The Faith of Scientists

Philosophers of science have long noted that the line between empirical science and metaphysics has been increasingly blurred in the modern era. Scientists who once prided themselves on taking nothing on faith and demanding hard evidence for their scientific beliefs have long since abandoned that position. Science today is very much about faith.

A piece at NPR by Marcelo Gleiser elaborates on this. Gleiser writes:

I want to ... examine a ... controversial issue, one that has been in the limelight of cutting-edge physics for the past few years: Do some scientists hold on to a belief longer than they should? Or, more provocatively phrased, when does a scientific belief become an article of faith?

To talk about faith in the context of science seems quite blasphemous. Isn't science the antithesis of faith, given that it is supposedly based on certainties, on the explicit verification of hypotheses? This vision of science as being perfectly logical and rational is an idealization. Of course, the product of scientific research must be something concrete: Hypotheses must be either confirmed or refuted, and data from experiments should be repeatable by others.

This is all true, but it seems to fall afoul of much thinking today on matters of global warming, evolution, and the multiverse, the first of which seems to suffer from a dearth of empirical confirmation and the latter two of which lead to no experiments repeatable by others. Yet they're firmly held to be true by many scientists, and indeed they may be true, but the belief that they are is based more on faith than on empirical evidence and experimentation. Gleiser goes on to say that,

There is, however, an essential difference between religious faith and scientific faith: dogma. In science, dogma is untenable. Sooner or later, even the deepest ingrained ideas — if proven wrong — must collapse under the weight of evidence. A scientist who holds on to an incorrect theory or hypothesis makes for a sad figure. In religion, given that evidence is either elusive or irrelevant, faith is always viable.

The claim here is that it's dogmatic to hold to a theory in spite of the evidence and that such doxastic tenacity is characteristic of religious belief but is anathema among scientists. Yet surely Gleiser knows that the most deeply ingrained ideas, ideas that lie closest to the bone of our deepest metaphysical commitments, are rarely proven wrong in science. As Thomas Kuhn famously argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the old ideas only pass away when the scientists who hold them do.

When the beliefs people hold are entailments of their worldview those beliefs will not be surrendered unless the worldview itself shifts. And that tectonic intellectual event requires such a formidable expenditure of psychological energy and exertion of the will that it happens only infrequently among those who have reached their mature years.

If one's worldview demands materialistic explanations of phenomena, for example, then some materialistic explanation of a phenomenon will be clung to regardless of whether there's good evidence for it. The belief becomes a dogma, and scientists are no less likely to embrace dogma than are religious people. Examples of prominent scientists admitting to this are not hard to find. Here's a well-known admission from one of the world's top biologists, Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

In other words, defending materialism is more important than following the evidence. Evolutionary atheist and philosopher of biology Michael Ruse acknowledges that belief in evolution is actually religious, of all things:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint...the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

The stereotype of the completely objective scientist persuaded only by empirical evidence and unencumbered by biases, preferences, and ideological predilections is hard to find in the real world, at least in those scientific fields which have profound metaphysical implications.

Waste

I was listening to a show on public radio this morning, and they featured a segment during which it was explained that the EPA is very concerned with the amount of food that gets wasted in American households. The bureaucrats at the EPA (and the good folks at my local PBS) evidently think this deplorable and are doing studies to assess exactly how much food gets scraped off our plates and stuffed down the garbage disposal each week.

I was inclined to agree, in a knee-jerk kind of way, that it's bad to waste food until I heard this segment and started to think about it. I certainly agree that waste is bad when it's a non-renewable resource like oil that's being squandered, or if what's wasted is a mind, or time, or a life. To see any of these wasted is very sad.

But why is wasting food bad, I asked myself. It's not as if the food that goes down the garbage disposal would otherwise go to feed hungry children somewhere in the third world. Our wastefulness isn't depriving someone else of sustenance.

Then I wondered what would happen if people only bought exactly what they were going to eat. Would that be good? Well, not necessarily. The more food we buy the more money we put in the pockets of the food merchants who sell it, the farmers who produce it, the processors who prepare it, and the truckers who transport it, whether the food we buy gets eaten or not. This is a good thing. The food may go moldy in our cupboards, but buying it provides jobs for a lot of people and if we all limited ourselves to buying only what we consumed, a lot of those people would be worse off.

So maybe I'm missing something, but wasting food doesn't seem to be the same sort of thing as wasting time or wasting water during a drought. As long as it's not taking food out of the mouths of the hungry I don't see why it's "wrong" at all, and I don't know why the EPA thinks it's any business of theirs how much people waste.

Maybe if the EPA is concerned about waste they should do a study on how many taxpayer dollars they waste on dumb studies on waste.

Molecular Machines

Here's a post from April of 2013 that I thought worth running again:

Among the phenomena which support the claim that life is the product of intentional, intelligent design is the sheer number of complex molecular machines that operate in each of the trillions of our body's cells to ensure that these cells carry out the functions that keep us alive.

One of these machines is the system of proteins that synthesizes adenosine triphosphate (ATP) from adenosine diphosphate (ADP). Here's a short video animation that describes how this machine, called ATP synthase, works:

There are thousands of such machines in the cell, all of which, on the standard Darwinian account, somehow developed - through random, undirected, processes - not only their structure, not only the coordination with other systems in the cell necessary for proper function, but also the genetic regulatory mechanisms that control how and when the machine operates.

David Hume, in his famous essay On Miracles, wrote that when we hear an account of a miracle we should ask ourselves whether it's more likely, given our experience, that a law of nature had been violated or that the witness was somehow mistaken. Hume argued that a mistaken witness is always more likely than that a law of nature had been violated, and we should always, he insisted, believe what's most likely. Applying the principle to the present case, when confronted with a structure like ATP synthase we should ask ourselves, what is the greater miracle, that such an astonishing thing came about by chance and luck or that it came about by intelligent engineering?

It seems to me that the only way one can assert the former is if they've already, a priori, ruled out the possibility of the existence of the intelligent engineer, but, of course, that begs the question. Whether the intelligent engineer exists is the very matter we're trying to answer by asking whether blind chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the existence in living things of such machines as ATP synthase.

If we allow the evidence to speak for itself rather than allow our prior metaphysical commitments to dictate what the evidence says then I'm pretty sure most people would say that the kind of specified complexity we see in this video points unequivocally to the existence of a designing mind.

If this video has whetted your interest here's another that pushes us toward the same conclusion. It's an animation of just a few of the structures and processes in a living cell. Note the amazing motor protein that carries the vesicle along the microtubule:

How does the motor protein "know" to carry the vesicle along the microtubule and where to take it? What regulates the process? How and why did such a complex system ever come about? Was it all just blind chance and serendipity or was it the product of intelligence?

The Looming Iceberg

Almost overshadowed amidst revelations by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who was one of the chief architects of the Affordable Care Act, that he and his colleagues lied and misled Congress and the American people about what the law contained in order to get it passed, is the news that the Supreme Court has decided to hear the Halbig case (technically called King v. Burwell)

Essentially, what Halbig is about is this: When the ACA was designed it mandated that poor people be given subsidies to offset the cost of insurance if they purchased their coverage through their state's insurance exchange program. Thirty four states, however, refused to set up exchanges and the federal government had to go in and provide the service. The problem is that the ACA explicitly asserts that only consumers using state exchanges are eligible for subsidies, and it makes no provision for subsidies to people who use federal exchanges. Thus, as the law is written, millions of poor people in states with no state exchange will not be eligible for subsidies and will not be able to afford insurance. This, some observers believe, would be the death knell for Obamacare.

Consequently, the White House is arguing that the intent of the law was to give everyone subsidies even though the law explicitly denies this, and the same Jonathan Gruber is on tape explicitly insisting that subsidies were meant to be granted only to those using the state exchanges. The case has been quietly making its way through the judicial court system and the Supreme Court has now decided to take it up.

This development has led to a lot of speculation about exactly who the justices were (there were four of them) who voted to hear the case. Hot Air's Allahpundit makes a good case for thinking they were three conservatives (Scalia, Thomas, and Alito) plus Anthony Kennedy. If he's right about this, and if he's also right that it's unlikely these Justices would've chosen to hear the case unless they were inclined to rule against the administration, then Chief Justice John Roberts, who saved Obamacare in 2012 from being declared unconstitutional by transmogrifying a fine into a tax may well find himself the swing vote once again.

