Only Two Alternatives

Physicist Leonard Susskind has written a book titled, Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design in which he seeks to explain away the fine-tuning of the universe by offering the hope that there are something like ten to the 500th power universes out there all with different laws and constants so that one of them just has to be like ours. He suggests that there really are only two options: The existence of zillions of universes, so many that we cannot comprehend the number (To get an idea of the size of the number there are only ten to the 80th atoms in the whole of our universe), or there is only one universe and it was intentionally designed by a cosmic intelligence.

Some time ago New Scientist ran an interview with Susskind by Amanda Gefter. Here's an excerpt:

Gefter:So even if you accept the multiverse and the idea that certain local physical laws are anthropically determined, you still need a unique mega-theory to describe the whole multiverse? Surely it just pushes the question [of the source of fine-tuning] back?

Susskind: Yes, absolutely. The bottom line is that we need to describe the whole thing, the whole universe or multiverse. It's a scientific question: is the universe on the largest scales big and diverse or is it homogeneous? [i.e. Is it many universes or just one] We can hope to get an answer from string theory and we can hope to get some information from cosmology.

There is a philosophical objection called Popperism that people raise against the landscape idea. Popperism [named for philosopher Karl Popper] is the assertion that a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it's just metaphysics. Other worlds, alternative universes, things we can't see because they are beyond horizons, are in principle unfalsifiable and therefore metaphysical - that's the objection. But the belief that the universe beyond our causal horizon is homogeneous is just as speculative and just as susceptible to the "Popperazzi".

Gefter: If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design?

Susskind: I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now, we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.

Nuclear physicist David Heddle responds:

Susskind's answer shows that his book should be subtitled String Theory and the Possible Illusion of Intelligent Design. He has done nothing whatsoever to disprove fine-tuning. Nothing. He has only countered it with a religious speculation in scientific language, a God of the Landscape. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, he tells us that we should embrace the String Theory landscape, not in spite of its ugliness, but rather because of it. Physics should change its paradigm and sing praises to inelegance. Out with Occam's razor, in with Rube Goldberg. Out with reductionism, in with lots of free parameters. Why? Because if we don't (according to Suskind) there really is no way to explain the fine-tuning, except by Intelligent Design. He even likens, in his last sentence quoted above, those physicists who search for the antithesis of his landscape, a simple, beautiful fundamental theory, to IDers.

I think he is correct. For a fundamental theory that predicted all the constants would be a "win" for ID - it would destroy the only real threat to cosmological ID: multiple universes with varying laws of physics.

The subtext (at times explicit) in Susskind's book is that fine-tuning is real, in the sense that our universe really does exist on a knife's edge, so much so that it demands attention. The only possible way that it is an illusion is if our universe is but one of many. To save materialism, Susskind argues that we must explain this fine-tuning, and his landscape [i.e. that there are zillions of universes] has the best chance of playing the role of a white knight.

Susskind's argument demonstrates the desperation of materialists who wish to escape the conclusion that there is an intelligence behind the cosmos. He is willing to jettison the criteria of testability, falsifiability and Occam's razor and accept on faith, without any evidence, that there exits a nearly infinite number of other worlds. With so much cosmological variety, he believes, one of those other worlds just has to possess the extraordinary complex of features required to support life. Thus our universe is not so extraordinary after all.

Susskind's interview makes it plain that the battle over Intelligent Design is not one between science and religion but rather between two different philosophical views of the world. Susskind says that our universe certainly appears to be intricately well-ordered and planned for living things, but that any apparent purpose and intention woven into the parameters of the universe are simply illusions. Given the fact that so many universes exist, he asserts, the existence of one as improbable as ours becomes much less astonishing.

The intelligent design theorist counters that the only evidence we have tells us that this universe is the only one that exists. ID tells us that our world is singular, unique, and alone and that this is in any event the most parsimonious hypothesis. Thus, we think we see purpose and intentional engineering in the fabric of the cosmos because it's really there, and the only reason one would have for failing to accept this conclusion is an a priori metaphysical commitment to atheism which is not a very scientific approach to the search for truth.

Should anyone question why everyone seems to agree that the universe at the least appears to be deliberately fine-tuned I commend either or both of the following: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen Barr and Nature's Destiny by Michael Denton.

Why Americans Dislike Muslim Society

At NRO David French, a veteran of our Middle East military efforts, cites recent polls showing large pluralities of Americans hold unfavorable views of Muslims and Islam and offers an interesting theory as a partial explanation why that is:

Yesterday, YouGov and the Huffington Post released a poll showing that large majorities of Americans — and pluralities across every political demographic — have an “unfavorable opinion” of the Islamic faith. The numbers are simply not close: There will be no doubt some hand-wringing about “Islamophobia” and further calls to continue the American elite’s fourteen-year track record of whitewashing Islamic beliefs and culture, but I wonder if the media is missing a powerful, largely-uncovered influence on America’s hearts and minds — the experience and testimony of the more than two million Americans who’ve served overseas since 9/11 and have experienced Islamic cultures up-close.

Yes, they were in the middle of a war — but speaking from my own experience — the war was conducted from within a culture that was shockingly broken. I expected the jihadists to be evil, but even I couldn’t fathom the depths of their depravity. And it was all occurring against the backdrop of a brutally violent and intolerant culture. Women were beaten almost as an afterthought, there was a near-total lack of empathy for even friends and neighbors, lying was endemic, and sexual abuse was rampant. Even more disturbingly, it seemed that every problem was exacerbated the more religious and pious a person (or village) became.

While it’s certainly unfair to judge Indonesia or Malaysia by the standards of Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s very hard to shake the power of lived experience, nor should we necessarily try. After all, when we hear stories from Syria, Yemen, Gaza, the Sinai, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Mali, Pakistan, and elsewhere they all fit the same depressing template of the American conflict zones. Nor is the dazzlingly wealthy veneer of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the other Gulf States all that impressive. Tens of thousands of soldiers have seen the veritable slave labor that toils within the oil empires and have witnessed first-hand their casual disregard for “lesser” life.

Two million Americans have been downrange, and they’ve come home and told families and friends stories the media rarely tells. Those stories have an impact, but because of the cultural distance between America’s warriors and its media, academic, and political aristocracy, it’s an impact the aristocracy hasn’t been tracking. Experience trumps idealistic rhetoric, and I can’t help but think that polls like YouGov’s are at least partly registering the results of a uniquely grim American experience.

French goes on to say that American soldiers treasure the Muslim friends they did have overseas largely because these people took enormous risks to help Americans, help that made it necessary for them to side with American soldiers and Marines against their own violent and dysfunctional social structure.

In any event, French offers an interesting argument, one that certainly sounds plausible. It's not hard to imagine that each American who has served in that region has held dozens of friends and family spell-bound as he recounted his or her experience of the societies Islam has produced in the Middle East, and those impressions doubtless rippled outward to many others. Might those stories be unfair? Perhaps, but one clue that they're not might lie in the fact that so many refugees from the region, Muslim as well as Christian, have no desire to go to other Muslim countries but prefer instead to risk their lives to get into Europe.

God and Evil (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post discussed one classical response of theists to the problem of evil based upon the assumed existence of human free will. It was pointed out that although human volition may account for some kinds of evil, what's usually called moral evil, the question remains as to why an all-powerful, benevolent God would tolerate evil that resulted not from human free will but from natural causes like storms, accidents, famine, and disease.

Before attempting to address this question, we should be reminded that in yesterday's post it was stipulated that the understanding of God's power that we're working with holds that God can do anything that is logically possible to do, i.e. God can do anything that does not entail a contradiction or a logically inconceivable state of affairs. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it. That's a logical impossibility and not even God can do the logically impossible.

