C. elegans

One of the most fascinating fields of study in biology is the field of embryology - the study of how a zygote develops into an adult organism. For most animals our knowledge of their ontogenetic development is still incomplete, but a team of scientists has worked out the complete developmental history of a nematode called C. elegans and has won a Nobel Prize for their achievement.

The ontogeny of this tiny worm, so small that you need a microscope to see it, is programmed to follow a specific pathway, but several mysteries surround attempts to determine what it is that controls that ontogeny as well as attempts to elucidate how undirected processes could ever have produced such a control system in living things. Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson discusses some of the problems in this 10 minute video.

Perhaps there's a materialist explanation for embryological development such as we see in C. elegans and even more astonishingly in higher organisms, but if there is it's not very widely publicized. What we see in this presentation seems to point to a teleology that many scientists insist on ruling out a priori, but I wonder if they're not missing something by refusing to admit the possibility of teleological explanations into their scientific work.

I've quoted before in this context a passage from William James that I think is particularly apt. James wrote that, "Any rule of thought that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." If the purpose of science is to discover truth why rule out ahead of time certain kinds of explanations just because they're incompatible with a particular metaphysical commitment?

The refusal to permit the hypothesis that a mind may be somehow responsible for what we see in C. elegans reminds me of another quote, this one from geneticist Richard Lewontin who once said that,

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.

Scientists used to declare that they were committed to following the evidence wherever it leads, but now that at least some evidence seems to lead away from materialism and toward mind as the fundamental substance underlying reality, that declaration is apparently no longer operative.

VEST

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has been working with a team of engineers to design a device that will convert the frequencies of sound waves into vibrations that deaf people will be able to feel and interpret. These vibrations will allow the deaf to actually "hear" words that are spoken to them. This sounds like an amazing technological development, and I've posted some excerpts from the article in The Atlantic:

The VEST, or the Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer, is a wearable tool that allows the deaf to, as Eagleman puts it, "feel" speech. An app downloaded onto a smartphone or tablet with a microphone will pick up sounds and send them via bluetooth to the vest. The vest will then "translate" those sounds into a series of vibrations that reflect the frequencies picked up by the mic by using a network of transducers — devices that can convert the signals into vibrations. So, if you spoke to the person wearing the vest, that person would "feel" what you're saying through vibrations on their back, instead of through their ears.

But Eagleman is quick to point out that the vest isn't just translating the sounds into a code — the patterns felt aren't a "language" to be interpreted like braille. In fact, the device doesn't use a specific language; it responds to all ambient noises and sounds.

"What you're feeling is not code for a letter or a word...you're actually feeling a representation of the sound."

"The pattern of vibrations that you're feeling [while wearing the VEST] represent the frequencies that are present in the sound," he said. "What that means is what you're feeling is not code for a letter or a word — it's not like morse code — but you're actually feeling a representation of the sound."

So far, it all works, Eagleman said. The team tested a prototype on a 37-year-old deaf man who, after five days of wearing the VEST, understood the words said to him out loud by feeling the vibrations because, as Eagleman put it, "his brain is starting to unlock what the data mean."

That "unlocking" phenomenon, like adding a new sense, is hard to explain. How do a series of vibrations that supposedly reflect sound eventually have meaning when there's no language assigned to them? How does the brain on the first day have no idea what a couple of vibrations on, say, the lower back means, but by the fifth day, know that they form a specific word?

This leads me to wonder whether a bat's sonar system might work this way and whether something similar could be designed to aid blind people in navigating their environment.

"My view is that the brain is a general-purpose computational device," Eagleman told me. "You could take any kind of data stream and the brain will figure it out. I consider it the biggest miracle no one's heard of."

How does the brain perform this astonishing miracle? More specifically, how did such an ability ever evolve through chance and natural selection since clearly there was no need for the brain to be able to manipulate data streams in this fashion until now? I suppose we should put our doubts aside and just will ourselves to have faith in the capability of blind, purposeless forces to effect such miracles.

The Left's State of Disrepair

Matt Purple at The American Spectator dissects the political left's unenviable current condition:

The Obama era should have been a high watermark for American liberalism. Democrats in 2009 not only laid claim to the House, the filibuster-proof Senate, and the White House, but did so during an economic recession in which jobs vanished, wages shrank, and Wall Street was held in nearly universal contempt. Deregulation was out and stimulus was in. The table was better set for progressive ideas than at any time since the Great Depression.

Early on, liberals made three calculations that cost them dearly. First, given enough political capital to tackle either sweeping Wall Street reform or sweeping health care reform, but not both, President Obama chose the latter. The public viewed that as a diversion from the real economic issues—jobs and wages—and punished Democrats in the 2010 elections, releasing the left’s hold on Congress.

Second, liberals hitched their fate to the economy by pledging that their policies would end the recession. They often did this in tangible terms, as when the president’s economic advisors said unemployment would never exceed 8 percent if the stimulus was passed. None of this worked as planned: GDP growth was anemic, the economy stagnated, and the unemployment rate jumped to 10 percent in October 2009. It wouldn’t dip below 8 percent for another three years. Democrats suffered accordingly.

Third, following the placards-and-pitchforks election of 2010, Democrats began crusading against their political opponents with the desperation of a party shut out of power. The left’s obsession with stopping the Tea Party became so all-consuming that it distracted from the business of crafting policy. By the 2014 election, Democrats stood for nothing beyond sticking it to the anti-Obamacare wingnuts and shadowboxing something called the War on Women. While liberals smirked at Obama Derangement Syndrome, their own derangement was in a very advanced stage.

And that gets to the grand irony here. Liberals spent years sneering that Republicans were the party of no, out of ideas, deathly, dying, dead. This spurred conservatives and engendered a Great Awakening on the right the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Contract with America. It was liberalism that went bankrupt, with little internal dialectic and nothing to show but hatred, economic stagnation, and the same hoary tax-and-spend policies it’s been trying for decades.

Purple could have added the decline of race relations under the Obama administration, the president's refusal to enforce our immigration laws and secure our borders, his legally dubious abuse of executive orders, his decision to release five hardened terrorists in exchange for one American deserter, the growing inequality between rich and poor, the constant seige of scandal that has beset his administration from the Secret Service to the NSA, VA, EPA, IRS and on to Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and on and on.

Purple could also have noted the mess the Obama administration has made of our foreign policy. We've alienated many of our friends and lost the respect of many of our enemies. Our appeasement of the Iranians has made the world less safe. Our refusal to aid the Ukrainians in any substantive way has sacrificed them to Mr. Putin's hegemonic ambitions. Our precipitous withdrawal from Iraq created a vacuum which ISIL rushed in to fill, slaughtering Christians, Yazidis, and Shia Muslims by the thousands. Our unwise approach to Egypt and Libya has turned the latter into chaos and only the action of the Egyptian military, against Mr. Obama's wishes, has prevented chaos there. Mr. Obama's strategy, such as it is, of leading from behind around the world, so far from intimidating the world's tyrants, has served only to embolden them.

All of this has eroded confidence in the competence of this White House in particular and in the ability of the left in general to run the country, which perhaps explains why only two incumbent Republicans, Pennsylvania's governor and a Florida congressman, failed to win re-election in the 2014 mid-terms while Democrat incumbents were decimated. These losses have been catastrophic for the Democratic Party, coming on the heels of a disastrous mid-term in 2010, and leaving it with very few young, promising faces. Consequently, there's almost no one the party can run for president in 2016 other than the scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton who has no accomplishments to which she can point which qualify her for the nation's highest office, and who is running simply on the circumstance that she's married, sort of, to Bill Clinton.

