Spring Birds

Long time readers of VP know that I enjoy birds. It's something of a hobby of mine, and the spring migration is a great time to get out and try to get a good look at some of the beautiful bits of feathered fluff passing through on their northward trek.

Here are a few of my favorites from this past week. All of these pics are of males of the species. Females are often more drab, and, in the case of the last two species, they look much different than the males:

The bird above is a Magnolia warbler. It's the bird that inspired a young teen-ager named Roger Tory Peterson to take up birding which led to a lifetime of painting birds and a whole series of nature field guides. Peterson saw the Magnolia warbler in New York's Central park and was immediately hooked on birds.

The Blackburnian warbler is in my mind one of the most striking birds in all of North America. When the sunlight hits the bird's throat it's as if it has been set aflame.

The Cape May warbler nests in boreal forests in the U.S. and Canada and is only found in Cape May, NJ during migration. It was first described by ornithologist Alexander Wilson in Cape May, NJ but not seen there for a hundred years afterward. The Cape May warbler's tongue is unique among warblers. It's tubular, like the hummingbird's tongue, and enables the bird to sip nectar from flowers on its wintering grounds in the Caribbean.

The Prothonotary warbler is famous, those who've read about the "Red Scare" of the early 1950s might recall, for being instrumental in convicting Alger Hiss on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. You can read about it here. The Prothonotary warbler got its name from the bright yellow robes worn by papal clerks, known as prothonotaries, in the Roman Catholic church.

The bird pictured above is an Indigo bunting. Here's an interesting fact about birds that many people have a hard time believing. Birds do not have blue pigment in their feathers. The blue color found in many birds is due to the way their feathers refract sunlight. The Indigo bunting is common in eastern North America but is often overlooked because it's small, and the dazzling blue color only shows up in good light against a proper background.

The Rose-breasted grosbeak is a handsome woodland species that occasionally visits sunflower feeders during migration. The female looks like a large brown sparrow.

Bird migration is one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature and it's occurring this week across much of the United States. Since it happens largely after dark most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring in the skies above them most nights at this time of year.

Even so, millions of birds are traveling each night from their winter haunts in Central and South America to their breeding territories in North America. The migration involves birds of all types, hundreds of different species, navigating their way north to find a mate, establish a territory, breed and return south again in the Fall.

To help give a sense of the movements 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 and why did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales, dragonflies and numerous other creatures, ever evolve in all these different groups through mindless, unguided processes like random mutation and natural selection? Did it evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

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? How did that ability evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

Birds truly are a marvel.

The Lies We Must Believe

In his book Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher reminds us of George Orwell's observation in his classic 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that, "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

Dreher adds that,

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language - Newspeak is the Party's word for the jargon it imposes on society - it controls the categories in which people think. "Freedom" is slavery, "truth" is falsehood, and so forth.

I thought of this when I read the latest effort of the left to change the language. Just as we must refer to those who promote abortion as being pro-choice rather than pro-abortion, and refer to those who advocate racism against whites as anti-racists, and refer to those who adopt fascist tactics in our streets as anti-fascists, and call those who practice political and religious intolerance, tolerant, so, too, must we now refer to Mother's Day as "Birthing Person's Day."

It's surreal.

Dreher describes Orwell's word Doublethink as "holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them." This, he says, is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party's ideology:

The citizen is conditioned to believe whatever the state tells them. If the Party insists that 2 + 2 = 5 then despite all your senses telling you that that's false you had to acknowledge that it was true because the Party said so.

Writes Orwell, "Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense."

Hannah Arendt notes in her masterpiece study of Nazism and Stalinist communism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, that, "The ideal subjects for totalitarian rule ... [are] people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false...no longer exist."

There seem to be a lot of those kind of folks in contemporary America.

Dreher adds that in America the rising cultural dictatorship is softer and more subtle than in Nineteen Eighty-Four or the twentieth century tyrannies Arendt studies. Under what Dreher calls "soft totalitarianism,"

...the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in Doublethink every day. Men have periods, The woman standing in front of you is to be called 'he.' Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally...."

Dreher could've added the patent falsehoods, belief in which is de rigueur in much of America today, that the country is systemically, ineradicably and irredeemably racist, that black people have more to fear from white cops than they do from their own neighbors and that racism is uniquely endemic to the white race.

None of these beliefs can be empirically substantiated, they're all to be believed solely because those with "moral authority," the "oppressed" (like Lebron James and Ibram X. Kendi), say so.

As weird as it would've seemed to an American just ten years ago, we appear today to be spiraling toward an Orwellian dystopia in which the basic freedoms we've always cherished, the accomplishments of Western science and literature, and the idea of rewarding merit and excellence must all be done away with. They're all manifestations of white supremacy and systemic racism and need to be rooted out and torn down.

In order to accomplish this we must also dispense with manifestations of white privilege like truth, logic and objective facts. Thus, we are a people beset on every side by lies, distortions and sloppy thinking. Hopefully, the vast bulk of Americans will soon be roused from our complacent slumber, demand truth, reject the lies and scorn the liars, but if not there may be some very hard times ahead.

If you have never done so, I encourage you to read Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's been said with only slight exaggeration that the only thing he gets wrong in this prophetic work is the date in the title.

The Sovietization of America

Victor Davis Hanson makes a compelling case in an op-ed at the Telegraph Herald that Americans are heading down the same road as did the citizens of the Soviet Union in the last century.

Hanson lists ten symptoms of what he calls "Sovietism," but before he does, he asks a couple of questions: "What ultimately ended the nihilist Soviet system? Was it not that Russians finally tired of the Kremlin’s lies and hypocrisies that permeated every facet of their falsified lives?"

Does that sound familiar?

We are ourselves surrounded by lies. Many of our political leaders, much of our media, and many social activists have no respect at all for objective truth. Their standard is a kind of pragmatism in which "truth" is whatever serves to advance their agenda or whatever they strongly feel ought to be the truth. Any assertion which meets these criteria is considered to be justified.

Hanson's ten "symptoms of Sovietism" are accompanied by a brief explanation of how each one manifests itself in our society. Here's a sample:

The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents.

Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot extremist sentiments. The U.S. Postal Service recently admitted it uses tracking programs to monitor the social media postings of Americans.

CNN recently alleged that the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security is considering partnering with private surveillance firms to get around government prohibitions on scrutinizing Americans’ online activity.

The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought.

Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of diversity, equity and inclusion staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan the admissions, hiring, curriculum and administration at universities [for any heterodox actions or speech].

Like good commissars, our diversity czars oversee compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize for and renounce its evil foundations.

The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons for rooting out all potential enemies of the people.

Since when did Americans encourage co-workers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a rival? Why are there now new thought criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism or vaccination racism?

The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom. Instead, they boasted that they were advocates for equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege — and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased.

Our wokists are similarly defending their thought-control efforts, forced re-education sessions, scripted confessionals, mandatory apologies and cancel culture on the pretense that we need long-overdue “fundamental transformation.”

So if they destroy people in the name of equity, their nihilism is justified.

You can read the rest of Hanson's indictment of the direction in which we are moving at the link.

In his excellent book, Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher makes much the same case as Hanson. He draws numerous parallels between the oppressive circumstances in which people in the Soviet bloc found themselves in the post WWII era and what's happening in the United States today. Dreher focuses on the inveterate dishonesty of the Soviet regime and cites the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

What did it mean [in the former Soviet empire] to live by lies?

It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm - or at least not to oppose - to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force.

The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.

There are still a multitude of such "refuseniks" in America who refuse to swim with the mendacious cultural currents flowing through our institutions. They merit our support, and hopefully more of us will number ourselves among them.

