Believing in the Multiverse

Physicist and writer Brian Greene does a fine job of explaining the concept of the multiverse in a column at The Daily Beast.

In the piece he quotes Carl Sagan as saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and then tacitly acknowledges that there's not much evidence for the multiverse theory, so we're left to wonder why it has enjoyed so much popularity among some cosmologists.

Perhaps one reason is that the universe is comprised of forces and constants whose values are calibrated with unimaginably exact mathematical precision. If any of dozens of forces, like gravity, for instance, deviated in their strength from the tiniest amounts - one part in 10^40 in the case of gravity - the universe could not exist, or if it did it would not be the sort of place where living things could emerge.

It's mind-bendingly improbable that such precision would have emerged by sheer chance and there are thus only two viable explanations for it. Either the universe is the product of an intelligent engineering process or there are so many different universes, an infinite number, that one like ours would have to exist. Just as the probability of a blind-folded shooter hitting a postage stamp half a mile away is increased as the number of bullets fired increases, so, too, the chance of a universe like ours appearing increases as the number of different universes that are produced increases.

It seems odd that scientists would posit an explanation which requires the existence of so many entities for which there's so very little evidence, but consider that the only viable alternative is that the universe is the creation of an intentional agent, a God, and it's easier to understand why they do so. It is, at least for some of them, an act of metaphysical desperation. As physicist Bernard Carr once put it, "If you don't want God you better have a multiverse." They're the only two live options.

Anyway, it would be good to read Greene's article. It's written by a physicist who's sympathetic to the multiverse theory and, like much of his work, it's very lucid and accessible to the layman.

The Insanity Continues

Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt sums up pretty well one reason why there's contempt for liberal progressivism in general and the Obama administration in particular in many quarters of American society:

Your wages may not be up. Your 401(k) may be sputtering along. The murder rate in the country’s largest cities jumped 13 percent in the past year. A Federal Reserve Board survey finds 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage, and 47 percent say they couldn’t cover an unexpected $400 expense.

Children are starting to come across our southern border in greater numbers again, with fears of another surge coming this summer. Our immigration enforcement remains inexplicably lax; “In 2015, [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] freed 19,723 criminal aliens, who had a total of 64,197 convictions among them. These included 8,234 violent convictions and 208 homicide convictions; 124 criminal aliens released by ICE have subsequently been charged with homicide.”

But by golly, the Obama administration is not just sitting there!

What have they been doing, you ask? Why, just last night the Obama administration issued a directive to every public school in the nation "urging" them to make sure students are free to use whatever bathrooms match their gender identity or face punishment. Schools don't have to just provide facilities for transgendered students, mind you, they have to allow transgenders to use whatever facilities exist for students of the gender with which the transgendered student identifies.

As if public school employees didn't have enough problems, now they have to interrogate every male entering a girls' restroom (and vice-versa) to see if the students feel in their hearts that they're really a female (or male).

Here are some questions for the Solomonic bureaucrats in the Department of Education who have nothing better to do than to stick their meddlesome fingers into every local pie within their considerable reach: What criteria are school officials supposed to use to tell whether a student is telling the truth about their gender "identity"? How fluid is this identity? Can one feel he's a man today but identify as a woman tomorrow? Or an hour from now? How can anyone presume to tell the individual that he can't? Do we want to burden our already overburdened school officials with trying to sort through all this? Shouldn't applicants be required to pass an IQ test to get hired in the Department of Education?

Anyway, I can't think of a better way to guarantee that more parents will be opting out of the public school system in favor of private or home schooling than to tell them that their public school children will be sharing restrooms with students of the opposite sex. It'll also be interesting to see how many states will join Texas in suing the administration over this directive. I wonder, too, whether people will soon have had enough of Mr. Obama and his misbegotten efforts to fundamentally transform America.

Finally, I don't expect him to take advantage of it, but Mr. Trump has a golden opportunity here to force Hillary to either support this ghastly obtrusion of government power or to renounce it. Either way, he'd put her in a difficult spot, but Mr. Trump has himself forfeited the issue by having already expressed his own personal indifference to it. Too bad.

Restroom Wars

It's come to this:

The left, always in search of old traditions and moral boundaries to smash as they go about the business of destroying the country and culture, has taken up the cause of mandating that biological males be permitted into women's rest rooms. That sounds crazy enough to most sane people, but the rationale for it, and who's voicing the rationale, is stunning.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has delivered herself of the opinion that laws excluding from women's rest rooms men who see themselves as women are like the Jim Crow laws that kept blacks out of white establishments. This is so looney that only an Obama official could have come up with it.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch

The Federalist has a staff editorial explaining just some of the looniness of Lynch's position. Here are some of the salient points:

After North Carolina refused to drop the law [excluding members of one sex from restrooms designated for the opposite sex] because the Obama administration said so, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday that the DOJ would take the state to court. According to the DOJ’s lawsuit, the law (HB 2) “constitutes a pattern or practice of employment discrimination on the basis of sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

Yuuuuuup. The DOJ is completely convinced that barring a grown man claiming to be a woman from entering the same public locker room as your vulnerable school-aged daughter is just like the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation and perpetuated the racist notion that blacks and whites were genetically distinct.

DOJ’s new rationale is especially curious given that so-called trans advocates have claimed for years that sex and gender are distinct notions, and that one’s gender need not have any relation to one’s biological sex. The term “gender identity” was invented as a way of describing this particular delusion. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, does not mention gender. It mentions only sex, which is determined exclusively by one’s chromosomal makeup. As of today, though, DOJ has apparently once again decided that gender and sex are totally the same thing.

What matters is not the subjective view one has of oneself. What matters is the objective anatomical accoutrements one carries about. If one has male parts one should be restricted to male restrooms regardless of whether one thinks of oneself as male or female.

Comparing the transgender agenda to racial equality seems to be a favorite among leftists. This argument, however, just doesn’t make sense, because race is a social construct while sex is a biological one. For decades, civil rights advocates fought against the notion that blacks and whites were genetically distinct.

Everyone’s chromosomes are literally stamped with his or her sex. Female chromosomes contain two X’s and male chromosomes contain an XY, whereas there is no biological equivalent to dictate who is black and who is white, as much of the definition is dependent upon cultural context.

