Can't Have Both (Pt. II)

Two days ago I wrote that naturalists, i.e. those who deny that the ultimate reality is a personal intelligent being, are in an intellectually untenable position. They want to maintain a belief in moral responsibility, objective moral duties, human equality, objective human rights, free will, consciousness, and so on even though their fundamental assumption, that material nature is all there is, reduces all of these to illusions.

Here are some quotes, all from philosophical naturalists, to illustrate the point:

• "Ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused...[yet] the world as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events."
• "The mechanistic stance allows us to understand what makes us tick and how we fit into the physical universe ...[but] when those discussions wind down for the day, we go back to talking about each other as free and dignified human beings."
• "A human being is simultaneously a machine and a sentient free agent, depending on the purposes of the discussion." Steven Pinker MIT in How the Mind Works.
• "The physical world provides no room for freedom of the will...[yet] that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. {So] We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false." Marvin Minsky MIT in The Society of Mind.
• "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom even though there's no ground for it." John Searle
• "We cannot live adequately with ...a complete awareness of the absence of free will ...[thus] we ought to hold on to those central but incoherent or contradictory beliefs in the free will case." Philosopher Paul Smilansky
• "Free will is a very persistent illusion. It keeps coming back." Harvard Psychologist Daniel Wegner
• "Consciousness has to be an illusion." Cambridge Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey
• "Common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist." Philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland
• "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." Philosopher John Gray

If free will and consciousness are illusions then there simply can be no objective moral duties or truth, thus no responsibility for anything we do no matter how cruel or harmful to others. There can be no human rights beyond what one powerful group of human beings arbitrarily confer upon another, nor can there be any grounds for trusting our sense perceptions or even our reason.

If truth is subjective, if beliefs aren't true in an objective sense, then the belief that naturalism is true is simply an expression of a subjective preference. It can't be objectively true.

Naturalists (i.e. atheists) have to live in two contradictory worlds. In their everyday lives with family and friends they live like everyone else, behaving as if the common sense view is obviously correct, but in their professional or intellectual lives they live as if human beings are machines with no free will, consciousness or dignity.

In other words, in their daily lives they live as if theism is true while in their intellectual lives they adamantly deny it.

They oscillate back and forth between these two irreconcilable worlds, unable to give up the common sense entailments of theism yet unable to live consistently with what the logic of naturalism, the philosophical worldview they embrace, tells them is the case.

It makes one wonder if perhaps naturalism is a mental illness.

Can't Have Both (Pt. I)

There's a fascinating struggle going on today for the hearts and minds of American youth, a struggle between two very different philosophical views of reality.

It's a struggle being waged primarily in our institutions of higher education and in our entertainment media.

Currently, the prevailing view in those institutions is naturalistic materialism - the idea that nature and matter are all there is and that there's no supernatural nor immaterial substance.

This view stands in diametric opposition to its rival, theism, which predominates, of course, among Christians, Jews and Muslims. In its broad outlines this view of the world (worldview) holds that human beings are the intentional product of a personal, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient Mind which both created, and thus transcends, space, time and mass/energy.

One of the criticisms that philosophical naturalists level at theists is that theism, they claim, is irrational - it's irrational to believe in the existence of entities that are undetectable by the human senses.

There's much that could be said in response to this particular criticism, but in this post I want to ask which of the two views is really most at odds with reason and which conforms best to our own personal experience of the world.

Here's the problem for the naturalist: In order to embrace it one must, if one is to be rational, either give up believing in a host of things that most naturalists don't want to give up believing in, or come up with some secondary or ad hoc explanation for them.

For instance, on naturalism there's no basis for believing in human equality, objective human rights, or human dignity. Nor is there any basis for believing in objective moral obligation, moral responsibility, free will, the existence of the self, human consciousness or the trustworthiness of our reason.

None of these can be accommodated by a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, except by forcing them, Procrustus-like, into it. Yet they all fit quite comfortably in theism.

Moreover, on naturalism one must hold that human beings are simply machines made of meat, that the universe came into being uncaused and out of nothing, that the fine-tuning of the parameters and constants of the universe which permit life are just a fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, that the origin of life is another fortuitous, though astronomically improbable, accident, and that the amazing ability of mathematics to describe the world and the ability of humans to not only comprehend it but to articulate it in language are even more fortuitous accidents.

Either one believes all that or one must believe, despite the lack of any evidence, that there's an infinity of different universes and/or that we're really living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix.

If one claims to be a naturalist (i.e. an atheist) and yet believes that there are some things that are wrong for anyone to do (like torture children), if they believe that people are responsible for their actions, that we all have a conscious mind, that our beliefs and sense experiences are not illusions, that our reason can be generally trusted and that the notion that we're living in a multiverse or a computer simulation is extremely far-fetched, then one is simply not thinking consistently with one's worldview, and is therefore being irrational and they're certainly not a very good naturalist.