Scylla or Charybdis

Over the last couple of days, we've considered the question whether it was more rational to be a naturalist or a theist. Today I'd like to share some final thoughts on the topic.

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 must be wrong. Why that belief is "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are lots of very good reasons, some we listed on Thursday, 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.

I wonder, too, if they won't think it incomprehensible that anyone could think that it was more rational to believe naturalism to be true than to believe theism to be true.

Which Is More Rational (Pt. II)

Yesterday we examined the objection to theistic belief that belief in God is irrational. In reply to this objection I suggested that there are a number of things an atheistic materialist has to believe that many people, including atheists, would consider irrational or at least less rational than believing their contraries.

I'd like to finish up those thoughts by noting one other grave problem with what we might call the atheistic argument from irrationality. The atheist who employs this argument against the theist actually winds up shooting himself in the foot. Here's why.

Atheists, or naturalistic materialists (Nat Mats), are philosophically wedded to a Darwinian explanation of the emergence of the human species, but according to the Darwinian view organisms and all their capacities evolve to enable them to survive and reproduce.

It follows, then, that the Nat Mat must acknowledge that human beings have evolved their cognitive faculties, which include reason, to enable them to survive and reproduce. But survival is not the same thing as truth. Our cognitive faculties have not evolved to enable us to discover truth.

Most Naturalists freely admit this. Here are four examples of the dozens that could be cited:

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Physicist Eric Baum.

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman.

"Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Neuroscientist Steven Pinker.

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Philosopher Patricia Churchland.

You get the idea. If Darwinian evolution is true then we have no basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth because reason didn't evolve to serve that function. The thoughts in our brains are just the movement of electrons along neurons which are, in turn, the result of a mindless, unguided evolutionary process.

If this is so, why should I believe anything those electro-chemical reactions in the brain tell me is true? Indeed, what grounds does a Nat Mat have for even believing that Nat Mat is true?

Naturalistic philosopher John Gray writes, "The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth," and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett agrees, “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.”

How then can our Nat Mat friends claim that it's rational to believe in the evolution of human reason, a faculty not designed to discover truth, but that it's irrational to believe that human reason was designed by an intelligent Mind to enable us to apprehend truth? Clearly, the atheist has put himself in a pickle here.

If the atheist is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties and thus also given us strong reason to doubt the truth of any belief they produce, including the belief that there is no God.

Moreover, since the atheist has no grounds for trusting the deliverances of his reason he a forteriori strips himself of any rational basis for science. If atheism is true then there's no warrant for either science or truth, since both depend upon the ability to trust the faculty of human reason. Atheism saws off the epistemic branch that it sits on.

How, after all, can it be reasonable to hold the belief that we have no basis for trusting reason?

So, which is more rational, holding a belief - atheism - that implicitly denies that our reason is trustworthy and that truth can be known, or holding a belief - theism - that tells us that our reason is trustworthy because it was instilled in us by a rational Creator?

Which Is More Rational?

A criticism often leveled against theistic belief is that it's irrational to believe in an entity (God) that can't be observed. French philosopher Michael Onfray, for example, has written that "Monotheism loathes intelligence." And, "God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence and the critical mind."

Onfray, of course, is an atheistic materialist who, like the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, and others, argues that belief in God is an irrational delusion.

Well, is it? Which is the more rational belief system or worldview, atheism or theism? Is it more rational to believe, for instance, that ...

• the information needed to form the first living thing arose by chance, or to believe that wherever we find it information is always the product of a mind?
• the extraordinarily precise calibration of the parameters, forces constants and initial conditions of the universe necessary to permit life to exist is just an astronomically improbable accident or to believe that this cosmic fine-tuning is the result of intentional engineering?
• the space, time, material universe created itself, or to believe that space, time and matter were caused by something that is itself neither spatial, temporal nor material?
• moral values - belief in human equality, dignity, rights, the belief that it's wrong to harm others - are purely subjective and arbitrary or to believe that they're objectively grounded and independent of whether people agree with them or not?
• every choice, act and thought is the inevitable consequence of prior causes that determine everything we do or to believe that we are in some sense free to choose between alternative futures?
• our conscious experience is just electro-chemical processes in the brain or to believe that the phenomena of human consciousness are the products of an immaterial mind working in concert with our physical body?
• your life is a pointless "tale told by an idiot" or to believe that your life is meaningful because what you do in this life matters forever?

Materialism offers no plausible explanation for the origin of the universe, the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, or the origin of consciousness. To be a consistent materialist one should be a determinist about human choices and a nihilist about life in general and morality in particular.

Perhaps a further question one might ask in addition to those listed above is, is it more rational to adopt a worldview (atheistic materialism) whose entailments are almost impossible to live with consistently or is it more rational to adopt a worldview (theism) whose entailments are consistent with our most basic beliefs about life?

After all, what's irrational is denying that there's a God while living as if there is.

Materialist Superstition

John Zmirak offers an acerbic critique of Woke culture in an essay at The Stream and wonders how we've come to the place where so many highly educated Americans have been reduced "to a Stone Age level of fanatical superstition." His answer is, "In a word, Darwin."

He explains:

[Darwinism] insists that the existence of the universe itself is a meaningless cosmic accident. No purpose or mind lies behind it. Likewise the emergence of life, which Darwinists believe by some secular miracle leapt fully-armored from the mud like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Mere chance somehow engineered not just the baroque complexities of the humblest bacterium, but the vast, elaborate rococo of higher mammals, then primates. Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not their arrival.

But somehow this combination of infinitesimally unlikely genetic mutations, and ruthless natural selection red in tooth and claw produced … human beings with brains perceptive and reliable enough to generate Modern Science.

I'd quibble that it may be more accurate to use the term naturalistic materialism, of which Darwinism is one expression, for what follows, but no matter. Zmirak continues:

Even though this Science tells us that we’re meaningless epiphenomena of random cosmic burps and vicious competition, somehow we also have dignity and rights, including the right to Equity. (Insert stolen premises from the biblical worldview here.) But the science that teaches us about that dignity and those rights - theology - should curl up and die once we’ve taken ... the gold fillings out of its teeth.

The Woke folk will decide what “Equality,” “Equity” and “Justice” mean. And they’ll do so with all the arbitrary, random, irrational whimsy that the universe showed in mutating us into existence. They’ll enforce their capricious verdicts with all the ruthlessness of Natural Selection, throwing their failed competitors onto the fossil heap of history.

True enough. Once a substantial percentage of the educated population comes to believe that life, including human life, is all a big accident, that there's no meaning to any of it, that death is the end of existence, then the only ethics that makes sense is an egoistic form of might makes right.

In a world devoid of purpose there can be nothing that's wrong in any meaningful sense, and thus there's nothing wrong with destroying, either literally or figuratively, people who disagree with them.

So, in the universe of the naturalistic materialist, whatever it takes to make my own existence more pleasant - including using others as means to my ends and imposing my will upon them - whatever I have the power and desire to do, I might as well do.

In this purposeless world, whoever has the loudest voice and the most political heft makes the rules, and it's pointless for the less powerful to object that the rules make no sense or are immoral. Sense and morality depend upon the existence of objective truth about human nature, and in a Godless, Darwinian world there is no objective truth about human nature that binds us or constrains us.

Human nature is malleable. It's whatever humans are able to make it. What rules there are, about morality and about human nature, we make for ourselves.

All of this follows from the embrace of an antitheistic materialism by our cultural elites. Our ivy educated betters scorn what they like to call "religious superstition," but they adopt instead all manner of other superstitions - superstitions about human nature, race, gender and evolution to name just a few.

As G.K. Chesterton famously observed, "When people no longer believe in God they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

Free Will Skepticism

There's an interesting article at The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman on the topic of free will.

