Dissociation

Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution has a fine piece at National Review on the different ways conservatives and liberals see their country and how liberals see conservatism.

He begins by describing the reaction of a few members of an audience at a charity banquet where he was giving a speech when he made mention, in the context of work being done in Africa by American charitable organizations, of "American exceptionalism." The comment was met by polite boos from one segment of the audience, and Steele uses this incident as a springboard for explaining the left's attitude toward America in general and conservatives in particular. I'd like to be able to excerpt the entire essay, but I'll focus on just a few of Steele's points and urge you to read the whole thing.

Referring to his experience with the boo-birds at the banquet, he writes:

It was as if they were saying, “Don’t you understand that even the phrase ‘American exceptionalism’ is a hubris that evokes the evils of white supremacy? It is an indecency that we won’t be associated with.” In booing, these audience members were acting out an irony: They were good Americans precisely because they were skeptical of American greatness. Their skepticism was a badge of innocence because it dissociated them from America’s history of evil. To unreservedly buy into American exceptionalism was, for them, to turn a blind eye on this evil, and they wanted to make the point that they were far too evolved for that. They would never be like those head-in-the-sand Americans who didn’t understand that American greatness was tainted by evil.

Steele believes that this desire to dissociate themselves from the evils of the past drives much of liberal thinking today.

In its hunger for innocence, post-1960s liberalism fell into a pattern in which anti-Americanism — the impulse, as the cliché puts it, to “blame America first” — guaranteed one’s innocence of the American past. Here in anti-Americanism was the Left’s all-defining formula: relativism-dissociation-legitimacy-power. Anti-Americanism is essentially a relativism — a false equivalency — that says America, despite her greatness, is no better an example to the world than many other countries. And in this self-effacement there is a perfect dissociation from the American past, and thus a new moral legitimacy — and so, finally, an entitlement to power .... American exceptionalism was a scandal that one booed in the name of humility and decency. Dissociation from it was the road to the Good. And this was so sealed a matter that booing me was only an expression of one’s moral self-esteem — the goodness in oneself bursting forth to censure a heretic.

Steele's essay is a reminder that different people can look at the same set of facts and interpret them completely differently. Just as some looking at the picture below see an old woman and some see a young girl, liberals looking at America see its historical flaws and conservatives see its historical uniqueness. It's flaws are troublesome, but every nation has them. Its uniqueness, however, has made America great not only in terms of military and economic power, but also in terms of the freedoms, opportunities, and assistance it offers not only to its own citizens but also to those of much of the rest of the world. The fact that so many people wish to emigrate to the U.S. or at least live under its protective umbrella is an implicit confirmation that they think so, too.

Steele's portrait of the racism he experienced growing up (Steele is African American) will perhaps come as a surprise to younger readers conditioned to think of the brutality on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma or the unleashing of dogs and firehoses on peaceful protestors in Alabama as typical of how whites looked at and treated blacks in the 20th century. It wasn't:

When I was a boy growing up under segregation, racism was not seen as evil by most whites. It was simply recognition of a natural law: that some races were inferior to others and that people needed and wanted to be with “their own kind.” Most whites were quite polite about this — blacks were in their place and it was not proper to humiliate them for their lowly position. Racism was not meant to be menacing; it was only a kind of fatalism, an acceptance of God’s will. And so most whites could claim they held no animus toward blacks. Their prejudice, if it was prejudice at all, was perfectly impersonal. It left them free to feel compassion and sometimes even deep affection for those inferiors who cleaned their houses, or served them at table, or suckled their babies. And this was the meaning of things.

Of course, the fact that so many people had benign, even compassionate feelings to those they deemed inferior, doesn't justify the attitude that it was in the nature of things that blacks should always be second-class citizens. The attitude was obviously wrong, but as it manifested itself in many people of the time it was not evil. Unfortunately, it requires a mind able to handle nuance to understand the way things were back then, and nuance is one of the first casualties when the epithet of "racism" takes wing. To illustrate the attitude Steele is describing think of the movie Driving Miss Daisy.

The last part of his essay is given to a description of the liberal perception of conservatives and the irony of that perception given the repeated, and sometimes disastrous, failures of liberal social policy:

Conservatism — liberals believed — facilitated America’s moral hypocrisy. Its high-flown constitutional principles only covered up the low motivations that actually drove the country: the self-absorbed pursuit of wealth, the insatiable quest for hegemony in the world, the unacknowledged longing for hierarchy, the repression of women, the exploitation of minorities, and so on. Conservatism took the hit for all the hypocrisies that came to light in the 1960s. And it remains today an ideology branded with America’s shames. Liberalism, on the other hand, won for its followers a veil of innocence. And this is the gift that recommends it despite its legacy of failed, even destructive, public policies. We can chalk up the black underclass, the near disintegration of the black family, and the general decline of public education — among many other things — to liberal social policies.

Welfare policies beginning in the 1970s incentivized black women not to marry when they became pregnant, thereby undermining the black family and generating a black underclass. The public schools in many inner cities became more and more dysfunctional as various laws and court cases hampered the ability of school officials and classroom teachers to enforce discipline. Meanwhile, the schools fell under the sway of multiculturalism as well as powerful teachers’ unions that often oppose reforms that would make their members more accountable. Students in these schools, after the welfare-inspired breakdown of the black family, were less and less prepared to learn.

Affirmative action presumed black inferiority to be a given, so that racial preferences locked blacks into low self-esteem and hence low standards of academic achievement. “Yes, we are weak and non-competitive and look to be preferred for this; our weakness is our talent.”

School busing to achieve integration led only to a more extensive tracking system (classes that are assigned by academic performance) within the integrated schools, so that blacks were effectively segregated all over again in the lower academic tracks. And so on. Post-1960s liberalism — on the hunt for white American innocence — has done little more than toy with blacks. Yet it is conservatives who now feel evicted from their culture, who are made to feel like outsiders even as they are accused of being traditionalists. And contemporary conservatism is now animated by a sense of grievance, by the feeling that the great principles it celebrates are now dismissed as mere hypocrisies.

There's much more wisdom and insight at the link. If you want to understand the culture conflicts of our day, particularly as it relates to race, Steele's work, including his several books (The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.) are good places to start.

Raising Wages, Lowering Jobs

One of the arguments against raising the minimum wage is that it will do more harm to poor people than it will do good. By raising the minimum wage many employers who work on tight profit margins will be forced either to lay off employees or go out of business. It doesn't help a single mom trying to make a few extra bucks if her wage is raised to $15 an hour but her hours are reduced to zero. Nor does it help lower income people when the businesses at which they shop have to charge their customers more in order to pay the higher labor cost, or when a business that might have added an extra worker or two decides to forego taking on the additional cost.

This article reports that that's the very thing that's beginning to happen in Seattle as a result of the town fathers' decision to raise the city's minimum wage:

Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law goes into effect on April 1, 2015. As that date approaches, restaurants across the city are making the financial decision to close shop. The Washington Policy Center writes that “closings have occurred across the city, from Grub in the upscale Queen Anne Hill neighborhood, to Little Uncle in gritty Pioneer Square, to the Boat Street Cafe on Western Avenue near the waterfront.”

Of course, restaurants close for a variety of reasons. But, according to Seattle Magazine, the “impending minimum wage hike to $15 per hour” is playing a “major factor.” That’s not surprising, considering “about 36% of restaurant earnings go to paying labor costs."

Washington Restaurant Association’s Anthony Anton puts it this way: “It’s not a political problem; it’s a math problem. He estimates that a common budget breakdown among sustaining Seattle restaurants so far has been the following: 36 percent of funds are devoted to labor, 30 percent to food costs and 30 percent go to everything else (all other operational costs). The remaining 4 percent has been the profit margin, and as a result, in a $700,000 restaurant, he estimates that the average restauranteur in Seattle has been making $28,000 a year.

