Just Right

Scientists have cataloged dozens of parameters that have to be just right for life to appear on earth. The improbability of a planet having so many of these properties is so high that some scientists have speculated that life, at least complex life, might exist nowhere else in the universe no matter how many other planets are out there. This is the thesis of such books as Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards.

A few such parameters are:

...a galactic habitable zone, a central star and planetary system having the requisite character, the circumstellar habitable zone, a right sized terrestrial planet, the advantage of a gas giant guardian and large satellite, conditions needed to ensure the planet has a magnetosphere and plate tectonics, the chemistry of the lithosphere, atmosphere, and oceans, the role of "evolutionary pumps" such as massive glaciation and rare bolide impacts, and whatever led to the still mysterious Cambrian explosion of animal phyla. The emergence of intelligent life may have required yet other rare events.

New Scientist has a report on some research that shows yet another cosmic coincidence that allows life to exist on earth. It turns out that, as strange as it may seem at first, the orbit of Saturn has to be almost exactly as it is for life to exist on earth:

Earth's comfortable temperatures may be thanks to Saturn's good behaviour. If the ringed giant's orbit had been slightly different, Earth's orbit could have been wildly elongated, like that of a long-period comet.

Our solar system is a tidy sort of place: planetary orbits here tend to be circular and lie in the same plane, unlike the highly eccentric orbits of many exoplanets. Elke Pilat-Lohinger of the University of Vienna, Austria, was interested in the idea that the combined influence of Jupiter and Saturn – the solar system's heavyweights – could have shaped other planets' orbits. She used computer models to study how changing the orbits of these two giant planets might affect the Earth.

Earth's orbit is so nearly circular that its distance from the sun only varies between 147 and 152 million kilometres, or around 2 per cent about the average. Moving Saturn's orbit just 10 percent closer in would disrupt that by creating a resonance – essentially a periodic tug – that would stretch out the Earth's orbit by tens of millions of kilometres. That would result in the Earth spending part of each year outside the habitable zone, the ring around the sun where temperatures are right for liquid water.

Tilting Saturn's orbit would also stretch out Earth's orbit. According to a simple model that did not include other inner planets, the greater the tilt, the more the elongation increased. Adding Venus and Mars to the model stabilised the orbits of all three planets, but the elongation nonetheless rose as Saturn's orbit got more tilted. Pilat-Lohinger says a 20-degree tilt would bring the innermost part of Earth's orbit closer to the sun than Venus.

In other words, our solar system is like a delicately balanced ecosystem, all the parts of which seem to be important in making earth the sort of place where life can arise and be sustained. The odds of such a system existing elsewhere in the universe would seem to be very small.

It might be mentioned in passing that it's not just Saturn's orbit that makes life possible on earth. Scientists have shown that massive outer planets like Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune act as gravitational vacuum sweepers sucking up a lot of debris that would otherwise invade the inner reaches of the solar system and threaten earth with constant collisions. It really is astonishing how many factors must all be just right for life to exist on this one little planet.

Police Shootings

If a visitor from Mars were to listen to media chatter they might think that young unarmed black men are being mown down in the streets by racist white cops with alarming regularity. The facts, though, are otherwise as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post study reveals.

The WaPo's data is displayed on a chart that reveals a number of facts about police shootings that may come as a surprise to some who check out their findings.

For example: In 2015 there were 990 people shot and killed by police. The overwhelming majority of those killed by police were armed and white. Four hundred ninety four of the dead were white and 258 were black (Hispanics and other races made up the balance). Most of the deceased were showing a weapon, but 93 were unarmed, 32 of whom were white and 38 black.

Among these unarmed individuals 14 of the whites and 15 of the blacks who were killed were attacking, or in some way threatening, the police officer. Of those who were unarmed and not attacking the officer, several of them were shot accidentally, or they brandished a device that was mistaken for a weapon, etc.

In short, there may be a problem with police sometimes using excessive force, but the idea perpetuated by Black Lives Matter and others that African Americans are a deliberate target of racist cops is simply not born out by the facts.

On the Evolution of Language

Geneticist Michael Denton's new book, somewhat awkwardly titled Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, is a remarkable piece of philosophy of biology. In the book Denton critiques the classical Darwinian view that biological structures develop in organisms gradually over long periods of time because they serve an adaptive function. This view is called functionalism and Denton argues persuasively that functionalist explanations are simply inadequate to explain a host of structures like the mammalian forelimb, the shapes of leaves, the structure of flowers, and many others.

One other example of phenomena that functionalist explanations cannot explain, Denton argues, is the emergence in human beings of language. He recently wrote a synopsis of his argument for Evolution News and Views of which the following is a part:

In the early 1960s, in one of the landmark advances in 20th-century science, Noam Chomsky showed that all human languages share a deep invariant structure. Despite their very different "surface" grammars, they all share a deep set of syntactic rules and organizing principles. All have rules limiting sentence length and structure and all exhibit the phenomenon of recursion -- the embedding of one sentence in another. Chomsky has postulated that this deep "universal grammar" is innate and is embedded somewhere in the neuronal circuitry of the human brain in a language organ.

Children learn [human] languages so easily, despite a "poverty of stimulus," because they possess innate knowledge of the deep rules and principles of human language and can select, from all the sentences that come to their minds, only those that conform to a "deep structure" encoded in the brain's circuits.

The challenge this poses to Darwinian evolution is apparent. Take the above-mentioned characteristic that all human languages exhibit: recursion. In the sentence, "The man who was wearing a blue hat which he bought from the girl who sat on the wall was six feet tall," the italicized words are embedded sentences. Special rules allow human speakers to handle and understand such sentences. And these rules, which govern the nature of recursion, are specific and complex. So how did the computational machinery to handle it evolve? David Premack is skeptical:

I challenge the reader to reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or protohumans were hunting mastodons... Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers to be able to remark, "Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack"?

Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules, of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like. For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

There is considerable controversy over what structures in the brain restrict all human languages to the same deep structure.... Yet however it is derived during development, there is no doubt that a unique deep structure underlies the languages of all members of our species. It is because of the same underlying deep structure that we can speak the language of the San Bushman or an Australian aborigine, and they in turn can speak English.

The fact that all modern humans, despite their long "evolutionary separation" -- some modern races such as the San of the Kalahari and the Australian aborigines have been separated by perhaps 400,000 years of independent evolution -- can learn each other's languages implies that this deep grammar must have remained unchanged since all modern humans (African and non-African) diverged from their last common African ancestor, at least 200,000 years ago. As Chomsky puts it:

What we call "primitive people"... to all intents and purposes are identical to us. There's no cognitively significant genetic difference anyone can tell. If they happened to be here, they would be one of us, and they would speak English... If we were there, we would speak their languages. So far as anyone knows, there is virtually no detectable genetic difference across the species that is language-related.

[I]t is not only the deep structure of language that has remained invariant across all human races. All races share in equal measure all the other higher intellectual abilities: musical, artistic, and mathematical ability, and capacity for abstract thought. These also, therefore, must have been present in our African common ancestors more than 200,000 or more years ago, and must have remained unchanged, and for some reason latent since our common divergence. To suggest that language and our higher mental faculties evolved in parallel to reach these same remarkable ends independently in all the diverse lineages of modern humans over 200,000 years ago or more, would be to propose the most striking instance of parallel evolution in the entire history of life and be inexplicable in Darwinian terms.