Wanting to prevent grown men from using the little girls’ room doesn’t make you a bigot, and wanting to force young girls to shower in a locker room with men who pretend to be women doesn’t make you Martin Luther King, Jr.

The reason racial discrimination is wrong is not because discrimination simpliciter is wrong. It isn't, indeed, it's often necessary. Racial discrimination such as was enforced by Jim Crow laws is wrong because it sends the message that one is inferior completely on the basis of one's race alone.

This is dehumanizing, but there's nothing dehumanizing about respecting personal privacy, respecting the desire of both males and females for modesty, and protecting girls and women from the sexual perverts who would exploit the ability to use women's rest rooms for nefarious purposes. Or, do the rights to privacy and security of the overwhelming majority of people have to be sacrificed so that the less than 1% of transgenders who feel inconvenienced by having to use a sex-appropriate restroom can have their feelings accommodated?

That any of this even has to be discussed shows how far off into insanity the progressive left has taken us.

Liberal Discrimination

Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times has stirred up something of a kerfuffle with a column that admits, and laments, the overwhelming and inexcusable bias in the culture against conservatives and conservative ideas. He writes:

[C]onsider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.

“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

“Much of the ‘conservative’ worldview consists of ideas that are known empirically to be false,” said Carmi.

“The truth has a liberal slant,” wrote Michelle.

“Why stop there?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”

To me, the conversation illuminated primarily liberal arrogance — the implication that conservatives don’t have anything significant to add to the discussion. My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren’t at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose.

Kristoff goes on to cite studies that show that conservatives are grossly underrepresented on university faculties and adds this:

The scarcity of conservatives seems driven in part by discrimination. One peer-reviewed study found that one-third of social psychologists admitted that if choosing between two equally qualified job candidates, they would be inclined to discriminate against the more conservative candidate.

Yancey, the black sociologist, who now teaches at the University of North Texas,conducted a survey in which up to 30 percent of academics said that they would be less likely to support a job seeker if they knew that the person was a Republican.

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.

“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

It's not just university faculty who are biased against conservative ideas. Former Facebook employees have revealed how Facebook censored conservative news stories and sites so that they wouldn't get circulation.

Liberals will outnumber conservatives as commencement speakers at major colleges this year by a ratio of at least 4 to 1.

The intriguing question about this censorship of, and discrimination against, conservatives, especially conservative evangelicals, is why the left fears them so much that they have to deny them a platform and deny exposure for their ideas. Why do those on the left, despite a massive amount of empirical evidence to the contrary, continue to reinforce to each other the silly, self-serving myth that conservatives are not very bright and that their ideas have been discredited?

Perhaps it's because deep down they know that in a free and open exchange of ideas liberals simply don't stand a chance of convincing open-minded, critical listeners but conservatives do. Folks on the left know that if colleges made it a point to seek ideological balance on campus the same thing would happen to liberal ideas in the classroom as has happened to liberal ideas on talk radio, cable television, and internet news aggregators, all of which became dominated by conservatives almost as soon as conservatives chose to compete in these media.

Liberals suspect that they'll get clobbered in an open competition of ideas so in order to avoid being rejected by the masses they censor conservatism so that the uninformed masses don't realize that there's any alternative to their own ideas.

Which brings me to an irony in the Kristoff column: One person (Steven) was quoted as having declared, in so many words, that conservatives should be censored and discriminated against because they're stupid. Yet it was Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, who repeatedly acknowledged that the Obama administration was able to foist the Affordable Care Act onto the American public because the voters were too stupid to know what was happening to them.

Now which voters was he talking about? It surely wasn't conservative voters who supported Obamacare, and indeed no Republican politician voted for it. All of the ACA's support came from Democrats, i.e. liberals. These are the people, the members of his own party, who the Obama administration's Mr. Gruber, enjoys calling "stupid:"

I wonder if Steven supported Obamacare.

Good Questions

Theist and scientist Hugh Ross was once invited by an atheist group to address a convocation of some 300 non-believers. In the course of his presentation he asked the audience two questions:

1. How many of you would believe in God if you saw compelling scientific evidence for His existence and saw that evidence increase as we learned more about the universe and the record of nature?

2. How many of you here would not believe in God until the scientific evidence eliminated all other alternate conceivable explanations for the universe and life?

Ross reported that one-third of the audience answered in the affirmative for question #1 while two-thirds answered in the affirmative for question #2.

Those two hundred or so who responded affirmatively to question #2 are implicitly acknowledging a couple of things: They're saying, firstly, that they want to set the bar for belief in God impossibly high so as to insure that it'll never be reached, and secondly, and following from the first, the fundamental reason they don't believe is that they just don't want theism to be true.

As long as there's any possibility, no matter how small, that there's an alternative explanation for the evidence that points to a cosmic creator, they'll refuse to believe that there is one. In other words, unless the theist can establish with absolute certainty that theism is true, these atheists will be able to justify to themselves their unbelief, but certainty is an unrealistic bar. Nothing is ever proven in either science or philosophy with absolute certainty.

What's aimed for is not certainty but plausibility and probability. If the arguments for theism are more plausible than opposing arguments, if the theistic hypothesis is more probably true than false, then anyone who is willing to believe is within his or her epistemic rights in doing so. In fact, we are intellectually obligated, when confronted with a forced choice (e.g. to believe or not), to believe whatever hypothesis best comports with the evidence and is most probably true.

Ross writes:

This approach [i.e. the response to question #2] presents [theists] with an impossible challenge. A [theist] would need to acquire complete knowledge not only about the physical universe but also about everything that could conceivably exist beyond the universe. Neither goal is possible.

Since our powers of investigation are constrained by the universe’s space-time dimensions, it is impossible for humans to ever gain a complete database about the properties of the universe, let alone about what lies beyond. Our inability to ever gain absolute proof, however, does not mean that we cannot attain practical proof.

To satisfy the evidential demands of these atheists the theist would have to prove beyond any possible doubt that both the universe and life did not arise through purely natural processes. The atheists in Ross' audience are saying they're justified in clinging to their atheism, even if the probability of a naturalistic origin of either the cosmos or of life were so low as to be beyond comprehension, unless that probability can be shown with certainty to be zero.