So, the question before us is, wouldn't a perfectly good and omnipotent creator have designed a world in which there was no natural evil. One way to answer this question, perhaps, is to suggest that it may not be possible, even for God, to create a world governed by physical laws in which there's no potential for harm. Any world governed by gravity, for instance, and the law of momentum is going to contain within it the potential for people to fall and suffer injury. Thus the laws of gravity and momentum are not compossible with a world free of the potential for injury. Once God decided to create a world governed by laws, those laws entailed the possibility of harm.

At this point it might be objected that theists hold that God creates heaven and that heaven is a world in which there is no natural evil so it must be possible for a world governed by laws of some kind to exist without there being any human suffering. If God could create heaven, why wouldn't he, if he was perfectly good, create this world like that?

Perhaps the answer is that God did create this world like that. Perhaps the reason that there is no evil in heaven is that God's presence suffuses that world, fills every nook and cranny and acts as a governor, an override, on the laws which might otherwise result in harm to beings which exist there. The skeptic might rejoin that even were he to grant that God's presence in heaven could serve as an override to the laws which govern that world, that doesn't help the theist because there's no reason why God couldn't do that here in this world as well, and, since he doesn't, he must not be perfectly good.

This is, however, exactly what Christian theology says that God did, in fact, do. The account goes something like this: God created a world regulated by the laws of physics and indwelt that world with man, his presence negating any harmful effects the expression of those laws may have had. Although the potential for harm existed, there was no disease, suffering, accident, or even death. At some point, however, man betrayed the idyllic relationship that existed between himself and God. In an act of cosmic infidelity, man chose to use his freedom in a way, the only way, apparently, that God had forbidden. It was as if a good and faithful husband returned home to discover the love of his life in bed with his worst enemy.

If, as was suggested yesterday, God did not foresee this crushing blow coming, it must have broken his heart, metaphorically speaking. Man had made a choice to treat with contempt the wishes of his creator, and God would not force him to do otherwise. Grief-stricken at the rejection he suffered at the hands of his beloved, God withdrew his presence from the world, leaving man, in his self-imposed, self-chosen alienation and estrangement, to fend for himself against the laws and forces which govern the universe.

God did not abandon man entirely, but he has given man his autonomy, he has set man free in the world. All subsequent history is the story of God's attempt to woo mankind back to himself, to win back the heart of his unfaithful lover. God's love for us still burns, and he wants us back despite our disloyalty. Indeed, he desires our love so much that he redeems us himself. Man's infidelity deserves eternal divorce, eternal separation, from God, but God atones for our unfaithfulness himself on the cross in the person of Jesus the Messiah. The story of God's redemption is a beautiful, tragic story, a romance, a story of faithfulness, goodness and perseverance, and it's a story that makes sense of human history.

If God does not exist, if death is the end, then all of life, all of history, is a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." There is no purpose, there is no significance. It's all absurd. The evil which besets us, the suffering, pain, and grief we experience, are all meaningless. They're all for nothing. Atheism, carried to its logical conclusion, ends in nihilism, the belief that nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing matters.

In the face of this despair Christianity infuses life with hope, meaning, and dignity. Christianity redeems the absurdity of the world by insisting that nothing in our world is for nothing. There is a reason for our existence and a reason why there is evil. We may not know what it is, but if we were created by God we may assume that God had a purpose for doing so, and that that purpose is our purpose. If our world is beset by evil we have grounds for hoping that there is a reason why God endures it, and that in some future existence justice will be done and suffering will be no more.

Atheism offers none of this. In a world without God people are born out of nothingness, they suffer, and eventually sink back into the void from whence they came, and there's no significance or meaning to it at all. Atheism offers no basis for hope that there is any ultimate meaning to life or any ultimate justice in the world. It offers no basis for believing that right and wrong are grounded in anything other than subjective feeling. It offers no basis for granting human beings dignity and significance. In a world without God there is no point or purpose to life beyond whatever short-term goals we set for ourselves to keep us from reflecting on the fact that everything we do ultimately goes for naught.

Christianity may not be true, but each of us, including the atheist, should certainly hope that it is. Inexplicably, most atheists hope for the very opposite. They hope that they are right that there is no God. The atheist, in fact, finds himself in the awkward position of holding firmly to a view which, one might think, he should hope with all his heart and mind is completely wrong.

God and Evil (Pt.I)

The philosophical problem of suffering (or evil) has come up in my classes so I thought it might be useful to reach back to a pair of posts from 2004 (7/27 and 8/8) which offer a few thoughts on the topic. The first post follows and the second will be up tomorrow:

In an earlier post entitled God and Time I mentioned that despite the serious liabilities entailed by the idea that God does not have complete knowledge of the future - that is, he doesn't know what choices free beings will make in their future - it is nevertheless an attractive idea because it provides the theist with an answer to a difficult apologetic question. That question arises in the course of attempts to give a reply to the problem of evil. Let's look at that problem first and then the problematic question that it raises.

No doubt the most troubling objection to the existence of a God as traditionally construed by theists is the existence of evil in the world. Whether people are persuaded by the presence of evil that the existence of a God is unlikely or whether they employ evil as an a posteriori rationalization for the disbelief they've already embraced, it is a difficult challenge for theists and has been since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.

One thing that needs to be said about the problem is that despite its power to instill and sustain doubt, the reality of evil does not constitute a proof against God's existence. Its philosophical strength, its advocates argue, is that it makes the existence of God unlikely.

The traditional argument takes the form of a dilemma:

1.If God is perfectly good he would want to prevent evil.

2.If God is all-powerful he would be able to prevent evil.

3.However, evil exists.

4.Therefore, either God is not perfectly good or God is not all-powerful.

In either case, God is not the God of traditional theism.

This is not a proof that God doesn't exist or that he's not all-powerful or good because it's possible to slip between the horns of the dilemma and reply that God could be both able to prevent evil and wants to prevent evil but for some reason chooses to permit it to occur.

Most anti-theists grant this as a theoretical possibility, but, they ask, what kind of God would allow evil to exist if he could prevent it? What loving father would stand by and do nothing as his child suffers, if he could do something to stop it? No reason the theist can come up with, the skeptic argues, can justify the suffering of an innocent child. Thus, it is unlikely that the world is the product of the kind of God theists believe in.

Before we consider the classical theistic response to this challenge we should lay a bit more groundwork. First, we need to understand that to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he can do anything at all. Rather, it is to say that God can do anything that it is logically possible to do. This means that it is beyond God's power to do anything which entails a contradiction of some sort.

For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it, or, it is not within his power to bring it about that you and I, or God himself, never existed. These are contradictory states of affairs and therefore logical impossibilities.

A theist might say here that God is not constrained by the laws of logic, that God really can make a square circle if he wishes, but if one wants to argue this way he has to recuse himself from arguing at all and retreat into a private mysticism where nothing much can be said about God. To abandon the constraints of logic is to put God beyond the ability of men to reason about him, or to know anything about him, because anything that one could say about God could be both true and false at the same time, which is incoherent.

The second thing we should mention is that there are two basic kinds of evil. There is evil that emerges from human volition, and there is evil which results from natural causes like disasters, disease, famine, etc. The first we may call moral evil and the latter we'll call natural evil.

Having said this, let's look at why God might allow moral evil to exist, given that it is within his power to prevent it. We'll take up the question of natural evil tomorrow.

The argument that many Christian theologians have put forward goes something like this:

Part of God's essence is that he is perfect love. Love desires an object, something to lavish itself upon, something to live in a relationship with. He could have made man so that man would have no choice but to love God, but this would be about as satisfying as programming the screen saver of your computer to say "I Love You." The most satisfying relationships are those between persons who are free to both receive and give love. Thus God created persons to live in a love relationship with him, and he endowed them with the quality of freedom so that they could genuinely choose to requite his love or to reject it.

