Receding Tide

Pat Buchanan suggests that the Clinton campaign is losing momentum and a lot of people, including people in her campaign, are puzzled as to why she's not running away with this race given Trump's uncanny ability to shoot himself in the foot whenever he's given the opportunity.

Here's Buchanan:

Sixty days out, one senses she has lost momentum – the “Big Mo” of which George H.W. Bush boasted following his Iowa triumph in 1980 – and her campaign is in a rut, furiously spinning its wheels.

The commander in chief forum Wednesday night should have been a showcase for the ex-secretary of state’s superior knowledge and experience.

Instead, Clinton looked like a witness before a grand jury, forced to explain her past mistakes and mishandling of classified emails at State.

“Of the two candidates,” the New York Times reported, “Mrs. Clinton faced by far the tougher and most probing questions from the moderator, Matt Lauer of NBC, and from an audience of military veterans about her use of private email, her vote authorizing the Iraq war, her hawkish foreign policy views...”

On defense most of the time, Clinton scored few points.

And with a blistering attack on Lauer, the Times all but threw in the towel and conceded that the Donald won the night. “Moderator of Clinton-Trump Forum Fields A Storm of Criticism,” was the headline as analyst Michael Grynbaum piled on: “Mr. Lauer found himself besieged on Wednesday evening by critics of all political stripes, who accused the anchor of unfairness, sloppiness, and even sexism in his handling of the event.”

When your allies are ripping the refs, you’ve probably lost the game.

Moreover, when it comes to her strongest suit, foreign policy, before Clinton can elaborate on her vision, she is forced to answer for her blunders.

Why did she vote for the war in Iraq? Why did she push for the war in Libya that produced this hellish mess? Does she still defend her handling of the Benghazi massacre? What happened to her “reset” with Russia?

Most critically, when facing the press, which she has begun to do after eight months of stonewalling, she is invariably dragged into the morass of the private server, the lost-and-found emails, her inability to understand or abide by State Department rules on classified and secret documents, and FBI accusations of extreme carelessness and duplicity.

Then there are the steady stream of revelations about the Clinton Foundation raking in hundreds of millions from dictators and despots who did business with Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

And with thousands of emails still out there, the contents of which are known to her adversaries, she will likely have IEDs going off beneath her campaign all the way to November.

My hunch is that polls will continue to show Trump gaining, especially in the battleground states. Hillary seems to be casting about for a way to damage Trump but, despite the fact that he offers so many targets for her to aim at, he seems so far to be made of teflon. This must be galling for the Clintonites because every time Trump opens his mouth he seems to say something that should make him a laughingstock, yet Clinton can't effectively criticize him because every accusation made by her or her supporters seems to boomerang back on her or her surrogates.

For example, George Stephanopolous, a Clintonite and host of a Sunday talk show on ABC, asked Trump's campaign manager, Kelley Ann Conway, whether she thought it was a good idea to have a sexual harasser (i.e. Roger Ailes) advising Trump. This might have been an effective question if made on behalf of any other candidate, but an obvious retort to the Clintons, if anyone presses Ailes' access to Trump, is to ask whether it's a good idea for Hillary to be taking advice from the sexual harasser to whom she's married.

Again, Hillary avers that Trump is lying about his university, Trump U, and he probably is, but when Hillary calls someone else a liar people laugh out loud at the absurdity and chutzpah of an allegation of mendacity coming from the woman whose name is almost synonymous with duplicity.

Others have said that Trump's not qualified to be president, and of the 17 original Republican candidates he's surely the least qualified, but most of the people scoffing at Trump's qualifications voted for Obama in 2008, a man whose qualifications for serving as president could have been listed on a post-it note in 50 pt. font.

A final example: Daughter Chelsea has called Trump a misogynist which would be a serious charge indeed were she not the daughter of one of the most notorious users and abusers of women ever to walk the halls of the White House.

"Meanwhile," Buchanan writes, "Donald Trump’s message has begun to come through – loud, clear and consistent."

He will secure the border. He will renegotiate the trade deals that have been killing U.S. manufacturing and costing American jobs. He will be a law-and-order president who will put America first. He will keep us out of wars like Iraq. He will talk to Vladimir Putin, smash ISIS, back the cops and the vets, and rebuild the military.

Other than being the first woman president, what is the great change that Hillary Clinton offers America?