Naturalists, to be consistent, must confront this choice: Either give up all (or most) of the beliefs enumerated above or give up naturalism. One simply can't hold on to both and be rational.

It's an interesting fact that when facing this choice many people would rather cling to naturalism than hold on to the belief in moral responsibility or in the existence of conscious minds. They know that abandoning naturalism means accepting the unpleasant fact that theism is true, and they'd apparently prefer to continue to live irrationally than accept that they've been wrong about God.

Why that is would make for an interesting psychological study.

Total Eclipse of the Sun

There's lots of talk about the upcoming solar eclipse next Monday. What doesn't seem to get much airtime is any discussion of how extraordinary a total eclipse of the sun is - not just its rarity but also the factors that have to be precisely fine-tuned for such a phenomenon to occur.

For instance, the apparent circumference of the moon's disc is exactly the same as that of the sun. This can only happen if the earth, moon and sun are almost exactly the distances they are from each other and almost precisely the sizes they are.

The following five and a half minute video was made during and after a 1995 solar eclipse and features astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher of science Jay Richards.

Richards points out that our location in the galaxy, the size of our earth, the nature of its atmosphere, the type, size and age of the star we orbit, the structure of the solar system we're located in, as well as a host of other factors, are not only optimal for observing solar eclipses from which we can glean an enormous amount of scientific information about our universe, but these factors are also optimal for the existence of intelligent life and scientific discovery.

If that's a coincidence it's certainly a remarkable one. The beauty of the eclipse inspires awe and wonder. So, too, should the amazing precision necessary to produce such a beautiful event.

Here's the video:

Engineering Genius

I've shown this video to some of my classes in the past because it's so well done. Drew Berry is an animator who creates computer generated animations of cellular processes. The processes he depicts here are occurring all the time in each of the trillions of cells in your body. As you watch it keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

And notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did they evolve in the first place?

Perhaps we'll eventually discover naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible naturalistic explanations sound to all but the irrevocably committed and the more it looks like the living cell has been intelligently engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

It's a Little Late for Regrets, Richard

British biologist and uber-atheist Richard Dawkins has reiterated a claim that he's made in the past which I find interesting. He asserts that he's a cultural Christian but that he disbelieves every doctrine of the Christian faith.

From an article at The Daily Caller:

"I do think that we are culturally a Christian country, and I call myself a cultural Christian,” Dawkins said. “I’m not a believer, but there’s a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. I love hymns and Christmas carols. I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.

“It’s true that statistically, the number of people who actually believe in Christianity is going down, and I’m happy with that,” he continued. “But I would not be happy if, for example, we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So, I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we substituted any alternative religion. That would be truly dreadful."

What Dawkins doesn't seem to realize is that we can't have all those wonderful fruits of the Christian worldview while simultaneously killing the tree that produces them. Destroy the tree, which Dawkins has spent much of his adult life trying to do, and the fruit eventually withers and dies on the branches.

Dawkins is also alarmed that Islam is growing in his native England with 6000 mosques currently active in Britain and more in the planning stages:

“If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time," he says. "It seems to me to be a fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not.”

Set aside the puzzling reference by an atheistic evolutionist to "fundamental decency" (What criteria does he base "decency" upon?). Having done his best over the last thirty years to create a religious vacuum in the English-speaking world, he's now dismayed that Islam is rushing in to fill the void he's helped create, but what did he expect?

There are really only four live religious options in the contemporary Western world:

1. State atheism, such as we see in communist North Korea, China, and the old Soviet Union with all the attendant horrors that those nations inflict on their people,
2. Islam, with its repressive treatment of women and its long-term goal of world conquest,
3. Paganism, a religious syncretism rooted in superstition and sensuality,
4. Christianity, with its heritage of beautiful art, music, hospitals, universities, science, human dignity and equal rights, and a morality based on compassion and justice rather than power.

Dawkins has devoted himself to eradicating #4, but to the extent he's had success, he's mostly succeeded in opening the door wide for the other three.

There's more on Dawkins' regrets at the link.

Beauty, Morality, and Reason

Biologist Ann Gauger, in an article at Evolution News, discusses three aspects of the world that C.S. Lewis thought eluded any naturalistic explanation or account.

The first of these is beauty. She writes:

Why should there be beauty? What is it for? We find joy in beholding something truly beautiful, a sense of awe even. And we never grow tired of that beauty, unless some spiritual sickness has entered and sapped us of all capacity for joy. Even more strange, it is a great pleasure to participate in the creation of something beautiful, something that moves other people, that brings joy to them.

Why should this be, that there is joy for the creator in the creative act and joy for the audience also?