Things can turn around quickly, of course. The United States has a volatile electorate, but at the moment the future looks bleak for the left, and they've pretty much done it all to themselves.

Ethical Duties

The journal Science (subscription required) ran a review a year or so ago by Rudolph Griss of a book by atheistic biologist E.O. Wilson titled The Social Conquest of Earth. At one point Griss says this:

As intriguing as self-understanding may be from an intellectual point of view, Wilson sees it as a means to an end: something that must be achieved if humans are to bring their unsustainable and destructive lifestyle to a halt. He laments, "We are needlessly turning the gold we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be despised by our descendants." We are not only polluting our planet beyond recognition, we are also bidding good-bye forever to species after species. Wilson tells us to grow up, to stop making excuses and shuffling off responsibility onto deities. We alone are responsible for the future of our planet. The sooner we understand who we are and where we come from, the sooner we will know where we need to go.

I thought this was interesting because Wilson seems to assume that we have some sort of moral obligation to future generations not to despoil and deplete the planet, but where does such an obligation come from? Who imposes it? Why is it wrong to exploit the earth's resources to make our lives as comfortable as we can and let future generations fend for themselves? Our descendants may despise us for acting this way but why should we care? What's wrong with selfishness?

It may seem obvious to some readers that of course we have a duty to care about the planet and our descendants, but it's not obvious to me at all that we do, or at least it's not obvious to me that an atheist has any grounds for believing that we do.

Indeed, I don't think Wilson, who is a Darwinian materialist, can cogently answer any of the above questions, because for the atheist there simply is no answer. To paraphrase philosopher Richard Rorty*, for the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be selfish. Or to paraphrase Richard Dawkins*, what's to prevent us from saying that selfishness is right? That's a genuinely difficult question.

If we're simply the product of blind, purposeless Darwinian processes which enabled us to succeed in the struggle for survival then to suggest that we should not be selfish, that we should suppress our instincts and deny ourselves the benefits of the earth's largesse for the sake of generations yet to come, is absurd.

The only basis for thinking that we have a duty to conserve the earth's resources is the belief that a transcendent moral authority, a God, has imposed upon us the obligation to be stewards of the earth and to care about the well-being of others. Take away the divine source of that obligation, as Wilson does, and the obligation itself disappears.

Atheists delight in calling theists irrational, but what's more irrational, believing that we have a duty to care for the planet because the creator of the universe imposes that duty upon us, or believing that we have a duty to care for the planet even though there's nothing at all that could possibly impose such a duty upon us?

If Wilson thinks we do have such a duty then maybe he should reassess his commitment to atheism.

You can read more about Griss' review of Wilson's book at Evolution News and Notes.

* I substituted the word "selfish" for Rorty's original word "cruelty," and I substituted "selfishness" for Dawkin's original word "Hitler."

Some Questions about Rights

1) If it's okay for Angie's List and other businesses to boycott Indiana because they believe Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is wrong, why is it not okay for small businesses to boycott gay weddings because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that gay marriage is wrong? What is the significant difference?

2) Is there not a significant difference between the act of refusing service to people who enter a shop which is open to the public and the act of refusing to engage in business at an event which celebrates what the businessperson believes to be an immoral activity? Suppose, for example, that a group of Satanists walked into a catering business owned by Christians and asked them to cater a Satanic mass. Would, or should, the caterer be obligated to service this event? Suppose the mass involved explicit sexual behavior or animal sacrifice. Would any photographer who was solicited by the hosts of the event be required to provide photographic services at the affair even if she felt that this was something she didn't wish to be a part of?

Maybe there's something here that I'm missing, but it seems to me that if religious freedom has any meaning at all it should mean that a businessperson should not be required by the state to participate in, or attend, events to which the people running the business have sincere moral objections. This is a different situation, of course, than one in which people walk into an establishment to make a purchase. In that circumstance, the customer is not representing him or herself as anything other than a human being, and the businessperson is not being asked to participate in any activity other than a normal business transaction. In such a case the customer is, and should be, legally entitled to service, but if the laws of the state demand that businesspersons must actually attend, and thus participate in, events that are explicit expressions of behavior deemed immoral by the businessperson, those laws are unjust and need to be changed.

The Iran Deal

The Obama administration, in concert with several European allies and Russia, has been negotiating with Iran over the future of their nuclear program, specifically whether they will ever be able to obtain nuclear weapons. The two sides claimed to have reached a preliminary agreement, but no sooner was the agreement announced than the Iranians were claiming that the United States was misrepresenting it.

In dispute, inter alia, is the American claim that sanctions won't be lifted until Iran has dismantled much of its nuclear production capability. Iran is claiming that the agreement was that sanctions would be lifted as soon as the final deal was signed. That the White House will nopt release a copy of the agreement does little to instill confidence that our interpretation is correct and theirs is wrong.

That aside, a letter in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend, authored by two heavyweight former Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, dissects the agreement, or at least what we know of it, and comes to the conclusion that this is a very bad deal for the world. The letter is a bit lengthy, but anyone interested in the future of the planet should read it. It begins with these lines:

The announced framework for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program has the potential to generate a seminal national debate. Advocates exult over the nuclear constraints it would impose on Iran. Critics question the verifiability of these constraints and their longer-term impact on regional and world stability. The historic significance of the agreement and indeed its sustainability depend on whether these emotions, valid by themselves, can be reconciled.

Debate regarding technical details of the deal has thus far inhibited the soul-searching necessary regarding its deeper implications. For 20 years, three presidents of both major parties proclaimed that an Iranian nuclear weapon was contrary to American and global interests—and that they were prepared to use force to prevent it. Yet negotiations that began 12 years ago as an international effort to prevent an Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very capability, albeit short of its full capacity in the first 10 years.

Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of U.N. resolutions, Iran has gradually turned the negotiation on its head. Iran’s centrifuges have multiplied from about 100 at the beginning of the negotiation to almost 20,000 today. The threat of war now constrains the West more than Iran. While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point officially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for 10 years Iran will never be further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be significantly closer.

Messers Kissinger and Schultz go on to explain some of the problems with the agreement. Here are just a few highlights:

Under the new approach, Iran permanently gives up none of its equipment, facilities or fissile product to achieve the proposed constraints. It only places them under temporary restriction and safeguard—amounting in many cases to a seal at the door of a depot or periodic visits by inspectors to declared sites. The physical magnitude of the effort is daunting. Is the International Atomic Energy Agency technically, and in terms of human resources, up to so complex and vast an assignment?

In a large country with multiple facilities and ample experience in nuclear concealment, violations will be inherently difficult to detect. Devising theoretical models of inspection is one thing. Enforcing compliance, week after week, despite competing international crises and domestic distractions, is another. Any report of a violation is likely to prompt debate over its significance—or even calls for new talks with Tehran to explore the issue. The experience of Iran’s work on a heavy-water reactor during the “interim agreement” period—when suspect activity was identified but played down in the interest of a positive negotiating atmosphere—is not encouraging.

Compounding the difficulty is the unlikelihood that breakout will be a clear-cut event. More likely it will occur, if it does, via the gradual accumulation of ambiguous evasions.