Unfortunately for Trump, Hillary may well start off the evening on November 8th with 240 of the 270 electoral college votes she needs to win just because she's a Democrat and all but certain to carry big states like California and New York. It'll take some tectonic events between now and then to overcome that math and shift it into Trump's favor.

Metaphysical Freeloader

Note: This post ran on VP three years ago, but, given what my students and I are talking about in class, I thought it'd be helpful to run it again.

P.Z. Myers is a very devout atheist. He's committed to an evolutionary view of life so it's perplexing that he makes so many moral pronouncements in his recent condemnation of atheistic fellow-traveler Richard Dawkins' latest transgressions against Myers' moral sensibilities. Myers quotes from an article in The Times magazine in which Dawkins discusses an incident from his childhood:

In an interview in The Times magazine on Saturday (Sept. 7), Dawkins, 72, said he was unable to condemn what he called “the mild pedophilia” he experienced at an English school when he was a child in the 1950s.

Referring to his early days at a boarding school in Salisbury, he recalled how one of the (unnamed) masters “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.”

He said other children in his school peer group had been molested by the same teacher but concluded: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today,” he said.

He said the most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder and should not be bracketed with what he called “just mild touching up.”

That was Dawkins saying that being briefly fondled by his teacher as a child was no big deal. Well, it is to Myers. Note the moral outrage in his criticism of Dawkins:

I can think of some lasting harm: he seems to have developed a callous indifference to the sexual abuse of children. He was a victim of an inexcusable violation; that he can shrug it off does not mean it was OK, or ‘zero bad’, or something trivial.

Should I have raised my children with such a lack of self-respect that they should have allowed dirty old men to play with their genitals? I would have wanted them to inform me, so that such behavior could be stopped.

Just when did it stop being OK for acquaintances to put their hands inside Richard Dawkins shorts? I presume it would be an utterly intolerable act now, of course — at what age do the contents of childrens’ pants stop being public property?

Should we be giving pedophiles the idea that a “mild touching up” is reasonable behavior? It’s just a little diddling...it does no “lasting harm”. [T]hat sounds like something out of NAMBLA.

And that all Richard Dawkins experienced was a brief groping does not mean that greater harm was not being done. That man was a serial child molester; do we know that he didn’t abuse other children to a greater degree? That there aren’t former pupils living now who bear greater emotional scars?

We do not excuse harm to others because some prior barbaric age was indifferent to that harm. Furthermore, the excuse doesn’t even work: are we supposed to believe that a child-fondling teacher would have been permissible in the 1950s? Seriously? Was that ever socially acceptable? And even if it was, in some weird version of British history, it does not excuse it. It means British schools were vile nests of child abuse, just like Catholic churches.

Thanks for swapping the moral high ground for a swampy mire of ambiguity, Richard. I’m not going to argue that compelling kids to memorize Bible verses and fear hell, as stupid an excuse for education as that is, was child abuse, while getting manhandled by lascivious priests was a trivial offense, to be waved away as harmless. I’m sure many Catholics are quite gleeful that Richard Dawkins has now embraced the same moral relativism that they use to rationalize crimes against children.

Myers is incensed that Dawkins would pooh-pooh what Myers sees as a terrible wrong. He condemns the act because of the harm it does, and expresses disdain, while he's at it, for Dawkins' moral relativism.

Now I share all of these sentiments with Myers, but what I'd like to know is where does Myers think his moral sensibilities come from? If he says they've evolved in us over the eons then why, exactly, should we pay them any heed? Evolution molded us for life in the stone age, not the modern age. Besides, if our sense of moral aversion to pedophilia is a product of evolution then so is the urge to indulge in pedophilic behavior. Why does the aversion take precedence over the indulgence? Why is the antipathy toward molestation any more "right" than the desire to fondle children if both are the products of evolution?

Moreover, how can an impersonal process like evolution impose a moral duty on us to refrain from molesting children in the first place? Moral duties cannot be imposed upon us by an impersonal force or process. They can only be imposed by the personal Creator of the universe, but Myers is absolutely hostile to the idea that such a Creator exists. Yet the fact is that for someone who shares Myers' worldview there are no grounds whatsoever for saying that pedophilia is wrong because in the absence of a personal, transcendent moral authority we have no moral duties at all.

Myers can say he doesn't like what happened to the young Dawkins and doesn't like Dawkins' minimizing of it, but for him to talk as if there's something terribly wrong with it, for him to talk as if there's much more than a simple expression of his personal distaste involved, is just silly.