Although Burkeman writes the article in such a way as to suggest that he himself is a determinist, or what he calls a "free will skeptic," he admits at the end of the piece that he "personally can’t claim to find the case against free will ultimately persuasive; it’s just at odds with too much else that seems obviously true about life."

Nevertheless, almost all of the people he cites in the article are determinists with the opinions of some compatibilists* mixed in, but doesn't mention any arguments from those philosophers who believe we have libertarian free will*.

I've pulled a few passages from Burkeman's article that help to give a sense of it. Let's start with this one:

Nothing could be more self-evident [than that we make free choices]. And yet according to a growing chorus of philosophers and scientists, who have a variety of different reasons for their view, it also can’t possibly be the case. “This sort of free will is ruled out, simply and decisively, by the laws of physics,” says one of the most strident of the free will sceptics, the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

Leading psychologists such as Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom agree, as apparently did the late Stephen Hawking, along with numerous prominent neuroscientists, including VS Ramachandran, who called free will “an inherently flawed and incoherent concept” in his endorsement of Sam Harris’s bestselling 2012 book Free Will, which also makes that argument.

According to the public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, free will is an anachronistic myth – useful in the past, perhaps, as a way of motivating people to fight against tyrants or oppressive ideologies, but rendered obsolete by the power of modern data science to know us better than we know ourselves, and thus to predict and manipulate our choices.

It's important to note that each of these thinkers is a naturalistic materialist. Their determinism is a derivative of their prior belief that all that exists are matter and the physical laws which govern it. Being committed to that ontology it's not surprising that they would be free will skeptics, since materialism allows no room for any deviation from physical law. As Burkeman says at one point, "Our decisions and intentions involve neural activity – and why would a neuron be exempt from the laws of physics any more than a rock?"

If, however, naturalistic materialism is false, if there's more to us than just our material bodies and brains, if we also possess an immaterial mind or soul, then the strength of the argument for determinism is substantially diminished.

Burkeman explains why the free will question is crucially important:

...the stakes could hardly be higher. Were free will to be shown to be nonexistent – and were we truly to absorb the fact – it would “precipitate a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution”, Harris has written.

Arguably, we would be forced to conclude that it was unreasonable ever to praise or blame anyone for their actions, since they weren’t truly responsible for deciding to do them; or to feel guilt for one’s misdeeds, pride in one’s accomplishments, or gratitude for others’ kindness.

And we might come to feel that it was morally unjustifiable to mete out retributive punishment to criminals, since they had no ultimate choice about their wrongdoing. Some worry that it might fatally corrode all human relations, since romantic love, friendship and neighbourly civility alike all depend on the assumption of choice: any loving or respectful gesture has to be voluntary for it to count.

The consequences of widespread acceptance of determinism would be so dire that some philosophers believe the masses shouldn't be exposed to the "truth" that free will is just an illusion:

Saul Smilansky, a professor of philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, who believes the popular notion of free will is a mistake, [but] although free will as conventionally defined is unreal, it’s crucial people go on believing otherwise ....“On the deepest level, if people really understood what’s going on...it’s just too frightening and difficult,” Smilansky said.

“For anyone who’s morally and emotionally deep, it’s really depressing and destructive. It would really threaten our sense of self, our sense of personal value. The truth is just too awful here.”

Smilansky is right about the consequences of a deterministic view of human choice. Not only would it do away with the idea that humans deserve reward and punishment, it would also do away with the idea of moral guilt. It would also strip our species of any notion of human dignity, equality or rights:

By far the most unsettling implication of the case against free will, for most who encounter it, is what it seems to say about morality: that nobody, ever, truly deserves reward or punishment for what they do, because what they do is the result of blind deterministic forces. “For the free will sceptic,” writes Gregg Caruso in his new book Just Deserts,...“it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible.”

Were we to accept the full implications of that idea, the way we treat each other – and especially the way we treat criminals – might change beyond recognition.

For Caruso, who teaches philosophy at the State University of New York, what all this means is that retributive punishment – punishing a criminal because he deserves it, rather than to protect the public, or serve as a warning to others – can’t ever be justified....Retribution is central to all modern systems of criminal justice, yet ultimately, Caruso thinks, “it’s a moral injustice to hold someone responsible for actions that are beyond their control. It’s capricious.”

The preceding paragraph illustrates why so few philosophers believe we can live consistently as determinists. Caruso uses words like "unjustified" and "capricious," but if determinism is true there are no acts which are justified or unjustified, and there certainly is no caprice. Everything happens as the inevitable consequence of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. To complain that an act is unjustified is meaningless and to allege that an act is capricious is to imply that it could have been otherwise than it was, which is nonsense if determinism is true.

Caruso commits the same inconsistency in the next section. Burkeman writes:

Caruso is an advocate of what he calls the “public health-quarantine” model of criminal justice, which would transform the institutions of punishment in a radically humane direction.

You could still restrain a murderer, on the same rationale that you can require someone infected by Ebola to observe a quarantine: to protect the public. But you’d have no right to make the experience any more unpleasant than was strictly necessary for public protection. And you would be obliged to release them as soon as they no longer posed a threat.

But how, assuming the truth of determinism, can we speak of a "right" to do something and an "obligation" to do something else? These words are meaningless if there are no genuine choices. If at every given moment there's only one possible future how can people have a right or an obligation to do other than what they've been determined to do?

Like so many philosophical questions, the question of free will really comes down to the question of God. If one doesn't believe in God then it's indeed difficult to see how we could have free will even though we'd find it impossible to live consistently as a determinist. But if God does exist then it's possible that He has endowed us with an immaterial self (mind or soul) not subject to physical law and out of which not only conscious experience but also genuinely free choices arise.

Put differently, if you believe that there are at least some moments in your life when you're genuinely free to choose between two alternatives, then to be consistent you should be a theist. If you are a naturalistic materialist then free will certainly would seem inexplicable, but if determinism is true why are the implications so disturbing and why can't we live consistently as determinists?

As Burkeman admits, he has to live as though determinism is false:

I’m certainly going to keep responding to others as though they had free will: if you injure me, or someone I love, I can guarantee I’m going to be furious, instead of smiling indulgently on the grounds that you had no option. In this experiential sense, free will just seems to be a given.

Burkeman has much more to say about "Free will Skepticism" at the link. The article's a bit long, but worth reading in that it does a good job of presenting the determinist challenge to those who believe in libertarian free will.

*Compatibilism is the notion that even though our choices may be determined, it makes sense to say we’re free to choose. Compatibilists think determinism and free will are both true. Libertarian free will is the view that there are some moments in which one can genuinely choose between two or more possible futures.

Unsettled Science

It may surprise you to learn that there are eminent scientists who believe that the science surrounding climate change is anything but settled. Indeed, much of what we "know" about the climate controversy we apparently don't really "know" at all.

A pair of articles in the Wall Street Journal, one by Holman Jenkins (see here) and one by Mark Mills (see here) features a brilliant - and brave - physicist named Steve Koonin who has written a book titled Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters in which he explains why we should be much more critical of what we're told by our media about climate than many of us are.

Jenkins tells us a bit about the author:

Mr. Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His parents, with less than a year of college between them, nevertheless intuited in 1968 exactly how to handle an unusually talented and motivated youngster: You want to go cross the country to Caltech at age 16? “Whatever you think is right, go ahead,” they told him.

“I wanted to know how the world works,” Mr. Koonin says now. “I wanted to do physics since I was 6 years old, when I didn’t know it was called physics.” ... He would teach at Caltech for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions.

Jenkins adds that,

For the record, Mr. Koonin agrees that the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since 1900 and will warm by another degree this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus.

Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity.

He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon free base-load power. He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

There are other advantages: Local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six- or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.”

