Libertarianism, Determinism, and Compatibilism

In class discussions of free will and determinism, a number of students have asked if there isn't a middle way. One student even dug a post out of the archives that I did on such a via media back in 2008 (12/24/08). The post starts out by addressing the notion of a kind of compromise position between libertarian free will and determinism, usually referred to as "compatibilism," and ends up summarizing the discussions we've had in class on these different philosophical positions. Here it is:

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

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

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

The temptation for the materialist (i.e. one who allows no non-material entities in his ontology) is to simply accept determinism, but not only does this view strip us of any moral responsibility, it seems to be based on a circularity: The determinist says that our choices are the inevitable products of our strongest motives, but if questioned about how we can know what our strongest motives are he would invite us to examine the choices we make. Our actions reveal our strongest motives and our strongest motives are whichever ones we act upon. But, if so, the claim that we always act upon our strongest motives reduces to the tautology that we always act upon the motives we act upon. This is certainly true, but it's not very edifying.

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

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

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

Shrugging at Lies

One of the most distressing things about the Benghazi hearings this past week was the almost complete indifference in the liberal media to the fact that Hillary Clinton was shown to have lied to the nation about what happened at Benghazi in Libya. The attack on our embassy that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya, was a coordinated terrorist attack. Mrs. Clinton has maintained ever since that it was a spontaneous riot precipitated by an obscure video that painted an unflattering picture of Islam and the Prophet. This was false and the hearings have shown that she knew it was false at the time.

Jonah Goldberg at National Review summarizes:

Yesterday’s hearings confirmed that Hillary Clinton deliberately and knowingly lied when she blamed it [the attack] all on that video. This really isn’t a debatable point now. We can argue about why she lied and we can debate whether that lie matters. But that she lied is incontrovertible.

First of all, we know that the video story wasn’t, in fact, true.

Second, we know that the Obama administration knew it wasn’t true.

Third, we know that Hillary knew it wasn’t true. (You could claim that she was lying to the Egyptian prime minister when she said, “We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.” But it seems less likely that she would have lied to her own daughter on the night of the attack.)

After reading many of Clinton’s e-mails -- never mind her bizarre claim in the Democratic debate that the Libyan intervention was a success story -- it seems pretty clear that one of her motivations was to shift blame away from what she -- and Sid Blumenthal -- had wrought. They had schemed for a long time to find a way to spin the Libyan adventure as her triumph in anticipation of a presidential run. The Benghazi debacle threatened to shed light on the underlying policy failure -- not just of failing to provide security, but of the whole intervention. Better to blame the video.

In the wake of the hearings I heard commenter after commenter enthusing about how Mrs. Clinton was poised and graceful, how the Republicans failed to goad her into "screech mode," how she now has a clear path to the presidential nomination, assuming the FBI uncovers no wrongdoing, or, if they do, assuming the Justice Department chooses not to indict Democratic wrong-doing.

Scarcely anyone seemed repelled by the acknowledgement that she had lied to the nation in order to save President Obama's bacon (Recall that he had assured us that al Qaeda was on the run. It wouldn't do to admit that al Qaeda was actually running through our embassy killing our diplomats) and to deflect questions about her own failure as Secretary of State (No one, for example, has been held accountable for not granting Ambassador Stevens' many requests for more security).

We bemoan the fact that politicians are corrupt, yet as long as they're on our side, so far from punishing them for their corruption, we applaud it.

Perhaps the left is willing to shrug at Mrs. Clinton's lies because they believe that everyone does it. The idea of integrity and character is foreign to so many of us that confirmation that the woman who could be the next president of the United States has lied persistently makes as little impression on them as a bb shot at the side of a battleship.

Now if the liar were a Republican, well, that would be different. Democrat lies are peccadilloes, at worst. Republican lies are evil at best.

The moral fiber of our nation has deteriorated to the point where it's hard to believe anything anyone tells us, and a big part of the reason is that too many of us don't see anything wrong with lying. Indeed, too many of us don't see much wrong with almost anything short of murder, child abuse, and opposition to gay marriage.

Evolution and Ethics

In an essay titled Evolution and Ethics written in 1893 Thomas Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for morality. One popular candidate for such a basis is the evolution of our species, but Huxley, despite his total fealty to Darwinian evolution, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,”... adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution.

I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Huxley's right, of course. If the inclination to be kind and tolerant has evolved in the human species then so has the inclination to be selfish, violent, and cruel. So if evolution is to serve as our "moral dictionary" what grounds do we have for privileging kindness over cruelty? Both are equally sanctioned by our evolutionary history, and thus we can't say that either is better or more right than the other.

Huxley goes on to dispense with the notion that the evolutionary development of our ethical sensibility can provide us with some sort of guide to our behavior:

There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called “ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittest’; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.

The problem is that, for naturalists, the processes of nature are the only thing they can look to for moral guidance. Having rejected the notion that there exists a transcendent, personal, moral authority, the naturalist, if he's to avoid nihilism, is left trying to derive ethics from what he sees in nature, which leads to what I regard as the most serious problem with any naturalistic ethics: There's simply no warrant for thinking that a blind, impersonal process like evolution or a blind, impersonal substance like matter, can impose a moral duty on conscious beings.

Moral obligations, if they exist, can only be imposed by conscious, intelligent, moral authorities. Evolution can no more impose such an obligation than can gravity. Thus, naturalists (atheists) are confronted with a stark choice: Either give up their atheism or embrace moral nihilism. Unwilling to do what is for them unthinkable and accept the first alternative, many of them are reluctantly embracing the second.

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

I had been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality….

I experienced a shocking epiphany that religious believers are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality….

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Joel Marks, An Amoral Manifesto

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The world, according to this new picture [i.e. the picture produced by a scientific outlook], is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….

Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative. W.T. Stace, The Atlantic Monthly, 1948

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We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality. Kai Nielson (1984)

What these thinkers and dozens like them are saying is that the project of trying to find some solid, naturalistic foundation upon which to build an ethics is like trying to find a mermaid. The object of the search simply doesn't exist, nor could it.

Human Flourishing

Philosopher Sam Harris is often identified as a "New Atheist," one of a number of prominent thinkers who have undertaken to discredit religion in all its manifestations. Harris gave a TED Talk in 2010 which he based on his book The Moral Landscape and in which he sought to rebut the common view that science, being the study of that which can be observed and measured, really has nothing to say about the aesthetic life - the realm of values, including moral values. In his TED Talk Harris says this:

So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

In other words, Harris claims that right and wrong are about what promotes the flourishing of human beings and that science can speak to this question. There are, however, at least three things wrong with using human flourishing as a criterion for ethics:

1. On what grounds do we privilege human beings over other animals? What works against human flourishing (e.g. mass slaughters) might be a boon to the flourishing of animals, particularly carrion-eaters. On atheism, then, what grounds are there for the specieist promotion of human flourishing over that of the flourishing of other animals in general and other mammals in particular?

2. Whose idea of flourishing do we promote? What promotes human flourishing in the mind of a member of ISIS who thinks the human race would be better off if everyone were forcibly converted to Islam or killed might be distinctly immoral to say, Sam Harris. Whose conception of human flourishing should we privilege and how do we decide that?

3. On what grounds does an atheist conclude that I should be concerned with the flourishing of others as opposed to simply my own flourishing? If I can flourish at the expense of others why would that be wrong? Why is it wrong for me to flourish by exploiting the earth's resources and letting future generations yet unborn to fend for themselves?