As I argue in my novels (see links above right) when an atheist makes a moral judgment, he's essentially acting as if God existed. On atheism there are no grounds for such judgments, but man can't live consistently with the nihilism his atheism entails so he temporarily piggy-backs on Christian theism in order to favor us with his moral pronouncements and hopes all the while that no one will notice that he is, in effect, a metaphysical freeloader.

Atheism's Moral Dilemma

Lincoln Mullen has a review in Books and Culture of Peter Watson's The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God.

In the course of his review, Mullen makes a point which I think needs to be clarified. He writes that:

The most common charge that Christians level against atheists is that they have no morals.

He might be correct that this is a common charge, but even so, the moral problem that Christians (and theists in general) have with atheism is not that atheists don't have moral values but rather that they have no ground for making moral judgments beyond their own subjective preferences.

Take a concrete example. A tobacco company lies about the danger its product poses to the consumer. A theist would say that such deception is objectively wrong because it violates the will of the Creator who commands that people be treated with dignity, respect, and kindness - a command that imposes a clear moral duty not to harm people.

The atheist may also be outraged that the tobacco company has lied to people about the hazards of using its product, but the only reason they could have, if atheism is true, for condemning the company's behavior is that they simply don't like it. If an atheist were to respond to this by insisting that it's just wrong to hurt people, the question then needs to be asked, "Why is it wrong?" If atheism is true then we are here as a result of a blind, impersonal, evolutionary process, and blind, impersonal processes cannot impose a moral duty on anyone to do anything. Nor can such processes prescribe or proscribe behavior, nor pronounce a behavior wrong in any meaningful moral sense.

Lots of thoughtful atheists have admitted this. Consider the following quotes by thinkers all of whom are, or were, atheists:

• What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question. ~ Richard Dawkins
• What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after. ~ Ernest Hemmingway
• This philosopher (Joel Marks is speaking of himself) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality....Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. ~ Joel Marks
• Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs....The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways. ~ Margaret Sanger
• For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel. ~ Richard Rorty.
• The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower. ~ Leo Tolstoy
• Communism abolishes all eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality. ~ Karl Marx
• One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life…only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best. ~ Charles Darwin
• As evolutionists, we see that no justification (of morality) of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding....Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place. ~ E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... ~ Will Provine
• I would accept Elizabeth Anscombe’s suggestion that if you do not believe in God, you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do. ~ Richard Rorty

So, the problem atheism has with morality, as the theist sees it, is not that atheists can't choose to adopt the sort of values of which society approves. Of course, they can. The problem is that they wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense had they chosen to adopt completely opposite values. Their choice is purely a matter of personal preference, like choosing to paint their house brown instead of green.

Thus, it's puzzling when atheists adopt the view that they hold to a superior morality than that of Christians as Mullen asserts in a later passage:

Listen carefully to the debate on contemporary issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and you will hear moral reasoning on both sides; when atheists, agnostics, or "nones" take a position, they do so out of a conviction that their morality is superior to that of traditional Christianity.

The most the atheist can claim, however, is that, on the Christian's own assumptions, the atheist's views on these issues might be closer to what God wills than are the Christian's views, but in order to make this claim the atheist has to piggyback on the theist's belief that both God and objective moral duties exist.

Moreover, the atheist cannot say that the theist is wrong in holding the views on these issues that perhaps he does. The most the atheist can say is that the theist's views are inconsistent with what he professes to believe about God's moral will. Of course, it may be true that the theist is not acting consistently with his fundamental moral assumptions, but that doesn't make those fundamental assumptions wrong, and it certainly doesn't make them inferior to the atheist's values which are grounded in nothing more authoritative than his own tastes.

This is the point I seek to make in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss. An atheist, if he's to be consistent, can either give up the pretense of holding to some non-arbitrary moral standard and admit that he's just making his morality up as he goes along, or he can admit that he believes that right and wrong are not merely matters of subjective preference but are real, objective features of the world. But, if he admits that, then, to be consistent, he'd have to give up his atheism and become a theist. He has to do one or the other, or he could simply do neither and admit that he prefers to live irrationally, which is the option many atheists apparently settle upon.

Will Obama Voters Go for Hillary?

