Minds, Free Will, and Materialism

An article in Psychology Today by Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles named Matthew Lieberman caught my eye. Lieberman is a materialist who writes an interesting piece about the connection between a belief in free will and the belief that we have a mind. Here's part of his article:

It is impossible to take a materialistic view of the universe (i.e. the view that there is nothing but physical material in the world, atoms bouncing off one another in perfectly predictable patterns) and not come to the conclusion that free will is an illusion because your will must ultimately be caused by events in your physical brain which were caused by previous events in your brain, body, environment and so on. It makes no sense to talk about a will that is disconnected from causal chains of biological events.

Given a materialist view of the universe, it makes no sense to talk about consciousness or experience at all. We have absolutely no idea what it is about the three pounds of mush between our ears that allows it to perform this trick of being conscious. If you damage one spot in visual cortex, a person will cease to see motion. If you damage another spot, they may lose the ability to see things in the right side of their visual field. But we have no idea why those regions cause us to have conscious experience of motion or the right side of the visual field in the first place. Knowing that an engine can’t run without a particular part is not the same as knowing why it can run because of that part.

In other words, we have no idea how consciousness can arise from mere chemical reactions in matter, but he believes that it does despite the powerful intuition that there's something more to us than just the material aspect of our nature. He even acknowledges that his belief in materialism is a "leap of faith":

I am a neuroscientist and so 99% of the time I behave like a materialist, acknowledging that the mind is real but fully dependent on the brain. But we don’t actually know this. We really don’t. We assume our sense of will is a causal result of the neurochemical processes in our brain, but this is a leap of faith.

Perhaps the brain is something like a complex radio receiver that integrates consciousness signals that float around in some form. Perhaps one part of the visual cortex is important for decoding the bandwidth that contains motion consciousness and another part of the brain is critical to decoding the bandwith that contains our will. So damage to brain regions may alter our ability to express certain kinds of conscious experience rather than being the causal source of consciousness itself.

I don’t actually believe the radio metaphor of the brain, but I think something like it could account for all of our findings. Its unfalsifiable which is a big no-no in science. But so is the materialist view — its also unfalsifiable. We simply don’t know how to reverse engineer consciousness. Saying that the complexity of the brain explains why we are conscious is just an article of faith — it doesn’t explain anything. We don’t know why our brains are associated with conscious experience and nothing else in the universe besides brains seems to be.

If we acknowledge just how much we don’t know about the conscious mind, perhaps we would be a bit more humble. We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good. So we will go on acting like free-willing creatures no matter what. Its what we're built to do.

Reflect for a moment on how much one must deny in order to avoid the conclusion that we are something more than just a lump of protoplasm. We must deny the overwhelming sense that we make free choices and that we are responsible for those choices. We must also deny the powerful intuition that we have a conscious mind that is something other than the brain with which it is integrated. We must deny this in order to maintain belief in a metaphysical position which is not, as Leiberman points out, scientific, which is strongly counterintuitive, and which must be accepted not because there's evidence for it but purely on faith.

It's true, of course, that free will and conscious minds are illusions if materialism is correct, but how do we know materialism is correct? We don't. Materialists, as Leiberman admits, simply believe it by faith, and they do so, in my opinion, largely because to acknowledge the existence of a mind is to acknowledge a key element in the worldview of Christian theism, a step they're loath to take.

That'd be their business, of course, except that so many of them - unlike Lieberman - insist on telling those who believe these powerful intuitions exist in us precisely because they correspond to reality, that they're irrational.

In order to sustain their materialism the materialist has to deny what everything in their experience is telling them is true, and then they try to persuade us that the worldview which most comfortably accommodates and explains this experience, Christian theism, is a non-rational and superstitious alternative.

It's very odd.

What's Not to Like?

Gary Jason is a philosopher and a senior editor of Liberty. In an essay at American Thinker he reviews the state of play between the EPA and the natural gas industry. He writes that after concerted attempts to limit or stop the use of fracking technology to drill for gas, the EPA seems to be backing off their earlier opposition. Here are a few of the important points he makes in the essay:

[The EPA] has withdrawn its lawsuit against Range Resources Corporation wherein, it had alleged that the company was polluting water wells near Fort Worth, Texas. Moreover, the EPA will now retest water in Wyoming about which it had earlier raised questions.

Add to this the fact that the Agency has tested well water in Pennsylvania, once found to be polluted, and now (like the state's own similar agency) declares the water to be safe, and you begin to sense that the EPA is being forced to retreat from its ... opposition to the new technology.

One good sign is that the extremist environmentalist groups are beginning to come down hard on the EPA, long considered an agency that belonged to them.

What is emerging here is a consensus among scientists that to the extent that gas from fracking gets into a water supply -- and that is relatively rare as it is -- the cause is not the fracking itself (i.e., the injection of water, sand, and small amounts of chemicals into shale to release the gas), but rather wells that are not properly constructed.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection recently worked with Chesapeake Energy to come up with a greatly improved well design....Chesapeake agreed to those improvements (which increase the drilling costs per well by about 10%, or half a million dollars) after one of its wells leaked natural gas into the water supply. But it is important to note that the leakage in this one well occurred before any fracking had been done.

Add to this the realization that the production of natural gas made possible by fracking should actually reduce atmospheric greenhouse gasses and it seems as if it would be environmentally foolish to stop it.

How does fracking reduce CO2? Jason explains: Fracking (and horizontal drilling) have led to a massive increase in the production of domestic natural gas, driving the prices dramatically down. In fact, from 2008 to the present, the price of natural gas has plummeted over 80% from $12 to $2.30 per million Btus (MMBtu). This has led to natural gas being used to generate power formerly generated by coal-fired plants, and burning natural gas emits less CO2 than does burning coal.

Summing up, Jason writes:

Fracking is ecologically safe, helps America achieve energy independence, provides great-paying jobs for blue-collar workers in an era of seemingly endless rates of high unemployment, and lowers greenhouse gas emissions.

If the first part of that really is true, and there are those who contest it even if the EPA is no longer among them, then what's not to like about it?

Well, it seems that the Obama administration is still not convinced.

Breaking News: Philosophy Doesn't Exist

Following the lead of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who claim to have demonstrated that God almost certainly doesn't exist, a pair of Copenhagen philosophers have constructed a proof that philosophy doesn't exist either. You can read the report that has rocked the academic world here.

Just for the sake of cheap titillation I'll share with you the lede:

Two philosophers based in Denmark have apparently come up with a proof that shows that philosophy doesn’t exist and their discovery is rocking the philosophical community. For centuries, philosophy has been at the core of just about every discipline and has provided a foundation for most of Western thought. From Plato to Kripke, philosophers have been tackling the universe’s toughest problems. But in 2012 Dr. Soren Filosht and another thinker who wants to be known only as “Dagmar” have developed a complex argument that ostensibly shows that philosophy is merely the product of wishful thinking and has no basis in reality.

The two Danes are arguing that disciplines like metaphysics and epistemology are a crutch that the weak-minded have used to better understand the world, and their proof casts serious doubt on whether these things actually exist. “It’s necessarily true that everything is just real and reality consists of properties, relations, sets, and facts and you can study them. No metaphysics required.” claims Dagmar.

Epistemology, too, is a chimera and these thinkers are calling on all philosophers to give it up. “Look, we just know stuff. If you are justified in believing a statement is true, then you know it. People who believe they’re doing ‘epistemology’ just confuse the matter and the sooner they come to believe that, the better off we’ll all be.”