With the minimum wage spike, however, he says that if restaurant owners made no changes, the labor cost in quick service restaurants would rise to 42 percent and in full service restaurants to 47 percent.

Restaurant owners, expecting to operate on thinner margins, have tried to adapt in several ways including “ higher menu prices, cheaper, lower-quality ingredients, reduced opening times, and cutting work hours and firing workers,” according to The Seattle Times and Seattle Eater magazine. As the Washington Policy Center points out, when these strategies are not enough, businesses close, “workers lose their jobs and the neighborhood loses a prized amenity."

A spokesman for the Washington Restaurant Association told the Washington Policy Center, “Every [restaurant] operator I’m talking to is in panic mode, trying to figure out what the new world will look like… Seattle is the first city in this thing and everyone’s watching, asking how is this going to change? Seattle is rightly famous for great neighborhood restaurants. That won’t change. What will change is that fewer people will be able to afford to dine out, and as a result there will be fewer great restaurants to enjoy. People probably won’t notice when some restaurant workers lose their jobs, but as prices rise and some neighborhood businesses close, the quality of life in urban Seattle will become a little bit poorer.”

If raising the minimum wage is a good idea why not eliminate poverty altogether and raise it to $50 an hour? The answer is obvious, of course. Businesses couldn't handle it, and would have to close down, but many of them can't handle an increase to $15 an hour either. So why is the city requiring them to do it?

Maybe these businesses could apply to Washington for subsidies to pay their workers, sort of like how people can apply for subsidies to pay their increased health care premiums under Obamacare.

St. Patrick

The following is a post I've run on previous St. Patrick's Days and thought I'd run again this year because, I say in all modesty, it's pretty interesting:

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating. As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 B.C., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed. Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGaeil (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Why Naturalism Is Self-Refuting

Among the live options for worldviews on offer in modern times certainly one of the most popular among scientists, philosophers, and other academics is the view called naturalism. This view states that all that exists is ultimately explicable in terms of the sorts of explanations employed by scientists. In other words, nature and nature's laws are all there is, there's nothing else.

Most worldviews offer a Grand Story for how we got here. In naturalism the Story is some iteration of Darwinian evolution. Blind, natural processes generated life which evolved through genetic mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift to produce the grand diversity of life including man and his marvelous powers of reason. The problem with this Story, though, is that according to philosopher John Gray (who is himself a naturalist) it's self-refuting.

In a piece in The New Republic critical of his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins Gray writes:

[T]he ideas and the arguments that [Dawkins] presents are in no sense novel or original, and he seems unaware of the critiques of positivism that appeared in its Victorian heyday.

Some of them bear re-reading today. One of the subtlest and most penetrating came from the pen of Arthur Balfour, the Conservative statesman, British foreign secretary, and sometime prime minister. Well over a century ago, Balfour identified a problem with the evolutionary thinking that was gaining ascendancy at the time. If the human mind has evolved in obedience to the imperatives of survival, what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of reality, when all that is required in order to reproduce the species is that its errors and illusions are not fatal?

A purely naturalistic philosophy cannot account for the knowledge that we believe we possess. As he framed the problem in The Foundations of Belief in 1895, “We have not merely stumbled on truth in spite of error and illusion, which is odd, but because of error and illusion, which is even odder.” Balfour’s solution was that naturalism is self-defeating: humans can gain access to the truth only because the human mind has been shaped by a divine mind. Similar arguments can be found in a number of contemporary philosophers, most notably Alvin Plantinga. Again, one does not need to accept Balfour’s theistic solution to see the force of his argument. A rigorously naturalistic account of the human mind entails a much more skeptical view of human knowledge than is commonly acknowledged.

Balfour's argument is sometimes a bit difficult to understand when encountered for the first time, but it says essentially that any trait selected for survival by natural selection can only coincidentally be a trait that is useful in discovering truth. If human reason is the product of naturalistic evolution it would have been selected for because it somehow conferred survival value, not because it was reliable in finding truth. There's no necessary connection between knowing truth and survival of a species.

In her recent book titled Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism Secularism, and Other God Substitutes Nancy Pearcy quotes a number of naturalist thinkers who make this point but who don't seem to realize that it undercuts their own naturalism (The following draws upon an excerpt of Pearcy's book at Evolution News and Views). Pearcy writes:

Of course, the sheer pressure to survive is likely to produce some correct ideas. A zebra that thinks lions are friendly will not live long. But false ideas may be useful for survival. Evolutionists admit as much: Eric Baum says, "Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth." Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not." The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false.

An example comes from Francis Crick. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, he writes, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive."

But, Pearcy tells us, that means Crick's own theory cannot be relied upon to be true.

To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value.

The same thing is often said about morality. "It's an illusion," philosopher Michael Ruse wrote, "fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." But if all of these things are the illusory products of evolution how do we know that the theory of evolution and the naturalistic worldview it supports are not also illusions? Why should we think these things true if our thinking is as likely to lead us to falsehood as it is to lead us to truth? Pearcy continues:

A few thinkers, to their credit, recognize the problem. Literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, "If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? ... Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it."

On a similar note, philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, "Is the [evolutionary] hypothesis really compatible with the continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge?" His answer is no: "I have to be able to believe ... that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct -- not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so." Hence, "insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining."

Pearcy goes on to show that Darwin himself, and many of his followers, argued that man's mind leads him to belief in God but that our minds, being the product of blind chance and selection, are too untrustworthy to credit that conclusion. Yet they never applied that same skepticism to the theory of evolution itself.

People are sometimes under the impression that Darwin himself recognized the problem. They typically cite Darwin's famous "horrid doubt" passage where he questions whether the human mind can be trustworthy if it is a product of evolution: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy."

But, of course, Darwin's theory itself was a "conviction of man's mind." So why should it be "at all trustworthy"?

Surprisingly, however, Darwin never confronted this internal contradiction in his theory. Why not? Because he expressed his "horrid doubt" selectively -- only when considering the case for a Creator.

In another passage Darwin admitted, "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man." Again, however, he immediately veered off into skepticism: "But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?" That is, can it be trusted when it draws "grand conclusions" about a First Cause? Perhaps the concept of God is merely an instinct programmed into us by natural selection, Darwin added, like a monkey's "instinctive fear and hatred of a snake."

In short, it was on occasions when Darwin's mind led him to a theistic conclusion that he dismissed the mind as untrustworthy. He failed to recognize, though, that to be logically consistent he needed to apply the same skepticism to his own theory.

Pearcy concludes the excerpt with a quote from Oxford mathematician John Lennox who wrote that according to atheism "the mind that does science ... is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn't trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science."

One way to summarize all this is to say that you can believe your reason is trustworthy or you can believe in naturalistic evolution, but you can't believe in both.

The Gang of 47

Last week 47 Republican senators signed a brief letter to Iran's regime informing them that any deal they sign with the administration regulating their nuclear weapons program has to be approved by the U.S. Senate. I don't know what effect the letter has had on the Iranians but it has sent Democrats in congress and the media into hysterics. They're demanding that the 47 be tried for treason. they're demanding that this is the most seditious behavior ever in the history of the universe. What they're not doing much of, though, is telling us exactly how the senators were violating the law and how the letter undermines the administration's negotiations.

