, but those who are trying to sell an ideology will have great difficulty with this point and would rather obscure or downplay any weak points.

5.Be willing to publicly acknowledge when you are wrong. Those selling an ideology often have great difficulty admitting to being wrong as this undercuts the rhetoric and image that is being sold. You get small points for admitting to being wrong on trivial matters and big points for admitting to being wrong on substantive points. You lose big points for failing to admit being wrong on something trivial.

6. Demonstrate consistency. A clear sign of intellectual dishonesty is when someone extensively relies on double standards. Typically, an excessively high standard is applied to the perceived opponent(s), while a very low standard is applied to the ideologues' allies.

7. Address the argument instead of the person making the argument. Ad hominem arguments are a clear sign of intellectual dishonesty. When resorts to insulting their opponent, often by relying on stereotypes, guilt-by-association, and superficially innocent-sounding "gotcha" questions they're revealing the inadequacy of their own arguments and trying to deflect attention away from that inadequacy.

8. When addressing your opponent's argument, do not misrepresent it. Misrepresenting an argument in order to make it look weaker and easier to defeat is called the "straw man" fallacy. Straw man often occurs when people are quoted out-of-context or are paraphrased incorrectly. When critiquing an argument one should show that one has made a good faith effort to both understand it and to represent it in its strongest form.

9. Demonstrate a commitment to critical thinking. This seems self-explanatory.

10. Be willing to publicly acknowledge when one's opponent has made a good point or criticism. If someone is unwilling to admit that his opponent has made a telling point or an incisive criticism it demonstrates an unwillingness to honestly engage in the give-and-take of dialogue.

My own experience has been that even when I think I'm doing the best I can to abide by the rules Mike describes I sometimes find myself teetering close to the boundary nonetheless. Luckily, I have friends and students among my readers who are not shy about calling me on it when they think I've transgressed.

Sometimes I think they're wrong, but sometimes not.

I think it's wise to keep in mind that none of us is perfect and to watch carefully how we express ourselves in discussions on matters we feel strongly about. I've printed out Mike's Ten Signs of Intellectual Honesty and have them posted over my computer.

Maybe it would be a good idea for all of us to do that.

Despicability Sweepstakes

It's not news that people today on both left and right have little confidence in the trustworthiness of what they hear in our news media. For some their lack of confidence stems from little else than the fact that media personalities on the other side of the ideological divide from themselves present ideas and arguments which lie at variance with their own beliefs.

This is in itself warrant enough for some to consider the personalities unreliable and even dishonest.

For others their lack of confidence stems from the inveterate sloppiness with both facts and reasoning on the part of some in the media that seems at times to border on the intentional.

One of the most common shortcomings among those who serve up opinion on television, radio and print, perhaps, is the failure to be see how their criticisms of those with whom they disagree are often just as applicable to those whom they support. Donald Trump, to give one example, is frequently criticized for his paleolithic attitudes toward women by folks in the media who nevertheless loved Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy.

One wonders how those who deplore Trump's boorishness and Trump himself for being boorish reconcile their disdain for the president with the fawning admiration they had for men who were at least as bad and possibly worse. After all, Donald Trump, as far as we know, was never responsible for a girl's death.

While not of the same species as this sort of blindness Stephanie Ruhle at MSNBC offers us a good recent illustration of the intellectual sloppiness and silliness that induce suspicion and contempt among the viewing public.

In one segment in a show last week (see the clip below) she made the startling asseveration that Russia's meddling affected our election.

“What are people on the ground telling you there,” Ruhle asked a correspondent, “and are they mentioning Russia at all? Because,” she continued, “they have a chance to vote for a Democrat or a Republican, but we need to remind our audience of the first thing in the findings — that Russia interfered, foreign interference affected the election and could affect the next one.” (emphasis mine)

Well, where she got this from is unclear but the context of the exchange was the Mueller report, and nothing in Mueller's findings substantiates the claim that "foreign interference affected" the 2016 election. This is more than just a minor faux pas. If the election was affected by foreign actors then the results would be illegitimate and the current president would be politically crippled.

This state of affairs would precipitate a constitutional crisis and would not be at all good for the country.

Then Ruhle follows up with a bit of rhetorical snark: "Are the Republicans capable," she wonders, "of nominating someone who's not a despicable human being who will still do good things for the country?"

Ms. Ruhle is evidently burdened with an attenuated political memory. She forgets 1992 (G.H.W. Bush), 2008 (John McCain), and 2012 (Mitt Romney) - and she forgets that, as Ed Morrissey points out at Hot Air, the Democrats cast every one of these gentlemen as despicable human beings.

A minority of Republican voters finally decided in the 2016 primaries that if the Democrats are going to treat virtuous Republican candidates as despicable persons they might as well nominate the genuine article, especially since the Democratic candidate herself is a rather strong competitor in the despicability sweepstakes.

Here's the video clip:

As long as folks like Ruhle fail to get their facts straight and fail to see the obvious inconsistencies in their rhetoric they can hardly expect to attract a viewership that consists of anyone other than those already ideologically committed to her point of view and indifferent to the actual truth and reasonableness of what they're hearing.

John Updike on the Resurrection

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes for a meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

Tanya and the Prince

Some time ago I did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya at another blog. I thought that Good Friday might be a good time to run the post again, slightly edited.