Perhaps Harris can answer these questions, but I have serious doubts. Atheism simply does not supply the philosophical resources necessary to support a belief in objective moral obligation. If atheism is true morality devolves to subjectivism, i.e. the view that what's right is whatever I feel is right or whatever I feel I should do, and subjectivism offers no rational justification for stopping short of a "might-makes-right" view of ethics.

On atheism, whoever has the power to make the rules gets to make them, whatever they are, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Bernie Sanders: Moralist

As Democrat voters grow increasingly wary of, and disenchanted with, Hillary Clinton and come to view her as representative of all that's wrong with politics and politicians, Bernie Sanders looks better and better by comparison. Whatever one thinks of Sanders' socialism, he certainly seems like an honest man, and indeed he likes to couch his policy proposals in moral rhetoric, describing them as "the moral thing to do."

It may seem naive in this Machiavellian age, but I agree that policy should be first and foremost moral. Nevertheless, my question for Sanders is what does he ground his moral judgments in? He says, for example, that income inequality is immoral, but why is it immoral? Why is it wrong for some people to have more than others? What makes that wrong? Perhaps the answer is that it's not fair, but then the question is why is unfairness wrong?

Perhaps someone might reply that I wouldn't want to be treated unfairly and therefore shouldn't treat others unfairly, but the conclusion in that reply just doesn't follow. It's true that I wouldn't want to be treated unfairly, but why's that a reason that I shouldn't treat others that way, especially if I can get away with it? Where does this notion come from that we should treat others the way we want to be treated? Why is it wrong to treat others however we wish?

Unless, Sanders is a theist (I know nothing of his views on the matter) all his talk about morality is literal nonsense. It's empty rhetoric. Unless moral judgments are grounded in the will of a transcendent, personal, and perfectly good Creator who has the power to hold people accountable for what they do, there simply is no such thing as moral right and wrong. How could there be?

We may have strong intuitions that there are such things, but those intuitions are simply illusions which evolved eons ago as a result of impersonal forces shaping us for life in the stone age. They certainly have no power to impose obligations or duties upon us. The claims that lying, income inequality, or exploiting others or the environment are all wrong is really to claim nothing more than that we don't like these things, but of course our personal likes and dislikes are hardly the standard of right and wrong.

The next time you hear Senator Sanders use a word like "immoral" ask yourself what, in our secular age, he could possibly mean by the term if he's not implying that the behavior he's talking about violates the will of God. If he's not implying that, if he, in fact, is a non-theist, then all he's doing is venting his own subjective feelings and there's no reason anyone should be duty-bound by his feelings.

Death Spiral

Betsy McCaughey is one of the most knowledgeable critics of the Affordable health Care Act (Obamacare) in the country. In a recent column in the New York Post she observes that Obamacare is about to enter the predicted "death spiral."

The "death spiral" is the result of trying to insure everyone by raising the cost of insurance to those, like the young, who are healthy and don't use it. Obamacare requires everyone to buy insurance but despite the penalties for not having it, the young still calculate that it's cheaper for them to decline the purchase.

The failure to lure the healthy into the market means that those who are covered are sicker than the general population and thus the insurance companies have to pay more compensation out than what they're taking in. This forces insurance companies to raise the premiums on everyone else which causes even more people to decide that they can't afford it and drives them out of the market as well. As the price goes up fewer people are paying into the system, the government tries to compensate the insurers and subsidize those who can't afford the insurance, but this just makes the burden on taxpayers greater.

Eventually, the whole system collapses under its own weight, at least this is what critics have been predicting will happen in a year or two. McCaughey claims it's beginning to happen now:

The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.

Last Thursday, the administration predicted enrollment for 2016 will be less than half what the Congressional Budget Office predicted in March.

Despite subsidies to help with premiums and out-of-pocket costs, most of the uninsured who are eligible for ObamaCare are saying “no thanks.” Only one in seven is expected to sign up. That’s despite a hefty increase in the financial penalty next year for not having insurance.

Bad enough that healthy people aren’t buying. Worse is that the administration is spending billions of your tax dollars covering up the problem, paying insurers to keep offering the plans, even though they’re losing their shirts. But facts are facts — and there’s no hiding these.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell predicts ObamaCare enrollment will inch up by 1 million or so, to 10 million people — half what the CBO forecasted. Open enrollment for the coming year, which begins Nov. 1, “is going to be a challenge,” she said.

David Wichmann, UnitedHealth Group’s president, announced higher premiums last week because enrollees will “require more medical services than original expectations.”

Many states (though not New York) are looking at premium hikes of 30 percent or more, according to a new Robert Wood Johnson/Urban Institute analysis. The Heritage Foundation estimates that insurers lost 12 percent selling ACA plans in 2014, with more losses this year.

McCaughey has more at the link. The republicans are reported to be coalescing around a plan to revamp the whole system while the Democrats (Clinton and Sanders) want to raise taxes to pay for the subsidies, raise the penalties, and compel people to buy health insurance.

And to think that Democrats once touted themselves as the party of individual freedom. Times have sure changed. The only individual freedom liberals endorse today is sexual freedom. Everything else they want to make subject to government regulation.

The First Cause

Philosopher Tim Maudlin is one of the top thinkers in the world on the subject of the nature and origin of the universe (i.e. cosmology). There's a six minute interview of him at Aeon in which he talks about some of the puzzling questions associated with the origin of the universe.

Specifically, he addresses the question whether something or nothing came "before" the Big Bang. Maudlin grants that if the universe is not eternal in the past it must have had a beginning. This raises the question, which he doesn't get into, of what caused the beginning since whatever comes into being must be brought into being by something else that already exists. If the beginning of the space-time universe is what we're trying to explain then whatever caused it must itself transcend space and time. Moreover, it must be exceedingly powerful and intelligent, and if intelligent then personal.

Furthermore, if we define the universe as the totality of contingent beings then the cause of this totality cannot itself be contingent (else it would be part of the universe) and must therefore be a necessary being. Necessary beings do not themselves have a beginning and thus do not require causes.

In other words, the cause of the universe sounds very much like the God of theism, but Maudlin, being a non-theist, doesn't draw out these implications. The interview is interesting but would've been much more so had he addressed the possibility that the universe is, in fact, the product of a creative act of God.

An Anachronism in His Party

One of the more interesting moments in the Democratic debate last Tuesday night, at least for me, was when Anderson Cooper posed the question about who the candidates considered to be their enemy. Some of the answers were a bit peculiar. For example, Hillary listed, inter alia, the Iranians who want to see our children dead, and then went on to include the Republicans with whom she presumably will have to work if she's successful in achieving the presidency. It was a jarring juxtaposition.

The last candidate to answer the question was former Senator Jim Webb whose answer made the others' seem trivial, but for younger viewers his reply may have been a bit obscure. What was he referring to?

For those too young to remember, Webb is a former Marine and Vietnam veteran who received the Navy Cross for valor in combat. Here's an excerpt from his citation:

On 10 July 1969, while participating in a company-sized search and destroy operation deep in hostile territory, First Lieutenant Webb’s platoon discovered a well-camouflaged bunker complex which appeared to be unoccupied. Deploying his men into defensive positions, First Lieutenant Webb was advancing to the first bunker when three enemy soldiers armed with hand grenades jumped out. Reacting instantly, he grabbed the closest man and, brandishing his .45 caliber pistol at the others, apprehended all three of the soldiers. Accompanied by one of his men, he then approached the second bunker and called for the enemy to surrender. When the hostile soldiers failed to answer him and threw a grenade which detonated dangerously close to him, First Lieutenant Webb detonated a claymore mine in the bunker aperture, accounting for two enemy casualties and disclosing the entrance to a tunnel. Despite the smoke and debris from the explosion and the possibility of enemy soldiers hiding in the tunnel, he then conducted a thorough search which yielded several items of equipment and numerous documents containing valuable intelligence data. Continuing the assault, he approached a third bunker and was preparing to fire into it when the enemy threw another grenade. Observing the grenade land dangerously close to his companion, First Lieutenant Webb simultaneously fired his weapon at the enemy, pushed the Marine away from the grenade, and shielded him from the explosion with his own body. Although sustaining painful fragmentation wounds from the explosion, he managed to throw a grenade into the aperture and completely destroy the remaining bunker.