If I understand Denton aright, these capacities, which all humans share, have been present from the origin of the species but no alleged non-human evolutionary precursor has them. Thus, these capacities, as remarkable as they are, must have evolved with extraordinary rapidity, appearing full-blown in the earliest human beings. That's very hard to explain in terms of traditional Darwinian gradualism and functionalism.

It seems the more we learn the more implausible classical naturalistic Darwinism appears to be.

A Legacy in Three Acts

President Obama is at the point in his administration when the occupant of the White House begins to think hard about the legacy he'll leave to history. Mr. Obama may himself be indifferent to such matters, but if he does care about how historians will judge his tenure it must be giving him heartburn.

Consider just three issues into which his administration has pumped a lot of time, energy and political capital:

Health care (Obamacare) - For the third straight year insurance companies participating in the Obamacare marketplaces are finding it necessary to raise their premiums, arguing that the system is unsustainable if premiums are actually "affordable." If they can't raise premiums many of the insurers will be leaving the system. If they do raise premiums many healthy people will simply not buy insurance leaving the risk pool full of people most likely to use coverage which makes it more expensive for everyone else. In any case, Obamacare is growing increasingly unstable and will probably be greatly changed after Mr. Obama leaves office.

Mr. Obama's credibility has been seriously tarnished by this. He promised on numerous occasions that his plan would actually make insurance cheaper for families, a family of four, he insisted, would actually pay, on average, $2500 less for premiums, but the opposite has been the case. Just as bad as higher premium costs has been the rise in deductibles. Many people with insurance are not only paying more for their coverage, but their deductibles are so high the insurance they're paying for never gets used. Mr. Obama also promised that everyone would be insured under his plan, but that hasn't happened, either. Millions are uninsured and their number is actually expected to rise over coming years.

Moreover, twelve of the original 23 federally-financed Obamacare co-ops have already collapsed and eight of the 11 remaining co-ops appear likely to fail this year. All in all, Obamacare does not look like an achievement upon which historians will look upon with favor.

See the link for a more detailed synopsis of the problems the Affordable Health Care law is facing.

Education - Joy Pullman at The Federalist concludes that Common Core, despite costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, has been an educational failure. It's a failure a lot of teachers saw coming long ago. Pullman writes that:

[T]he centerpiece of Mr. Obama's education policy, is dead. The big postmortems will roll out in a year or two, but it’s already clear this education monstrosity is eking out its last gasps.

To recap, Common Core is an organizing scheme that aims to control all of American education, from preschool through college. Its core is a set of testing and curriculum blueprints being used as a lever to get all of what kids learn in every subject and at every age into “alignment” with its centrally planned, academically low-quality, and one-size-fits-all mandates.

In fact, Pullman says, all Common Core succeeded in doing is enriching the consultants who lobbied for its implementation.

Last week the Brookings Institution issued the preliminary autopsy in its annual major report on education. It finds that American children are receiving objectively worse academic instruction because of Common Core, in two major respects: In the increase in nonfiction their teachers are assigning, and in a nationwide decline in students taking algebra in eighth grade.

Further, it finds that Common Core has done nothing to help children learn more overall, which was one of its supporters’ major claims: “there also is no evidence that CCSS has made much of a difference during a six-year period of stagnant NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores.” NAEP is the nation’s highest-quality set of large-scale tests, used widely by researchers as benchmarks for American kids’ abilities over time. While younger students have made some small gains on NAEP since it began in 1992, high-school graduates since then have not improved one whit. Even though its supporters promised it would, Common Core isn’t helping.

Researcher Ze’ev Wurman looked at several other indicators of student achievement and found none have improved since Common Core went into effect. In fact, SAT and ACT scores are slightly down. Maybe this spring’s new, Common Core-aligned SAT will start covering for that by making the test easier (as it has every time it did a major test change).

Employment - A third unfortunate aspect of Mr. Obama's legacy is his support for raising the minimum wage. Jed Graham of Investors Business Daily gives us some empirical evidence that forcing employers to pay their employees higher wages simply results in fewer employees:

Despite a nationwide increase in low-paying retail jobs (an increase of 400,000 retail jobs since the end of 2014) three states have experienced a contraction. One, North Dakota, has suffered because low worldwide oil prices have pulled in the reins on the fracking boom there, but the other two states Massachusetts and Connecticut have lost retail jobs for a different, thoroughly predictable, reason.

It’s probably no coincidence that Connecticut and Massachusetts, the first two states to approve hikes in their statewide minimum wage to north of $10 an hour, now stand out because of retail-employment contractions.

Massachusetts has lost 2,200 retail jobs since employment in the sector peaked last July, seasonally adjusted Labor Department data show. Retail employment is down 500 from December 2014, before the first step of the state’s wage hike went into effect. In January, two of the four Sam’s Clubs slated for closure by Wal-Mart were in Massachusetts. While the company didn’t specifically blame the state’s rising minimum wage, closures of other Wal-Mart discount centers or Neighborhood Markets came in high-minimum-wage havens including Oakland, the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart scrapped plans for two stores in D.C., where the $10.50 minimum wage will rise by $1 this July.

Massachusetts was also home to two of the 40 department stores targeted for closure by Macy’s in January after a weak holiday season.

Before Massachusetts approved an $11 wage, Connecticut held the title for the highest state wage. The state first hiked its minimum from $8.25 to $8.70 at the start of 2014, then became the first to embrace President Obama’s call for a $10.10 wage. The current minimum wage of $9.60 will hit $10.10 at the start of 2017.

Now retail employment in Connecticut is down 1,400 from a peak of 185,000 first hit in April 2014, and the state has fewer retail jobs than it did 30 months ago.

This seems to be a pattern everywhere that the minimum wage is rising. American Apparel, for example, is laying off 500 workers in California.

This is how the market works and why government interference is so often counter-productive. Government intrusion into the economy is like trying to tune the engine of a race car with a hammer. When government deprives employers of the freedom to pay their workers what the workers are worth to the employer, the employer will simply hire fewer workers. Politicians will preen themselves on having raised the minimum wage while more low-skilled job-seekers despair of finding any work at all.

Adopting policies that put people out of work is a very odd way to help the poor, and it's a terrible way to build a legacy.

Reductio ad Absurdum

The controversy surrounding open access to any rest room or locker room one feels comfortable in may strike you as ridiculous or it may seem to you to be a matter of basic human rights, but let's set aside for a moment our preconceptions. One test of an idea is to see what happens when it's taken to its logical conclusion. If the implications of an idea can be drawn out without devolving into absurdities then the idea is perhaps sound. If, when taken to its logical endpoint, though, the idea gets us entangled in absurdities from which we cannot extricate ourselves then that's a good indicator that the idea is itself absurd.

