Belief Doesn't Always Require Evidence (Pt. I)

It's not uncommon to hear religious believers criticized for holding beliefs they can't empirically demonstrate to be true, or at least probably true. The critic assumes that if no scientific evidence can be adduced in support of the belief then it's mere superstition.

This was in fact a popular view among skeptical philosophers from about 1870 to about 1980, and is still trotted out and dusted off every so often today. It's a view called evidentialism, and philosopher Alvin Plantinga has a great deal of fun dismantling it in his book titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Indeed, since Plantinga's book came out philosophers are much more shy about using this argument against religious believers, but others unfamiliar with the philosophical literature are not so reticent.

Plantinga asks,inter alia, why our beliefs should be considered guilty until proven innocent. Why should beliefs not be counted innocent until proven guilty?

He wonders, too, why a person of sound mind, convinced in her heart that God exists, and who has never been confronted with an antitheistic argument that she found compelling, should be required nevertheless to suspend her belief until she has acquired overwhelming evidence that her belief is true.

Suppose, for instance, that you were accused of a crime. There's substantial evidence against you and little that you can offer to offset it. Even so, you're convinced you're innocent. You know you're innocent. You can't explain the contrary evidence, but it doesn't matter. You just know you didn't commit the crime. Should you, despite this assurance, acknowledge anyway that you're guilty because you can't present an argument to explain why you're certain of your innocence?

Many people believe in God on the basis of a totally subjective experience that they can't document or prove but which leaves them with an assurance that they could not deny even were they so inclined. The experience of former atheist Kirstin Powers, a liberal journalist, provides us with a good example. She writes:

Then one night in 2006, on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, "Here I am." It felt so real. I didn't know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn't shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

You can read her full account of her experience at the link.

There's a scene in the movie Contact, which was based on a book by atheistic astronomer Carl Sagan, in which the character played by Jodie Foster, a scientist named Ellie Arroway, is part of an experiment in which she's transported to the center of the galaxy. However, upon her return she's unable to offer any evidence that she actually left earth.

None of the data collected by her colleagues from her transporter confirm that the experiment worked. Yet she's convinced that she actually experienced all that she claims to have experienced.

Is she justified in holding that belief? If her belief is the product of properly functioning cognitive faculties belonging to an accomplished scientist not given to imaginative flights of hysteria, is what she says in the following exchange with an interrogator discredited by her inability to present empirical evidence?

Michael Kritz: "Wait a minute, let me get this straight. You admit that you have absolutely no physical evidence to back up your story."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that you very well may have hallucinated this whole thing."
Ellie Arroway: "Yes."
Michael Kitz: "You admit that if you were in our position, you would respond with exactly the same degree of incredulity and skepticism!"
Ellie Arroway: "Yes!"
Michael Kitz: [standing, angrily] "Then why don't you simply withdraw your testimony, and concede that this "journey to the center of the galaxy," in fact, never took place!"
Ellie Arroway: "Because I can't. I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone! I wish... I... could share that... I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish."

Ellie Arroway, in Sagan's telling of the tale, had what amounts to a religious experience. Sagan clearly wants us to believe that her experience was veridical and that she's warranted in believing her experience was veridical despite the lack of proof, or even of any objective evidence.

But if that's so, why are Christians faulted, by folks just like Sagan, for believing in God on the basis of a subjective assurance similar to that possessed by Arroway?

Indeed, far more people have had an experience like Kirstin Powers had than have had an experience like Ellie Arroway. If Arroway is justified in believing that she actually encountered a different world why would people like Powers not be similarly justified?

Just as it would be foolish to expect Ellie Arroway or Kirsten Powers to discount their experiences because they can't empirically prove that they had them, so, too, it's foolish of skeptics to think that the only warrant for belief in God is the ability to provide objective, physical evidence that the belief is true.

More tomorrow.

The End of the Biden Administration

It'll come as no surprise to readers of Viewpoint that I'm not sorry to see Joe Biden and his administration leave Washington. What kind of president Donald Trump will be, I can't predict, but he can hardly do worse than Mr. Biden.

Mr. Biden's administration was deeply disappointing, although no one who's been paying attention over the course of the last sixteen years should've been surprised at this. Mr. Biden has demonstrated himself throughout that time to be a venal, unprincipled man whose chief concern was himself and his family.

Mr. Biden has corrupted the executive offices he's held, allowing his family to peddle influence abroad to enrich themselves and then awarding them "pre-emptive" pardons on his way out the door to protect the family from accountability.

Moreover, his administration's attempt, at Mr. Biden's behest, to destroy Donald Trump through criminal indictments that would never have been brought against anyone else has besmirched trust in American legal institutions. Not only has this "lawfare" been brought to bear against Trump but also against many of his associates and some ordinary people who on January 6th were guilty of nothing more serious than trespassing on federal property.

He campaigned on bringing us together, on being a unifier, but he repeatedly disparaged ordinary citizens who disagreed with him, implying that they were "fascists" and at one point explicitly calling them "garbage."

The outgoing president was not only personally corrupt, he was lawless in other ways as well. He refused to obey the law requiring him to control the border, he refused to heed the judgment of the Supreme Court which ruled that his plan to pay off student loans was unconstitutional, and he absurdly announced last week that he was declaring the ERA to be constitutional and the law of the land.

His Attorney General's use of the FBI to harass ordinary citizens at school board meetings, branding those concerned parents as terrorists for expressing angry opinions at those meetings, was a disgrace, as was the DOJ's harassment of pro-lifers, and the pressure the Biden administration applied on social and other media to restrict the circulation of opinions at odds with the administration's narratives.

Mr. Biden and his aides lied to us repeatedly about matters great and small. Among the former were Mr. Biden's insistence that he would never pardon his son, that he never talked to his son about his business dealings, that Donald Trump called Neo-nazis "good people" after Charlottesville, and that Mr. Biden himself was cognitively sound. Anyone who offered a contrary opinion, as did special prosecutor Robert Hur, was smeared in the media.

The Biden administration coddled the progressive left and their most absurd ideological conceits such as DEI in general and the trans ideology in particular. The administration and the party have been congenial to some of the most vicious antisemitism we've seen in this country since the 1930s, and they also did enormous damage to our economy by trying to impose their green energy agenda on businesses and consumers and by restricting our ability to drill for fossil fuels.

Ironically, the Biden administration's commitment to green energy, particularly offshore wind energy, is endangering the Right whale and has caused the deaths of countless migratory birds.

Reckless infusions of trillions of dollars into the economy drove inflation up over 20% during the Biden presidency and caused mortgage rates to jump from 2.8% to over 7% which has erected a huge impediment to young first-time home buyers.

Mr. Biden's disastrous Afghanistan pullout and his ridiculous talk about how a minor incursion by Russia into Ukraine wouldn't be so bad encouraged Vladimir Putin to launch a massive invasion in 2022. Biden's reluctance to give needed military supplies to both Ukraine and Israel has prolonged both of those conflicts, needlessly increasing the death toll. He released billions of dollars to Iran when that terrorist state was all but moribund from the Trump sanctions. The infusion of cash allowed the Iranians to get back on their feet, finance more bloodshed in the Middle East, and accelerate toward their goal of achieving a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, at home, our own military preparedness and recruitment have been allowed to wane.

Finally, it's doubtful that Mr. Biden, who spent 40% of his time in office on vacation, was even the person running his administration. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has said that when he asked the president why he signed an executive order freezing the exports of natural gas crucial to Europe Mr. Biden was unaware that he had in fact actually done so.