Nor have I heard much from the left on why what these senators did is anywhere near as bad as what, say, Ted Kennedy did back in the 80s when he secretly sent emissaries Moscow to stab Ronald Reagan in the back, or what any number of Democrats, including current Secretary of State John Kerry, did in the 80s when they went to Nicaragua to give aid and comfort the Sandinistas, or what Representative Jim McDermott and other Democrats did in 2002 when he went to Baghdad to undermine George W. Bush, or Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria in 2007 for similar reasons.

When Democrats deliberately try to undermine the foreign policy of a Republican administration they're celebrated as heroic patriots, but when Republicans do something far less toxic the liberals in the media and congress want them all arrested. Geez, you'd think the GOP had used the IRS to punish their political enemies or something.

Anyway, Breitbart has a very good piece on all this plus a video clip of the author of the letter, Senator Tom Cotton, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, being grilled by the folks on MSNBC's Morning Joe program. Here's the heart of the Breitbart article wherein the writer, Ben Shapiro, names names:

Senators John Sparkman (D-AL) and George McGovern (D-SD). The two Senators visited Cuba and met with government actors there in 1975. They said that they did not act on behalf of the United States, so the State Department ignored their activity.

Senator Teddy Kennedy (D-MA). In 1983, Teddy Kennedy sent emissaries to the Soviets to undermine Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. According to a memo finally released in 1991 from head of the KGB Victor Chebrikov to then-Soviet leader Yuri Andropov: On 9-10 May of this year, Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow. The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.

What was the message? That Teddy would help stifle Reagan’s anti-Soviet foreign policy if the Soviets would help Teddy run against Reagan in 1984. Kennedy offered to visit Moscow to “arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Then he said that he would set up interviews with Andropov in the United States. “Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews…Like other rational people, [Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations,” the letter explained.

The memo concluded:

Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988. Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.

House Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX). In 1984, 10 Democrats sent a letter to Daniel Ortega, the head of the military dictatorship in Nicaragua, praising Ortega for “taking steps to open up the political process in your country.” House Speaker Jim Wright signed the letter.

In 1987, Wright worked out a deal to bring Ortega to the United States to visit with lawmakers. As The New York Times reported:

There were times when the White House seemed left out of the peace process, uninformed, irritated. ”We don’t have any idea what’s going on,” an Administration official said Thursday. And there was a bizarre atmosphere to the motion and commotion: the leftist Mr. Ortega, one of President Reagan’s arch enemies, heads a Government that the Administration has been trying to overthrow by helping to finance a war that has killed thousands of Nicaraguans on both sides. Yet he was freely moving around Washington, visiting Mr. Wright in his Capitol Hill office, arguing his case in Congress and at heavily covered televised news conferences. He criticized President Reagan; he recalled that the United States, whose troops intervened in Nicaragua several times between 1909 and 1933, had supported the Somoza family dictatorship which lasted for 43 years until the Sandinistas overthrew it in 1979.

Ortega then sat next to Wright as he presented a “detailed cease-fire proposal.” The New York Times said, “Mr. Ortega seemed delighted to turn to Mr. Wright.” Senator John Kerry (D-MA). Kerry jumped into the pro-Sandanista pool himself in 1985, when he traveled to Nicaragua to negotiate with the regime. He wasn’t alone; Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) joined him. The Christian Science Monitor reported that the two senators “brought back word that Mr. Ortega would be willing to accept a cease-fire if Congress rejected aid to the rebels…That week the House initially voted down aid to the contras, and Mr. Ortega made an immediate trip to Moscow.” Kerry then shilled on behalf of the Ortega government:

We are still trying to overthrow the politics of another country in contravention of international law, against the Organization of American States charter. We negotiated with North Vietnam. Why can we not negotiate with a country smaller than North Carolina and with half the population of Massachusetts? It’s beyond me. And the reason is that they just want to get rid of them [the Sandinistas], they want to throw them out, they don’t want to talk to them.

Representatives Jim McDermott (D-WA), David Bonior (D-MI), and Mike Thompson (D-CA). In 2002, the three Congressmen visited Baghdad to play defense for Saddam Hussein’s regime. There, McDermott laid the groundwork for the Democratic Party’s later rip on President George W. Bush, stating, “the president of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.” McDermott, along with his colleagues, suggested that the American administration give the Iraqi regime “due process” and “take the Iraqis on their face value.” Bonior said openly he was acting on behalf of the government:

The purpose of our trip was to make it very clear, as I said in my opening statement, to the officials in Iraq how serious we–the United States is about going to war and that they will have war unless these inspections are allowed to go unconditionally and unfettered and open. And that was our point. And that was in the best interest of not only Iraq, but the American citizens and our troops. And that’s what we were emphasizing. That was our primary concern–that and looking at the humanitarian situation.

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). In 2002, Rockefeller told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, “I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq, that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11.” That would have given Saddam Hussein fourteen months in which to prepare for war. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). In April 2007, as the Bush administration pursued pressure against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to visit him. There, according to The New York Times, the two “discussed a variety of Middle Eastern issues, including the situations in Iraq and Lebanon and the prospect of peace talks between Syria and Israel.” Pelosi was accompanied by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Tom Lantos (D-CA), Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY), Nick J. Rahall II (D-WV), and Keith Ellison (D-MN). Zaid Haider, Damascus bureau chief for Al Safir, reportedly said, ‘There is a feeling now that change is going on in American policy – even if it’s being led by the opposition.”

Don't look for any of the above on MSNBC, however, or in the New York Times or Washington Post. It doesn't fit the narrative they want the American people to accept about how uniquely evil Republicans are.

Time

The nature of time has been described as perhaps the universe's most baffling mystery. Immanuel Kant thought that time was a part of our mental structure that enabled us to experience an external world that would be incomprehensibly incoherent without that structure.

Many modern thinkers, on the other hand, think of time as an objective reality that exists statically and through which we somehow pass. In this view there is no past or future. Every moment exists simultaneously but we experience them sequentially.

Somewhat between these two views is the theory that what we call time is a collection of states of affairs that we experience, but that time itself is an illusion.

There's an interesting article on time in Popular Science by astrophysicist Adam Frank who seems to adopt this latter view. Frank presents us with an excerpt from his book About Time in which he advances the interesting theory that time has no real existence and describes the thinking of physicist Julian Barbour in support of his theory:

Julian Barbour’s solution to the problem of time in physics and cosmology is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing as time.

“If you try to get your hands on time, it’s always slipping through your fingers,” says Barbour. “People are sure time is there, but they can’t get hold of it. My feeling is that they can’t get hold of it because it isn’t there at all.”

Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. Einstein changed this picture by unifying space and time into a single 4-Dimensional entity. But even Einstein failed to challenge the concept of time as a measure of change. In Barbour’s view, the question must be turned on its head. It is change that provides the illusion of time. Channeling the ghost of Parmenides, Barbour sees each individual moment as a whole, complete and existing in its own right. He calls these moments “Nows.”

“As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows,” says Barbour, “and the question is, what are they?” For Barbour each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. “We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more, nothing less.”

Barbour’s Nows can be imagined as pages of a novel ripped from the book’s spine and tossed randomly onto the floor. Each page is a separate entity existing without time, existing outside of time. Arranging the pages in some special order and moving through them in a step-by-step fashion makes a story unfold. Still, no matter how we arrange the sheets, each page is complete and independent.

As Barbour says, “The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands.” The physics of reality for Barbour is the physics of these Nows taken together as a whole. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment. Instead all the different possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom throughout all of creation, exist simultaneously. Barbour’s Nows all exist at once in a vast Platonic realm that stands completely and absolutely without time.

“What really intrigues me,” says Barbour, “is that the totality of all possible Nows has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now and I call the country Platonia, because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical rules.” The question of “before” the Big Bang never arises for Barbour because his cosmology has no time. All that exists is a landscape of configurations, the landscape of Nows.