Tanya's comment was provoked by an atheist at the other blog who had issued a mild rebuke to his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christian holidays to deride Christian belief. In so doing, he exemplified the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees that one might wish all people, atheists and theists alike, would adopt. Unfortunately, Tanya spoiled the mellow, can't-we-all-just-get-along, mood by manifesting a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the traditional Christian understanding of the atonement.

She wrote:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life." Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the shallowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the wonderful city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow.

Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was all to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that should be good enough to satisfy the king's demands.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, horrid creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to be rid of him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They snuck into her village, kidnapped Tanya, and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange her for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would kill Tanya.

The king, distraught beyond words, related the horrible news to the prince.

Despite all the rejections the prince had experienced from Tanya, he still loved her deeply, and his heart broke at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved that he would do the dreadful creatures' bidding. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that his father try his best to persuade Tanya to live safely in the beautiful city once she was ransomed.

And so the day came for the exchange, and the prince rode bravely and proudly bestride his mount out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward the camp of his mortal enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she was out of the camp, fleeing toward the safety of the king's city, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she was running past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange, and the awful people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding him, they pulled him from his steed, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and determination to endure whatever agonies to which he was subjected were strengthened by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe.

Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body onto a garbage heap.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart melting like ice within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his son's heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to remain with him within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore.

Tanya considered the offer, but decided that she liked the allurements of the life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and besides, she really didn't want to be in too close proximity to the prince. "By the way," she wondered to herself, "where is that pissy little whiner son of his anyway?"

Have a meaningful Good Friday. You, too, Tanya.

Of Resurrections and the Multiverse

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from the circularity of basing the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible. But we can only know they're impossible if we know that all reports of miracles are unreliable.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if molecules of hot water are added to a pot of molecules of cold water the molecules will tend to eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature.

It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules on one occasion to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident. They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that there could be an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. There's no evidence of other worlds, unfortunately, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist.

The skeptic clings to this conviction because if these things aren't so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to his psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well? If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens.

Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not with the claim that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a transcendent Mind that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead.

After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

Nones

It has frequently been noted that religious belief in the United States is in decline and that the trajectory is similar to that experienced in the late-19th and 20th century Western Europe. According to what's called the "Secularization Hypothesis," as a nation becomes more advanced and prosperous it will inevitably become more secular.

The most recent General Social Survey of religious affiliation in the United States seems to confirm that something like this is happening here. According to a couple of articles on the GSS findings (see here and here),

The number of Americans who identify as having no religion has risen 266 percent since 1991, and is now statistically tied with the number of Catholics and Evangelicals.

People with no religion – known as 'nones' among statisticians – account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population, while Catholics make up 23 percent and Evangelicals account for 22.5 percent, according to the General Social Survey.

Those three groups now represent the largest three religious groups in America.

It appears from the chart that much of the rise of the "Nones" has come at the expense of what's called mainline, or liberal, Protestantism. As the "Nones" have ascended, the number of mainline Protestant Christians has fallen 62.5 percent since 1982, to now account for just 10.8 percent of the U.S. population, according to the survey.

The trend is not being fueled by a rise in atheism which is still relatively rare and not much more common than it was in the 1990s - somewhere between 3 and 4% of the population.

Evangelicalism (a more conservative protestantism) and Catholicism seem to be down but not much. The stability of the numbers of Catholics is really quite remarkable given the scandals that have rocked the Catholic church in recent years.

Another interesting aspect of the report is that religious affiliation seems to track political affiliation, or vice versa:

Political conservatives identify far more with organized religion than political liberals do; political moderates fall between them in religious identification, as they do in politics. In 2014, 9 percent of political conservatives had no religious preference compared to 19 percent of political moderates and 38 percent of political liberals.

In 1990, 5 percent of conservatives, 6 percent of moderates, and 15 percent of liberals had no religious preference. Hout and Fischer wrote extensively about this trend in their 2014 article in the Sociological Science, pointing to political polarization and generational succession as the keys to understanding the trend in religious preferences.

The alliance between conservative politicians and the leadership of conservative religious denominations was pushing political liberals who had been raised in conservative denominations away from organized religion.

This may be true, but it doesn't seem to explain why the heaviest losses are in the most liberal denominations while the more conservative groups seem to be holding fairly steady. As mentioned above, though, whatever is going on it doesn't seem that belief in God is declining significantly:

Conventional religious belief, typified by belief in God, remains very widespread — 59 percent of Americans believe in God without any doubt. Atheism is barely growing; one percent of Americans positively did not believe in God in 1965, two percent in 1991, and three percent in 2014.

Nor is disbelief fueling the trend toward no preference as beliefs changed much less during these years of institutional defection than between the 1960s to the 1990s when religious preferences changed little (and differential birth rates explained the changes that did occur).

It's risky to speculate, of course, but what seems to be happening is that theologically liberal protestantism has failed to maintain its hold on the hearts and minds of many of those it formerly counted among its number. As the doctrinal positions of the mainline churches were diluted to the point of insipidity people simply drifted away, taking their children with them.

Some of these found a home in more conservative churches with a more robust theology and others have simply become estranged from the church altogether. They've not become atheists, at least not in significant numbers, but they don't care to maintain an identification with any traditional religious body.