Roberts received so much condign criticism for that 2012 decision that a lot of people wonder whether he'd be willing to go through all that misery again and might instead be looking for a reasonable way to justify voting against the White House this time around (It's odd that nobody seems to think that a Supreme Court Justice might actually rule on what the Constitution says, but Roberts seriously diminished confidence that he would so rule by deciding as he did in 2012).

Richard Hasen at the LA Times thinks Roberts might decide against the White House in the current case by arguing that the Congress wrote what it wrote and that if they didn't say what they meant to say in the ACA then it's up to them to change it. This would certainly be a reasonable position, but it would almost certainly be the end of Obamacare because there's very little chance that a Congress now controlled by the Republican party, not a single member of which voted to make the ACA law, will now vote to save it.

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Raising the Minimum Wage

There's been much talk lately about raising the federal minimum wage. It's very hard to see, however, how such a move will not do more harm than good.

When the minimum wage is raised it's not just the wages of the very lowest paid workers that must be raised. Everyone's wages must go up. When the lowest paid entry level workers have their starting wage increased to, say, $10 an hour those who have been employed by that business for a longer time who are also making $10 and hour are going to resent that new hires are making as much as they are. Thus, the salaries of these more experienced workers will also rise. The raises will ripple right up the entire wage structure of the business.

In the end, many small businesses will be unable to survive without raising their prices, laying people off, or refusing to hire new employees. Many other businesses will simply have to close down. How does any of this help anyone?

The Federalist has a couple of stories about how small businesses and the people who work for them are suffering as a result of raises to their state's minimum wage. Here are some excerpts:

“I got my son back because I worked here. It kept me out of trouble and on the right path,” Stacey Osborn said.

Osborn lives in Hillsdale, a small town in rural Michigan. She used to work at Tastes of Life, a local restaurant that supported a residential program, Life Challenge of Michigan. It provided training in social, developmental, waitressing, and cooking skills to people who needed help getting on their feet. Some employees had cancer, experienced deaths in the family, spent time in jail, or struggled with substance abuse.

That is, until Michigan’s legislature hiked the mandatory minimum wage.

Osborn was with Tastes of Life from day one—Father’s Day of 2012—until the restaurant closed on September 28 because of the minimum wage hike. She said she came to the restaurant with a lot of problems that the owners, Pastor Jack Mosley and his wife, Linda, helped her through.

“I could go to them for anything,” Osborn said. “It hurts so bad that it closed.”

Mosley explained that, unlike a typical business that might fire a chef with a hot temper “who breaks dishes,” Tastes of Life managers were more long-suffering and wanted to help employees polish their life skills.

“Life has issues,” Mosley said. “This was a place to shore them up, and help them cope and get through.”

Osborn said she has looked for other jobs, but nothing compares to what Tastes of Life was to her. Instead of working for a warm family restaurant, Osborn has found herself bartending late at night. She doesn’t want to work someplace that will send her in the wrong direction.

“I did the math and realized I would need 200 more customers a week to stay open,” Mosley said.

That, accompanied by the fact that many of their customers go south for the winter and food prices have risen dramatically, forced Mosley to close doors. Twelve people lost their jobs.

Terry Hatch, another Tastes of Life employee, had worked at the restaurant for six months.

“I have a few disabilities and this gave me friends. It was a lot more than a paycheck,” Hatch added.

Lori Burger, manager of Hillsdale’s House of Pizza and BBQ, said she has started cutting her employees’ hours. She employs seven young women, and the minimum wage affects her profit margin.

Although she will keep taking applications, she said there’s no sense in hiring new employees when she is cutting hours for the ones she already has.

The very people the wage hike is supposed to help end up with a higher wage, but less work. Lisa Slade has worked at the Finish Line Restaurant since 1976 and now owns the business. She said the first incremental wage increase hasn’t affected her yet because she only has one minimum-wage employee. However, she said the future increases will mean she’ll have to raise menu prices.

“It irritates me because the government dictates what to pay,” Slade said. “I like to give people raises when they do a good job. The guy who is doing a good job shouldn’t make the same amount as the guy who is still learning.”

Pai Ringenberg, owner of the Coffee Cup Diner, shared Slade’s sentiment.

She said if lawmakers raise the wage, businesses will raise prices to cover it, and that influences everyone’s cost of living. As a result, lawmakers will want to raise the wage again.

In the end, a forced wage increase only makes it harder for people to get into the workplace. If employers have to pay more, they want their employees to come with more specialized skills and stronger work ethics.

But entry-level workplaces such as restaurants or retail stores can’t survive under the pressure. The wage increase discourages entrepreneurs from chasing the American Dream, because they can’t afford the price tag.

As Osborn’s story shows, the very people the minimum wage hike was sold as helping often lose their jobs because of it. Those who need more work hours are getting fewer, and those who would have benefited from lower prices are paying more for everyday items. The minimum wage hike is a self-destructing initiative—just ask your local barista.

Raising the minimum wage is a bad idea, and imposing it on employers is an abuse of power. People should be paid according to their value to their employer, not according to what bureaucrats in some state capital or worse, in Washington, D.C., think they're worth. If the job is such that it requires no particular skill or talent then why should employers be forced by the state to pay as if it does? The value of someone's work is something that should be agreed upon between employer and employee. If an employee doesn't want to work for what the employer wants to pay then they're free to look for work elsewhere.

For the state to dictate what employers must pay their employees is yet another symptom of the modern usurpation of our liberty by a metastasizing government.

The Way Forward

Now that The Republicans will control both houses of Congress in January suggestions for legislation they should pass have been littering the editorial pages.

It must be remembered, however, that many bills require a 60 vote majority to pass in the Senate because the minority party can filibuster. That is, the Democrats can block any bill they don't like by declaring a filibuster which it takes 60 votes to override. The Republicans will only have (at most) 54 senators so they'd have to find six or more Democrats willing to buck their party leadership to move the bill through the Senate and onto the president's desk. That will be difficult.

Nevertheless, here are some measures that are being proposed by conservatives. Some of them would be wonderful, some I'm not sure about, and some I don't like, but you decide what you think about them.

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds offers six suggestion several of which which reflect his libertarian inclinations. The accompanying explanations are excerpted from his article:

End the federally imposed 21-year-old drinking age. The limit was dreamed up in the 1980s as a bit of political posturing by then-secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole. It has been a disaster. College drinking hasn't been reduced; it has just moved out of bars and into dorm rooms, fraternities/sororities and house parties. The result has been a boom in alcohol problems on campus.

Repeal the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This awful law, passed in the Clinton era, is a giveaway to the entertainment industry. It places major burdens on Internet and computer users and electronic innovators.

Make birth-control pills available over the counter. Cory Gardner made this a part of his winning platform in Colorado's Senate race. Let women choose.

End public-sector employee unions. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker eliminated dues-withholding for public employee unions in his state. The unions were so angry that they organized a recall campaign against him. They lost. They then tried to recall a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who upheld his action. They lost. They then tried to beat Walker in last week's election. They lost again. President Franklin Roosevelt opposed public employee unions because he thought that people whose salaries came from the taxpayers shouldn't have the right to collectively bargain against citizens whose taxes were being collected by force, and that collective bargaining by public employees was a conflict of interest. He was right.

Institute a "revolving door" surtax on those who make more in post-government employment. Leave a Treasury job making $150,000 a year to take one in private industry paying $750,000, and you'll pay 50% surtax on the $600,000 difference. Most of the increased pay is based on knowledge and connections you got while on Uncle Sam's dime, so why shouldn't Uncle Sam get a share?

Syndicated columnist George Will of the Washington Post offers another half dozen suggestions. I've shortened the explanations somewhat and added a one sentence note to the last one:

Abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.The CFPB is empowered to “declare,” with no legislative guidance or institutional inhibitions, that certain business practices are “abusive.” It also embodies progressivism’s authoritarianism by being, unlike any entity Congress has created since 1789, untethered from all oversight mechanisms: Its funding, “determined by the director,” comes from the Federal Reserve.

Repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board. This expression of the progressive mind is an artifact of the Affordable Care Act and may be the most anti-constitutional measure ever enacted. When the IPAB’s 15 presidential appointees make what the Affordable Care Act calls a “legislative proposal” limiting reimbursements to doctors, this proposal automatically becomes law unless Congress passes a similar measure cutting Medicare spending. Under this constitutional travesty, an executive-branch agency makes laws unless the legislative branch enacts alternative means of achieving the executive agency’s aim. The Affordable Care Act stipulates that no measure for the abolition of the board can be introduced before 2017 or after Feb. 1, 2017, and must be enacted by Aug. 15 of that year. So, one Congress presumed to bind all subsequent Congresses in order to achieve progressivism’s consistent aim — abolishing limited government by emancipating presidents from restraint by the separation of powers.

Repeal the Affordable Care Act’s tax on medical devices.This $29 billion blow to an industry that provides more than 400,000 jobs is levied not on firms’ profits but on gross revenues, and it comes on top of the federal (the developed world’s highest) corporate income tax, plus state and local taxes. Enough Democrats support repeal that a presidential veto might be overridden.

Improve energy, economic and environmental conditions by authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline would reduce the risk of spills by reducing the transportation of oil in railroad tankers.

Mandate completion of the nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The signature achievement of Harry Reid’s waning career has been blocking this project, on which approximately $15 billion has been spent. So, rather than nuclear waste being safely stored in the mountain’s 40 miles of tunnels 1,000 feet underground atop 1,000 feet of rock, more than 160 million Americans live within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where 70,000 tons of waste are stored.

Pass the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act. It would require that any regulation with at least a $100 million annual impact on the economy — there are approximately 200 of them in the pipeline — be approved without amendments by a joint resolution of Congress and signed by the president. “In effect,” writes the Hudson Institute’s Christopher DeMuth, “major agency rules would become legislative proposals with fast-track privileges.”

As it is various executive agencies can promulgate regulations with enormous economic impact and Congress is essentially helpless to stop them.

For those interested more in process and the larger picture Senator Mike Lee has some excellent advice in a column at The Federalist.

On Veteran's Day

In recognition of Veteran's Day, I thought I'd run this post from last year:

National Review's Quin Hillyer reviews two books apropos for this Veteran's Day. One of the books, Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior, by Rorke Denver with Ellis Henican, describes the brutal training undergone by men who aspire to be SEALs. The second book, Cold Days in Hell: American POWs in Korea, by William C. Latham recounts the many acts of courage and endurance demonstrated by American POWs in Korean prisoner of war camps in the early 1950s.

Hillyer discusses Denver's book first:

Where this book fully captivates is in its description of the process of creating a SEAL in the first place. We may know, intuitively, that the training (and winnowing-out process) is incredibly arduous, but the details still astound.

Despite Denver’s assurances that SEAL training stays just on the right side of “the fine line between tough and torture,” his descriptions of “the random acts of instructor violence” — “more random and more violent every day” — are enough to give pause to any reader. Forced swims in 52-degree Pacific surf, on next to no sleep after days of physical abuse, “sand and salt water in your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth,” followed by paddling sea races so intense that participants hallucinate: It’s enough to make one cringe just to think about them.

To read about this training, and then to read about the missions for which the training prepared the SEALs, is to understand that the warrior’s life is not one of video-game glamour but of grit and pain — pain borne, as Denver goes to great lengths to emphasize, by real human beings with real fears and real families.

Hillyer then turns to Latham's account of a different kind of heroism:

The privations suffered by many of the POWs matched some of the horrors of World War II’s Bataan Death March. In one particularly horrific incident, a Korean major nicknamed “the Tiger” summarily executed a lieutenant, Cordus H. Thornton, for the offense of having too many of his men “fall out” of a forced march because of severe exhaustion, grievous injuries, and rampant dysentery.

In one prison compound, “typhus, hepatitis, and pneumonia spread throughout the camp, and the doctors soon found themselves treating more than 350 cases a day, with very limited success.” Day after day, more would die, with one historian writing that “here were the bodies of America’s finest young men, covered with filth and lying in stacks in a hostile country.”

In the midst of these horrors, numerous incidents that Latham recounts involved heroic acts of mercy and courage: men carrying each other despite Korean (or Chinese) orders to abandon them; other prisoners sneaking around camp, at mortal peril if caught, to forage for extra food or medical supplies for the wounded. Chief among these heroes was a chaplain, Father Emil Kapaun, whose ministries to the sick and suffering, despite his own serious infirmities, went far beyond the ordinary call of duty.

Particularly riveting was Latham’s description of Easter Sunday 1951:

Kapaun openly defied Communist ideology by celebrating an ecumenical sunrise service in the ruins of a burned-out church. Holding a makeshift crucifix, Kapaun wore his priest’s stole, as well as the purple ribbon signifying his pastoral office, and recited the Stations of the Cross. Most of the men in the officers’ compound attended, including Catholics, Protestants, Jews and atheists. While the Chinese guards watched nervously, Kapaun ended the service by leading the men in song; “America the Beautiful” echoed from the surrounding mountains, still blanketed by snow. The officers sang at the top of their lungs, hoping the music would reach the other prisoners at Pyoktong.

Two months later, Kapaun was dead. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously last April.

In addition to these books I would add a favorite of my own, Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini, written by Laura Hillenbrand. Zamperini was an Olympic distance runner who became a bomber pilot in WWII. His plane crashed into the Pacific during a mission and Hillenbrand recounts his absolutely astounding tale of human endurance and survival. He and another crewman were afloat for over forty days on a tiny life raft in the vast ocean only to be "rescued" by Japanese soldiers and sent to a POW camp on the mainland where he and thousands of others were held for years, all the while subjected to unimaginable deprivation and suffering.

As Hillyard says in his concluding sentence, on this special day each year we should thank God for putting such men and women in our midst.

P.S. Louie Zamperini passed away on July 2nd of this year. He was 97.

Whatever Works

This video is from a conference on the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) a couple of years ago, but it's been resuscitated lately and is making the rounds on the internet. It consists of fifty two seconds of one of the architects of the law, Jonathan Gruber, essentially admitting that he and his colleagues deliberately misled the American people about the act in order to get it passed into law.

Mr. Gruber affords us an excellent illustration of political pragmatism. If you have to lie and deceive in order to get your law passed then it's right to do so.

Of course, we know that the creators of Obamacare aren't the only ones who deceived us. The president himself insisted on numerous occasions that the ACA would lower premiums and that people would be able to keep their doctors, but we know now that he knew at the time that none of that was true.

The law was passed only because the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House and because the American people were persuaded by such as Mr. Gruber and Mr. Obama that they were being told the truth about the law when, in fact, they weren't.

If anyone doesn't understand why the Democrats took such a drubbing in 2010 and again last Tuesday, they need only reflect on the utter loss of confidence among a growing segment of the American electorate in that party's ability to tell us the truth.

Speaking of last Tuesday's election, the most serious consequence of the massive defeat suffered by the Democrats, perhaps, is what it has done to their "feeder systems" at the state level. Republicans now have complete control — the governorship and the legislature — in 23 states. Democrats control only seven. Democrats hold 18 governorships, but only a handful are in the most populous states.

The implications of this for the Democrats' future may be dire. State houses and governorships are the spawning grounds for future candidates and at that level the party is being eviscerated because of dissatisfaction with the people at the top. As a result there are few Democrats who look like future candidates at the national level.

Indeed, other than Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and maybe Andrew Cuomo. There seem to be few heavy hitters on the Democrat bench, and unless the party can turn things around at the state level there'll be fewer still in the years after 2016.

All of which tempts me to risk a prediction. If Hillary fails to get elected in 2016, either because she doesn't run or is defeated, I predict that one of the most attractive candidates in the Democratic Party in 2020 will be the newly elected governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf. Everybody likes the guy, even the people who won't vote for him. He's a very successful businessman and offers, on the surface, at least, a moderate alternative to the extremist progressives who head the party today. If he manages to work fairly well with his GOP legislature and wins a second term in 2018, there'll be a lot of interest in him for 2020.