“Platonia is the true arena of the universe,” he says, “and its structure has a deep influence on whatever physics, classical or quantum, is played out in it.” For Barbour, the Big Bang is not an explosion in the distant past. It’s just a special place in Platonia, his terrain of independent Nows.

There's more on this at the link. Take the time to read it, or perhaps I should say, enter the Now of reading the article.

Some Hatred Is Okay, Some Isn't

The news out of Oklahoma last weekend is pretty ugly. A bunch of frat boys at Oklahoma University filmed themselves engaging in dehumanizing, racist chants. The video went public and the president of the university acted with dispatch and shut the fraternity down. There are a couple of things about this sordid affair upon which I'd like to comment. One thought I had is that it was a little surprising to see the number of people in the media who expressed surprise that young people (!) would exhibit racist sentiments. Young people, many observers seem to assume, are far more tolerant and open-minded and not nearly so bigoted as older generations. In fact, in my book In the Absence of God (See link at top right of this page) certain racial attitudes are presented that some readers thought were anachronistic. I was told by one young reader that race just isn't an issue for young people now-a-days. I wonder what that reader is thinking today.

Anyway, anyone surprised that college students would flout the pieties, racial or otherwise, of their elders and others in authority just doesn't know young people. That's what young people, especially college students, have always done, and the more strenuously university authorities and the modern thought police insist that students toe the line of political correctness, the more likely young people are to deliberately cross the line of propriety to stick their thumb in the over-forty crowd's eye and mock their orthodoxies.

Their dismayed elders did the same thing when they were students, of course, and now they're surprised that some of their kids are doing it today. That they are is wrong, to be sure, but it'd be silly to draw grand sociological conclusions from what these guys did. They behaved like jerks, so why is that noteworthy?

Another thought that I heard expressed over the weekend is that this shows that racism is still alive and well among white people, but if that were so these young men would be lauded by their peers and on social media. Instead they've been humiliated by the national media, the student body has banded together to censure their actions, and the university president was uncharacteristically forceful (for a university president) in condemning their conduct, even to the point of expelling two of them.

Which raises another thought. As bad as their behavior was it was nothing compared to the virulent hate and bigotry spewed by people like Louis Farrakhan (not to mention numerous black murderers who claimed that they wanted to kill white people, and did), yet even though he speaks for tens of thousands of African-Americans who sympathize with, or, bizarre as it may sound, even share, his views the media and many in the black community completely ignore him. There are no editorials or talking heads on the Cable nets deploring his vile speeches. There are no vigils in the black community with people carrying signs declaring that Farrakhan doesn't represent them.

Yet when a bunch of immature white goofballs indulge in relatively mild (compared to Farrakhan, at least) racial insults the media and the university (rightly, in my view) go to code red. The student body massively repudiates it, the campus media strongly condemns it, and the administration quickly punishes it. What these guys did was detestable. It was hurtful to people, and the university was right to send the message that this sort of thing will not be tolerated. That they did so shows that racism, at least in the white community, may be alive, but it's on life support and it's not doing at all well.

Now, if only college administrators elsewhere would follow President Boren's lead and direct the same degree of outrage at anti-semites on their campuses who evidently feel free to intimidate, threaten and express their hatred of Jewish students. Or is hatred on American campuses okay as long as it's only directed at Jews?

Benjamin Libet on Free Will and Determinism

This post is from the archive but is relevant to a topic we're discussing, or soon will be discussing, in class:

Students of psychology, philosophy and other disciplines which touch upon the operations of the mind and the question of free will may have 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, 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 (freely) 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. Or, we might say, free will is really "free won't."

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.

The Crusades

In the wake of President Obama's infelicitous comments during the National Prayer Breakfast tacitly implicating Christianity in atrocities during the Crusades I decided to undertake a re-reading of Rodney Stark's excellent work on the Crusades titled God's Battalions.

Stark points out, and documents, that contrary to popular mythology and perhaps the president's understanding of them, the Crusades were not motivated by greed and a desire to pillage. Nor were they wars of imperialism waged by brutal Europeans against peaceful and gentle Muslims. Nor did the crusaders seek to convert the population or oppress them. Nor were the crusaders colonists who turned the recaptured cities in what is today Syria and Israel into cash cows for Europe. Indeed, there was very little wealth to be had in Arab lands and the financial and other personal costs incurred by the crusaders in their mission to free the Holy Land was immense. As Stark observes, the flow of wealth during the two centuries of crusader rule went very much from Europe to the Middle East, not the other way around. The Crusades were, in fact, wars of self-defense undertaken at enormous risk, cost, and suffering to the crusaders, after centuries of Muslim torture, slaughter, and conquest of Christian cities and pilgrims. Their entire purpose seems to have been to liberate the Holy Land from the terrorism of the Muslims and make it safe for Christian pilgrims to journey there.

The expeditions stretched over a span of two centuries, roughly from 1097 - 1289 and were amazingly successful in military terms. Much larger Muslim forces were no match for the technological superiority and disciplined forces of the outnumbered crusaders who had traveled some 2500 miles on foot to reach the Holy Land. Indeed, the crusaders were much more likely to fall victim to disease, deprivation, and betrayal by the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople than to Muslim armies. They ultimately failed to hold on to their gains in the Middle East because their European supporters grew weary of the investment it took to supply them thousands of miles away.

Perhaps more to the point of this post, there were three events that occurred during the Crusades that some historians point to as proof of crusader savagery and barbarism, and of the Church's complicity in their crimes, but Stark explains that those events, while tragic, are more complex than some historians admit.

The first was the slaughter of the Rhineland Jews by German crusaders enroute to the Middle East. This was a horrific crime, but it's simplistic to think that it was an instance of Christian persecution of Jews. As a relatively small force of German crusaders began their trek through the Rhine valley on their way to the Holy Land they massacred Jews in a number of cities along the way. The knights who perpetrated these atrocities were confronted in every town by bishops of the Church who, at much personal risk, hid Jews and sought to protect them from the ghastly violence. Moreover, the slaughters were strongly condemned by the pope, though he was unfortunately powerless to prevent them. The Germans who murdered the Jews were themselves almost completely wiped out when they reached Hungary by Hungarian knights, a denouement which most European Christians believed to be condign punishment delivered from heaven for the crimes these men had committed in the Rhineland.

The second event was the massacre of Muslims that followed the taking of Jerusalem during the First Crusade in the summer of 1099. This massacre, Stark writes, "has been used again and again to vilify the crusaders," but "it is not only absurd, but quite disingenuous to use this event to 'prove' that the crusaders were bloodthirsty barbarians in contrast to the more civilized and tolerant Muslims." Dozens of cities in the region had been completely destroyed and their inhabitants beheaded, tortured, or sold into slavery by Muslims in the years leading up to the Crusade. Moreover, the prevailing rule of warfare at the time was that if a city surrendered when beseiged the inhabitants would be spared, but if they refused to surrender and instead forced the attackers to take it through combat, and thus sustain high casualties, the inhabitants could expect to be slain. Stark suggests that had the Muslims surrendered before the scaling towers were rolled against the walls the resulting blood-letting would not have happened, but they did not. This rule of seige warfare may seem barbaric to us, but all sides abided by it in the eleventh century (although Muslim forces regularly violated it and several times massacred all the inhabitants of cities that had surrendered to them).

