The Modern View of Man

James M. Tour, world famous chemist and professor at Rice university, quotes Victor Frankl on where the modern view of man leads: Viktor Frankl, a former Auschwitz inmate wrote in The Doctor and the Soul, that the source for much of the 20th Century’s inhumanity has come from the [view of man promoted by modern materialism]:

“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

“I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers [emphasis added].”

When men cease to see other men as having transcendent worth because of their status as beings created in the image of God by a God who cares about each of them individually, when they deny that there's any overarching purpose to human existence, deny that there's any objective ground for moral value, deny that there's any such thing as a soul, free will, or human dignity, when they come to view other men and themselves as the products of eons of natural accidents and coincidences that have serendipitously resulted in a human animal only slightly different than a cow, then human stockyards like Auschwitz become a logical, a rational, inevitability.

That's where the modern view of man leads, and it is, as Frankl notes, materialistic, naturalistic philosophers and scientists who have in the 19th and 20th centuries cleared the theoretical ground upon which those who wield political power build their abattoirs.

Take just three representative examples to illustrate what many modern scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars believe and ask where such thinking will lead us if it were ever to become the consensus view among our political class:

First a quote from evolutionary biologist Will Provine of Cornell: "Let me summarize my view on what evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear: There are no Gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death .... There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no meaning in life, and no free will."

Here's atheistic philosopher Richard Rorty: "For the secular man [like himself] there's no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel'?"

And one more from early 20th century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes: "When one thinks coldly I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand."

When people en masse come to think this way what reason would they have not to build another Auschwitz or Treblinka?

Taxonomy of Political Ideology

Probably one reason why a lot of people steer clear of politics is that they find the ideological labels (as well as words like ideological) to be very confusing. Terms like left, right, liberal, conservative, progressive, libertarian, fascism, socialism, and communism are thrown around a lot by our punditry and they're rarely accompanied by any explanation of what they mean. This post will try to supply that lack so that as we roll deeper into the campaign season readers might have a bit better understanding of what they're hearing.

For starters, a political ideology is the set of principles which guide and inform one's social, economic, and foreign policies. All the terms listed in the previous paragraph denote various political ideologies.

The following diagram will give us a frame of reference to talk about these terms:

Let's start on the right side of the spectrum and define the terms going right to left. Each of them expresses a different view of the role of government in our lives and a different view of what rights citizens have vis a vis the state. I have one quarrel, though, with the diagram. I personally don't think either anarchy or mob rule belong on it since neither is a stable ideology. They both either evaporate, like Occupy Wall Street did, or they morph into communism or fascism. With that said, let's consider the remaining elements of the spectrum:

Libertarianism: This is the view that the role of government should be limited largely to protecting our borders and constitutional rights. Libertarians believe that government should, except to protect citizens, stay out of our personal lives and out of the marketplace. They are also very reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts. Senator Rand Paul who recently withdrew from the race for the Republican nomination for president, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary libertarian politician. Ayn Rand (who wrote Atlas Shrugged and for whom Rand Paul is named) is the most well-known libertarian writer.

Conservatism: Conservatives tend to be libertarians, but see a somewhat more expansive role for government. The emphasis among conservatives is on preserving traditional values and the Constitution and also upon diffusing governmental authority from the central, federal government and giving it back to the states and localities. They're reluctant to change unless it can be shown that the change is both necessary and has a good chance of improving the problem the change is supposed to solve.

Conservatives take a strict view of the Constitution, interpreting it to mean pretty much precisely what it says, and oppose attempts to alter it by judicial fiat. They also oppose government interference in the market by over-regulation and oppose high tax rates as being counter-productive. They strongly oppose illegal immigration and believe in a strong national defense, but, though more willing to use force abroad when our interests can be shown to be threatened, are nevertheless leery of foreign adventures. Ted Cruz is perhaps the most well-known contemporary conservative politician, and William F. Buckley is the most well-known conservative writer.

Moderates: Moderates tend to be conservative on some issues and liberal on others. They see themselves as pragmatists, willing to do whatever works to make things better. They see themselves as non-ideological (although their opponents often see them as unprincipled). President George W. Bush was a moderate politician and New York Times columnist David Brooks would be an example of a moderate writer.

Liberalism: Liberals see a more expansive role for government. They take a loose view of the Constitution, interpreting it according to what they think the founders would say if they wrote the document today. They tend to think that traditional values shackle us to the past and that modern times and problems require us to throw off those shackles. They agree with libertarians that government should stay out of our personal lives, but they believe that government must regulate business and tax the rich and middle classes to subsidize the poor. They tend to hold a very strong faith in the power of government to solve our problems, a faith that conservatives and libertarians think is entirely unwarranted by experience. President Bill Clinton might be an example of a liberal politician.

Progressivism: Progressivism can be thought of as hyper-caffeinated liberalism. Most prominent members of today's Democratic party are progressives as are many in the mainstream media and on cable networks like MSNBC. Progressives tend to see the Constitution as an obstacle to progress. Whereas conservatives view the Constitution as a document which protects individual rights, progressives see it as an archaic limitation on the ability of government to promote social and economic justice. They tend to be indifferent to, or even disdainful of, traditional values and institutions such as marriage, family, and religion.

Progressives are essentially socialists who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to call themselves that. A humorous depiction of progressivism can be found here. President Barack Obama and candidate Hillary Clinton are progressives.

Socialism: As stated in the previous paragraph, socialists are progressives by another name. Both progressives and socialists desire that power be located in a strong central government (they're sometimes for this reason referred to by their opponents as "statists.") and both wish for government to be involved in our lives "from cradle to the grave" (see this ad which ran in the last presidential campaign). They favor very high tax rates by which they hope to reduce the disparity in income between rich and poor. Perhaps one difference between socialists and progressives is that though both would allow corporations and banks to be privately owned, socialists would impose more governmental control over these institutions than progressives might. Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is an example of a contemporary socialist.

Fascism: Typically fascism is considered an ideology of the right, but this is a mistake. Fascism, like communism, is a form of totalitarian socialism. Indeed, the German Nazis as well as the Italian fascists of the 1930s were socialists (The Nazi party was the National Socialist Party). Fascism is socialist in that fascists permit private ownership of property and businesses, but the state has ultimate control over them. Fascism is usually militaristic, nationalistic, and xenophobic. It is totalitarian in that there is usually only one party, and citizens have few rights. There is no right to dissent or free speech, and fascists are prone to the use of violence to suppress those who do not conform. Those on the far left on campus who shout down speakers and professors whose message they don't like are adopting fascistic methods.

Communism: Like fascism, communism is totalitarian and socialist, but it's a more extreme socialism. Under communism there is no private ownership. The state owns everything. Moreover, communism differs from fascism in that it is internationalist rather than nationalist, and it doesn't promote a militaristic culture, although it certainly doesn't shy from the use of military force and violence to further its goals. Like fascism, however, communism does not permit free speech, and those who dissent are executed or cruelly imprisoned.

Few completely communist nations remain today though throughout much of the twentieth century the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and many other Asian and African states were all communist. Today North Korea is probably the only truly communist nation. Scarcely any contemporary politicians would admit to being communists though some of President Obama's close associates and friends over the years, such as Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, Van Jones, and mentor Frank Marshall Davis are, or were, all communists.

I hope this rather cursory treatment will be helpful as you seek to make sense of what the various pundits and candidates jockeying for their party's nomination are saying.