Scientifically speaking, does beauty indicate design or un-design? The answer is this: there is no reason to expect random mutation and selection to produce beauty, and no particular reason for us to find certain things beautiful. Functional, yes. But the beauty we see does not necessarily correlate with safety or suitability for eating or mating. It has no particular survival value. Instead, beauty is a lovely surprise that points toward the transcendent Something that is the source of beauty.

The second aspect of the world that Lewis believed could not be adequately explained within a naturalistic framework is morality. Here's Gauger:

As [Lewis] observed, when people quarrel, they often appeal to moral standards: “You promised,” or “You shouldn’t treat people that way.” They appeal to these standards expecting to be understood.

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Or even our belief that there is such a thing as right or wrong?

There are certain acts that are universally acknowledged to be morally wrong, such as the killing of innocent human beings. Where does such objective certainty come from? If someone says, “Well, we evolved that view,” then there is no reason to suppose it has any basis in objective truth. Any moral view selected for its survival value loses any claim to objective truth. Should it not be just as moral, if not more so, to kill innocent humans if it benefits you, under that scenario?

On the other hand, if we concede that we didn’t evolve morality, a lot of people then default to the position that there is no objective basis for morality. We must define it for ourselves. Why, then, do most people still choose to adopt the moral precept that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings?

All this argues for the objective reality of moral values, and for our innate sense of them, sometimes called the natural law. And the existence of objective moral law points toward a designer who set this law into our hearts.

Lewis' third point is the existence of human reason. Gauger explains:

The fact that we reason at all, and that our reason corresponds with reality, is a remarkable thing. Have you never thought that it should be surprising that our minds are capable of probing the deep things of the universe, and that the universe is constructed in such a way as to be discoverable? That it should be founded on laws that we can grasp and that surprisingly find a match with our abstract mathematics?

Ape brains that evolved to hunt prey and run from lions should not be expected to do higher-order mathematics or particle physics. Yet our brains are fitted for the task, as deep as we need to go. Our brains and our abilities go so far beyond what survival requires that no evolutionary explanation could possibly account for the things we can do.

If evolution is all there is, then rationality hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Natural selection may favor the fastest or strongest or most fertile, but it doesn’t care about syllogisms or propositions or inferences. And if all we have is an evolved feeling that our minds are trustworthy, then our minds aren’t trustworthy.

She quotes Lewis:

All possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really “must” be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them — if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work — then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

Her argument is that "naturalism has cut itself off at the knees." She adds that,

Naturalism depends on the idea that science has discovered the truth about the world — what the world really is — namely, that it is nothing but matter and energy, particles in motion, and neurons firing, with consciousness an epiphenomenon and free will an illusion. But see — on what basis do they claim to know? Science is supposed to be a logical enterprise that interrogates the natural world and discovers its hidden reality using reason and logic, which naturalism cannot justify as being reliable.

Just so. We can add to what Gauger wrote the words of atheist philosopher John Gray who stated that,

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth.

And in his book On Miracles Lewis wrote this:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

It's a marvel that a worldview, naturalism, that's so intellectually thin would nevertheless be so attractive to so many intelligent people.

The Stolen Body

Saturday's post was a comedic look at the argument that the disciples conspired to steal Jesus' body from the tomb thus leaving the tomb empty on the first Easter morning.

Today's post, courtesy of Marc Tapscott, offers a more scholarly look at the significance of the empty tomb for the Resurrection of Jesus.

Tapscott asserts that the empty tomb of Jesus is the single most consequential fact in all of history. I'd quibble with him on a technicality. It wasn't the empty tomb per se which was the most significant fact but rather what the empty tomb signified, i.e. the resurrection of Jesus, but set that aside.

What of the possibility that the body was stolen from the tomb? Tapscott writes:

There are only three candidate groups who logically might have had a motive for stealing the body of Jesus. First, there are the disciples themselves. Critics have long claimed the disciples stole the body and then invented the Resurrection myth.

Here's why that claim is preposterous: the disciples scattered when Jesus was arrested. They were terrified that they would be next. Peter's thrice denial of even knowing Jesus is indicative of the group's cowardice.

Why is that significant? None of the disciples is known to have had any military training, yet we are to believe that this scattered crew of cowards somehow found the courage to overcome a crack unit of the Roman Legion that was guarding the tomb, or buy them off, then hide Jesus' body where it would never be found, and afterwards go out and tell everybody that Jesus was God?

The second candidate group would be Jesus' enemies, chiefly, the Pharisees and Sadducees who were the religious leaders of Israel. Throughout His three-year ministry, Jesus had tangled with these religious leaders who accused Him of blasphemy for claiming to be God-become-man. That's why they demanded that Pilate order Jesus crucified.