This freedom is what makes us human, it makes us more than brutes, it gives us dignity. Without freedom we're little more than sophisticated robots and there's no dignity in that. Freedom is part of the Imago Dei. God gives us the freedom to choose as a marvelous gift, and to the extent that we misuse that gift, to the extent we use our freedom wrongly, moral evil enters the world.

So God could prevent moral evil and wants to eliminate it, but doing so would entail depriving us of the very thing that makes us human and makes our relationship with him meaningful, our free will. This would not only reduce us to automatons and destroy our humanity, it would nullify the whole purpose for which we were created in the first place, which is to live in a freely chosen love relationship with God.

Some might deride the idea that this love between God and man is worth allowing men to inflict such terrible misery upon his fellows. Whether this is so is difficult to ascertain from our vantage. We have to look at the matter sub specie aeternitatis, or from the standpoint of eternity. Surely, if this life is all there is then all human suffering is meaningless and existence is a cruel hoax for hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been filled with it.

On the other hand, if this life is a relatively brief interlude between nothingness and eternity, then our temporal suffering, as horrible as it may be, may ultimately seem a very small price to pay for having lived it.

So, the suggestion that moral evil exists because God gave man free-will as a means of enhancing and elevating our relationship to him seems plausible. It also seems plausible that the reason God does not prevent evil is because he considers it an even greater evil to strip us of our freedom and thus of our humanity.

However, this brings us to the difficulty we mentioned at the beginning. Let's assume that it's possible to know the future. Let's assume, therefore, that God knows the future and thus knows what would happen in any world, not just this one, that he could create. Among the worlds God could have created are worlds in which people are free to choose, but in which they always choose to do right.

Imagine God before the creation. He has an image of every world he could possibly make in his mind. Because he knows everything it is possible to know (assuming that it is possible for God to know the future) he knows every choice that every being would make in every one of those worlds if that world were to actually be created. At least one of those worlds, it would seem, would contain free beings who always chose to do the right thing. They could have chosen to do wrong, but they don't. Such a world is certainly possible, after all, since Christians believe that heaven will be such a world. So the question is, would not a perfectly good and loving God have created that world instead of the world he did create where people are free but choose to do evil far too often?

Why, in other words, didn't God create the best world he possibly could? For God to have done less is to have deliberately created a world in which some people would suffer terribly, and then, if the traditional Christian view of hell is true, spend eternity in further torment, when he could have created a world in which no one would suffer from moral evil and no one would choose hell. People would be free to choose in this world and would always choose to love God and each other. So, if that world is a possible world, one which God could have created, why didn't he create that world instead of this one? The fact that he didn't, it is alleged, is powerful reason to conclude that God is not perfectly good.

Faced with this question the theist is put in a difficult spot. He can plead that at this point our ability to understand God's ways simply fades out; or he can resort to something like Alvin Plantinga's concept of trans-world depravity, a flaw that afflicts every human in any possible world in which humans exist, and thus makes it impossible for God to create a world in which free people always choose to do right; or he can say that perhaps one of the things that is beyond God's power is to know what free beings will choose in a future which does not yet exist.

In this latter view, the world God fashioned may well be the best possible world he could have created, consonant with the existence of human freedom. Given that God desired to create a world in which humans were free, he had to accept that although he knew all possible outcomes, he didn't know for sure how man would choose to use his gift of choice. Would man use it to love or to hate? In order to have creatures to love, God took a tremendous risk. He knew the stakes and deemed them worth it.

As was said earlier, despite the advantage of providing an answer to the question why God didn't create a better world than the one he did create, there are serious difficulties with this theory and for that reason many theologians and philosophers think it to be on balance not worth the cost of what has to be given up in order to embrace it. Some have even called proponents of the "Open Future" idea heretics.

In any case, the argument that evil is a consequence of human freedom, to the extent that it is persuasive, only accounts for why there is moral evil. It doesn't explain the existence of natural evils such as accidents, famines, disease, etc. We'll talk about that tomorrow.

Trump's Proposal

Donald Trump has provoked a spasm of media pants-wetting over his statement that we should temporarily halt all Muslim immigration, but why is this a bad idea? A lot of people are saying it's unconstitutional, but our immigration laws already allow us to refuse admission to certain classes of immigrants and, in fact, President Carter refused to allow Iranians into this country in the 1970s. The relevant law reads as follows:

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. (Sec.10, f)

Some people are rightly concerned that terrorists will infiltrate the immigrant refugees President Obama is bringing to the states, but while this is a serious problem, it's perhaps a secondary concern. The primary concern should be the ease with which second and third generation Muslims, the children of immigrants, can be turned into killers. The calamity that Trump's proposal is intended to forestall is one that will be faced by the next generation of Americans as potentially large numbers of children of Muslim refugees gravitate toward those who preach violence, terror, and jihad. This is what's happening, in fact, in Europe and it's precipitating a cultural crisis there.

Parenthetically, although there's been much moral preening by those who want to be seen as standing up for immigrants, there's almost no concern raised over the fact that we're actually deporting Iraqi Christians who are already here. Nor is the President allowing Syrian Christians into the country. Only Muslims.

But an influx of terrorists is not the only problem that permitting large numbers of Muslims to immigrate presents. Majorities of Muslims, even among those already here, devoutly wish to replace the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights with sharia law. Sharia calls for women to be treated like property, for criminals to be mutilated, for gays and lesbians to be executed, for any criticism of Islam or Mohammad to be a capital offense, for Christians and Jews to be treated as second class citizens, for atheists to be killed.

It's not just that Muslims hold to a different religion than that of many Americans. It's not like we're just adding one more denomination to the religious stew, as though Muslims were like Baptists moving into a Catholic neighborhood. Muslims have a deep antipathy toward non-Muslim culture. A Muslim imam once admitted to me that if they had the political power they would impose sharia. Even those who seem moderate and friendly if pressed would say that their allegiance is to sharia, not to the Constitution of the United States. Bringing them into the country in large numbers without taking time to allow for assimilation makes no more sense today than bringing large numbers of communists into the country would have made sense in the 1950s.

Our media seems shocked every time there's a Muslim act of terror in this country. They ask why these Muslims who have lived the American dream and benefited from the freedoms and opportunities our country offers hate us so much. There's no mystery to this. They hate us for three simple reasons:

1. We are essentially Israel's protector
2. We are not Muslims
3. The Qu'ran, to which they are deeply devoted, instructs them that Allah despises the infidel and that unbelievers deserve whatever treatment they get from the hand of the believer.

Most Muslims do not, and probably would not, commit acts of violence, but the more devout a Muslim is, the more literally he interprets the Koran, the more closely he emulates the example of Mohammad, the more likely he is to sympathize with those who do.

Compassion demands that we help these people, prudence dictates that we do so in a manner that doesn't entail cultural suicide. Just as we can help the homeless without bringing them into our homes, so there are things we can do to help refugees without bringing into our national home hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who think like Syed Farooq and Tashfeen Malik.

Testing Worldviews

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live consistently with it. On this test the worldview called naturalism, i.e. the view that nature is all there is, falls short since many, if not most, naturalists find that they have to give up some beliefs and assumptions that are very difficult to let go of. Among the things for which there is no room in a naturalist ontology are the following:

1. ultimate meaning in life
2. free will
3. objective moral right or wrong
4. intrinsic value of human beings
5. mind/consciousness
6. an adequate ground for beauty, love and truth

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in a classical Christian worldview, it could be argued that they're actually entailed by that view. The logic of naturalism, however, compels one to regard them all as illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that. They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives do have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if they do have free will.