Understanding the Crusades (Pt. II)

As was mentioned in yesterday's post the Crusades were not wars of aggression against innocent Muslim Arabs but rather were reactions against atrocities committed by Muslims against Christians throughout the Middle East. Greg Scandlen, reviewing Rodney Stark's book God's Battalions, writes:

.... what would prompt hundreds of thousand Europeans to leave their homes and travel 2,500 miles to engage an enemy is a desert kingdom—especially after the Muslim conquest of Europe had been turned back?

There had been long-festering concern about the fate of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. After his conversion to Christianity in the early 300s, the Roman Emperor Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of what was believed to be Jesus’ tomb, and other churches in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. These sites prompted a growing number of European pilgrims to visit the Holy Land, including Saint Jerome, who lived in Bethlehem for the last 32 years of his life as he translated the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. By the late fifth century, Stark reports, more than 300 hostels and monasteries offered lodging to pilgrims in Jerusalem alone.

But in 638 Jerusalem surrendered to Muslim invaders, and mass murders of Christian pilgrims and monks became commonplace. Stark includes a list of select atrocities in the eight and ninth centuries, but none worse than the some 5,000 German Christians slaughtered by Bedouin robbers in the tenth century.

Throughout this period, control of Palestine was contested by several conflicting Muslim groups. Stark writes, “In 878 a new dynasty was established in Egypt and seized control of the Holy Land from the caliph in Baghdad.” One hundred years later, Tariqu al-Hakim became the sixth caliph of Egypt and initiated an unprecedented reign of terror, not just against Christians but against his own people as well. He burned or pillaged some 30,000 churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the tomb beneath it.

Soon enough, newly converted Turkish tribes came out of the north to seize Persia and Baghdad (by 1045) and press on to Armenia, overrunning the city of Ardzen in 1048, where they murdered all the men, raped the women, and enslaved the children. Next they attacked the Egyptians, in part because the Turks were Orthodox Sunnis and the Egyptians were heretical Shiites. While the Turks did not succeed in overthrowing the Egyptians, they did conquer Palestine, entering Jerusalem in 1071. The Turks promised safety to the residents of Jerusalem if they surrendered the city, but broke this promise and slaughtered the population. They did the same in Ramla, Gaza, Tyre, and Jaffa.

Finally, they threatened Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Alexius Comnenus wrote to Pope Urban II in 1095, begging for help to turn back the Turks. This was remarkable given the intense hostility between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Perhaps the pope saw an opportunity to unite or at least reduce tensions between the two Christian churches, but he responded with a call to create an army that would go to the Middle East.

Thus, a series of expeditions known as the Crusades were begun. I hasten to note that one shouldn't have the impression that the Crusaders were all noble soldiers of high moral caliber. They were, in fact, often a mixed lot, and some of them were little more than criminal thugs. A German contingent during the first crusade, enroute to the Middle East from Germany, slaughtered thousands of Jews in European towns along their way, apparently for sport, despite heroic attempts by Christian bishops to protect the Jews and universal opprobrium among Christians for what the Germans were doing. It was thought to be divine retribution that these men were themselves later massacred in a series of hostile encounters with local forces in Hungary.

The point, though, is that, in Stark's telling, the Crusades were fought largely for just reasons, and largely by valiant men with noble motives and were, when supported by their leaders back home and not betrayed by allies or ravaged by disease and starvation, quite successful. Indeed, as Stark puts it, the Crusader knights, "starving, riddled with disease, having eaten most of their horses, and with greatly reduced numbers," not only pushed the Turks back from Constantinople, but, "pushed on to Jerusalem and against all odds stormed over the walls to victory."

I highly recommend God's Battalions to anyone interested in the history of the Crusades and looking for a readable account of that history.

Understanding the Crusades (Pt. I)

Islamic terrorism, it's sometimes alleged, is fueled by resentments fostered by the wars conducted against Muslims in the Holy Land 800 years ago. The Crusades are often claimed to have been wars of imperialism waged against peaceful Muslims who defended themselves heroically against the malevolent Europeans, defeating them time after time in battle. All of that, however, happens to be false, according to Rodney Stark in his excellent book on the Crusades titled God's Battalions.

The Crusades, Stark argues, were defensive wars fought in response to Muslim atrocities against Christian pilgrims. The Crusader armies were technologically superior to their foes and were almost invariably victorious over them, but, after several centuries of occupation, eventually failed to hold their gains because of a lack of will among political leaders back home to spend the money necessary to sustain an army at such a distance. Moreover, so far from going to war to rob Arabs of their wealth, the Crusaders incurred enormous expense to make the arduous journey and few expected to reap any profit from a land that, in any case, offered precious little wealth to plunder. Indeed many Crusaders expected never to return home at all and many did not.

A review by Greg Scandlen in The Federalist of Stark's book helps clear away a lot of the mythological fog about the Crusades. Here are some highlights:

In light of President Obama’s recent remarks comparing the brutality of the Islamic State to the Crusades, it might be time to take a fresh look at those events. Were they really the one-sided Dark Ages barbarism we have been taught? Were they an early manifestation of Western imperialism and global conquest?

Scandlen notes that the Crusades were first of all a reaction against Muslim aggression and atrocities:

[I]n the final years of Mohammed ... a newly united Arab people swept through (Zoroastrian) Persia and the (Orthodox Christian) Byzantine- controlled areas of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa. (Byzantine refers to the Greek-speaking eastern remainder of the Roman Empire.) Eventually Arabs took over control of the Mediterranean islands, most of Spain, and the southern part of Italy, and even reached as far as 150 miles outside of Paris before being turned back by the Franks, or early French.

The Muslims were brutal in their conquered territories. They gave pagans a choice of converting to Islam or being killed or enslaved. Jews and Christians other People of the Book) were usually but not always treated somewhat better, and allowed to retain their beliefs but under conditions of Sharia subjugation....

Not surprisingly, there was intense Christian resistance and determination to take back lost territories. Especially effective were the Normans and the Franks in Spain and Italy.

But that was all prelude. One myth Stark wishes to dispel is that Islamic science and learning was somehow superior to that of Europeans of the period. In fact, he argues, Islamic learning and technology was largely a borrowed commodity:

Stark says the best of the Islamic culture was appropriated from the people Muslims conquered—the Greeks, Jews, Persians, Hindus, and even from heretical Christian sects such as the Copts and Nestorians. He quotes E.D. Hunt as writing, “the earliest scientific book in the language of Islam [was a] treatise on medicine by a Syrian Christian priest in Alexandria translated into Arabic by a Persian Jewish physician.” Stark writes that Muslim naval fleets were built by Egyptian shipwrights, manned by Christian crews, and often captained by Italians. When Baghdad was built, the caliph “entrusted the design of the city to a Zoroastrian and a Jew.” Even the “Arabic” numbering system was Hindu in origin.

And, while it is true that the Arabs embraced the writings of Plato and Aristotle, Stark comments,

However, rather than treat these works as attempts by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslin intellectuals quickly read them in the same way they read the Qur’an – as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction…. Attitudes such as these prevented Islam from taking up where the Greeks had left off in their pursuit of knowledge.