The president assures us that if Iran is found to be cheating, a near-certainty given their track record, sanctions will be reimposed (a strange threat given that one of the justifications Mr. Obama offered for negotiating with Iran was that sanctions weren't working), but this is much easier said than done:

The agreement’s primary enforcement mechanism, the threat of renewed sanctions, emphasizes a broad-based asymmetry, which provides Iran permanent relief from sanctions in exchange for temporary restraints on Iranian conduct. Undertaking the “snap-back” of sanctions is unlikely to be as clear or as automatic as the phrase implies. Iran is in a position to violate the agreement by executive decision. Restoring the most effective sanctions will require coordinated international action. In countries that had reluctantly joined in previous rounds, the demands of public and commercial opinion will militate against automatic or even prompt “snap-back.” If the follow-on process does not unambiguously define the term, an attempt to reimpose sanctions risks primarily isolating America, not Iran.

Worse, after the ten year period of good behavior has elapsed Iran will be within a few months to a year of being capable of producing a nuclear weapon. None of the other countries in the region, many of them majority Sunni (Iran is majority Shia) will be content to sit by and see what Iran does with their bomb. They'll want a nuclear deterrent of their own, which means there'll be a nuclear arms race in the most volatile, suicidal region in the entire world.

Previous thinking on nuclear strategy also assumed the existence of stable state actors. Among the original nuclear powers, geographic distances and the relatively large size of programs combined with moral revulsion to make surprise attack all but inconceivable. How will these doctrines translate into a region where sponsorship of nonstate proxies is common, the state structure is under assault, and death on behalf of jihad is a kind of fulfillment?

Some have suggested the U.S. can dissuade Iran’s neighbors from developing individual deterrent capacities by extending an American nuclear umbrella to them. But how will these guarantees be defined? What factors will govern their implementation? Are the guarantees extended against the use of nuclear weapons—or against any military attack, conventional or nuclear? Is it the domination by Iran that we oppose or the method for achieving it? What if nuclear weapons are employed as psychological blackmail? And how will such guarantees be expressed, or reconciled with public opinion and constitutional practices?

If anyone thinks that a future president like Mr. Obama, or almost anyone for that matter, is going to launch a nuclear war against Iran in the event that Iran detonates a nuke over, say, Baghdad, they are incredibly naive. Moreover, if Iran alone has nuclear weapons they will be able to achieve hegemony in the Middle East without having to use them. The mere threat of their use will enable them to impose their will on surrounding Arab nations, and they will doubtless use this power to force a unified Arab assault against Israel.

Mr. Obama came to the White House boldly declaring that he would not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, but he has made it much more likely than it was six years ago that within a decade they will indeed have them. And when they get them Armageddon will become a perpetual fear in the hearts of every Israeli.

Putting One's Money Where One's Mouth Is

In the wake of the Indiana passage of their Religious Freedom Restoration Act a lot of Very Important People have rushed to deplore Indiana's attempt to protect its citizens' religious liberties. Their concern, of course, is that the law gives businesspersons the right to refuse service to gays and others. One of the most outspoken was Apple CEO Tim Cook, who, according to blogger John Hawkins at RWN, proudly announced that:

Our message, to people around the country and around the world, is this: Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love. Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination....This is about how we treat each other as human beings....Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.

Indeed, it does take courage to oppose discrimination, and it's wonderful to hear Apple's CEO assure us that Apple will never tolerate it, but as Hawkins goes on to note, Apple's indignation at discrimination doesn't seem to stand in the way of doing business with some of the worst nations in the world in terms of how they treat gays and women. Hawkins writes:

Tim Cook’s message seems rather ironic in light of the fact that Apple willingly does business with some of the most virulently anti-gay nations on the planet....[H]omosexuality is punishable by death in Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran. So not only is [Apple] willing to “tolerate discrimination” in those countries, Apple is also happy to sell an iPod to the people who are murdering gays so they can listen to some cheery music when they’re done. What these nations are doing to their gay communities is despicable and should be condemned by every decent person. We hope Tim Cook believes that as well.

Given the news coverage of the Indiana RFRA you might think this photo was taken outside an Indiana pizza shop, but it was actually taken in Iran, a country with which Apple does a very brisk business. The two boys about to be executed were arrested and convicted of homosexuality. Perhaps Mr. Cook has not yet heard of how homosexuality is treated in Muslim countries.

Hawkins concludes by calling on Cook to show that he's not just indulging in empty moral preening, but that he really does have the courage of his convictions. Indeed, that he actually does have the convictions he claims to have:

Tim Cook says that, “Opposing discrimination takes courage,” and we agree. We call on Mr. Cook to live up to our shared principles by pulling Apple out of Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran until they stop their official government policies of jailing and murdering gays and lesbians.

Well, Mr. Cook, how deep is your commitment to non-discrimination really? We look forward to the news that Apple refuses to do business any longer with any country that tyrannizes gays and oppresses women, but we're not holding our breath. There is, after all, a lot of money to be made in those countries.

It's a Draw

William Lycan is a materialist philosopher, i.e. he rejects the dualist view that there are two fundamental essences to reality - matter and mind. He believes that matter is all there is and that mind is just a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain.

Nevertheless, in a paper on the subject he acknowledges that, though it pains him to say it, materialism is little more than a prejudice. The arguments for materialism, he notes, are no better than the arguments for dualism:

I mean to have shown here that although Cartesian dualism faces some serious objections, that does not distinguish it from other philosophical theories, and the objections are not an order of magnitude worse than those confronting materialism in particular. There remain the implausibilities required by the Cartesian view; but bare claim of implausibility is not argument. Nor have we seen any good argument for materialism. The dialectical upshot is that, on points, and going just by actual arguments as opposed to appeals to decency and what good guys believe, materialism is not significantly better supported than dualism.

Yet, I am inclined to believe, the charge of implausibility is not irrational or arational either, and I would not want this paper to turn anyone dualist. Have a nice day.

In the paper Lycan observes that the strongest argument against dualism is the incomprehensibility of two fundamentally disparate substances, mind and matter, interacting in the brain to produce mental phenomena. It's hard to imagine how an immaterial substance like mind could act causally on matter. Lycan doesn't think that this is much of an objection because we scarcely understand causality in the first place.

In this he is joined by a lot of other philosophers who, in the words of J.P. Moreland, find the so-called interaction problem to be "the most exaggerated problem in the history of philosophy." I discussed the problem recently here.

If the materialist wishes to cite "interactionism" as an objection to dualism he must confront the inconvenient difficulty that materialists themselves have long believed that disparate entities or substances could interact even though their interaction was incomprehensible. How, for example, does space generate quantum particles? Indeed, how does matter bend space? Whatever one's conception of space it's very difficult to conceive how such things happen. If a materialist, nevertheless, believes they do, as most thinkers since Einstein have, then it seems a case of special pleading to exclude mind/brain interaction on the grounds that we have no theory to explain how it could occur.

Ruse Seems Confused

Florida State philosopher of biology Michael Ruse has a piece at the New York Times' Opinionator in which he explores some reasons why some of the more well-known among his fellow atheists get so upset over religious belief. After cataloguing some of the more egregious crimes committed by religious believers in the 20th century - the abuse of boys by Catholic priests, the too numerous to count atrocities committed by Muslim fanatics (strangely, he neglects to mention the roughly 100 million murders committed in the 20th century in the name of state atheism) - he says this:

What is truly striking is that atheists of Dawkins’s stripe don’t just say that believing in God is an intellectual mistake. They also claim that it’s morally wrong to believe in the existence of God or gods. You might think there is something a little funny here.