So with that short introduction out of the way watch this video, and ask yourself if there's anything wrong with the interviewer's logic. If there is not, ask yourself if there's anything wrong with the starting point of the students being interviewed. After all, something has to be wrong somewhere:

The tactic the interviewer employs in this video is called in logic reductio ad absurdum - a demonstration that the person's initial position, when taken to its logical terminus, reduces to an absurdity. In this case the affirmation that one is whatever one sees oneself as clearly entails that if a 5'9" white male sees himself as a 6'5" Chinese woman then he really is a 6'5" Chinese woman. This is, however, a position one can only hold on pain of being thought delusional.

Pay it Forward

Looking to do something that'll make a difference in people's lives? Why not consider Kiva:

Kiva is a world-wide microfinance organization. The way it works is people from all around the globe lend money to small businesspersons and others in the third world to help them obtain the capital they need to manage their businesses successfully. The borrowers then pay the loan back over time, and the lender can relend the money or withdraw it.

It's a great way to help the poor help themselves and a wonderful opportunity to express your gratitude for all that you have by "paying it forward". You can learn more about how Kiva works at the link.

Nobody's Right If Everybody's Wrong**

There's an interesting contretemps bubbling at Marquette University over one professor's criticism of another instructor, and it seems in this case it's hard to find anyone who has behaved quite as they should have. Here's the story:

In November 2014 an undergraduate approached philosophy instructor and PhD candidate Cheryl Abbate, after a class on John Rawls’ theory of equal liberty. The student said he objected to her suggestions during the class that same-sex marriage isn’t open for debate and that “everyone agrees on this.”

Unknown to Ms. Abbate, the student recorded the exchange on his cell phone. During the conversation, she told him “there are some opinions that are not appropriate, that are harmful, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions” and if someone in the class was homosexual, “don’t you think that that would be offensive to them if you were to raise your hand and challenge this?”

When the student replied that he has a right to argue his opinion, Ms. Abbate responded that “you can have whatever opinions you want but I can tell you right now, in this class homophobic comments, racist comments and sexist comments will not be tolerated. If you don’t like that you are more than free to drop this class.” The student reported the exchange to Marquette professor John McAdams, who teaches political science. Mr. McAdams also writes a blog called the Marquette Warrior, which often criticizes the Milwaukee school for failing to act in accordance with its Catholic mission.

If the facts are as this Wall Street Journal article reports them then in my opinion both the instructor and the student behaved improperly, but the instructor's offense was much the worse. She teaches a philosophy class, for heaven sakes. To rule opinions out of bounds, provided they're courteously expressed, is professionally inexcusable. College is a place where students should be exposed to all sorts of viewpoints and be free to express their own. To treat people like fragile snowflakes which melt at the slightest touch of an unpleasant opinion, is to do students a serious disservice. If Ms. Abbate really did prohibit certain opinions to be voiced in her class then she needs to receive some lessons from the administration on the value of the free exchange of ideas in a college setting.

The student (perhaps) also acted improperly by secretly recording what seems to have been a private conversation between himself and Ms. Abbate.

But there's more.

Mr. McAdams wrote on his blog that Ms. Abbate was “using a tactic typical among liberals now. Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.” His blog went viral, and Ms. Abbate received vicious emails. She has since left Marquette.

Needless to say, the students who sent the vicious emails were acting abominably. This is not the way to react to what Ms. Abbate did. Students could certainly have registered their displeasure without being mean-spirited, rude, or disrespectful. By acting this way they tacitly provide justification for Ms. Abbate's fear that allowing dissenting opinions in class would generate an uncomfortable classroom environment.

Mr. McAdams, too, is not without fault in this matter. He may have been correct in what he said, but throughout the almost fifty years I've been teaching it has always been my conviction that it's unprofessional for one colleague to criticize another to students. I'm not so naive as to think it isn't done, I know all too well that it is, but it's not only an egregious breach of professional ethics, it's often also very juvenile.

But we're not done.

[N]ow Marquette is going after Mr. McAdams. In December 2014, the school sent him a letter suspending his teaching duties and banning him from campus while it reviewed his “conduct” related to the blog post. “You are to remain off campus during this time, and should you need to come to campus, you are to contact me in writing beforehand to explain the purpose of your visit, to obtain my consent and to make appropriate arrangements for that visit,” Dean Richard Holz wrote.

Marquette President Michael Lovell told the tenured professor that he would be suspended without pay and would not be reinstated unless he admitted his conduct was “reckless” and apologized for the unpleasant emails Ms. Abbate received.

This seems to be a gross over-reaction. Mr. McAdams was wrong to stoke the hostility to this instructor - although it's not clear that he did so intentionally - and I have no problem with insisting that he accept responsibility in some fashion, but to deprive him of his livelihood for his offense seems draconian. Moreover, his punishment seems to violate the guidelines set forth in Marquette's Faculty Handbook which says professors may be terminated at the university’s discretion,

only for “serious instances of illegal, immoral, dishonorable, irresponsible, or incompetent conduct.” The handbook says that “in no case” may just cause for dismissal be interpreted “to impair the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.”

So, Marquette seems to have a mess on its hands, one in which nobody looks particularly good. What do you think?

** Buffalo Springfield 1967, For What It's Worth:

Our Readership

From time to time I like to take a moment to thank the many faithful readers of Viewpoint who visit us from all over the world. Most of our readers are North American, of course, but we have dozens of regular readers in most European countries as well as in countries in South America, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, and Africa.

To give an idea of what VP's readership looks like Blogger provides data on visits to the blogs it hosts and has these stats for just the past week on Viewpoint:

• United States - 459
• France - 27
• United Kingdom - 21
• China - 19
• Spain - 15
• Germany - 8
• Russia - 8
• Burkina Faso - 5
• Portugal - 5
• Canada - 3

To see the readership data depicted visually scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the arrow. The red dots on the globe represent recent hits.

With my brother Bill's help we started this blog in 2004 with the intention of reaching just friends and family, but it has obviously grown beyond that, a growth for which I'm deeply grateful. I appreciate every single one of you and am both flattered and honored that so many of you have written to tell me you read VP regularly. Thanks.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. It would indeed be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathphobic students may wince at a statement like this, but it gets worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises. In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

On Meaning

Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl once wrote a book titled Man's Search for Meaning in which he asserted that man can't live without believing that there is some purpose or meaning to his life. To waken in the morning and realize that there's no real point to anything one does in the hours that lie ahead beyond just keeping oneself alive is psychologically deadening. It can lead to a kind of existential despair.

Each of us, of course, has projects which inject a kind of temporary meaning into our lives and help us to avoid a numbed listlessness, but when we ask what, in the overall scheme of things, those projects amount to, the answer seems to depend on how enduring they are.

Long term projects like raising a family or building a business seem more meaningful than short term projects like mowing the grass or watching a television program. Yet the problem is that if death ends our existence it also erases the meaning or significance of what we do, no matter how important it may seem to us while we're engaged in it.

For some, a relative few, their projects live on after them for a time, but even of many of these it might be asked, what's the point? Napoleon conquered much of Europe, was responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, but he was overthrown, died in exile, and the monarchy of France was restored. His deeds live on after his death, but what was the sense of all that death and carnage?

Meaning is a slippery notion, it's hard to define precisely what it is, but if our lives, like the light of a firefly, are here one instant and gone the next, if the earth is doomed to die a casualty of a solar supernova, then nothing lasts and nothing really means anything. Unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all.