They developed their proof while sampling the wide variety of local plant life in Christiana (a small community inside of Copenhagen). As with most discoveries of this kind, they weren’t looking for it. They were functioning as working philosophers developing a paper that attempted to show that Kripke’s possible worlds have no basis in anything actual.

“We were close. Real close.” Dagmar recalls. “Then we got a brainwave, as if we were in some kind of psychotic hallucination.” Not only are possible worlds not actual, they hit upon the striking fact that philosophy itself isn’t real. “We kind of felt like modern-day Descarteses; we thought philosophy out of existence: cogito ergo non philosophia.” Filosht added, visibly shaken as he spoke.

"Visibly shaken" probably doesn't begin to describe what's being felt in humanities departments all across the world. Read the rest of this revolutionary achievement - an achievement to rival that of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al. - at the link.

Cohabiting

Meg Jay is a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now. In an essay in the New York Times she says that she neither favors nor opposes cohabitation, but couples should know that as a prelude to marriage it's fraught with hazards. Nor does it make divorce unlikely once the cohabiting couple does marry. In fact, it actually increases the chances that divorce will eventuate. She writes:

When Jennifer started therapy with me less than a year later, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married,” she sobbed. Most disheartening to Jennifer was that she’d tried to do everything right. “My parents got married young so, of course, they got divorced. We lived together! How did this happen?”

Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number is more than 7.5 million. The majority of young adults in their 20s will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation.

This shift has been attributed to the sexual revolution and the availability of birth control, and in our current economy, sharing the bills makes cohabiting appealing. But when you talk to people in their 20s, you also hear about something else: cohabitation as prophylaxis.

In a nationwide survey conducted in 2001 by the National Marriage Project, then at Rutgers and now at the University of Virginia, nearly half of 20-somethings agreed with the statement, “You would only marry someone if he or she agreed to live together with you first, so that you could find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds said they believed that moving in together before marriage was a good way to avoid divorce.

But that belief is contradicted by experience. Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect.

Much of the problem with cohabitation stems from the different ways in which it is viewed by women and men:

Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

Couples often feel they wasted years of their lives living with someone when their relationship would probably have ended after only a few months had they just been dating. The live-together relationship acquires a certain inertia due to what Jay calls setup and switching costs:

Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs. Living together can be fun and economical, and the setup costs are subtly woven in. After years of living among roommates’ junky old stuff, couples happily split the rent on a nice one-bedroom apartment. They share wireless and pets and enjoy shopping for new furniture together. Later, these setup and switching costs have an impact on how likely they are to leave.

Jennifer said she never really felt that her boyfriend was committed to her. “I felt like I was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife,” she said. “We had all this furniture. We had our dogs and all the same friends. It just made it really, really difficult to break up. Then it was like we got married because we were living together once we got into our 30s.”

There's more at the link. Any young person contemplating moving in with his or her significant other ought to read it. It'll at least help to have one's eyes open when one makes the move. It'll also help to know that couples shouldn't expect living together to strengthen their relationship. It may, but based on statistics, it probably won't.

Out of Touch

Supporters of President Obama are frequently heard making the claim that Mitt Romney is "out of touch" with the average American. He has been insulated by his wealth from the sorts of concerns and exigencies faced by middle class Americans, they say.

Well, perhaps this is true, but it sounds awfully strange coming from people who are striving to reelect a man who spent much of his childhood in distinctly unAmerican Indonesia and then in Hawaii, who spent his college years in the insular cocoon of ivy league schools, who then taught law students at the university level, and who worked as a community organizer dealing mostly with inner city poor. From there he was catapulted into the state legislature, then into the U.S. Senate, and finally into the White House.

So, when in his adult life has Mr. Obama rubbed elbows with middle class Americans? What does he know of their values and problems? How is he any more "in touch" with average people than is Mitt Romney? He's never worked a blue-collar job. He's never sent his kids to a public school. He's never had to meet a payroll. He's probably never had to worry about making a mortgage payment.

There's nothing wrong with any of this, of course, but there is something wrong with one of the most out of touch presidents in modern history having his surrogates fault his opponent for being out of touch with average Americans.

Tax the Rich

CNBC's financial analyst Rick Santelli expresses quiet doubt (I'm kidding) that raising taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" as the president keeps insisting we do will do any good at all:

I suggest that anyone who wants others to pay higher taxes should be asked whether they themselves take any of the deductions to which they're legally entitled. If they do, then they should be asked why they do. There's something hypocritical about saying on the one hand that we should all be willing to pay more tax to the government and on the other ensuring that one pays as little tax as he can.

Warren Buffet, the multibillionaire who complained that his secretary pays at a higher rate than he does and urged that the wealthy be required to pay more than they do, is a good example of this hypocrisy. Buffet is ten years delinquent in his own tax obligation, he owes the IRS a billion dollars, and he's fighting them to keep from having to pay it. What a guy.

Closing of the American Mind at 25

Those of a certain age and intellectual appetite might remember the amazing stir caused in 1987 by the publication of professor Allan Bloom's devastating critique of modernity titled The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom set out in the book to chronicle the demise of American higher education and culture and to lament the relativism that had seeped into every interstice of the modern American university.

His critique led to howls of execration from humanities professors whose toes he stepped upon, but surprisingly, Americans (and others) bought his book in prodigious quantities, making him, by the time of his death five years later, a very wealthy man.

Even so, despite the popular reception of his cultural indictment, not much has changed. The charges he leveled against American education in 1987, seem in many ways to be just as valid today.

Now his publisher, Simon and Schuster, is releasing a 25th anniversary edition of Closing and Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard observes the occasion by offering an essay on Bloom, the reception of his book, and the themes it addressed. Here's an excerpt from early on in Ferguson's fine retrospective:

It’s useful to recall the world Bloom and his book broke into and riled so. In material ways, the United States of America of 1987 seems as remote as Republican Rome. Our national wealth has more than tripled in the last 25 years. The digital revolution, with its upending of commerce, communication, and the habits and patterns of everyday life, was just getting underway.

Music lovers delighted in the portability and convenience of their book-sized Walkmans, never imagining the tiny wonders they would be slipping into their shirt pockets a decade hence. Cars, on the other hand, seem to have been roughly half their present size, at least in memory. You couldn’t carry around a telephone unless you yanked it off the wall. Atari was as sophisticated as gaming systems came. And nobody used the words “gaming system.”

Culturally, the country fretted. Culturally, of course, all countries, or some segments of them, are always fretting, and have been doing so since Cicero grieved, “O tempora, O mores,” up to and beyond Yeats’s insistence that the center cannot hold. But by the end of the 1980s in the United States, there were numbers to underscore the worry. In the previous 30 years, violent crime had increased 500 percent, the divorce rate had doubled, the teen suicide rate had tripled, and the number of “illegitimate births” (this was the last era when you could use the term) had increased 400 percent.

Beyond the numbers, the worriers readily found signs of the culture’s degradation, if not its imminent collapse. On TV, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael had introduced a new kind of freak show that would have been unthinkable a decade before and proved enormously popular, banishing modesty and discretion, making a virtue of exhibitionism, inviting adulterers and wifebeaters and cross-dressers to strut their hour upon the stage set. (Eerie fact: Exactly nine months after Closing’s publication date, Snooki Polizzi was born.)