Webb stood on that stage last Tuesday, at least in that moment, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. It's too bad that in today's Democrat party men like Webb are anachronisms.

Mind or Matter

In my classes recently we've spoken about the view of reality often referred to as Idealism. Idealists hold that what really exists is not objective material stuff but rather ideas in minds. The notion is intriguing, largely because it's so counterintuitive and also because it seems that so many scientists and philosophers have come to the belief that some version of it is more plausible than the common sense view that the world is composed of material substance.

In light of these class discussions I wanted to run this post that I originally put on VP a couple of years ago:

One of the many fascinating questions being revived in today's philosophical debates is the question of the ultimate nature of reality. In other words, what is the world made of? For the last two hundred years, and still today, the consensus answer among scientists and philosophers is that matter is the fundamental constituent of the world. Everything in the world, it's believed, can be reduced to matter (or energy).

This view is called metaphysical materialism, but despite its status as the consensus view there have always been prominent thinkers who've insisted that materialism is quite wrong. There has long been a substantial minority of very brilliant men who believe that the material world is really an expression of mind and that mind is fundamental. This view is usually referred to as metaphysical idealism.

Here are a few examples of quotes from scientists and philosophers who embrace(d) one form or another of metaphysical idealism:

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

"Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." Erwin Schroedinger, quantum physicist

"It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality." Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner, 1961

"If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history." Thomas Nagel, author of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, 2012.

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

So what does all this matter (no pun intended)? If mind is fundamental then it may follow, psychologically if not logically, that personality is as well, and pretty soon it seems plausible to think that the fundamental reality is in fact the Universal Mind of traditional theism.

This is an intolerable conclusion for metaphysical naturalists who thought they had laid such notions to rest in the 19th century. Now it appears that the matter is far from settled, and presently, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, there's an interesting philosophical donnybrook brewing over whether science and philosophy, so far from having proven there is no transcendent mind, no God, are actually, even if inadvertently, accumulating increasing evidence that there is.

Sundry Thoughts

A few ruminations in the wake of last night's Democratic debate:

There was a lot of talk about the damage that atmospheric CO2 is doing to our climate and how we need to tax carbon and end fossil fuel consumption. This would, of course, raise fuel costs, put an awful lot of people out of work, and be especially hard on the poor. That should concern those who claim to have the interests of the middle class and poor at heart, so I wonder if it might not be a better idea to offer research grants to encourage the development of economically feasible technology that would suck CO2 out of the air rather than destroy entire industries to try to prevent it from going in. It would certainly be better to create manufacturing and R&D jobs than to destroy them.

There was also much talk among the Democrat candidates about free college education, but the question that pleads for an answer is how would it be paid for? The consensus among the leftist/socialists on the stage was what it always is for leftist/socialists, i.e. tax the rich. This, however, is a proposal that's almost guaranteed not to work. I prefer Jim Geraghty's idea (or is it Jonah Goldberg's): Levy a tax on the endowments of our richest universities, like Harvard. They're loaded with dough, and they're all run by very progressive folks who are vociferously in favor of requiring the rich to pay more taxes. Surely they'd leap at the chance to pay their fair share to make free education possible for everyone, don't you think?

There was considerable enthusiasm last night for raising the minimum wage to $10 and hour so that everyone in the country could make a "living wage." This is a great idea, but it's only a start. If $10 an hour helps people get by, why stop there? Why not raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour so that everyone can be rich, own their own boat and vacation wherever it is the Obama's vacation? We should print bumper stickers saying, "Why not $100?" But where's the money going to come from, you ask? I don't know. Obama's stash. Who cares? It's the right thing to do. It helps the poor. If we need more money we can just print it.

Critics often allege that Hillary is not nearly as good a liar as her husband, Bill, but I think this is very unfair to Hillary, and, since she's a woman, the slur borders on being sexist. Indeed, she fibbed masterfully in the debate. For example, she claimed that because the GOP wants to end subsidies to Planned Parenthood of half a billion dollars a year that therefore they're really promoting big government. It's not clear how wanting to cut taxpayer support of Planned Parenthood and shifting the funds to other organizations which promote women's health is an act of "big government," but the art of telling a good whopper is, in part, saying something ridiculous and getting an unthinking audience and media, who are sure they've just heard a jolly good zinger, to cheer. Breitbart lists a bunch of other examples of Hillary's skillful mendacity in last night's event here.

Finally, once upon a time we were told that Hillary was the smartest woman in the world. Well, maybe so, but do smart people say things like, "I made no decision on the Keystone pipeline until I made a decision on the Keystone pipeline"? Just asking.

Multi-Dimensional Realities

To paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our view of reality. We observe the world with our five senses and take for granted that the world we perceive is exactly what's there. We simply assume that our senses give us an accurate and exhaustive picture of reality, but why should we think that?

Why, for example, should we suppose that just because our minds can only apprehend three dimensions (four, if you count time) that that's all there are? Could the world not consist of numerous dimensions that we can not only not perceive, but we can't even imagine? Could there not actually be entire worlds integrated with our world but closed off to us because our minds lack the necessary structure to perceive them?

One way to try to imagine what reality might be like if there are actually more than three dimensions of space is to imagine how a three dimensional object would appear to a two dimensional being as illustrated in this short video:

If we actually do consist of more than three dimensions we would look completely different to a being who could perceive those other dimensions than we do to each other. There could literally be, in other words, far more to each of us than meets the eye.

Double Standards

You might recall that when Israel bombed Hamas a couple of years ago and inadvertently killed civilians, many of whom were being used as human shields by Hamas, the world rose up in high moral dudgeon to condemn Israeli "savagery." Israel almost became an international pariah for, in the course of trying to preserve its existence, killing Palestinian Arabs who were trying, and in many cases succeeding, to kill them. Well, Arabs are presently being killed in quantity all across the Middle East today, but the world doesn't seem to be much interested. When Arabs kill Arabs the world yawns. It's only when Israelis kills Arabs that the juices of moral indignation get to flowing.

Consider, for example some facts revealed in this article at Strategy Page and ask yourself how many editorials you've seen at the New York Times about them. Then ask yourself how many editorials you would've read had the death dealers been Israelis:

Saudi Arabia has its lobbyists in the West working overtime to deal with accusations that the Saudi led Arab coalition air attacks in Yemen have killed more civilians (more than 2,000) this year than Israel did during their 2014 war in Gaza with Hamas. That conflict saw 2,100 Palestinians killed and about two-thirds of them were civilians. The Palestinians, and their Arab allies in the UN, want Israel prosecuted for war crimes because of this. There is no such clamor for the Saudis to be similarly prosecuted.