This, it would seem, is not only irrational, but it makes plain the fact that much unbelief (like much belief) is often more a matter of the will and of the heart than it is of the reason.

Ms. Clinton Headed for Rough Seas

The conventional wisdom is that the campaign has now come down to a contest between a developmentally arrested bully and a serial fabulist who may soon be facing felony charges for having broken the law with respect to the handling of classified material when she was Secretary of State. Which of these excellent candidates will the voters of our Republic select to be our national leader for the next four to eight years?

Most Americans are probably at least dimly aware that Ms. Clinton has been under investigation by the FBI for the past year regarding her secret and apparently illegal use of a private email server upon which classified information was found and which could have been, and probably was, hacked by every intelligence service in the world.

That investigation has gotten relatively little coverage by the media, at least compared to what it would have gotten had it been a Republican candidate under FBI scrutiny, and what it has received has sometimes been misleading. In any case, the investigation may soon be coming to a close. Jazz Shaw at HotAir.com brings us up to speed:

At one point in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private bathroom email server, reporters were able to coax an unnamed “FBI official” into saying that Hillary Clinton was “not the target” of the investigation. It’s a line which all of her defenders, including the White House, have stuck to like glue. But now the end days of this long process appear to be upon us and that line of defense is crumbling quickly. As The Hill reports, this process is developing pretty much in keeping with the standard FBI playbook, with Clinton’s closest allies having been interviewed shortly before the former Secretary of State herself will answer questions. And the last person you talk to is pretty much always “the target.”

A former U.S. Attorney who has handled similar cases, Matthew Whitaker, was quoted as saying that investigators will be looking to see if there are any contradictions between Clinton’s answers and those of her aides and others involved with the installation and maintenance of the server. This won’t be an effort to gather new information because, “they’re only going to ask her questions that they know the answers to already.”

One notion that has been advanced frequently in the media is that Ms Clinton is not really in any legal jeopardy because she didn't intend to violate any law, but this is little more than an attempt to put wings on a pig to make it fly. According to the law intent doesn't matter:

[A]n experienced national security lawyer, Bradley Moss, ... put this line of media defense to rest.

“[T]he extent to which the person intended to remove classified documents is irrelevant,” he said in an email to The Hill. “All that matters for strict legal purposes of culpability is whether the person, by virtue of their official position, came into possession of classified information and affirmatively removed the information to an unauthorized location (i.e., the private server). Whether the person knew or suspected the information was classified is irrelevant.”

The evidence against Ms. Clinton is alleged to be overwhelming so, Jazz Shaw writes,

The only remaining question is whether or not [FBI Director] James Comey has the intestinal fortitude to pull the trigger and what the Justice Department will do with this hot potato if it lands in their lap less than two months before the Democrats name the target of this felony level national security investigation as their nominee to be the leader of the free world.

It's hard to imagine that if the case against Ms. Clinton is strong the Attorney General won't at least make it look like they're prosecuting her. If they don't indict and prosecute, anyone with any integrity in the FBI, which could be a lot of people, including the Director, will resign and Mr. Obama hardly wants that sort of scandal marring his last days in office.

The downside for the president in giving the AG the green light to prosecute is that if Clinton is fatally weakened (politically), and a Democrat does not win in November, his entire legacy could be reversed by the Republicans in a matter of months.

So, it's a tough call for Mr. Obama, assuming that his decision will be based purely on a political calculus and not on simply doing what's right, but given the choice between another major scandal and sacrificing Ms. Clinton, for whom the Obamas have little love in the first place, Ms. Clinton might find herself under indictment and Mr. Obama might decide to take his chances with Bernie Sanders carrying on his legacy.

Of course, Mr. Obama could shock the world and just follow the law regardless of the consequences for himself and the Democrat party, but after eight years of watching this administration conduct itself it's doubtful that more than a few idealists expect that that will happen.

A Morning Walk

A morning walk through a local park today produced a few of nature's gems. Here are a few pics (taken from the web) of some of the birds that were flitting about the trail:

This strikingly colored bird is called a scarlet tanager. There are a number of species of tanagers throughout the country but this is the only one commonly found in the northeast. If you know their song you can find them in almost any fairly large stand of mature deciduous woodlands:

This beauty is a rose-breasted grosbeak. It's found in the same habitat as the scarlet tanager but is less common.

The following picture shows an indigo bunting. They're about the size of a sparrow and are very common around open fields and meadows, but many people miss them because they only show the brilliant blue color when seen in good light.

All the birds shown above are males. The females of each species lack the beautiful coloration of the males and are much plainer.

There's a lot of gorgeous things to see on a simple walk through the woods and fields, but it helps to know the birds' songs and to have a good set of field glasses along if you want to get good looks at them. But even if you don't have field glasses, if you look carefully on the trail, especially where the sun hits it, you might very well see tiger beetles. One common species in the northeast is only about 3/4 of an inch long but is the most breathtakingly emerald green color you'll ever see:

Troubling News from Europe

While debate continues about the wisdom of importing large numbers of unvetted Muslim refugees into the country it's instructive to look to the experience of the Europeans. We're all familiar with the rise in Islamic terrorism in Europe perpetrated by indigenous Muslim residents, but Strategy Page has a piece that gives us a different slant on the danger. The article focuses on the number of radical Muslims in the police and military in several European countries. Here are some excerpts:

In the wake of the late 2015 ISIL attack in Paris and the early 2016 attack in Brussels most European countries were forced (by the majority of voters and much of the local media) to reveal data on the extent of Islamic terrorist activity in local security forces.

Germany reported that since 2007 at least 22 military personnel have been identified as Islamic radicals and supporters of Islamic terrorism. Five of these people had completed their service and were civilians again but 17 were still in uniform and were dismissed from service. In addition at least 65 military personnel are currently under investigation for Islamic terrorist sympathies and 29 former military personnel have been identified as having gone to Syria to join ISIL.