But these are changes it makes no economic sense to force. Let technology and markets work at their own pace. The climate might continue to change, at a pace that’s hard to perceive, but societies will adapt. “As a species, we’re very good at adapting.”

Mills tells us that Koonin challenges four widely accepted claims about climate:

1. Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900” and “the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.

2. Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.

3. Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.

4. The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.”

This is not to say that Koonin isn't sympathetic to environmental concerns:

Mr. Koonin says he wants voters, politicians and business leaders to have an accurate account of the science. He doesn’t care where the debate lands.

Yet his expectations are ruled by a keen sense of realities. I mention, along with some names, that I never met anyone of serious judgment who didn’t privately pooh-pooh the idea that humanity will control CO2 by means other than the mostly unregulated progress of markets and technology. Mr. Koonin nods his agreement.

He speaks of “could,” “should” and “will”—and what “will” happen is a lot less than elites, in response to current reward structures, are pretending will happen. Even John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate czar, recently admitted that Mr. Biden’s “net-zero” climate plan will have zero effect on the climate if developing countries don’t go along (and they have little incentive to do so).

Mr. Koonin hopes that “a graceful out for everybody” will be to see the impulse for global climate regulation “morph into much more impactful local environmental action: smog, plastic, green jobs. Forget the global aspect of this.”

Mills goes on to discuss a few more of Koonin's concerns:

Mr. Koonin laments the sloppiness of those using local weather “events” to make claims about long-cycle planetary phenomena. He chastises not so much local news media as journalists with prestigious national media who should know better.

This attribution error evokes one of Mr. Koonin’s rare rebukes: “Pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-caused climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest.”

When it comes to the vaunted computer models, Mr. Koonin is persuasively skeptical. It’s a big problem, he says, when models can’t retroactively “predict” events that have already happened. And he notes that some of the “tuning” done to models so that they work better amounts to “cooking the books.”

He should know, having written one of the first textbooks on using computers to model physics phenomena.

So why have so many people uncritically accepted the climate change alarmism peddled by our elites? Mills again:

Since all the data that Mr. Koonin uses are available to others, he poses the obvious question: “Why haven’t you heard these facts before?” He is cautious, perhaps overly so, in proposing the causes for so much misinformation.

He points to such things as incentives to invoke alarm for fundraising purposes and official reports that “mislead by omission.” Many of the primary scientific reports, he observes repeatedly, are factual. Still, “the public gets their climate information almost exclusively from the media; very few people actually read the assessment summaries.”

I said above that Koonin is brave. To deviate publicly from the progressive consensus today is to invite vitriolic attacks upon one's self and family and to risk being "canceled," and Koonin is not unaware of what's in store for him. Mills closes with this:

Mr. Koonin says that he knows he’ll be criticized, even “attacked.” You can’t blame him for taking a few pages to shadow box with his critics.

But even if one remains unconvinced by his arguments, the right response is to debate the science. We’ll see if that happens in a world in which politicians assert the science is settled and plan astronomical levels of spending to replace the nation’s massive infrastructures with “green” alternatives.

Never have so many spent so much public money on the basis of claims that are so unsettled. The prospects for a reasoned debate are not good. Good luck, Mr. Koonin.

Jenkins' column concludes with these words:

First, the mainstream climate community will try to ignore his book, even as his publicists work the TV bookers in hopes of making a splash. Then Mr. Koonin knows will come the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate.

He adds with a laugh: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.”

Cosmic Roll of the Dice

From time to time I've posted on the argument for an intelligent designer of the universe based on something called cosmic fine-tuning (okay, maybe a little more often than just "from time to time"). Anyway, here's a four minute video by Justin Brierly on the subject that serves as a nice primer for those not wishing to get too bogged down in technical aspects of the argument:

Brierly refers in the video to the theory that there could be an infinity of other universes all constructed with different initial conditions, laws and constants. This is the hypothesis called "the Multiverse," and though it has fallen into disfavor among many scientists, others still cling to it because it allows them to account for the kind of fine-tuning Brierly highlights without having to invoke a cosmic designer, i.e. God.

The idea is that as improbable as a universe so exquisitely calibrated as ours is - a universe in which life can thrive - if there are an infinity of different universes then one that's life-permitting just has to exist and we happen to be in it.

In short, for many scientists the chief motivation for promoting the multiverse idea is the desire to escape having to acknowledge that an intelligent mind has engineered the universe.

As Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind put it,

If...the [multiverse] turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons or because it disagrees with observation, [then] we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the [intelligent Design] critics.

University of London physicist Bernard Carr observed that,

To the hard-line physicist the Multiverse may not be entirely respectable, but it is at least preferable to invoking a Creator. Indeed, [many] physicists are attracted to the multiverse precisely because it seems to dispense with God as the explanation of cosmic design.

But as philosopher of science Stephen Meyer explains in his excellent new book Return of the God Hypothesis, the multiverse doesn't really help the naturalistic scientist escape the cosmic designer because, among other reasons, whatever is producing that endless parade of universes must itself be exquisitely fine-tuned.

Brierly is the host of the weekly British radio show Unbelievable which is available on podcast. Each week Justin brings together believers and unbelievers to talk about some issue related to matters of faith. The discussions are almost always pleasant, informative, and Justin does an excellent job moderating them. They're usually what such conversations should be like, but too often aren't.

If you'd like to sign up for the podcast or browse the archives of past shows which have featured discussions on almost every topic related to religious belief you can go to the Unbelievable website here. Meanwhile, here's another short video that does a fine job of explaining cosmic fine-tuning:

Prager U. on CRT

Schools, corporations and governments across America are eagerly jumping on the Critical Race Theory train. This doesn't bode well for the future of our social cohesion and comity, and I've occasionally explained why I think this neo-Marxian social theory is not benign, most recently here.

It puzzles me that anyone who thinks that a theory or set of assumptions about race that rejects the ideals of human equality and the belief that all human beings - not just whites - are corrupted by original sin and which promotes division, resentment, hostility and racist attitudes toward whites, is a good thing to be teaching everyone, especially children.

According to an article at The Federalist,

CRT rejects the foundational premises of classical liberalism — such as legal neutrality and individual rights — and from that perspective, colorblindness is not understood as a strategy to overcome racism but as a method to perpetuate it.

“It’s a white ideology,” Burnham said. “Colorblindness really comes into fashion as a means of denying the persistence of racial stratification in the United States.”

In other words, to endorse Martin Luther King's plea that people be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin is a means of perpetuating racism according to proponents of CRT.

The Federalist article gives several examples of how this is working out in practice, one of which describes a lawsuit brought by two white employees of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife:

In the California lawsuit brought by the two white men, a discussion hosted by the state Department of Fish & Wildlife featured speakers who said that black people don’t use the outdoors in proportion to their population because of white racism, generational trauma, and a historical fear of lynching.

White employees were instructed on the country’s deeply racist legal system and advised that “silence is complicity” when it comes to racial injustice.

According to the lawsuit, employees were subjected to implicit bias training that amounted to compelling staff to take “loyalty oaths” to CRT ideology. The lawsuit, filed last October, is in the early procedural stage; the state’s lawyers are seeking to have the case dismissed.

Evidently, it's fear of being lynched by all the murderous racist white folks hiking the trails of our state and national parks that keeps blacks from frequenting them.

Another suit against the New York City Department of Education alleges that employees were told at a diversity retreat that “there is White toxicity in the air and we all breathe it in.” Examples given included the Protestant work ethic and being socialized to be “defensive.”

These are ridiculous to be sure, but the most insidious examples of CRT indoctrination are occurring in our schools where children are being made to feel guilt because of their race and "privilege." One mixed-race student in a Nevada charter school was actually failed in his senior year because he refused to assent to the accusation that he was racist because of his "whiteness."