The reality is that the situation is much worse than that. Far more Palestinians are killed by other Palestinians (and other Arabs) than by Israelis. For example nearly 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Syrian Civil War since 2011. Hundreds were tortured to death and more than that were executed, often in gruesome ways, for being on the wrong side or for “blasphemy”. In Gaza hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting or executed by Hamas for various offenses (like disagreeing with Hamas rule.) In the last half century far more Palestinians have been killed by Arabs than by Israelis.

The current situation becomes more embarrassing when you look at the reaction of Arabs and their supporters in the West to all this. The Palestinian accusations, and willful ignorance of Palestinians killed by Arabs has been increasingly supported in the West, especially among leftist political groups, who automatically agree with the Palestinians.

This justifies accusations that Israel must be doing something wrong. Israel points out that their Arab and Western critics would, and do, respond as Israel does when attacked by nearby terrorists, but that fact is ignored. Well, not completely. Many Arabs, especially Arab diplomats who know a lot about Israel and the Palestinians privately agree with the Israelis. But to openly point out the reality of the situation in the Moslem world will get you death threats, or worse. In the West it’s safer to point out the obvious although in leftist political circles the pro-Palestinian supporters can be loud and even a little violent at times. In Europe this has led to more tolerance of anti-Semitic violence and more European Jews moving to Israel (and elsewhere).

This situation can only get worse as Europe (and the U.S.) absorbs more and more Syrian refugees. Eventually a point is going to be reached where these immigrant Muslim populations have the political clout to affect the policy of their governments toward Israel and Israel will then find itself increasingly isolated in the world. Add to the mix a nuclear Iran and the current administration's surly antagonisms toward Israel, and the future of this tiny outpost of freedom and democracy in the midst of millions of hostile people ruled by tyrants and autocrats looks very bleak.

Imagining Our Politics

Imagine a cop who spends much of his time in the donut shop. You note that lawlessness is rampant in the neighborhood, laws are not being enforced, and you march into the donut shop to ask the cop why. He shrugs it off, tells you he doesn't like the laws and isn't going to enforce them. You tell him he's not doing his duty, but you're powerless to change anything so you storm out. Next thing you know the cop is pulling you over and writing you up for going three mph over the speed limit, having a small crack in your windshield, and a burned-out taillight. He tells you that if you don't like the way he does his job you can expect more of the same. That's Barack Obama.

Imagine a cop who stops you and tickets you for a minor infraction. Later you see the same cop pulling over a Cadillac for running a red light and nearly causing an accident. The wealthy driver hands the cop his license and a $100 bill. The cop says "thanks" and sends the driver on his way. You also learn that this cop has top secret inside information on undercover police operations involving organized crime and terrorism which he freely shares with his friends on Facebook for the whole world to see. That's Hillary Clinton.

Imagine a job applicant who, when asked how he would benefit the company were he hired, instead of answering the question, proceeds to mock the other applicants, laughing at them because they sweat too much in the interview, or have an ugly face. You think this applicant is suffering from arrested emotional development and has the maturity of a twelve year old. That's Donald Trump.

Imagine a father who has two sons. One works hard to support himself and not be a burden to the family. He works long hours and barely has time to eat, but he does what's necessary to pay his way and save for his children. The other son sleeps till noon and plays video games the rest of the day. The father nevertheless loves the second son and supports him, paying his bills and accommodating the family to the son's life choices. Finally, though, the father runs out of money. Rather than force the second son to act responsibly and get a job the father insists that the first son give 70% or more of his income to support his brother. That's Bernie Sanders.

Heaven help us.

The Future of Warfare

Lasers are employed so ubiquitously as weapons in science fiction movies that it may come as a surprise to read that they really haven't been applied that way in the military. They're used as targeting devices, to be sure, but, with the exception of a laser weapon on a naval warship, the USS Ponce, not as the instrument that does the damage. According to an article in The Week, however, that's soon going to change:

This week Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor behind the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, announced it was exploring ways to put a laser on the controversial fighter. The U.S. Navy has already fielded a laser weapon on the USS Ponce. And the U.S. Army is looking for ways to use lasers to protect troops in the field from artillery shells, missiles, and drones.

All of this is just a start. As lasers grow smaller and more compact, eventually they will be mounted on everything from bombers to tanks. A quiet killer at the speed of light, lasers may some day dominate the battlefield as we know it.

A laser inflicts damage with heat produced by focused light. This heat can burn a hole in the skin of airplanes, set a pickup truck's gas tank on fire, and even burn holes in people. Pointed at an artillery shell in flight, a laser can heat the shell until the explosive inside detonates. Engineers have known how lasers work for decades but have been held back by various problems, chief of which are power generation and storage. A laser needs a lot of energy — in the tens of kilowatts range or higher — to be usable as a weapon. And it needs it instantly.

Despite the technological hurdles, there are reasons why research has persisted. Lasers have many advantages over conventional projectile weapons. A laser moves at roughly the speed of light, or 186,000 miles per second. Unlike a missile, an accurate laser beam can't be avoided. Lasers aren't affected by strong winds and can't be blown off target.

Laser weapons are invisible, operating at an optical wavelength the human eye cannot discern. They are also silent and unlike bullets and shells, do not produce miniature sonic booms. Unlike conventional weapons, which utilize a controlled explosion to generate energy, lasers have no recoil.

Lasers are also affordable. A single Griffin short-range missile costs at least $115,000. A shot from a laser costs usually costs less than a dollar, the price of the energy used. The actual laser system is more expensive — the laser on the USS Ponce cost $40 million, including six years of research and development — but expect the price tag to fall as they become more common.

The article goes on to discuss a few more pros and cons of laser weapons and the military's plans to use them. The article doesn't mention it, but for years the military was researching ways to mount lasers on high-flying aircraft to shoot down attacking nuclear ICBMs while they were still in their boost phase. With the North Koreans and Iranians developing ICBMs to deliver nuclear weapons against the U.S. homeland, and a few other nations like China and Russia already having this capability, it would be nice if we had a way to protect ourselves from such a horrific possibility.

The Democrats in general, however, and the Obama administration in particular, have been reluctant to develop such a capability fearing that it would lead to another arms race. This argument may have made some sense when the only real nuclear threat was the old Soviet Union, which was led by men who, whatever else they were, were at least not lunatics. Given that we can't say that about the North Koreans nor the Iranians it makes eminent sense to do what we can now to defend ourselves from the psychopaths who have their fingers on the nuclear button in these countries.

Of course, it would've also been helpful had the president not seen fit to release $150 billion of frozen Iranian assets so that the fanatic mullahs in Tehran, who keep declaring their devout wish to incinerate us, could fund their nuclear dreams of mushroom clouds filling American skies.

Information Enigma

One of the major intellectual controversies of our time is the debate between naturalists and non-naturalists over origins. Naturalists maintain that life originated and developed through purely mechanistic processes, processes which acted blindly and strictly in accord with physical laws. Some non-naturalists reply that blind random forces and laws cannot generate the information we see in living things. Information, they argue, is always the product of intelligent minds, never the product of random mechanisms, and living things are saturated with it.

One version of this non-naturalist view is called intelligent design. Intentionally or unintentionally, ID is perhaps the most misrepresented theory, scientific or metaphysical, on the contemporary scene. It's detractors frequently confuse it with creationism, which is a caricature, and insist on calling it religious, which it is not.

The following recently released twenty minute video, titled Information Enigma, presents a nutshell explanation of ID. It's intended for those who wish to have an accurate understanding of the theory and why increasing numbers of philosophers and scientists are finding ID's arguments intellectually compelling. It's worth the twenty minutes it takes to watch it:

Science and Metaphysics

There's a school of thought in philosophy called scientism which asserts that there is no significant truth about reality that is not in principle discoverable through the methods of science. Philosophers who embrace this view are at pains to eliminate metaphysics from their ontology. There are no metaphysical truths worth knowing, the devotee of scientism argues, everything worth knowing is a physical fact. In the words of Duke philosopher Alex Rosenberg, "Physics fixes all the facts."