Meanwhile, science and technology were burgeoning in Europe and it was these advances which gave the Europeans enormous advantages over their Muslim opponents in war:

[The] explosion of technology [in Europe] made ordinary people far richer than any people had ever been. It began with the development of collars and harnesses that allowed horses to pull plows and wagons rather than oxen, doubling the speed at which people could till fields. Plows were improved, iron horseshoes invented, wagons given brakes and swivel axles, and larger draft horses were bred. All this along with the new idea of crop rotation led to a massive improvement in agricultural productivity that in turn led to a much healthier, larger, and stronger population.

Technology was also improving warfare with the invention of the crossbow and chain mail. Crossbows were far more accurate and deadly than conventional archery, and could be fired with very little training. Chain mail was almost impervious to the kind of arrows in use throughout the world. Mounted knights were fitted with high-back saddles and stirrups that enabled them to use more force in charging an opponent, and much larger horses were bred as chargers, giving the knights a height advantage over enemies. Better military tactics made European armies much more lethal. Stark writes:

It is axiomatic in military science that cavalry cannot succeed against well-armed and well-disciplined infantry formations unless they greatly outnumber them…. When determined infantry hold their ranks, standing shoulder to shoulder to present a wall of shields from which they project a thicket of long spears butted in the ground, cavalry charges are easily turned away; the horses often rear out of control and refuse to meet the spears.

In contrast, Muslim warriors were almost exclusively light cavalry, riding faster but lighter horses bareback with little armor, few shields, and using swords and axes. Their biggest advantage was their use of camels, which made them much more mobile than foot soldiers and gave them the ability to swoop in and out of the desert areas to attack poorly defended cities.

Another advantage Stark discusses but Scandlen omits is the development of something called Greek fire, a mysterious napalm-like substance that could be sprayed from tubes at enemy ships and other fortifications. Because it was flammable even in water, it was extremely effective in warding off incursions by Muslim fleets in the centuries prior to the Crusades but doesn't seem to have been used much during the Crusades themselves.

Tomorrow we'll take a closer look at what prompted the series of campaigns against the Muslim Arabs that came to known as the Crusades.

The Contingency of the World (Pt. II)

Yesterday, we discussed the Argument from Contingency as it has been formulated by philosophers Stephen Davis and William Lane Craig, following the 17th century genius Gottfried Leibniz. Leibniz can rightly be called a genius because he was not only a philosopher and theologian but also a mathematician who invented (simultaneously with, but independently of, Isaac Newton) the mathematics of calculus.

The argument, in outline, runs as follows:

1. Any entity that exists must have an explanation for its existence, either in itself or in something else.
2. The universe exists.
3. Therefore, the universe has an explanation for its existence, either in itself or in something else (from 1 & 2).
4. If the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God.
5. Therefore, God exists (from 3 & 4).

We noted yesterday that this argument is valid so that if the premises all turn out to be true then the conclusion must be true. We then inquired as to the truth of the premises noting that premise 2 is obviously true and premise 3 clearly follows from premises 1 and 2. That left us with ascertaining the truth of premises 1 and 4. We discussed 1 yesterday and will look at 4 today.

I closed yesterday's post by saying that 4 is simply a restatement of what most atheists believe. Here's why: Most atheists assert that the universe has no explanation at all. In the words of the famous British philosopher Bertrand Russell, it's just there. Its existence is a brute, inexplicable fact. In other words, if there is no God to have created the universe then there just is no explanation for its existence. Since atheist thinkers believe there is no God to have created the universe then they believe that the universe has no explanation.

But consider that claim: If there is no God then the universe has no explanation for its existence. This is logically equivalent to saying that if the universe does have an explanation then there is a God who created it. In other words, if the universe has an explanation then that explanation is God which is what premise 4 states.

So premises 1, 2, 3, and 4 all seem to be accepted, even by the atheist, as true, which means that 5 is true also.

Now, this conclusion could be avoided by admitting that the universe must have an explanation, but that either a) the explanation is that it's necessarily existent, which we considered yesterday, or b) the explanation is something other than God. We saw yesterday that it's more reasonable to think the universe is a contingent rather than a necessary entity so adopting a) seems to be an unfruitful strategy. What, though, about b)? Could the explanation of the universe be something other than God?

We need first to understand what a cause of the universe would be like. Since the universe is all of space, time, and matter whatever explains it must itself be non-spatial, non-temporal, and immaterial. The only kinds of things which could exist and fit this description would be either abstract objects, like numbers or concepts, or disembodied minds. However, abstract objects, if they exist, don't cause anything. The number 7 doesn't bring anything about, nor does the concept of, say, justice, by itself, have any causal efficacy.

That leaves us with a mind as the ultimate explanation for the universe, and any mind that is a sufficient explanation for the universe must be extraordinarily powerful, intelligent, and purposeful. Moreover, if it's intelligent and purposeful it's also personal.

In other words, the most plausible explanation for the universe is a being that has many of the characteristics traditionally attributed to God.

Here's a short video that might help to make the argument a bit clearer:

The Contingency of the World (Pt. I)

One of the classical arguments for the existence of God has experienced something of a renaissance in the last few years. The argument was originally popularized by the great philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) and is sometimes referred to as the Argument from Contingency. Leibniz asks the question why does anything at all exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? His answer to this question ultimately leads to the existence of the God of traditional theism.

Modern advocates of the argument, such as philosophers Stephen Davis and William Lane Craig, outline the argument somewhat like this:

1. Any entity that exists must have an explanation for its existence, either in itself or in something else.
2. The universe exists.
3. Therefore, the universe has an explanation for its existence, either in itself or in something else (from 1 & 2).
4. If the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God.
5. Therefore, God exists (from 3 & 4).

At first glance this syllogism, particularly premise 4, may seem highly dubious and contrived, but it is in fact a valid argument. If the premises are all true then the conclusion must be true, but are the premises true, or at least more likely to be true than false? It certainly seems so.

Premise 2 is obviously true, but what about 1 and 4? In the remainder of this post we'll look at premise 1 and then consider premise 4 tomorrow.

What does premise 1 mean? It's simply an expression of what's called the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Existing entities have an explanation of their existence either in the necessity of their own nature or in some external cause.

To say that their explanation is in the necessity of their own nature is to say that it's impossible for the thing to not exist. It's not caused by anything else nor is its existence in any way dependent upon anything else. It has what philosophers call necessary being. Some mathematicians think that numbers and other mathematical "objects" exist in this way.

Almost everything in our experience, however, is explained by some cause outside of itself. These things - like trees, chairs, cars, and people - could possibly not exist and are referred to as contingent beings. They depend upon something outside of themselves for their existence.

So premise 1 is saying that every entity which exists is either a necessary being or a contingent being. This is clearly the case, so the universe, which is of course an existing entity, is either a necessary being or a contingent being. It's possible, however, that the universe not exist. Indeed, there was a state of affairs, apart from the Big Bang, in which it did not exist. Therefore, the universe is contingent, and its explanation must be found outside of itself.

Now, there's much more that could be said about premise 1. There are objections that have been raised, and answered, to the claim that the universe is contingent, but I think it fair to say here that the contingency of the universe is by far the consensus view among philosophers who attend to the matter. It's difficult to imagine that the universe is necessary, i.e. the sort of thing that could not not exist.

Thus we're left to defend premise 4 which certainly seems to commit the fallacy of begging the question. That is, it seems to be stating the very thing the argument strives to conclude. As we'll see the next time, though, so far from begging the question, premise 4 simply affirms what most atheists say all the time.