But let's say they did steal Jesus' dead body because they were quite aware that He had said He would "rise again." (Mark 9:31). Weeks after Jesus' crucifixion and burial Peter spoke to thousands of people on the Day of Pentecost, explicitly claiming Jesus was alive. Three thousand people became Jesus's followers that day and the Christian church was born.

But if they had stolen His body from the tomb, as soon as Peter began claiming the Resurrection, Jesus's enemies would have rolled his stinking, rotting corpse down Jerusalem's Main Street to prove He was dead, not alive.

Then they would likely have arrested Peter and any of the rest of the disciples they could lay their hands on and crucified them. Instead of the day it was born, Pentecost would have been the day the Christian church died.

And the third candidate group for stealing Jesus' dead body? Grave robbers had been around for centuries and robbing the tombs of famous people was not uncommon. After all, as with the Pharaohs, who loaded up their tombs with valuables for the next world, robbers could make one big hit and be set for life.

But here's the problem: Nobody ever accused Jesus of being rich, so they had no reason whatsoever to think His tomb would be stuffed with gold, silver and precious jewels. Remember: He was so poor, He had to be buried in somebody else's tomb!

That tomb was owned by Joseph of Arimathea, who, being a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, might well have been wealthy. So maybe the local robbers figured it was at least worth a shot?

But how likely was it that a band of grave robbers that would have been made up of only two or three men could have overcome the [soldiers] guarding Jesus's tomb?

One point I might add to Tapscott's argument: If thieves stole the body why would they take the time to unravel the grave cloths and remove the body from them, leaving the grave linens in the tomb? Wouldn't they have been in a great hurry to get out of there before the guards found them out?

Anyway, there's really only one reason for thinking that Jesus' body was stolen and that the Resurrection didn't really happen. That's the belief that miracles aren't possible, but we can only be sure that miracles aren't possible if we already believe that there's no God. If God exists then miracles surely are possible, and we should judge each report of a miracle on the basis of the historical evidence.

And the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus is about as strong as any evidence for any historical event could possibly be.

Tapscott has more about this evidence for the Resurrection at the link.

A Resurrection "Plot"

One of the explanations promoted over the years by skeptics to explain how Jesus' tomb came to be empty after His crucifixion and burial was that the disciples managed somehow to steal His body. In his book The DaVinci Code, author Dan Brown seems to support this theory, and many others have advocated it as well.

Given all of what history records about these events the idea seems implausible at the very best. For example, the "stolen body" theory doesn't explain how the disciples overcame their fear, formulated a plot to steal the body, managed to overwhelm an armed guard, and why they were never arrested for their crime.

Nor does it explain why they really believed Jesus had risen from the dead and were prepared to suffer and even die for that belief. It also fails to explain how such a plot could've been kept secret among so many conspirators.

The theory that Jesus' corpse was hidden somewhere by the thieves also fails to explain why so many people, in diverse circumstances, believed that they had seen Jesus alive after His death. For example, the fact that Paul, who was an enthusiastic persecutor of Jesus' followers, and James, the brother of Jesus, who was skeptical of his brother's sanity, both became committed followers of "The Way." The New Testament states that it was an appearance by Jesus that convinced them that He really had come back from the dead.

Anyway, the Babylon Bee has a little fun mocking the "stolen body" theory in the video below, and I wish all our readers a wonderful Resurrection Day tomorrow. Enjoy the video:

Thoughts on Miracles and Easter

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 a circularity. He seems to base 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 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 a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will 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 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 it's possible that there are 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. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, 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 it's not 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 the skeptic's 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 array of universes, a multiverse, as has been seized upon as a means of avoiding 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 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 of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly 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 Mind out there 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.

Most - The Bridge

Tomorrow Christians observe the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday. Given the importance of the day for Christians it might be helpful to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film titled Most-The Bridge.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on the first "Good Friday."

It might be well today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and who those passengers on the train were - and are.

John Updike on the Resurrection of Jesus

As Christians around the world prepare for Easter this coming Sunday I'm reminded of the American novelist John Updike (1932-2009). Updike 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 despite his flaws 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, literally, physically, and historically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. The miracle of the Resurrection is the guarantee that the Christian's faith in Christ is not misplaced. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

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.

What Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things.

Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face.

As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain. But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored.

It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain.

To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself.

The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face." But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face?

Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? The memory of where the key is stored must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are ordinarily necessary for memory.

And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised.

But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties, but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us.

Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of remembering in particular and the phenomenon of consciousness in general. That something else, many philosophers believe, is an immaterial mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of every aspect of the human species?

How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences?

It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Attrition

As a follow-up to last week's post that addressed the difficulty Russia is having replacing lost artillery, this post, gleaned from an article at Strategy Page, expands on additional Russian losses.