The third event was the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. Constantinople was an ostensibly Christian city (Greek Orthodox) which makes the destruction of it by European Christian crusaders difficult to understand, until one reads the history. By 1204 the Byzantine emperors at Constantinople had repeatedly betrayed crusader armies traversing their territory enroute to the Holy Land with the result that tens of thousands of crusaders and their families perished. Moreover, the Byzantines themselves in the course of internecine warfare plundered their capital for three days in 1081. In 1182 the emperor had all Latin Christians in the city put to the sword resulting in the deaths of thousands of women, children and elderly - many more dead than were believed to have been killed when the crusaders, betrayed once more by the Byzantine emperor and under attack by his navy, finally had had enough and attacked the city. The city fell, about two thousand of the 150,000 residents were killed and much of the many art treasures were plundered. It is this last that has outraged some historians more than the deaths of the inhabitants of the city.

In any case, while preparing this post I came across an article in The Federalist which also discusses Stark's book. The article is pretty good and you might wish to check it out.

Well, That's a Relief

Earlier today I posted an excerpt from an Israeli web site that specializes in defense matters. The site raised the specter of a nuclear bomb dropped into the Mediterranean by Iran generating a tsunami that could wipe out Tel Aviv. I said that I didn't know if this were even possible and now I find out that it's not, or at least there's good reason to think that it's not.

A piece at Real Clear Defense explains why not. The short version is, "There is just no explosive powerful enough — atomic or otherwise — that can displace the amount of water required to create waves powerful enough to destroy cities."

For which we can all be grateful. Now we can just worry about Iran affixing their nukes to missiles and delivering them the old-fashioned way.

What's Israel Afraid of?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before a joint session of Congress last Tuesday to explain why any deal with Iran that lets them continue their nuclear weapons program or allows them to keep the machinery in place to start it up again is a bad deal for the world. The speech was in my view Churchillian and Netanyahu seems to be filling the role of spokesperson for the free world, a role formerly played by whomever was serving as the president of the United States.

Be that as it may, it might be wondered what would be so bad about Iran developing a few nukes. Other nations have them, and besides, how would Iran deliver them? They have no air force to speak of and their missiles would probably be shot down by Israel's Iron Dome defense system, so why all the fuss?

However, even if these reasons for not being overly concerned about an Iranian nuclear capability were all granted, the question naively assumes that it's Iran's intention to put their nukes in missile warheads and launch them at Israel, but there's another possible scenario that's far more worrisome, DEBKAfile explains: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu speaks out against Iran becoming a pre-nuclear state that could at any time cross the line agreed to in diplomacy with the US and build a bomb whenever it chooses. Netanyahu has never spelled out the mechanics of this threat to Israel’s survival.

There's one potential scenario that, given Israel’s small size, would call for no more than one nuke to destroy its heartland and inflict at least an estimated million casualties. This nuclear bomb or device would be dropped from an IranAir civilian airliner on a regular run from Larnaca over the Mediterranean about 100 km from the Israeli coast.

After the plane disappeared, the delayed action mechanism would detonate the bomb and set off a tsunami. Giant waves would swamp the densely populated Tel Aviv conurbation and its satellites. This 1,500 square kilometer area is home to some 3.7 million people, nearly half of the country’s entire population, its military and banking centers, hi-tech industry and the stock exchange. The cost in lives would be cataclysmic – at least a million dead.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary rulers make no secret of their plans for Israel. On Feb. 26, the second day of Iran’s 2015 war games, a senior Revolutionary Guards officer declared that Iran had the ability to wipe the cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv off the face of the earth.

I don't know if a nuclear blast over the Mediterranean could generate a tsunami, but if it could it would seem there'd be no way to stop this kind of a threat apart from keeping Iran from developing a bomb in the first place.

DEBKAfile adds that there's no doubt that Israel’s defense chiefs have set up defenses and a second-strike capacity in mountainous areas outside the range of a tsunami and far from Israel’s shores, but deterrence only works against rational people. It doesn't work against fanatics who are eager to precipitate the end of the world and more than eager to sacrifice themselves to bring it about.

Moreover, A nuclear Iran almost certainly means, as Netanyahu pointed out, a nuclearized Saudi Arabia, U.A.E., Egypt and Iraq. These countries will not sit by and let Iranian Shiites gain hegemony over the region. Any deal that the Obama administration strikes with Iran that leaves them with the capability to build a nuclear weapon is extremely foolhardy, which is what Netanyahu tried to convince us of on Tuesday. If Iran obtains nuclear weapons there will almost certainly be nuclear war. One hopes that our leadership in the White House believes that.

Miracles and Multiverses

Naturalism is the view that physical nature is all there is. It holds that there's no non-physical reality, no supernatural. Naturalists usually embrace the idea of the existence of a multiverse in which infinite universes with different laws and parameters exist something like bubbles in a bubble bath. Our universe is just one such bubble. There's scarcely any empirical evidence for the multiverse and it's popularity seems to stem largely from its utility as a response to the powerful argument for a cosmic Designer based on the incredible improbability that a universe like ours, with astonishingly precise values of the parameters that form the fabric of the universe, would exist at all.

If, however, there's an infinite number of different universes with different laws and parameters, then even astronomically improbable universes will be among that infinite array. Thus, as amazing as our world is, it pretty much had to exist, given the multiverse. Nevertheless, as philosopher Vincent Torley points out in a lengthy treatment of the multiverse at Uncommon Descent there's a perplexing difficulty for the naturalist who clings to the multiverse in order to avoid falling into theism. If the multiverse exists then not only does the improbable become certain, but so, too, does anything that is physically possible, including miracles.

The irony is that the naturalist rejects the miraculous because he rejects belief in the existence of God, but in order to sustain his non-belief in God he relies on a hypothesis that makes miracles certain to occur.

Naturalism sees the universe as invariant. That is, the laws of physics hold everywhere and always. They're inviolable. Thus, miracles, for the naturalist, are impossible, but as Torley points out, in a multiverse there should be universes in which the laws of physics fluctuate episodically, thereby permitting anomalous events like miracles, and that these universes should be far more common than uniformitarian worlds in which the laws are invariant.

Here's Torley:

[B]ecause multiverses allow laws to vary bizarrely on rare and singular occasions, and because not all such variations are fatal to life, we can conclude that a life-permitting universe is far more likely than not to experience anomalous events (which some might call miracles), and that a life-permitting universe in which Biblical miracles occur is still more likely than one in which the laws and physical parameters of Nature are always uniform.

Thus [the] belief that we live in in a universe where Biblical miracles occurred will still be more rational than the modern scientific belief that we live in a universe whose laws are space and time-invariant, because [these] universes are more common in the multiverse than law-invariant universes.

The naturalist who embraces the multiverse has a another problem in addition to the problem with miracles. Darwinian evolution is predicated on uniformitarianism, the belief that the laws of physics never change, but if there's a multiverse, of which we are a part, then uniformitarianism becomes highly improbable. Torley says:

And since the argument for Darwinian evolution is based on the assumption that the laws and parameters of Nature do not vary, it follows that if we live in a multiverse, then our own universe is infinitely more likely to be one in which the miracles of the Bible occurred than a uniformitarian one in which life evolved in a Darwinian fashion.

... there will still be a number of possible universes in the multiverse, in which life pops into existence in the manner described in Genesis 1, and where living things just happen to exhibit the striking traits predicted by Darwinism, whereas there is (by definition) only ONE way for a given set of laws and parameters NOT to vary: namely, by remaining the same at every point in space and time.

The problem [for the naturalist] is that the uniformitarian requirement that the laws and parameters of Nature are the same at every point in space and time – which is rather like hitting bull’s eyes again and again and again, for billions of years – is inherently so very unlikely, when compared to “singularism” (the hypothesis that the laws of Nature undergo slight, short-lived or local fluctuations)...