Premoderns, Moderns, and Postmoderns (Pt.III)

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

Bottum writes that:

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

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

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

A better word in the previous sentence might have been "scientistic" rather than "scientific," scientism being the belief that only science can give us knowledge and that any questions science can't answer, such as metaphysical questions, aren't worth worrying about.

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

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

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

Premoderns, Moderns, and Postmoderns (Pt. II)

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

Bottum writes that:

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

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

Bottum continues:

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

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

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

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

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

We'll conclude our look at Bottum's essay tomorrow.

Premoderns, Moderns, and Postmoderns (Pt. I)

Having discussed in my classes this week some philosophical distinctions between premodern, modern, and postmodern metanarratives I thought it might be useful to rerun some posts on the subject from last year. This one is the first in a three-part series:

There are in the West three basic ways to look at the world, three worldviews which serve as lenses through which we interpret the experiences of our lives. Those three worldviews are essentially distinguished by their view of God, truth, and the era in which they were dominant among the cultural elite. We may, with some license, label these the premodern, modern, and postmodern. The premodern, dominating the culture from ancient times until the Enlightenment (17th century), was essentially Christian. The modern, which prevailed at least until the 1970s and is still very influential today, is essentially naturalistic and secular, and the postmodern, which has been with us now for a couple of generations, is hostile to the Enlightenment emphasis on Reason and objective truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottum continues:

In some sense, of course, these words premodern, modern, and postmodern are too slippery to mean much. Taken to refer to the history of ideas, they seem to name the periods before, during, and after the Enlightenment, but taken to refer to the history of events, they seem to name the period from creation to the rise of science, the period from the rise of science until World War II, and the period since the war. It is tempting to define the categories philosophically, rather than historically, around the recognition that knowledge depends upon the existence of God. But the better modern philosophers (e.g., Descartes and Kant, as opposed to, say, Voltaire) recognize that dependence in some way or another.

Perhaps, though definitions based on intent are always weak, the best definition nonetheless involves intent: it is premodern to seek beyond rational knowledge for God; it is modern to desire to hold knowledge in the structures of human rationality (with or without God); it is postmodern to see the impossibility of such knowledge.

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

Bottum again:

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

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

More on this next time.

Biologically Superfluous Phenomena

One of the perplexities of modern evolutionary theory is how structures, systems, and abilities evolved that are completely superfluous to an organism's survival. Natural selection, according to the theory, acts upon genetic variations, favoring those that suit the organism for its environment and culling from the population those which don't. But nothing in the theory explains, or at least explains well, biological extravagance, notwithstanding that we see such extravagance all around us.

Evolution News and Views, in observance of a new book that addresses this topic (Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis) by biologist Michael Denton, has an essay up that discusses three examples of biological phenomena that far exceed anything that would have been necessary for fitness. The three are the Venus Flytrap, the stripes on a zebra, and the prodigious memory capability of the human brain. Here's what ENV says about the Venus Flytrap:

New work by researchers in Germany, published in Current Biology, shows that this plant can count! The team's video, posted on Live Science (see below), shows how the trigger hairs inside the leaves generate action potentials that can be measured by electrical equipment.

Experiments show that the number of action potentials generates different responses. Two action potentials are required to close the trap. When closed, the plant starts producing jasmonic acid. The third spike activates "touch hormones" that flood the trap with digestive juices. The fifth spike triggers uptake of nutrients. The struggling insect will trigger some 50 action potentials. The more they come, the more the trap squeezes tighter and tighter, as if knowing it has a stronger prey. The squeezing presses the animal against the digestive juices, also allowing more efficient uptake of nutrients.

"It's not quite plant arithmetic, but it's impressive nonetheless," says Liz Van Volken­burgh of the University of Washington in Seattle. "The Venus flytrap is hardwired to respond in the way that's now being described," she says.

Wayne Fagerberg at the University of New Hampshire in Durham agrees. "Obviously it doesn't have a brain to go 'one, two, three, four'," he says. "Effectively, it's counting. It's just not thinking about it."

In our experience, "hardwired" things that can count and activate responses are designed. This elaborate mechanism, involving multiple responses that activate machines on cue, seems superfluous for survival. The Venus flytrap has photosynthesis; it can make its own food. The argument that it needs animal food because it lives in nutrient-poor soil is questionable; other plants, including trees, do fine without animal traps.

Here's the video mentioned above. It's better to watch it at the link since the video is larger there:

How did such an astonishing ability, not just the ability to capture prey but also the ability to count, ever evolve through blind, purposeless processes in a plant?

Regarding the capabilities of the brain, a topic also discussed in the ENV article, I'm reminded of a quip by philosopher Alvin Plantinga who was discussing the brain's extraordinary ability to do higher math and reflecting on the implausibility of such an ability being adequately explained by a process that merely shaped human brains for reproductive dominance. Plantinga observed dryly that, after all, it's only the rare graduate student whose prospects for reproductive success are enhanced by his ability to solve differential equations.

Tearing Down the Safety Net

Democratic candidate for president Senator Bernie Sanders did a town hall event last Monday morning in Iowa Falls, Iowa at which he asked the crowd for testimonials about the difficulties of sustaining a life off of $12,000 a year, and a woman stood to tell her story. It was heartbreaking, but it was doubtless the story of many people, especially women, living in the 21st century.

One of the ironies of this sad video is that for the last one hundred years liberal progressives, like Sen. Sanders, have been pushing the government (i.e. the taxpayer) to create and maintain a social safety net for people like this woman, while at the same time promoting a culture which is guaranteed to produce many more like her. As their policies create millions of tragic lives progressives demand that the taxpayer give ever more of their own income to support their victims.

For two thousand years we have had a social safety net for women. It wasn't perfect, but it worked for millions of otherwise vulnerable women and children. They were protected from ruin and destitution by three institutions: marriage, family, and church.

Married women are far less likely to be poor than are single women, especially if they have children. Moreover, a woman with an extended family usually benefits from the security relatives provide and from the care available to her from her children as she gets older. And a woman who belongs to a thriving church has a community to support and sustain her in numerous ways as she suffers the vicissitudes of life.

The left, however, has always made it their mission to destroy the nuclear family (read Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto or any of the radical feminist tracts). Progressives like Irina Dunn and Gloria Steinem once argued that men were superfluous to women ("A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle"). A decadent entertainment culture, augmented by the legitimization of abortion-on-demand, degraded the significance of sex and marriage. Cohabitation and transient sexual "hook-ups" quickly morphed from scandalous to normal, and no-fault divorce became the law of the land, making a woman's position even more tenuous. Gay marriage broadened the definition of marriage and opened wide the gate to polyamory and other arrangements that will further erode the security of women.

Having embraced single motherhood and given it our stamp of approval, more and more children are now being raised in families which, instead of having two parents (and incomes) and four grandparents (often with substantial savings and inheritances to bestow upon their grandchildren), these children have only one frequently stressed-out parent like the mother in the video, and one grandmother who is herself often resource-poor. Little wonder that that poor mother was in tears.

Churches, too, traditionally afforded help to distressed families and were thus an essential element in the safety net for women, but the left is hostile to organized religion, and as this hostility has pervaded both academic and popular culture, especially since WWII, there has been a mass migration of young people from the church. This not only isolates women for whom religious community is no longer a live option from a major source of relief, but it also has left many churches bereft of the resources and manpower required to serve those who still remain within its ambit.