You heard it here first.

Four Errors about Tuesday

Several mistaken claims (at least, I think they're mistaken) have been circulating in much of the post-election analysis of last Tuesday's sweeping Republican victory over the Democrats. Here are four that I think are particularly flawed:

1. Voters voted for Republicans because they want something to get done in Washington. I don't think the results warrant this conclusion. If the voters wanted Washington to get things done they would've voted to give the president a Congress run by his own party. You don't vote to "get things done" by splitting the balance of power between the executive and the legislative branches. The fact that voters voted the Democrats out in the Senate and decreased their numbers in the House suggests to me that so far from wanting Washington to work together they were voting to stop the president from acting like a monarch.

2. The GOP won big because the elections were mostly in "Red" states. In fact, this is not so. Illinois is a deep "blue" state and yet it elected a Republican governor. The same is true of Maryland and Massachusetts. Florida, though not as deeply Democratic as Illinois, Maryland, or Massachusetts, nevertheless went for Barack Obama in 2012 but it also elected a Republican governor on November 4th. Iowa has been reliably Democratic for a while but it still elected a Republican senator and Democratic states like Virginia and New Hampshire came within a whisker of electing Republican senators.

3. Democrats lost because of low voter turnout. This is partially true. The turnout was low and the Democrats suffered because much of their base didn't show up (the same problem that cost Mitt Romney the election in 2012). But think about what this means. It means that the strength of the Democratic party lies largely in rousing the most indifferent, apathetic, uninformed segments of our society to bestir themselves to get to the polls. In other words, if the people who don't have any idea what they're voting for turn out, they'll vote Democratic, largely because they know Democrats give them stuff, and the party elected by these, the least responsible elements in our society, will run the country. That can't be a good thing.

4. The election was about the economy. I'm not sure about this. A lot of voters said that the economy was their number one concern, but I think the economy is just a convenient synecdoche for the entire sweep of Mr. Obama's tenure as president. I suspect that Tuesday's vote was a referendum on Mr. Obama whom many see as heading an administration riddled with abuses and corruption, listless and without a compass in foreign policy, and divisive and destructive on social policy. I also think that Mr. Obama is viewed by the majority of voters who cared enough to show up on Tuesday as a man who much prefers the perquisites of office than actually doing the job of president and who was singularly unqualified for the position in the first place. The economy is a concern, to be sure, but the biggest concern people had on Tuesday, I suspect, was the quality of leadership being provided by the man at the top.

Fascism, Hate, and Deception

One of the more lamentable casualties of our modern politics and the ideological polarization of the country over the last few decades is the erosion of tolerance for people whose views fall outside the mainstream of fashionable opinion. The classical liberal tolerance espoused by people like 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill who argued so eloquently in his book On Liberty for the proposition that almost any dissenting idea should be allowed free expression is hard to find among those who call themselves liberals today.

Mill's argument that society benefits from hearing diverse opinions and that permitting them is the only way to honor a commitment to truth has been rejected by those who a generation ago were claiming his views on free expression as their own. Today, especially on the left, any opinion that deviates from the orthodox position is seen as an ideological cancer that must be destroyed, along with the person who holds it.

Among no group, perhaps, is this more noticeably the case than among gay rights activists. One flagrant example is that of Robert Oscar Lopez, an associate professor of English at California State-Northridge University. Lopez tells the story of his ordeal at the hands of the gay rights inquisitors in an article in First Things. Here's the heart of it:

I am a professor of English and Classics at Cal State-Northridge, where I began teaching in 2008 after earning my doctorate in English and MA in Classics from SUNY. I specialize in American literature and published a scholarly study of American writers and conservatism in 2011.

On August 6, 2012, I published an essay in Public Discourse, entitled “Growing Up with Two Moms.” It described my life growing up with a lesbian mother and her partner. Discussion of same-sex parenting until that point generally treated the children of gay parents as extensions of gay adults. Whatever was good for gay adults was presumed to benefit children they raised. No serious consideration was given to divergence between the children’s interests and the interests of gay adults who wanted and loved them. My point was this:

Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s. Inside, however, I was confused.

There were loving things about my childhood, but it was hard. That is all I wanted to say. I didn’t argue anything about gay marriage or even gay adoption. Eventually I did come to voice support for traditional marriage laws, but here I only spoke out of my own experience.

The same day, I received an email from someone named Scott “Rose” Rosenzweig, the first of more than a dozen. His message went to my Cal State account and was copied to colleagues and administrators, saying among other things,

Recently, CSUN’s Lopez published a gay-bashing essay ... on the website of the Witherspoon Institute....[F]or reference, Lopez’s politicized gay-bashing is here.

Note how this distorts my essay from personal reminiscence to “gay-bashing,” an inflammatory charge on a college campus, the first in a relentless twenty-six months of harassment.

This was only the beginning for Lopez. He goes on to recount an incessant stream of lies, distortions, and hatred to which he has been subjected simply because he talked about the pain of his childhood with a lesbian mother and her partner. The persecution he has suffered makes for fascinating and very troubling reading, and I encourage you to take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with it. Here's a portion of it:

Soon I was getting hit by writers all across the web. A piece on August 9, 2012, in Frontiers LA affixed my photograph and began with the line, “Perhaps you know Cal State Northridge bisexual professor Robert Oscar Lopez—and hence might understand why he wants to cozy up to the antigay National Organization for Marriage.”

At that time I had no connection to the National Organization for Marriage, yet as late as September 2014, the Human Rights Campaign would still claim that I spoke at NOM “March for Marriage” rallies. All of this would be jarring news for NOM, since I support gay civil unions and foster care eligibility for gay couples.

Against these charges, I tried to explain myself, even writing a three-thousand-word rebuttal in Frontiers LA, but the misrepresentations continued.

On August 14, 2012, the campaign reached my workplace in a whole new way when my dean informed me that I would have to turn over all emails from January 2009 onward that had anything to do with Mark Regnerus and his research team, Witherspoon Institute, Bradley Foundation, NOM, U.S. elected officials, the Romney campaign, Republican National Committee, and University of Texas officials.

A team of IT workers and student employees were allowed to access emails and turn them over to my off-campus accusers.

For a year, the provost’s office, dean’s office, and president’s office at Northridge were barraged with angry emails denouncing me and demanding that the university take action.

There are several ironies in his story. One is that Lopez is himself a bisexual who supports gay marriage. Another is that the attempt to censor him and to destroy his career comes from people who themselves have for years demanded tolerance of their own beliefs about sexuality and would have insisted that hiring and firing on the basis of sexual preference is a violation of their civil and human rights. Yet they refuse to extend the same tolerance to those who offer an alternative point of view to the narrative they wish to advance about sexuality in our society.

A lecture delivered by Dr. Lopez at Stanford on the Architecture of the Family can be viewed here.

Fascism is alive and well today, but it's not a phenomenon of the right as is so often thought. It's contemporary practitioners are found most prominently on the left, especially on many of our elite university campuses.

Moral Paralysis

In 2011 (12/5) I ran the following post critical of ethical relativism. Having just talked about that topic recently in my classes I thought it'd be appropriate to run it again:

Denyse O'Leary relates a story told by a Canadian high school philosophy teacher named Stephen Anderson. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as human beings:

I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies—multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha (see below). Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital. I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions, but I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff.” Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”

While we may hope some are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is “never judge, never criticize, never take a position.”

This is Bibi Aisha. She was deliberately mutilated by her family because she did not want to stay in a marriage to which she did not consent and in which she was treated like livestock. Anyone who would do this to another human being is evil. Any culture which condones it is degenerate, and any person who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this, or to sympathize with her suffering, is a moral dwarf.

The shocking prevalence of moral dwarfism in our culture should not surprise us, however. Once a society jettisons its Judeo-Christian heritage it no longer has any non-subjective basis for making moral judgments. Its moral sense is stunted, warped, and diminished because it's based on nothing more than one's own subjective feelings. Since no one can say that their feelings are superior to the feelings of the people who did this to Bibi Aisha we hear fatuous insipidities like, "If it's right for them then it's right," or "It's wrong to judge other cultures," or the ultimate criticism, "This sort of thing is inappropriate."