Thus in a multiverse scenario, uniformitarianism becomes the albatross around the neck of Darwinism: no matter how many of Darwin’s predictions scientists manage to confirm, the sheer unlikelihood of the hypothesis that we live in a universe whose laws never vary renders Darwinism too unlikely a theory to warrant scientific consideration.

What a pickle. The naturalist rejects miracles and accepts Darwinian evolution (i.e. that evolution is a completely natural process with no intelligent input from a non-natural mind) largely because he rejects the existence of God. He buttresses that rejection by also accepting the idea of the multiverse as an answer to the argument for God's existence based on cosmic fine-tuning, but by accepting the multiverse he pretty much has to give up the underlying assumption of Darwinism (uniformitarianism) and also his opposition to miracles. In other words, he can't have it both ways.

Here's another example of how embracing the multiverse leads to all sorts of unintended consequences for the naturalist. Cosmologist Sean Carroll, an atheist, has been quoted as arguing that the multiverse hypothesis, though it does not meet to the standard criteria of a good scientific theory (i.e. it's not falsifiable or testable) nevertheless should be accepted as legitimate science. He writes:

Modern physics stretches into realms far removed from everyday experience, and sometimes the connection to experiment becomes tenuous at best. String theory and other approaches to quantum gravity involve phenomena that are likely to manifest themselves only at energies enormously higher than anything we have access to here on Earth. The cosmological multiverse and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posit other realms impossible for us to access directly. Some scientists, leaning on Popper, have suggested that these theories are non-scientific because they’re not falsifiable.

The truth is the opposite. Whether or not we can observe them directly, the entities involved in these theories are either real or they are not. Refusing to contemplate their possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though they might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets.

This reminds me of a passage from William James who said that, "any rule of thought which would prevent me from discovering a truth, were that truth really there, is an irrational rule."

Carroll wants to apply James' assertion to science in the belief that it's not reasonable to restrict science only to conjectures about entities whose existence can be tested. Thus, the multiverse should be considered legitimate science because it's an entity that's either real or it's not, and "refusing to contemplate [it's] possible existence on the grounds of some apriori principle, even though [it] might play a crucial role in how the world works, is as non-scientific as it gets."

Very well, but wouldn't this same standard also apply to God? Wouldn't it also apply to Intelligent Design which is banned from public school classrooms because it allegedly can't be tested and is therefore not regarded as a genuine scientific theory by such experts on the philosophy of science as Judge Jones?

Carroll wants to make the multiverse a viable scientific option because it gives him an out when confronted by the phenomenon of cosmic fine-tuning, but in order to include the multiverse hypothesis in the field of legitimate scientific inquiry he has to open up the domain of science to include conjectures about the existence of God, which is the very thing he's trying to avoid.

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. III)

This is the third in the series of reflections on Joseph Bottum's essay titled Christians and Postmoderns. See here and here for the two previous posts on his essay.

Bottum writes that:

Believers should not become entangled in the defense of modern times. This is the key - the postmodern attack on modernity is right: without God, essences are the will to power. Without God, every attempt to call something true or beautiful or good is actually an attempt to compel other people to agree.

Of course believers are tempted, when they hear postmodern deconstructions of modernity, to argue in support of modernity. After all, believers share with modern nonbelievers a trust in the reality of truth. They affirm the efficacy of human action, the movement of history towards a goal, the possibility of moral and aesthetic judgments. But believers share with postmoderns the recognition that truth rests on a faith that has itself been the sole subject of the long attack of modern times.

The most foolish thing believers could do is to make concessions now to a modernity that is already bankrupt (and that despises them anyway) and thus to make themselves subject to a second attack - the attack of the postmodern on the modern. Faithful believers are not responsible for the emptiness of modernity. They struggled against it for as long as they could, and they must not give in now. They must not, at this late date, become scientific, bureaucratic, and technological; skeptical, self-conscious, and self-mocking.

"Premoderns" are torn between modernity and postmodernity precisely because they share so much in common with both. They bristle at the withering assaults of the postmoderns on the modern's belief in objective truth, particularly truth about morals. Yet they are in fundamental agreement with the postmodern critique of the futility of modernity's attempt to ground meaning and truth in the shifting sands of positivism, naturalistic metaphysics, the scientific method, or whatever. They recognize that modernity reduces man to a machine and thus robs him of his dignity and worth and inevitably his human rights.

We live in a tragically empty age, one in which the promises of secular reason to usher in a golden era of enlightenment and knowledge were dashed on the rocks of two world wars and the bloodiest century in human history. Postmoderns rightly ridicule the impotence of reason, it's utter inability to offer human beings meaning or to lead us into a humanist nirvana, but they offer nothing in its place other than subjectivity and nihilism.

We can't go back to the premodern era, of course, nor would many of us want to. Modernity, despite its failures and shortcomings, has made the physical burdens of life immeasurably easier to bear. Perhaps, though, we could, if we really set our minds to it, import the crucial assumptions of the premodern age about the necessity of a transcendent foundation for knowledge, meaning, morals, and human nature into our present era. Then not only would the physical burdens of life be easier to bear but so, too, would our spiritual or existential burdens.

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. II)

I'd like to continue our look at the First Things essay (Christians and Postmoderns) by Joseph Bottum that I began Saturday.

Bottum writes that:

[T]he massive scientific advance of modernity reveals how easy it is to discover facts, and modernity's collapse reveals how hard it is to hold knowledge. We have an apparatus for discovery unrivaled by the ages, yet every new fact means less than the previously discovered one, for we lack what turns facts to knowledge: the information of what the facts are for.

Precisely so. Modernity offers us no satisfying interpretive framework for assigning meaning to the facts discovered by science. It attempts to supply the need for such a framework by interpreting everything in terms of evolutionary development, but the view that each of us is just a meaningless cipher in the grand flow of time and evolution fails somehow to quench our deepest longings. According to the modern worldview there really is no purpose for the existence of anything. The facts discovered by science, as important as they may be for the furtherance of our technology, don't really have any metaphysical significance. Like everything else, they're just there.

Bottum continues:

And so "we must learn to live after truth," as a group of European academics wrote in After Truth: A Postmodern Manifesto. "Nothing is certain, not even this . . . The modern age opened with the destruction of God and religion. It is ending with the threatened destruction of all coherent thought." Nietzsche may have been the first to see this clearly .... But, even in the fundamental thinkers of high modernity, hints can be found that knowledge requires God: Descartes uses God in the Meditations in order to escape from the interiority where the cogito has stranded him; Kant uses God as a postulate of pure practical reason in order to hold on to the possibility of morality.

What believers have in common with postmoderns is a distrust of modern claims to knowledge. To be a believer, however, is to be subject to an attack that postmoderns, holding truthlessness to themselves like a lover, never have to face. The history of modernity in the West is in many ways nothing more than the effort to destroy medieval faith. It is a three-hundred-year attempt to demolish medieval (especially Catholic) claims to authority, and to substitute a structure of science and ethics based solely on human rationality.

But with the failure to discover any such rational structure - seen by the postmoderns - the only portion of the modern project still available to a modern is the destruction of faith. It should not surprise us that, in very recent times, attacks on what little is left of medieval belief have become more outrageous: resurgent anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic broadsides, vicious mockery of evangelical preaching, desecrations of the Host in Catholic masses. For modern men and women, nothing else remains of the high moral project of modernity: these attacks are the only good thing left to do. The attackers are convinced of the morality of their attack not by the certainty of their aims - who's to say what's right or wrong? - but by opposition from believers.