By rejecting the traditional values of marriage, family and church we've made life far more difficult for women like the lady in the Sanders video. That's tragic enough, but the tragedy is compounded by the fact that in her desperation she finds herself pleading for help from people - left-liberal-progressives like Senator Sanders - whose ideas, policies, and influence in the culture over the last three generations are largely, even if inadvertently, responsible for her plight.

Hard to Believe He Meant This

I recently received in my inbox an ad for a new book by Sojourners' founder Jim Wallis titled, America's Original Sin which, presumably, is a book about America's racist past. Racism is indeed an ugly fact of American life. The toxin can be found among whites, blacks, and probably every other racial group in the nation. It's an unfortunate part of human nature and a manifestation of our disordered humanity.

Even so, the ad for the book made a startling claim. It uses a pull quote from the book in which Wallis writes: “If white Christians acted more Christian than white, black parents would have less to fear for their children.”

Maybe this good man (I mean that sincerely. Wallis has devoted his life to helping the poor) didn't intend this quote to be interpreted as meaning what it patently means, but if he does it's very disturbing that he would say this. Surely no one who thinks clearly thinks that black parents fear for their children because white Christians are not Christian enough. Black parents' fears for their children stem from the fact that too many other black children are raised in families which have failed to instill basic moral values. A black child is far, far more likely to be harmed by another black than by anyone who is white, Christian or otherwise. Surely, Wallis knows this.

In fact, white parents have a great deal more to fear for their children if they live in or near a black neighborhood than black parents have to fear for their children in white neighborhoods. Thousands of black kids are murdered and maimed every year in cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Detroit and they're not being killed by nominally Christian white kids.

Wallis should ask why it is that many black parents want to get their kids into predominately white schools and neighborhoods where they'll be surrounded by white kids, but white parents whose children attend predominately black schools often live in daily trepidation of their children being beaten, intimidated and extorted by black teens.

To blame white Christians for the fears and problems confronting African American parents in our society is ridiculous, irresponsible and reprehensible.

It's ridiculous because it's so manifestly false. It's irresponsible because it shifts the blame onto people who have little to do with the problem, thus impeding any prospect of solution to the very serious problems facing black Americans, and it's reprehensible because it seeks to make people feel guilty for a problem not of their doing and engendering and reinforcing suspicion and hostility among blacks for whites.

I guess to be fair to Wallis I should read his book and get the context, but this is the pull quote he uses to promote it, and it's mystifying why he'd use it unless he meant what it says. What's needed in this country is to bring people together, to unify us as a people, to stop pointing fingers, to stop the "us vs. them" rhetoric so that we can solve the problems that residual racism causes. If this book is anything like the pull quote it'll only have the opposite effect.

Too Big to Jail?

It appears that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is up to her wig in felonies due to her cavalier treatment of classified material which she put on her personal, unprotected email server. Yet her campaign insists, despite an ongoing FBI investigation, that the former first lady is not the "subject" of an investigation.

Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online explains the technical use of the term and exactly what's going on with the FBI perusal of Ms. Clinton's derelictions. His essay is very informative.

McCarthy begins by adumbrating the current state of public knowledge of Ms. Clinton's recklessness and mendacity:

The latest shoe in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s scandalous mishandling of classified information dropped heavily this week. It had already been reported that, contrary to her denials, hundreds of secret intelligence communications were transmitted over the private, unsecured e-mail system on which the former secretary of state recklessly conducted government business. It is now clear that some of these contained “top secret/SAP” information. (SAP is “special access programs.”) This indicates defense secrets of the highest order, the compromise of which can destroy vital intelligence programs, get covert agents killed, and imperil national security.

In other words, there was material on her server, which was accessible to every reasonably tech savvy intelligence agency in the world, which exposed secret operations and operatives. It's not known yet whether Ms Clinton's arrogant defiance of security protocols has cost anyone his or her life but it may well have.

McCarthy then explains that a "subject" of an investigation is a person

whose conduct is being scrutinized and who, depending on what evidence turns up, may or may not be charged. This distinguishes them from targets, who are suspects virtually certain to be indicted for an obvious crime; and from mere witnesses, whose interaction with a suspect suggests no criminality on their part (e.g., the teller in a bank hold-up, or the neighbor awakened by a fatal gunshot next door).

If someone’s conduct is being investigated for potential wrongdoing, it is safe to assume that person is a subject of that investigation. Thus understood, Mrs. Clinton is not only a subject; she is the main subject. After all, the investigation centers on her mishandling of classified information via a private e-mail system that she improperly set up for all her government business and over which she well knew it was illegal to disseminate classified information. And if recent reporting is accurate, the investigation is now delving into potential corruption: the favorable treatment donors to her private foundation were given by the State Department she was running. Given that the investigation appears to be tracking her unique activities, how could she possibly not be a subject? What would otherwise be the point of investigating?

Yet the Clinton campaign and various media outlets insist she's not a "subject" of an investigation, so what's the explanation for this?

As a technical matter, no matter how extensively the FBI pokes around on its own, no one can be a subject of a real investigation — i.e., one that can lead to criminal charges — unless and until there is a grand jury. That does not happen until the Justice Department hops on board. Alas, regular criminal-justice procedures have been suspended by the explosive politics of the Clinton investigation. The FBI is doing its professional, apolitical best to investigate the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

The high stakes rattle not only the Clinton campaign but also the Democratic administration in which Mrs. Clinton worked when she engaged in the work-related conduct being investigated. On the one hand, the Obama administration does not want to be seen by the public as obstructing the FBI; on the other hand, President Obama does not want to be seen by his base as tanking the Democrats’ best shot at retaining the White House — the likely fallout if the Obama Justice Department signals that a formal, very serious criminal investigation is underway.

So Obama is hedging his bets. He is letting the FBI investigate, but on its own, without Justice Department prosecutors and the grand jury. This frees the administration and the Clinton campaign to be, by turns, ambiguous and disingenuous about whether there really is a formal investigation going on... I don’t think it’s going to work.

Of course, making the case would not mean the FBI could force attorney general Loretta Lynch — and the president to whom she answers — to pursue the case. The FBI cannot convene a grand jury and present an indictment. But you’d best believe the FBI can make the Obama administration look very bad if it shrinks from doing so. Then it will be a matter of how far Barack Obama is willing to stick his neck out for Hillary Clinton. I’m betting not that far.

A number of commenters familiar with the FBI personnel involved have said that should Attorney General Loretta Lynch refuse to empanel a Grand Jury and issue an indictment there'll be significant resignations in the FBI, as well there should be. The speculation is, too, that all the information that the FBI has accumulated against Ms. Clinton would be leaked into the public domain, which would not only stain Ms. Clinton's image in the midst of a presidential campaign but also, potentially, sully both Ms. Lynch and Mr. Obama. Why would they want to risk that for a woman like Hillary Clinton? I'm betting they won't.

Kinesin

Kinesin is a protein which transports vacuoles along microtubules to different regions of the cell. Watch this three minute video and then see if you can think of a plausible explanation for how such a mechanism could have evolved through blind, unguided processes:

The more scientists learn about life, consciousness, the earth, and the universe the harder it is becoming to cling to the old Darwinian materialism so fashionable in the last century. Indeed, twentieth century materialism is beginning to look something like a philosophical anachronism, a contemporary version of alchemy. Alchemy seemed right during the medieval period but couldn't be sustained once our knowledge of chemistry began to blossom in the 18th and 19th centuries. So it is with philosophical materialism today.