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but in the way they live their everyday lives they affirm their reality over and over again. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage, because their own worldview cannot provide them.

But when one has to poach from competing visions of reality in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to holding a rational, coherent worldview. To be consistent a naturalist should be a nihilist and accept the emptiness and despair entailed by nihilism, yet even though some naturalists see that, few can bring themselves to accept it. For those who do, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that naturalism requires.

For many others, though, who long for that same liberation, the nihilistic consequences either don't occur to them, or if they do, they're often simply ignored as though they don't matter. Naturalists are free to embrace this schizoid view of life, of course, but they're not free to live as if they can hold onto those existential needs while denying the only adequate ground for them and at the same time declaring their worldview more rational than the Christian alternative.

Post-Prandial Beheadings

Reading this essay by Timothy George one realizes that the butchers of ISIS make the pacifist option even more difficult than it already is. There's much in the piece worth reading but I'll focus on this excerpt:

Perhaps the president should listen to the Rev. Canon Dr. Andrew White, who for many years was the Anglican Chaplain in Iraq and Vicar of St. George’s Church. The “Vicar of Baghdad,” as he is called, is a remarkable pastor who built up his church to a congregation of more than 6,000 with an outreach that included a school, a clinic, and a food bank. But in recent years he has seen his church decimated by violence and mayhem. Some 1,200 men, women, and children who once worshipped in his church have been killed as the Christian population in Iraq has declined in recent years from 1.5 million to only 260,000. Among those who have been killed were four boys White knew. They were decapitated by ISIS for refusing to embrace the faith of Islam.

Andrew White is no stranger to terrorists. For more than two decades he has served as a hostage negotiator and an apostle of reconciliation in one of the most volatile regions in the world. He has been kidnapped, shot at, and held captive. He was once the director of the Center for Peace and Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral and still wears around his neck a cross made out of nails taken from the cathedral after it was bombed by the Germans during World War II.

So, when his friends and parishioners were being killed or fleeing for their lives, Canon White did what he had often done before when confronting an enemy. “I invited the leaders of ISIS for dinner. I am a great believer in that. I have asked some of the worst people ever to eat with me.” He did receive a reply to this surprising initiative. The ISIS leader said, “You can invite us to dinner, but we’ll chop your head off.” Something like that happened to John the Baptist when he dared to speak truth to power in the time of Christ. The head of Canon White is worth a lot to ISIS, which have placed on it a bounty of 157 million dollars.

Archbishop Justin Welby, whose friendship with Andrew White goes back to their days together in Coventry, ordered his friend to leave Baghdad last Christmas. “Andrew, look,” Welby said, “what you are doing is so important and the reality is you are more use alive than dead. Come out of there. Don’t die.” Thanks to the Archbishop’s intervention, Canon White still has an unsevered head.

These experiences have led Canon White, like Pope Francis, to admit that military force may be necessary to stop the kind of terror and atrocities perpetrated by ISIS. Canon White does not regret seeking dialogue with the Islamic State. Time and again he has risked his own life in order to serve and help others. But as painful as it is for him to admit, he acknowledges that there is an evil so palpable, so demonic in theological terms, that it can only be dealt with through the use of force. “Can I be honest?” White asked. “You can’t negotiate with them [ISIS]. I’ve never said that about another group of people. These are really so different, so extreme, so radical, so evil.” White made clear that he was not talking about all Muslims. There are “many good Sunni leaders,” he said. But the ISIS radicals who perpetrate terror in the name of God need to be dealt with “radically.”

Two generations ago many pacifists, including Albert Einstein, laid aside their principled non-violence and urged the world to unite in resisting the demonic evil of Nazism. In the present day it is the demonic evil of ISIS which, though it may seem impossible, is at least an order of magnitude worse than that of the Nazis.

If these people get nuclear weapons, a prospect made frighteningly more likely by President Obama's Iran deal, then the horrors of 9/11 and San Bernardino will seem mild by comparison to the prospect we'll be facing. Fighting this evil may not by itself be sufficient to stop them, but surely it's necessary. One hopes that Mr. Obama will soon get serious about it.

Book-Signing

If you live near York, PA and are free Friday night, December 11th, how about visiting the best indie bookstore in Pennsylvania? I'm going to be participating in a book-signing event for my novel Bridging the Abyss at Hearts and Minds Bookstore at 234 E. Main St. in Dallastown at 7:00 pm., and I invite you to stop by.

Another author and I will be discussing our books, reading excerpts, and signing copies. If you're trying to come up with an idea for a Christmas gift for a reader on your list, a signed copy of Bridging the Abyss might be just what you're looking for, but whether you purchase a book or not, I'd love to see you and hope you can stop in for a few minutes.

Saint Nicholas

Here's a post I've put up on VP a few times over the years during the Christmas season that I think you'll find interesting:

Theologian James Parker offers us a brief history of the original Santa Claus and how the myths around him grew.

Here's an excerpt:

Most people simply do not realize the rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized and sanitized contemporary version pales in comparison with the deeply Christian ethos and content of the original.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him in the fear and admonition of the Lord and taught him "sacred books" from the age of 5. He was forced to grow up quickly upon the sudden death of his parents.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he had the desire to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute with three daughters. Without marriage dowry money, the daughters would be condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later as a teenager, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine. Upon returning home he felt called to ministry and was subsequently ordained. He spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly elected him bishop, and he became known for his holiness, passion for the Gospel and zeal. He challenged the old gods and paganism at the principal temple in his district (to the god Artemis), and it was said that the evil spirits "fled howling before him."

There's more to the story. Nicholas was imprisoned under Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan.

Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was the color of vermilion. Bishop Nicholas was also said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

Nicholas opposed Arianism, the belief that Jesus was a created being and not divine, and according to some perhaps apocryphal traditions, actually attended the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. where he got into a physical altercation with Arias himself.

Whether that's true or not, the story of St. Nicholas (Say Saint Nicholas fast with an Italian accent and you get Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular mythology surrounding him. Read the whole thing at the link.

What PC Has Wrought

Among the horrible news items related to the San Bernadino murders by a husband and wife team of Muslim terrorists there is this tidbit:

A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.

Neighbors saw suspicious activity at the home of the man who killed fourteen people yesterday, but were reluctant to report it for fear they'd be branded as racists. Profiling is among the more serious offenses listed on the liberal Index of forbidden activities, of course, and few citizens wish to run afoul of social media inquisitors who can make one's life a living hell were the citizen to transgress politically correct orthodoxy.

A Muslim boy makes a clock that looks for all the world like a suitcase bomb. He takes it to school, his teachers are alarmed, the boy is suspended, and social media, and even the president, no less, excoriate the school for "profiling" the boy because he was a Muslim.

A female resident in a mostly white, upscale neighborhood sees a black man trying to break into a home and alerts the police. It turns out that the man is a prominent university professor who has locked himself out of his own house, but liberals in the media criticizes the woman for "profiling."

We must not profile. It's bad. So despite the fact that most terrorists who seek to bomb airplanes are Middle Eastern Muslim males between the ages of 18 and 40, TSO agents, if they're going to cast a suspicious eye at passengers who fit this description, must also frisk elderly women in wheelchairs to prove that they're not discriminating against anyone.

We've been snookered into abandoning common sense and playing a grand game of "Let's Pretend." We have to pretend that there's no correlation whatsoever between certain kinds of criminal activity and certain demographic identities. Everyone knows there is, of course, but we must pretend there isn't, and as soon as someone points out the obvious correlation, interest groups like CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) shriek and howl until social media pounces on the hapless offender and pillories him for his insensitivity and bigotry.