Among the many things that must be worrying the Clinton campaign team nowadays - in addition to her health concerns, a possible embarrassing Wikileaks dump, more indications in her emails of poor judgment or criminality, her husband's penchant for sexual scandal, and so on - is that it's doubtful that she'll be able to match Barack Obama's voter turnout among young people in general and African Americans in particular in November.

It's hard to imagine that either of those groups will be as enthusiastic for the nearly septuagenarian, uncharismatic Hillary as they were for Obama, and it's largely on the strength of the support of these two groups that Obama won in both 2008 and 2012. It's not that these erstwhile Obama voters will migrate en masse to Trump, certainly, but rather that they just won't be sufficiently inspired to turn out on election day at all.

In fact, an article in the New York Times which describes the Clinton campaign's fretting over the lack of enthusiasm for their candidate among younger black voters:

When a handful of liberal advocacy organizations convened a series of focus groups with young black voters last month, the assessments of Donald J. Trump were predictably unsparing.

But when the participants were asked about Hillary Clinton, their appraisals were just as blunt and nearly as biting.

“What am I supposed to do if I don’t like him and I don’t trust her?” a millennial black woman in Ohio asked. “Choose between being stabbed and being shot? No way!”

“She was part of the whole problem that started sending blacks to jail,” a young black man, also from Ohio, observed about Mrs. Clinton.

“He’s a racist, and she is a liar, so really what’s the difference in choosing both or choosing neither?” another young black woman from Ohio said.

Young African-Americans, like all voters their age, are typically far harder to drive to the polls than middle-aged and older Americans. Yet with just over two months until Election Day, many Democrats are expressing alarm at the lack of enthusiasm, and in some cases outright resistance, some black millennials feel toward Mrs. Clinton.

A majority of African Americans is convinced - unfairly, I think - that Trump is a racist, so it's doubtful he can win as many of their votes as did George W. Bush, but Trump's surely counting on the possibility that African Americans and young people just won't turn out for Hillary in Obama-sized numbers either.

The question of just how many young African Americans will show up to vote carries profound implications for this election. Mrs. Clinton is sure to dominate Mr. Trump among black voters, but her overwhelming margin could ultimately matter less than the total number of blacks who show up to vote.

To replicate President Obama’s success in crucial states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, she cannot afford to let the percentage of the electorate that is black slip far below what it was in 2012. And while a modest drop-off of black votes may not imperil Mrs. Clinton’s prospects, given Mr. Trump’s unpopularity among upscale white voters, it could undermine Democrats’ effort to capture control of the Senate and win other down-ballot elections.

Adding to the worries is a separate poll of African-Americans that Mr. Belcher conducted earlier in the summer indicating that Mrs. Clinton is lagging well behind Mr. Obama’s performance among young blacks in a handful of crucial states.

“There is no Democratic majority without these voters,” Mr. Belcher said. “The danger is that if you don’t get these voters out, you’ve got the 2004 John Kerry electorate again.”

There's much more analysis of Hillary's difficulties in sparking enthusiasm in minority communities at the link. Maybe she'll soon be dusting off her southern patois again in order to pander to young blacks:

The Unemployment Rate Is Misleading

Since it's Labor Day it's appropriate to post something about jobs and unemployment.

Politicians like to boast when the unemployment rate is down, and on the surface a lower unemployment rate (called the U3) is good news, but not necessarily. What the politicos and their media fanboys often leave out is something called the labor participation rate. When this is also down the unemployment numbers look deceptively good.

That may sound confusing so I recommend this short video to help you understand why the unemployment rate is a meaningless number unless placed in the context of the labor participation rate:

To recap, if ten out of a hundred able-bodied adults are unemployed and looking for work the unemployment rate is 10%. If five of those just drop out and stop looking that means that there are now only five people unemployed and still looking for work. The unemployment rate is now 5% but there are no more people working than there were before. The unemployment rate has been cut in half but the actual job situation in the country has gotten worse, not better, since some people have given up even trying to find a job.

The actual unemployment rate, called the U6, factors in all those who are unemployed or underemployed.

The official unemployment rate in August, the U3, was 4.9%, but if the labor participation rate is factored in the U6 was 9.7%. The U6 is a better indicator of the employment situation in the country, but the U3 is the one we usually hear about.

There's a helpful interactive graph here which shows how the U3 and U6 have varied over the last couple of decades.

One thing that should be kept in mind is that not all of the drop in the labor participation rate is due to a weak economy. Some of it is due to large numbers of baby boomers taking early retirements.