For more on the video and others like it go here.

Contra Trump

National Review has come out with an article in which they lay out the case for declining Mr. Trump's seductions. This has irritated Rush Limbaugh and a few others who claim to be conservatives but who, like a girl yielding her virtue to a charming rake, throw their principles to the wind as soon as someone comes along who can put the media in its place, who is not part of the political establishment, and who doesn't give a hiccup about political correctness. Evidently, some people have yearned for so long to hear a politician speak as Trump does that they don't much care what he says or what his past political opinions have been, he's their guy. It's been sad to watch.

Anyway, the list of conservatives who participated in the accompanying symposium at NR is impressive. It includes the following names:

Economist Thomas Sowell, Media Research Center president L. Brent Bozell III, TheBlaze founder Glenn Beck, former U.S. attorneys general Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey, syndicated radio hosts Dana Loesch and Michael Medved, syndicated columnists Cal Thomas and Mona Charen,The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, First Things editor R. R. Reno,Commentary editor John Podhoretz, National Affairs editor Yuval Levin, novelist Mark Helprin, National Review contributing editor Andrew C. McCarthy, The Resurgent founder Erick Erickson, Club for Growth president David M. McIntosh, author and presidential scholar Steven F. Hayward, The Federalist publisher Ben Domenech, Cato Institute executive vice president David Boaz, Townhall.com editor Katie Pavlich, and Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Each of them makes a contribution to the symposium and their reasons for resisting the Trump temptation are very much worth reading. Here's the lede from the National Review article:

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries.

Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones. Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.)

Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it. His signature issue is concern over immigration — from Latin America but also, after Paris and San Bernardino, from the Middle East. He has exploited the yawning gap between elite opinion in both parties and the public on the issue, and feasted on the discontent over a government that can’t be bothered to enforce its own laws no matter how many times it says it will (President Obama has dispensed even with the pretense).

But even on immigration, Trump often makes no sense and can’t be relied upon. A few short years ago, he was criticizing Mitt Romney for having the temerity to propose “self-deportation,” or the entirely reasonable policy of reducing the illegal population through attrition while enforcing the nation’s laws. Now, Trump is a hawk’s hawk.

Do read the rest, especially if you're a Trump supporter who considers him or herself to be a conservative.

Meanwhile MSNBC host Chris Matthews whose boorishness makes talk radio host Sean Hannity seem the essence of courtesy, was in such a state of distemper at this piece that he embarrassed himself even more than usual the other night, inviting a National Review editor to respond to his questions and then refusing to let her get a word in edge-wise:

This, I suppose, is what passes for civil, enlightened discourse at MSNBC. Nothing in the National Review piece or in the symposium cites Trump's alleged opposition to the war, other than perhaps his inconsistency on the matter, as the reason for opposing him. But this doesn't matter to Matthews who sees a chance to take some wild shots at a few of his least favorite people and in the process bully a woman, a sport in which he often indulges on his show.

In any case, I wonder how much impact the National Review anti-endorsement will have on the race. The people who contribute to the symposium and who read the magazine are conservative intellectuals, but I don't think Trump's supporters are intellectually inclined or support him for intellectual reasons. Their support for Trump, like the support for Obama in 2008 and 2010, is more visceral than rational, and, given the precedent, that should concern us all.

Warming Bad, Ice Age Good

Husna Haq at Christian Science Monitor writes about how carbon emissions since the industrial revolution have actually averted a real geological/climatological catastrophe - another global ice age. If this is true then atmospheric greenhouse gasses have been a genuine blessing, but Ms. Haq doesn't see it that way:

[A] new study suggests climate change may have delayed the next ice age by 50,000 to 100,000 years.

Human interference in the form of burning fossil fuels has irrevocably changed Earth's cycles, significantly delaying the next glacial cycle, according to a study published in the journal Nature....

Were it not for high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Earth would be due for an ice age, a period of extreme cooling of the climate during which ice sheets cover large swatches of the land.

This sounds like it should be cause for rejoicing, but then Ms. Haq delivers herself of a real head-scratcher:

While it may appear to be good news that humans have successfully delayed the next ice age, it's actually not.(emphasis mine)

Ice ages play a significant role in shaping the landscape and leaving behind fertile soil for Earth's civilizations. They carve channels in Earth, leaving behind rivers and lakes. If the period between ice ages becomes too long, the planet may become relatively dry and barren, explains Gizmodo.

Gizmodo is a tech blog so I don't know what particular expertise they have in climatology or geology, but never mind that. What seems to concern Ms. Haq is that since the earth is not now undergoing glaciation, new rivers and lakes are not being formed.

Think about that for a moment. If an ice age did recur most of North America and Europe would be covered with an ice sheet about one mile high. Whole cities would be crushed and leveled as the ice advanced southward from the arctic. Much of the world's population would be pushed into a considerably reduced habitable region which would create enormous chaos and conflict as migrants struggled with indigenous people for land and resources. Agriculture would be disrupted and mass starvation would ensue, as would mass extinctions of wildlife, but Ms. Haq would apparently prefer all these calamities befall the world than have global warming raise sea levels a few inches. What else could she mean when she says that averting an ice age via global warming is not good news?

One can only stand in jaw-dropping astonishment at how some people think.

Does Maher Know Whereof He Speaks?

Bill Maher seems like a very bright guy and is one of the better-known and more outspoken representatives of contemporary atheism, which is why I was surprised to see his response to a question in an interview he did recently.

The interviewer asked him a question about Republican candidate for president Ted Cruz: "Why do you find him [Cruz] scarier than Trump? He is certainly more cunning than him and a far more educated guy with Princeton, Harvard Law, and his constitutional law background."

Maher's reply was this:

It’s high intelligence in the service of evil. It’s one thing to have evil people who aren’t that bright! There’s a reason why everyone hates Ted Cruz. There’s a reason why the big question about Ted Cruz is always, “When he shaves in the morning, how does he avoid spitting in the mirror?” To think of this guy being the president of the United States, this ambition and love of power combined with being on the wrong side of every issue, it’s a very scary prospect. (emphasis mine)

Set aside whatever feelings you may have about Ted Cruz and focus on Maher's use of the term "evil." Evil is a moral category. It denotes an act or a person who does horribly wrong acts, so my question is, how does an atheist like Maher explain his use of a moral term? If atheism is true then there are no wrong acts, we are, as Nietzsche put it, beyond good and evil. What's morally wrong, as Hemmingway says, is simply whatever one feels bad after doing.

In other words, on atheism, to call something or someone evil is simply to express one's own disapprobation, one's own dislike or aversion to the act or person, but it tells us no more than that. Moral evil, like moral good, can only exist in any meaningful way if there's an objective standard of behavior to which we are held accountable and that standard can only exist if there is a personal, transcendent, perfectly good source of it, i.e. God or something very much like God.

If one wishes to hold onto moral value and the ability to make moral judgments one must forego atheism. If one insists on atheism then one should face up to the fact that to be consistent he/she should be a moral nihilist and forever renounce the right to say of anyone or anything that it is morally wrong. What one cannot reasonably do is embrace atheism and also make moral judgments of other people's behavior.

For Maher to call Ted Cruz evil, then, is misleading, inappropriate, and silly. It's like calling a grizzly bear evil because it attacks hikers. It's what philosophers call a category mistake - imputing to something a property which does not belong to that thing. Maher should know better, and maybe he does in which case he's damaging his credibility. On the other hand, maybe he doesn't.