We're told that "If we see something say something," but people are justifiably fearful that if they do say something they'll be the next media whipping boy so, like the man in the news story above, they conclude it's safer to say nothing than to offend the thought police. Consequently, fourteen people are dead today, sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

Of course, we want to be careful not to give the impression that all Muslims are terrorists so one might appreciate caution in this regard were it not so hypocritical. It'd be easier to accept the reluctance to sound like one is critical of all Muslims, notwithstanding that a sizable minority of them are behaving barbarically, if it weren't for the suspicion that were a small coterie of Tea Partiers shooting up Christmas gatherings full of innocent people liberals would have no reservations whatsoever about condemning the entire movement.

Profiling is okay, you see, as long as the people being profiled are members of a group liberals despise.

Ant Bridges

Tropical army ants display an incredible behavior. As a column of ants marches through the rainforest they encounter small ditches or other barriers across which they form a bridge with their bodies so that other ants can cross over:

This is amazing. How do insects know to do this? The behavior is obviously inherited but how is it passed on? Genes code for proteins and proteins build structure. What is it that codes for behavior? If it's proteins then how do protein molecules in the teensy brain of an ant translate into behavior?

And how does instinctive behavior evolve in the first place? According to the standard darwinian story, natural selection works on mutated genes to create novel structures, but if behavior isn't a function of an organism's genome how does it ever arise?

I wish that those who are so certain that all explanations are naturalistic, materialistic explanations would offer a plausible answer to these questions because they comprise what I think is perhaps the greatest mystery about living things - the origin and transmission of instinctive behavior.

Tiresome Double Standards

A deranged murderer holes up in a Planned Parenthood facility, and the Left and their media epigones immediately places the blame on outspoken critics of the grisly business in which Planned Parenthood engages. It's the "incendiary rhetoric" of those who were disgusted by the videos of PP employees casually discussing over wine and cheese the sale of fetal body parts which caused Robert Dear to snap, or so we are to believe. This is, to say the least, a bizarre but expected reaction to the murders at the Colorado Springs PP.

If we accept the argument that opposition, even heated opposition, to a given person or policy is responsible for violent crimes against those associated with those persons or policies, we have to acknowledge that any opposition to anything is responsible for any crime anyone commits. If some lunatic attacks a gay it's presumably because some people oppose gay marriage, if another lunatic attacks a scientist it's because some people are skeptical of climate change. This is a very convenient tactic because it pretty much shuts down unwelcome dissent. If people disagree with the president their disagreement just encourages the psychos out there to launch an assault on the White House so it's irresponsible to disagree with the president. Very clever.

It only works one way, though. No one on the Left, for instance, would ever dream of connecting the Black Lives Matter supporters parading down the street in St. Paul, Minnesota chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon" to the murders by other blacks of white cops:

Jim Geraghty makes this point in a column at National Review. He writes:

Let me get this straight. In the eyes of the Left criticism of Planned Parenthood means something like the shooting in Colorado “was bound to happen" but chants where people describe police as ‘pigs’ and call for them to be ‘fried like bacon’ doesn’t lead to attacks on police.

When an event by Pamela Geller is targeted by an Islamist shooter, it is “not really about [Geller's right to] free speech; it was an exercise in [her] bigotry and hatred” and the attempt to kill her means she has “achieved her provocative goal” while at the same time, investigators contend we may never know what motivated a 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez to kill four Marines and a sailor in an attack on Chattanooga’s U.S. Naval and Marine Reserve Center last July.

A shooting by a diagnosed schizophrenic, who believed that grammar was part of a vast, government-directed mind control effort, is characterized by the Southern Poverty law Center as having views that are the “hallmark of the far right and the militia movement” while the shooter who opened fire in the lobby of the Family Research Council in downtown Washington in 2012, who planned to target the Traditional Values Coalition next, does not spur any need for a broader discussion or societal lessons about the demonization of political opponents.

A California killer, who was treated by multiple therapists and already had police checking on him after posting disturbing YouTube videos, is a reflection of “sexist society,” but there’s little reason to ask whether the Oregon shooter’s decision to target Christians reflects a broader, societal hostility to Christians, or whether it reflects his personal allegiance to demons.

When white supremacist Dylann Roof committed an act of mass murder in an African-American church, Salon declares “White America is complicit” and the Washington Post runs a column declaring, “99 percent of southern whites will never go into a church, sit down with people and then massacre them. But that 99 percent is responsible for the one who does", but the Roanoke shooter’s endless sense of grievance and perceptions of racism and homophobia in all of his coworkers represents him and him alone.

Do I have all that right? And does that make sense to anyone?

If you're unfamiliar with Geraghty's references you can find links to each of them in his column. The point is that just as the liberal media goes on endlessly about the alleged prevarications of Donald Trump and Ben Carson but never applies the same criticism to the manifestly dishonest claims of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, they also seize on tragedies like that at PP and use it as a cudgel with which to pummel their political foes while completely ignoring the "incendiary rhetoric" on their own side.

This bias is worsened by the fact that there seems to be a much clearer correlation between the murders of cops and the revolting chants of the the marchers who call for them to be "fried like bacon" than there is between Robert Dear's mutterings about "baby body parts" and anything anyone morally aghast at the incriminating PP videos has said.

Strange Strategy

Over at InfoWars they're in a bit of a swivet over the fact that the Obama administration required our military to give ISIS' oil tanker drivers 45 minutes to get clear of their trucks before we blew them to smithereens:

The Obama White House is giving ISIS a 45 minute warning before bombing their oil tankers by dropping leaflets advising potential jihadists to flee before air strikes in Syria.

“Get out of your trucks now, and run away from them. Warning: air strikes are coming. Oil trucks will be destroyed. Get away from your oil trucks immediately. Do not risk your life,” the leaflet reads.

The leaflet drops are justified under the premise that the oil tanker drivers might be civilians and not ISIS recruits, although it’s an explanation that doesn’t wash with critics.

“It’s not like these drivers are innocent, uninvolved ‘civilians’ like children or sick people,” writes J.E. Dyer. “They’re waging ISIS’s war, just like the other non-uniformed participants who make up 100% of ISIS’s ranks. This is how far the Obama administration is going to avoid “collateral damage” — and who knows, it may be worse.”

Okay. Forty Five minutes maybe seems a bit excessive, but unless the drivers are able to drive their trucks out of harm's way in that interval it doesn't seem to me to be anything other than a humane effort to avoid unnecessary casualties. I don't see anything wrong with that. In fact I applaud it.

On the other hand, I'm much more perplexed by the fact that the oil tankers are still around in the first place. President Obama launched the campaign against ISIS over a year ago and we're just now getting around to taking out their financial lifeline? What have we been bombing all this time? Speaking of which, why is it that when the French decided to hit ISIS after the Paris terror attack they were able to find a command and communication center with a munitions dump and training facility to bomb? Why was that target still available after all the explosives we were supposed to have been dropping on the ISIS psychopaths?

It sounds like our Commander in Chief has had our pilots burn a lot of jet fuel over the last year flying what pilots call lazy eights over Syria without dispatching very much ordnance on the enemy. Why?

Now comes word that the reason for President Obama's reluctance to attack the oil tankers is that he was afraid of incurring collateral environmental damage. This is stunning. He has apparently permitted ISIS to rake in billions of dollars a year selling oil on the black market, financing their crimes against humanity with the profits, because he was afraid that smoke from burning oil tankers would pollute the desert air? That just can't be right. We are to believe that he stood by watching hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Syrians and Iraqis be horribly tortured and executed all the while refusing to cripple the economic legs that supported these atrocities because he was afraid that oil would get spilled?