I take Bottum to be saying here that modernity, in its death throes, wishes only to finish the business of killing off God, or at least belief in God. Modernity has nothing else to offer. It cannot give answers to any of life's most gripping existential questions. Nowhere in the writings of the anti-theists at large today do we find an answer to any of the following: Why is the universe here? How did life come about? Why is the universe so magnificently fine-tuned for life? Where did human consciousness come from? Why do we feel joy when we encounter beauty? How can we prove that our reason is reliable without using reason to prove it? How can we account for our conviction that we have free will? What obligates us to care about others? Why do we feel guilt? Who do I refer to when I refer to myself? What gives human beings worth, dignity, and rights? If death is the end justice is unattainable, so why do we yearn for it? Why do we need meaning and purpose? What is our purpose?

Ask the Richard Dawkins' of the world those questions and all you'll get in reply is a shrug of the shoulders or a recitation of the alleged historical crimes of the Church. They dodge the question because they have no answer. This is a bit ironic: Neither modern nor postmodern atheism has an answer to the most profound questions we can ask. The only possible answer lies in the God of the "premodern" and this is the one solution to man's existential emptiness that the modern and postmodern atheist simply cannot abide.

More later.

Campus Hatred

One of the most troubling developments on modern American campuses has been the movement away from intelligent dialogue on matters of difference and toward the use of threats, intimidation, and suppression of free speech. The tactic is a rejection of the traditional American ideals of tolerance and free exchange of ideas and represents an embrace of the tactic of dehumanizing one's opponents by depriving them of their right to express opinions in an atmosphere free of fear.

It manifests itself on campus against both students and faculty who fail to pay suitable obeisance to the prophets of climate change catastrophe or who doubt the orthodoxies promoted by the proselytizers of Darwinian evolution, but in its ugliest form it discloses itself as a virulent, hateful anti-semitism as this video shows:

The sort of conduct displayed by the "anti-zionists" on this video would not be tolerated on campus were it, say, neo-nazis demonstrating against civil rights of minorities or even Jews demonstrating against Palestinian terrorism. Nor would a professor who created a climate of intimidation in a classroom go unpunished were the discomfort produced in the course of addressing any other issue.

If Nazis or Jews were conducting themselves like the thugs in the video the nation would be rightly horrified and the universities would be expelling the culprits as fast as they could identify them. Yet, Palestinians and their sympathizers are given tacit permission to permeate the campus with their hate and intolerance with impunity. Why?

As one of the speakers in the video points out, serious human rights violations are occurring all across the globe, often at the hands of Muslims, but the extent of the concern of campus activists at these horrors amounts to little more than a yawn. Why is it Israel and Jews that somehow manages to elicit paroxysms of bigotry and ugliness among students and how long will these be tolerated before university administrators put some steel in their spines and bring them to a stop?

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. I)

There are in the West three basic ways to look at the world, three worldviews which serve as lenses through which we interpret the experiences of our lives. Those three worldviews are essentially distinguished by their view of God, truth, and the era in which they were dominant among the cultural elite. We may, with some license, label these the premodern, modern, and postmodern. The premodern, lasting from ancient times until the Enlightenment (17th century), was essentially Christian. The modern, which lasted until roughly WWII, was essentially naturalistic and secular, and the postmodern, which has been with us now for a couple of generations, is hostile to the Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and objective truth.

I recently came across a wonderful treatment of the tension between these three "metanarratives" in an essay written by medieval scholar Joseph Bottum for First Things back in 1994. FT reprinted his article in an anniversary issue, and I thought it would be useful to touch on some of the highlights.

Bear in mind that although the terms premodern, modern and postmodern refer to historical eras there are people who exemplify the qualities of each of these in every era, including our own. Thus though we live in a postmodern age due to the dominance of postmodern assumptions among the shapers of contemporary thought, there are lots of premoderns and moderns around. Indeed, outside the academy I suspect most people are either premodern or modern in their outlook.

About a quarter of the way into his essay Bottum, writing on behalf of the Christian (premodern) worldview, says this:

We cannot revert to the premodern, we cannot return to the age of faith, for we were all of us raised as moderns.

And yet, though we cannot revert, we nonetheless have resources that may help us to advance beyond these late times. The modern project that attacked the Middle Ages has itself been under attack for some time. For some time, hyper-modern writers have brought to bear against their modern past the same sort of scarifying analysis that earlier modern writers brought against the premodern past. These later writers, supposing the modern destruction of God to be complete, have turned their postmodern attacks upon the modern project of Enlightenment rationality.

The postmodern project is, as Francois Lyotard put it, a suspicion of all metanarratives based on reason. It rejects the Enlightenment confidence that human reason can lead us to truth about the world, particularly truth about the important matters of meaning, religion and morality. Indeed, postmodern thinkers are skeptical of any claims to a "truth" beyond simple empirical facts.

Bottum continues:

In some sense, of course, these words premodern, modern, and postmodern are too slippery to mean much. Taken to refer to the history of ideas, they seem to name the periods before, during, and after the Enlightenment, but taken to refer to the history of events, they seem to name the period from creation to the rise of science, the period from the rise of science until World War II, and the period since the war. It is tempting to define the categories philosophically, rather than historically, around the recognition that knowledge depends upon the existence of God. But the better modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes and Kant, as opposed to, say, Voltaire) recognize that dependence in some way or another. Perhaps, though definitions based on intent are always weak, the best definition nonetheless involves intent: it is premodern to seek beyond rational knowledge for God; it is modern to desire to hold knowledge in the structures of human rationality (with or without God); it is postmodern to see the impossibility of such knowledge.

In other words, premoderns believe we can have knowledge of God through direct experience apart from reason. As Pascal put it, "The heart has reasons that reason can never know." Moderns believe that knowledge can only come through the exercise of our reason. Postmoderns hold that moderns are deluding themselves. None of us can separate our reason from our biases, prejudices, experiences and so on, all of which shape our perspective and color the lenses through which we view the world. For the postmodern there is no such thing as objective reason or truth.

Bottum again:

The premoderns said that without God, there would be no knowledge, and the postmoderns say we have no God and have no knowledge. The premoderns said that without the purposefulness of final causation, all things would be equally valueless, and the postmoderns say there is no purpose and no value. The premoderns said that without an identity of reality and the Good, there would be no right and wrong, and the postmoderns say there is neither Good nor right and wrong. Though they disagree on whether God exists, premoderns and postmoderns share the major premise that knowing requires His existence. Only for a brief period in the history of the West-the period of modern times-did anyone seriously suppose that human beings could hold knowledge without God.

Here is an interesting insight. Christians hold in common with modern atheists that there is objective truth, that there is meaning to life, and that there is moral right and wrong. At the same time they hold in common with postmodern atheists (not all postmoderns are atheists, it should be stressed) that none of those beliefs can be sustained unless there is a God. Does this, as Bottum alleges, put Christians closer to postmoderns than to moderns?

More next week.

Head Transplant

New Scientist has an article about an Italian surgeon, Sergio Canavero, who fully anticipates doing head transplants within a few years. Aside from the practical difficulties involved, which Canavero thinks we're on the cusp of solving, there are some serious ethical concerns being raised about this. I'm not sure that most of the ethical concerns can't be assuaged, but I do wonder about something else.

Before I get into that here's the lede from the New Scientist report:

It's heady stuff. The world's first attempt to transplant a human head will be launched this year at a surgical conference in the US. The move is a call to arms to get interested parties together to work towards the surgery.

The idea was first proposed in 2013 by Sergio Canavero of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group in Italy. He wants to use the surgery to extend the lives of people whose muscles and nerves have degenerated or whose organs are riddled with cancer. Now he claims the major hurdles, such as fusing the spinal cord and preventing the body's immune system from rejecting the head, are surmountable, and the surgery could be ready as early as 2017.