The situation is no less troubling elsewhere in Europe:

France recently admitted that since early 2015 the number of suspected Islamic terrorists in general had risen 50 percent to 8,250. Worse, the French admitted they had problems with some Moslems in their own security forces. France had identified 17 Moslem policemen who had been radicalized since 2012. It was already public knowledge that by early 2015 at least ten Moslem French soldiers had deserted and joined ISIL in Syria. Some of these deserters have since been identified as training other terrorists in skills they learned in the French military. One of these deserters had risen to a leadership position in ISIL.

The problems with radicalized police were worse because police have access to police databases containing information about terrorism suspects, counter-terrorism tactics and ongoing counter-terrorism operations. Not all the details of this infiltration of the security forces has become public and it is believed there is more of it and the French are, for obvious reasons, not revealing exactly what they are doing about it.

We keep telling ourselves that it's only a minority of Muslims who've been radicalized, and that it's unjust to be suspicious of the intentions of all Muslims, qua Muslims. Perhaps so, but liberals, at least, are pretty selective in how they employ this claim.

For example, it's only a small minority of gun owners who use their weapons illegally, but the left wants to punish all gun owners by banning firearms altogether. Moreover, it's probably only a small minority of Klansmen who would actually do something to harm people they don't like, but it's considered a moral virtue to despise anyone associated with the Klan which, in its bigotry, is probably no worse than that of many intrepretations of Islam. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see why it's right to despise the Klan but wrong to be merely wary of adherents of a religion that has spawned so much carnage, death and terror over the last three decades.

Polls in Britain found that almost 20% of British Muslims felt little loyalty to Britain but were completely loyal to Islam, a finding which leads one to ask, at what point does the risk associated with bringing among us people who believe that God hates us and who want nothing more than to destroy our way of life, become intolerable? At what point do we decide that maybe it's not a good idea to have people, many of whom have contempt for this country and its people, occupying positions of leadership in the military and police forces?

A lot of Europeans are evidently asking themselves those same questions right now.

Engineering Genius

I showed this video to some of my classes this week because it's so well done. Drew Berry is an animator who creates computer generated animations of cellular processes. The processes he depicts here are occurring all the time in each of the trillions of cells in your body. As you watch it keep in mind a few questions:

1. The proteins which work with the DNA to produce other proteins were themselves produced by DNA. So which came first? How did the DNA produce the helper proteins before the helper proteins existed to guide the process?

2. How did unguided processes like mutation and genetic drift produce such coordinated choreography? How did blind, unguided processes produce the information which tells the proteins where to go and how to function?

3. How does this information get processed by mindless lumps of chemicals and how is it passed on from generation to generation?

And notice how the motor proteins are structured in such a way that enables them to "walk" along microtubules carrying various items to locations where they're needed. How do these motor proteins "know" how to do this, and how did they evolve in the first place? Perhaps we'll eventually discover naturalistic, materialistic answers to these questions, but it seems that the more progress we make in biology the more implausible naturalistic explanations sound to all but the irrevocably committed and the more it looks like the living cell has been intelligently engineered by a mind.

If you don't have time to watch the whole video start at the 2:54 mark:

Being Thankful Key to Happiness

Robert Emmons, writing at Big Questions, discerns the key to Happiness in the Queen of the Virtues - Gratitude.

In modern times gratitude has become untethered from its moral moorings and collectively, we are worse off because of this. When the Roman philosopher Cicero stated that gratitude was the queen of the virtues, he most assuredly did not mean that gratitude was merely a stepping-stone toward personal happiness. Gratitude is a morally complex disposition, and reducing this virtue to a technique or strategy to improve one’s mood is to do it an injustice.

Even restricting gratitude to an inner feeling is insufficient. In the history of ideas, gratitude is considered an action (returning a favor) that is not only virtuous in and of itself, but valuable to society. To reciprocate is the right thing to do. “There is no duty more indispensable that that of returning a kindness” wrote Cicero in a book whose title translates “On Duties.”

Cicero’s contemporary, Seneca, maintained that “He who receives a benefit with gratitude repays the first installment on his debt.” Neither believed that the emotion felt in a person returning a favor was particularly crucial. Conversely, across time, ingratitude has been treated as a serious vice, a greater vice than gratitude is a virtue. Ingratitude is the “essence of vileness,” wrote the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant while David Hume opined that ingratitude is “the most horrible and unnatural crime that a person is capable of committing.”

Emmons goes on to discuss the myriad benefits of a spirit of gratitude for both the individual and society:

To give a flavor of these research findings, dispositional gratitude has been found to be positively associated with qualities such as empathy, forgiveness, and the willingness to help others. For example, people who rated themselves as having a grateful disposition perceived themselves as having more prosocial characteristics, expressed by their empathetic behavior, and emotional support for friends within the last month.

When people report feeling grateful, thankful, and appreciative in studies of daily experience, they also feel more loving, forgiving, joyful, and enthusiastic. Notably, the family, friends, partners and others that surround them consistently report that people who practice gratitude are viewed as more helpful, more outgoing, more optimistic, and more trustworthy.

One of the most important passages in the essay, at least in my opinion, was when Emmons says this:

A spirit of ingratitude corrodes human relationships and becomes epidemic within a culture when entitlements and rights are prioritized over duties and obligations, laments Senior Fellow Roger Scruton of the American Enterprise Institute. Is it any wonder then, that the biggest fear that parents now have for their children is a sense of entitlement and the resentment produced when life fails to deliver what their children think they are entitled to?

When people come to see themselves as entitled their sense of gratitude withers. That's one of the corrosive effects of the modern welfare state - people feel they're owed something from others and consequently their sense of thankfulness is often attenuated. Moreover, when people are granted help from a nebulous, impersonal government it's much more difficult to be thankful for it than when it comes from concrete individual persons.

At any rate, I urge those readers who are searching for happiness in their lives to do a little introspection and ask themselves how grateful they are for what others do, and have done, for them. I also urge readers to read the rest of Emmons' article. There's a lot of wisdom in it.

Architectural Marvels

A friend has passed along a link to a fascinating series of photos of structures built by insects. Take a look at them and ask yourself a question: How is the information that codes for the behavior of these insects passed on from generation to generation? I don't think it can be coded for in DNA because DNA codes for proteins and proteins create tissue, so where does the information come from and how is it transmitted to offspring? If it is coded for on the DNA how are proteins DNA generates translated into behavior?