A Cure for MS?

There's an amazing story out of the UK this week. It appears that doctors have developed a technique for arresting the progression of multiple sclerosis and reversing the deterioration in function that it causes. Some of the details are discussed in a report in the UK Telegraph:

A pioneering new stem cell treatment is reversing and then halting the potentially crippling effects of multiple sclerosis.

Patients embarking on a ground-breaking trial of the new treatment have found they can walk again and that the disease even appears to be stopped in its tracks.

The treatment is being carried out at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield and Kings College Hospital, London and involves use a high dose of chemotherapy to knock out the immune system before rebuilding it with stem cells taken from the patient’s own blood.

Holly Drewry, 25, from Sheffield, was wheelchair bound after the birth of her daughter Isla, now two. But Miss Drewry claims the new treatment has transformed her life.

She told the BBC’s Panorama programme: “I couldn’t walk steadily. I couldn’t trust myself holding her (Isla) in case I fell. Being a new mum I wanted to do it all properly but my MS was stopping me from doing it.

“It is scary because you think, when is it going to end?”

Miss Drewry had the treatment in Sheffield. She said: “I started seeing changes within days of the stem cells being put in.

“I walked out of the hospital. I walked into my house and hugged Isla. I cried and cried. It was a bit overwhelming. It was a miracle.”

Her treatment has now been reviewed and her condition found to have been dramatically halted. She will need to be monitored for years but the hope is that her transplant will be a permanent fix.

For other patients, the results have been equally dramatic. Steven Storey was a marathon runner and triathlete before he was struck down with the disease and left completely paralysed: “I couldn’t flicker a muscle,” he said. But within nine days of the treatment he could move his toe and after 10 months managed a mile-long swim in the Lake District. He has also managed to ride a bike and walk again.

“It was great. I felt I was back,” he said.

Doctors believe MS is caused by a person's own immune system turning on the person and attacking the brain and spinal cord, leading to loss of function and even death.

The procedure involves harvesting and storing the patient's stem cells and then killing the immune system with drugs usually used in cancer treatment. Once the immune system is destroyed the stem cells are reinserted into the patient where they form red and white blood cells and within a month the immune system is reestablished, evidently in a more benign form.

Professor Basil Sharrack, a consultant neurologist at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: "Since we started treating patients three years ago, some of the results we have seen have been miraculous.

"This is not a word I would use lightly, but we have seen profound neurological improvements."

There are more details in the article. It didn't say when the treatment will be made more widely available, but if it's shown to work consistently I'm sure there'll be hundreds of thousands of MS sufferers in the US who will be eager to try it out.

Microaggressors and Micromanagers

When we were small children we probably all had the experience of running in tears to our mother or father because a sibling had said or done something we thought terribly hurtful or mean and then pleading with our parent for redress. At some point in our development, of course, we outgrew this behavior and realized that being a crybaby was infantile.

If and when we became parents ourselves we encouraged our children to ignore slights or to handle them in a more mature fashion than demanding sympathy and succor from us. That's what grown-ups try to teach the young - unless, that is, the grown-ups are administrators at Penn State University. There the administrators have apparently chosen to assume the aspect of a parent who actually encourages little Suzy to tattle on her brother:

At Pennsylvania State University, no hurt feeling is too small, no slight too inconsequential, no unintentionally biased statement too unimportant. Administrators want to know it all.

The public university is in the midst of a massive campaign that encourages students not only to watch what they say, lest they offend someone, but also to report any and all biased statements to campus officials.

“There is no place for hate, overt or subtle, at Penn State – such actions do not represent our mutually held values,” Eric Barron, president of Penn State, stated in a recent message to the campus community.

More than 1,000 images of a stop sign in the form of posters and magnets have been distributed at Penn State. They tell students to “be the difference” and “take a stand for a positive campus climate.” The posters classify a wide array of situations as a “bias incident” including cases of discrimination, bigotry, inequity, sexual assault, injustice, and much more.

Barron, in his message to the campus, stated that students should report acts of “hate or intolerance.”

Lisa Powers, director of Penn State’s strategic communications office, said in an email to The College Fix that an act of intolerance includes microaggressions. “An act of intolerance can be identified as any forms of microaggressions, verbal assaults, and/or racial subjugation,” Powers said.

And what constitutes "racial subjugation"? Does expressing strong disagreement with an opinion expressed by a person of another race in a classroom discussion count? What constitutes a "verbal assault"? Does calling President Barron a dimwit count?

Weirdly, Ms Powers averred that this policy is actually not a threat to students' First Amendment rights: Powers said the bias reporting acts as a catharsis of sorts for students, acknowledging the public university has no right to hinder students’ First Amendment rights.

“Penn State stands firmly behind free speech and free expression, even in those instances when the views being expressed are disturbing or insulting, or the actions hurtful,” Powers told The College Fix. “The First Amendment doesn’t just apply to those who express ideas with which we agree. It also applies to those whose ideas we may find challenging, repugnant or even appalling. By providing an outlet for individuals to report bias they have seen or experienced, we are giving them an equal right to express their thoughts and feelings on the matter.” Sure, but if she really believes this what's the point of the Speech Police at PSU spending a lot of money to get students to report speech which hurts their feelings? Is the next step to somehow sanction the transgressors?

Like the child who wails for parental justice because her brother is "looking at her," it won't be long before "microaggressions" are deemed weighty enough by the students who suffer the pain of being "looked at" to demand the full weight of the University disciplinary apparatus be brought down on some unfortunate student's head.

There are two fascinating characteristics of modern-day Progressivism on display here: The first is the manifestation of the totalitarian impulse which has always tempted the ideological left. The second is the infantilizing of our young men and women which, of course, makes them easier to control and manipulate. A university that treats its students as if they're attending a day-care prepares them for the sort of governmental regimentation the left has always wished to impose.

This is the perhaps inevitable consequence of placing authority and power in the hands of Progressives, for these are people who feel it their mission in life to micromanage other people's lives.

Martin Luther King

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday and it would be well to focus on why we do. King was a man of great courage who was resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America. His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's sad that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his dream of racial harmony has not.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to liberalism.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance, but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. Our Justice Department is reluctant to prosecute blacks who deny others their civil rights, and any criticism of our president is interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Sadly, people are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history, but that's precisely contrary to Martin Luther King's dream.

Nor do I think he would have been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it were somehow separate from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of American history. The civil rights movement was not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded. It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely held these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to stop thinking of racism as a sin committed by the majority race only.

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and of our minds and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

Moderate Islam

Andrew McCarthy at National Review argues that the reason so many Muslims are violent terrorists is not because they've been radicalized but because they take their Koran seriously. McCarthy offers a critique in his column of an essay by Cheryl Bernard in which she makes the claim that the best way to win over Muslim radicals is by the influence of moderate Muslims. McCarthy has a lot of experience as a prosecutor of Muslim terrorists and his entire article is recommended, but here's the key excerpt:

[Bernard's] error is implicit from the very start of her essay (my italics):

Over the past decade, the prevailing thinking has been that radical Islam is most effectively countered by moderate Islam. The goal was to find religious leaders and scholars and community ‘influencers’ — to use the lingo of the counter-radicalization specialists — who could explain to their followers and to any misguided young people that Islam is a religion of peace, that the term jihad refers mainly to the individual’s personal struggle against temptation and for moral betterment, and that tolerance and interfaith cooperation should prevail.