Well, I do think there's something funny about this, although as we'll see later Ruse actually doesn't, but he should. What's "a little funny" is that an atheist like Dawkins would say that believing in God, or anything, for that matter, is morally wrong. Dawkins once said that the universe is a place where there really is "no purpose, no evil and no good." He also once remarked that it was difficult, on atheism, to say why Hitler was wrong. It is a little odd that someone who says this sort of thing would then assert that believing in God was morally wrong.

In any case, Ruse comments that there are a number of arguments which support belief in God. He discusses two in particular, the cosmic fine-tuning argument and the argument from consciousness:

This is a pretty remarkable state of affairs that we have here — planets, suns, organisms, humans and so forth. Why is there any of it? Why is there something rather than nothing? This question is not about the Big Bang or if anything went before. It is about the very fact of existence. One doesn’t expect something like this, with its astounding interdependency and innumerable complex parts functioning in service of the whole, to just happen.

The existence of consciousness, or sentience, can be seen in the same way. Brain science has thrown a lot of light on the way we think, but the very fact of thinking is a puzzle. And the problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of progress forward. We know a lot about how conscious states are correlated with brain states, but this tells us nothing about how consciousness as we experience it could be a brain state.

Can such a wonderful universe be entirely without point?

This is all to the good, but then, says Ruse, you start to look at the other side.

According to many monotheistic religions, God is supposed to be both all loving and all powerful. If so, why does he/she allow human suffering? For war, starvation or painful diseases to exist? And more to the point, perhaps, why does he allow the abuse of children by members of the clergy of his/her own religion, whether they be Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, Muslim clerics or Protestant pastors?

Fair enough. The problem of suffering and evil has long been a difficult problem for theistic philosophers, but then he seems to lapse into silliness:

This is only a small sample of what is going on in the minds of atheists. Yes, there are good reasons to think that there is more than meets the eye. But no, the Christian and other theistic solutions are simply not adequate. So, if there are so many problems with theistic belief, why do people continue to take it seriously? The truth is that many don’t. In parts of the world where people are allowed and encouraged to take these things seriously and to think them through, people increasingly find that they can do without the God factor. It is in places where one is being indoctrinated from childhood and bullied in adulthood that people continue with God belief.

The problem with this is that there are tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people who count themselves believers who were never indoctrinated as children nor bullied as adults. Journalist Kirstin Powers' story is typical of many.

Even more, it seems morally repugnant to accept — if not rejoice in — living in a world ruled by the God of religions. The moral repugnance is only increased when we see the self-deception and indoctrination that leads people to accept such astounding claims on such paltry evidence. Here it is worth recalling the Victorian philosopher and mathematician W. K. Clifford’s admonition: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” That universal claim may be too strong. But too often religious believers seem oblivious to Clifford’s admonition and accept things with way too little evidence.

Yes, it is indeed too strong. In fact it's so strong that it refutes even itself. If one accepts Clifford's admonition, they're wrong to do so since there's no evidence that it's true. Clifford's maxim is self-referentially incoherent, but Ruse's insistent resort to moral censure in this article is, well, if not self-refuting, at least inconsistent with much else that he's said in the past. For example, he closes with this:

That I much suspect is what motivates the New Atheists and in fact expresses the deepest and most powerful moral objection to theism.

But elsewhere Ruse has written that "morality is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." It's hard to see how there can be powerful moral objections to theism if moral objections are nothing more than illusions. This is a problem for naturalists like Ruse who'd like to have things both ways. On the one hand, their naturalistic metaphysics demands that they abandon belief in any objective morality, but on the other hand, they simply cannot resist the temptation to employ moral rhetoric. Ruse claims that belief in God is morally repugnant, but whether it is or isn't at least it's not irrational, like saying that a belief is morally repugnant while also holding that morality is an illusion. One has to be more than a bit confused to commit an error like that.

Easter and Miracles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, moderns have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident. They ground their belief in these things on their belief that there could be an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even highly improbable events are bound to happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hate and Degradation

Some of our friends on the left recently showed themselves to be bullies and haters by going on twitter to utter threats and imprecations against a young woman and her father who own a pizza shop in Indiana because the woman, when interviewed by a news reporter eager to find evidence of homophobia in the state, replied to the reporter's question by saying she would not cater a gay wedding. Thousands of vitriolic and vile tweets ensued, one from a teacher, no less, who urged people to go with him to burn the pizza shop down. In a sane world that man would be fired. He certainly should not be in a position of influence over young people.

At any rate, in reaction to the outpouring of hate, a website was set up where those who support the father and daughter, who had to close their shop out of fear of the cretins who threatened them, could make contributions to help defray their financial loss. As of this afternoon the total amount pledged had reached an amazing $750,000, and some of the donors were themselves gays sickened by the treatment meted out to this family. The success of the fund-raiser has driven some on the left to even greater frenzies of lunacy.

Having failed to ruin this family business, as they had apparently hoped, some are now claiming that the whole event was an orchestrated set-up by the family which, it's alleged, somehow knew they'd benefit from public sympathy. The liberal mind is a mysterious thing, to be sure, but this has to be the nuttiest bit of left-wing paranoia most of us have ever encountered.

A gentleman by the name of Michael Poole, a possessor, apparently, of amazing powers of discernment and deserving of all the public opprobrium he receives, has tweeted that the whole thing was a con. You can read his tweets at the Washington Free Beacon which delivers a great satire on those who, like Mr. Poole, will believe any story, no matter how far-fetched, rather than believe that they are themselves a bunch of hate-filled bigots.

Watch this interview with the shop owner on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox and decide for yourself whether this girl is capable of the machinations Mr. Poole has conjured up.

There's a substantial difference between denying people service who come into your store and being asked to participate by them in an activity which you find morally objectionable, but it's a distinction beyond the ken of folks blinded by their own hatreds and demons.

I suspect that what the left finds most outrageous in this whole awful episode is that anyone should actually have a moral objection to homosexual/lesbian weddings. They don't want mere tolerance of the gay lifestyle, they don't want merely to be legally equal to heterosexuals in terms of the rights they enjoy, they want more than that - they want assent and affirmation. If you wish to see what some of these people are like read their comments at You Tube. It's almost hard to believe that there's so much hate and human degradation out there, but evidently there is.

On Good Friday

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

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

She wrote:

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

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

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

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

The king, distraught beyond words, related the horrible news to the prince.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Relativism

In 2011 (12/5) I ran the following post under the title of The Fatuousness of Relativism. Having just talked about that topic recently in some of my classes I thought it'd be appropriate to run it again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is moral paralysis, and it's the legacy of modernity and the secular Enlightenment.

RFRA

There's been a lot of hand-wringing this week over the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which protects individuals from being forced to compromise their religious beliefs in their place of business. This has been interpreted by many, particularly on the left, as an open the door to discrimination against gays and minorities, and thus the expressions of outrage directed at the Indiana legislature. This interpretation is, however, wrong. The law only allows a defendant to use religious liberty as a defense against lawsuits, it doesn't guarantee that the defense will succeed. Even so, what's been missed in all the commotion and teeth gnashing is that some twenty states have such laws, state senator Barack Obama voted for a RFRA in Illinois when he served in that state's legislature, and Bill Clinton signed a similar law at the federal level in 1993. No matter. It's okay when Democrats pass laws like this, but when Republicans do it you just know there's treachery afoot.