These gloomy thoughts occurred to me as I read about a lecture given by biologist Jerry Coyne. Coyne told his audience that:

The universe and life are pointless....Pointless in the sense that there is no externally imposed purpose or point in the universe. As atheists this is something that is manifestly true to us. We make our own meaning and purpose.

This is perhaps the consensus view among those holding to a naturalistic worldview. It was eloquently articulated by philosopher Bertrand Russell in his book A Free Man's Worship in which he wrote the following words:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

It's a bleak view of life, to be sure, but given that extinction awaits us, both individually and corporately, it's hard to dispute it. As the writer Somerset Maugham put it:

If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said essentially the same thing though with a bit more angst at the prospect of the emptiness and futility of existence:

What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?

If, though, death is not the end of our existence as a person then there's a chance that maybe there's meaning in the chaotic horror that is human history. If death is simply the transition between two stages of life, like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly, then maybe there's meaning, not only to history, but to each and every individual life.

If, on the other hand, death really is the end then all we are is dust in the wind, and philosophers and writers from Schopenhauer to Shakespeare are right: Life is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. We're born, we suffer, and we die, and that's all there is to it. Pretty depressing.

What They Hate

Fareed Zakaria, a CNN commentator, recently did a series titled Why They Hate Us. The final installment might better have been subtitled What They Hate. The "They", of course, refers to Muslim extremists around the world. Zakaria makes a couple of important points. He writes:

The next time you hear of a terror attack -- no matter where it is, no matter what the circumstances -- you will likely think to yourself, "It's Muslims again." And you will probably be right. In 2014, about 30,000 people were killed in terror attacks worldwide. The vast majority of those perpetrating the violence were Muslim but -- and this is important -- so were the victims. Of the some 30,000 dead, the vast, vast majority were Muslims.

That's crucial to understand because it sheds light on the question, "Why do they hate us?" Islamic terrorists don't just hate America or the West. They hate the modern world, and they particularly hate Muslims who are trying to live in the modern world.

This is no doubt true, and it's worth pondering. Why do they hate the modern world? The Ostensible answer is because they see modern values and cultures as conflicting with Islam. This is not just an artifact of Islamic extremism. Zakaria tacitly admits that when he declares:

Let's be clear. While the jihadis are few, there is a larger cancer within the world of Islam -- a cancer of backwardness and extremism and intolerance. Most of the countries that have laws that restrict the free exercise of religion are Muslim majority, while those that have laws against leaving the faith are Muslim majority.

In other words, majority-Muslim countries enforce laws that are antithetical to the freedoms we take for granted in the West. The populace of these lands may not sympathize with the methods of the extremists, they may even themselves be victimized by the extremists, but they share in common with the extremists a view of the way the world should be that is innately hostile to the principles enshrined in our Bill of Rights and our Declaration of Independence, particularly freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the principles of human and gender equality.

Up to this point Zakaria has not written anything that could be gainsaid, but while admitting that this is a cancer in Islam, a cancer afflicting a great many Muslims who are not themselves terrorists but who sympathize with the ultimate goals of the terrorists, he is at pains to deny that this affliction is inherent in Islam. Here he embarks upon much more controversial terrain:

When experts try to explain that in the 14th century, Islamic civilization was the world's most advanced, or that the Quran was once read as a liberal and progressive document, they're not trying to deny the realities of backwardness today. What they are saying is that it can change.

It's not at all clear that Islamic civilization was ever the world's most advanced, nor is it clear what metrics should be employed to ascertain such a thing, but never mind. Zakaria has a more important question to ask:

Islam, after all, has been around for 14 centuries. There have been periods of war and of peace. Before 1900, for hundreds of years, Jews fled European pogroms and persecution to live in relative peace and security under the Ottoman Caliphate. That's why there were a million Jews in the Muslim Middle East in 1900. Today, Jews and Christians are fleeing from Iraq and Syria and radical Islamists take control of those lands. It's the same religion then and now. So what is different?(emphasis mine)

It's not theology, it's politics. Radical Islam is the product of the broken politics and stagnant economics of Muslim countries -- they have found in radical religion an ideology that lets them rail against the modern world, an ideology that is now being exported to alienated young Muslims everywhere -- in Europe, and even in some rare cases in the United States.

How can we bring an end to this?

There's really only one way: Help the majority of Muslims fight extremists, reform their faith, and modernize their societies. In doing so, we should listen to those on the front lines, many of whom are fighting and dying in the struggle against jihadis. The hundreds of Muslim reformers I've spoken to say their task is made much harder when Western politicians and pundits condemn Islam entirely, demean their faith, and speak of all Muslims as backward and suspect.

I want very much to agree with everything he has said here, but speaking only for myself there's a huge impediment standing in the way of my assent, and I suspect it stands in the way for a lot of devout Muslims as well. It's this: Among the obligations imposed upon pious Muslims there are two which are perhaps most important: Follow the example of the Prophet Mohammad, and follow the precepts of the Koran. The reason these obligations are a problem is that Mohammad himself practiced brutal war against infidels, and it's hard to read the Koran without getting the sense that it, too, endorses an any-means-necessary strategy for spreading the faith.

If this is true, perhaps the most intractable of the three measures Zakaria commends to us for ending Islamic terror is the second - reforming the faith. Accomplishing this would seem to be as difficult as convincing devout Christians that they must change their views, not only of the authority of the New Testament, but also of the authority of Jesus Christ. Most Christians would properly see such a demand as an attempt to extinguish Christianity altogether and most Muslims would, mutatis mutandis, probably view attempts to reform Islam the same way.

If reformation of the faith is the linchpin of the strategy to end terror, prospects for success don't look particularly promising.

When Does Inconsistency Become Hypocrisy?

One expects politicians and others who dabble in politics to sometimes say one thing but do another. It almost seems to be in their genes. Indeed, none of us is perfect, and most of us act from time to time in our lives in ways inconsistent with what we profess. Even so, PayPal and Apple are pushing inconsistency so far toward hypocrisy that it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they're behavior isn't just mere inconsistency.

An article by Bradford Richardson in the Washington Times tells us that both PayPal and Apple are seeking to punish North Carolina for passing a law that would prohibit people of one sex from using the restrooms of the other sex. This seems like pretty tame stuff, and I would suspect that most women, especially, would appreciate the added protection from male predators afforded them by the law, but apparently PayPal and Apple see a Very Important Principle being violated by the Tar Heel legislators:

PayPal drew a line in the sand when North Carolina passed a law prohibiting people from using the restrooms of the opposite sex, but critics say that line got washed away on the shores of Malaysia, a nation that consistently ranks among the least LGBT-friendly in the world.

The company canceled its plan to build a global operations center in Charlotte after the passage of HB2, which CEO Daniel Schulman called discrimination against the transgendered. He noted that the move will cost North Carolina 400 well-paying jobs.

Okay, but:

Malaysia’s Penal Code 187 — which punishes homosexual conduct with whippings and up to 20 years in prison — did not stop PayPal from opening a global operations center there in 2011, which the company estimated would employ 500 workers by 2013.