Popular fiction chronicled a generation of pampered youth lost to anomie and cocaine. As the Iran-contra scandal shook the executive branch, pundits discovered among the people a loss of faith in their institutions. A devastating crash on Wall Street was credited to greed unchecked by law or moral obligation.

And as if all that weren’t sufficient cause for alarm, consider this: Madonna.

Here's another:

He asked readers to consider contemporary students as he encountered them. They arrived ill-equipped to explore the large questions the humanities pose, and few saw the need to bother with them in any case. Instead, he said, they were cheerful, unconcerned, dutiful, and prosaic, their eyes on the prize of that cushy job. They were “nice.” You can almost see him shudder as he writes the word. “They are united only in their relativism,” he wrote. “The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate.”

Relativism, in fact, was the only moral postulate that went unchallenged in academic life. Defenders of relativism often defend it by denying it exists: No one, they say, truly believes that one idea is ultimately as good as another. And of course they’re right that none of us in our own lives act as though we believed this. But most of us profess it nonetheless, especially if we’ve got a college education, in which case we will be careful to use air quotes when we are forced to say the word “truth” in polite company.

In a genial but harrowing review of Closing, a professor at Carleton College, Michael Zuckert, told of canvassing the students in his class on American political thought. He asked whether they agreed that the truths in the first lines of the Declaration of Independence were indeed “self-evident.” Seven percent voted “yes.” On further conversation, he wrote, it turned out “that they were convinced there is no such thing as ‘truth,’ self-evident or otherwise, in the sphere of claims of the sort raised in the Declaration.” He would have gotten the same response in almost any college classroom today, and I’m not too sure about the 7 percent.

What follows when a belief in objectivity and truth dies away in higher education? In time an educated person comes to doubt that purpose and meaning are discoverable​—​he doubts, finally, that they even exist. It’s no mystery why fewer and fewer students in higher education today bother with the liberal arts, preferring professional training in their place.

Deprived of their traditional purpose in the pursuit of what’s true and good, the humanities could only founder. The study of literature, for example, was consumed in the trivialities of the deconstructionists and their successors. Philosophy curdled into positivism and word play. History became an inventory of political grievances....

I strongly urge those unfamiliar with Closing to first read Ferguson's piece at the Weekly Standard for background and then get a hold of a copy of the new edition. It's worth it.

Thomas Nagel and the Inadequacy of Materialism

Thomas Nagel is a prominent philosopher who once wrote that he didn't want God to exist. It wasn't just that he didn't believe that God existed, it was that he didn't want God to exist. Stern stuff, but despite that earlier sentiment he seems recently, perhaps, to have taken a step closer to changing his mind. He's now arguing that materialism is a philosophically inadequate and sterile metaphysics and that there must be something more to evolutionary history and cosmology than just physics.

This will be seen by many of his fellow atheists as a scandalous betrayal, leading as it does to intimations of the Divine, but he feels so strongly about it that he's written a soon-to-be-released book on the topic. The volume is titled Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False and is published by Oxford University Press. Nagel argues in the book, inter alia, that materialism simply cannot explain the phenomena of consciousness.

Here's the publisher's blurb:

In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.

Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history.

An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one.

The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.

I think it's fair to sum up the implications of Nagel's thinking with a simple syllogism:

1. Either the universe is ultimately the product of mind or it is solely the product of natural forces acting on matter.
2. It is not solely the product of natural forces acting upon matter (Nagel's argument).
3. Therefore, the universe is ultimately the product of mind.

If this is indeed the conclusion toward which Nagel is listing a lot of New Atheists will be sorely vexed.

Racism and Double Standards

When Washington, D.C. Councilman Marion Barry offered his opinion recently that Asian shopkeepers should get out of D.C. the racial geiger counters in the liberal media registered hardly a click. Perhaps that's because although most of the racist rhetoric nowadays, particularly the most vicious forms of it, is coming from the (Listen to this if you can stomach the hatred) black community it's not politically correct to make a big deal of it, and besides everybody's pretty much grown accustomed to it.

Here's what Barry said:

We got to do something about these Asians coming in and opening up businesses and dirty shops. They ought to go. I’m going to say that right now. But we need African-American businesspeople to be able to take their places, too.

It's only when a white, preferably a Republican, makes a relatively mild or innocuous comment like Trent Lott made in comforting Strom Thurmond, the former segregationist, on his 100th birthday that he'd have made a great president, or when George Allen refers to a swarthy Middle-eastern heckler as "macaca", or when a "white Hispanic" who's getting his head bashed against the concrete shoots his black attacker, that the progressive left and the race-hustlers go ballistic.

When the former D.C. mayor says he wants Asians out of the black community so that blacks can take over their businesses, that's scarcely worth a comment on the evening talk shows. Does Barry really think that if Asians leave his neighborhood that their businesses will be taken over by African-Americans? Why are there so few African-American businesses now in a community that's almost 95% black?

Barry laments that shopkeepers and restauranteurs in D.C. have been first Jews, then Italians, and now Asians, but why haven't African-Americans stepped up and started businesses of their own? What's stopping them? Racism? That excuse is getting very tired, very fast.

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On a perhaps not completely unrelated note this video describes some amazing advances in biotechnology:

What does the video have to do with Marion Barry's racism? Well, Ada Poon, the scientist featured in the video, the scientist who is developing a technology that may someday save Marion Barry's life, appears to be an Asian. I wonder what Mr. Barry thinks about that.

Animals Are People, Too

Wesley Smith writes an article in The Weekly Standard that describes the ongoing effort to secure human rights for animals, or more specifically to get animals treated under the law as persons. Here are a few excerpts:

For years, animal rights activists have been preparing the intellectual ground to overcome the “animals aren’t persons” legal impediment to their goal of allowing animals to sue their owners—a concept known as “animal standing”—by which they plan to destroy animal industries and eventually end all domestication of animals. They know that no legislature will pass laws elevating even the most intelligent animals to the status of persons. So they plan to file multitudinous lawsuits, hoping judges will bootstrap animals into the moral community.

It has already started. The European Court of Human Rights agreed in 2008 to hear the appeal of an Austrian Supreme Court ruling denying personhood to a chimp. More such cases could soon be filed in the United States. Law professor and animal rights activist Steven Wise was quoted in the New York Times recently promising to file lawsuits starting in 2013 with the goal of using “the latest science to help persuade state court judges that such creatures as whales and chimpanzees should be accorded common law personhood and rights.”

It would be easy to roll one’s eyes and dismiss this as simply what radical lawyers do, to little effect. That would be a mistake. “Animal personhood” has become a respected idea in philosophy, the life sciences, the academy generally, and among some within the highly politicized science establishment.

But animal personhood is a real and present threat. Indeed, as Wise has written, it would only take one judge ambitious to make history to open the floodgates of litigation, first demanding inclusion of ever more animals in legal personhood, and from there, granting those animal persons standing to sue their owners for violations of their fundamental rights.

The lawyers who would take those cases are ready and waiting for the judicial go-ahead, their legal briefs already written. For years, professors have been busily training students in animal law courses and seminars at more than 100 of America’s top law schools, preparing an army of legal minds for the day they can represent whales, dolphins, chimps, elephants, pigs, and other animal “clients” in court.

I couldn't help wondering, as I read this, whether once animals are given the same rights as persons there will be prisons for animals which kill or steal from each other. Will entire species be considered irredeemably vicious and thus either exterminated or imprisoned? Will animals be entitled to health care? Will surrogates be appointed to cast votes on their behalf?