James Lindsey at Prager U. agrees that CRT is a corrosive acid eating away at our social fabric and sums up some of its major problems in this five minute video:

It's certainly jarring to a generation raised on the belief that all people are equal in the eyes of God, that we have a moral duty to treat everyone the way we'd want to treated, and that one's skin color is irrelevant to be told now that this is all pernicious claptrap and that the color of one's skin is the most important thing about them, that it defines them in almost every significant way, and that if they're white they ipso facto bear an enormous load of guilt and shame.

American Race Relations Have Never Been Better

A column in the Wall Street Journal(paywall) by Jason Riley makes the case that, contrary to what we hear from our progressive friends, race relations are better today than they've ever been in this country.

This is bad news for leftist progressives whose rhetoric and policies rely upon and promote the perception of racial resentments, but Riley provides the evidence to buttress his claim.

He begins with a critique of the claim that Donald Trump's election in 2016 is proof that the nation is racist:

[I]t’s worth clarifying (yet again) that former supporters of Barack Obama, not white nationalists, were the voters responsible for Mr. Trump’s election. Only occasionally did the establishment media acknowledge this in its reporting. “It’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump,” reads a New York Times dispatch from 2017. “He flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side."

Political scientist Eric Kaufmann of the Manhattan Institute cites data showing, Mr. Riley avers, that,

[R]acial attitudes have been trending toward more tolerance for well over half a century, even as black politicians (Mr. Obama, Kamala Harris ), professional polemicists (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi ) and major media organs (the New York Times’s '1619 Project') continue to insist otherwise.

According to Mr. Kaufmann, “at a time when measures of racist attitudes and behavior have never been more positive, pessimism about racism and race relations has increased in America.” Terms like “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” are increasingly common, but white racist views have been in steady decline, whether with regard to having black co-workers, classmates or neighbors.

Riley goes on to cite some important statistics:

Intermarriage trend lines also undermine the notion that racial bigotry in America is a growing problem. “Approval of black-white intermarriage rose among whites from around 4% in 1958 to 45% in 1995 and 84% in 2013,” Mr. Kaufmann writes. “In 2017, fewer than 10% of whites in a major Pew survey said that interracial marriage was a ‘bad thing,’ ” and the “actual share of intermarried newlyweds rose from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015.”

In fact, intermarriages involving Asians, Hispanics and Jews have all risen sharply over the decades, yet progressive intellectuals want to lecture the rest of us on how to be “antiracist.”

But what about the "systemic racism" plaguing our police departments?

Fatal encounters between police officers and black suspects are always unfortunate and sometimes tragic, but they’re also exceedingly rare. Nor is it rational to conclude, without supporting evidence, that these encounters are driven by racial animus.

As Mr. Kaufmann notes, “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” According to a Washington Post database, police shot and killed 999 people in 2019, including 424 whites and 252 blacks.

Twelve of the black victims were unarmed, versus 26 of the white victims. In a country where annual arrests number more than 10 million, if those black death totals constitute an “epidemic” of police use of lethal force against blacks, then the word has lost all meaning.

So why aren't these statistics more widely known? Why is it that when police shoot an unarmed black person it's a national news story, but when they shoot an unarmed white person, which happens twice as often, we never hear about it?

The reason, perhaps, is that the left, both black and white, has an ideological interest in keeping society divided. By presenting themselves as the only ones who can remedy our nation's racial ills the left manipulates our misperceptions to aggrandize their own power.

It's reprehensible, to be sure, but if the above statistics are correct what other explanation is there for the constant effort by the left to turn every incident, every disparity, into a confirmation of their narrative that we are a thoroughly racist people?

Atlas Is Shrugging

In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand pictured a society in which those who produce wealth and jobs and bear the burden of carrying society upon their shoulders, the creative geniuses who've made society prosperous, decide that a parasitic state has made their lives intolerable, and they all just quit.

Burdensome laws and regulations imposed on the wealth creators make it so difficult for them to continue that they give up, abandon their enterprises and abscond to a mysterious mountain retreat.

Something analogous is occurring today in our society, but it's not the corporate CEOs who are taking sudden and early retirement, it's those who provide a service at least as important as those who provide jobs - our police. Apparently, many officers have decided that they've had enough and are looking for other employment or are retiring.

Moreover, young people are deciding that police work in a society that seems intent on doing everything it can to make their job impossible isn't for them.

A piece at the Blaze.com tells the story:

The "defund the police" movement and the "abolish the police" movement, constant negative coverage of law enforcement by the media, anti-police sentiment becoming mainstream, and the threat of riots have contributed to a police shortage across the country.

The Philadelphia Police Department currently has 268 vacancies and is expecting even more shortages in the near future.

"From Jan. 1 through Thursday, 79 Philadelphia officers ... intend to retire within four years, according to Mayor Jim Kenney's office," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. "During the same time period last year, just 13 officers had [so indicated]."

"It's the perfect storm. We are anticipating that the department is going to be understaffed by several hundred members, because hundreds of guys are either retiring or taking other jobs and leaving the department," Mike Neilon, spokesperson for the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police, told the newspaper.

And it's not just Philadelphia:

Neighboring New Jersey is facing a "recruiting crisis," according to Pat Colligan, president of the New Jersey State Policemen's Benevolent Association.

"Every action has a reaction. When you vilify every police officer for every bad police officer's decision, [people] don't want to take this job anymore," Colligan, head of New Jersey's largest police union, said. "It's been a very trying and difficult time to put on the badge every day."

Colligan also said the "quality has really diminished in the last few years," which could mean more tragic police confrontations in the future.

Col. Patrick Callahan, the acting superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, said the state's largest police agency received a "historically low" number of applications this year. In some years, the New Jersey State Police would usually receive between 15,000 to 20,000 applications – this year they only received 2,023 qualified applicants as of Thursday, according to NJ.com.

In Baltimore they're talking about having to close police districts. If that happens they will almost certainly be closed in those parts of the city where stresses are highest and the need for police is the greatest.

According to a spokesperson for the Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police, patrol numbers are now below 700 officers which is about 300-400 below what is needed, creating huge safety issues for our officers and for the citizens of Baltimore.

There's more at the link.

The Federalist's Katy Faust interviewed an African-American police officer about policing in the wake of the recent trial of former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin.

After talking for awhile about the Derek Chauvin trial Faust asked (Her questions are in boldface),

How would you characterize public opinion towards police today? There is a general narrative that demonizes law enforcement. In my opinion, the anti-cop narrative began with the Obama administration. He made negative law enforcement comments, and in controversial cases would show up to the deceased’s funerals (which were later justified as lawful shootings). The Dallas five were killed under Obama and he didn’t show any respect toward them.

Do you think that policing in America is systemically racist? Ha. Absolutely not. No.

In your experience has policing become more difficult since George Floyd’s death? Yes, but we’ve been on this slippery slope since the start of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] movement. That’s where things really started to take a serious turn. We were already nose diving, and Floyd’s death is just more fuel to the fire.

All these cases involve a false narrative of police racism, from Trayvon Martin to Rayshard Brooks to George Floyd, causing tension and a divide between law-enforcement and the community. People want us to solve their problems, but they don’t want us to defend ourselves or the community while doing it.

They want us to be able to talk it out with everybody, but the reality is we can’t always do that. If people shoot us, we’re going to shoot back. That’s what happened with the Breonna Taylor case. Somehow people are upset about that.

And facts don’t matter. Even though the false Michael Brown “hands up don’t shoot” narrative was proven false, I still can’t drive around the city without someone eyeballing me and putting their hands up and saying “don’t shoot” while I drive past.

There's more that's both interesting and important at the link. The interview concludes with this:

How’s morale? Each agency has its own subculture, but this region’s morale is generally crappy. A lot of officers are leaving. We don’t have anybody, anybody applying to be officers here, so we are lowering standards to get numbers up.