I can't think of any positive accomplishment for which President Biden will be remembered, and he may well be regarded by future historians as perhaps the worst president of the modern era. It's hard to feel regret - at least it is for me - that he and his associates are no longer in charge.

A Thought for MLK Day

One of the differences between Martin Luther King's approach to the race problem and that of many of those who celebrate him today is that many of our contemporaries see racial guilt as a collective stain whereas King saw it as individual and color-blind. To paraphrase the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the guilt for crimes of the past runs not through races nor through nationalities but through every individual human heart.

The collective view that whites, for example, share moral responsibility for what other whites did to blacks in the past, is implicit in demands for reparations and other racial preferences, but it's nonsensical.

Suppose you are of English descent and you read about how some Englishman two hundred years ago committed an atrocity against a Frenchman, would you feel that you personally owed contemporary French some sort of apology?

Suppose you are a male and you read about the horrific 2022 murder of four Idaho college students by Bryan Kohberger, another male. Would you feel that you are somehow responsible because you shared the same gender as Mr. Kohberger?

Would you feel some shared responsibility if your name was also Bryan? What if your surname just by happenstance was Kohberger? How much guilt would you bear for the Idaho murders?

If you think you would indeed be in some sense responsible, why do you? And if you think it absurd to claim that you are in any way responsible, that one's nationality or gender or surname do not make someone guilty for crimes committed by others who have those things in common with you, why is your race uniquely different?

Specifically, why are whites collectively expected to repent for what other whites did to blacks two hundred years ago?

Does a black man in Philadelphia share guilt when a black man in Los Angeles murders a white man? If a black man's great, great grandfather murdered a white man's great, great grandfather, does the contemporary black man bear guilt for the crime?

If your brother commits a crime and is sent to prison would justice be served by imprisoning you as well, merely because you're related, if you had no part in the crime?

Interestingly, the notion of collective guilt, a favored trope of the left, only applies when it works against whites. The left is today insisting that Israel has been cruelly punishing the Palestinian people in Gaza for what other Palestinians did on October 7th. But if collective guilt is a legitimate concept, why shouldn't all Palestinians pay for the atrocities of Hamas?

In fact, campus left-wingers at some of our major universities hold American Jews reponsible for what Israeli Jews are doing in the Middle East, yet these leftists claim it's a war crime to punish the Palestinians for what the savages that the Palestinians elected, supported, and cheered for, did to Jews on October 7th.

The concept of collective guilt is absurd. Guilt and merit are individual, not collective. No one today is guilty for what people of their same race did to others a century or more ago or are doing today. They're only guilty to the extent that they themselves participate in harming others or explicity or implicitly condone harming others.

We'd have a much healthier, cohesive society if everyone honored Martin Luther King by following his example and acknowledged that simple fact.

Living With the Incoherence

Readers of Viewpoint are doubtless well-aware that I think the question of how we ground our moral beliefs is of paramount importance.

They're doubtless aware, too, that we live in an era in which some secular folk are extremely judgmental of the behavior of others, to the extent that they're willing to destroy the careers of those who deviate from what the censorious deem morally acceptable opinions or behavior.

One of the ironies of this is that the most judgmental people in our society are often secularists or non-theists yet these are the very folks who should be the most non-judgmental of all.

I say this not because I think that non-theists (or naturalists) are more noble than others but because a naturalistic worldview, which naturalists presumably embrace, offers them no basis for making any judgment at all about the moral rightness or wrongness of other people's behavior.

Here's why:

Humanity, generally speaking, shares a basic moral understanding (i.e. that loyalty is good, betrayal is bad; kindness is good, cruelty is bad; honesty is good, dishonesty is bad, etc.). This understanding seems to be inherent in human beings as though it were somehow inscribed on our DNA.

Granting that this is so, how do we explain the existence of this basic moral understanding?

There are, it seems, two possibilities. Either we've acquired this understanding through an impersonal, unguided, naturalistic process like Darwinian evolution, or we've acquired it through the intentional act of a creator (i.e. God).

There's no plausible third option. It seems that naturalism and theism exhaust all the possibilities.

Suppose then, that the answer is that we've evolved this moral understanding naturalistically. If so, then what makes acting against this understanding "wrong"? How can blind, purposeless, impersonal processes like gene mutation, the accidents of genetic drift, and natural selection impose an obligation on us today to live according to a moral understanding that evolved to suit us for life in the stone age?

Moreover, if evolution is the source of our moral sentiments then it's also the source of our propensity for selfishness, violence, and tribal hatreds. That being so, if a propensity for kindness and a propensity for cruelty have both evolved in human beings, why should we assume that it's right to be kind and wrong to be cruel?

If we insist on making that assumption then we must be comparing kindness and cruelty to some higher standard that transcends our evolutionary history, but naturalism admits of no such higher standard.

On the other hand, if that moral understanding - call it conscience - is instilled in us by a perfectly good, all-knowing creator of the universe who both loves us and has the authority to insist that we act in accord with that moral understanding, and if that creator also possesses the power to hold us accountable for how we live, then we have a good reason for thinking that we have an objective duty to live according to what our conscience tells us is good and right.

On naturalism we can certainly intuit that we should be kind rather than cruel, selfless rather than selfish, but we have no obligation to follow those intuitions. Human nature being what it is we're often pulled and tugged in a direction opposite to what we think we should go, and in a naturalistic universe there's no compelling reason why we should resist those tugs. It's not morally wrong to yield to them.

In sum, if naturalism is true then ethics is just a bunch of socially fashionable and arbitrary conventions which have no real moral binding force.

If theism is true, though, there can be genuine moral right and wrong and genuinely objective moral obligations.

Anyone who believes that we have a moral obligation to do justice and to show compassion to the poor and oppressed should, if they're consistent, be a theist.

If they're a non-theist and nevertheless maintain that there are objective moral obligations they're irrationally importing those beliefs from an alien worldview (theism). Their own worldview offers no basis for them.

It's one of the more remarkable features of our times that so many secular people who pride themselves on their intellectual perspicacity either don't see this or don't mind living with the incoherence.

Are We Alone in the Cosmos?

In an interesting piece at Evolution News physicist Jonathan Witt asks whether there other thinking, speaking creatures living on faraway planets? What are the chances? Just focusing on the odds of intelligent life forms existing on planets in our galaxy the improbabilities are daunting.

There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy and possibly several trillion planets so it might seem likely that intelligent life has arisen on at least one of them, but there's much more to be considered than just the number of stars and planets.

As scientists' knowledge of the factors necessary for a planet to produce intelligent life grew it became apparent that it could very well be that our earth is the only planet in the entire galaxy, and maybe in the entire universe with its up to two trillion galaxies, that satisfies the conditions necessary for life.