Mostly, though, I wondered why these people are trying so hard to extend personhood to animals but not to unborn humans? Did they file amicus briefs in those states which tried to pass personhood laws that would protect the unborn under the Fifth Amendment?

But set all that aside. The personhood for animals movement makes a certain amount of sense in a post-Christian world. After all, traditionally the only reason human beings had for thinking that they were qualitatively distinct from animals was that human beings were believed to be created in the image of God and animals weren't. There was an ontological chasm between mankind and animals that separated us from each other, but as that view faded in the 19th and 20th century enthusiasm for Darwinian materialism the chasm narrowed to a ditch and then pretty much disappeared altogether.

Perhaps the crucial blow was struck by Desmond Morris in the 1960s with his book titled The Naked Ape. Man, Morris argued, is nothing more than an ape without all the hair. That being the case there's no reason, at least in the minds of the secular elites, for not conferring legal rights upon animals.

Once we embark down the road of a secular, materialist vision of man there's no end to the absurdities we find ourselves logically compelled to accept.

Photo ID

States all across the country are trying to impose voter photo ID laws to protect the integrity of the voting process. The Obama administration in general, and Attorney General Eric Holder in particular, have argued that such laws are unnecessary, that there's no evidence of voter fraud occurring in the U.S., that photo ID laws are a solution in search of a problem.

After this video of a bit of surreptitious investigative journalism by James O'Keefe, I'm not so sure. O'Keefe presents himself to the poll worker and asks if they have a registration under the name of Eric Holder. Watch the rest, his "goodbye" line is clever:

It's ironic, as the video shows at the end, that the Department of Justice is fighting efforts to require photo ID for voters, but they require photo ID to gain admission to their office building.

The Talk

John Derbyshire was until recently a writer for the conservative journal National Review. He is an atheist and a Darwinian (the significance of which I'll explain below) which is unusual among political conservatives, and he was recently fired for writing a racially insensitive column based on "The Talk" that a number of African-Americans are saying that they have at some point with their children.

"The Talk" could be construed to be racially offensive to whites, in my opinion, but few commentators seem to want to say that out loud. Derbyshire was an exception. He satirized "The Talk" by writing down advice he has given to his own children over the years.

Some of what he said was wise, some of it was simply sociological fact, but some of it was seen as unfair, inaccurate, and gratuitously insulting to blacks, and for that he was fired. I'll leave it to you to read his essay and judge it for yourself. For my part, I'd like to focus on an aspect of it that no one else has remarked upon, at least so far as I am aware.

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that Derbyshire was indeed motivated by racial animus and eager to insult blacks qua blacks. Let's suppose that he really is a racist. If one is an atheistic Darwinian like Derbyshire why would one think that there was anything wrong with that? Darwin himself believed that blacks were an inferior race and as we've argued here on numerous occasions atheism entails moral nihilism, the idea that there is no right or wrong.

In other words, there's nothing wrong with racism unless there's an obligation binding each of us to love our neighbor, i.e. to treat him with dignity, respect and kindness, but there can only be such a duty if there's a transcendent moral authority who imposes it. Since, on Derbyshire's metaphysical presuppositions, there is no such authority, neither he nor anyone who shares those presuppositions can say that he was wrong to say what he said, or to think what he thinks. The most that can be said is that he violated some social taboo, but what's wrong with that?

Put simply, unless there is a Divine law-giver who imposes upon us the duty to treat each other the way we want to be treated then there's no basis whatsoever for saying that racism is wrong. One may find racial bigotry distasteful, of course, just as one may find the thought of eating dog food distasteful, but it's not morally wrong.

Thus, when an atheist pontificates about the evils of racism he's just blowing hot air. Only a theist has any grounds for saying that racism is evil.

Whether Derbyshire really is a racist or whether he's just a contrarian who refuses to truckle to the politically correct pieties of our age, I can't say, but it's hard to imagine a black writer being fired for writing similar things about whites, and it's hard to imagine, in any event, why secularist progressives would be outraged at what Derbyshire wrote even if they are racist.

Parental Warning

Paul Pardi at Philosophy News features this poster warning parents of alarming studies that find that one in five kids will experiment with philosophy.

Parents - be sure you're able to recognize the warning signs:

Suppressing Dissent

Diversity is important, any modern progressive academic will tell you, and every university should aim to have a faculty that has a mix of genders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. It's important to liberals to expose themselves and others to a wide variety of different perspectives, at least it is unless the variety of perspectives includes unacceptable religious or political views. At that point lines need to be drawn.

A university will bend over backward to ensure they have all genders and races, gays, transvestites, transsexuals, vegans and pagans on their faculty, but if a highly qualified candidate for employment is manifestly Christian and/or conservative, well, diversity must not be carried too far. At least, that's the lesson this female law professor has learned:

Teresa Wagner, who works as an associate director of writing at the University of Iowa College of Law, is suing former dean Carolyn Jones for employment discrimination, claiming she was not hired for a professor position because Jones and other law faculty disapproved of her conservative views and activism.

Wagner, who graduated with honors from the law school in 1993, has taught at the George Mason University School of Law. She has also worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion, and the conservative Family Research Council.

In 2006, Wagner applied for a full-time instructor position with the law school and was denied. She was also rejected for an adjunct or full-time position in four subsequent attempts, according to her attorney, Stephen T. Fieweger.

Fieweger said Wagner's candidacy was dismissed because of her conservative views, and he cited a 2007 email from Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson to Jones in which Carlson wrote: "Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it)."

There's more on the story at the link. It's astonishing that liberals are so concerned about diversity in matters of race, gender, and sexual orientation, but diversity of thought and opinion they despise. They're very concerned about justice, but their concern extends only to justice for people who think like themselves. Justice for conservatives is not high on their list of priorities, at least not at Iowa University College of Law.

It's a very small-minded frame of mind, but it shows itself so often where liberals are in positions of power that it seems that it's more than just ideological blindness. Dissent in liberal precincts is considered good and noble only when it is liberals who are dissenting from traditional pieties and orthodoxies. When conservatives assail the dogmas of liberalism the unfortunate deviants can expect to be cast out into outer darkness, and the irony is that the people doing the casting out fancy themselves to be enlightened champions of free speech and free thought.

God's Battalions

In your high school world history classes you may have been taught that the Crusades were an unprovoked assault on peaceful Muslims carried out by a greedy European church and aristocracy in order to plunder and pillage. You may also have been taught that the Crusaders were brutal barbarians who, though usually outclassed by a superior foe, often managed to massacre highly cultured, tolerant Muslims whose armies fought only to defend themselves, their lands, and their religion. Perhaps you also learned that it's the bitter memory of those Crusades that fuels modern Islamic resentments toward the West.

That's the narrative that has dominated Western education for a century and it's the narrative perpetuated by films like Kingdom of Heaven and by the media in the wake of 9/11, but as historian Rodney Stark argues in God's Battalions, none of it is true.

In his book, which often reads like a novel, Stark documents the provocations which led to the Crusades, how for four hundred years Muslims had attacked, killed, raped, and enslaved Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land and slaughtered Christian populations in cities that had been Christian from the earliest days of the church. Muslim armies swept across North Africa, conquering Italy, Sicily, and much of Spain, putting tens of thousands to the sword and enslaving women and children. Mohammed himself was responsible for the mass beheadings of 700 Jews in Medina who were first made to dig their own graves.