Since the invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, the Russians have suffered the loss of,

• 430,000 soldiers killed, captured, or missing.
• 6,790 tanks and 13,000 other armored vehicles. (The armored vehicle losses have been catastrophic. The Russian tanks and other armored vehicles being used now are mostly older models, including tanks produced in the 1950s and 1960s which were put into reserve in the 1970s.)
• 10,000 artillery systems.
• about a thousand MLRS (Multiple Launcher Rocket Systems), which are usually mounted on heavy trucks.
• 720 air defense systems which include systems that use missiles as well as mobile systems that use smaller missiles and 30mm autocannon.
• 347 jet fighters and ground attack aircraft lost along with 325 helicopters. (The jets are difficult to replace because they include a lot of imported electronics and other components from European companies which are no longer available due to sanctions for Russia’s attacks on Ukraine.)
• 14,000 trucks for moving supplies and, in tanker trucks, fuel.
• 24 warships sunk or disabled, including one submarine.

Additional details can be found at the Strategy Page article. This level of attrition has made Putin's gambit in Ukraine exceedingly costly, and experts are skeptical that Russia can keep it up indefinitely, especially if legislation allocating aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that's currently bottled up in the U.S. Congress is approved after the current two-week recess.

What Exactly Is Matter?

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe - including our bodies, our brains, our thoughts, our sensations - all of it is reducible in principle to material "stuff." There's no mental substance, no mind, just brains and the functions the brain performs. But if that's so, then what is the material stuff everything is made of? What, exactly, is matter?

Physicists, many of whom are materialists, tell us that matter is made up of particles which are themselves simply a "wave function," but then what's a wave function? What's it made of? No one seems to have an answer.

This video takes the viewer down to the smallest bits of matter, but when we ask what these smallest bits are comprised of the only reply from physicists is a shrug of the shoulders.

At some point matter just seems to dissolve into energy, forces, and fields which are themselves inscrutable. They can be measured, but if we ask what it is, precisely, that we're measuring we just get another shrug for an answer. The fundamental nature of matter is a riddle:

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor helps us understand the provenience of the idea that everything is made of matter. He writes:

The materialist conception of matter derives in part from Democritus and Lucretius (two ancient materialist philosophers), but I believe that the most cogent view of matter as held by modern materialists is that of Descartes.

Descartes defined matter as res extensa — literally, substance extended in space. Matter, in the Cartesian view, is characterized by extension — length, width, and depth, and by associated properties such as mass that accompany extension in space. In the Cartesian view, all subjective mental properties, such as qualia [our sensory experience of, for instance, pain or color] and intentionality [the fact that something like ink on paper can be about something, can have meaning], were defined away — excluded — from matter itself. How, then, could the mind exist if subjective properties had no basis in matter?

In order to explain subjective experience and the mind, Descartes posited the existence of a second substance, res cogitans, which entailed subjective mental experience and which was [not] composed [of] matter in human beings. This was Cartesian substance dualism. The body and the mind were separable substances, each existing in its own right. Furthermore, Descartes believed that only humans had minds. Animals were automatons, essentially mindless machines made of meat.

Modern materialists have discarded Descartes’ mental substance, and have tried to explain nature and consciousness via matter alone. Modern materialists are Descartes’ descendants: although they have discarded Cartesian dualism, they retain Cartesian materialism. To the modern materialist, what really exists is matter extended in space, tangible stuff, and all intangible stuff (like the mind) needs to be explained in terms of tangible matter. Hence the bizarre cornucopia of materialist theories of mind, such as philosophical behaviorism, identity theory, computer functionalism, and eliminative materialism.

Of course, none of this explains what matter actually is. If it's "extended substance" then what kind of substance? And how can such a nebulous entity explain human cognition, human values, or any of the products of human consciousness? Egnor puts the question this way:

How, from a materialist perspective, can we explain the laws of physics? How can we explain abstract things, like universals and mathematics, if all that exists is matter extended in space? How can the mind arise from matter — how can meat think? How can we square the materialist understanding of nature with quantum mechanics, which reveals very non-materialist properties of matter at its most fundamental level?

The nature of matter is a profound mystery and the belief that everything is made up of, and/or arises from, this mysterious substance is really nothing more than a prejudice that derives from a naturalistic worldview.

Naturalism holds that there are no supernatural entities. If there were supernatural entities they'd be immaterial, thus naturalism cannot allow something like an immaterial mind into its ontology because that would lead to the conclusion that humans, at least, have souls. And once souls are allowed to exist then the naturalist fears he will have stepped onto a slippery slope leading to an affirmation of the existence of God and other things supernatural.

In other words, naturalism is heavily reliant for support upon materialism. Without it naturalism loses much of its ability to persuade.