If that's true, if Mr. Obama is conducting this war as if he thinks that the roar of jet engines overhead is sufficient to terrify ISIS foot soldiers so much that they'll reconsider their murderous ways and link arms to sing peace on earth, good will toward men, then he's perhaps the most naive man to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Obama promised that we were going to "degrade and destroy ISIS" but at this point it looks as if he either didn't really mean it or, if he did, he has the most baffling war strategy of any president in the history of the country.

Privileged Species

One of the most profound discoveries that scientists have made over the last century or so is that there are an amazing number of facts about the universe, the earth, and chemistry that have to be just as they are in order for complex living organisms to exist at all.

This beautifully produced thirty minute video takes a look at just a few of the hundreds of examples of these astonishing "coincidences" and leaves the viewer with the impression that the claim that this world is the result of some sort of cosmic accident is, to say the least, implausible.

Take some time to watch it and see what you think:

Making Philosophy Matter

Lee McIntyre, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and a lecturer in philosophy at Simmons College, sounds the tocsin for his fellow philosophers, urging them to wake up to the fact that their discipline is in trouble. Universities looking for ways to tighten their budgetary belts have let their eyes fall upon their philosophy departments which are increasingly regarded as academic fat.

McIntyre laments the short-sightedness of such a view, but also blames his colleagues for not doing more to make philosophy relevant to the lives of their students and to our public debates.

Here's a sample from his essay:

In March administrators at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas announced that, because of budget cuts, the entire department of philosophy would be eliminated. Philosophers rallied, the administration flinched, and within a month the crisis was averted. So all is well, right?

Not so fast. Unless systemic changes are made within the profession of philosophy over the next several years, we can expect that within a few decades, the entire discipline may be threatened.

In November 2010, The Boston Globe reported that student interest in humanities courses has cratered in recent years. And long-term trends are troubling, too. When adjusted for total enrollment, numbers from the National Center for Education Statistics show a 20-percent drop in philosophy and religion majors from 1970 through 2009. Of course, none of that is news to anyone who has worked recently in an American philosophy department. There is anecdotal evidence aplenty that our students are disappearing.

And how have we responded? Do we design better courses? Try to attract more student interest? Some members of our profession do, but by and large our response has been pitiful. We collapse tenured positions as soon as their inhabitants retire. We hire more adjuncts. Instead of trying to figure out how to reach more people with philosophy, we cut back. But in doing so, we eat our seed corn. (Note that in saving philosophy at UNLV, the department agreed to slate all its junior faculty members for termination.)

Something should be done about the growing crisis in philosophy, but no one seems to be doing anything. Who is to blame?

We are. Philosophers. We did this to ourselves.

McIntyre goes on to explain exactly how philosophers have done it themselves. Everything he says rings true, but there's one thing he doesn't mention that's an interesting fact about the jeopardy philosophy finds itself in. It doesn't seem to be at all in trouble in religious schools, at least as far as I can tell. One reason, perhaps, is that the problems examined in philosophy courses are highly relevant and crucial to a thorough religious education.

Philosophy as taught by secularists in secular institutions always struck me as a dry, barren and tedious affair. Philosophy is most exciting, I think, to those who are interested in seeing how the ideas of the great thinkers bear on their own deepest convictions. Philosophers who teach courses on very narrow, abstruse topics are simply walling themselves off from a larger body of students who might otherwise be eager to think about ideas and issues that both challenge and reinforce their own convictions, particularly their metaphysical convictions.

McIntyre goes on to observe that unlike scholars in other disciplines, too many philosophers eschew writing for a popular audience:

We have painted ourselves into a corner of irrelevance so completely that at times I wonder whether most philosophical work is even very interesting to other philosophers. There is, of course, genuine value to pure research in philosophy, just as there is in other fields. But what seems problematic is the widespread philosopher's prejudice that we are somehow sullying our discipline any time we try to make a real-world connection.

Thus, even when we have the chance to make a difference, philosophers often blow it. How many of us, when we teach ethics, have used the hypothetical example of whether torture is justified to get evidence in the face of a ticking bomb? But when a U.S. president actually endorsed the use of torture, there was mostly silence from the philosophical community, from both sides of the political spectrum.

Few op-eds in national newspapers. Little attempt to make use of our terrific critical-reasoning skills in the public arena to cut through the fallacies of the politicians or the blowhards on cable TV. Too many preferred instead to brag of their brave political convictions to the captive audience in their classrooms.

Quite so. Any discipline which can't show people how the subject it studies matters to them, how it relates to their life and their deepest yearnings, is by definition going to be culturally irrelevant. Philosophy is a rich and fascinating discipline, but when it's decoupled from the ultimate questions of life, or when it's presented to students by instructors who are themselves lost in the arid, empty wastelands of a naturalistic metaphysics, it often comes across as a dessicated exercise in pointless erudition.

How Thanksgiving Became an Official Holiday

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. On September 28th, 1863, a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, however, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, this proclamation was actually written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads as if it could have been written today. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Progressive Liberalism

Nick Cohen at the Guardian undertakes to contrast traditional liberalism with modern, progressive liberalism. He writes:

On the one hand, traditional liberals say they must oppose political Islam. It is oppressive in its attitude to women, freethinkers and gay people, dogmatic in its intolerance of believers in other religions and none, and contemptuous of democracy and human rights. In Saudi Arabia and Iran, it mandates theocracy. In Syria and Nigeria, it justifies slavery and the mass murders of unbelievers.

Traditional liberals say we should oppose its non-violent and violent sectarianism as vigorously as we oppose Christian, Jewish, Hindu or any other form of sectarianism. Let your enemies play the race card and call you an Islamophobe if they must. Liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims need your support and you need to show that you are not living a lie.

Against traditional liberalism stands multicultural liberalism, which the majority of people who call themselves “progressives” believe. An unimprovable example of how it turns old certainties on their heads came two days before the Paris massacres. The Muslim Council of Britain demanded a blasphemy law because “Muslim communities need to be able to respond to accusations [against] Muslims, or against the Prophet, in a more effective way”.

The council’s guest, Keith Vaz, appeared to agree. It is symptomatic of our time that Vaz is not a Tory traditionalist who thinks it wrong for impious critics to mock the beliefs of the faithful, but a Labour politician. In general today, the left rather than the right, multicultural liberals rather than Tories, are the most likely to defend religious conservatism.

There can be no compromise between these two versions of liberalism and we should have the honesty to admit it.

Cohen has more at the link. Cohen captures several ironies of modern, progressive liberalism in his column. One point that could be added to what he writes is that "progressive liberalism" is actually a misleading label. Modern progressives are much closer to fascists than they are to liberals in the classical sense. They reject, for example, the traditional freedoms that liberals have long cherished - freedom of speech, the spirited clash of ideas, freedom of religion, the equality of all persons under the law, free and open markets, etc.

Modern progressives oppose all of these. Where progressives are influential, as they are on university campuses, speech codes, forbidden words and topics and other stiflings free speech are rife. Ideas which dissent from the orthodox view are shouted down and their proponents subjected to all manner of intimidation and punishments ranging from loss of tenure (instructors), to expulsion from school (students), to calls for arrest (climate change skeptics).

Progressives endorse freedom of religion as long as long as the religion isn't Christianity. Christians are pressured to shed their belief in traditional marriage, for instance, and threatened with fines or loss of tax exemption and, in some European countries, even arrest if pastors speak out in favor of traditional marriage, but progressives would never dream of subjecting Muslims to such sanctions.

Having insisted for decades that minority groups are victims of racism and oppression progressives now find themselves unable to oppose or criticize whatever members of those groups demand, whether it be the right to practice sharia law or even the right to impose sharia on the broader culture by enacting blasphemy laws.