At any rate, remember the next time the media gives the impression that the economy is getting better because unemployment is down that there's more to the story that they may be leaving out.

Paying Their Fair Share

One thing we're almost guaranteed to hear between now and the election in November, and even afterward, is that in this country the rich need to pay their fair share of taxes. The implication, of course, is that the rich, whoever they are, are not now shouldering a just proportion of the nation's tax burden and can afford to pay more.

We often hear the richest 1% disparaged for shirking their duty to pay more of their income in order for the tax burden to be fairly distributed.

A UCLA economics professor takes on these claims and gives us some surprising (perhaps) statistics on what the rich actually do pay in federal taxes. The upshot is that the rich are already contributing their fair share by any reasonable definition of the word "fair."

This video is about five minutes long and paints an easy to understand and helpful portrait of how federal taxes are distributed across various income groups:

Leaving Science Behind

An article by Kirk Dunston at Evolution News and Views illustrates the blurry line that's often separates science and metaphysics. Dunston discusses some of the calculations that have been done by astronomers to assess the probability of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos and quotes scientists who think those chances are incomprehensibly miniscule:

[I]n his book The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin has shown that the probability of merely attaining RNA replication and translation (a necessary requirement for even the simplest life) is less than 10^-1018. He concludes that it is highly unlikely to occur anywhere in the universe. His preferred explanation is that we are one of the lucky universes among a near-infinite number of universes.

In other words, the odds against just one molecular function necessary for life to arise purely by chance are so unimaginably small if our universe is the only one that exists as to be all but impossible.

Koonin's solution is to posit a near infinite number of different universes, a multiverse, in which every event, no matter how improbable, will happen somewhere. Just as the likelihood of rolling double sixes in dice increases the more times you try, so, too, the likelihood of life arising somewhere increases the more universes there are. If the number of different universes approaches infinity, even the most incredibly improbable events will happen in at least one of them.

One (of many) difficulties with the multiverse theory, however, is that it's out of place in a scientific setting. There's no empirical evidence for a multiverse, nor could there be any since any observations we could make would be of objects in this universe. It's not that we're limited by the power of our telescopes, it's that even in principle we can't observe anything outside our universe. Thus the multiverse hypothesis is an example of a metaphysical idea. It can't be verified and it can't be falsified.

Dunston goes on to say:

From a materialistic, evolutionary perspective, our technologically advanced civilization is almost certainly unique in the universe. Indeed, if the origin of life is so improbable that we should not even be here, then it seems we are faced with an interesting choice. The first option is to grant Koonin's theory that we won a lottery against mind-staggering odds, requiring a near infinite number of unseen, untestable universes. The second option arises out of our observation that the universe and this particular planet seem to be incredibly fine-tuned to support life.

Those are the only live options. One either believes that the universe was created by an intelligent agent or one believes that there are a near infinite number of universes out there. There's evidence for the first option but none for the second. Moreover, the first option has the philosophical virtue of being a lot simpler than the second.

In any case, the belief that life is a naturalistic phenomenon, a product of purposeless natural forces and processes, is, at bottom, a metaphysical, not a scientific belief because to be at all plausible it must rely on belief in a multiverse.

Cosmic Voyage

Have you ever wondered how big the universe is or how small the smallest things are? Morgan Freeman takes us on a journey in this an eight and a half minute video to plumb the vastness of space as well as its incredible minuteness.

Take a look:

Some insist that our universe is all a grand fluke, an accident, others insist it's intentionally designed. Some believe that there are a near infinite number of universes (the multiverse), others argue that ours is the only one for which we have any evidence.

Most scientists agree, though, that the universe described in this video started out as a point-like object which contained within its tiny circumference all the mass-energy the universe now possesses. This miniscule point, called a singularity, expanded with unimaginable rapidity at the moment of the universe's origin in an event that has come to be known as the Big Bang, and it's still expanding today.

It's all very fascinating.

Poverty and Bad Decisions

An interesting piece by Emily Badger at CityLab cites research that suggests that, contrary to common opinion, poor people are not poor because they make bad decisions but rather they make bad decisions because they're poor. The exigencies of poverty, some research shows, exert such a powerful pull on people that unwise choices are practically inevitable. Here's part of her essay:

Researchers publishing some ground-breaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little [cognitive] bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort. This research suggests that the reality of poverty actually makes it harder to execute fundamental life skills. Being poor means, as the authors write, “coping with not just a shortfall of money, but also with a concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.”