Nevertheless, there's no reason not to believe that the fundamental stuff of the universe isn't material at all but rather mental. Indeed, this is the direction in which modern physics has been moving since the early years of the twentieth century.

Perhaps, so far from mind arising from matter, our perception of matter actually is a product of mind.

Just as Copernicus sparked a revolution in science by getting us to look at the solar system from a different perspective - a heliocentric rather than a geocentric perspective - looking at the world from the perspective of mental substance rather than material substance could spark an analogous revolution not only in science but also in metaphysics.

Can Russia Continue to Fight Beyond This Year?

There's been some dreary news lately regarding the Ukrainians' war of self-defense against the morally abhorrent Russian invasion so I thought I'd share some good news. At least it's good news if you hope Ukraine repulses Vladimir Putin's military.

The analysis comes from Tom Holsinger, a military expert who writes for Strategy Page. Holsinger claims that Russia may well be unable to continue their war of aggression beyond the end of this year.

Holsinger writes:

Hard limits are appearing on Russia’s ability to continue the Ukraine war. It has begun running out of tube artillery (as opposed to rocket artillery) and light armored fighting vehicles (AFVs).

The artillery shortage is because tube artillery barrels are wearing out, while the light AFV shortage is because so many have been lost in combat.

Russia’s stocks of self-propelled tube artillery pieces were eliminated by combat losses in the Ukraine, worn-out barrels or exploded from firing with worn-out barrels, and were replaced by towed artillery from its reserve stocks.

Now the Russians have lost, worn out or almost worn out everything but their oldest reserve tube artillery, 50+ year-old 122mm towed guns of which they allegedly had about 4,000 in 2021.

These are Russia’s last artillery reserve, are being put into service now and, when those are worn out this year, Russia’s tube artillery park will be reduced to their current production of about 200 yearly tube artillery pieces. At that point Russia can no longer continue the war unless their 2024 production increases to at least 2000 a year.

Russia cannot sustain the fight without artillary. If they can't replace their losses they'll simply have to retreat.

Holsinger goes on to explain why these artillery barrels wear out and why it'll be so hard for Russia to replace them. He also discusses the significance of the loss of armored fighting vehicles.

It's an interesting article and it allows for a glimmer of optimism that if Ukraine can hold out for the next nine months, and if the West supplies the Ukrainians with weaponry, ammunition and other necessities, Russia will be in a militarily untenable position.

For Millenials and Gen Zers

In a column in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Mary Eberstadt claims that Millennials and Generation Zers have been robbed. They've been bamboozled by our progressive elites into believing that their country is "an irredeemable cesspool of racism and bigotry."

Consequently, only a third of Millenials and Gen Zers will acknowledge that they're "extremely proud" of their country. She invites these Americans to ask themselves why.

Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our families. Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our neighborhoods. Think about that the next time someone trash-talks your national home and neighborhood, your country.

One such figure, impresario of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” says she has never regarded herself as “particularly patriotic.”

Another, whose sulfurous racialism permeates elite education, says that he has never felt free in the U.S., even as his every grievance is celebrated and subsidized. If they have such a low opinion of America, what makes you think they care about Americans—including you?

This is particularly ironic given that the United States is by almost any measure not only the greatest country in the history of civilization, but it's the greatest country in history in which to be a minority. There's never been any other place in the world where minorities have more opportunity to flourish than they do here.

It's why tens of thousands of Central Americans, Haitians and others from around the globe risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.

Eberstadt continues, arguing that today's younger Americans have also been robbed of two great sources of immaterial wealth, "the consolations and joys of family life" and the rich benefits that accompany religious belief:

Generations of thinkers have disparaged the family as the enemy of utopian schemes. In their depictions, home and hearth amount to a slaughterhouse of dreams and aspirations, especially for women.

To the contrary: Unprecedented rates of abortion, fatherlessness and divorce, far from liberating you, have subtracted actual and potential loved ones from your lives. No wonder surveys show that young people are the loneliest Americans....

...[Moreover, religious belief has inspired] the greatest art and science, architecture and music and human creation at large that our species has ever devised. Permanent membership in “none of the above” secularism risks relinquishing your own cultural inheritance: Western civilization.

"This brings us," she declares, "to the political choice before you. Today’s neo-Marxism and identity politics seek to co-opt your youthful energies into a lifetime of performative rancor. Is that what you want?"

Good question. To be permanently angry, to be permanently focused on racial, sexual or LGBTQ identity is to dissipate one's human potential by expending it on relative trifles. It's to spend one's life judging books by their dust jackets.

Eberstadt concludes with this:

Young people are designed by nature to love and to be loved with energy and magnanimity.

Today’s misanthropes tell you the opposite: that humanity is a toxin on the planet, unworthy of reproduction. This counsel couldn’t be more wrong—especially for you. If loneliness is the problem, putting more people in your lives with marriage and children is the self-evident solution.