So, a law that protects women from having to share a restroom with someone with male physiological accoutrements is so egregious that PayPal, in high moral dudgeon, is taking its operations center elsewhere. Yet the company was not sufficiently outraged to decline to build a similar center in a country which punishes LGBT people with whippings and lengthy stays in their luxurious prisons. How do they reconcile these two reactions? Moreover:

PayPal’s international headquarters are located in Singapore, where sexual contact between males is punishable by up to two years in prison, and even littering can be punished by flogging. The company has a software development center in Chennai, India, where same-sex marriage is prohibited.

But it's not just PayPal that seems to have a problem with consistency:

Apple is among the other major corporations that have taken to the pulpit to lecture North Carolina for its sins despite doing business with anti-gay foreign regimes. CEO Tim Cook was one of several high-profile tech CEOs who signed a letter to Republican Gov. Pat McCrory calling on him to repeal the legislation.

“We are disappointed in your decision to sign this discriminatory legislation into law,” the letter reads. “The business community, by and large, has constantly communicated to lawmakers at every level that such laws are bad for our employees and bad for business.”

But, as Matt Sharp, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, points out, that has not stopped Apple from opening stores in Saudi Arabia, where gay people are regularly executed in public and cross-dressing is also an offense that can, in the “best” case, end with a flogging. Pro-gay and trans advocacy are illegal, as is every religion except Islam.

“We’ve seen the same thing with Apple and some of these other companies that are fine doing business in Saudi Arabia and other countries that are extremely oppressive of the LGBT community,” Mr. Sharp said.

How do these companies respond to the charge of hypocrisy? With gobbledygook:

Deena Fidas, director of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Workplace Equality Program, said PayPal’s expansion into areas with bad human rights and anti-gay records doesn’t call into question what the company is doing in the U.S. because it’s all about the message.

“Businesses are going to be making strategic decisions based on a variety of factors, and the fact that they’re not ceasing operations in other locales doesn’t diminish this very important moment where they’re sending a very clear message,” Ms. Fidas said.

“The reality is that right now, at any given moment, businesses are expanding in locales that have some problematic laws on the books for the LGBT community,” she added. “But what we’ve found is the private sector can be a bastion in an otherwise-unwelcoming climate.”

American Airlines and the NBA are also looking pretty "inconsistent" on this issue:

A spokeswoman for American Airlines, which has its second-biggest hub in Charlotte, called such laws “bad for the economies of the states in which they are enacted.” And the National Basketball Association, which has scheduled next season’s All-Star Game for Charlotte, said it is “deeply concerned that this discriminatory law runs counter to our guiding principles of equality and mutual respect.”

However, both corporations are eager to do business in China — American operates flights to Beijing and Shanghai; the NBA played two exhibition games in China before this season and will play two before this fall in the basketball-crazy country.

In addition, earlier this spring, American Airlines made clear that it plans to use its Miami hub for business in communist Cuba, petitioning for 12 of the 20 available daily flights to the Cuban capital and requesting flights to five other Cuban cities.

Yet China and Cuba are tough terrain for LGBTs:

While neither China nor Cuba criminalizes homosexuality as a form of bourgeois decadence, as each did during the Cold War era, gay rights are severely limited. Both nations have constitutional provisions defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, a holy grail far beyond what America’s religious conservatives can hope to pass in 2016.

In both countries adoption by gay couples is banned, and anti-discrimination laws operate on the basis of sex, race, religion and other categories but do not protect the transgendered. Cuba’s anti-discrimination laws do cover gays, but only in some fields. Also, both countries are still officially one-party dictatorships that routinely arrest and beat anti-government protesters, limit the activities of dissidents and restrict depictions of homosexuality.

The official China Television Drama Production Industry Association posted new regulations stating that “no television drama shall show abnormal sexual relationships and behaviors, such as incest [and] same-sex relationships.”

We don't want to be too quick to call all this hypocrisy, but it sure looks like these corporations have one set of rules for the U.S. and a much less draconian set of rules for other nations. I'm loath to ask this, but do you think that in the end it may have something to do with profits?

Where Does Altruism Come From?

Damon Linker argues at The Week that self-sacrifice is inexplicable on naturalism. Naturalism rests heavily upon evolutionary explanations of behavior, but cases like that of Thomas Vander Woude simply don't fit that narrative. Here's Vander Woude's story:

[C]onsider Thomas S. Vander Woude, the subject of an unforgettable 2011 article by the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. One day in September 2008, Vander Woude's 20-year-old son Josie, who has Down syndrome, fell through a broken septic tank cover in their yard. The tank was eight feet deep and filled with sewage. After trying and failing to rescue his son by pulling on his arm from above, Vander Woude jumped into the tank, held his breath, dove under the surface of the waste, and hoisted his son onto his shoulders. Josie was rescued a few minutes later. By then his 66-year-old father was dead.

This is something that any father, atheist or believer, might do for his son. But only the believer can make sense of the deed.

Pick your favorite non-theistic theory: Rational choice and other economically-based accounts hold that people act to benefit themselves in everything they do. From that standpoint, Vander Woude — like the self-sacrificing soldier or firefighter — was a fool who incomprehensibly placed the good of another ahead of his own.

Other atheistic theories similarly deny the possibility of genuine altruism, reject the possibility of free will, or else, like some forms of evolutionary psychology, posit that when people sacrifice themselves for others (especially, as in the Vander Woude case, for their offspring) they do so in order to strengthen kinship ties, and in so doing maximize the spread of their genes throughout the gene pool.

But of course, as someone with Down syndrome, Vander Woude's son is probably sterile and possesses defective genes that, judged from a purely evolutionary standpoint, deserve to die off anyway. So Vander Woude's sacrifice of himself seems to make him, once again, a fool.

Things are no better in less extreme cases. If Josie were a genius, his father's sacrifice might be partially explicable in evolutionary terms — as an act designed to ensure that his own and his son's genes survive and live on beyond them both. But this egoistic explanation would drain the act of its nobility, which is precisely what needs to be explained.

We feel moved by Vander Woude's sacrifice precisely because it seems selfless — the antithesis of evolutionary self-interestedness.

But why is that? What is it about the story of a man who willingly embraces a revolting, horrifying death in order to save his son that moves us to tears? Why does it seem somehow, like a beautiful painting or piece of music, a fleeting glimpse of perfection in an imperfect world?

It's an interesting question that Linker raises. Even if we can account for what Vander Woude did in evolutionary terms it's harder to account for why we who read about it think he did something noble and wonderful. Most evolutionists deny that there is such a thing as true altruism, that everything we do has a self-interested motive buried somewhere, but it's hard to see what that would be in the case of Thomas Vander Woude.

Linker believes that such acts of radical altruism give us a fleeting glimpse of something transcendent. Whether one agrees with that conclusion or not it certainly seems that altruism, unlike egoism, is very difficult to account for in a naturalistic worldview.

Are We Living in the Matrix?

One of the perplexing metaphysical questions posed by philosophers has to do with the ontological nature of reality. Is matter the fundamental substance which makes up all reality or is the fundamental reality composed of mind? Those aren't the only alternatives, of course.

For example, it could be that reality is a composite of both matter and mind, but if, as many thinkers are beginning to suspect, the world is more like an idea than it is like a machine, if it's true, as many believe, that all matter is somehow an instantiation of information, then it would seem that mind, or mental substance, is the fundamental constituent of reality.