Witt points us to a book written by astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards titled The Privileged Planet, in which the authors compile a list of factors necessary for a planet to be habitable. Here's the list with some explanation that I added in parentheses:

• Orbits an early G dwarf type star (These are stars that are very close to the sun’s mass, temperature, brightness, and spectral type. Most stars are either much more massive or much less massive than G dwarf type stars) that is at least a few billion years old.
• Orbits a star in the galactic habitable zone (The habitable zone is a region not too close to the galactic center and not too distant from it).
• Orbits a star near the co-rotation circle (This is the circular band around a spiral galaxy’s center where the stars move at about the same speed as the spiral arms) and with a low eccentricity galactic orbit (This is an orbit that's almost circular).
• Orbits a star outside the spiral arms (A planet within a spiral arm would be constantly bombarded with space debris).
• Is a terrestrial planet the right distance from the host star to have liquid water on the planet’s surface (a distance known as the circumstellar habitable zone).
• Is near enough the inner edge of the circumstellar habitable zone to allow high oxygen and low carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
• Orbits a star with no more than a few giant planets comparable in mass to Jupiter and that are in large, nearly circular orbits (so that the gas giants do not mess up the earth-like planet’s orbit).
• Has a low eccentricity orbit outside of regions around a star that would destabilize a planet’s rotation axis and orbit due to the gravity of giant planets.
• Is in the right mass range (A planet that's too massive would retain toxic gases in it's atmosphere due to it's strong gravity. If it were not massive enough, its graavity would be too weak to hold oxygen and nitrogen which are necessary for life).
• Has the right concentration of sulfur in its core.
• Has a large moon and the right planetary rotation period to avoid chaotic variations in its obliquity (i.e. its tilt on its axis).
• Has the right amount of water in the crust.
• Has steady plate tectonic cycling (No planet without crustal movements can recycle nutrients to the surface).
• Is a habitable planet where single-celled life actually emerged.
• Experienced a critically low number of large (meteorite) impacts during its history.
• Experienced a critically low number of transient radiation events from outer space during its history.
• Is a planet where plant and animal life successfully evolved from single-celled life.
• Is a planet where an intelligent, technology-wielding life form evolved from lower animals.
• Is among that subset of planets that have hosted technological life where the technological life has not destroyed itself or otherwise gone extinct.

Witt goes on to explain that,

Gonzalez and Richards assign a 10 percent chance for each of these 19 factors, but they make a strong case that the odds are much slimmer in many instances. Some of the factors may have an infinitesimally small probability of occurring by happenstance. For instance, perhaps the origin of the first self-reproducing cell is improbable or even impossible given the limited tool kit of materialists (chance + natural laws). The same may hold for the origin of plants and animals.

Richards and Gonzalez are skeptical that chemistry and natural selection alone can evolve fundamentally new forms of life, as am I. But for the sake of argument they generously grant even these factors a 1 in 10 chance of occurring on any terrestrial planet where all the other necessary factors are in place.

We are multiplying out fractions here, so the odds get geometrically smaller with each additional factor. Multiply out just the first 13 [to avoid the controversial evolutionary assumptions] and we find that the odds of any one star system having a habitable planet is less than one in a trillion, meaning that even with all the billions of stars in the Milky Way, the odds are strongly against there being even one other habitable planet in our galaxy besides Earth.

And note, Gonzalez and Richards further low-balled the odds by leaving out several factors. Also keep in mind that for some time now the calculated odds have been getting slimmer and slimmer as new habitability requirements are discovered.

So, is it reasonable to think that there are intelligent beings elsewhere in our galaxy? No. Such a phenomenon is exceedingly improbable, unless, Witt points out, our galaxy is not the product of chance and natural forces at all, but is instead the product of a unfathomably intelligent and powerful Creator.

If that's the case, our galaxy could be teeming with life, but unfortunately that's not a hypothesis open to the naturalist.

Read more on this topic at the link.

Is Torture an Absolute Evil?

Yesterday's post was instigated by a remark by Senator Angus King during the hearing for President-elect Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth didn't answer King's questions on the use of torture to the senator's satisfaction which elicited from him the rather gratuitous comment that Hegseth must think "torture's okay."

I argued yesterday that this was unfair inasmuch as torture is not an easy thing to define. Today, I'll argue, furthermore, that even though it's morally wrong, evil, in fact, to use torture purely to punish or for a sick amusement, it's not an absolute wrong.

To make my case I've dredged up an old post from several decades ago. See what you think:

So there I was the other night in thrall to the taut drama and machinations unfolding in the second season DVD of the thriller series called 24.

Determined to be patient with several gaping holes and other silliness in the story-line, I let myself be caught up in the suspense as terrorists planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Los Angeles and set it to go off "today." The Counter Terrorism Unit led by superhero Jack Bauer is tasked with saving the lives of millions of people.

Well, what should happen but that one of the terrorists who knows where the bomb is located falls into Jack's hands. Time is short and he has to discover the whereabouts of the weapon before it explodes, incinerating everything and everyone within a radius of a couple of miles and spreading a deadly cloud of radiation for hundreds of miles more.

Naturally, the terrorist refuses to talk. Jack cuffs him about the head once or twice but he knows that such measures are futile. He could, of course, employ waterboarding but that seems to be unknown to the script writers and besides it would violate the tenets of woke ideology, not to mention the Geneva Conventions which sagely affirm that the lives of millions of Americans are simply not worth the panic experienced by a single thug who wishes to slaughter them.

So, what does our superhero do? Those of you who are fans will find this to be very old news, but for those of you who have more important things to do on Monday nights than to watch a television show, I shall tell you and then ask some questions.

Jack has anticipated his prisoner's reticence and, unbeknownst to the viewer, has had the police in the terrorist's home country (which for some reason is never named) arrest the man's family (two sons and a wife). They bind and gag the hapless innocents in chairs and train a television camera on them. The video feed is up-linked and sent to a computer screen that the prisoner in L.A. can see. Already I can envision Andrew Sullivan and the editorial staff of the New York Times yelling at their televisions that Bauer can't do this, he's flouting the Geneva Conventions, he's a cruel, amoral imperialist pig, he's no better than the terrorists, etc. But it gets worse.

Agent Bauer then tells the prisoner that unless he spills the beans right now about where the bomb is to be found he will order the police in the unnamed foreign country to execute the man's eldest son. The terrorist's resolve is shaken but not broken. Bauer gives the order by phone, and the viewer sees on the computer screen a policeman kick over the boy's chair and shoot twice. The terrorist's family screams, the terrorist is traumatized, and the viewer is stunned, mostly at how little regard Bauer seems to have for the Geneva Conventions, international law, and enlightened moral opinion.

Now Bauer is screaming at the terrorist to tell him where the bomb is or he will order the execution of the youngest boy. The terrorist cannot withstand the psychological and emotional torture any longer. He breaks and gives Bauer the information he needs. The terrorist is then taken out of the room, and the scene focuses on the computer screen where we see the foreign police untying and releasing the man's family, including the boy who was supposedly shot.

The whole thing was a set-up, a ruse to deceive the prisoner into thinking that his family was being murdered when in fact they were not.

Now this ploy was certainly a violation of the Geneva Conventions on torture, even if no one was physically harmed (although no doubt both the prisoner and his family were terrified). So here's my first question: Given the circumstances, was Bauer justified in deceiving the prisoner in this way?

Is what he did so beyond the pale that it would have been better to allow millions of people to die a horrible death than to lie to this man in such a way as to make him believe that his silence was costing the lives of his loved ones when it really wasn't?

A great many people would answer that question with a resounding "Yes, it would be better that millions die than that this man have to endure the pain of that awful deception". Certainly the authors and signatories of the Geneva Conventions would answer this way, and presumably so would Senator King.

Does that strike you as absurd?

Suppose your family were visiting the city in which the bomb was planted and you are somehow privy to the events as they unfold. You're terrified. Your children could be incinerated if that bomb goes off. Would you object to what Bauer was doing?

If after the bomb is disarmed and you're hugging your spouse and children and thanking God that everyone is okay could you say to your children and spouse that you're so happy that they're okay, that they weren't harmed, but that, truth to tell, you think it would've been better had they been burned to death in a nuclear fireball, than that the terrorist be administered the ghastly treatment to which Bauer subjected him?