Take any species-specific behavior we find in the animal kingdom, particularly among the lower phyla and classes of organisms. Whether it's courtship, nest-building, webs, threat displays, migratory behavior or whatever, the behavior must be passed on from generation to generation, it's not learned, and it must somehow be an expression of information. So what's the carrier of that information and how did the behavior/information ever evolve in the first place?

Here's one of the photos of a structure built by the caterpillar of a moth called a bagworm:

As the photographer asks: How did the caterpillar manage to create such symmetry? How did it get twigs of just the right size to create the log cabin? I'd add to these questions, how did it know to do all this and to build it just this way? How do birds know how to build their nests? How do spiders know exactly what kind of web to spin?

Animal behavior is mysterious enough, but it seems literally incredible on the materialist view that it's solely the product of random mutations and chance genetic drift. It's also hard to see how this structure could have had a selective advantage over any of the thousands of simpler structures the bagworm could have adopted.

Perhaps biologists already have all this worked out, but I've never seen an explication of it, and if anyone knows what it is please let me know.

Of Protests and Riots

Did you hear about the Tea Party protestors at a Hillary Clinton campaign event who smashed some cars, swore at, threatened, and even beat up some of Hillary's supporters? No? Well, you certainly would have had it ever happened. According to the media of four years ago the Tea Partiers were a grave danger to American political civility despite the fact that their rallies were not much more boisterous than Sunday School picnics.

Now, however, we have leftists rioting at Trump rallies and the media acts as if it's just college kids on spring break. David Harsanyi at the Federalist wonders why:

If a mob of conservatives attempted to shut down a major Hillary Clinton event, as rioters did the other day during a Donald Trump event, America would be thrust into an insufferable national dialogue about the growing violent tendencies of the Right to crush debate. There would be a flood of anxious op-ed pieces and cable news roundtables featuring chin-stroking pundits contemplating the future of discourse in America. No one would be spared.

And you better believe every conservative politician in the country would be asked to comment on this bloodcurdling development.

Do you, sir, feel that your own rhetoric about immigration and guns has somehow contributed to this ugly trend we’re seeing?

Does the GOP need to soften its tone on abortion to stop this kind of violence from happening in the future?

You might remember that, during the 2009-2010 Obamacare debates, every false and exaggerated claim about Tea Party violence induced a thousand wringing hands to grapple over the fascistic tendencies and ugly underbelly of conservatism. You might remember the Democratic leadership in Congress decrying “acts of violence” against House members in concerted effort to create the perception that bloodshed was imminent. You will no doubt remember the fake bravery of Nancy Pelosi and friends carrying a gavel across big crowds of wholly peaceful people protesting leftist health care policy as if they were facing down Orval Faubus.

The media was happy to portray the peaceful Tea Party as a movement surreptitiously driven by racism without a shred of proof outside its opposition to Barack Obama. You will remember Paul Krugman blaming peaceful assembly and free speech for an insane person’s “assassination” attempt against Kathleen Gifford, and Ezra Klein lamenting how scary things get when conservatives oppose liberal doctrine. Every shooting in America necessitates a thorough investigation into political proclivities of the perpetrator. Is he angry at the president? Did he ever register as a Republican? Is he fond of the Confederate flag? But only when the facts mesh with the helpful narrative do we hear about it.

When a single incoherent nutjob shoots up a Planned Parenthood, the National Rifle Association and every pro-life organization—nay, every pro-lifer in the country—is called to do some soul-searching about their positions. All of it an attempt to chill speech.

But I don’t remember any riots during the heyday of the Tea Party. I do remember citizens making their case known in town hall meetings, often loudly. (When the Left is yelling, it’s activism. When the Right yells, we all are forced to ask ourselves, “What ever happened to civility?”) This week, the media informs us that “protesters took to the streets” at a Donald Trump campaign event in California.

From the AP report:

One Trump supporter had his face bloodied in a scuffle as he tried to drive out of the arena. One man jumped on a police car, leaving its front and rear windows smashed and the top dented and other protesters sprayed graffiti on a police car and the Pacific Amphitheatre’s marquee.

Dozens of cars — including those of Trump supporters trying to leave — were stuck in the street as several hundred demonstrators blocked the road, waved Mexican flags and posed for selfies. Some protesters badgered Trump’s fans as they walked to their cars in the parking lot.

Read the rest at the link. Violence and rioting is what the left does. It's what they've always done. And the media, which itself leans left, let's them get away with it like an indulgent parent refusing to chastise a spoiled child. Like an indulgent parent blind to the misbehavior of its offspring, it refuses to condemn the violence of those with whom it sympathizes. But let a Tea Partier or Pro-Life protestor hold up a sign that expresses an unwelcome or politically incorrect sentiment and the media howls as if the end of the Republic is nigh. Will Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders be asked to repudiate the rioters? Will they be badgered by the media to condemn the violence and intimidation? Don't hold your breath. The media only does that to Republicans. It's no wonder fewer and fewer people think them trustworthy.

Why Tyrants Ban the Bible

Eric Metaxas, has a column at USA Today in which he suggests some answers to a couple of interesting questions: Why do tyrants almost always ban the Bible, and why do so many secular folks fear it? Whether one believes that the Bible is the literal word of God or is convinced that it's just a compilation of the literary and historical musings of people who lived in a long dead civilization, the questions should have resonance, in fact they should have special piquancy for those who hold the latter view of the Bible. Why would a book of ancient fables and superstitions be feared by those who seek to exercise mind-control over the people? Why not just treat it like we treat Aesop's Fables?

Anyway, here are some excerpts from what Metaxas says:

Every single year the Bible is the world’s best-selling book. In fact, it’s the number one best-selling book in history. But recently it made another, less-coveted list: the American Library Association’s “top 10 most-challenged books of 2015.” This means the Bible is among the most frequently requested to be removed from public libraries.

But what’s so threatening about it? Why could owning one in Stalin’s Russia get you sent to the Gulag, and why is owning one today in North Korea punishable by death? What makes it scarier to some people than anything by Stephen King?

We could start with the radical notion that all human beings are created by God in His image, and are equal in His eyes. This means every human being should be accorded equal dignity and respect. If the wrong people read that, trouble will be sure to follow. And some real troublemakers have read it.