(This is not to say that the Crusaders were not also guilty of atrocities. German forces slaughtered Jews in the Rhineland at the outset of the first and second Crusades despite the frantic effort of Catholic bishops to save the victims.)

During the Crusades themselves Muslim troops, despite having superior numbers and the advantage of short supply lines, were rarely a match for the technologically superior Crusaders. The Europeans won almost every engagement against their Islamic foes, and were ultimately defeated, after over 200 years of protecting the Holy Lands, not because of Muslim skill and tactics but because people in Europe grew weary of sustaining the expense necessary to field an army so far from home.

The movie Kingdom of Heaven portrays the Europeans defending Jerusalem as largely thuggish savages and the Muslims under Saladin as compassionate and merciful. The facts are otherwise. Saladin was a ruthless killer responsible for numerous massacres both before and after his victory at Jerusalem, a victory due largely to the fact that the city was defended by only two knights and a multitude of untrained refugees and other "civilians".

It was the custom at the time that if a city surrendered without the besieging army having to take it by force, the defenders would be given safe passage. The defenders of Jerusalem requested such terms and Saladin granted them. He allowed about half of the inhabitants to pay a ransom and leave unmolested, but not because he was particularly chivalrous. Indeed, he enslaved about half of those who couldn't afford the price. Moreover, at the battle of Hattin he looked on with glee as his underlings took turns beheading captured Crusader knights, and even participated himself in the butchery.

If you enjoy reading history I highly recommend God's Battalions. Not only does it illuminate important events and dispel numerous myths about the Crusades, it's also a very enjoyable, even fascinating, read.

Easter and the Modern Mind

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

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false. Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

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

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

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

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if molecules of hot water are added to a pot of molecules of cold water the molecules will tend to eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water is a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules on one occasion to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

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

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

For example, modern atheists have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident. They ground their belief in these things on their conviction that there are an infinite number of different universes and in an infinite number of worlds even highly improbable events are bound to happen.

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

Extensive time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. There's no evidence of other worlds, unfortunately, but part of the faith commitment of the modern atheist is to hold that they must exist. The atheist clings to this conviction because if these things aren't so then life and the universe must have a personal rather than a scientific explanation and that discovery would produce a metaphysical shock to his psyche.

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

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

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

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead. His real problem is with the claim that God deliberately raised this man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't say that because in order to justify such a claim they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is improbable, and that they cannot do.

If, though, one is willing to assume that there are an infinite number of universes out there in order to explain the properties of our universe, why would he have trouble accepting that there's a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead? After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

Constitutional Scholar

I was just remarking the other day that I thought it was peculiar that few if any former students of the president, as far as I knew, had come forward to talk about his professorial talents and to describe their impressions of him as both a teacher and a man. Lo and behold, today I came across this piece, written by a former law student of President Obama's named Thom Lambert.

Lambert voices his embarrassment at the president's recent remarks in which he seemed to be saying that it would be an unprecedented instance of judicial overreach if the Supreme Court were to strike down the Affordable Care Act.

Here's Lambert:

Imagine if you picked up your morning paper to read that one of your astronomy professors had publicly questioned whether the earth, in fact, revolves around the sun. Or suppose that one of your economics professors was quoted as saying that consumers would purchase more gasoline if the price would simply rise. Or maybe your high school math teacher was publicly insisting that 2 + 2 = 5. You’d be a little embarrassed, right? You’d worry that your colleagues and friends might begin to question your astronomical, economic, or mathematical literacy.

Now you know how I felt this morning when I read in the Wall Street Journal that my own constitutional law professor had stated that it would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the Supreme Court to “overturn[] a law [i.e., the Affordable Care Act] that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Putting aside the “strong majority” nonsense (the deeply unpopular Affordable Care Act got through the Senate with the minimum number of votes needed to survive a filibuster and passed 219-212 in the House), saying that it would be “unprecedented” and “extraordinary” for the Supreme Court to strike down a law that violates the Constitution is like saying that Kansas City is the capital of Kansas.

Thus, a Wall Street Journal editorial queried this about the President who “famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago”: “[D]id he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison?”

I don't know which is more remarkable, that Mr. Obama, a "constitutional scholar," would make such an absurd claim or that we now have proof that he actually did teach classes in constitutional law at U. of Chicago.

Flawed Science

Recent sociological studies have found that those who regard themselves as politically or religiously conservative are increasingly lacking confidence in science. When I first heard this I didn't think the assessment was quite accurate. Few people lack confidence in science, I thought, but a lot of people do lack confidence in the objectivity of scientists. Now, after reading this article, I'd have to add that there's perhaps good reason to lack confidence in their professional integrity as well. Here's why I say that:

A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"It was shocking," said Begley, now senior vice president of privately held biotechnology company TetraLogic, which develops cancer drugs. "These are the studies the pharmaceutical industry relies on to identify new targets for drug development. But if you're going to place a $1 million or $2 million or $5 million bet on an observation, you need to be sure it's true. As we tried to reproduce these papers we became convinced you can't take anything at face value."

Begley's experience echoes a report from scientists at Bayer AG last year. Neither group of researchers alleges fraud, nor would they identify the research they had tried to replicate. But they and others fear the phenomenon is the product of a skewed system of incentives that has academics cutting corners to further their careers.

Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full time for up to a year. Bayer dropped the projects.

Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies. "We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure," said Begley. "I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they'd done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It's very disillusioning." Such selective publication is just one reason the scientific literature is peppered with incorrect results.

On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent.

Ferric Fang of the University of Washington, speaking to the panel, said he blamed a hypercompetitive academic environment that fosters poor science and even fraud, as too many researchers compete for diminishing funding. "The surest ticket to getting a grant or job is getting published in a high-profile journal," said Fang. "This is an unhealthy belief that can lead a scientist to engage in sensationalism and sometimes even dishonest behavior."

Setting aside the irresistible but frivolous observation that Ferric Fang (Iron Tooth) sounds like the name of a villain in a James Bond movie, one has to wonder whether this same lack of rigor and care Fang describes infects areas of science beyond cancer and drug research. How reliable are the studies in, say, climate science or those regarding the hazards of fracking?

After all, when one reads that climatologists are saying things like Mike Hulme is reported to have said it certainly makes it hard to believe that they're committed to following the evidence wherever it may lead or that any research results they come up with are trustworthy:

Mike Hulme, a professor of climate change, explains, “The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. … It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change … to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic, and personal projects over the decades to come.”

So, at least for Hulme—who in addition to his influential work with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a high-ranking professor at the University of East Anglia (of Climategate emails fame)—global warming “science” is not essentially about science but politics. Then science becomes not about seeking to understand and control our world, but about activism and controlling our neighbors.

If the ideal of the disinterested researcher whose chief ambition is to discover the truth is becoming obsolete why should anyone be anything but skeptical about anything scientists tell us, especially when politics and ideology are involved?

Odd Logic

Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss starts off an essay in the LA Times by writing this:

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the world was designed so that we could flourish.

Purpose and design in the universe are illusions, Krauss would have us believe, but he offers no proof, or even any evidence, that such a sweeping metaphysical claim is true. He just asserts it as though he were stating a fact that everyone already knows to be true.

Later in the column, however, he writes this:

Does all of this prove that our universe and the laws that govern it arose spontaneously without divine guidance or purpose? No, but it means it is possible.