Progressives have constructed an implicit narrative that governs the way they see the world. According to this narrative those who have power are ipso facto oppressors and those who lack power are ipso facto innocent victims. Thus, whenever the oppressor, for example a police officer, employs force against a victim the officer is by the very nature of the case engaging in oppression against the oppressed. The victim is by definition innocent and the oppressor is by definition guilty. Justice demands that the innocent be vindicated and the guilty oppressor be punished.

This progressive narrative infuses much of the racial tension in this country and sets the tone for the relations of Muslims to the wider culture in Britain. One way the innocent are to be vindicated, in the progressive view, is by yielding to their demands, which emanate, after all, from the moral high ground, and turning a blind eye to their social, legal, and intellectual transgressions and inadequacies.

Of course, when this point is reached genuine justice is no longer possible. And that, indeed, is the legacy of progressive liberalism.

Responsibility

Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest lays responsibility for the Syrian refugee crisis at the feet of three people: Syrian president Bashar Assad, ISIS leader al-Baghdadi, and President Obama. Why President Obama, you ask?

This paragraph from the conclusion of the essay sums up Mead's indictment of the president's culpability and the rest of the article fills in the facts supporting his allegations:

For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.

What exactly were the president's omissions, in Mead's estimation?

Obama’s own policy decisions — allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones — were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn.

Many Americans who now oppose the President’s ill-considered refugee program have long supported the use of American power to create “safe zones” in Syria so the refugees could be sheltered and fed in their own country. If President Obama seriously cared about the fate of Syria’s millions of displaced people, he would have started to organize those safe havens years ago. And if he understood the nature of America’s role in Europe, he would have known that working with the Europeans to prevent a mass refugee and humanitarian disaster was something that had to be done.

Not even President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq has been as destructive for Europe or as damaging to the Transatlantic alliance as President Obama’s hard-hearted and short-sighted Syria policy. The flood of refugees is shaking the European Union to its core, and Obama’s policy has cemented perceptions among many around the world that the United States is no longer the kind of useful ally that it once was. France didn’t even bother to invoke NATO’s Article 5 after the Paris attacks; nobody really thinks of President Obama as the man you want at your side when the chips are down.

Mr. Obama prefers to "lead from behind" which implies that he prefers to cede leadership to others, but this is an abdication of his responsibility. The American president, whoever he is, is ipso facto the leader of the free world. If America declines to lead Western civilization will be rudderless, disunited, and vulnerable to the savage barbarians howling for blood just outside the gates.

The collapse of President Obama’s Syria policy is hardly a partisan issue. He has repeatedly overruled his own national security officials, top diplomats, and advisors, many of whom have been horrified by the President’s passivity in the face of onrushing disaster. His abrupt policy switch on airstrikes left many senior Democrats who had supported his apparent determination to enforce his “red line” against Assad twisting in the wind.

Mead also points to an astonishing irony in the president's policy:

The Obama Administration’s extreme caution about engagement in Syria led it to insist on such a thorough process of vetting potential Syrian allies that years of effort and tens of millions of dollars resulted in only a paltry handful of people being found acceptable to receive American weapons and training. The refugee vetting process won’t be nearly this thorough; it’s almost certain that the President’s program will result in settling people in the United States who could not be certified to fight for the United States in Syria. Given our gun laws, uncertified Syrians living in the United States will soon have the opportunity to get weapons that the United States government would refuse to give them in Syria.

Being largely responsible for the refugee mess it ill-suits Mr. Obama to mock those who urge a cautious approach to allowing thousands of refugees, refugees his policies have contributed to creating, into this country. Nor is the crisis over:

The Syria war has not finished creating refugees, undermining regional and even global security, putting WMD in terrorist hands, or spreading the poisons of radicalism and sectarian war across the Middle East and among vulnerable Muslims in Europe and beyond. Things can and will get worse as long as American policy continues to flounder; instead of arguing about how to shelter a few thousand refugees we need to look hard at how we are failing to address the disaster that has created millions, and that continues to grow.

Mr. Obama came into office thinking, or at least giving the impression that he thought, that all he had to do was convince the world that he wasn't anything like George Bush and peace and love would break out all over. Unfortunately, the world is comprised of billions of people who care little about "goodness" and who are restrained by only two things: Power and the willingness to use it. The Obama administration has sounded an uncertain trumpet and refused to back up its own threats in Syria. The evil-doers in ISIS know that this administration is not really serious about stopping them, so, unintimidated by our weak hand and the lack of leadership from this administration, the world is merrily tearing itself apart.

Is Islam Violent?

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently claimed that "Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Secretary of State John Kerry recently assured us that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.

Over and over we're told that Islam is a religion of peace. Well, the religion of peace is racking up quite a body count lately, not just the 3000 victims of the 9/11 attack, not just the more recent 600 plus victims of the Ankara, Beirut, and Russian airliner bombings, the 130 victims of the Paris slaughter, and the 30 or so victims of the Mali hotel attack, but uncountable lesser crimes throughout the world all done in the name of Islam.

To say that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism is like saying Christendom had nothing to do with the Inquisition. As Jonah Goldberg puts it:

The jihadists say they are motivated by Islam. They shout “Allahu akbar!” whenever they kill people. “Moderate Muslims” in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have been funding Islamic radicals around the world for nearly a century. This morning in Mali, terrorist gunmen reportedly released those hostages who could quote the Koran. The leader of ISIS has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and openly talks about restoring the Caliphate.

Oh, one other thing: The Islamic State is called the Islamic State. I used to eat at a restaurant called “Burrito Brothers.” Saying the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam is like telling someone eating a burrito they bought at Burrito Brothers that Burrito Brothers has “nothing whatsoever” to do with burritos.

It is inexplicable that so many of our politicians and opinion-molders seem unable to grasp this. If Republicans had rung up as many casualties as Muslim terrorists have you can bet there'd be no reticence about drawing the connection between Republican thinking and murderous barbarism. Indeed, some who can't bring themselves to put the words terrorist and Muslim together in the same sentence had no trouble putting the words Tea-party and terrorist together just a few years ago.

But set all that aside. The test of whether people are true Muslims or Christians is how closely their behavior, either theoretical or actual, comports to that of the founder of their religion - the one whose example and teaching they aspire to emulate.

When this test is applied to Islam it turns out, unfortunately, that the ISIS savages who enslave and behead are far more like their founder than are those Muslims who simply want to live in peace.

Mohammad himself practiced slavery, he condoned it for Muslims, and encouraged his followers to have sex with their female slaves. Yet all of these the world professes to be appalled at when practiced by ISIS.

Mohammad also cut off the heads of those he had taken prisoner. He had 500-900 Qurayza Jews, men and boys, decapitated after the battle of Trench and gave their wives, mothers, and sisters to his soldiers. When ISIS cuts the heads off their enemies they're following the example of the Prophet all Muslims revere and whose life they look to as their example. Indeed, Islamic literature, including the Qu'ran, is replete with passages enjoining Muslims to kill infidels.

This is why, perhaps, significant minorities of Muslims in eleven countries polled by the Pew Foundation condone the horrors that ISIS perpetrates. The numbers of supporters, though small in terms of percentage of the population, are huge in absolute terms. As many as 63 million people in eleven countries actually support ISIS, and that number rises to as many as 287 million if those who aren't sure are factored in. In Israel alone, for example, only 4% of the Muslim population supports ISIS but that translates to 66,000 individuals.

In any case, the claims of Clinton and Kerry that ISIS does not represent Islam and that Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism seem to be instances of burying one's head in the sand to avoid having to face a very unpleasant reality. We can be very grateful that millions of Muslims deplore the atrocities perpetrated by ISIS and other Islamic groups, but in order to do so they have to tacitly distance themselves from the behavior of Mohammad himself.