One of them was George Whitefield, who discovered the Bible as a teenager and began preaching the ideas in it all across England. Then he crossed the Atlantic and preached it up and down the thirteen colonies until 80 percent of Americans had heard him in person. They came to see that all authority comes from God, not from any King, and saw it was their right and duty to resist being governed by a tyrant, which led to something we call the American Revolution.

Another historical troublemaker was the British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce. When he read the Bible, he saw that the African slave trade — which was a great boon to the British economy — was nonetheless evil. He spent decades years trying to stop it. Slave traders threatened to have him killed, but in 1807, he won his battle and the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire. In 1833, slavery itself was abolished too.

In the 20th century, an Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi picked up some ideas from the Bible about non-violent resistance that influenced his views as he led the Indian people to independence. And who could deny the Bible’s impact on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said the Bible led him to choose love and peaceful protest over hatred and violence? He cited the Sermon on the Mount as his inspiration for the Civil Rights movement, and his concept of the "creative suffering," endured by activists who withstood persecution and police brutality, came from his knowledge of Jesus’ trials and tribulations.

It could be added that a book that teaches that no earthly authority is ultimate, that men must obey God's law when it conflicts with man's law, that tyrants who abuse their power, which they all do, will answer for their evil, a book that says all that is not going to find favor with dictators.

But why is it often banned from public libraries in countries which ostensibly have freedom of speech? Perhaps one reason is that the Bible defies the secularist orthodoxy that "the cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be" to quote Carl Sagan. Any book that says otherwise is simply not to be tolerated, even by those who claim to make a virtue of tolerance. These folks may not be tyrants of the sort who rule North Korea, but they share some aspects of the tyrannical spirit all the same.

The Dark Ages

A lot of high school and even college students are taught that the historical period roughly from the fall of Rome to the 15th century was a time of intellectual stagnation with little or no scientific or technological progress. The ignorance that descended over Europe during this epoch has caused it to be called the "Dark Ages," a pejorative assigned to the Middle Ages by historians of the 18th century hostile to the Church and desirous of deprecating the period during which the Church wielded substantial political power.

Lately, however, historians have challenged the view that this epoch was an age of unenlightened ignorance. Rodney Stark has written in several of his books (particularly, his How the West Won) of the numerous discoveries and advancements made during the "dark ages" and concludes that they weren't "dark" at all. The notion that they were, he argues, is an ahistorical myth. Indeed, it was during this allegedly benighted era that Europe made the great technological and philosophical leaps that put it well in advance of the rest of the world.

For example, agricultural technology soared during this period. Advances in the design of the plow, harnessing of horses and oxen, horseshoes, crop rotation, water and wind mills, all made it possible for the average person to be well-fed for the first time in history. Transportation also improved which enabled people and goods to move more freely to markets and elsewhere. Carts, for example, were built with swivel axles, ships were more capacious and more stable, and horses were bred to serve as draught animals.

Military technology also made advances. The stirrup, pommel saddle, longbow, crossbow, armor, and chain mail eventually made medieval Europeans almost invincible against non-European foes.

Similar stories could be told concerning science, philosophy, music and art, and thus the view espoused by Stark that the medieval era was a time of cultural richness is gaining traction among contemporary historians who see the evidence for this interpretation of the time to be too compelling to be ignored.

This short video featuring Anthony Esolen provides a nice summary:

Scylla and Charybdis

One of the mysteries of our current political drama is why so many people who would, one would think, be hostile to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton nevertheless support them. Trump, for his part, has received a lot of love from people who identify themselves as either Christian or conservative or both, yet there's not much in Trump's personal history nor his current deportment which would engender confidence that he is sympathetic to the concerns of either group and an awful lot in his history and conduct that would indicate that the opposite is true.

Even so, Trump is very popular and one reason why may be found in this article from the Washington Examiner:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has revealed that 124 illegal immigrant criminals released from jail by the Obama administration since 2010 have been subsequently charged with murder.

"The criminal aliens released by ICE in these years — who had already been convicted of thousands of crimes — are responsible for a significant crime spree in American communities, including 124 new homicides. Inexplicably, ICE is choosing to release some criminal aliens multiple times," said the report written by CIS's respected director of policy studies, Jessica M. Vaughan.

What's more, her report said that in 2014, ICE released 30,558 criminal aliens who had been convicted of 92,347 crimes. Only 3 percent have been deported.

Her analysis is the latest shocking review of Obama's open-border immigration policy. And despite the high number of illegal immigrants charged with murder, the list doesn't include those released by over 300 so-called "sanctuary cities" and those ICE declined to take into custody.

Vaughan added that "ICE reported that there are 156 criminal aliens who were released at least twice by ICE since 2013. Between them, these criminals had 1,776 convictions before their first release in 2013, with burglary, larceny, and drug possession listed most frequently."

In a way, Donald Trump is a product of President Obama's open borders immigration policy. Trump has promised more forcefully than any other candidate, certainly more forcefully than either of the Democrat contestants, that he will put a stop to the flood of illegal aliens and criminals pouring into our country. It's that promise, perhaps - along with the fact that his supporters believe that, unlike the "establishment" Republicans who've been running the show for the last eight years and whom the rank and file regard as a bunch of milquetoasts, Trump will actually fight - which has won a lot of people to his candidacy despite his lamentable emotional immaturity and sundry other shortcomings.

For others, contemplating the looming choice between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton, who has made herself rich peddling access to the wealthy, both domestic and foreign, who wish to influence policy and legislation for their own benefit, and who behaved at best recklessly as Secretary of State and certainly incompetently, Homer's Odysseus comes to mind. The hero Odysseus was forced by circumstances to navigate his boat between the monster of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis, a perilous and terrifying task, and a political counterpart to which confronts the American voter this November. Americans will likely find themselves having to choose between the Scylla of Hillary and the Charybdis of Trump, who together comprise, perhaps, the most disagreeable pair of presidential candidates in modern times.