Gabriel Malor at The Federalist has a good piece explaining the Indiana law and illustrating how shallow is so much of the protest against it, but perhaps the blue ribbon for nincompoopery among the protests goes to Connecticut governor Dan Malloy who has proclaimed that he will ban all state travel to Indiana to punish that state for its retrograde belief that religious freedom deserves to be protected. What Gov. Malloy evidently didn't realize as he basked in the glow of his righteous indignation was that Connecticut has had an even more restrictive law than Indiana's on the books for twenty years. Perhaps the rest of the country should ban travel to Connecticut.

These RFRA's stem from the fact that business people have been sued and some have been forced out of business because they felt that it violated their religious convictions to, for example, bake a wedding cake for a gay couple or photograph their wedding. Whether their religious convictions are right or wrong is not the issue. The issue is whether anyone who has strong religious or moral objections to a particular practice must nevertheless set those convictions aside as they conduct their business. To say they must disregard their beliefs, as some insist, is to say that one person's freedom of religion must be subordinated to another person's freedom of sexual expression, or whatever. The purpose of the RFRA, in all the states that have them and in the law that Bill Clinton signed, is to protect those who have religious/moral objections to what their customers are asking them to do.

Of course, one baker's refusal to countenance a gay union may be an inconvenience to a gay couple, but there are plenty of other bakers who would be happy to bake cakes for them and film their weddings. The couple's inconvenience hardly seems worth forcing a family-run bakery to choose between their conscience, a lawsuit, and going out of business.

A Problem With Teaching Ethics

Ray Penning at Cardus Blog asks the question, "Can ethics be taught?" The answer, of course, is yes and no. Ethics, as the study of the rules that philosophers have prescribed to govern our moral behavior, can certainly be taught, but, although thousands of books have been written about this, I doubt that any of them have changed anyone's actual behavior. Part of the reason is that, as Penning observes:

Ethics courses that leave students with a bunch of “you shoulds” or “you should nots” are not effective. There are deeper questions that proceed from our understanding of what human nature is about and what we see as the purpose of our life together.

This is true as far as it goes, but the reason teaching such rules is not effective is that focusing on the rules fails to address the metaethical question of why we should follow any of those rules in the first place. What answer can be given to the question why one should not just be selfish, or adopt a might-makes-right ethic? At bottom secular philosophy has no convincing answer. Philosophers simply utter platitudes like "we wouldn't want others to treat us selfishly, so we shouldn't treat them selfishly," which, of course, is completely unhelpful unless one is talking to children.

The reply is unhelpful when aimed at adult students because students will discern that the reply simply asserts that we shouldn't be selfish because it's selfish to be selfish. The question, though, is why, exactly, is it wrong to do to others something we wouldn't done to us? What is it about selfishness that makes selfishness wrong?

Moreover, this sort of answer simply glosses over the problem of what it means to say that something is in fact "wrong" in the first place. Does "wrong" merely mean something one shouldn't do? If so, we might ask why one shouldn't do it, which likely elicits the reply that one shouldn't do it because it's wrong. The circularity of this is obvious.

The only way to break out of the circle, the only way we can make sense of propositions like "X is wrong," is to posit the existence of a transcendent moral authority, a personal being, who serves as the objective foundation for all our moral judgments. If there is no such being then neither are there any objective moral values or duties to which we must, or even should, adhere. This lack of any real meaning to the word "wrong" is a major consequence of the secularization of our culture, and it's one of the major themes of my novel In the Absence of God (see link at the top of this page) which I heartily recommend to readers of Viewpoint.

The Interaction Problem

I've run a few posts on the topic of mind and matter this past week, largely because we've been discussing it in my classes, and because the topic is, I think, fascinating.

There's one more thing I'd like to say about it, particularly with regard to one of the common objections materialists make to the belief that we are at least partly comprised of immaterial mental substance. This is the objection based on what philosophers call the interaction problem. The problem is that it's inconceivable or literally unthinkable that two completely different substances, mind and matter (brain), could in any way interact with each other. Given that we can't describe how brains interact with immaterial minds and vice versa, belief that they somehow do is unwarranted, or so it is claimed.

The problem with the interaction objection is that it seems to be based on the assumption that something can only be affected by other things which are like it. That is, matter, like brains or bodies, can only be affected by other things which are material, but this principle - that like can only affect like - is surely not true. We see counter examples all around us:

• An immaterial phenomenon like the idea of food causes the physical reaction of salivary glands secreting saliva.
• The excitation of cone cells in the retina, a physical reaction, produces the sensation of red which is non-physical.
• Swirling fluid in your inner ear, a physical condition, causes the sensation of dizziness which is non-physical.
• Getting your fingers caught in a closing car door, a material situation, causes pain which is an immaterial phenomenon.

And so on. The only way that the principle that "like causes like" can be known to be true is if we know to start with that materialism is true, but the truth of materialism is the very point that's in question in this discussion.

The materialist can attempt to evade the examples given above by insisting that ideas, color, pain and other sensations are not really immaterial phenomena but are merely names we give to certain types of neurochemical events in the brain, but this is unconvincing. It may be that when you experience pain there are certain chemical reactions occurring in your brain and certain nerve fibers being stimulated, but those physical phenomena are not what pain is any more than thunder is the same thing as lightning. In fact, thunder can at least be explained in terms of lightning, but there's no way to explain how nerve fibers firing produces pain.

The Evolution of Consciousness

Sal Cordova at Uncommon Descent talks about how reflecting on the phenomenon of human consciousness as a high school student led him to doubt the Darwinian story:

I remember sitting in class and the biology teacher gave the standard talking points. But for some reason, the fact I was conscious did not seem reducible to evolutionary explanations. Strange that I would even be perplexed about it as a high school student, but I was. That was the beginning of my doubts about Darwin…

Years later, when I related the story to Walter ReMine, he explained to me that consciousness poses a serious problem for evolution.

He said something to the effect, “Say an animal has to flee a predator — all it has to do is run away. Why does it have to evolve consciousness in order to flee predators?” Mechanically speaking the animal can be programmed to flee, or even hunt, without having to be self-aware. Why does it have to evolve consciousness to do anything for survival?

Why would selection favor the evolution of consciousness? How does natural selection select for the pre-cursors of consciousness? I don’t think it can. Ergo, consciousness didn’t evolve, or it’s just a maladaptation, or an illusion — or maybe it is created by God. Materialists can say consciousness is an illusion all they want, but once upon a time, when my arm was broken in a hang gliding crash, I felt real pain. It would have been nice if consciousness were an illusion back then, but it wasn’t.

Somehow, at some point in our embryonic development consciousness arises, but how does a particular configuration of material stuff generate it? Dead people have the same configuration of matter in their brains (unless they suffered a head injury) that they had before dying and yet before death they were conscious and after death they are not. Why? What's missing after death?

How do physical processes like electrochemical reactions in the brain produce a belief, or a doubt, or understanding? How do atoms whirling about in our neuronal matrix give rise to our sense that the distant past is different from the recent past? How do chemical reactions translate a pattern of ink on paper into a meaning and how do firing synapses translate electrical pulses into the sensation of red? Not only does no one kno0w the answers to these questions, it's very hard to see how they even could have an answer if our material brain is the only entity responsible for them.

Consciousness is an incredibly intriguing phenomenon and not only is there no explanation of it in a materialist ontology, there's also no explanation for how it could ever have evolved through purely random physical, material processes.