The first attempt at a head transplant was carried out on a dog by Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov in 1954. A puppy's head and forelegs were transplanted onto the back of a larger dog. Demikhov conducted several further attempts but the dogs only survived between two and six days.

The first successful head transplant, in which one head was replaced by another, was carried out in 1970. A team led by Robert White at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another. They didn't attempt to join the spinal cords, though, so the monkey couldn't move its body, but it was able to breathe with artificial assistance. The monkey lived for nine days until its immune system rejected the head. Although few head transplants have been carried out since, many of the surgical procedures involved have progressed. "I think we are now at a point when the technical aspects are all feasible," says Canavero.

The article goes on to discuss exactly how Canavero hopes to accomplish this surgery and some of the reaction to it in the medical community. The question I would pose is this: If the surgery is successful, who would the resulting individual be? Would he/she be the person whose head is afixed to the torso, or would he/she be the person whose torso it is? Or would the resulting individual be a new person altogether?

Most people would probably opt for the first alternative, believing that the self is somehow associated with the brain. If, then, Dr. Canavero could somehow transplant simply the brain the resulting individual would be the self whose brain he/she bears. But why think that the material brain is necessary to identify the self? Why would the self not be the body or brain at all but rather the information that's contained in the brain so that if we could download the information contained in the brain into another brain/body physical system it would be identical to downloading the self into another physical system?

Of course, information is immaterial which means that the self is immaterial which means we're getting uncomfortably (from a materialist point of view) to saying that the self is really one's soul.

Litmus Tests

A writer at The New Yorker by the name of Adam Gopnik believes that a presidential aspirant's views on evolution should be a litmus test for serving as president. Really, he does. Speaking of the question asked of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker last week in London as to whether he believed in evolution, Gopnik says this:

What the question means, and why it matters, is plain: Do you have the courage to embrace an inarguable and obvious truth when it might cost you something to do so? A politician who fails this test is not high-minded or neutral; he or she is just craven, and shouldn’t be trusted with power. This catechism’s purpose—perhaps unfair in its form, but essential in its signal—is to ask, Do you stand with reason and evidence sufficiently to anger people among your allies who don’t?

This is silliness of a high order. It assumes that our politicians all have thought deeply about the matter and have arrived at a considered opinion about it, which is nonsense. I doubt very much whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can explain the difference between genetic drift and natural selection or between micro and macroevolution, or what punctuated equilibrium is. Indeed, I doubt either of them could explain what Neo-Darwinism is. Nor should that deficit count against them as long as they don't decide to pontificate on the matter. If someone does not have much expertise on something then, pace Mr. Gopnik, it's both rational and wise to refrain from offering opinions on it as if he had.

More than than the silliness of what amounts to a religious test of high office, Gopnik's profession of fealty to reason and evidence is hard to believe. After all, evolution of the Darwinian variety, i.e. the view that natural processes and forces are adequate to account for all that we see in the living world, is not necessarily based on reason or evidence but rather often on a commitment to a naturalistic metaphysics. Consider what several accomplished evolutionary biologists have said on this very point:

“[I believe evolution to be true] not because it can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible,” the late D.M.S. Watson, chair of evolution at the University of London.

“Evolution is unproved and improvable, we believe it because the only alternative is special creation, which is unthinkable,” Sir Arthur Keith, the late physical anthropologist and head of the Anatomy Department at London Hospital.

"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." Richard Lewontin, former professor of genetics at Harvard University.

Gopnik continues:

All the available evidence collected within the past hundred and fifty years is strongly in its favor, and no evidence argues that it is in any significant way false.

Unfortunately for Gopnik's thesis this claim is itself false. The theory may, in its major lineaments, be true, but it's simply wrong to say that there's no significant evidence against it. Gopnik should read Stephen Meyer's books, Signature in the Cell, or Darwin's Doubt, or Michael Behe's books Darwin's Black Box or The Edge of Evolution, or Jonathan Wells' Icons of Evolution, or Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis or Nature's Destiny. It may turn out that the evidence amassed in these works can be explained in Darwinian terms, but so far most refutations of them consist pretty much of assertions that the problems raised have all been answered without actually showing exactly how that is so.

Anyone wishing to read more about the problems with Darwinism without having to read a whole book can check out a relatively short piece by Casey Luskin in which he lists and explains ten problems that Darwinian versions of evolution have found to be intractable. The ten are these. Go to the link for the explanations:

1. Darwinism has no viable mechanism to generate a primordial soup
2. Unguided \chemical processes cannot explain the origin of the genetic code
3. Random mutations cannot generate the genetic information required for irreducibly complex structures
4. Natural Selection struggles to fix advantageous traits into populations
5. The abrupt appearance of species in the fossil record does not support Darwinian evolution
6. Molecular biology has failed to yield a grand "Tree of Life"
7. Convergent evolution challenges Darwinism and destroys the logic behind common ancestry
8. Differences between vertebrate embryos contradict the predictions of common ancestry
9. Neo-Darwinism struggles to explain the biogeographical distribution of many species
10. Neo-Darwinism has a long history of inaccurate Darwinian predictions about vestigial organs and "Junk DNA"

Apparently unmindful of these difficulties Gopnik goes on to say this:

But evolutionary biology is not an ideology, which one believes in or doesn’t. What it demands is not belief but what science always demands, and that is the ability to evaluate the evidence and hear out the theory, and to poke holes in it if you can. So far, the fabric remains defiantly unpoked, the holes either unmade or else readily mended, with the stitching improving the tensile strength of the whole.

Again, there may eventually turn out to be answers to these difficulties within a neo-Darwinian framework (although as time goes on this seems less and less likely), but the assumption that they will is an act of faith. It's a faith in the truth of the metaphysical view called naturalistic materialism. Ironically enough, for man committed to reason, Gopnik's insistence that presidential candidates share his particular faith seems more than a little unreasonable.

Fundamental Reality

This is a rerun of a post I wrote on May, 31st of last year. I'm reposting it since it's relevant to some topics my students and I have been discussing in class:

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries it was the consensus view among scientists and philosophers that reality, the universe, was fundamentally material. The belief was that everything was reducible to matter and energy and that if there was any immaterial substance, it was a property of matter. Thus, in this materialist view, there was no such thing as mind or soul that existed independently of matter. Mind, if it existed, emerged from matter.

All this began to change in the 20th century with the development of quantum physics, and as that century came to a close and the new century began a number of experiments were done which led physicists to believe that, in fact, mind is fundamental and that the material world is an emergent property of mind.

Rather than seeing the universe as a machine, as thinkers had done ever since Isaac Newton in the 17th century, the universe was now being viewed, in the words of Sir James Jeans, more like "a grand idea."

The following video gives a fairly good description of two experiments in physics which have led many (not all) scientists to agree with Jeans. The video moves quickly so you might wish to replay parts of it.

There's resistance to accepting the universe as a product of mind because such a view both refutes the materialism upon which atheism rests and fits nicely into a theistic view of the world (see the quote from physicist Alain Aspect below).

Nevertheless, this is the view accepted by a growing number of quantum physicists. Here are a few quotes to illustrate:

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Max Planck (1944)

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Erwin Schroedinger.

“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality” -Eugene Wigner 1961 – received Nobel Prize in 1963

"If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history." Philosopher Thomas Nagel

"What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving 'entanglement' (the phenomenon Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices, and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices...To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time." Antoine Suarez, 2013

"Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist)." Alain Aspect, 2007

The Sizes of Things

Here's a fun interactive site that you won't be able to stop playing with. By moving the scroll bar you can zoom in or out to see how big the universe is compared to our planet and how big we are compared to the smallest parts of an atom.

Give it a try and spend a little time just being amazed. You'll need an updated version of Adobe Flash Player, though.