This inability to make moral judgments or to call evil by its name is a form of moral paralysis, and it's a legacy of modernity and the secular Enlightenment.

Naturalism and Nihilism

This is a slightly revised version of a post which appeared on VP on 11/8/13.

French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to take atheism to its logical conclusion. Many atheists are reluctant to do this because they can't live consistently with their belief that man is all alone in the cosmos.

Some there are, though, who call upon their fellow non-theists to face up to the gloomy entailments of the belief that nature is all there is. Alex Rosenberg and Joel Marks are two who seek to face squarely the logic of their unbelief. Another example is a commenter at Uncommon Descent who lays out clearly and with no sugar-coating what one should believe if one also embraces atheism, as he (or she) does.

He/she writes:

I’m a nihilist because it shows reality. If there is no higher power, then everything humanity holds dear was constructed by humanity and therefore not real.

Thus there is:

• No objective, absolute, inherent meaning in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent purpose in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent value in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent morality in life or the universe. No good, no evil, no right, no wrong
• No objective, absolute, inherent truth in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent knowledge in life or the universe
• No objective, absolute, inherent logic in life or the universe

There's more:

• We are the cobbled together Frankensteins of billions of years of trial and error
• We have no free-will, mind, consciousness, rationality or reason. They are illusions and [the notions of] personhood, identity and humanity are not real.
• The emotions we express are just chemicals in our brain. The very things we seek in life like happiness, peace, contentment, joy are just chemicals reducing us to nothing more than chemical addicts.
• We are no more important than other animals. A dog is a rat is a pig is a boy.
• There is no afterlife. Once we die, we fade from existence and all our memories, experiences, knowledge etc goes with it. In time, we are forgotten.
• All the things we do in life are just for survival. Learning, loving, seeking, being positive, eating, relating, having fun are created for the sake of ignoring the real reason we are here and that’s to live as long as we can.
• There is no help coming to save humanity as a species or as individuals. We are all alone and on our own. If you can’t survive, you die.

The reader might wonder why anyone would embrace such a melancholy set of beliefs, but if the only alternative to nihilism is to accept that there's a God, then nihilism, as depressing, hopeless, and bleak as it may be, will still be more appealing to a lot of people than the theistic alternative. The writer might reply that atheism is true and we should therefore have the courage to accept its consequences, but why think atheism is true? Could one not reason that it's far more probable that the above list of consequences is not true than that it is true? And if the above consequences are not true then, since they're entailed by atheism, atheism is not true.

Eight Questions about Consciousness

In an article in The Guardian a couple of years ago, Anil Seth listed eight problems concerning consciousness that neuroscientists are investigating. The article presupposes a materialist view of the subject but even one who finds materialism to be an incomplete account of human ontology will find the questions fascinating. Seth lists and gives a brief summary of each of the eight. I've made his summaries even more brief and urge interested readers to visit the link for more detail. Seth writes:

Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious feature of our existence. A new science of consciousness is now revealing its biological basis. Here are eight key questions that neuroscientists are now addressing:

1. What are the critical brain regions for consciousness?

We now think that consciousness depends primarily on a specific network of regions in the cortex (the wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (a walnut-sized structure buried deep in the interior). Some of these regions are important for determining the level of consciousness (the difference between waking and dreamless sleep) while others are involved in shaping conscious content (the specific qualities of any given experience).

2. What are the mechanisms of general anaesthesia?

A good way to study a phenomenon is to see what happens when it disappears. General anaesthesia can be induced by many different substances but the outcome is the same: total loss of consciousness. There is now increasing evidence that anaesthesia involves a disintegration of how different parts of the brain work together, a sort of "cognitive unbinding" rather than a general shutting-down.

A key question now is how similar general anaesthesia is to other states of unconsciousness, such as dreamless sleep.

3. What is the "self"?

Selfhood is a complex phenomenon, encompassing a first-person perspective on the world, a sense of ownership of our body, actions, and thoughts, perceptions of our internal physiological condition, and of course the narrative we tell ourselves about our past experiences and imagined futures.

We now know that these different features depend on different brain mechanisms, and can even be manipulated experimentally (for example, it's possible to generate "out of body" experiences in the lab). Understanding how the brain constructs the conscious self will help us better understand and treat psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, which involve a disintegration of selfhood.

4. What determines experiences of volition and 'will'?

The question of whether "free will" exists is guaranteed to raise philosophical hackles. Neuroscientists have studied this issue since the 1980s by looking for neural signatures of volition (the experience of intending to do something) and agency (the experience of causing an action). A growing consensus now rejects the idea of volition as explicitly causing actions, instead seeing it as involving a particular brain network mediating complex, open decisions between different actions.

5. What is the function of consciousness? What are experiences for?

Researchers have now discovered that many cognitive functions can take place in the absence of consciousness. We can perceive objects, make decisions, and even perform apparently voluntary actions without consciousness intervening. One possibility stands out: consciousness integrates information. According to this view, each of our experiences rules out an enormous number of alternative possibilities, and in doing so generates an incredibly large amount of information.

6. How rich is consciousness?

This evidence may provide a basis for tackling one of the thorniest problems in consciousness science: distinguishing the brain mechanisms of consciousness itself from those involved in being able to relate what we experience.

7. Are other animals conscious?

Mammals share much of the neural machinery important for human consciousness, so it seems a safe bet to assume they are conscious as well, even if they can't tell us that they are. Despite this similarity, animal consciousness is unlikely to involve conscious selfhood in the same sense that humans enjoy.

8. Are vegetative patients conscious?

In the US alone, about 15,000 patients are in a "vegetative state", having suffered massive brain injury. The key feature of this state is that patients' behaviour suggests that they are awake but not aware. Brain imaging has revealed, however, that at least some of these patients are conscious, and has even facilitated communication between these patients and their families and doctors.

Seth closes with what is perhaps the most interesting question: Why is consciousness part of the universe at all? Indeed, even if consciousness can ultimately be explained purely in terms of material processes, something many philosophers deeply doubt, it is hard to imagine how or why it should have arisen in a purely mechanistic, naturalistic world in the first place. So, if not, where did it come from?

If the Republicans Take the Senate

If the Republicans gain control of the Senate tomorrow, an outcome some observers are predicting but which is by no means assured, there will be a number of consequences, two of which are these:

It will signal an end to congressional gridlock. Many Americans complain that Congress can't get anything done and they're correct to think that. However, part of the reason is that when the House of Representatives, which is controlled by the Republicans, passes legislation it must go to the Senate, currently controlled by the Democrats, to be voted on before it becomes law. Currently, there are some 340 pieces of legislation passed by the House which the Democrats in the Senate, whether committee chairs or the Majority Leader, refuse, for various reasons, to bring to the floor for a vote.

If the GOP holds the House (which is pretty much a certainty) and wins a net six Senate seats they'll effectively control both chambers and thus legislation will move much more smoothly through Congress. That's not to say it'll make it into law because it'll still have to be signed by the president, who may not be disposed to sign Republican initiatives, but at least the bottleneck won't be Congress.

The second consequence is that the president will be forced to temper his predilection to nominate appointees who reside on the far left of the political spectrum. Such nominees will not likely be confirmed by a Republican Senate. This will be especially significant for nominees to the federal bench, and a forteriori, to the Supreme Court, where there could be at least two retirements in the next two years.

One fear that many Democrats have about a GOP takeover of the Senate seems to me to be unfounded. The concern is that if the Republicans control both houses they'll seek to impeach President Obama. I doubt this very much unless Mr. Obama does something extraordinarily reckless. The way impeachment works is that the House impeaches the office-holder and then the case goes to the Senate where the impeached individual is essentially put on trial.

In order to convict and have the person removed from office it takes the vote of two-thirds of the Senate. That'd be 67 senators. Even if every Republican voted for it (something that didn't happen when President Clinton was impeached), there would still have to be some fifteen or sixteen Democrats who'd have to join them. The chances of finding this many Democrats who would vote to remove a president of their own party are slimmer than zero.

The Republicans wouldn't waste the resources on such an effort unless they thought it had a chance of success, and it would have such a chance only if the American people and the media were howling for impeachment, a prerequisite that, as of now, seems as remote as the planet Pluto.