Those who insist that torture is an absolute moral wrong would have to answer that, yes, they would.

Some say that it's unchristian to engage in such dehumanizing behavior, but is it Christian to be able to possibly prevent a great evil but choose to not do so? Would it be loving to refrain from preventing the suffering of thousands of people out of moral squeamishness? Sometimes life hands people excruciating choices. At such times one has to do what in their honest judgment is least evil and most loving.

Saving the lives of one's family and tens of thousands of others at the cost of traumatizing the terrorist is, I think, both. Feel free to disagree.

"So, You're Saying That 'Torture's Alright.' "

During yesterday's Senate confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, Senator Angus King (I. ME) quizzed him on his views on torture. Mr. Hegseth's answers didn't satisfy the senator who concluded with implicit disdain that Mr. Hegseth was simply acknowledging that "torture's alright."

This is the sort of intellectual muddle-headedness that gives politicians a bad name.

The problem with trying to answer Senator King's questions is that there really are at least two issues with the use of torture by the authorities of the state which need to be teased apart unless one is simply trying to score political points to titillate the media.

One question is definitional or ontological, the other is ethical. They are: What actually constitutes torture, and, secondly, whatever torture is, is it ever justified? The argument in some quarters seems to boil down to this: "Don't worry about what torture is. Just don't do it." This position is quite unhelpful and more than a little ludicrous.

To start let's agree that torture is at least almost always wrong. If we're going to absolutely prohibit it, however, we have to have a pretty good idea what it is, especially if we risk abolishing a useful tool in preventing terror attacks that could potentially take the lives of our spouses and children.

The Geneva Convention of 1984 defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person...."

Let's apply that definition to one of the most notorious, and effective, means of coercing cooperation among suspected terrorists interrogated by the CIA - waterboarding. The CIA is believed to have used waterboarding in certain special cases to prevent the deaths of innocent victims.

In waterboarding a detainee is strapped to a table, his face is covered with a thin cloth and water is poured over it. This somehow produces a gag reflex, the sensation of drowning, and induces panic in the person to whom it's done. It's said to be very effective in eliciting accurate intelligence, intelligence which has saved lives.

Be that as it may, let's set aside the question of its justification for now and ask why we should think that this particular technique, if not abused, constitutes torture according to the Geneva Convention. What are some possible answers to that question?

Perhaps it's torture because it's painful.

But apparently there's not much pain involved, and if there were it would only be brief since people only hold out for a few seconds when subjected to it.

Perhaps it's torture because it does lasting harm to the detainee.

Evidently not. If done properly, the individual is no doubt shaken but none the worse for the experience. In fact, interrogators have had it done to them as part of their training just so they know what it feels like.

Perhaps it's torture because it's done to punish.

No. It's done to elicit information. Once the subject cooperates the treatment ceases.

Perhaps it's torture because it's unpleasant.

It is unpleasant, but surely an unpleasant experience is not ipso facto torture. If it were, then putting someone in restraints or feeding them institutional food would be torture.

Perhaps it's torture because it frightens the terrorist.

Indeed, it does frighten the terrorist, but so does the prospect of being executed for their crimes or being put in prison for the rest of their life. Should they not be threatened with these possibilities? Why must we be so squeamish that we're reluctant even to scare people who are trying to murder our children?

Perhaps it's torture because it elicits information against the detainee's will.

It certainly does motivate the terrorist to divulge information, but the fact that they don't do so willingly is hardly reason to think that the method is somehow tainted. If it were then phone taps, etc would be torture since they are means by which we obtain information from people who would not otherwise willingly give it.

Perhaps, it's torture because some men are exerting power over another.

Yes, but so is a police officer who stops you for a traffic violation, and we don't consider that torture.

Perhaps it'storture because it can be abused by the interrogator causing lasting harm to the suspect.

True enough, but any treatment of a suspect can be abused and cause lasting harm. The objection here is to the abuse not to the technique.

The fact is that the suspect has complete control over how long the process lasts or whether it will even begin. This is an important point. The terrorist is essentially in complete control of what, if anything, happens to him. He's no more damaged when it's over than when it started. He experiences no sensation other than panic and though he's frightened, he knows that he really is not drowning.

So why would waterboarding be considered torture but, say, lengthy imprisonment, which may do some, or even all, of the things mentioned above, is not? I really have no answer to the question.

Whatever one thinks about waterboarding there are certainly other forms of coercion that might violate the Geneva Convention, but the definition that the signatories to the Convention have endorsed appears to be inadequate.

Defining torture is difficult enough, but insisting that it's use is absolutely wrong and should never be employed is perhaps even more difficult, as tomorrow's post will attempt to show. Please don't draw any conclusions about the present post until you've read tomorrow's offering.

The Rise of Non-denominational Christianity

Ryan Burge is a sociologist of religion and he has an interesting graph on his website. It'll come as no surprise to anyone who's been tuned into what's going on in the Christian church for the past decade or two, but it might be a surprise to those who haven't been paying much attention.

Here's Burge:

A lot of what I do is talk about decline. I am painfully aware of that fact. Religious attendance is down in the United States. The proportion of young people who identify as Christian has declined significantly over the last couple of decades. The share of Americans who don’t believe in God has risen, as has the share of folks who take an agnostic view of God. Many religious groups are significantly smaller now than they were twenty years ago....

· However, there is one group that is much larger and is growing. It’s not really a denomination. And it’s not really a tradition. They are united by what they reject - that is the idea of organized denominations. I always tell people that the rise of the nones (those who reject religion entirely) is the biggest story in the faith space. But the second most important story is the rise of the nons - that is those folks who identify as non-denominational Christians.

In the early 1970s, non-denominational Protestants were little more than a rounding error. Just 2% of all respondents said that they were non-denominational - it was 3% of the Protestant sample. You could forgive any religious demographer for ignoring this part of the sample.

Both figures slowly began to increase over the next couple of decades. But, really noticeable growth would not begin until the mid-1990s. By 2000, about 10% of all Protestants and 5% of the entire sample were non-denominational.

By 2010, the percentage of Protestants who were non-denominational would rise to about 20% and they were about 10% of all Americans. In the most recent survey, which was collected in 2022 - one in three Protestants did not identify with a denomination like Southern Baptists or Evangelical Lutherans. That was a twelve point increase from just a few years earlier.

Here's the graph:

Nearly 35% of all protestants identify as non-denominational as of three years ago and the trajectory appears to have been almost straight up. What do the numbers look like today? What will they look like by 2030? If I may be permitted a prediction based on nothing more than a hunch and perhaps some wishful thinking, I think the decline in the overall numbers of Christians is soon going to bottom out, if it hasn't already, and begin to reverse.

People are looking for something that can put meaning, hope, and objective moral values into their lives and the secular worldview does not, and cannot, offer any of these. We may well be on the threshhold of another "Great Awakening."

Naturalism Excludes a Trustworthy Reason

In past VP posts (see here for example) I've written that the metaphysical doctrine of naturalism and the biological doctrine of evolution cannot both be true. It may be that one or the other is true, but they can't both be true.

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if naturalism (which entails materialism) is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic naturalist has no rational basis for believing that naturalism, materialism, or anything else, is true.

Moreover, naturalism is dependent upon evolution as an explanation for the origin of our cognitive faculties, but evolution is, theoretically, a process whi ch leads to survival, not truth.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument.