The problem with this, beside the fact that it seems patently false, is that it itself is a metaphysical assertion. It's making a claim about reality that transcends the ability of science to adjudicate. Science simply cannot tell us what the limits of science are. Nor can it tell us whether there are facts to which the methods of science are blind.

An excerpt from a new book by philosopher Roger Trigg, the title of which is Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics, discusses the problem:

Once the logical independence of reality from science is accepted, the question is why reality has a character that enables it to be understood scientifically. The intelligibility and intrinsic rationality of reality cannot be taken for granted. Even the greatest scientists, such as Einstein, have seen that the intelligibility of the world is a mystery.

He famously remarked that “the eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.” Like the way in which mathematics seems to map the intrinsic rational structure of the physical world, this is presupposed within science and cannot be given a scientific explanation. It appears to be a metaphysical fact, and the explanation for which, if there can be one, must come from beyond science.

In other words, metaphysical assumptions are woven into the body of assumptions that scientists make as they go about their everyday work. Science would be impossible without these assumptions (for example, the assumption that the universe is intelligible and that it can be explained by mathematics). When scientists and philosophers allege that science doesn't use or require metaphysics they're, in fact, sawing off the branch on which they sit.

New Species?

The recent discovery of hominin (human-like) bones in a South African cave has sparked a lot of excitement. The skeletal remains are virtually intact and reveal a people who have an interesting blend of characteristics - curved fingers which suit them for arboreal life and modern feet which indicates that most of their time was spent walking upright. An article in The Guardian elaborates on the find. Here's an excerpt:

Another team led by William Harcourt-Smith at the City University of New York analysed 107 pieces of Homo naledi foot bone. Writing in the journal, they describe how the foot is similar to those of Neanderthals and modern humans, but with a number of subtle differences. The toe bones are slightly curved, which may have helped Homo naledi a little when it took to the trees. The arch of the foot is low, or absent entirely, making Homo naledi flat-footed.

“It was unequivocally spending more time walking upright than not,” said Harcourt-Smith. “But you can imagine it spending time in the trees to gather fruit, or perhaps nesting in trees, or going there when there are predators around.” The curved toe bones are thought to be skeletal adaptations that Homo naledi inherited from its more arboreal ancestors and had not lost.

Until the bones can be dated, one of the major questions surrounding Homo naledi will remain: did the species emerge millions of years ago and live in successful isolation, perhaps even overlapping with modern humans? That is one possibility. Another is that Homo naledi is an evolutionary side-branch, a sister species of a known human ancestor, such as Homo erectus.

“You can imagine this lineage emerging early on, close to the origins of the Homo genus, and hanging on for a long period of time,” said Harcourt-Smith. “But that’s speculation. Evolution is messy. There is lots of experimentation going on, and lots of dead ends.”

However long ago H. naledi lived a question still remains that I've not seen anyone answer. Why is it assumed that these are the bones of an organism that is an entirely different species from H. sapiens? For that matter why is it assumed that H. erectus and H. sapiens are different species? The definition of a species is (or was) a reproductively isolated population of organisms. In other words, if two organisms can copulate and produce fertile offspring they're considered to be members of the same species. If they can't produce fertile offspring then they're assigned to different species.

So the question is how do we know that H. naledi, H. erectus, and H. sapiens could not interbreed? Even if they were separated in time that doesn't mean that they were a different species any more than a H. sapiens today is a different species than a H. sapiens which lived 50,000 years ago. It's true that all of the hominins are anatomically different but why would that make them different species? After all, every breed of dog, as different as they all are, are all the same species.

I'm eager to be instructed on this point, but until I am it seems to me that calling any of these hominins anything other than morphological variations of the same species is simply unwarranted on the basis of the evidence we have. What reason do we have to think that just because these different populations of hominins were separated by time or morphology that they would've been incapable of producing fertile offspring?

Gun Deaths

In the wake of the awful murders of college students in Oregon by a hate-filled lunatic there has been a resurgence of calls for gun control. I want to say something about that, but before I do I want to pose a question. Imagine that a white bigot targeted blacks (as happened in Charleston) or Muslims. Would we be talking about gun control or would we be talking about the state of racism or anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S.?

I'm pretty sure that from the president on down the talk would be primarily about the latter, but, if so, why is it that when a bigot of a different sort targets Christians all that gets talked about is the need to "do something" about guns? Isn't the fact that this guy picked out Christians for execution worth probing? What does it say about the state of anti-Christian bigotry in this country that haters want to kill people just because they're Christians? Just wondering.

Anyway, an article at Hot Air has some interesting numbers on gun deaths in the U.S. According to the CDC's most recent figures (2011) there were 32,352 deaths inflicted by firearms in this country which certainly sounds horrific, but when the numbers get broken down the tell a somewhat different story:

[Of] those 32,352 gun deaths, 21,175 of them were suicides. That leaves us with 11,177 deaths to account for. But as it turns out, the FBI records that 8,583 deaths were murders of various sorts involving guns of all types. The remaining roughly 2,500 were accounted for by accidents and unintentional injuries.

Of the actual 8,583 gun murders committed in 2011, 323 were committed with “rifles.” And that’s all rifles, including bolt action, deer hunting rifles and all the rest. The number committed with so called “assault rifles” were a fraction of that. When you ask how dangerous those rifles are, compare that to nearly 1,700 who were stabbed as well as nearly 500 murdered with blunt objects and more than 700 beaten to death by somebody with their bare hands.

How many murders were committed with legally purchased guns? Less than 850. That's still too many, of course, but the point is that legal gun ownership is a relatively minor factor in the murder rate in this country. So, too, is legal ownership of automatic rifles. The real problem is illegal gun possession, but politicians don't have the stomach for measures that have proven effective in reducing that. One such measure is "stop and frisk." Stop and frisk was responsible for a significant reduction in the number of illegal guns on the streets of New York and a consequent reduction in the level of violence, but there was concern among civil libertarians that police were using racial profiling to do stop and frisk and that young black men were disproportionately targeted, so the policy has been curtailed.

Meanwhile, the murder of young black men by other young black men with illegal guns continues apace, but at least now it's harder for the police to profile.

A Movie Running Backwards

A student recently dug this old post out of the archive and I thought I'd re-post it:

There is a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views invites us to imagine a scenario which illustrates this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards! The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the simplest explanation for the phenomena in the video, certainly simpler than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell wants to relate this to the problem of undirected Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a professor describing the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class. “Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms was formed by pure chance with the ability to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were also able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors that crept in.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded into a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have reversed the pictures! You did it backwards” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

That's the problem with Darwinian evolution. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as butterfly metamorphosis, or create a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these things were the intentional product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

Of course, if a mind was somehow directing the process that would change everything.

The "Why" Questions

In the wake of the tragic shooting in Oregon yesterday, a lot of people from President Obama on down are demanding that we just DO SOMETHING. Well, yes, but what? To simply demand that something be done, that laws be passed, is little more than emotional cathexis. Talking about "doing something" substitutes for actually doing something constructive. The problem is that when these people, from the president on down, are asked what, exactly, should be done, they have no answer.

In the excerpt below, Mark Halperin insists that we need to be "more passionate" about finding solutions, but he admits that he himself has none to offer. As Charles C.W. Cooke says in the video, none of them do.