A Few Musings on the Electoral Season

1. Why do the media talk incessantly about the GOP's failure to attract women, but rarely talk about the Democrat's failure to attract men? There's almost as much of a male gender gap favoring the GOP as there is a female gender gap favoring the Democrats, but we never seem to hear stories about how Democrats need to do more to reach out to men.

2. What does it mean that people like Congressman Charley Rangel are accusing Republicans of favoring slavery and Senator Mary Landrieu of LA insinuating that her constituents are racist and sexist? Rangel's claim is simply bizarre, but Landrieu's is both bizarre and amusing. She serves in a state that has, in recent memory, had a female governor, an Indian governor, and a female senator (her). Are her allegations in fact an act of desperation to try to salvage a campaign showing signs of sinking?

3. Is it also a sign of desperation that one Republican senatorial candidate, Corey Gardner of Colorado, has been accused by his opponent's supporters of wanting to make condoms illegal, of all things, even though the candidate has called for making birth control available over-the-counter? Do serious people make such allegations? Do serious people believe them?

4. President Obama, in referring to voter ID laws said a week or so ago that attempting to win elections by limiting the number of people who vote is a sign of weakness. Is it not also a sign of weakness that the Democrats depend for electoral success on dragging to the polls the least engaged, most uninformed, and most apathetic segments of the voting public (single women, poor urban minorities, and disaffected young people)? If the base of the party consists largely of people who don't know what's going on and/or don't much care, certainly not enough to take the trouble to obtain an ID card, then what does that tell us about the party?

5. Why will Democrat candidates for office not tell enquirers who they voted for in the last presidential election? Why do they not want Mr. Obama to be anywhere near them as they campaign for office? Is it because he's black and they're white? Lest you scoff we've been told for six years that the Republicans' refusal to cooperate with Mr. Obama is a symptom of racism in the Republican Party. If so, why is it not racist for white candidates to treat the president as if he has Ebola? Why else will they not admit their vote for him? If they do oppose his policies, as some of them are claiming, which of them, exactly, do they oppose and what would they, if elected, be willing and able to do to change them?

6. In Pennsylvania the man who shot and killed a young state trooper and seriously wounded a second before taking to the woods to hide for 48 days from the police has finally been apprehended. The prosecutor has declared that he will seek the death penalty. Every candidate for state-wide office in Pennsylvania, including Governor Corbett and his challenger Tom Wolfe, should be asked to publicly declare whether he/she supports or opposes that decision and why.

7. Every election there's much hand-wringing over how much money is spent to elect the various candidates. This year over $1 billion has been spent on political advertisements, a lot of money, no doubt, but it's less than half of the $2.2 billion dollars Americans spent last month on Halloween candy. Looked at that way the money spent on political advertising doesn't seem like such a big deal.

8. The Democratic state committee in New York has sent all registered Democrats a letter that essentially tells them to vote, or else.... The letter says specifically that “We will be reviewing voting records . . . to determine whether you joined your neighbors who voted in 2014....If you do not vote this year, we will be interested to hear why not.” Democrats in New York have been outraged at what they see as blatant voter intimidation by their own party. What is the "or else" that would follow a failure to vote, and are people who use such threatening tactics the sort of people we want in positions of power? Come to think of it, is this not the sort of thing many Americans are afraid is happening in the NSA, the IRS, and the DOJ? It seems to be of a piece with Mr. Obama's rhetoric about the need to punish one's political "enemies."

9. Hillary Clinton isn't running for any office just yet but she is campaigning for sundry Democrat candidates. However, she went some distance toward disqualifying herself from being taken seriously, whether as a supporter of candidates or as a candidate herself, when in a prepared speech she declared recently that businesses don't create jobs. If businesses don't create jobs then who does? Perhaps Ms Clinton would be willing to undertake this little thought experiment. Imagine that every business in the U.S. suddenly closed its doors. What would happen to the unemployment number? Perhaps she was telling the truth when she later tried to walk her comment back and make it more palatable, or perhaps she's trying to out-Warren Elizabeth Warren, her prospective rival on the left in 2016.

The Hard Problem

Here's a fascinating video in which one of the foremost philosophers of mind, the Australian David Chalmers, discusses the difficulty of explaining consciousness from an evolutionary materialistic perspective. His point is that as far as natural selection is concerned, we could have evolved to be highly effective automata or zombies, operating strictly on instinct, without the phenomenon of being self-aware added on.

In other words, according to Chalmers, there's nothing about consciousness, as compared to the zombie model, that gives a creature an additional benefit in passing along its genetic legacy to its descendants. In that sense consciousness is superfluous and therefore devilishly hard to explain as a product of unguided evolution. Where then did it come from and how did we come to possess it?

Coming up with an explanation for how material processes like chemical reactions in the brain can actually create sensations - such as the experience of red or sweet or pain - and explaining exactly what these sensations are is what philosophers of mind call the "hard problem" of consciousness. The "easy" problem is mapping the parts of the brain that are involved when various sensations (called qualia)are being experienced. The "easy" problem is "easy" only relative to the difficulty of the "hard" problem.

What to Look For

My friend Jason sends along a link to an article by Charles Lipson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, in which he discusses what we might look for from the president once Tuesday's election is over. The article requires a subscription unless you google: Lipson: Obama's Post-Election Blowout, but here's a quick synopsis:

1) Immigration. How many millions will the president let in? On what terms? One hint: The Department of Homeland Security recently ordered more than four million green cards and visas for next year and says it might order another 29 million for future years. The cards would give immigrants who are here illegally the right to continue living and working in the U.S. legally—and perhaps receive a variety of federal and state benefits. Should the president unilaterally issue these cards, there will be a brutal debate over the wisdom of this policy, whether it extends to welfare benefits, and whether the president has the constitutional authority to issue so many cards without specific congressional approval.

2) The next U.S. attorney general. The president wants a crusader on progressive causes and a reliable firewall to protect him, just as Eric Holder has done. Rumor has it that he wants Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has been the point man on racial preferences.

3) Keystone XL Pipeline. Given his druthers, the president almost certainly would prefer to kill this project and appease his environmentalist supporters. But he won’t do that before the final votes are tallied for Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu , who is running for re-election.

4) Bergdahl. The Pentagon has completed a long-delayed report on Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl but won’t tell us what it says. Sgt. Bergdahl walked away from his unit in Afghanistan, was taken in by the Taliban, and was finally swapped for five Taliban leaders who were detained at Guantanamo Bay. If Sgt. Bergdahl is found to have deserted his post, the report will be bad news for the White House. People will ask why the president gave up so much for a turncoat and why the president held a Rose Garden celebration to mark Sgt. Bergdahl’s return.

5) Iraq and Syria. No one knows what the president will do with regard to Islamic State; in fact, it is now virtually impossible to tell who our “friends” are since America’s opposition to ISIS, a Sunni group, makes the U.S. effectively a partner of its Shiite opponents in Tehran and Damascus. The Saudis, who lead the Sunni coalition, are livid and wonder if the U.S. has switched sides in the Persian Gulf, flipping from its longtime partnership with Saudi Arabia to a de facto one with Iran. Everyone wonders what the president’s strategy really is and whether he will stick to it after the election.

6) Iran. This is the big enchilada. If the president cuts a major deal on Iran’s nuclear-weapons program—which will surely include major concessions on U.S. economic sanctions, he will face a storm of controversy among the public and on Capitol Hill. Worse, Mr. Obama might refuse to submit the deal to Congress, claiming that it is an agreement and not a treaty requiring Senate approval. That could generate a true constitutional crisis.

And a constitutional crisis would lead to calls for the President's impeachment, a move Republicans are loath to make and which there's no point in making if they don't win the Senate on Tuesday. Even so, the President is deeply unpopular and his plans are offensive to the vast majority of Americans so it may happen. Lipson concludes:

All of these matters have been high-profile and potentially deeply divisive. That is precisely why the White House is postponing any announcements. When the administration finally does speak, it will unleash a political storm, even if Democrats hold the Senate. If Republicans win, those winds will reach hurricane force, since the president will likely try to ram everything through a lame-duck Congress. If that happens, consider boarding up the windows.