And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” - Atheist philosopher 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. - Atheist philosopher John Gray

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.- Atheist biologist Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them in his book On Miracles where he writes:

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.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E.

The naturalist is faced with a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false.

On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet, despite all this, the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.

Fantastic Design (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper one gets into it.

Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here are some further questions: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Moreover, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

And how is all of that produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution?

Finally, given all we know about the marvels discussed in yesterday's post and today's, why is there so much resistance to the hypothesis that living things are not the product of chance mutations and serendipitous selection, but rather the product of intentional engineering?

Fantastic Design (Pt. I)

A couple of years ago I read the book Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD and was truly dazzled by the amazing degree of engineering that the human body displays.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents over a billion or so years of genetic mutation and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's more probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's an excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.

CRT and Historical Inversion

Why do so many people oppose the teaching of Critical Race Theory? I've offered a number of reasons here, but a historian and literature professor emeritus at the University of California Santa Cruz named John Ellis offers a rather different take. Ellis has a piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which he asserts that:

The Biden administration had quietly implemented policies throughout the federal government based on this theory, and it is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It has overrun much of the corporate world, and it has even secured a place in the training of many professions.

The accusations made in closed training sessions are astonishingly venomous: Arrogant white supremacy is ubiquitous; white rage results when that supremacy is challenged; whites hold money and power because they stole it from other races; systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going.

Ellis declares that all of this is based on historically false assumptions and that Critical Race Theory (CRT) has actually inverted the history of global interactions between the races. He says that, "the thinkers and engineers of the Anglosphere, principally England and the U.S., are the heroes, not the villains, of this story, while the rest were laggards, not leaders."

For most of recorded history, neighboring peoples regarded each other with apprehension if not outright fear and loathing. Tribal and racial attitudes were universal. That’s a long way from the orthodoxy of our own time, which holds that we are all one human family. Before that consensus arose, a charge of racism made no sense. By today’s standards, everyone was racist.

It’s not hard to understand why tribalism once reigned everywhere. Without modern transportation and communication, most people knew nothing about other societies. What contact there was between different peoples often involved warfare, and that made everyone fear strangers. The insecurity of life in earlier times added to this anxiety.

Protections we now enjoy didn’t exist: policing, banking, competent medical care, social safety nets. The supply of food was uncertain before trucks and refrigeration. In a dangerous world people clung to their own kind for safety, and that was a natural and even necessary attitude.

So, what was the impetus that led to the belief that we are all one common humanity? Ellis gives the credit to British and American engineers:

They invented the steam engine, then used it to develop the first railways. They followed this by inventing and mass-producing cars, trucks and finally airplanes. They pioneered radio, television, films, newspapers and the internet. The result was that ignorance of other peoples was turned around.

But in the 18th century the British did something even more important: They began to develop our contemporary attitudes toward race. How? By being the first modern state to foster individual liberty. Liberty fostered prosperity, and prosperity led to widespread literacy:

Widespread literacy created the first large reading public: By the beginning of the 18th century, dozens of newspapers and periodicals were being published in Britain. An extensive reading public allowed public opinion to become a powerful force, and that set the stage for manifestos and petitions, even campaigns about matters that offended the public’s conscience.

A series of British writers began to promote ideas about the conduct of life and the role of government. Among the most important was John Locke, who argued that every human life had its own rationale, none being created for the use of another. Another was David Hume, who wrote that all men are nearly equal “in their mental power and faculties, till cultivated by education.”

These and many others were launching what would become the modern consensus that we are all one human family. The idea gained ground so quickly that in Britain, and there alone, a powerful campaign to abolish slavery arose. By the end of the 18th century that campaign was leading to prohibitions in many parts of the Anglosphere, while Africa and Asia remained as tribalist and racist as ever.

As this idea took hold it made the British see their empire differently. Like other European countries, Britain had initially sought empire to strengthen its position in the world—others would add territory if Britain didn’t, and Britain would be weakened. But if the peoples of the British Empire were one human family, how could some be subordinate to others?

The British began to consider themselves responsible for the welfare and development of their subject peoples, and for giving them competent administration before they had learned to provide it themselves. That change inevitably led to the dissolution of empire, and to a consensus that the time for empires (of which there had been hundreds) was over. The world’s most influential anti-imperialists were British.

As the influence of Britain grew the belief in human rights and equality spread across the world. Ellis concludes with this:

There’s a simple explanation for what critical race theory calls “white privilege.” Because the Anglosphere developed prosperous modernity and gave it to the world, English-speakers were naturally the first to enjoy it. People initially outside that culture of innovation are still catching up.

Asians and Asian-Americans have done this with great success, but critical race theory impedes the progress of other groups by persuading them to demonize the people who created the modern values they have adopted. It betrays those values by stoking racial hatred.

Critical race theory tells us that all was racial harmony until racist Europeans disturbed it, but the truth is rather that all was tribal hostility until the Anglosphere rescued us.

I would add to Ellis' column that the spread of the idea of racial equality across the globe was facilitated by the work of countless thousands of missionaries from the Anglosphere, supported by countless thousands more Christians in the home country, who carried the message everywhere that all people are created in the image of God, loved by Him, and are His children.

People who truly believe this proposition have a hard time thinking that one race of people is inferior in any significant respect to another.

Scientists Leave Atheist Organization Over Transgender Ideology

John Sexton has an interesting piece up at HotAir.com. It seems that several prominent atheists are resigning from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) because of a split over the biological reality, or unreality, of transgenderism.

The latest to resign is Richard Dawkins who served on FFRF's board. Dawkins and the other resignees are scientists who reject the left's contemporary infatuation with transgender ideology whereas FFRF is evidently totally committed to it to the point that they actually unpublished an article written by one of their members rebutting a previous article which argued that the only way one can define what, or who, a woman is is by what the individual in question tells you.

Here's Dawkins's letter of resignation:

It is with real sadness, because of my personal regard for you both, that I feel obliged to resign from the Honorary Board of FFRF. Publishing the silly and unscientific “What is a Woman” article by Kat Grant was a minor error of judgment, redeemed by the decision to publish a rebuttal by a distinguished scientist from the relevant field, namely Biology, Jerry Coyne. But alas, the sequel was an act of unseemly panic when you caved in to hysterical squeals from predictable quarters and retrospectively censored that excellent rebuttal.

Moreover, to summarily take it down without even informing the author of your intention was an act of lamentable discourtesy to a member of your own Honorary Board. A Board which I now leave with regret.

You can read an excerpt from the article which triggered Jerry Coyne's rebuttal at the above link (the entire article is also linked to there). It was written by a lawyer named Kat Grant and she appears to argue that the existence of intersex individuals makes any attempt to define "woman" problematic. Intersex individuals are people born with some sex characteristics such as chromosomes, genitals, reproductive organs, secondary sex traits, and/or hormonal patterns that don't align with their other sex characteristics.

I was particularly interested in Coyne's rebuttal which was originally published by FFRF and then yanked when members complained that Coyne was committing heresy by refuting Grant's argument. Sexton writes that "[Coyne's] basic response is that a) biology doesn't care about your feelings and b) a tiny number of exceptions to these universal categories of male and female does not mean the categories are useless or unscientific."