The problem is not guns, it's a spiritual sickness that pervades our society. Too many young men have been inculcated from their youth with the message that everything is meaningless and pointless, that their lives are empty and futile, that they're just animals like any other, that violence in movies, video games, and music is cathartic and makes them a man, and then we're shocked when men actually act consistently with what they've been absorbing from the culture all their lives.

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that in these horrific events the shooter sometimes singles out Christians as victims. It happened at Columbine, in Charleston, and in Oregon. Why? Why is there such hatred for Christians? Where does it come from? Could it be that Christianity, being an utter repudiation and denial of the nihilism these young men have embraced, engenders, in a perverse sort of way, a resentment that stokes their frustration to the level of rage?

Having committed themselves to moral anomie and metaphysical absurdity perhaps these see Christianity as an indictment of their choice and of themselves, an indictment they can't bear. In their existential despair they are gripped by a powerful urge to destroy everything and everyone that, like a mirror held up to their face, shows them an alternative, the only viable alternative, but one the very thought of which sends them into an irrational fury. I don't know, but I wish the media wouldn't just ignore the apparent pattern.

In any case, passing laws won't heal this sickness. We have laws against murder but we still have murders. Nor will trying to get rid of guns succeed. This would only work if these deranged young men were also disarmed, but they wouldn't be. We can't even stop millions of people from sneaking across our border, how would we stop the smuggling of millions of guns into the country for sale on black markets everywhere?

If we are to solve this problem we need to ask why so many kids are so filled with hatred and violence, why they hold human life in such contempt, and then we need to address those causes. I doubt, though, that modern secular America is going to ask those "why" questions. The answers they may find might not fit their view of how things should be.

Putin's Objectives

Ralph Peters writes on foreign policy matters for the New York Post. In his latest column he argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin's goal in propping up Bashar Assad in Syria is to humiliate President Obama. I have no doubt that this is true. Putin sees Obama as weak and lacking the will to do anything risky to stop him, but there's more in Putin's calculation than just a desire to emasculate an American president.

After explaining why Putin will keep pressing to make Mr. Obama look as ineffectual as possible, Peters lists what he sees as Putin's strategic goals:

In the short term, rescue the failing regime of Russia’s ally, Syria’s blood-drenched President Bashar al-Assad. And in doing so, eliminate all opposition groups except ISIS, leaving the United States, Europe and the world with the stark choice of “Assad or Islamic State?”

In the mid-term, create a fait accompli, irreversible circumstances, on the ground in the Middle East (and in Ukraine) that will defeat the next US president even before he takes office.

In the longer term, Putin intends to re-establish Russia’s grandeur and glory from the apogee of the czars — and to go still further by dominating the Middle East and its energy resources. Putin has bet on the Shia world against the Sunni Muslims and is well along in the process of building a wall of allies from Tehran to Tripoli. Already, Russia has a renewed presence and influence in the Middle East after a four-decade absence.

Our response? We’re still funding the Iranian-owned Baghdad government; still shortchanging the Kurds; still afraid to use real military power against ISIS; and terrified that Putin will push the Syrian situation into a confrontation. He will. And the Obama administration is utterly, profoundly unprepared.

There is no doubt that Mr. Obama's biggest blunder was withdrawing from Iraq, a withdrawal that left a vacuum in the region for ISIS, Russia, and Iran to fill, and they have. Russia will now have military bases and seaports in Syria, but most importantly, and this is probably Putin's long-term goal, they will have enormous influence over the flow of oil from Iraq and Iran.

By controlling so much oil, Russia will be in a position to dictate terms to our European and Asian allies who need petroleum for their economic survival. Long term, the Russians will use that leverage to wean these allies away from us, isolate us on the world stage, and reduce us to impotence. Meanwhile, President Obama is cutting our military, alienating our Israeli allies, empowering Iran, and giving Putin the impression that he's pushing against an open door.

It's all very difficult to understand. In fact, it's easier to understand why the Russians are doing what they're doing than to understand why we're doing what we're doing.

New Book Release!

I'm excited to announce that my newest novel, Bridging the Abyss, has been released and is now available.

Here's the Prologue to the story:

A twelve year-old girl walking on the street near her home, in mid-afternoon, suddenly vanishes, the victim of an apparent abduction. Her disappearance sets off a chain of events which form the narrative recounted in the following pages, but before entering into that story it might be worth asking why men perpetrate such horrors. How do we explain human depravity? How can we account for the fact that moral evil seems so commonplace?

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves, perhaps, as a partial answer to these questions. Writing about the shift in the 17th century from a theistic to a materialist worldview which entailed the belief that there were no purposes or final causes in nature, Stace says:

“This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too.

Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

Bridging the Abyss should be read as a companion to my earlier novel In the Absence of God. Both are stories of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. They both offer a picture of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is to exist in a world in which people live consistently, though perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God, if there is one, is irrelevant to our lives.

Having marginalized the God of traditional theism moderns find themselves shorn of any objective basis for forming moral judgments, for hope that the deep human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied, or for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole, or in the life of the individual in particular.

Moderns dispense with God and believe that life can go on as before, or even better than before, but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty, and truth as well as the only possible ground for belief in objective human rights or in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in many ways been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessing has outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss sketches the tension between these competing views of the world as they're illustrated by the lives of the characters who inhabit these pages.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Bridging the Abyss addresses some of the same themes as my previous novel In the Absence of God and is something of a companion volume to that earlier work. Like Absence, Bridging is an apologetic for Christian theism, but it's more than that. It's also a novel that raises some serious ethical questions, but I don't want to say too much about the story because I prefer that the reader decide for him or herself what lessons to take from it.

Both Bridging the Abyss and In the Absence of God are available at Amazon (paperback $15.99; kindle $7.99) Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook) and perhaps the best bookstore in northeastern North America, Hearts and Minds. I hope you'll read it, and if you do, I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, I hope you'll tell others about it via your Facebook page and other social media.

Thank you so much.

The Nature of the Threat

This short video explains why Americans, and a lot of other people, should be very concerned about Islamism. The video focuses on Islamist extremists and their desire to impose sharia on the entire world, but there are large numbers of Muslims in America who are not extremists who nevertheless would gladly exchange the Bill of Rights for sharia. According to one study 51% of American Muslims would prefer to live under sharia, and 25% of American Muslims think that violence against those who insult Islam is justified.

Clearly, we have a problem. After all, what constitutes an insult? Drawing caricatures of Mohammed? Refuting Islam's historical claims? Believing that the Koran is a plagiarized Old Testament? Actually, most Muslims would consider all of these to be insults and if 25% believe insults deserve a violent response then our basic freedoms of speech and the free exchange of ideas are in jeopardy.

Anyway, watch the video. It's not long and it puts the problem into perspective:

The Problem with Mutation Rates

There have been numerous accounts in the news of late about the discovery of Homo naledi in Africa and the discovery of water on Mars, but one science story we've heard very little about is the growing dissatisfaction among biologists with the classical Darwinian account of how we got here. It's not that biologists are doubting the basic evolutionary explanation, but rather that they're increasingly skeptical that evolution can be explained by the mechanisms of genetic mutation, genetic drift, and natural selection - what we might call the standard model. Biologist Ann Gauger explains why in an essay at Evolution News and Views. She writes:

One of the reasons many scientists acknowledge the insufficiency of Darwinism is because they know the accounting won't work. The mutation rate, the generation times, the strength of selection versus genetic drift, the population sizes, and the time available don't match up.