Scylla and Charybdis

Lost in the Multiverse

Physicist Adam Frank is impressed, as most scientists are, with the degree of fine-tuning scientists are finding in the cosmos. He writes:

As cosmologists poked around Big Bang theory on ever-finer levels of detail, it soon became clear that getting this universe, the one we happily inhabit, seemed to be more and more unlikely. In his article, Scharf gives us the famous example of carbon-12 and its special resonances. If this minor detail of nuclear physics were just a wee bit different, our existence would never be possible. It’s as if the structure of the carbon atom was fine-tuned to allow life.

But this issue of fine-tuning goes way beyond carbon nuclei. It's ubiquitous in cosmology.

Change almost anything associated with the fundamental laws of physics by one part in a zillion and you end up with a sterile universe where life could never have formed. Not only that, but make tiny changes in even the initial conditions of the Big Bang and you end up with a sterile universe. Cosmologically speaking, it’s like we won every lottery ever held. From that vantage point we are special — crazy special.

Indeed, the figure of one part in a zillion hardly begins to capture the incomprehensible precision with which these cosmic constants and forces are set, but lest one conclude that perhaps it's all purposefully engineered, Frank quickly waves the reader away from that unthinkable heresy:

Fine-tuning sticks in the craw of most physicists, and rightfully so. It’s that old Copernican principle again. What set the laws and the initial conditions for the universe to be “just so,” just so we could be here? It smells too much like intelligent design. The whole point of science has been to find natural, rational reasons for why the world looks like it does. “Because a miracle happened,” just doesn’t cut it.

This is a bit too flippant. Intelligent design doesn't say "a miracle happened" as though that were all that's needed to account for our world. ID says simply that natural processes are inadequate by themselves to explain what scientists are finding in their equations. Even so, it's ironic that every naturalistic theory of cosmogensis does say that the origin of the universe was miraculous if we define a miracle as an extraordinarily improbable event that does not conform to the known laws of physics.

In any case, how do scientists who wish to avoid the idea of purposeful design manage to do so? Well, they conjure a near infinite number of universes, the multiverse, of which ours is just one:

In response to the dilemma of fine-tuning, some cosmologists turned to the multiverse. Various theories cosmologists and physicists were already pursuing — ideas like inflation and string theory — seemed to point to multiple universes.

Actually, these theories allowed for the existence of other universes, they don't require them, but be that as it may, the advantage of positing a multiplicity of different worlds is that the more different worlds you have the more likely even a very improbable world will become, just as the more times you deal a deck of cards the more likely it will be that you'll deal a royal flush. Frank, though, issues a caveat:

There is, however, a small problem. Well, maybe it’s not a small problem, because the problem is really a very big bet these cosmologists are taking. The multiverse is a wildly extreme extrapolation of what constitutes reality. Adding an almost infinite number of possible universes to your theory of reality is no small move.

Even more important, as of yet there is not one single, itty-bitty smackeral of evidence that even one other universe exists (emphasis mine)....

Finding evidence of a multiverse would, of course, represent one of the greatest triumphs of science in history. It is a very cool idea and is worth pursuing. In the meantime, however, we need to be mindful of the metaphysics it brings with it. For that reason, the heavy investment in the multiverse may be over-enthusiastic.

The multiverse meme seems to be everywhere these days, and one question to ask is how long can the idea be supported without data (emphasis mine). Recall that relativity was confirmed after just a few years. The first evidence for the expanding universe, as predicted by general relativity, also came just a few years after theorists proposed it. String theory [upon which the multiverse idea is based], in contrast, has been around for 30 years now, and has no physical evidence to support it.

I'm surprised Frank doesn't mention the irony in this. Scientists feel impelled to shun ID because, they aver, it's not scientific to posit intelligences for which there's no physical evidence (set aside the fact that the existence of a finely-tuned universe is itself pretty compelling evidence). Yet, in its stead they embrace a theory, the multiverse, for which, as Frank readily admits, there's no physical evidence and yet they think this is somehow more reasonable than embracing ID.

When you're determined to escape the conclusion that the universe is intentionally engineered, you'll embrace any logic and any theory, no matter how bizarre, that allows you to maintain the pretense of having refuted the offending view.

Pretty amusing.

Sauce for the Goose

Larry O'Connor at Hot Air questions how President Obama can reconcile his pique at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when Netanyahu came to the U.S. to urge Congress to reject Mr. Obama's deal with Iran with his decision to go to London to urge the Brits not to leave the European Union. Even more, he threatened them with diminished prospects of a trade deal if they did leave. Why is it wrong, in President Obama's eyes, for Netanyahu to interject himself in the affairs of this country, but not wrong for Mr. Obama to interject himself in the affairs of Great Britain?

Here's O'Connor:

During the height of the debate over Obama’s disastrous nuclear capitulation to Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted an invitation to address the US Congress to make a strong case against the deal that could hand nuclear weapons to a terrorist state pledged to annihilating his nation.

Do you remember the White House’s petulant reaction to the speech?

On CNN, Fareed Zakaria asked the president.... "Is it appropriate for a foreign head of government to inject himself into an American debate?”

Obama then employed his patented, passive-aggressive snark. “I’ll let you ask Prime Minister Netanyahu that question, if he grants you an interview,” he replied with a suggestive smirk. An arrogant response meant to convey a snide “I know and you know the answer to that question, but I’ll snidely demure so I can give the appearance of staying above the fray. Oh, and I’ll throw in a little jab suggesting Netanyahu is scared to sit with you and take a question like that even though I clearly am not.”

And then he couldn’t help himself. He said, “I do not recall a similar example.”

By providing that last answer, he validated Zakaria’s question and the premise it was built upon. That Netanyahu had “injected himself, forcefully,” into an internal American affair and it was unprecedented.

He could have said, “Listen Fareed, the US has a long and important relationship with Israel and clearly this Iran deal is going to affect the Israeli people and all the other nations in the region. I welcome the Prime Minister’s input and he has every right to accept Congress’ invitation.”

But he didn’t.

No, he didn't. He in fact took great umbrage at Mr. Netanyahu's impertinence in addressing the U.S. Congress. So, did he apply the same standard to himself when he visited England? Not at all:

No matter what side of the Brexit (British exit from the EU) question you fall on, there’s no doubt that Obama is “injecting himself forcefully into the debate” over British policy, right? And by doing so, he is showing himself to be a world-class hypocrite.