Here's a part of Coyne's argument:

In the Freethought Now article “What is a woman?” author Kat Grant struggles at length to define the word, rejecting one definition after another as flawed or incomplete. Grant finally settles on a definition based on self-identity: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”

This of course is a tautology, and still leaves open the question of what a woman really is. And the remarkable redefinition of a term with a long biological history can be seen only as an attempt to force ideology onto nature. Because some nonbinary people—or men who identify as women (“transwomen”)—feel that their identity is not adequately recognized by biology, they choose to impose ideology onto biology and concoct a new definition of “woman.”

Further, there are plenty of problems with the claim that self-identification maps directly onto empirical reality. You are not always fat if you feel fat (the problem with anorexia), not a horse if you feel you’re a horse (a class of people called “therians” psychologically identify as animals), and do not become Asian simply become you feel Asian (the issue of “transracialism”). But sex, Grant tells us, is different: It is the one biological feature of humans that can be changed solely by psychology.

But why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality.

Instead, in biology “sex” is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells (“gametes”). Males have small, mobile gametes (sperm in animals and pollen in plants); females have large, immobile gametes (ova in plants and eggs in animals). In all animals and vascular plants there are exactly two sexes and no more. Though a fair number of plants and a few species of animals combine both functions in a single individual (“hermaphrodites”), these are not a third sex because they produce the typical two gametes.

It’s important to recognize that, although this gametic idea is called a “definition” of sex, it is really a generalization—and thus a concept—based on a vast number of observations of diverse organisms. We know that, except for a few algae and fungi, all multicellular organisms and vertebrates, including us, adhere to this generalization. It is, then, nearly universal...

Yes, there is a tiny fraction of exceptions, including intersex individuals, who defy classification (estimates range between 1/5,600 and 1/20,000). These exceptions to the gametic view are surely interesting, but do not undermine the generality of the sex binary.

Nowhere else in biology would deviations this rare undermine a fundamental concept. To illustrate, as many as 1 in 300 people are born with some form of polydactyly—without the normal number of ten fingers. Nevertheless, nobody talks about a “spectrum of digit number.” (It’s important to recognize that only a very few nonbinary and transgender people are “intersex,” for nearly all are biologically male or female.)

Sexton adds that that's not even half of Coyne's essay:

[Coyne] closes by saying, "One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights." But apparently the FFRF disagreed. After a backlash, they pulled Coyne's response down. He responded in an email, calling the decision "quasi-religious."

“That is a censorious behavior I cannot abide,” he wrote in an email. “I was simply promoting a biological rather than a psychological definition of sex, and I do not understand why you would consider that ‘distressing’ and also an attempt to hurt LGBTQIA+ people, which I would never do.”

“The gender ideology which caused you to take down my article is itself quasi-religious, having many aspects of religions and cults, including dogma, blasphemy, belief in what is palpably untrue (‘a woman is whoever she says she is’), apostasy, and a tendency to ignore science when it contradicts a preferred ideology.”

Coyne left FFRF as did psychologist and author Steven Pinker. Dawkins was the third person to leave the group.

I'd add that the argument that one cannot define what a woman is because the boundary between male and female is indistinct is like arguing that we cannot define the color red because in a color spectrum the boundary between red and orange is indistinct. Though there may be a very small number of instances in which an observer cannot really tell where orange ends and red begins it does not follow that red cannot be defined or that we cannot accurately discern the color red in the overwhelming number of cases.

Who Designed the Designer?

Philosopher of science Jay Richards is a proponent of intelligent design, i.e. the view that the universe and life show evidence (lots of it) of having been intelligently engineered. Richards asserts that one of the most frequent objections he encounters, one raised in fact by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion is, "If the universe and life are designed then who designed the designer?"

Laypeople can be forgiven for asking the question because it seems common-sensical, but someone of Dawkins' stature should know better, and he took a lot of heat from philosophers, even philosophers sympathetic to his metaphysical naturalism, for his evident lack of philosophical sophistication.

Here's a short video in which Richards addresses the question:

It's worth noting, I think, that the attempt to use this question as an indictment of the intelligent design hypothesis is misguided for other reasons besides those Richards gives.

Let's look at the first part of the question: "If the universe and life are designed...." implies a willingness to accept for the sake of argument that the universe is designed, but as soon as he's granted that the universe is designed the naturalist has gotten himself into trouble.

Once it's conceded by the naturalist, even if only hypothetically, that the universe is designed, then whether there's just one designer or an indefinite number doesn't much matter. Naturalism would stand refuted since naturalism holds that the universe is self-existent.

Moreover, to posit more designers than what's necessary to explain the universe is a violation of the principle that our explanations should contain the minimum number of entities necessary to explain what we're trying to explain - in this case, the universe. So the simplest, and therefore the best, explanation is that there's only a single designer of the universe.

There's no good reason to think that anyone who believes there's a designer of the universe must allow for an infinite regress of designers.

We might also point out that the universe is a contingent entity. Contingent entities require a necessary being as their ultimate cause, and a necessary being is, by definition, not itself dependent upon anything else for its existence. Necessary beings are self-existent.

So, if the universe was ultimately the product of a non-contingent, necessary being then it makes no sense to ask what designed that being. Nothing designed it. If it were designed it would be a contingent being dependent upon whatever designed it.

Finally, it should be noted that if there is an intelligent designer it must not only be a necessary being, but it must also transcend space and time because these are aspects of the designed universe. Therefore, the designer must be non-spatial and non-temporal. It must also be very intelligent and very powerful. In other words, it must be something very much like God.

Given all this, naturalists would be better off resisting the temptation to ask "who designed the designer?" It's a question which carries far less polemical punch than they think it does.

Inconvenient Truth

Robert Spencer is a scholar who specializes on Islam. He claims that the authorities have been either willingly or unknowingly missing the real explanation of the radicalization of the New Orleans terrorist, Shamsud-Din Jabbar. He writes:

NBC News reported Saturday that unnamed “experts” ...have said that “the details that have emerged about Jabbar align with the typical pattern of how a veteran can be radicalized to violence.” It seems that it all comes from a downturn in Jabbar’s fortunes: “In the years leading up to Wednesday’s attack, Jabbar experienced his third divorce, accumulated significant debt and lost his corporate job.

Divorce court records from January 2022 reveal he was facing business losses and credit card debt in the tens of thousands of dollars, along with more than $27,000 in overdue mortgage payments. By August of that year, his bank accounts held just $2,012, according to filings in the case.”

Yeah, that may be it. But there are important ways in which this doesn’t explain a thing.

The most obvious problem with this is that there are numerous people in America today who are thrice-divorced and in debt, and in worse situations than that, and it never once occurs to them to drive a truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers.

There are, moreover, aspects of Jabbar’s behavior that just don’t fit into the scenario of a man driven to despair by personal and professional downturns.

So to what does Spencer think Jabbar's behavior should be imputed?

In a video he recorded shortly before his attack, Jabbar told his family that he had originally planned to kill them instead. “I wanted to record this message for my family,” the killer said. “I wanted you to know that I joined ISIS earlier this year.” He added with chilling directness: “I don’t want you to think I spared you willingly.”

He explained that he had initially intended to hold a “celebration” for them so that those attending could “witness the killing of the apostates.” NBC helpfully adds that is “an apparent reference to killing them,” but doesn’t bother to pause to explain the significance of his reference to “apostates.”

Jabbar apparently considered his family to be apostates from Islam, whether formally by declaring that they had left the religion, or functionally, by having ceased to practice it. Either way, leaving Islam carries the death penalty in Islamic law, in accord with the Qur’an: “If they turn renegade, then take them and kill them wherever you find them” (4:89).