When candidate Obama said in 2008 that he wanted to fundamentally transform the country I wonder how many people realized that this was the sort of thing he had in mind.

The Failed Experiment

With all the crises, scandals, and more mundane sorts of incompetence that comprise the daily fare delivered to our doorstep with the morning paper, it seems that yesterday's hot topic is forgotten as a new one supplants it today.

The scandal of Mr. Obama's use of taxpayer money to reward his corporate cronies and big donors in the government bailout was eclipsed by news of Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice department facilitating the sale of guns to Mexican drug lords, and this remarkable breach of the law was obscured by the administration's refusal to protect American diplomats in Benghazi, which took a back seat to the incredibly botched rollout of Obamacare, which was followed by KGB-style spying on journalists by the Obama administration, which was lost amidst reports of Secret Service shenanigans with hookers in South America, which was overshadowed by the abuses of the IRS against the administration's political foes, which was superceded by the spying of the NSA on American citizens, which was pushed off the front pages by the incompetence of the Veteran's Administration which resulted in perhaps hundreds of unnecessary deaths, which were forgotten amidst the flood of illegal immigrants pouring across our essentially undefended borders, which was quickly overshadowed by the sudden appearance of ISIS in the vacuum left by the unnecessary American withdrawal from Iraq, which was ignored when the CDC seemed to not know what to tell us about Ebola.

Now we're being reminded that 2015 is going to be a critical year for Obamacare, and the portents are not looking favorable. Barbara Boland at CNS News reports that almost a quarter of a million of the nation's doctors are not going to participate in the exchanges for reasons Boland explains in her article:

Over 214,000 doctors won't participate in the new plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA,) analysis of a new survey by Medical Group Management Association shows. That number of 214,524, estimated by American Action Forum, is through May 2014, but appears to be growing due to plans that force doctors to take on burdensome costs. It's also about a quarter of the total number of 893,851 active professional physicians reported by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In January, an estimated 70% of California's physicians were not participating in Covered California plans. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. Reimbursements under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) are at bottom-dollar - they are even lower than Medicare reimbursements, which are already significantly below market rates. "It is estimated that where private plans pay $1.00 for a service, Medicare pays $0.80, and ACA exchange plans are now paying about $0.60," a study by the think-tank American Action Forum finds. "For example, Covered California plans are setting their plan fee schedules in line with that of Medi-Cal-California's Medicaid Program-which means exchange plans are cutting provider reimbursement by up to 40 percent."

2. Doctors are expected to take on more patients to make up for the lost revenue, but that's not happening, because primary care doctors already have more patients than they can handle. "Furthermore, physicians are worried that exchange plan patients will be sicker than the average patient because they may have been without insurance for extended periods of time, and therefore will require more of the doctor's time at lower pay," says the study.

The study also points to two reasons that doctors might not get paid at all:

3. An MGMA study indicates that 75% of ACA patients that had seen doctors had chosen plans with high deductibles. Given that most of the patients are low-income, doctors are concerned that the patients cannot meet the deductibles and they, the doctors, will get stuck with the bill.

4. Health and Human Services requires that insurers cover customers for an additional 90 days after they have stopped paying their premiums: the insurer covers the first 30 - but, it's up to the doctor to recoup payment for the last 60 days. This is the number one reason providers are opting to not participate in the exchange plans. Currently, about a million people have failed to pay their premiums and had their plans canceled.

As Boland notes, Obamacare is asking doctors to take on sicker patients for less money, and with the risk of not getting paid at all.

What are the lessons to be learned from all this? Here, in my opinion, are two:

1. When Americans vote they are voting irresponsibly if they don't vote for the person they believe to be the best qualified candidate to lead the country. To vote for someone because he/she speaks well, is young, attractive, the right gender, or the right race or ethnicity is to betray one's responsibility as a voter. To vote for someone on the basis of such factors when that person has nothing in his or her resume that suggests that he or she has the requisite background to lead the country is doubly irresponsible. It's like taking the most popular kid in the senior class and putting him at the helm of an aircraft carrier because he's so cool he'll surely know how to manage the thing.

2. Since WWII the left has been arguing that big, centralized government and European-style socialism is the solution to all of our problems. Their brief has been that when technocrats, bureaucrats, and wonks run our lives we'll be much better off than if we were free to make our own decisions without ivy-league graduates telling us what to do. The left rejoiced when the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress and the White House in 2008 because now, they believed, they'd finally be able to conduct their grand experiment and prove how effective big government can be. Six years later it takes the blindest of leaps of faith to still believe that, given expanded power, government will be efficient, competent, transparent, and lawful.

Are We Headed for Eco-Catastrophe?

John Coleman, co-founder of the Weather Channel, has added his voice to the growing chorus of scientists who allege that prophecies of imminent climate catastrophe are not based on sound scientific research and are, at best, seriously misleading.

An article in the British Express quotes from an open letter in which Coleman criticizes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading organization of world climatologists, which has been predicting devastating global climate changes for a couple of decades.

He writes that, contrary to the IPCC's claims and predictions of an imminent global calamity:

• The ocean is not rising significantly.
• The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number.
• Heat waves have actually diminished, not increased. There is not an uptick in the number or strength of storms (in fact storms are diminishing).
• There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past, at least not in the last 18 years, and there is no reason to fear any in the future.
• Efforts to prove the theory that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas and pollutant causing significant warming or weather effects have failed.

The article goes on to claim that,

Climate expert William Happer, from Princeton University, supported Mr Coleman's claims. He added: "No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production.

"The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science."

In 2010 a high-level inquiry by the InterAcademy Council found there was "little evidence" to support the IPCC's claims about global warming.

It's perhaps relevant that Mr. Coleman's letter comes as the U.S. has, by some measures, experienced the coolest year in its history.

It's hard to know who to believe on this issue, but one thing seems fairly certain. The claim that global warming is "settled science" accepted by all the experts in the field is very hard to credit.

Explanatory Inadequacies

Casey Luskin points us to an interesting problem with naturalistic evolutionary explanations of human behavior. The problem is that Darwinian evolutionists seem to be at a loss to explain morality and language. Luskin writes:

Humans do appear hard-wired for morality, but were we programmed by unguided evolutionary processes? Natural selection cannot explain extreme acts of human kindness. Regardless of background or beliefs, upon finding strangers trapped inside a burning vehicle, people will risk their own lives to help them escape -- with no evolutionary benefit to themselves. For example, evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Schloss explains that Holocaust rescuers took great risks that offered no personal biological benefits:

The rescuer's family, extended family and friends were all in jeopardy, and they were recognized to be in jeopardy by the rescuer. Moreover, even if the family escaped death, they often experienced deprivation of food, space and social commerce; extreme emotional distress; and forfeiture of the rescuer's attention.

Francis Collins gives the example of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who risked his life "to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers." As Collins points out, "That's the opposite of saving his genes." Schloss adds other examples of "radically sacrificial" behavior that "reduces reproductive success" and offers no evolutionary benefit, such as voluntary poverty, celibacy, and martyrdom.

In spite of the claims of evolutionary psychologists, many of humanity's most impressive charitable, artistic, and intellectual abilities outstrip the basic requirements of natural selection. If life is simply about survival and reproduction, why do humans compose symphonies, investigate quantum mechanics, and build cathedrals? Natural Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell explained why evolutionary psychology does not adequately predict human behavior:

Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive -- except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed -- except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.

Contrary to Darwinism, the evidence indicates that human life isn't about mere survival and reproduction. But in addition to our moral uniqueness, humans are also distinguished by their use of complex language. As MIT linguist Noam Chomsky observes:

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world. If this is so, it is quite senseless to raise the problem of explaining the evolution of human language from more primitive systems of communication that appear at lower levels of intellectual capacity. ... There is no reason to suppose that the "gaps" are bridgeable.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has humorously observed that there's no Darwinian explanation for why we should have the intellectual ability to do higher math. The potential ability to do calculus was of no benefit to our primitive ancestors and even today it's only the rare grad student whose reproductive prospects are improved by his ability to solve quadratic equations.