For example, supposedly humans last shared common ancestry with chimps about six million years ago. Since that time, we have accumulated significant differences with chimps -- genetic, anatomical, physiological, behavioral, and intellectual differences, among others. The genetic differences between humans and chimps are much more than the (shrinking) 1.2 percent difference in base pairs that is so often quoted in the media....we have more than 11.7 percent of our genome with unique features not present in chimps.

There is only so much time for these differences to have accumulated. Mutations arise and are propagated from generation to generation, so the number of generations limits how many mutations can accumulate. The estimated mutation rate is about 10-8 per base pairs per generation, and we have an average generation time of somewhere between 10 and 25 years. Our estimated breeding population size six million years ago is thought to have been about 10,000.... Based on these numbers, one can estimate how many years it would take to acquire all those mutations, assuming every mutation that occurred was saved, and stored up.

But there's a difficulty -- it's called genetic drift. In small populations, like the 10,000 estimate above, mutations are likely to be lost and have to reoccur many times before they actually stick. Just because of random effects (failure to reproduce due to accidental death, infertility, not finding a mate, or the death of all one's progeny), a particular neutral mutation may have to arise many times before it becomes established in the population, and then many more years before it finally becomes fixed (that is, before it takes over the population and replaces all other versions).

How long before a single, new mutation appears and becomes fixed? An estimate from a recent paper using numerical simulations is 1.5 million years. That is within the range of possibility. But what if two specific mutations are needed to effect a beneficial change? Their estimate is 84 million years. Other scientists have done this calculation using analytical methods, but their numbers are even worse. One report calculates 6 million years for one specific base change in an eight base target typical of the size of a DNA binding site to fix, and 100 million years to get two specific mutations. (That work was later amended to 216 million years.) Extrapolating from other published data merely confirms the problem....

Yet in all likelihood many more than two binding sites would be required to change anything significant, and those binding sites must be appropriate in location and in sequence to accomplish the necessary changes. They must work together in order for a specific adaptive change to happen.

Genes operate in networks, and to shift a gene regulatory network would require many mutations, and not just random ones. Remember there are anatomical physiological, behavioral, and intellectual differences to explain, multiple traits each requiring multiple coordinated mutations. Unless one invokes luck on a large scale, those traits would not have come to be.

The point here is not that it didn't happen, but that there's no plausible naturalistic explanation for its having happened. Scientists will continue to hold onto the standard model until something better comes along, of course, but they're growing increasingly uneasy with it which is why books like philosopher Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False have created so much controversy and why they're being written at all. Nagel believes that the process of evolution is guided by some telic principle in the universe, that the process just couldn't, by chance, have led to conscious creatures who can think and and recognize moral value.

Nagel is not a theist, nor an advocate of intelligent design, but an increasing number of thinkers like him, scientists and philosophers alike, are beginning to believe that naturalistic explanations are simply inadequate to account for the world we see around us. Gauger's essay gives us a glimpse of the kinds of reasons driving them to this conclusion.

The Sizes of Things

Here's a fun interactive site that will give you an appreciation for how big and how small the universe and it's constituents are. Go to the link and move the scroll bar to zoom in or out to see how big the universe is compared to our planet and how big we are compared to the smallest parts of an atom.

Give it a try and spend a little time just being amazed. You won't be able to stop playing with it.

I recall reading somewhere that if the sizes of all objects in the universe are averaged together it turns out that the average size is exactly the size of human beings. I don't know if there's some significance to that or if it's just an interesting coincidence, so I'll leave it to you to mull over as you play with the scroll bar.

Transgender Delusion

Richard Corradi is a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He has an article in the current issue of First Things (subscription required) in which he pretty much excoriates his own profession for what he sees as an abdication of their professional responsibility. Psychiatrists and psychologists have been so intimidated by the politically correct, Corradi claims, that they've failed to call mental illness by its name when it comes to issues of sex and gender.

Here are some excerpts:

Human nature does not change. Despite our postmodern sophistication and our wishful thinking about perfectibility, our nature is immutable—not least in its fickleness, its embrace of irrational ideas and practices, and its suggestibility.

The medieval field of alchemy—the attempt to change base metals into gold and to find the philosopher’s stone capable of bringing about human perfection, even immortality—is ludicrous to the modern mind, a relic of a prescientific time. Yet the ancient belief in transmutation is still with us. Current popular delusions are aspirations not to turn base metals into gold, but rather to transcend the laws of biology and transmute human nature. Among them is the popular belief that gender is fungible, so that whether we are born male or female is of no consequence.

Now consider one of our current popular delusions: that gender is a social construct rather than a biological fact. This is the notion that there are no biologically determined characteristics of either sex—that “male” and “female” are socially assigned roles. According to this worldview, a person is not simply male or female. In fact there are no “opposite sexes,” only a gender spectrum between femaleness and maleness (hence the prefix “trans-” in “transgender”), and one may choose to identify oneself with any point on the continuum, or to remain undecided.

This delusion has infected groups that are presumed to be the most highly educated, sophisticated, and worldly-wise in our society.

Another manifestation of denial of the biological differences between the sexes takes the form of a man’s declaring, in effect, “My gender is what I say it is. I feel like I’m a woman in a man’s body, and I demand that I be treated like one.” The demands that society accommodate such absurd personal delusions are becoming ever more aggressive. We see municipal and school authorities, for example, scrambling to mediate conflicts about gender-neutral bathrooms and shared locker rooms, fearful of being labeled as bigots, or sued, if they do not comply.

If someone wonders whether a middle-aged man who declares that he is a woman and demands the use of public female restrooms might be mentally disturbed, that doubter had better not voice her concern publicly; she risks not only being labeled a bigoted denier of civil rights but also having her business boycotted.

The entire spectrum of gender dysphoria disorders is treated as though it were an authentic lifestyle choice unreasonably suppressed by a bigoted majority.

It is lamentable that American psychiatry has abrogated its professional role and allowed public hysteria to define the transgender phenomenon. This deprives people of treatment that could lead them to understand themselves and take control of their lives, rather than be passive victims of a one-size-fits-all fad.... Transient developmental crises that would be amenable to appropriate psychotherapy are turned into profoundly life-altering, irreversible physical mutilations.

[A]norexia nervosa is a multidimensional disorder, similar to transgenderism in that it involves a profound dissatisfaction with one’s body. However, seriously underweight anorexic patients who see themselves as obese are not treated with weight-reducing liposuction by physicians who go along with their irrational belief. Instead, anorexia is treated as a psychiatric illness.

Another body dysmorphia that is currently receiving some notoriety—and acquiring a constituency that would like it to be included in the DSM—is “Body Integrity Identity Disorder” (BIID). Also known as “transableism,” BIID is the desire of an able-bodied person to become disabled—by a limb amputation, or by being blinded, rendered deaf, or even paralyzed. One hopes that common sense, which judges such a desire as grotesque, will prevail over those who would regard it as just another lifestyle choice. The wish to be rid of an offending limb is remarkably similar to the wish of a transgender man to be rid of an unwanted penis.

That purported experts on mental illness should enable the acting-out of a cultural delusion is egregious enough. Most flagrant, however, is their treatment of a mental disorder with mutilating surgery. What can my colleagues be thinking when they prime patients with hormones and prepare them for surgery? Are they themselves delusional, and do they believe that they can change women into men (and vice versa)? Do they think that surgery should be the treatment of choice for people who are dissatisfied with themselves? Have they forgotten, or did they never learn, about psychotherapy, a cornerstone of psychiatry that helps patients understand themselves and their experiences so that they can take control of their lives? Clearly the disaster of a previous attempt to treat mental illness with surgery—prefrontal lobotomy—has not served as a lesson.