Also, a hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

Jabbar didn't kill his family, Spencer states, because he was afraid that that would've obscured the more important message that there's a war being waged by believers upon the unbelievers.

There's more at the link, but the reluctance of our authorities and our media to call attention to the fact that Muslims who strictly follow the Qur'an believe they're duty-bound to Allah to kill infidels, if it's a deliberate decision to withhold such information, is a dereliction of their responsibility to clearly state the truth about threats to our society, even if that truth is politically inconvenient.

The Unending War

The terrible terrorist attack in New Orleans should awaken Americans to a very uncomfortable fact: Islam's struggle against the West is an unending war. We may think we don't have to fight it, but radical Muslims believe they're doing the will of Allah in waging a war that has waxed and waned for over 1300 years.

Groups like al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian government, the Houthis, the Taliban are all permutations of the same belief system that has been slaughtering unbelievers in the Middle East, North Africa, and everywhere else they've had the ability ever since the time of Mohammad in the seventh century.

Matthew Continetti at the Free Beacon writes that the horrific attack in New Orleans was just the latest atrocity perpetrated against Westerners in the name of "a sick ideology," and goes on to point out that the jihadist worldview exemplified by ISIS is resurgent.

There was a terrible attack in Moscow last April, and last month's Christmas market attack in Germany killed four women and a nine-year-old boy. Radical Islamism is growing in, and fuels violence throughout, Africa. ISIS rages in Syria and Iraq as its Sunni compatriots in Hamas fight to the death in Gaza. Shiite radicals in Hezbollah and among the Houthis sow terror at the direction of their Iranian masters.

Above all, ISIS has embedded in Afghanistan, where its leaders issue communiques to an international following, plot against the West, and attack both the Taliban government and neighboring Pakistan.

As President Trump demonstrated by all but destroying ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and the Israelis have shown in their response to the October 7th horrors, the only way to diminish this enemy - they will never be defeated forever as long as there are people who believe that it's God's will that they slay the Jews and the infidels - is by the application of military force.

Here's Continetti:

Terrorist movements wax strong when they believe that history is on their side. And there is no better way to rid the terrorists of that notion than to deny them haven and reduce their leaders to ash. America forgot this lesson. Our leaders reduced commitments in Iraq and Syria. Federal law enforcement shifted its attention to domestic extremism and white nationalism.

Worst of all, President Biden beat a hasty retreat from Afghanistan that left 13 U.S. servicemen killed, U.S. citizens and visa-holders stranded, Afghan allies abandoned, the Afghan people in hock to a jihadist militia that calls itself a government, and Afghanistan's ungoverned spaces in the hands of ISIS.

At the time, Biden pledged continued surveillance of the enemy, "over-the-horizon" military capabilities, and support for Afghan women and girls. None of this was true. Retired general Frank McKenzie, former CENTCOM commander, said last spring that "in Afghanistan, we have almost no ability to see into that country and almost no ability to strike into that country."

The Taliban resumed public executions, imposed dress and behavioral codes on women, and deprived girls of schooling. The other day, the Taliban said it would shutter NGOs that employ women.

Our current political leadership seems to believe that the way to defeat the Islamists is by means of carrot and stick half-measures. Continetti invites us to consider the contrast between Israel and the United States.

Israel possesses the will to strike its enemies, establish facts on the ground favorable to its security, and restore deterrence in a dangerous neighborhood.

The United States, meanwhile, has been tossed about by a whirlwind of events that it believes are beyond its control: an open southern border, a passive-aggressive desire to renew the nuclear agreement with Iran, disaster in Afghanistan, war between Russia and Ukraine that is lessening weapons stockpiles, virulent anti-Semitism on campuses and in city streets, and long-running operations against the Houthis that have led nowhere.

This aimlessness and passivity create openings for terrorists. It gives them the sense of impending victory.

Continetti concludes with this:

I am not arguing that we re-invade Afghanistan tomorrow. Nor am I saying that a more assertive U.S. foreign policy would end every threat to the homeland.

My argument is that the way to reduce the ISIS threat, foreign and domestic, is to take the fight to the evildoers. Don't pretend jihadists can be left to their own devices. Put them on the defensive. Thin out their ranks, dry up their finances, keep them on the run.

Then ISIS's ability to inspire will wane. And justice will be done for the people of New Orleans.

I'd add that we have to secure the border, more thoroughly vet immigrants coming into the country, and clearly expose the hate that's emanating from some of our schools and mosques. Put simply we need people in the Washington who have a clear understanding of the nature of the struggle we're in and who know that this enemy can't be bought off.

The world can't afford any more decisions like the inexplicable and astonishingly foolish decision of President Biden to release 16 billion dollars to Iran, the most brutal state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, at a time they were all but bankrupt and impotent.

That decision guaranteed that there will be more bloodshed, suffering, and grief in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S.

Mt. Rushmore and the Design Filter

How do we recognize intentional, intelligent design? How do we distinguish things that are designed from things that occur naturally? Back in the 1990s mathematician William Dembski explained that consciously or unconsciously we employ what he called an explanatory filter that helps us to immediately intuit that something is intentionally designed. What follows is a simplification of Dembski's work.

His filter consists of three steps.

When considering whether any object or event was designed we first ask whether it's the sort of thing that physical laws like the laws of electricity or gravity could've produced. If so, then it's intellectually prudent to ascribe the object or event to natural causes rather than intelligent agency. Phenomena that happen as a result of physical law have a high probability of occurring. So the first node in the filter is to ask, does this phenomenon have a high probability of occurring naturally.

If the answer is yes we impute it's occurrence to non-agential causes and rule out design.

For example, is there any physical law that makes the creation of the operating software of a computer highly probable? There doesn't seem to be, so design of the software is still a live option.

The second node is to ask whether the phenomenon has a plausible likelihood of occurring by chance. If it does then we generally attribute it to chance rather than intelligent agency.

For instance, if a poker player is dealt a royal flush (approx. 1 chance in 650,000 attempts) we'd be amazed but such good fortune can be expected to happen from time to time purely by chance, apart from any finagling by an intelligent agent. In such a case we can again rule out design.

Is it probable, though, that a poker player be dealt three consecutive royal flushes or that a computer operating system came about by chance without the input of an intelligent agent? It seems astronomically improbable.

If neither law nor chance are plausible explanations then we're left with design as the most likely alternative. Given an intelligent programmer complex arrangements of zeroes and ones that specify a meaningful computer operation are not improbable at all and given a skilled card cheat neither are three consecutive royal flushes unlikely.

We can apply the same reasoning to the origin of life and the very first DNA sequence. DNA is much like a computer program, it specifies the construction of an entire organism whether a protist or an elephant. The simplest strand of DNA, one long enough to specify a single protein necessary for the functioning of a living cell, is unimaginably complex and the probability it arose by chance makes the belief that it did akin to an extraordinary act of blind faith.

There's no law that governs the formation of DNA and the chance formation of a sufficiently long strand of meaningful DNA, a strand that specifies a necessary protein, is so improbable as to be well beyond plausibility.

Thus, the alternative that DNA was designed by an intelligent mind is the default. The only reason anyone has for refusing to accept that alternative is that they have an a priori commitment to naturalism which rules out the existence of any mind that can't be explained in terms of natural, material causes.

In other words, the rejection of an intelligent designer is an act of blind faith in the power of nature to accomplish the equivalent of writing Windows 10 purely by chance not just once but numerous times.