If that's so then maybe the world is, at bottom, something like the Matrix:

Thinking about this spurs us on to ask lots of further questions. Here's perhaps one of the biggest: If we're really living in a matrix-like reality, who or what programmed it?

The End of Moral Relativism

The Atlantic's Jonathan Merritt argues that our culture's fling with moral relativism, a fling that's persisted for at least sixty years, is over. Borrowing from a column by the New York times' David Brooks, Merritt maintains that, at least among Millenials, we're seeing what may be described as a New Absolutism. He may be right, but I think the absolutism he sees having descended upon us like a smog is not really an absolutism at all, but rather an emotivist power play.

I'll explain shortly, but first some excerpts from Merritt's column:

In The New York Times last week, David Brooks argued that while American college campuses were “awash in moral relativism” as late as the 1980s, a “shame culture” has now taken its place. The subjective morality of yesterday has been replaced by an ethical code that, if violated, results in unmerciful moral crusades on social media.

A culture of shame cannot be a culture of total relativism. One must have some moral criteria [by] which to decide if someone is worth shaming.

“Some sort of moral system is coming into place,” Brooks says. “Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action.”

This system is not a reversion to the values that conservatives may wish for. America’s new moral code is much different than it was prior to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Instead of being centered on gender roles, family values, respect for institutions and religious piety, it orbits around values like tolerance and inclusion. (This new code has created a paradoxical moment in which all is tolerated except the intolerant and all included except the exclusive.)

Although this new code is moral, it is not always designated as such. As Brooks said, “Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition.” No wonder many God-and-family conservatives dislike this new moral code as much as the relativism it replaced.

To be sure, there's a new wave of moral absolutism sweeping academia which sees things like racism, sexism, support for Israel, and reservations about gay marriage and global warming as absolutely wrong, but to simply point this out and then conclude that relativism is dead is to miss the fatal weakness lurking in the moral passion to which Merritt alludes.

That weakness lies in the fact that the moral fervor with which the above positions are often held on campus and in the media today has no ground in any objective moral referent. These positions are based on nothing more than the ardent feelings of those who hold them. As such they may be regarded as absolutes by those convinced of their rightness, but, if so, they are arbitrarily chosen absolutes, which is to say they're not really absolutes at all.

For any moral principle to be absolute it has to be objectively grounded in something which transcends one's own feelings, indeed which transcends humanity altogether. Otherwise, how do we adjudicate between the passionate feelings of one person and the passionate feelings of another? We can't, of course, unless we have some standard to which we can compare those disparate passions. Lacking such a standard, when we say something is wrong all we're saying is that it offends my personal preferences, to which someone might well ask, "Why should your preferences be the standard of right and wrong for everyone else?"

The new moral absolutism to which Merritt and Brooks advert is not absolutism at all. It's simply a form of narcissistic subjectivism, or egoism, which presumes that anything which transgresses my personal moral preferences is wrong for everyone and anyone to do.

You, let's say, think it's right to help the poor. I, let's say, think we should adopt social Darwinism and let the poor fend for themselves. You insist I'm wrong. I ask why am I wrong? You say because I'm being selfish and greedy. I ask why selfishness and greed are wrong. You say because they hurt people. I ask why it's wrong to hurt people. You reply that I wouldn't want people to hurt me. I respond that that's true but it's not a reason why I should care about hurting others. You give up on me, judging me hopelessly immoral, but what you haven't succeeded in doing is explaining why it's wrong to let the poor suffer. You've simply given expression to your feelings about the matter.

For there to be any objective moral duties there has to be a transcendent moral authority, a God, from which (whom) all moral goodness is derived. Take away God, as our secular society seems eager to do, and all we're left with is emotivism - people insisting that their emotional reactions to events are "right" and contrary reactions are "wrong", but lacking any basis for making such judgments.

This is not to say that if one believes in God one will know what's right. Nor is it to say that even if one knows what's right one will do what's right. What it is to say is that unless there is a God, or something very much like God, there simply is no right or wrong, and certainly no absolute moral duties.

As belief in God disappears morality becomes as insubstantial as the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland - to borrow a reference from this marvelous tale for the second week in a row:

Moral Paralysis

In 2011 I ran the following post on moral relativism, and having talked about that topic recently in my classes I thought it'd be appropriate to run it again, slightly edited:

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

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

I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha (see below). Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital.

I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

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

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

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

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

This is a picture of Bibi Aisha. She was deliberately mutilated by her family because she did not want to stay in a marriage to which she did not consent and in which she was treated like livestock.

Anyone who would do this to another human being is evil. Any culture which condones it is degenerate, and any person who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this, or to sympathize with her suffering, is a moral dwarf.

The shocking prevalence of moral dwarfism in our culture should not surprise us, however. Once a society jettisons its Judeo-Christian heritage it no longer has any non-subjective basis for making moral judgments. Its moral sense is stunted, warped, and diminished because it's based on nothing more than one's own subjective feelings.

With no objective moral standard by which to judge behavior people lose confidence in their moral judgments. They doubt that their opinions are any more "right" than the opinions of the people who did this to Bibi Aisha, and so they say things like, "If it's right for them then it's right", or "It's wrong for us to judge others", or "If you say it's wrong that's just your opinion."

This is moral paralysis, and it's a legacy of modernity and the secular Enlightenment which, in their embrace of metaphysical naturalism, have pulled the rug out from under all objective moral standards and offered nothing that can take their place beyond a vapid subjectivism.

Indoctrinating the Young

An article in The Guardian by Nathalia Gjersoe is remarkable for what it suggests about current trends in the philosophy of education. The article points out that students, including secular students, seem intuitively resistant to Darwinian evolution and intuitively inclined toward intelligent design. This is a puzzle and one that Gjersoe and the people she writes about are resolved to correct. She writes:

Evolution is poorly understood by students and, disturbingly, by many of their science teachers. Although it is part of the compulsory science curriculum in most schools in the UK and the USA, more than a third of people in both countries reject the theory of evolution outright or believe that it is guided by a supreme being.

It is critical that the voting public have a clear understanding of evolution. Adaptation by natural selection, the primary mechanism of evolution, underpins a raft of current social concerns such as antibiotic resistance, the impact of climate change and the relationship between genes and environment. So why, despite formal scientific education, does intelligent design remain so intuitively plausible and evolution so intuitively opaque? And what can we do about it?

Unfortunately, Gjersoe's paragraph suggests that she herself may not have a very good grasp of evolutionary theory. Contemporary biologists have grown increasingly skeptical that natural selection is anything more than an ancillary mechanism driving evolutionary change, but let's set that aside. We can set aside, too, the fact that if people believe evolution is guided by a transcendent agent it's not evolution they reject but rather metaphysical naturalism.

In any case, Gjersoe goes on to assert that one reason for the resistance to evolutionary explanations of origins is that people, especially youngsters, intuitively hold to a view that she calls psychological essentialism which holds that species don't change. She asserts that this "is one of the primary reasons why the theory of evolution is so widely misunderstood by both children and adults."