The academy has lowered their physical fitness standards and we have dropped ours completely. Now if you’ve got a pulse and some experience? We will take you. Because that’s how bad we are hurting for bodies. Of course, the lowering of standards does not increase the odds that things are going to be done right. So it will perpetuate the problems.

But even before we had to lower standards, we were still struggling. The public thinks that we are ninjas, that we are all MMA fighters. For a while that belief was helpful because it instilled a bit of healthy fear, of not wanting to mess with us.

But the reality is that most police officers have a YMCA degree (not to knock on the YMCA) but it’s like they went to one little seminar on self-defense and that’s kind of it. The level of training we get is so subpar compared to the demands.

Not only that, but there are important and serious limitations on our interactions with suspects. As an officer, I have a responsibility, we as a police force have a responsibility, to limit the amount of force to get someone into custody. But if they are overcoming my efforts, I can escalate my use of force, within reason, to effectuate that arrest.

In our precinct, we pitch and brainstorm ways that we can get better training. Unfortunately, “defund the police” is a movement, so our funding has already been slashed. There’s no money for classes or overtime for us to go.

So they’re basically saying, “We wish you guys were ninjas,” and we’re saying “OK, send us to ninja school.” And they’re like, “No we’re not going to pay for that. We’re just gonna put you in jail when you don’t meet our expectations even though we won’t give you the training you need.”

What would you tell America about this moment in time and your job? I think that it’s important for people to know that we still have a heart to have people’s backs. There isn’t a cop I know who isn’t willing to lay their life on their line for someone else in a life-or-death situation. But what we’re not willing to do is put ourselves or our careers or our families on the line for people’s inconveniences.

I’m happy to do that as a luxury as long as we have community support. But if we don’t have your support, and you call us about your neighbor’s loud music? No. Go talk to the neighbor yourself. Or buy some ear plugs.

The left appears about to get it's wish that police presence be abolished in many neighborhoods which, of course, will make those neighborhoods unlivable. And they'll stay that way as long as our cities, states and nation are governed by a party whose ideas about human nature are completely unmoored from reality.

Actually, the police aren't the only vital public servants looking for a less stressful line of work. Teachers have been taking early retirement for years for some of the same reasons as police, and as our cities become less and less governable, as police presence becomes increasingly thin, our schools, at least our urban schools, will become increasingly chaotic and it'll become even harder to find good people willing to teach in them.

It's hard to understand why anyone today would want to be either a police officer or a teacher, or to even live in a city that makes both of those jobs impossible.

The Most Efficient Swimmer

If you had to guess which, of all the creatures on earth, was the most efficient swimmer, what would you guess?

The answer is perhaps surprising, and this beautiful seven and a half minute video explains how this animal does it:

Good Letter

A friend of mine named Mike has a blog called Thought Sifter for which he writes excellent, if infrequent, posts. His latest is a letter he wrote to an activist progressive group in response to a solicitation he received from them which, he says, was so bad that he couldn't help responding.

Because he makes a number of important points in the letter, I requested and received permission to reproduce his missive in full. Here it is:

Dear Sir,

I don't normally respond to group, solicitation emails, but the one I received from you for the Rural Utah Project on April 22 compelled me to write to you personally.

I work both in education and in the criminal justice system. I also have an interracial family and can say--sadly but confidently--that I have personally experienced the impact of genuine racism. I cite these points about myself because each of them has shaped my perspective on the issues you allude to in the email.

Along with many other people, I have been increasingly disturbed by the state of public discourse in our culture on the most significant moral and political concerns of our day. The age-old practice of argumentation--that is of thoughtfully explaining why one believes his or her view to be right and then carefully listening to a well reasoned critique--is essentially extinct in American culture.

The standard mode of communication when it comes to things like criminal justice, race relations, politics, and religion, is to bypass the thought process altogether with empty but emotionally charged catch phrases and buzzwords which are not used to clarify what is true but to galvanize the faithful and reinforce their allegiance to the cause.

This is a pervasive and deeply exasperating problem, and your email is one of the clearest examples of this that I've seen.

For example, you say, "This is how we can celebrate the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin and simultaneously call for the end of mass incarceration. It’s how we call this accountability but not justice."

"Celebrate" is an inappropriate word to apply to the George Floyd/Derek Chauvin case. We should appreciate that Chauvin was held accountable for his crime, but the fact that Chauvin was a murderous cop and the fact that George Floyd was a drug-addicted criminal are both tragedies, neither of which should be celebrated.

Also, your point that Chauvin's conviction is "accountability but not justice" shows that, as so often seems to be the case, there is no real end point to your cause; rather, the cause is an end in itself. The idea that a conviction on all charges is not considered an example of justice to many who identify as "progressive" shows that their main interest is in being progressive rather than progressing toward a particular goal.

You also "call for the end of mass incarceration." This is a nonsense statement. "Mass incarceration" means almost nothing. It is a good example of a content-free buzzword used in place of a thought.

I am generally familiar with the demographics of the incarcerated population. In the prison where I work, there is a large percentage of Latino inmates, many of whom are gang members and are in prison because they bludgeoned, stabbed, or shot someone, or were involved in trafficking large amounts of weapons or narcotics. And, as is the case with the "mass" number of people in prison, many were sentenced only after committing multiple offenses.

The prison also has a significant number of old white men, many of whom were incarcerated because they raped or sexually molested young girls.

With this in mind, I'm curious how a decrease in "mass incarceration" would work? In the pursuit of anti-racism, should there be a moratorium on sentencing Latino gang members for stabbing or shooting someone until their numbers in prison are below a "mass" level?

I'm assuming the large number of old white men in prison for child molestation isn't relevant to the problem of mass incarceration since they are already guilty of being white. But wouldn't it be considered "agism" if too many are kept in prison after a certain age?

Incarceration, mass or otherwise, is what happens to individuals of all races for committing serious (and usually multiple) crimes. The best way to combat mass incarceration is to get that mass of potential criminals to refrain from committing crimes.

If your response to this is, "You don't understand. It's different for minorities," then I would encourage you not to have such a low view of minorities. People who grow up in disadvantaged situations still have the dignity of making choices.

There are few ideas more degrading to another person than to imply that he or she is only a passive product of a cultural environment with no capacity to make independent decisions.

In light of these concerns, I implore you to please, please stop contributing to the epidemic of facile, partisan chest-beating. Please stop the emotional fly-over of the complex array of facts on the ground.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid his plea is likely to fall on deaf ears. People committed to promoting an agenda often lack a commitment to truth and accuracy. Their idea of a true statement is one which is helpful in promoting their agenda, and for such people objective facts are at best a nuisance.

Is the Moon There When No One's Looking at it?

Earlier this week I did a post featuring an interview with philosopher Bruce Gordon in which he explains the philosophical theory called idealism, and I'd like to continue with that interview today. In this segment Gordon talks about a couple of quantum mechanics' weird aspects.

Here's Gordon:

...in the quantum mechanical formulism, you can demonstrate that [a subatomic particle] has zero probability of existing in any bounded region of space, no matter how large. You can close various loopholes to make it kind of a rock solid result.

So what does that mean? It means that unobserved [particles] don’t exist anywhere in space, and thus have no existence apart from being observed. Interestingly enough, there have been experiments conducted that would support [this].

This means that subatomic particles do not actually exist apart from being observed by a mind. As idealist philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) put it, "To be is to be perceived."

Here’s another [example of quantum weirdness] that’s absolutely fascinating. It’s been dubbed the quantum Cheshire cat phenomenon. You may recall from the story of Alice in Wonderland that Alice observes this grinning Cheshire cat that then disappears, leaving only its grin. Alice remarks that she’s “Often seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat.”