The following video elaborates on a simple illustration of the design filter:

God and the Intellectuals

Peter Savodnik's recent column on Substack is titled How Intellectuals Found God. It's a compilation of a number of interviews he did with writers, artists, techies, etc., and it causes one to wonder if perhaps there's a spiritual awakening happening in our culture.

Savodnik writes:

For more than a century, the people at the apex of the so-called thinking classes had insisted that, post-Enlightenment, it was impossible to believe in God. Not all of them put it as bluntly as Friedrich Nietzsche did in his 1882 work The Gay Science, in which he declared that “God is dead.” Nor did they attempt to dismantle the whole religious project the way philosopher Bertrand Russell did in his 1927 essay “Why I Am Not a Christian,” arguing that religion is based “mainly upon fear.”

But that’s what it amounted to.

The new godlessness anticipated a much wider rejection of faith: Over the course of the next several decades, the number of believers plummeted across the West. In 1999, 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a house of worship; by 2020, that figure was just 47 percent—less than half the country for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has dropped off—from a peak of roughly 90 percent in the early 1970s to 63 percent in 2022.

By 2070, Christians are expected to be in the minority in the United States.

[But now] something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”

What follows are excerpts from some of his interviews. For example, best-selling author Matthew Crawford after describing his own conversion says:

A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more. There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us. It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.

Here's an excerpt from the interview with Niall Ferguson:

You can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism. It’s fine for a small group of people to say, "We’re atheist, we’re opting out,” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart.

"The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

Comedian Russel Brand comments:

I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.

Savodnik also quotes tech mogul Peter Thiel:

“God has some kind of a plan for history,” Thiel said, while being interviewed by a pastor at a former church. “Maybe it’s a hidden plan; it’s a secret plan. He has a plan for your life.” It was a remarkable moment: One of the gods of Silicon Valley, who had long argued that technology could cure death, was now saying that there was one true God, and that human beings were human—limited, mortal, at the mercy of larger forces.

Even Elon Musk is included in Savodnik's essay:

“I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity,” Musk said. Soon after, Musk took to X to pronounce that “unless there is more bravery to stand up for what is fair and right, Christianity will perish.”

Psychologist Jordan Peterson said this:

“I would say God is hyper-real,” Peterson said in a recent interview with Ben Shapiro promoting [his new] book. “God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

Savodnik asks the question that others have been wondering about since these conversions, if that's what they are, started to become known to the public: Were these moves toward God, whether total or partial, genuine? Were these men and women genuine converts to Christianity, or at least to Theism, or was their embrace of the religious life a temporary blip in their otherwise secular lives?

Of course, it's just too soon to tell. Most of them have not been believers for more than a couple of years which makes it hard to assess how permanent the impact on their lives will be. Even so, it's remarkable that so many from among our "cultural elite" are openly turning to God and traditional expressions of religion to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

Here are a few more excerpts from Savodnik's essay.

Paul Kingsnorth: "When I asked Kingsnorth why he embraced Christianity after having steered clear of it for his entire life, he said it wasn’t a 'rational choice.' If you ever meet a holy person, you look at them and you think, Wow, that’s really something—you know, I would love to be like that. How does that happen?'"

He added that, “The culture,” by contrast, “doesn’t have any spiritual heart at all. It’s as if we think we can just junk thousands of years of religious culture, religious art, religious music, chuck it all out the window, and we’re just building and creating junk.”

Kingsnorth said the story we’ve been telling ourselves for the last 100 years or so, of endless progress and secularism and the triumph of reason, is now “at some kind of tipping point.” Our great “religious reawakening” is just people “finding their way back to something that they never expected to find their way back to.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali told Savodnik that: “It’s been a year, 15 months”—since embracing her new faith—“and I still feel almost miraculous,” Hirsi Ali told me.... “I’m actually very grateful for whatever it was that was ailing me,” because it led her to God. “My life now is much richer, more fulfilling, than before.”

About tech billionaire Jordan Hall, Savodnik wrote: "That was when Hall knew his frantic casting about for meaning was finally over. He didn’t expect it. His mother was Jewish; his father, Catholic, but only technically.

"The emptiness he’d spent years fleeing was not just his emptiness, as far as he could tell. It was society-wide.

“We’re actually facing a clear and present danger. It’s cultural termination, and it’s almost certainly going to come to a catastrophic end soon.”

Savodnik says that Hall was referring to "plummeting birth rates, imploding families, relationships that were pale shadows of real relationships—digitized friendship and love as opposed to genuine interactions between people who actually care about and know each other. 'The horrifying brokenness of people.'”

What these and so many others are discovering is that if we're just the product of blind, impersonal forces that have somehow raised us up out of the primordial soup and that our lives are not much different, biologically speaking, than those of ants, then our existence is just a Shakespearean "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Some people, evidently, can live with the awareness that their existence is pointless, empty, and meaningless, but many other very thoughtful people are finding that they cannot.

A Historian Discusses Christianity

I recently came across a couple of interesting pieces on Substack. The first is a discussion with historian Tom Holland who had been an atheist but whose study of history was a catalyst for his return, or at least partial return, to Christianity. The interview is conducted by Bari Weiss who's a secular, lesbian Jew, but who seems not unsympathetic with what Holland has to say.

Here are a few excerpts from the conversation:

Bari Weiss: Your book opens with the crucifixion. Your argument is that the turning point is not Jesus’s birth, but his death, at 33 years old, at the hands of the Roman authorities. Why is this the pivotal moment?

Tom Holland: It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God. In the opinion of the Romans, crucifixion is the fate that should properly be visited on slaves. Not just because it is protracted and agonizing, but also because it is deeply humiliating.

When you die, you will hang there like a lump of meat. This is a demonstration, in the opinion of the Romans, that essentially their might is right. That if a slave rebels against his master, this is what happens.

I think what is radical about what Christians come to believe is not the fact that a man can become a god. Because for most people in the Mediterranean that is a given. What is radical is that the man Christians believe was divine was someone who had ended up suffering the worst fate imaginable—death by crucifixion—which, in the opinion of the Romans, was the fate visited on a slave.

The reason that Jesus suffers that fate is that he is part of a conquered people. He’s not even from Judea. He’s from Galilee. Galilee is not properly under the rule of the Romans. It’s franchised out to a client king. He is the lowest of the low. Even the Judeans look down on him.

The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all.

The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last....

BW: I've always been so interested in how Christianity goes from being the bane of the powerful to being the faith of the emperor. Constantine, the emperor who could have been a god, instead converts to the faith whose god died on a cross. How does that happen?

TH: Christianity spreads through most of the major cities of the empire. It’s not difficult to see what the appeal is. In a society without any hint of a welfare state, a state in which no value at all is put upon the weak or the poor or the sick, what the church offers is the first functioning welfare state.

If you are a widow or an orphan or in prison or hungry, the likelihood is that you will be able to find relief from the church. And that offers a kind of power because bishop literally means an overseer—the figure of a bishop who has charity to dispense. That’s quite something. You are in a position of authority that even your pagan neighbors might come to respect.

BW: To join a community not based on the lineage of your family or where you are born, but based on a belief—that still feels so radical to me, even in 2024.

TH: To the Romans, it’s bewildering. They are very puzzled. Who do the Christians think they are? They don’t have a land. They don’t have a mother city. Because they claim a universal identity, to the Romans, it seems they have no identity at all. This is a tension that runs throughout Christianity.

There's much more at Substack. The next to the last question Weiss asks is what brought Holland back to Christianity. You can read his answer at the link.

I'll discuss the second article tomorrow.