I'm not convinced of that. I suspect that most people have trouble with naturalistic (i.e. Darwinian) evolution because it seems so implausible to them that blind, impersonal, unguided forces could produce something so intricate and complex as a human immune system or something so gratuitous and yet marvellous as sexual reproduction. The notion that such phenomena, as well as hundreds, if not millions, of other examples can be explained by the random activity of chance mutation and the vicissitudes of natural selection strikes many people, including many biologists, as quite nearly miraculous, and if miracles are to be part of our set of beliefs many are more inclined to think that their source is a personal agent rather than impersonal nature.

When viewers watch something like the following video, for instance, they're quite naturally stunned to think that the molecular machines discussed in it are some sort of fortuitous accident. When the examples of such amazing complexity and apparent design accumulate to a certain threshold, the fortuitous accident theory becomes literally incredible for a lot of people:

So, what to do about this very powerful inclination to see purposeful design in the world? How can it be stifled and eradicated so that people will be much more open to accepting Darwinian evolution? Gjersoe's answer is to indoctrinate children at ever younger ages:

So how do we override such widespread and tenacious cognitive biases?....

Evolution is typically taught to students at around 14- to 15-years of age as they prepare for their GCSEs. After persistent lobbying by the British Humanist Association, evolution was included in the British national primary curriculum for the first time last year. From September 2015, students will be taught about evolution from Year 6, at around 10-11 years of age.

Might this still be too late? [Deb Kelemen and colleagues at Boston University] chose 5- to 8-year-olds to test because at this age promiscuous teleology and psychological essentialism are still separate and fragmentary. She argues that by 10 years of age they have coalesced into a coherent theoretical framework that then gets in the way of contradictory scientific explanations and may remain the default, gut reaction, even in adults....If part of the reason that intelligent design is so popular is because it seems intuitively correct, might the solution be to disrupt those intuitions very early on? Should we reconsider the national curriculum (yet again) and start teaching evolution even earlier?

It's ironic that we are often told that parents and teachers should not instill their values in their children but should let them come to their own conclusions about right and wrong, religion, politics, etc. but then we read articles like this which celebrate doing that exact thing when it comes to explaining how living things came to be what they are. It seems that whether or not it's a good thing to instill one's values and beliefs in the young just depends on what one's values and beliefs are.

Can Evolution Account for Consciousness?

One of the many problems consciousness poses for naturalism (the view that only the natural world exists. There is no supernature) is the difficulty of explaining how consciousness could have evolved through random genetic mutations and natural selection. Natural selection acts on physical bodies, but consciousness seems to be something altogether different from physical, material body.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent highlights the problem when he writes:

Consciousness could not have evolved from “simpler” states of matter, because it is not a state of matter. To say that consciousness evolved from matter is like saying Newton’s theory of gravity evolved from apples.

Even if for the sake of argument one concedes that natural selection might account for the development of a material body, consciousness remains a mystery. There is still a vast uncrossable gulf between the physical body and mind. In other words, the difference between body and mind is qualitative, not quantitative. You can’t get an immaterial mind no matter how many slight successive modifications of the body there may have been.

This is a serious problem for naturalism because most naturalists hold that naturalism entails physicalism, i.e. the view that physics fixes all the facts about the world, and materialism, the view that all of reality is reducible to matter. Consciousness, however, does not seem to be something explicable in terms of either physics or matter which means that it's existence is a prima facie defeater for naturalism.

Naturalists can avoid having to surrender the field of philosophical combat by conceding that both physicalism and materialism are false and trying somehow to enfold consciousness into a naturalistic ontology, but this would be an accommodation most naturalists would find devastating.

Naturalism dominated philosophy for the two centuries from about 1750 to 1950, but it appears that work being done in the last couple of decades in the philosophy of mind is bringing an end to the reign it once enjoyed and making it increasingly difficult to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist," as Richard Dawkins once put it. On naturalism, it seems, there are just too many things one has to accept on faith.

Falling Seas and Red Queens

Science operates by making testable predictions. If those predictions don't come to pass the theory which generates them begins to teeter. Too many unfulfilled predictions and the theory is considered to be falsified and is discarded. Proponents of the theory of global warming have made at least two predictions which, according to some scientific observers, have failed to bear fruit.

The first prediction, made back in the 1990s, was that global temperatures would continue to rise sharply and catastrophically if nothing were done to limit greenhouse gasses. Since then nothing much has been done to limit those emissions but nevertheless the average global temperature hasn't shown any significant change in about 17 years.

The second prediction was that sea levels would rise throughout this century. Well, the century isn't over, of course, but so far it doesn't look good for that prediction either. According to a pair of charts at Real Science, sea levels at Atlantic City, NJ and Manhattan, NY have both been dropping since at least 2009.

This doesn't mean that global warming isn't going to be a long-term trend - it may be - but it does show that the science on this is far from "settled". It also shows that the calls from some quarters to punish, prosecute, and persecute those who are skeptical of the claims of the global warming proponents by firing them from their jobs or even throwing them in prison are not only the sort of thing one expects to hear in fascist dictatorships but are also based on an inexcusable attempt to make science serve a left-wing ideology.

These people, who would shut down dissent by force and intimidation, who demand that people be punished for disagreeing with the conclusions that global warming proponents infer from the data, remind one of the fatuous and cruel Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland demanding that anyone who displeases her have their heads cut off:

Mind and Materialism

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

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

This experience, Tallis observes, is not a fact about the physical realm:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of Tallis' article at the link. It's very good.

Robot Consciousness (Pt. II)

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on Sophia, the robot featured in an article on robots and consciousness, it might be instructive to focus on a remark in the article by a CEO of a robotics firm. He's quoted as saying that:

...fear will melt away, as people start interacting with robots. "A lot of the concerns people have about robots taking away all the jobs or wrecking the economy or rising up and killing us all, I think those fears are really overblown," he said.

Perhaps so, but on the other hand, there does seem to be some justification for concern about the economic consequences of robots in the workplace, especially those workplaces which employ low-skilled, easily replaced workers:

The CEO of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's has visited the fully automated restaurant Eatsa — and it's given him some ideas on how to deal with rising minimum wages.

"I want to try it," CEO Andy Puzder told Business Insider of his automated restaurant plans. "We could have a restaurant that's focused on all-natural products and is much like an Eatsa, where you order on a kiosk, you pay with a credit or debit card, your order pops up, and you never see a person."

Puzder's interest in an employee-free restaurant, which he says would be possible only if the company found time as Hardee's works on its northeastern expansion, has been driven by rising minimum wages across the US.

"With government driving up the cost of labor, it's driving down the number of jobs," he says. "You're going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants."

Puzder has been an outspoken advocate against raising the minimum wage, writing two op-eds for The Wall Street Journal on how a higher minimum wage would lead to reduced employment opportunities. "This is the problem with Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage," says Puzder. "Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?"

As a result, he and others in the fast-food business are investing big in automation. "If you're making labor more expensive, and automation less expensive — this is not rocket science," says Puzder.

For the time being, Puzder doesn't think that it's likely that any machine could take over the more nuanced kitchen work of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees. "They're always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case," says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.

And then there's another disturbing story in the LA Times:

White House economists released a forecast that calculated more precisely whom Atlas and other forms of automation are going to put out of work. Most occupations that pay less than $20 an hour are likely to be, in the words of the report, “automated into obsolescence.”