In other words, human intellectual ability must have been latent in the species for millions of years before it ever could have been useful in the struggle for survival, but an ability that serves no useful function will eventually be purged from the genome. It certainly wouldn't be selected for since natural selection only acts upon traits that express themselves to the environment.

Darwinism may ultimately be able to contrive an explanation for phenomena like morality, language, and math aptitude, but it can't do so comfortably. The explanations don't flow smoothly from the theory, a fact which should cause theorists to reflect that perhaps there's something missing in a purely naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the development of the human species.

The Appeal of Radical Islam

The recent shooting in Ottawa has caused us once again to ask what it is about Islam that drives so many of its adherents to murder. Or, conversely, why do so many people inclined to murder gravitate to Islam? Ray Pennings, editor of Comment magazine, comes at the question from a somewhat different angle. He asks what it is about Western culture that alienates so many young people so much that they're eager to embrace a radical jihadist version of Islam in the first place. Part of the answer to this question, Pennings believes, is to be found in the meaninglessness and emptiness of life entailed by a secular worldview:

I would also point out to those who advocate a public secularism, who insist that religion is simply a personal matter and is something of no public consequence, there are a number of “radicalized Islam fundamentalists” who are finding the answers of extreme Islamism more compelling than the emptiness of secularism that says there is no meaning beyond the here and now. These are not simple questions nor do I intend to suggest any sympathy or justification for Islamic fundamentalists. But it would be dishonest to ignore the reality that the nihilism of contemporary secularism is not at least in part the explanation for the appeal of extreme Islamic fundamentalism. Something always trumps nothing when it comes to providing a sense of meaning and purpose for individuals and our shared lives together.

Pennings is right, I think. Given a choice between a muscular worldview that infuses life with meaning, hope, and purpose - even if that worldview is otherwise fraught with error - and an arid worldview that empties life of meaning and purpose, which implies that life is nothing more than "a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing," which reduces love and beauty to neurochemistry, and which insists that hope of an existence beyond death is futile, many young men will find the former far more appealing than the latter.

It's ironic that secularism, the chief champion of the Darwinian view in the Western world, is being assailed around the globe by competing ideologies that seem to be more successful in the Darwinian struggle for survival.

Libet and Determinism

As a complement to yesterday's post on the free will/ determinism question here's a post from the archives on the work of Benjamin Libet who conducted some experiments that seemed to support, even prove, that determinism is true:

Students of psychology, philosophy and other disciplines which touch upon the operations of the mind and the question of free will have probably heard mention of the experiments of Benjamin Libet, a University of California at San Francisco neurobiologist who conducted some remarkable research into the brain and human consciousness in the last decades of the 20th century.

One of Libet's most famous discoveries was that the brain "decides" on a particular choice milliseconds before we ourselves are conscious of deciding. The brain creates an electrochemical "Readiness Potential" (RP) that precedes by milliseconds the conscious decision to do something. This has been seized upon by materialists who use it as proof that our decisions are not really chosen by us but are rather the unconscious product of our brain's neurochemistry. The decision is made before we're even aware of what's going on, they claim, and this fact undermines the notion that we have free will as this video explains:

Michael Egnor, writing at ENV, points out, however, that so far from supporting determinism, Libet himself believed in free will, his research supported that belief, and, what's more, his research also reinforced, in Libet's own words, classical religious views of sin.

Libet discovered that the decision to do X is indeed pre-conscious, but he also found that the decision to do X can be consciously vetoed by us and that no RP precedes that veto. In other words, the decision of the brain to act in a particular way is determined by unconscious factors, but we retain the ability to consciously choose not to follow through with that decision. Our freedom lies in our ability to refuse any or all of the choices our brain presents to us.

Egnor's article is a fascinating piece if you're interested in the question of free will and Libet's contribution to our understanding of it.

Freedom, Determinism, and Compatibilism

In class discussions of free will and determinism, a number of students have asked if there isn't a middle way. One student even dug a post out of the archives that I did on such a via media back in 2008 (12/24). The post starts out by addressing the notion of a kind of compromise position between libertarian free will and determinism, usually referred to as "compatibilism," and ends up summarizing the discussions we've had in class on these different philosophical positions. Here it is:

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a succinct rebuttal of compatibilism, i.e. the view that our choices are fully determined and yet at the same time free. As Arrington points out, this certainly sounds like a contradiction.

The compatibilist defines freedom, however, as the lack of coercion, so as long as nothing or no one is compelling your behavior it's completely free even though at the moment you make your decision there's in fact only one possible choice you could make. Your choice is determined by the influence of your past experiences, your environment and your genetic make-up. The feeling you have that you could have chosen something other than what you did choose is simply an illusion, a trick played on us by our brains.

Compatibilism, however, doesn't solve the controversy between determinism and libertarianism (the belief we have free-will). It simply uses a philosophical sleight-of-hand to define it away. As long as it is the case that at any given moment there's just one possible future then our choices are determined by factors beyond our control, and if they're determined it's very difficult to see how we could be responsible for them. Whether we are being compelled by external forces to make a particular choice or not, we are still being compelled by internal factors that make our choice inevitable.

The temptation for the materialist is to simply accept determinism, but not only does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

On the other hand, it's also difficult to pin down exactly what a free choice is. It can't be a choice that's completely uncaused because then it wouldn't be a consequence of our character and in what sense would we be responsible for it? But if the choice is a product of our character, and our character is the result of our past experiences, environment, and our genetic make-up, then ultimately our choice is determined by factors over which we have no control and we're back to determinism.

It seems to me that if materialism is true and all we are is a material, physical being, and all of our choices are simply the product of chemical reactions occurring in the brain, then determinism must be true as well, and moral responsibility and human dignity are illusions, and no punishment or reward could ever be justified on grounds of desert.

This all seems completely counter-intuitive so most people hold on to libertarianism, even if they can't explain what a free choice is, but they can only do so by giving up materialism. Only if we have a non-physical, immaterial mind that somehow functions in human volition can there be free will and thus moral responsibility and human dignity.

Opening the Floodgates

Reports have been circulating that the Obama administration is planning on granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens after the November elections. It would be a move of dubious constitutionality and would put enormous stress on the nation's economy and would completely change the nature of the country. The Washington Times explains:

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Friday threw open the door to as many as 100,000 Haitians, who will now move into the United States without a visa. Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, rightly and accurately denounced enabling Haitians awaiting a U.S. visa to enter the country and legally apply for work permits as “an irresponsible overreach of the executive branch’s authority.”

But this is only the tip of the iceberg that the administration has planned for us:

Earlier this month the immigration agency solicited a printer able to handle a “surge” of 9 million green cards “to support possible future immigration-reform initiative requirements.” In an ordinary year, about 1 million green cards are issued, and over the life of this contract the company is expected to produce up to 34 million cards, a figure representing an increase of the population of the United States by 10 percent.

Set aside the legalities involved and ask, why is the President doing this? Why flood the country with people who'll become eligible for food stamps, health care, and a host of other taxpayer-funded goods and services? Why, in a time of low employment in the U.S., import millions of new workers to compete for the few jobs that are there?

The Times editors assert that these amnestied aliens will eventually be granted full citizenship and with that win the right to vote. Doubtless, they'll choose to vote as Democrats, ensuring Democratic majorities and presidencies for the next three generations if not longer.

But political power is perhaps not the only reason. Many observers believe that Mr. Obama has harbored an antipathy and resentment toward the United States ever since his youth. The most influential people in his life all despised the country, its values, its success, its power, and its influence in the world. If Mr. Obama were intentionally trying to reduce the U.S. to third-world status there'd be no better way to accomplish that than to do what he's doing. As the Times says:

It’s a disaster in the making — indeed already here — for public health and national security, straining the welfare state to its limit. Most Americans want no part of this. A Gallup survey finds that 74 percent of Americans want the level of immigration to stay where it is, or reduce it. Mr. Obama has no support for his amnesty scheme except from those who want to transform America into a nation that no one would recognize.

It's one reason why the election on November 4th is so important. If President Obama has a Democratic Senate for the last two years of his term there'll be no restraints on his power to do whatever he wishes. If Congress is unable to check him he'll certainly succeed in achieving his goal, plainly announced in 2008, of fundamentally transforming the country.