Cordova has more at the link.

Mind and Materialism

Raymond Tallis at The New Atlantis discusses the devastating assault on philosophical materialism that began in the 1970s when American philosopher Thomas Nagel explored the question, "What is it like to be a bat?"

Nagel argued that there is something it is like to be a bat whereas it does not make sense to say that it is like something to be a stone. Bats, and people, have conscious experience that purely material objects do not have, and it is this conscious experience that is the defining feature of minds. Moreover, this experience is not a fact about the physical realm. Tallis writes:

This difference between a person’s experience and a pebble’s non-experience cannot be captured by the sum total of the objective knowledge we can have about the physical makeup of human beings and pebbles. Conscious experience, subjective as it is to the individual organism, lies beyond the reach of such knowledge. I could know everything there is to know about a bat and still not know what it is like to be a bat — to have a bat’s experiences and live a bat’s life in a bat’s world.

This claim has been argued over at great length by myriad philosophers, who have mobilized a series of thought experiments to investigate Nagel’s claim. Among the most famous involves a fictional super-scientist named Mary, who studies the world from a room containing only the colors black and white, but has complete knowledge of the mechanics of optics, electromagnetic radiation, and the functioning of the human visual system.

When Mary is finally released from the room she begins to see colors for the first time. She now knows not only how different wavelengths of light affect the visual system, but also the direct experience of what it is like to see colors. Therefore, felt experiences and sensations are more than the physical processes that underlie them.

Nagel goes on to make the claim, a claim that has put him in the bad graces of his fellow naturalists, that naturalism simply lacks the resources to account for conscious experience. Tallis goes on to say that,

But none of the main features of minds — which Nagel identifies as consciousness, cognition, and [moral] value — can be accommodated by this worldview’s [naturalism's] identification of the mind with physical events in the brain, or by its assumption that human beings are no more than animal organisms whose behavior is fully explicable by evolutionary processes.

One might wonder why naturalistic materialists are so reluctant to acknowledge that there's more to us than just physical matter. What difference does it make if an essential aspect of our being is mental? What does it matter if we're not just matter but also a mind? Indeed, what does it matter if we are fundamentally mind?

Perhaps the answer is that given by philosopher J.P.Moreland. Moreland makes an argument in his book Consciousness and the Existence of God that naturalism entails the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter and energy, that is, there are no immaterial substances. Thus, the existence of human consciousness must be explicable in terms of material substance or naturalism is likely to be false. Moreland also argues that there is no good naturalistic explanation for consciousness and that, indeed, the existence of consciousness is strong evidence for the existence of God.

Nagel, an atheist, doesn't go as far as Moreland in believing that the phenomena of conscious experience point to the existence of God, but he comes close, arguing that there must be some mental, telic principle in the universe that somehow imbues the world with consciousness. There is nothing about matter, even the matter which constitutes the brain, that can account for conscious experiences like the sensations of color or a toothache. There's nothing about a chemical reaction or the firing of nerve fibers that can conceivably account for what we experience when we see red, hear middle C, taste sweetness, or feel pain. Nor is there anything about matter that can account for the existence of moral value.

If it turns out that naturalism remains unable to rise to the challenge presented by consciousness then naturalism, and materialism, will forfeit their hegemony among philosophers, a hegemony that has already been seriously eroded.

You can read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.

Beetle Body

Are we identical with our bodies or are we beings which have bodies? Philosopher Alvin Plantinga makes an argument, borrowing from Franz Kafka's novel Metamorphosis, for the latter view:

If we just are our bodies then it would be incoherent to think that we could exist apart from our bodies, that is, there would be a contradiction involved in trying to imagine such a state of affairs. It would be like trying to imagine a triangle that doesn't have three sides.

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine yourself having an out-of-the-body experience where you're looking down from above on an operating table upon which your body is lying. Whether or not you believe OBEs happen, such a scenario doesn't seem to be incoherent, like trying to imagine a table with no surface, but if it is coherent to imagine our selves being separated from our bodies then our selves can't be identical to our bodies.

Collapsing Talks?

President Obama is exceedingly wroth with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his public criticism of Mr. Obama's plans for a nuclear deal with Iran, but it may be that Mr. Netanyahu isn't the only concerned party who's balking at the deal. According to debkafile (a source of questionable reliability, it must be said) both Germany and France, the latter of which is acting under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., are also getting cold feet:

President Barack Obama failed to shift French President France Hollande from his objections to the nuclear accord taking shape between the US and Iran in the call he put through to the Elysée Friday night, March 20. US Secretary of State John Kerry fared no better Saturday, when he met British, French and German Foreign ministers in London for a briefing on the talks’ progress intended to line the Europeans up with the American position. He then found, according to debkafile’s sources, that France was not alone; Germany, too, balked at parts of the deal in the making.

The French are demanding changes in five main points agreed between Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif before the Iranians quit the talks Friday:

They insist that -

• Iran can’t be allowed to retain all the 6,500 centrifuges (for enriching uranium) conceded by the Americans. This figure must be reduced.
• Similarly, the stocks of enriched uranium accepted by the US to remain in Iranian hands are too large.
• France insists on a longer period of restrictions on Iran's nuclear work before sanctions are eased.
• It's pushing for a longer moratorium – 25 years rather than the 15 years offered by the Obama administration – and guarantees at every stage.
• The main sticking point however is France’s insistence that UN sanctions stay in place until Iran fully explains the evidence that has raised suspicions of past work on developing a nuclear warhead design.

The Iranians counter that they could never satisfy the French condition, because they would never be able to prove a negative and disprove evidence of a weapons program that is forged. There is no chance of Tehran ever admitting to working on a nuclear warhead – or allowing US inspectors access to suspected testing sites – because that would belie supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s solemn contention that Iran’s nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes and always has been.

debkafile’s Gulf sources disclose that the tough French bargaining position in the nuclear talks stems partly from its intense ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations, including the United Arab Emirates.

If debkafile's report is true (a big "if" given past experience with them) all this insolence is doubtless not going down well in the White House where failure to truckle to Mr. Obama's wishes is taken to be an act of lèse majesty. He has publicly let it be known that Israel will be punished in the U.N. for its temerity in re-electing Mr. Netanyahu against our president's clear desire that they repudiate him at the polls. We might well wonder what he has in store for France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E. and any other nation which presumes to know more about what's in their own best interests than he does.

Bad Science Guy

Bill Nye won the hearts of a lot of kids who watched his videos in their science classes. He was goofy yet funny, corny but personable, and very likeable. In the last few years, however, a different side of "The Science Guy" has revealed itself. In 2010 Nye gave a speech to the American Humanist Association in which he declared that,

I'm insignificant. ... I am just another speck of sand. And the earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun an unremarkable star. ... And the galaxy is a speck. I'm a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.

It's ironic that he received a hearty ovation for this speech given that not only does it reveal a bleak, even nihilistic view of himself in particular and mankind in general, but one of the criticisms that humanists make of Christians is that their belief in their inherent sinfulness ("I suck") is dehumanizing and depressing. Maybe it's okay to be dehumanizing and depressing as long as one agrees with the humanist world picture.

At any rate, Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views talks about some of the scientific infelicities in Nye's new book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. Luskin writes:

Undeniable promotes the standard dumbed-down atheistic narrative about science, society, and evolution -- except now his book is influencing younger thinkers who mistakenly think Nye is an objective source of information for everything about science...