Well, everything that doesn't entail a contradiction is possible, even if only in the sense that it's possible to draw a royal flush a hundred times in a row purely by chance. It's possible, in the same way that the series of royal flushes is possible, that the universe arose without any divine guidance or purpose, but Krauss wants us to accept something much stronger than the mere logical possibility of an unguided creation of the cosmos.

He wants to argue that because it's possible that the universe formed with no intelligent input that therefore it must have happened. Why else would he conclude that the belief that the universe is designed is an illusion? It can only be an illusion if we know that there is no design or purpose to it, and, he seems to be asserting, we know there is no design or purpose because we know it's possible that there's no design or purpose.

It's a little like arguing that because it's possible that natural processes like wind, rain, and erosion could someday produce a replica of Mt. Rushmore that therefore it's likely that they will, and if it's likely that they will, then it's a guaranteed certainty that they will. And if you ever come across a Mt. Rushmore-like formation somewhere you must keep in mind that the appearance of design and purpose you see there must be an illusion because it's possible that they are illusions.

The leap from mere possibility to absolute certainty is an extraordinary accomplishment and one of which Krauss is doubtless proud, but for those of us who don't inhabit the rarified academic altitudes where cosmologists dwell it seems kind of bizarre.

It's also self-defeating. After all, following Krauss' example we can and should conclude that the universe is, in fact, intelligently designed. Consider: Since it's possible that the universe is intentionally designed by an intelligent agent, and, following Kraussian logic, since whatever is possible must actually be the case, the universe must be intelligently designed. QED.

Who would've thought that proving intelligent design could be so easy?

de Botton's Unfortunate Reception

Alain de Botton proposed in his book Religion for Atheists that culture should be made the new sacrament. We talked about his proposal a couple of days ago, but in the wake of the publication of his book there's been an interesting, though not surprising, reaction from his fellow atheists.

De Botton, not understanding the mindset of those religious folk educated enough to have been likely to read his book, expected them to react with contumely. That didn't happen, of course. Few intelligent religious people are upset by the arguments of atheists which they usually find unpersuasive, uniformed, and sophomoric. What did happen, however, was that de Botton has been vilified by his fellow atheists.

Here are some excerpts from de Botton's account of his unpleasant encounter with his atheist colleagues:

When I was writing my book, Religion for Atheists, I suspected that I might make enemies at both extremes of the spectrum, among firm believers and firm atheists. My book was doing a slightly unusual thing, being sympathetic to aspects of religion while resolutely denying the existence of God or any supernatural dimensions to existence.

What I couldn’t have predicted was which group of opponents would react most fiercely. But it’s now evident that it’s the atheists have won the race by far. While ostensibly speaking up in the name of plurality, free speech and tolerance, a small group of well-organised atheists have launched a concerted campaign of the kind not seen since John Gray last published a book. It’s not my book itself that bothers them, it’s the entire area that I’m covering.

As in the case of Gray, they simply don’t want anyone to show tolerance to bodies which they feel, in the famous words of Christopher Hitchens, poison “everything”. And despite their distaste for religions, they mirror – with uncanny precision – all the very worst tactics of their opponents: a refusal to engage in calm dialogue, ad hominem attacks, a desire to denigrate reputations at all costs and a lack of civility or forgiveness.

I have received hopes for my early and painful demise and stacks of hate mail of a kind I haven’t had since I appeared on Newsnight in 2006 and spoke up for the right of the existence of a Jewish homeland.

His claim that religious people act the way he alleges they do may be true on the fringes, but it's certainly not true of sophisticated, well-educated believers. It is true, however, of sophisticated, well-educated unbelievers. No one who has had the pleasure of reading New Atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, P.Z. Myers, et al. will be surprised at the reaction de Botton has suffered.

People have repeatedly claimed that it’s unfair to label militant atheists like Richard Dawkins “aggressive”. They are in fact – apparently – just very well meaning tolerant people laying out an argument with the help of reason and science. It’s their opponents who label them destructive in an attempt to denigrate them.

I wish I could believe this was true, I started off believing this, but Dawkins clearly stands at the head of a well-funded, well-disciplined movement that aims systematically to smear its opponents in an attempt to assert its vision of atheism. It seems lamentable just how intolerant contemporary atheism has become towards anything or anyone associated with religion.

It’s one thing not to believe, quite another to think that those who do believe or even show an interest in belief are betraying the cause and must be excommunicated from the fold.

The New Atheists are the jihadis in the contemporary war against religious belief. Their vituperation and offensiveness has been their trademark for at least the last fifteen years. Where has de Botton been?

A Meditation on Good Friday

Some time ago we did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya at another blog. I thought that as we approach Good Friday it might be worth running the post again, slightly edited.

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

She wrote:

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

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

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the wonderful city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow. Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that should be good enough.

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

The king, distraught beyond words, told the prince the horrible news.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warming Oceans and Sick Skeptics

Last week we mentioned a study that showed that the Medieval Warming Period which had heretofore been thought to have been a local phenomenon was in fact global in extent and was thus an example of serious warming that could not have been caused by human activity, given the time period in which it occurred. Now Live Science reports on another study that shows that the world's oceans have been warming for at least 135 years, more than twice as long as previously thought and suggesting that ocean warming began independently of human activity.

The report also notes that warming oceans are responsible for the rise in sea level around the globe because warm water is less dense than colder water. The article makes no mention of melting ice as a source of this rise. In other words, despite fears that warmer temperatures are causing polar and glacial ice to melt there seems to be no more water in the oceans today than in the past which seems paradoxical if global ice is in fact receding.

This is all irrelevant to people like professor Kari Norgaard, however, who opined last week that anyone who hasn't yet committed himself 100% to the view that humans are responsible for climate change is sick.

According to Ms Norgaard, a sociology and environmental studies professor at Oregon University, those who do not believe that global warming is real and is being caused by human existence are sick and need to be "treated."

Comparing global warming skepticism to racism, Professor Norgaard argued that "cultural resistance" to accepting human beings as being responsible for global warming "must be recognized and treated" as an aberrant sociological behavior.

Professor Norgaard is apparently oblivious to rule #1 of sound scientific theorizing, which is to hold one's hypotheses lightly and always be leery of any conclusions, tentative or otherwise, which run counter to the full body of evidence.

The professor seems already to have her mind made up, and when such people encounter others whose minds are not made up, or who ask uncomfortable questions, the time-tested tactic is to marginalize them by labeling them heretics or "sick".

Even though this ploy is very popular it reveals something unpleasant about the person who resorts to it. It's symptomatic of a deep insecurity concerning the beliefs the person is trying to defend. When one is confident that the facts are unambiguous in support of one's position one need not defame and slander those who disagree. One simply adduces the facts. When, however, one feels the need to employ insults and name-calling, it's usually because he or she is trying to mask a lack of confidence that their arguments are compelling.

Unleashing American Energy Production

Victor Davis Hanson explains the numerous advantages of drilling for domestic oil, something the Obama administration is unwilling to do:

The world was reinvented in the 1970s by soaring oil prices and massive transfers of national wealth. It could be again if the price of petroleum crashes — a real possibility given the amazing estimates about the new gas and oil reserves on the North American continent.

The Canadian tar sands, deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, horizontal drilling off the eastern and western American coastlines, fracking in once-untapped sites in North Dakota and new pipelines from Alaska and Canada could within a decade double North American gas and oil production.

Given that North America in general and the United States in particular might soon be completely autonomous in natural gas production and within a decade without much need of imported oil, life as we have known it for nearly the last half-century would change radically.