Lest common sense fail to convince readers that surgery is not a treatment for a mental disorder, a Swedish study published in 2011 found that over the long term, 324 people who had ­undergone sex-­reassignment surgery demonstrated an alarmingly high suicide rate and experienced considerably higher numbers of ­severe ­psychiatric problems than were present in the general population.

All of this may lead the reader to wonder why it is that psychiatrists are so reluctant to call some neuroses disorders but shrink (pardon the pun) from labeling others as disorders which are similar but in one way or another involve sex.

Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that once we determine that any sexual expression is "good" we put ourselves on a slippery slope which offers us no stopping point at which we can say "no further." On the slippery slope of "sexual freedom" no sexual expression is "wrong." Indeed, in a society that has largely rejected the idea of any objective moral right and wrong about anything, let alone sex, there remains no ground upon which to stand to say that anything at all is morally perverse.

Unless, matters change and sanity is restored, we can expect in the not too distant future to see calls for the legalization of polyamory, pedophilia, and incest. Why not.

Seeing Bigots Under Every Bed

Last week in Irving, Texas a 14 year-old Muslim student named Ahmed Mohammed was questioned by school authorities and placed in handcuffs by the police for bringing to school a device he claimed was an electronic clock he had invented. The reaction by the school and the police, we were assured by the media and multi alia (for example Kevin Drum at Mother Jones), is proof that America is a bigoted, racist nation. Except that as is so often the case when the media pontificates on the moral failings of Americans, the story is much more complex than they let on.

Kyle Smith at The New York Post gives us some perspective:

By now you’ve heard the story of Ahmed Mohamed, crowned by the Daily Beast “The Muslim Hero America Has Been Waiting For” after the 14-year-old brought to school a beeping, strange-looking homemade concealed device that turned out to be a clock.

School officials, thinking, as 95% of Americans would, that it kinda looked like a bomb, hauled him out of class. Police put him in handcuffs and, even after the confusion passed, the boy was suspended from school.

That earned Mohamed a planned trip to the White House, a message of support from Hillary Clinton, an offer to stop by Facebook to meet Mark Zuckerberg and an invitation to be an intern at Twitter.

The police overreacted. Yet the device did look like something Ethan Hunt would lob out of a helicopter at the last minute in “Mission: Impossible.” As National Review’s Charles Cooke pointed out on Twitter, the scary-looking tangle of wires “looks a lot more like a bomb than a pop tart looks like a gun.”

Josh Welch, a white Maryland kid with ADHD who was 7 years old when he was kicked out of school for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a pistol and pretending to shoot other students with it, must be puzzled.

Where’s his White House invitation? Where’s his chance to start networking at Facebook? His parents were forced to hire a lawyer and spent a year and a half just trying to get the suspension erased from the kid’s record. They were repeatedly refused.

“I stand with Ahmed, too. But I also stand with Alex Stone,” noted Reason writer Robby Soave. Alex Stone, a 16-year-old white kid from Summerville, SC, wrote a short story in which he imagined using a gun to kill a dinosaur. For this his locker was searched and he was arrested, handcuffed, charged with “disorderly conduct” and suspended from school for three days.

Obviously the White House and Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t be bothered to comment, but you’d think that, at the very least, Stephen King would have sent out a tweet expressing outrage that imagination was being punished.

Nada.

In Dyer County, Tenn., Kendra Turner says she was suspended for saying, “Bless you” after a student sneezed, and that her teacher told her that she would have no “godly speaking in class.” A school administrator said, “This was not a religious issue at all, but more of an issue the teacher felt was a distraction in her class.” Uh-huh. School leadership offered no explanation for the photos posted by students that showed “bless you” on a list of expressions banned in the classroom. Turner is still waiting for her call from President Obama.

Are white kids being punished en masse for dopey quasi-infractions because of their race? Of course not. That’s ridiculous. But it’s equally absurd to suggest that you have to be Muslim, or brown-skinned, or live in Texas, to be subjected to overenthusiastic use of school discipline and police force.

“It never would have happened to a white kid”? It happens to white kids all. The. Time.

There's more at the link, but in what he has said above Smith has a point. How can this incident be powerful evidence of "Racist America" when much younger white kids have suffered much worse punishments for doing things far less serious? Of course, the people eager to see Ahmed as a symbol of racial or religious oppression have probably never had that question occur to them.

The media hyped the boy for his genius in "inventing" this clock but he actually did no such thing. The electronics were "out-of-the-box" stuff that could've been bought at Radio Shack. So what was the point of what the Ahmed did? Why did he do it? Who knows, but look at this from the standpoint of school authorities and imagine this hypothetical scenario:

A young Muslim brings to school something that looks to the untrained eye like an explosive. The school authorities, not wishing to appear to be picking on a Muslim student, accept his explanation that it's just a clock and tell him it's okay for him to bring it to school if he wishes. But this was a "dry run."

A few days later he brings the same device to school again. The authorities, having already given it a pass, say nothing and don't bother to check it. Only this time it's not a clock, it's a bomb. In the aftermath of the carnage wouldn't the families of the victims have wanted those school personnel to have been a little less concerned about the PC prudes in the media and a little more careful with the safety of their children?

"That would never happen," someone objects, but only someone who never reads the newspapers would be so naive as to think that in the world in which we live such a thing would never happen.

Putting young Ahmed in cuffs may have been unnecessary, but the prudence which lay behind it was not. Besides, if the slogan, "If you see something, say something" is to have any meaning at all then people who see something and do something should be given the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, benefit of the doubt is something the media only extends to people on the left.

Carson's Right, the Media's Wrong

The media mugging of the week is claiming Ben Carson as this week's victim. Carson is being pilloried, not only by the media but also by some of his fellow Republicans, for asserting on Meet the Press last weekend that he could not support a Muslim seeking the office of President of the United States. Here's the exchange with NBC's Chuck Todd:

"I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation, I absolutely would not agree with that," were Carson's exact words.

This bit of common-sense has driven his critics into a near-frenzy. There's been much squawking, for example, over Mr. Carson's apparent ignorance of the Constitution, Article VI of which forbids any religious test for any elected office, as if Article VI were relevant to what Carson said. Carson did not state that it should be illegal for a Muslim to occupy the White House, he said, in effect, that he would not endorse a Muslim for the office. In that he's the one who has the Constitution on his side because a president must swear to uphold the Constitution, but it is fundamental to the Islamic faith that Sharia law supersedes all human law and Sharia is in many ways in direct conflict with the Constitution.

Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the equality of persons regardless of race or sex are all concepts alien to Islam and the Koran. Democratic governance, as we understand it, is not possible for someone who lives by the Koran, and for such a person to take the oath of office as administered to inaugurated presidents would be dishonest.

Eugene Robinson, writing in the Washington Post, claimed that Carson was "dead wrong," but he never even attempted to explain why, probably because he couldn't. Others have claimed that statements like Carson's are an insult to Muslims, yet I suspect that all but the most nominal of Muslims would agree that Koranic law is incompatible with the Constitution (I personally had a Muslim imam tell me as much). If Muslims are sincerely offended by Carson's remark it can only be because they don't understand that the primary duty of the president is to defend the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the media, in their enthusiasm to find something to criticize Carson for (can you imagine Hillary getting a question like Todd asked Carson?) has failed completely to think through what electing a pious Muslim as president would mean for the Bill of Rights. Or maybe they just don't care.