Unhelpful Rhetoric

President Obama has been strongly criticized, even by members of his own party, for his rhetorical lassitude in the wake of the Paris atrocity and for his refusal to see anything in the reluctance of many Americans to admit tens of thousands of Syrians into the country except unalloyed bigotry.

He recently couched a petulant response to his critics in the form of his favorite rhetorical device, the straw man, accusing opponents of his refugee policy of being frightened of "widows and orphans." This is an astonishingly silly characterization from the man who is supposed to be president of all Americans. Instead of explaining in a dignified manner befitting a world leader how his administration is making sure that no terrorists and terrorist sympathizers are sneaking in among the genuine refugees, he resorts to ridicule, a tactic more befitting a community agitator.

Mr. Obama insists that the refugees are being properly vetted, but until he explains exactly what that vetting process consists of it's hard to believe him. For most refugees there is no database, no records, against which to vet them. The vetting process consists essentially of asking them if they are who they say they are.

Over 70% of the refugees flooding Europe are young men of military age with no families. Many putative Syrian refugees are not Syrians at all but men from other nations carrying fake passports, and some Syrians are trying to sneak into the country illegally with fake Greek passports.

President Obama and others have chastised those who are calling for a cautious approach to letting in tens of thousands of people, some of whom may be murderous monsters, by declaring that such would be a denial of American values and that calls for caution only make it easier for ISIS to recruit. Both of these assertions are nonsense. There was no legal immigration into this country from 1924 to 1965. Moreover, according to current law, Cuban migrants seeking to come to the U.S. but intercepted at sea are returned to Cuba.

It might also be added that the attempt by some to compare the current refugee situation to that of Jews fleeing Nazi Europe in 1939 aboard the SS St. Louis, only to be turned away at American ports, is a red herring. Turning away a boatload of over 900 refugees from the Nazis was unconscionable, but the situation today is not analogous. There was no danger in 1939 that any of the Jews on board the St. Louis were plotting to commit mass murder of Americans, but ISIS boasts that they've heavily infiltrated the refugees and our FBI and Homeland Security leaders tell us there's no reason to doubt them.

Finally, if Mr. Obama really thinks that a cautious approach to the refugee problem gives ISIS a powerful recruiting tool then the president needs to get more rest. ISIS has successfully recruited young men and women because it offers them the promise of being in on the ground floor of the final victory of the forces of Allah over the hated infidels and Jews, not because of American immigration policies which are, it should be noted, far more liberal than those of any middle eastern Muslim country.

Luv Gov

A young woman named Alexis falls in love with a guy named Govinsky who turns out to be an overbearing, controlling lout who, despite his assurances of wanting only what's best for Alexis, gradually smothers her freedom.

Her friend Libby (Liberty) tries to warn her that "Gov" isn't what he appears to be, but Alexis allows herself, over a series of five short (5 minutes) videos, to become more and more deeply dependent until finally she has an epiphany and realizes that her dependence on Gov has wrecked her life.

Each of the videos in the series is an amusing parable for our times. Here's the first:

Evolution and Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cordova has more at the link.

A Problem With Teaching Ethics

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Should We Do?

President Obama insists that the slaughter in Paris by Muslim terrorists, at least one of which was a refugee from Syria, will not deter him from bringing 10,000 Syrian refugees into this country each year for the next several years.

It's strange that some of the same people in this country who demand that climate change skeptics be jailed, and who have nothing but hatred for Christians who doubt evolution and oppose gay marriage, are all in favor of bringing 10,000 people, many of whom would abolish science and hang gays, into our communities.

Those who think this is a bad idea, especially in light of the experience of France which has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews emigrate from the country because of violent Muslim antisemitism, are called bigots. They're lectured about how most Muslims are good people and only a small percentage of them are radical sociopaths. Of course, it's also true that most Germans were good people during WWII, but the few who had the power were sociopaths and we should reflect upon the damage those few inflicted upon the world.

Suppose only 1% of the 10,000 or so the president wants to bring in are terrorists or potential terrorists. If so, we would be bringing into the country every year 100 people, or ten cells like the one which wreaked such carnage last Friday night on Paris. Do we really think that's compassionate and wise? Are the families of the Paris dead glad today that their country was so compassionate as to let in so many people who hate the French and all that France stands for?

The desire to be compassionate doesn't mean we should be stupid. If there was any chance at all that a blood transfusion you needed contained a few bits of HIV would you let that blood into your body if you had an alternative?

The administration scoffs at these concerns and assures us that the refugees will be "vetted", but how? There are no records in Syria that we can check to see if these people are innocent victims or ISIS operatives. All we have to go by is their word that they have no terrorist sympathies. The claim that we'll be vetting them is simply absurd.

So what should be done? We should do two things: First, demand that temporary refugee camps be set up in Saudi Arabia, southern Iraq, and other Arab countries, paid for by the oil-rich Arabs who should be shamed, if need be, into showing some compassion for their Muslim brothers and sisters. Second, we, together with European and Arab allies, should purge Syria of the elements whose terror has set this refugee crisis in motion in the first place so that these people can return to their homes. That purgation would include not only ISIS but Assad. This may bring us into conflict with the Russians and the Iranians, and it would have been less dangerous had this been done a year ago, but as long as they're there supporting Assad the suffering of the Syrian people won't improve.

Unfortunately, President Obama doesn't seem inclined to take either of these measures. I hope I'm not being unfair to him but he doesn't seem interested in actually leading. Instead, we bide our time, dropping a few bombs here and there (parenthetical question: France retaliated against ISIS yesterday by bombing a training camp, communications center, and munitions dump. Why, after all the bombs we've supposedly dropped on ISIS over the last year, was this target still available to the French? Why wasn't it destroyed long ago?) until ISIS makes good on its threat to attack Washington, D.C.

Inconsistencies

A few ruminations on some current domestic issues:

Open Borders - Some think it's immoral to prevent people from coming into this country whenever they wish to use the resources Americans have built and bought. Very well. Perhaps those folks might tell us whether they lock their doors when they leave home? If so, why do they? Why not share what they have - the contents of their refrigerator, the contents of their wallet, their bathroom and bedroom - with those who are in need of it? What's the significant difference between locking the border and locking one's house or car? What's a person called who condemns people who want to do the former while that person does the latter?

Tax Hikes - Here are a couple of questions to ask of anyone who insists that we should all be willing to pay higher taxes: "Do you take any deductions on your own taxes? If so, are you not saying that you yourself don't really want to pay what you're already assessed, let alone pay more? You just want everyone else to pay more." The person who calls for higher taxes while taking whatever deductions to which he's entitled is, to put it charitably, confused.

Minimum Wage Hike - Suppose you hire a lawn outfit to mow your grass. They charge just about what you can afford to pay so you give them the work. Soon, however, they inform you that they're now going to pay their employees twice as much to ride a mower around your property so they have to charge you twice as much to cover their expense. What do you do? Quite likely, you inform them that you'll mow your own grass. Now the lawn guys have less business and have to lay off some workers. A lot of good getting that raise is doing those workers now.

Campus Protests - Many college students demand to be treated as adults while acting like fragile children afraid to be exposed to speech and ideas that may hurt their feelings. How adult is it to demand "safe spaces" on campus to which you can flee to avoid hearing mean words or anything with which you might disagree? How adult is it to demand that there be "trigger warnings" given before a professor says something that might make the student feel uncomfortable? The need for "safe spaces" is understandable when children are eight years old, but we expect well-adjusted people to outgrow their need for such refuges as they leave elementary school behind. In any case, walking around with the equivalent of a security blanket is hardly something one associates with being a mature adult.