Later, Nye reveals that his view that humans "suck" comes directly from his study of evolution: "As I learned more about evolution, I realized that from nature's point of view, you and I ain't such a big deal." According to evolution, Nye says, "humankind may not be that special."

And why aren't we special? Under Nye's nihilistic thinking, "evolution is not guided by a mind or a plan," and nature even shows "lack of evidence of a plan." For Nye, "Every other aspect of life that was once attributed to divine intent is now elegantly and completely explained in the context of evolutionary science."

Under Nye's outlook, even humanity's advanced abilities, like our moral codes and selfless altruism, are not special gifts that show we were made for a higher purpose. Rather, "Altruism is not a moral or religious ideal, no matter what some people might tell you," for human morality is merely a "biological part of who or what we are as a species."

If that's true, of course, then there's no reason why we should think that we have any objective moral duty to do anything. Nothing is really right or wrong if human morality is simply the product of blind, impersonal processes which cannot know what they were creating and cannot hold anyone accountable.

Luskin moves from Nye's metaphysics to reviewing some of his scientific claims and finds that Nye's science is still stuck in the 1970s:

On the natural chemical origins of life, Nye maintains that the famous Miller-Urey experiments "simulate[d] the conditions on earth in primordial times," and "produced the natural amino acids." Yet it's been known for decades that the Miller-Urey experiments did not correctly simulate the earth's early atmosphere. An article in Science explains why the experiments are now considered largely irrelevant: "the early atmosphere looked nothing like the Miller-Urey situation."

Nye also promotes the unsophisticated argument that humans and apes must share a common ancestor because our gene-coding DNA is only about 1 percent different. "This is striking evidence for chimps and chumps to have a common ancestor," he writes.

This argument is not just simplistic, it's also false.

Another article in Science challenged " the myth of 1%," suggesting the statistic is a "truism [that] should be retired," and noting, "studies are showing that [humans and chimps] are not as similar as many tend to believe." Geneticist Richard Buggs argues more accurate genetic comparisons show "the total similarity of the genomes could be below 70 percent."

But if we do share DNA with chimps, why should that demonstrate our common ancestry? Intelligent agents regularly re-use parts that work in different systems (e.g., wheels for cars and wheels for airplanes). Genetic similarities between humans and chimps could easily be seen as the result of common design rather than common descent. Nye's crude argument ignores this possibility.

Nye fares no better in his discussion of fossil transitional forms:

Nye cites Tiktaalik as a "'fishapod' (transition between fish and tetrapod, or land animal with four legs)" that is a fulfilled "prediction" of evolution because of when and where it was found in the fossil record.... Nye is apparently unaware that this so-called evolutionary "prediction" went belly-up after scientists found tracks of true tetrapods with digits some 18 million years before Tiktaalik in the fossil record. As the world's top scientific journal Nature put it, this means Tiktaalik is not a "direct transitional form."

In another instance, Nye claims we've "found a whole range of human ancestors, including Sahelanthropus tchadensis," apparently not realizing that an article in Nature reported there are "many... features that link the specimen with chimpanzees, gorillas or both," since " Sahelanthropus was an ape."

Nye calls the fossil mammal Ambulocetus a "walking whale" with "whalelike flippers, and feet with toes." Nye apparently missed a paper in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics which found that Ambulocetus had "large feet" and called its mode of swimming "inefficient" -- very different from whales. Another paper found that unlike whales, Ambulocetus was tied to freshwater environments and lived near "the mouths of rivers, lunging out at terrestrial prey -- analogous to the hunting process of crocodilians." This mammal had nothing like "whalelike flippers."

Luskin mercifully concludes his recitation of Nye's embarrassing unfamiliarity with current discoveries in biology with one more illustration. Word has apparently yet to reach the "science guy" that one of the anti-designers' favorite examples of poor design, the human eye, is actually an example of excellent design:

Nye also promotes an old canard that the human eye is wired backwards. According to Nye, "the human eye's light-sensing cells are tucked behind other layers of tissue" which is "not an optimal optical arrangement." He apparently never saw a 2010 paper in Physical Review Letters which found that our eyes have special glial cells which sit over the retina, acting like fiber-optic cables to channel light through the tissue directly onto our photoreceptor cells. According to the paper, the human retina is "an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images." Indeed, just this month a headline at Scientific American reports: " The Purpose of Our Eyes' Strange Wiring Is Unveiled." That article confirms the purpose lies in, "increasing and sharpening our color vision."

Nye tells his readers that the eyes of cephalopods like the octopus have "a better design than yours." But an article at Phys.org called our retinal glial cells a "design feature," and concluded: "The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow if it had only been able to orient its wiring behind the photoreceptor layer, like a cephalopod, is folly."

There are more examples of Nye's faulty science in Luskin's article which also contains links to his sources.

Evolution, at least in it's Darwinian form (i.e. a process that admits no "non-natural" influences), is a theory in crisis, as geneticist Michael Denton has described it, but if one is a naturalistic materialist it's really the only game in town, which is the main reason many scientists cling to it. Scientists like to say that they follow the evidence wherever it leads, but what counts as evidence is, as the philosophers of science like to say, theory-laden. That is, only evidence that fits the scientist's worldview is allowed to count as data. Everything else is ignored. It is an interesting fact that science is often driven by the scientist's metaphysical commitments, and only secondarily by empirical evidence. That's certainly not the way it's supposed to be or the way it's portrayed in the popular culture, but it is the way it too often is.

Ten Ways

A writer for Salon.com named Kali Holloway lists "Ten Ways White People Are More Racist Than They Realize." It's an interesting article, but it may be a case of there being less here than meets the eye. Holloway's first misstep is to fail to define what she means by the term "racism." The word means different things to different people and her failure to tell us what she means by it confuses her whole column.

For example, she shows that there are racial disparities in our society, but it hardly follows that disparities are due to racism. She attributes some data that she adduces to white racism, but the data show no such thing. She says in her intro that whites "believe racism is over" but again this is a meaningless claim in lieu of a plausible definition of racism. A lot of whites think, rightly in my opinion, that because blacks are no longer the target of discriminatory laws and are in fact protected by the law from overt discrimination, and because they benefit from affirmative action in all its various guises, and because educators bend over backwards to help black kids succeed in school, that genuine racism, while still holding out in some backwaters, is pretty much in retreat. But if by racism being over Holloway has in mind a state in which all whites love and admire all blacks and think the black sub-culture is a wonderful thing, well, then, racism isn't over, nor, on that definition of racism, is its persistence necessarily a bad thing.

At the risk of causing readers' eyes to glaze over here's why I think her ten reasons don't show what she seems to think they show. One caveat: I haven't followed up on the links she offers so I reserve the right to change my mind if the links were to prove any more convincing than are Holloway's arguments. Here are her reasons for thinking whites are racist to a greater extent than even they realize with a brief response from me:

1. College professors, across race/ethnicity and gender, are more likely to respond to queries from students they believe are white males. Okay, but whatever the reason for this, how can it be an exemplification of white racism if the more positive response to white males is, as Holloway acknowledges, exhibited by black professors as well as white?

2. White people, including white children, are less moved by the pain of people of color, including children of color, than by the pain of fellow whites. Probably true, but why is that? Is it because white children instinctively disdain black children, or is it because, as a matter of human nature, people universally have more difficulty relating to those who are unlike themselves? To show that this is a feature of white racism in particular rather than a general feature of human nature the studies would have to show that children of other races in the U.S. feel as much empathy for children of all other races as they do for other children of their own race. I bet a study wouldn't show that.