Much of this displacement is projected to occur over the next two decades:

Powerhouse consultancies like McKinsey & Co. forecast that 45% of today's workplace activities could be done by robots, AI or some other already demonstrated technology. Some professors argue that we could see 50% unemployment in 30 years.

Human workers of all stripes pound the table claiming desperately that they're irreplaceable. Bus drivers. Bartenders. Financial advisors. Speechwriters. Firefighters. Umpires. Even doctors and surgeons. Meanwhile, corporations and investors are spending billions — at least $8.5 billion last year on AI, and $1.8 billion on robots — toward making all those jobs replaceable. Why? Simply put, robots and computers don't need healthcare, pensions, vacation days or even salaries.

Nor does a workforce full of robots require a Human Resources department. Nor are they a source of friction and tension in the workplace. They don't take phony sick days, nor do they require emotional and psychological maintenance, or performance reviews, or incur any of the other expensive burdens of human employees. A robot like Sophia, who appears to be human, would surely be an attractive investment for an employer groaning under the burden of rising minimum wages for minimally skilled workers who demand a wage out of all proportion to their value to their employer.

Those folks "Fighting for Fifteen" might soon be wondering why there aren't any jobs for them at all.

Robot Consciousness (Pt. I)

After a classroom discussion on some specific characteristics of consciousness that materialism has a difficult time explaining a student forwarded me the link to this fascinating video:

The accompanying article quotes the developer of this amazing robot as saying that, "Our goal is that she will be as conscious, creative and capable as any human. We are designing these robots to serve in health care, therapy, education and customer service applications."

I'll believe that first sentence when I see it. Consider just one attribute of consciousness - understanding. A robot, a computer housed in a very artfully and intelligently designed mannequin, does not understand what it's doing. It's like a sophisticated version of philosopher John Searle's Chinese Room. Searle invites us to imagine a small room inside of which sits a man who understands not a word of Mandarin or of English. Slips of paper are passed to him through a slot. The paper has on it words written in Chinese characters which are completely unintelligible to him, but he has a book in which he can look up the characters and find their English equivalent. On another slip of paper he copies the English, which he also doesn't understand, and passes the paper out another slot. This is essentially what a computer does and what any robot will do. They won't understand what they're doing and will lack that essential aspect of human consciousness.

Not only do computers not understand the information they process, there's a host of other features of human consciousness which computerized robots will have a very difficult time achieving. Here are a few things that any human being does that machines, no matter how intelligently designed, cannot: Appreciate humor or beauty, feel gratitude or moral duty, experience disappointment, regret, guilt, boredom, resentment, or curiosity. Nor can machines doubt, hold a belief, desire, wish, worry, have ideas, assign meaning to what they do, or experience sensations like color, sound, fragrance, sweetness, etc. All of these are the hallmarks of consciousness and the difficulties involved in replicating them in a machine make the article's next paragraph seem extremely optimistic:

Hanson said that one day robots will be indistinguishable from humans. Robots walk, play, teach, help and form real relationships with people, he said. "The artificial intelligence will evolve to the point where they will truly be our friends," he said. "Not in ways that dehumanize us, but in ways that rehumanize us, that decrease the trend of the distance between people and instead connect us with people as well as with robots."

An interesting aside to the above is that should such robots ever be developed they would be the creations of highly intelligent engineers, a fact which should give us pause. If consciousness, in our experience, can only be created by highly intelligent software designers why do so many folks think that our consciousness is simply the product of random collisions of subatomic particles acting blindly over the span of a billion years or so with no goal in mind? To think that that's how our consciousness came to be requires a prodigious act of faith, indeed, blind faith, in the power of luck.

Miracles, Multiverses, and Easter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

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

Clash of Civilizations

It's been said that a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. A mugging tends to concentrate the mind and often causes us to dispense with idealistic and naive notions about others. Something like this seems to be happening on a large scale in Europe where terrorist attacks perpetrated by members of the religion of peace are causing a lot of people to abandon some naive attitudes about Muslim immigrants, and Islam in general, and demand that, well, that something, be done. Here are some excerpts from a recent New York Times piece:

Nigel Farage, a leader of the populist, conservative U.K. Independence Party, said: “I think we’ve reached a point where we have to admit to ourselves, in Britain and France and much of the rest of Europe, that mass immigration and multicultural division has for now been a failure.”

The attacks will also put more strain on the deal brokered last week by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany with the Turkish government to restrict the migrant flow into Europe, in return for more liberal visa arrangements for travel into Europe by Turkish nationals. That deal was already being criticized as a security threat to Europe and had been questioned on humanitarian and legal grounds.

“In the public eye everything gets connected: the mass abuse in Cologne on New Year’s Eve and the attacks today,” said Rem Korteweg, a security analyst at the Center for European Reform in London, referring to the sexual abuse and robberies in Cologne on New Year’s Eve that were linked to migrants. “However different, in the public mind and for the euroskeptic populace, they’re all the same thing.”

But in Europe, the insecurity around migration and terrorism has challenged key beliefs and principles of the European Union. The Schengen area of visa-free travel across 26 countries has already broken down under the pressure of the migrant flow, with many worried that the zone may never be fully resurrected because of terrorism. Analysts say that attacks like those in Paris and Brussels make it far more likely that European governments will insist on stricter passport, visa and luggage checks at their borders.

This liberal Belgian, posting on Twitter, is probably not atypical:

I’m all for integration and tolerance, but something is rotten to the core when it comes to Muslim culture within Europe. Djihadis, fundamentalists, whatever you want to call them are either too plentiful or have too much influence. Whether that was our fault due to not giving them the tools to integrate or theirs for refusing to take advantage of those tools is besides the point.

I am done defending this culture. I am done playing devil’s advocate… Perhaps it’s time we showed the world again that when we stand as one force, we will not bend. It’s time to show that dogs without bark can still bite.

Europeans have convinced themselves for at least a generation that all cultures are equally "valid" and all religions are aiming at the same ends. They've persuaded themselves that they can admit into their national home millions of immigrants whose values are diametrically opposed to their own and that despite the cultural clash everyone will be sure to work synergistically to bring about the Age of Aquarius. Now they're discovering through bitter experience that things don't seem to work that way in the real world, that these people, or at least a substantial fraction of them (see video), passionately hate Western civilization, are eager to kill Europeans and their children, and this blow to the Europeans' worldview is disorienting.

If Shapiro is correct that's 500,000 Muslims in America who think terror against civilians is sometimes justified, and almost 700 million Muslims worldwide who want to see sharia law imposed everywhere.

There's been no word yet from President Obama as to whether he's having second thoughts after Paris and Brussels about the wisdom of admitting hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees into this country, although I doubt that he is. He's not the sort of man who entertains doubts about himself. Surely, though, there are ways of helping these wretched refugees without putting ourselves in the same situation as has Europe. Just as many compassionate Americans help the poor and homeless in countless ways without giving them the key to their house, it seems that as a nation we can do likewise.

In any case, I'm going to step out on a limb and make a prediction: If the president goes ahead with plans to allow unvetted refugees to pour into this country, and we suffer another Islamist-inspired terror attack this summer, Trump will win in November in a landslide.