Take the Middle East. The U.S. currently devotes about $50 billion of its military budget to patrolling the Persian Gulf and stationing thousands of troops in the region.

But at a time of shrinking defense budgets, an oil-rich America might not need to protect Middle Eastern oil fields and lanes. U.S. foreign policy for once really could be predicated on the principle of supporting those nations that embrace constitutional government and human rights, without worry that offended dictators, theocrats and kings would turn off the spigots.

Curbing the voracious American appetite for imported oil could also help lower world petroleum prices for everyone. Poorer nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America would save billions of dollars on their imported-energy bills.

High-cost oil has warped the global system by rewarding luck and punishing accomplishment. Oil-poor countries that earned their wealth through hard work and innovation — China, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, for example — should be rewarded with reduced imported-energy costs, while those that became rich by having someone else find and develop the oil beneath their feet might find their windfalls reduced.

Americans tend to admire the earned wealth of China and Japan more than the accidental riches of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Without high-priced oil, Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are just neighborhood loudmouths rather than regional threats.

Unemployment here in the U.S. has not dipped below 5% since February 2008, during the last year of the Bush administration. But some estimates suggest that 3 million to 4 million jobs will follow from new gas and oil production alone.

That figure is aside from the greater employment that would accrue from reduced energy costs. Farmers, manufacturers and heavy industries could gain an edge on their overseas competitors, as everything from fertilizer and plastics to shipping and electrical power would become less expensive.

America is spending nearly a half-trillion dollars a year on imported oil — the greatest contributor to the massive annual U.S. trade deficit. We are also currently borrowing more than $1 trillion a year to finance chronic budget deficits, which in turn weaken the dollar and make oil imports even more expensive.

But without the drag of high-cost imported oil, the economy would grow more rapidly, and that could shrink both trade and budget deficits — lessening somewhat the need for spending cuts and new taxes.

Against all of this is the fear of environmentalists and the Obama administration that increasing oil production would increase the chance of an oil spill like the Deepwater Horizon accident and also postpone the day when we transition to green energy. In my view the advantages Hanson lists far outweigh the liabilities, and it's difficult to understand why the Obama administration does not think the same way.

Culture As the New Sacrament

Philosopher Alain de Botton, author of Religion for Atheists, extols the benefits of sacramental religion and suggests that the secular world would do well to imitate religion even if it rejects the basis for it. He proposes that culture could serve very well as an ersatz religion for those like him who've abandoned traditional forms of belief:

When religious belief began to fracture in Europe in the early nineteenth century, anguished questions were raised about how, in the absence of a Christian framework, people would manage to find meaning, understand themselves, behave in a moral fashion, forgive their fellow humans and confront their own mortality. And in answer, it was proposed by an influential faction that cultural works might henceforth be consulted in place of the biblical texts. Culture could replace scripture.

The hope was that culture might be no less effective than religion (which was understood to mean Christianity) in its ability to guide, humanise and console. Histories, paintings, philosophical ideas and fictional narratives could all be mined to yield lessons not far removed in their ethical tenor and emotional impact from those taught by the Bible. Moreover, such material would provide meaning unburdened by superstition.

The maxims of Marcus Aurelius, the poetry of Boccaccio, the operas of Wagner and the paintings of Turner could be secular society’s new sacraments.

Unfortunately for de Botton's thesis, the lessons of literature and philosophy are that life has no meaning, morality is an illusion, and human existence is pretty much "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The fruits of culture offer no hope if death is the end of conscious being, they offer no escape from the pain and despair of losing loved ones. That de Botton thinks they can make the meaningless meaningful is wishful thinking. It's as sad as it is futile.

Nevertheless, Professor de Botton soldiers on:

In his inaugural lecture at Oxford University in 1922, George Gordon, Merton Professor of Literature, emphasised the scale of the task that had fallen to his field: “England is sick, and …English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature now has a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.”

One problem for de Botton here is that according to his worldview there is no soul. Nor is anyone "sick", at least not in an existential sense. We're just material beings and we are what we are. There's nothing that anyone can do about it, least of all a bunch of novelists. Literature can only describe the human condition, it can offer no remedies. Indeed, if atheism is true there are no remedies for the human predicament. All that culture can prescribe to us is to try to live our lives as if they have meaning even though every thoughtful person knows they don't.

Novels and historical narratives can adeptly impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings do make suggestions about our requirements for happiness. Philosophy can usefully probe our anxieties and offer consolations. Literature can change our lives.

Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion do lie scattered across the cultural canon. Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

Why someone as smart as de Botton can't see the answer to his question is mystifying. "Religion" offers moral instruction which effectively shapes human behavior because the moral commands are willed by an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being. They have authority. The moral prescriptions in literature are nothing more than one human being sharing his arbitrary moral sentiments with another.

In the absence of divine authority moral discourse is little more than a discussion about one's preferred flavor of ice cream. Moral declarations are simply pronouncements about one's tastes.

The consolations of naturalistic philosophy are like the consolations of a doctor to a dying patient who's in in great pain: "Yes, you're dying, but it's okay. Everybody has to go sometime. Yes, you're suffering but soon you'll be dead and then you won't hurt any more."

Atheists like de Botton realize that they stand at a fork in the road. One path leads to nihilism and the other to an irrational life lived as if God existed even though they refuse to believe that he does. Neither path is appealing but the third road, the road that leads to belief that there in fact is a personal, transcendent moral authority who invests life with meaning, purpose, and a ground for hope, is, oddly enough, even less so.

So, in their desperation to somehow inject meaning into their lives they embrace silly proposals like making culture the new sacrament, but it doesn't help. Only something transcendent can carry that weight. Only immortality can enable us to escape the absurd pointlessness of human existence. Only if what we do in this life matters forever does anything we do in this life matter at all.

Mr. Obama's Political Opponents

Every president has supporters and opponents of his policies. Some opponents separate the man from his policies, liking the former but rejecting the latter. Columnist Peggy Noonan writes about people like this in a much remarked upon essay in the Wall Street Journal.

Her contention is that the affection and respect of those of Mr. Obama's political opponents who were nevertheless disposed to like him personally have recently begun to chill. The whole column is an interesting read. Here's how it begins:

Something's happening to President Obama's relationship with those who are inclined not to like his policies. They are now inclined not to like him. His supporters would say, "Nothing new there," but actually I think there is. I'm referring to the broad, stable, nonradical, non-birther right. Among them the level of dislike for the president has ratcheted up sharply the past few months.

It's not due to the election, and it's not because the Republican candidates are so compelling and making such brilliant cases against him. That, actually, isn't happening.

What is happening is that the president is coming across more and more as a trimmer, as an operator who's not operating in good faith. This is hardening positions and leading to increased political bitterness. And it's his fault, too. As an increase in polarization is a bad thing, it's a big fault.

The shift started on Jan. 20, with the mandate that agencies of the Catholic Church would have to provide birth-control services the church finds morally repugnant. The public reaction? "You're kidding me. That's not just bad judgment and a lack of civic tact, it's not even constitutional!"

Faced with the blowback, the president offered a so-called accommodation that even its supporters recognized as devious. Not ill-advised, devious. Then his operatives flooded the airwaves with dishonest — not wrongheaded, dishonest — charges that those who defend the church's religious liberties are trying to take away your contraceptives.

Noonan goes on to describe the open mic incident with Russian president Medvedev, Mr. Obama's reaction to the Trayvon Martin case, and last week's Supreme Court hearings on the individual mandate as adding to the perception that the president has agendas that he's trying to hide from the American people.