Plainly, the “prevailing thinking” casually assumes “facts” not only unproven but highly dubious. Bernard takes it as a given not only that there is an easily identifiable “moderate Islam,” but also that this . . . what? . . . doctrine? . . . attitude? . . . is the most effective counter to “radical Islam.”

But what is moderate Islam? She doesn’t say. She maintains that there are countless moderate Muslims who, by her telling, embrace “Western values, modern life and integration.” In fact, she assumes there are so many such Muslims that they constitute the “mainstream” of Islam. Yet, that proposition is not necessarily true even in the West, where Muslims are a minority who might be expected to assimilate into the dominant, non-Muslim culture; and it most certainly is not true in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East.

Even worse is Bernard’s assertion — uncritical, and without a hint that there may be a counter-case — “that Islam is a religion of peace, [and] that the term jihad refers mainly to the individual’s personal struggle against temptation and for moral betterment.”

As is the wont of Islam’s Western apologists, Bernard is attempting to shield from examination what most needs examining. Her reliance on the potential of “moderate Islam” to quell “radical Islam” is entirely premised on the conceit that Islam is, in fact, moderate and peaceful. Her assumption that the vast majority of Muslims can be won over (indeed, have already been won over, she seems to say) to Western values is premised on the conceit that those values are universal and, hence, locatable in the core of Islam — such that “tolerance and interfaith cooperation should prevail” because Islam is all for them.

Islam, however, is not a religion of peace. It is a religion of conquest that was spread by the sword. Moreover, it is not only untrue that jihad refers “mainly” to the individual’s internal struggle to live morally; it is also untrue that the Islamic ideal of the moral life is indistinguishable from the Western conception.

To be clear, this is not to say that Islam could not conceivably become peaceful. Nor is it to say that jihad could not be reinterpreted such that a decisive majority of Muslims would accept that its actual primary meaning — namely, holy war to establish Islam’s dominance — has been superseded by the quest for personal betterment. To pull that off, though, will require a huge fight. It cannot be done by inhabiting an alternative universe where it has already been done.

That fight would be over doctrine, the stark omission in Bernard’s analysis. I do not think the omission is an oversight. Note her labeling of faux moderates as “aggressive traditionalists.” Citing “tradition” implies that the backwardness and anti-Western hostility she detects, to her great dismay, is a function of cultural inhibitions. But what she never tells you, and hopes you’ll never ask, is where Islamic culture and traditions come from.

Alas, they are direct consequences of Islamic scripture and sharia, the law derived from scripture. She can’t go there. She wants Islam to be moderate, but its scriptures won’t cooperate. She must rely on tradition and culture because traditions and cultures can and do evolve. Scripture, by contrast, does not — not in Islam as taught by over a millennium’s worth of scholars and accepted by untold millions of Muslims. Mainstream Islam holds that scripture is immutable. The Koran, the center of Islamic life, is deemed the “uncreated word of Allah,” eternal...

Bernard must blame aggressive traditionalism because if the problem is aggressive doctrine rooted in aggressive scripture, then it’s not changing any time soon — or maybe ever. Moreover, she is not in a position to challenge doctrine and scripture without deeply offending the believers to whom she is appealing. They are taught that any departure from centuries-old scholarly consensus is blasphemy.

A Muslim student once told me that there is no such thing as moderate Islam or radical Islam. There is just Islam as it is taught in the holy Koran. Unfortunately, the Koran is not a moderate book which is why those who follow every jot and tittle of the Prophet's teaching chafe at being told by such as the mayor of the city of Philadelphia that they're not true Muslims.

Cruel Logic

A professor has given a lecture this evening in which he claims that our behavior is the product of our genetic make-up. We don't really have free will. There is no God and we're pretty much at the mercy of our genes which means that we're not really responsible for what we do.

A psychopath has managed to kidnap the professor and challenges him to defend this thesis in the real world. The video, titled Cruel Logic, is pretty grim but as you watch it ask yourself, given the assumptions of the professor, what answer could he make to the psychopath's challenge.

If you were in the professor's position what could you say to save your life? Does the psychopath's behavior make sense if the professor is correct? If man truly is morally autonomous what's actually wrong with the psychopath's behavior, beyond the fact that we just don't like it?

The only way to resist the conclusion that there's really nothing wrong with what he's doing is to deny the premise that our behavior is genetically determined and that morality is a completely subjective phenomenon. But, in the absence of an objective, transcendent ground for moral behavior, a God, there is no way out.

As atheist philosopher Richard Rorty once admitted, the secular man, such as himself, has no answer to the question, why not be cruel. Atheist biologist Richard Dawkins puts it this way: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

In other words, according to Dawkins the psychopath in the video conforms perfectly to the way things are in a Godless universe. Ideas do indeed have consequences.

Why So Many Don't Learn

It may be hard for those who themselves went to good schools but who haven't recently been inside a school building while classes were in session to understand why so many kids, especially kids in our urban schools, can't seem to get a good education despite the fact that taxpayers spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on each of them.

Indeed, the government of my state of Pennsylvania is at a budget impasse right now because the Governor wants to raise taxes to spend even more on public schools, thinking that that will improve our students' education, while the legislature refuses on the grounds that lack of funding is not why kids are not receiving the education they need.

Well, then, if it's not a matter of money, what is the reason so many of our young people seem to pass through our high schools with their minds only minimally improved by the experience? Some people, typically conservatives, blame teachers, while others, typically liberals, blame the lack of spending, but neither of these answers, in my opinion, gets to the heart of the problem. The reason that so many students come out of our public schools as ignorant as when they entered is because so many of these kids live in dysfunctional families, reside in dysfunctional communities, and carry the consequences of those dysfunctions, as well as their own dysfunctional behavior, into the school with them.

In the environment created by these students - and their parents - teachers can't teach and those students who do want to learn are seriously short-changed by chaotic classrooms. School authorities are either complicit in this or, if they really want to change it, find themselves hamstrung by laws and regulations that thwart them from removing surly, foul-mouthed, and disruptive students from halls and classrooms.

To get a sense of that to which I refer read this article at The Federalist by a high school English teacher in Baltimore named Dana Casey who describes a typical day. I urge anyone reading this who is planning a career in education to read Casey's article in its entirety.

Her article is summed up nicely, I think, by her concluding paragraphs:

On my way out of the building, I see a group of fellow teachers chatting, and I join in. We have little time with each other and are mostly isolated in our classrooms. The group is talking about yet another teacher who has quit—walked out in the middle of the school day.

That is the sixth teacher this year to quit, from a staff of around 60 teachers. Half of all new teachers don’t make it past the first year; more leave before year five. This particular teacher already had 12 years of service in, but just couldn’t take it anymore.

Chaos can do that to a teacher. Every day this week, some teacher was crying. Even I cried one day, and I am not usually a crier. Exhausted, I climb into my car and wave at a few students as I pull out of the lot. Tomorrow, I will do it all over again, as I have for the past 23 years. Maybe.

Young people have to be taught to value education at home. They have to be taught proper behavior and respect at home. If a substantial number of students come to school without having been taught such things, even if they're not the majority, they will turn their school into an ineffectual bedlam in which few will learn much of anything. The reason our schools are failing is because too many families, fragmented and indifferent to the values their children need to do better in life than their parents, have already failed.