3. White people are more likely to have done illegal drugs than blacks or Latinos, but are far less likely to go to to jail for it. Maybe so, but what are the unstated relevant factors? Were there prior arrests, was there resistance to arrest, were the whites able to secure better legal representation? Unless these questions are answered Holloway's citation of the disparity in sentencing tells us little about why the disparity exists.

4. Black men are sentenced to far lengthier prison sentences than white men for the same crimes. See #3

5. White people, including police, see black children as older and less innocent than white children. It's hard to see why this is even on the list. Whites tend to see Asians as younger than they really are. So what? Moreover, blacks often recount how they had to grow up fast on the streets and that they experienced more of life by the time they were thirteen than do most middle class people. If so, why is it racist on the part of whites to assume that blacks are telling them the truth about that?

6. Black children are more likely to be tried as adults and are given harsher sentences than white children. There's some interesting stuff in the details of Holloway's elaboration on this one. She writes: "That might explain why, of the roughly 2,500 juveniles in the U.S. who have been sentenced to life without parole, nearly all (97 percent) were male and (60 percent) black." Once again, no discussion of the relevant incidentals accompanies this stat, an omission which should at least give us pause. In order to tell whether there's an injustice lurking in this statistic we'd have to know what percentage of serious violent crimes were committed by blacks. If blacks commit 60% or more of such crimes then a 60% rate of life sentences seems completely unremarkable.

Holloway goes on to say that, "for black kids, killing a white person was a good way to end up behind bars for their entire adult life. For white kids, killing a black person actually helped their chances of ensuring their prison stay would be temporary. From the report: “[T]he proportion of African American [juveniles sentenced to life without parole] for the killing of a white person (43.4 percent) is nearly twice the rate at which African American juveniles overall have taken a white person’s life (23.2 percent). What’s more, we find that the odds of a [juvenile life without probation] sentence for a white offender who killed a black victim are only about half as likely (3.6 percent) as the proportion of white juveniles arrested for killing blacks (6.4 percent).”

If Holloway is looking for evidence of racism in these statistics then one of them is pretty damning, but not in the way she thinks. According to what she writes black juveniles kill whites at a rate almost four times greater than white juveniles kill blacks. I should think that that stat would count for far more in the "who's a racist sweepstakes" than, say, #2 above.

7. White people are more likely to support the criminal justice system, including the death penalty, when they think it’s disproportionately punitive toward black people. I'm going to go out on a limb here. Without having read the reports to which she links I'm going to predict that they are nonsense. I know, you're going to ask me how I can say that. The reason is that all of us have a built in Baloney Detector and mine red-lined when I read #7.

8. The more “stereotypically black” a defendant looks in a murder case, the higher the likelihood he will be sentenced to death. Ms Holloway must herself be black herself because if a white person wrote about stereotypically black criminals they'd be pilloried for it at Salon. But let's grant the concept of "stereotypically black" criminal since she introduced it. Is the determinative factor, as she puts it, broad nose, thick lips, and dark skin, or is it the fact that the convicted killer comes across as inarticulate, stupid, brutal and thuggish that sways the jurors against him? If it's the latter then why is this racist?

9. Conversely, white people falsely recall black men they perceive as being “smart” as being lighter-skinned. See #10

10. A number of studies find white people view lighter-skinned African Americans (and Latinos) as more intelligent, competent, trustworthy and reliable than their darker-skinned peers. Aside from the redundancy in what she says about "trustworthy and reliable" I have no doubt what she claims is true if the lighter-skinned African Americans are also more articulate, better educated, and don't wear their hats sideways and their pants around the middle of their butts. More significantly, I suspect that light skin is valued in the black community as well since that's who's buying all those skin lighteners she talks about in her explanation. Does that mean blacks are racists? If blacks wanting lighter skin is in some convoluted way indicative of white racism, is the desire for darker skin among whites who visit tanning salons indicative of black racism?

Leftist/Progressives think that the locus of racism in this country is on the right in groups like the Tea Party, but using them as a test case, how does someone like Holloway explain the popularity among Tea Partiers of people like Herman Cain in 2012, Ben Carson in 2016, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, and Walter Williams? All of these men have dark skin. So does Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisianna. So does Mia Love (elected to congress in Utah, of all places), Condaleeza Rice, Star Parker, Jason Riley and many, many others. Maybe it's not the color of one's skin that matters to people but rather the content of their ideas.

Sometime ago I wrote on VP about a study that showed that blacks themselves think racism afflicts a higher percentage of blacks than it does whites. If that's so it's another reason Ms. Holloway's case is weak. It sounds too much like special pleading.

Compulsory Voting

The staunchly pro-choice Mr. Obama created a bit of a stir the other day when he seemed to suggest that people should have no choice at all when it comes to deciding whether they should vote. The man who believes it should be legal to choose to terminate a pregnancy seemed to say that it would be a good thing if people could not choose to abstain from voting. Presumably the requirement would apply only to citizens, but who knows? This is a terrible idea even if he wishes to compel only citizens to vote - perhaps leaving it optional for non-citizens - and is completely at odds with the concept of a free people in a free society.

Here's what the president said during a Q&A session at a Cleveland town hall event last Wednesday:

I don’t think I’ve ever said this publicly, but I’m going to go ahead and say it now. In Australia and some other countries, there’s mandatory voting. It would be transformative if everybody [in the U.S.] voted — that would counteract money more than anything. If everybody voted then it would completely change the political map in this country.

I guess technically he doesn't actually endorse mandatory voting here although it's hard to understand why he mentioned it right before saying how it would be a wonderful thing if everybody voted. In any case, the dreadfulness of endorsing compulsory voting, complete with fines and prison sentences for those who fail to show up at the polls, is exceeded by the reasons why he wants everyone to vote:

The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups. They are often the folks who are scratching and climbing to get into the middle-class. They’re working hard.

One can understand why Mr. Obama wants these particular people to vote. When they do they tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, but I could never understand why anyone who cares about the well-being of our republic would want them to vote. The demographic the president identifies is usually not only the most politically disengaged they're also the most apathetic, least informed, and least invested in their communities. If they do vote their ballot is often based not on an informed consideration of the issues and candidates, and what's best for the country, but on the basis of emotional appeals or self-interest, the candidate's looks, charisma, sex, race, or age. None of these are good reasons for voting for someone - voting for president is not like voting for homecoming queen - but they're often the only reasons the uninformed can think of.

Here's a simple test: If someone can't name their state's U.S. senators and their district's congressional representative that should tell them that they really don't know enough yet to vote responsibly. If someone doesn't care sufficiently about voting to register on time, to secure an ID, to study the issues, to read a newspaper or its electronic equivalent, why should we make it easier for them to vote? The only answer is that if the uninformed can be compelled to vote it would guarantee political hegemony for whichever party promised them the most free stuff, and we know which party that would be.

We should not be encouraging people to vote who have no idea what they're voting for. What we should be encouraging people to do is to educate themselves on what's going on in their country and the world. If they do that then they'll be self-motivated to vote and the government won't have to make it easy or force them to do it. They'll care enough to do what's necessary to cast their ballot. Every adult citizen should be eligible to vote, but only those who are informed and engaged should be encouraged to vote, and those who are informed and engaged won't need much encouragement.