The left tells you that your fellow citizens are racists, fascists, sexists, bigots and haters. This relentless negativity obliterates youthful hopes. It shrivels the youthful imagination. Worst of all, it shrinks your hearts.

When young people have it constantly drilled into them that their fellow Americans are in fact odious individuals it makes despising them seem appropriate. So far from treating them with dignity, respect and kindness it becomes much easier to treat them with self-righteous contempt and hatred. Sadly, though, people who choose to live this way will find that Eberstadt is right.

A life spent judging others on the basis of what one perceives to be their politically incorrect sins, a life lived in a semi-permanent state of anger, bitterness, hostility, and contempt, is a life in which happiness will prove very elusive.

Lift Weights and Run

Want to live longer? Lift weights. At least that's the gravamen of this article. According to a research team at Indiana University there's a link between strength, muscle mass, and mortality, although mass isn't as important as strength.

The team assessed 4,440 adults ages 50 or up who had their strength and muscle mass assessed between 1999 and 2002. The researchers checked back in 2011 to see who had died.

The results, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, found that those with low muscle strength were more than twice as likely to have died during the follow-up period than those with normal muscle strength. In contrast, having low muscle mass didn’t seem to matter as much.

This may seem counterintuitive but it's common for individuals to have good strength levels without having bulging muscles. You can get details of the study at the link, but even though strength is more important than mass....

That doesn’t mean you can afford to let your muscle melt away as you age; having a good reserve of muscle mass may be important, for example, if you end up having to spend time in the hospital at some point. But it’s good news for those of us who struggle to put on muscle but persist in slogging through a reasonable number of pull-ups and other strength exercises.

A second study reinforced the idea that we should get at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week, but also suggested that the weekly workouts should include some sort of strength-building exercise at least twice. The benefits not only improve the quality of one's life but also extend it.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Researchers in Australia analyzed data from 80,000 adults in England and Scotland who completed surveys about their physical activity patterns starting in the 1990s. The headline result was that those who reported doing any strength training were 23 percent less likely to die during the study period and 31 percent less likely to die of cancer.

Meeting the guidelines by strength training twice a week offered a little extra benefit.

One interesting detail: Strength training in a gym and doing bodyweight exercises seemed to confer roughly equivalent benefits. So you don’t necessarily need to heave around large quantities of iron.

In this particular cohort .... the best outcomes of all—a 29 percent reduction in mortality risk during the study—accrued to those who met both the aerobic and strength-training guidelines.

These studies should be of interest to anyone who works in the health and/or fitness industries or who works with older people. Get in the gym and get with a personal trainer who will push you to develop more strength and get more aerobic exercise.

How They've Changed

To get an idea of how much the Democratic party has changed in just two decades watch this two-minute excerpt from then President Clinton's 1995 State of the Union speech. The party has changed radically, not only on immigration which is unchecked under the Biden administration, but also on abortion, same-sex marriage, and freedom of speech.

Compare what President Clinton said with our current open border with Mexico:

The Queen of the Problems

An article by Jonathan McLatchie at Evolution News describes sexual reproduction as "The Queen of the Problems" for evolutionary accounts of biological origins. McLatchie writes:

The origin of sexually reproducing organisms from asexually reproducing ancestors is a profound mystery which has baffled many an evolutionary biologist. The origin and subsequent maintenance of sex and recombination is a phenomenon not easily explained by Darwinian evolution. Indeed, there are several substantive, well-known reasons why the origin of sex presents a serious problem for conventional evolutionary explanations.

There are several reasons why the origin of sex presents a problem. For starters, there is the waste of resources in producing males. Assuming a sexually-reproducing female gives birth to an equal number of male and female offspring, only half of the progeny will be able to go on to have more offspring (in contrast to the asexually reproducing species, all the offspring of which can subsequently reproduce).

Thus, it is to be expected that the asexual female will proliferate, on average, at twice the rate of the sexual species. Given the disadvantage thereby confronting the sexually-reproducing species, one would expect them to be quickly outcompeted by the asexual species.

Moreover, it must be borne in mind that, in contrast to the asexual species, the females of the sexually-reproducing species perpetuate only half of their successful genotype. To transition, therefore, from a state of asexuality to sexual reproduction is, in effect, to gamble with 50% of one’s successful genotype.

Given that the whole purpose of natural selection is the preservation of those organisms which pass on their successful genes, this strikes at the heart of evolutionary rationale.

Since evolution is theorized to proceed as genetic mutations occuring over vast stretches of time confer some sort of advantage on a population of organisms, it's a mystery as to how sexual reproduction would've ever arisen from asexually reproducing organisms. But the problems extend even deeper than this.