I'm not sure I agree with Noonan on the timing of this disaffection. I suspect it started with the way Mr. Obama criticized Mr. Bush's policies, promising to change them, and then pretty much continuing them. If not then, perhaps it began with the way the administration and its congressional allies handled the debate over the Affordable Care Act and the subsequent demonization or humiliation of any and all who stand in the president's way or appear to be a political threat to him. At any rate Noonan continues:

All these things have hardened lines of opposition, and left opponents with an aversion that will not go away. I am not saying that the president has a terrible relationship with the American people. I'm only saying he's made his relationship with those who oppose him worse.

In terms of the broad electorate, I'm not sure he really has a relationship. A president only gets a year or two to forge real bonds with the American people. In that time a crucial thing he must establish is that what is on his mind is what is on their mind. This is especially true during a crisis.

From the day Mr. Obama was sworn in, what was on the mind of the American people was financial calamity — unemployment, declining home values, foreclosures. These issues came within a context of some overarching questions: Can America survive its spending, its taxing, its regulating, is America over, can we turn it around?

The president had his mind on health care. And, to be fair-minded, health care was part of the economic story. But only a part! And not the most urgent part. Not the most frightening, distressing, immediate part. Not the "Is America over?" part.

Machiavelli writes in The Prince that a ruler must never make himself despicable. By this he means that the ruler should never do anything that would cost him the respect of the people. He loses their respect, Machiavelli says, by being thought irresolute, changeable, and timid, and we might add, disingenuous. There are those who have opposed President Obama's policies from the beginning but who nevertheless resolved to respect him. I think the number of people in that category has shrunk considerably in the last few years as Mr. Obama has given the impression that he acts more from expediency than from principle.

Noonan concludes by opining that:

If you jumped into a time machine to the day after the election, in November, 2012, and saw a headline saying "Obama Loses," do you imagine that would be followed by widespread sadness, pain and a rending of garments? You do not. Even his own supporters will not be that sad.

It's hard to imagine people running around in 2014 saying, "If only Obama were president!" Including Mr. Obama, who is said by all who know him to be deeply competitive, but who doesn't seem to like his job that much. As a former president he'd be quiet, detached, aloof. He'd make speeches and write a memoir laced with a certain high-toned bitterness. It was the Republicans' fault. They didn't want to work with him.

Mr. Obama has a largely nonexistent relationship with many, and a worsening relationship with some.

Really, he cannot win the coming election. But the Republicans, still, can lose it. At this point in the column we usually sigh.

Candidate Obama presented himself to America as a post-racial uniter. He has proven himself to be otherwise. He presented himself as a man who had the answers to our economic woes. He has shown himself to in fact have none. He presented himself as a man who would win the respect of foreign nations, but he has antagonized and alienated our friends and earned no respect from our foes. Noonan may not be correct about when the disaffection set in, or what caused it, but she's certainly correct that it's happening.

Why the Liberal Media Has So Little Credibility

A lot of people are exploiting the Trayvon Martin case to push their social or political agendas and to reinforce their assumptions about race in America. Some of what has been done by people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in the wake of the shooting is sheer demogoguery and some of what has been done by the media is willfully dishonest. Both are reprehensible. NBC's Today show falls into the latter category.

They apparently edited the exchange between the shooter, George Zimmerman, and the police dispatcher to make it appear that Zimmerman was racially profiling the Martin boy. As Erik Wemple reports:

NBC told this blog today that it would investigate its handling of a piece on the Today show that ham-handedly abridged the conversation between George Zimmerman and a dispatcher in the moments before the death of Trayvon Martin. NBC issued the following statement:

“We have launched an internal investigation into the editorial process surrounding this particular story.”

Wemple goes on to say that Fox News and the media watchdog site NewsBusters were the first to expose how the Today segment edited the tape of Zimmerman's call to the dispatcher to say this:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

But here’s the actual conversation:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

In the Today version, Zimmerman volunteered that this person “looks black,” a sequence of events that would more readily paint Zimmerman as a racial profiler. In reality’s version, Zimmerman simply answered a question about the race of the person he was reporting to the police.

One has to remember that when one reads or hears something in the mainstream liberal media, there's a very good chance that one is not reading or hearing the truth. When everyone just knows that a "white Hispanic" is ipso facto a racist then squeezing the facts to fit the narrative is completely justifiable. Just ask Dan Rather who bequeathed to us the concept of "fake but true."

In a postmodern world truth is fluid, it's subjective, it's whatever feels right to someone. All that matters is whether the "facts" conform to one's understanding of the way the world is. If they do then they're "true", if they don't then they're "false".

I hope when all of the tension and controversy over this tragedy subsides that Zimmerman, if his account of what happened is in fact true, sues NBC for defamation. I also hope that whoever was responsible for the edit of this tape, unless they have a very good reason for it, is fired. They've only succeeded in fanning the flames of racial animosity and misunderstanding.

Cultural Superiority

Our post Different Strokes attracted a bit of disagreement from readers who took exception to my claim that the West is exceptional. What was particularly objected to were these graphs:

Even after all we've learned in the last couple of decades about how people in the rest of the world live their lives, there are still some liberal-minded folk who like to tell us that we in the West shouldn't think that our way of life is superior to that of people living elsewhere around the globe. All cultures and ways of life are equally worthy of celebration, the multiculturalists and cultural relativists insist, we're all patches in the brightly colored quilt of human expression and no patch is of better quality or more importance than another.

This sentiment makes for warm feelings in university faculty lounges and classrooms and may prompt us to break into a treacly chorus or two of Up with People or We Are the World, but it's an awfully hard belief to maintain once we start looking at how so many of the world's people actually live.

Since several readers wrote to say that indeed they don't think we should think Western culture is superior to that of people elsewhere around the globe I thought I should amplify a little bit.

What follows applies not just to cultures construed as different nations or global regions but also to sub-cultures within a country or region. Also, by the term "superior culture" I mean a way, or view, of life which promotes human flourishing to a greater extent than do other ways of life.

Thus, I want to insist that:

• A culture which produces a Bach, a Shakespeare, or an Einstein is a superior culture to one that never has.
• A culture which can invent and build jetliners is superior to a culture that can't build indoor plumbing.
• A culture which values hard work and education is superior to one which fosters indolence and ignorance.
• A culture which treats women with dignity and respect is superior to one which treats them as property and with contempt.
• A culture which values basic human freedoms such as the freedom of speech, opinion, and religion is superior to one which kills those who deviate from orthodoxy.
• A culture which values the rule of law and suppresses the resort to violence and individual vengeance is superior to one which doesn't.
• A culture in which men are expected to nurture and provide for their families is superior to one in which they're seen as little more than sperm donors.
• A culture which sends food, medicine, and people abroad to help others is superior to the culture to which they go.
• A culture which develops pain-killers and cures for disease is superior to a culture which is helpless against pain and disease.

In short, a culture which produces great art, music, architecture, technology, and literature, a culture which can harness nature or at least mitigate the damage it wreaks, and which is animated by humanitarian impulses, is superior to a culture which cannot do, or does not choose to do, any of this.

No culture is perfect, of course, but some are much less perfect than others. Every culture has flaws, but to the extent a culture is flawed it's usually because its people have adopted one or more of the traits of inferior cultures.

For more on this I invite the interested reader to read In Defense of Elitism, a Viewpoint post from 2010 on a similar topic.