Here's the Disney version:

Gordon continues:

In essence, that’s what’s going on [at the quantum level] because certain experiments — in particular, one using a neutron interferometer — have separated the properties of neutrons from any sort of substrate. So micro-physical properties don’t necessarily require a substrate.

What did the experiment do? Well, it sent the position of neutrons along one path and their spins along a separate path.

So that’d be kind of like sending a top along one path, and the fact that it was spinning along a separate path. Or the redness of an object along one path and the location of that object along another path. Micro-physical properties then can be separated from any idea of a substrate. They can be abstract properties moving through space.

So what do you get then? It would seem that under appropriate experimental conditions, quantum systems are decomposable into disembodied properties. A collection of Cheshire cat grins, if you will. So how is it that an abstract property could exist without any sort of substrate? Well, it can’t.

Unless, Gordon says, the property exists in a mental substrate, a mind, specifically, the mind of God.

There is no physical substrate, but the property has to inhere in something, so it’s inhering in the mind that perceives it. So in a way you could look at the properties, the quantum mechanical properties as kind of abstract particular properties, tropes even. But the tropes have to inhere in something. What they inhere in is a mental substance, not a physical one.

The interviewer, neuroscientist Michael Egnor, adds that,

What’s particularly fascinating as you point out, is how a deep look at the peculiarities, at the counterintuitive aspects of the quantum world, suggests that only an idealist metaphysics could make sense of all this. That materialist, or perhaps even dualist metaphysical perspectives fail at the quantum level. But the idealist perspective doesn’t.

The editor of the interview throws in this interesting tidbit:

Albert Einstein is reported to have asked his fellow physicist and friend Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, whether he realistically believed that "the moon does not exist if nobody is looking at it." To this Bohr replied that however hard he (Einstein) may try, he would not be able to prove that it does, thus giving the entire riddle the status of a kind of an infallible conjecture — one that cannot be either proved or disproved.

We can reasonably assume it exists, but we can never prove it without having a perception of some sort of it.

Berkeley's answer is that the moon does exist, even if we're not perceiving it, and that we can reasonably assume that it does, because it exists as an idea or perception in the mind of God. If God did not exist, however, we'd have no grounds for saying that the moon, or anything else, exists when no one was perceiving it.

The world, especially at the subatomic level, is a much stranger place than our common sense would have us believe.

Jumping to Conclusions

Another black kid has been shot and killed by a white cop and people who would merely yawn if the races were reversed or if the officer and the victim were of the same race are outraged.

A 16 year-old girl named Ma’Khia Bryant was seen in body cam footage about to plunge a knife into the body of another girl (both girls are black, not that it should matter).

The cop arrives on the scene and right in front of him a male is kicking a third girl laying on the ground while the cop shouts warnings to stop. They don't. A girl is about to be stabbed. The cop has a fraction of a second to act. He fires and kills her assailant.

Sadly, lots of people evidently felt it very important to make a judgment on the matter before getting any facts.

Former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett tweeted that "A Black teenage girl named Ma'Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice."

This is absurd. It wasn't a knife fight. It was a unilateral assault with a deadly weapon. The officer immediately decided to fire because if he hesitated the girl on the receiving end of the knife could well be dead. He shot multiple times because that's what they're trained to do.

Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki implied it was a case of "systemic racism": Psaki said, "She was a child... Our focus is on working to address systemic racism & implicit bias head on."

Psaki is suggesting that any case of a white cop shooting a black victim is ipso facto an instance of "systemic racism." It's an easy claim to make because although it's impossible to prove, it's also impossible to falsify. Her statement is vacuous, but no matter. Regardless of its truth it exacerbates racial divisions and thus has political utility for those who benefit from those divisions.

NBA basketball star Lebron James tweeted that the officer who shot Bryant will be the next to experience Derek Chauvin's fate. He subsequently took the tweet down, hopefully because he realized how foolish it was.

There were other expressions of anger and outrage over the shooting mentioned in the piece linked to at the beginning of the post and also here.

Here are a few questions for those who are so quick to pass judgment on events when they don't have any idea what they're talking about:

• What do these people suggest the officer should've done? The alternatives that some have suggested range from the impractical to just plain dumb.
• If the girl about to be stabbed had been the daughter of Jarrett, Psaki or James, and the police failed to do the only thing they could do to stop it, if their daughter was fatally knifed while an officer stood by and did nothing, would they have exonerated the officer and praised him for doing the right thing? Or would they be bitterly accusing the police of obvious racism because they let an innocent black girl be murdered?
• If Mr. James thinks that the officer who shot the knife-wielding young woman should be prosecuted, why hasn't he spoken out to protest the decision of the DOJ not to prosecute the police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt on January 6th? Unlike Bryant, Babbitt had no weapon and was not threatening anyone. Why doesn't James, and indeed the whole nation, especially our media, seem to care about her death? Is it because she was white?

I wonder if our media will interview the parents of the girl whose life that officer saved to get their take on the incident. Probably not, but what do you think their opinion of the officer's actions is right now?

There's a very distressing and dishonest double standard prevailing in our politics and in our media, the resentment it fosters is one of the reasons for the success of populists like Donald Trump, and it's just not going to end well if it persists.

The Religion of Identity Politics

In his book American Awakening Joshua Mitchell makes the point that today's Identity Politics (IP) is actually a distortion of Christianity, or perhaps more accurately, it's an anti-Christian religion. Here's why I say that (I borrow some of what follows from Mitchell):

As with Christianity, IP has a doctrine of original sin (racism), but unlike Christianity the original sin doesn't stain everyone. Some groups are innocent of this sin, and do not inherit the stain. Other groups, most notably in our time White, Heterosexual Males (WHM), are deeply infected. If these "Transgressors" are also Christian and/or conservative their guilt is compounded.

The stain is indelible. Nothing WHM can do can cleanse them of it. As in some Christian traditions, those who are infected with original sin are totally depraved and beyond human redemption. Their sin corrupts everything they touch.

As in Christianity the original sin is inherited so it makes no sense for the Transgressor to plead innocence, to insist that he's not racist. He's guilty by virtue of the fact of his race. Moreover, since there's no human redemption and since IP is thoroughly secular and has no room for a Divine redeemer, redemption is impossible.

Christianity, of course, provides a Divine redeemer, a scapegoat upon whose shoulders the sins of mankind are heaped, but there's no Divine scapegoat in IP. The sins of the WHM are borne on his own shoulders. He bears the guilt of all WHM past, present and future.

Derek Chauvin is perhaps an example. It wasn't just Chauvin who was on trial last week. Whether he as an individual deserved the jury's verdict or not, Chauvin was a scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb, deemed by the practitioners of IP to be responsible for all the transgressions, real and imagined, of all members of his race (and profession) everywhere. Whatever the facts of the case were, he was guilty in the same way and for much the same reason that O.J. Simpson was innocent.

As in some versions of Christianity there's also a repentance ritual in IP, and, as in Christianity, the ritual involves the penitent Transgressor publicly confessing his sin and often abasing himself in rhetorical sackcloth and ashes, emotionally flagellating himself and begging absolution for the shame and guilt of being a wretched sinner.

He himself may have done nothing to offend, but he's not innocent. He has inherited guilt and deserves whatever punishment the Innocents deem appropriate. If he's suitably obsequious, if he grovels before self-appointed representatives of the Innocents, he may be granted a temporary reprieve, but unlike Christianity, there is in this new religion no permanent forgiveness, no grace, no love, no redemption, no atonement, no reconciliation, no tradition and no God.

There are only hate, rage, judgmentalism, vengeance, professional "cancellation" and demands for a vague and undefined "justice."