There is, of course, the additional conundrum related to the fact that gametes (i.e. sex cells) undergo a fundamentally different type of cell division (i.e. meiosis rather than mitosis). Meiosis entails the copying of only half of the chromosomal material. In similar fashion to mitosis (which occurs in somatic cells), each chromosome is duplicated to yield two chromatids.

In contrast to mitosis, however, the homologous chromosomes are also associated. So, at the start of meiosis, each visible ‘chromosome’ possesses four chromatids. At the first division, these homologous chromosomes are separated such that each daughter nucleus has exactly half the chromosome number.

At this stage, each is present as two copies (chromatids). These chromatids are hence separated at the second division such that each new nucleus only has a single copy.

In order for sexual reproduction to work, it is essential that the process of meiosis evolve to halve the chromosome number. And this ability must also only occur in the gametes and not in the somatic cells. This difficulty is accentuated by the multitude of novel elements which are found in meiosis, rendering it unlikely to be explicable in terms of single mutational steps.

For those who'd like a refresher of their high school biology on cell reproduction here's a relatively brief video on the difference between meiosis and mitosis. And then there is the added problem of male and female complementarity. Many physical and physiological structures as well as many chemical reactions that enable the whole process to work must develop in male and female virtually simultaneously, even though these structures and reactions are completely different in the two sexes.

One example is sperm capacitation. Chemicals in the head of the sperm have to be modified while on the way through the female reproductive tract in order to prepare the sperm for penetration of the ovum.

There are numerous such chemical reactions that occur in the process of sexual reproduction that occur in no other bodily process and which must have all evolved almost simultaneously and in both males and females for sexual reproduction to work.

This video illustrates just a few of them:

One wonders whether Darwin, if he had been aware of all the problems that sexual reproduction entails, would have ever gone ahead with his theory of natural selection as the engine of evolution.

What Do the Democrats Want from Israel?

Democrat leaders from President Joe Biden to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have been strongly critical recently of Israel's conduct of the war against Hamas.

Mr. Biden has warned Israel not to do what has to be done to eliminate Hamas in their last stronghold in Rafah and Chuck Schumer has called for the Israelis to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Their indictment of the Israelis has to do with what they see as unjustifiable casualty levels among Palestinian civilians. According to Gazan authorities some 30,000 Palestinians have been killed so far by IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) operations, mostly bombings.

There are a number of things wrong with the criticisms leveled by Messrs. Biden and Schumer, however:

• The Gaza Health Ministry which released these casualty figures is controlled by Hamas, the same organization that launched the murders of over 1200 Israeli civilians on October 7th. It'd be foolish to believe them.
• The 30,000 dead figure does not distinguish between non-combatants and Hamas militants. As many as 20,000 of the dead could be Hamas fighters.
• We're told that many of the 30,000 are children, but anyone under 18 is counted as a child. Many of the Hamas fighters are teenagers between 15 and 18 years of age and would be considered to be child casualties.
• Many civilians either participated in or abetted the atrocities of October 7th or cheered for them, they overwhelmingly voted for the people who carried them out. It's ironic that the critics of Israel are often believers in the notion of the collective guilt of whites when it comes to the history of racism in this country, but draw a sharp distinction between the "innocent" Palestinians who live in Gaza and the terrorists of Hamas whom they've elected to govern them.
• The ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths in Gaza is historically low for any urban combat. The U.N. calculates that the ratio in modern warfare is 9:1 - nine civilians killed for every soldier who's slain. The ratio in Gaza is 1.5:1.
• For perspective, during World War II 100,000 civilians were killed in the battle for Manila and nearly 20,000 French citizens were killed by allied bombs in the run-up to the Normandy invasion.
• Usually absent from the criticisms of Israel is any suggestion as to what the Israelis should do differently from what they actually are doing. The complaints are often very general laments that Israel is just killing too many people, but we're never told what the magic number of acceptable deaths is nor how the IDF is to avoid killing civilians when Hamas uses them as shields to hide among and uses schools hospitals and residences from which to launch their attacks. Unless people can offer constructive recommendations as to how the Israelis should go about destroying Hamas it'd be best if they'd simply not say anything.
• Nor is there much, if any, pressure put on Hamas to end the killing by surrendering and releasing all Israeli hostages. Much of the world community, however, is demanding that Israel stop fighting. This makes no sense. Why are there so few calls for Hamas to surrender both themselves and the hostages? It is Hamas, after all, who started this war on October 7th when they barbarously slaughtered over 1200 Israeli civilians.

It's neither wise nor charitable to speculate on people's motives but, nevertheless, that so many are placing the onus on the Israelis to impose a cease-fire rather than demanding that Hamas surrender, leads one to wonder whether these folks don't really want Hamas to surrender and don't really want to see the terrorists defeated.