I don't feel comfortable with O'Connor's use of the word "hypocrite" to describe the President of the United States, but sadly, I can't think of any other word that better describes the conjunction of his petulance toward Netanyahu's conduct and his own conduct in England.

Born Yesterday

A post over at Why Evolution Is True, a site at which scientistic materialists and naturalists tend to gather, recently caught my eye. The poster, who went by the name Grania, wrote this about the ethics of the Bible:

A number of people over the years have pointed out that almost anyone can improve upon the Ten Commandments with minimal effort, the original set of ten ... moral laws by which humans were purportedly to live their lives.

What appears in Exodus is so old that its ethics are more concerned with livestock, possessions and outward symbols of worshiping the right god. It’s not particularly concerned with the well-being of children say, or women or pretty much anyone who wasn’t an adult male Jew camping at the bottom of Mount Sinai.

The point is that through no effort of our own and no failing of theirs, we live in a century where we are moral giants compared to our ancestors. We benefit from their failings and their flaws as much as from what wisdom they collated; and now we can do better without even thinking too hard about it.

There are at least two things wrong with what Grania claims.

First, the ethical imperatives in the Old Testament, and elaborated upon in the New, impose upon us the duties of doing justice, of caring for the widow, the orphan, the weak, the stranger, and the poor. I don't think that the last two thousand years has seen any improvement on those commands.

The Israelites were enjoined to love their neighbor as they loved themselves, and much of the rest of the Bible is a commentary on how, in practical terms, one might do that. The claim that we are moral giants compared to those who went before us seems to reflect the naivete of the person "born yesterday." It's very hard for anyone conversant with the last 100 years of world history to think that we today are morally superior to the inhabitants of earlier centuries, but if we grant that Western civilization has achieved a measure of moral superiority it is only because it has been for two thousand years marinated in the ethical teaching of Scripture, not because we're somehow better moral examples of the human species.

Second, the people of the Book can say with perfect logical consistency that to fail in the duty to love our neighbor is to do grave moral wrong. It is to violate the will of the Creator who, by virtue of His perfect goodness, power and knowledge, is a supreme moral authority and who holds us accountable for our behavior. The modern atheist, however, lacking any objective moral authority, cannot claim that any moral duties exist nor that there exist any moral wrongs. One can choose to love one's neighbor, of course, but if one chooses instead to harm one's neighbor he's violating no duty nor doing anything that's morally wrong. On an atheistic view there simply are no objective moral duties and thus no moral wrongs because there's no objective moral authority and no real accountability.

On atheism human beings are like the citizens of a town in the wild west with no laws and no sheriff. What's right is whatever the guy with the most guns on his side says is right. The atheist might bristle at this claim. He may strenuously deny it, but he has to piggyback on the moral assumptions of theism in order to do so. Atheism itself offers no grounds for supposing that morality is anything more than a cultural or social convention.

The Climate Controversy

A colleague passed along this short video featuring an expert in the field of climatology that helps put the debate over climate change into perspective.

What do the scientists working in this field agree upon and what do they disagree upon? Who is driving the contentious aspects of the debate and what are their motives? I think you'll find this five minute presentation both interesting and informative:

Another Point in Favor of Substance Dualism

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out that among the things that a material brain cannot accomplish just by itself is abstract thought. Egnor concludes that this is evidence for mind/brain dualism because certainly human beings are capable of abstract thinking. Why does he say that the material brain is incapable of generating abstract thoughts? He makes his case in a short essay at Evolution News, excerpts from which are here:

Wilder Penfield was a pivotal figure in modern neurosurgery. He was an American-born neurosurgeon at the Montreal Neurological Institute who pioneered surgery for epilepsy. He was an accomplished scientist as well as a clinical surgeon, and made seminal contributions to our knowledge of cortical physiology, brain mapping, and intra-operative study of seizures and brain function under local anesthesia with patients awake who could report experiences during brain stimulation.

His surgical specialty was the mapping of seizure foci in the brain of awake (locally anesthetized) patients, using the patient's experience and response to precise brain stimulation to locate and safely excise discrete regions of the cortex that were causing seizures. Penfield revolutionized neurosurgery (every day in the operating room I use instruments he designed) and he revolutionized our understanding of brain function and its relation to the mind.

Penfield began his career as a materialist, convinced that the mind was wholly a product of the brain. He finished his career as an emphatic dualist.

During surgery, Penfield observed that patients had a variable but limited response to brain stimulation. Sometimes the stimulation would cause a seizure or evoke a sensation, a perception, movement of muscles, a memory, or even a vivid emotion. Yet Penfield noticed that brain stimulation never evoked abstract thought. He wrote:

There is no area of gray matter, as far as my experience goes, in which local epileptic discharge brings to pass what could be called "mindaction"... there is no valid evidence that either epileptic discharge or electrical stimulation can activate the mind... If one stops to consider it, this is an arresting fact. The record of consciousness can be set in motion, complicated though it is, by the electrode or by epileptic discharge. An illusion of interpretation can be produced in the same way. But none of the actions we attribute to the mind has been initiated by electrode stimulation or epileptic discharge. If there were a mechanism in the brain that could do what the mind does, one might expect that the mechanism would betray its presence in a convincing manner by some better evidence of epileptic or electrode activations.[italics mine]

The brain was necessary for abstract thought, normally, but it was not sufficient for it. Abstract thought was something other than merely a process of the brain.

Why don't epilepsy patients have "calculus seizures" or "moral ethics" seizures, in which they involuntarily take second derivatives or contemplate mercy? The answer is obvious -- the brain does not generate abstract thought. The brain is normally necessary for abstract thought, but not sufficient for it.

Thus, the mind, as Penfield understood, can be influenced by matter, but is, in its abstract functions, not generated by matter.

There's more at the link. Egnor's argument boils down to this. If the material brain is sufficient to account for all of our cognitive experience, and since stimulation that normally triggers all sorts of "mental" activity never triggers abstract thinking, abstract thinking must arise from something other than the material brain.

This is not proof that there's a mind, of course, but it is certainly consistent with the dualist hypothesis that we are a composite of mind and brain and certainly puzzling on the materialist hypothesis that the material brain is solely responsible for all of our mental experience.

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.