Although Christianity doesn't celebrate the Jewish Passover ritual, it understands the significance of the observance. Like the Jews in Egypt who splashed blood on their doors so that the angel of death would pass by their household, guilt-ridden WHM often seek to avoid the IP "angel of death" by festooning their office doors, Facebook pages, lawns and/or cars with rainbow flags, BLM stickers and Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs.

When the IP enforcers see these attempts to certify one's innocence they may be inclined to (temporarily) give the individual a pass, not because they regard them as innocent but because they regard them as useful in reinforcing and spreading the assumption of guilt.

And just as the Catholic Church of the 15th century sold indulgences by which sinners could pay to have their sins, or the sins of loved ones, forgiven, so, too, does the ersatz religion of Identity Politics offer temporary absolution in return for transfer payments, reparations, and benefits coerced from CEOs and politicians. Those who willingly shower these benefits upon the representatives of the Innocents are seeking to buy forgiveness, a forgiveness that's at best transitory and never permanent.

Like the humanistic religions of August Comte in the 19th century and the communists of the 20th century, both of which loathed Christianity but nevertheless plagiarized their morality and many other features from the Church, IP is a religion without God, without salvation and without hope.

It's profoundly divisive and acts as a corrosive acid on our social fabric. Let's hope that it's a fad that soon passes.

How Physics Refutes Common Sense

Yesterday's post looked at some of philosopher Bruce Gordon's thoughts on the philosophical theory called idealism.

Idealism holds that the world is real, but it's subjectively real. Its reality is like that of pain. Pain is real, but it's completely in the mind of the one who's experiencing it. It's reality is subjective. If there were no creatures on earth whose nervous systems could create the sensation of pain, pain would not exist.

The common sense view, of course, is that most of the world is objectively real. It exists independently of whether or not anyone is experiencing it. The moon is there whether anyone sees it or not. This common sense view is called realism.

Realism is the view that there is a world outside our minds existing independently of our minds and perceptions, whereas idealism holds that the world is created by our minds by means of the observations we make. Idealism is a philosophical expression of the ideas popularized by the movie The Matrix.

Idealism strikes most of us as at best counter-intuitive. We're accustomed to think of matter as the fundamental reality (a view called materialism). Matter, we assume, is objectively real and exists whether we perceive it or not. On this view, whatever mind is it's somehow a creation or function of our material brains. Idealism turns this view on its head and declares that mind is actually the fundamental reality and that matter only exists as a subjective experience in our minds.

As I said, this view is counter-intuitive, but it's the view held by a lot of physicists who study the fundamental quantum structure of the world. This video gives a pretty clear idea of the thinking of many physicists, some of whom think that idealism is not only correct but that it leads to the conclusion that there is a God, or something very much like God.

The video's a bit long (17 minutes) and moves quickly. It also discusses some arcane physics at points along the way. Nevertheless, you don't have to understand the physics in order to follow the narrative. The science really only illustrates the basic idea which is that mind is fundamental and that matter is downstream, as it were, from mind.

Give it a click, kick back and savor how mysterious is the world in which we live and move and have our being:

A Philosopher Discusses Idealism

Bruce Gordon is one of the most brilliant and accomplished thinkers alive today. Among other things he's a historian and philosopher of science and was interviewed recently by another scientist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, on a number of topics, including philosophical idealism.

Gordon is one of a growing number of philosophers who find idealism a compelling hypothesis. The interview begins with Dr. Gordon explaining George Berkeley's (1685-1753) version of idealism:

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

Bruce Gordon: There are a lot of different varieties of idealism, and rather than go through a laundry list of its variations, let me just start with the kind of idealism that I would be an advocate of, which is an ontic theistic idealism, essentially a form of idealism that is probably most closely identified with the Anglican Bishop, George Berkeley.

George Berkeley 1727

Basically, it’s the idea that material substances, as substantial entities, do not exist and are not the cause of our perceptions. They do not mediate our experience of the world.

Rather, what constitutes what we would call the physical realm are ideas that exist solely in the mind of God, who, as an unlimited and uncreated immaterial being, is the ultimate cause of the sensations and ideas that we, as finite spiritual beings, experience intersubjectively and subjectively as the material universe....So we are, in effect, living our lives in the mind of God.

And he is a mediator of our experience and of our inner subjectivity, rather than some sort of neutral material realm that serves as a third thing between us and the mind of God, so to speak.

The discussion then turns for a bit to Plato's notion of idealism as expressed in his theory of Forms.

Plato believed that every particular thing that exists has an ideal essence or form that exists in some abstract realm of reality. Every chair, for example, is recognizable as a chair because it "participates" in the perfect abstract form of "chairness," every tree is recognizable as a tree because it "participates" in the perfect form of "treeness."

Likewise with everything, including humans.

Later Christian Platonists argued that these essences, or forms, or ideals existed not in some abstract realm but rather as ideas in the mind of God, and this, it seems, is Gordon's view as well.

Michael Egnor: There are, I believe, other kinds of idealism. For example, idealism by German philosophers. And how does that differ from Berkeleyan idealism?

Bruce Gordon: Well, .... [Immanuel] Kant (1724-1804) advocated a kind of epistemic, as opposed to ontic, idealism. Kantian idealism is entirely compatible with the existence of material substances, even though they are inaccessible as things in themselves.

So for Kantian idealism, you’ve got a self that .... precedes and grounds all of our experience. And our perception of reality, then, is governed by the innate structure of the human mind.

Immanuel Kant 1768 

What Gordon is saying here is that Kant believed that a material world existed but that everything we know about it is based on our sensory perceptions which produce ideas or sensations in the mind. Our mind is so structured as to create these ideas, but they may be nothing at all like the thing they represent.

In other words, what we know about the "thing in itself" is the sum of the ideas (or sensations) we have of it in our minds. We can't know it as it exists independently of our perceptions of it.

For example, our minds, upon seeing, smelling and tasting chocolate, generate the ideas of a certain color, fragrance and flavor, but these ideas are in our minds, they're not in the chocolate. The chocolate itself doesn't have color, it simply reflects certain wavelengths of light. Likewise, it doesn't have fragrance or flavor. It simply exudes chemicals which interact with our senses to produce the ideas of fragrance and flavor in our minds.

As Kant put it, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am."

Bruce Gordon: So we never experience reality in itself, which he called the noumenal world, but only reality as it appears to us, a ... phenomenal reality that is ordered by the innate structures of the human mind.

Kantian idealism and its descendants are, in many ways, an epistemic form of idealism, whereas the Berkeleyan form of idealism is ontic.

By this Gordon means that Kant's idealism had to do with what we can know about the world whereas Berkeley's idealism had to do with the ontology of the world - what was actually real and what reality was like. Gordon adds:

[Berkeley's Idealism is] a denial that there is material substance and [is instead] an embedding of reality in the mind of God, such that it is finite spiritual beings experiencing the reality brought into existence by this unlimited, uncreated, immaterial being.

Berkeley's idealism, then, was different from Kant's. Berkeley held that there was no material world at all. Everything we experience we experience as ideas in our minds, ideas which are presented to our minds by the mind of God.

As Berkeley himself says, “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind.” This may seem bizarre at first reading, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.”

It's interesting that in the last fifty years or so many physicists have embraced idealism. They're persuaded by developments in quantum mechanics that reveal that at the subatomic level many properties of the entities scientists study at that level don't exist until they're observed.

For instance, the 20th century scientist Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, once stated that,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

And Sir James Jeans, in his book The Mysterious Universe, wrote that, "The universe is beginning to look more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists, but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks, especially those who are heirs to the Calvinist tradition and its doctrine of predestination and who believe that everything that exists, and thus everything that happens, is in fact predestined by God.

Such a doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally an idea in the mind of God.