I don't know how reliable this study is, but I hope it's conclusions are not true. If they are true then the plight of the poor is almost hopeless. According to the study the poor make unwise decisions because they're poor, but they can't get out of poverty until they stop making unwise decisions. They're caught in a vicious cycle. Indeed, this study provides those living below the poverty line with a good reason to just give up.

Badger thinks, though, that taxpayers should give the poor financial independence so they can be freed from the stressors that drive them to make bad choices:

Conversely, going forward, this also means that anti-poverty programs could have a huge benefit that we've never recognized before: Help people become more financially stable, and you also free up their cognitive resources to succeed in all kinds of other ways as well.

Unfortunately, we've already conducted that experiment. Since the 1960s we've spent $22 trillion on the War on Poverty and there are still millions of our fellow citizens living in relative poverty (I say "relative" because poor people in America are only poor relative to their contemporaries in the U.S. Relative to the vast numbers of people who've inhabited the planet throughout history our poor are fabulously wealthy). How much more can, and should, we give and what reason do we have for thinking that we're not now at the point of diminishing returns? When the government subsidizes something we get more of it. That goes as much for poverty as it does for anything else.

Reading Badger's column raises a question: If it's true that poverty makes people choose actions that perpetuate their poverty how do we account for the fact that so many poor people have surmounted their circumstances, especially before there were any social welfare programs in place to help them? Irish and Asian immigrants had nothing but the shirts on their backs when they landed on these shores, and the latter didn't even speak English. Yet many of them, despite suffering brutal discrimination, made the choice to work hard, and they overcame tremendous odds to succeed. Moreover, much of the American population was impoverished during the Great Depression, yet they rose out of it, and still today many are lifting themselves out of poverty and achieving middle class status or higher.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but all of this taken together causes me to wonder if maybe it's not Ms. Badger and the study she cites that are missing something.

Reasons for Unbelief

A recent Pew survey found that the number of Americans who don't believe in God or who are unaffiliated with any religion is continuing to increase. The survey listed the reasons, and I have to say (and I hope no one is offended by this) the reasons seem pretty weak for such an important epistemic commitment:

Consider just the reasons for unbelief (I'm surprised, btw, that the problem of suffering didn't make the list since it's probably the best reason for skepticism out there.).

1. Learning about evolution. There's no incompatibility between evolution and God. Many theists believe in both. In fact, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga points out, the conflict really lies between naturalism (atheism) and evolution. If evolution is true then our rational faculties have evolved to help us survive, not necessarily to lead us to truth. Those who believe both atheism and evolution to be true have no basis for trusting their reason to lead them to truth, especially metaphysical truth. But if that's so they have no basis for trusting their reason when it leads them to conclude that either atheism or evolution are true. If God exists, however, then we have grounds for thinking that God has caused our reason to evolve to lead us to truth.

2. Too many Christians doing unChristian things. Even if it were granted that many people fall short of what we might expect of them (who doesn't?) what does that have to do with whether or not God exists? God's existence doesn't depend on whether people who believe He exists live consistently with that belief. One shouldn't confuse belief that God exists with a particular religious expression of that belief.

3. Religion is the opiate of the people. Even if it were granted that religion misleads or stupefies many people that's also irrelevant to the question whether God exists. The truth of theism is one thing, the truth of a particular religion, or religion in general, is something entirely different. It's ironic, parenthetically, that the opiate claim is taken from Karl Marx. If anything has stupefied the masses, as well as the intelligentsia, over the last one hundred years it has been atheistic Marxism.

4. Rational thought discredits religious belief. Even if it were granted that many religious beliefs cannot withstand rational scrutiny that has nothing to do with whether theism itself is rational. The claim that theism is discredited by rational thought is simply false as many, if not most, philosophers, both theist and atheist, have acknowledged.

5. Lack of evidence for a creator. This objection is as puzzling as it is common. There are numerous arguments that constitute evidence for a creator. At least two forms of the cosmological argument (the kalam argument and the argument from contingency of the universe), the argument from cosmic fine-tuning, and the moral argument are all strong arguments whose conclusions assert the existence of God.

6. Just don't believe it. I think this objection might better be stated, "I just don't want it to be true that God exists." If someone doesn't want theism to be true, of course, nothing will persuade him or her that it is.

I suspect this deep desire for a naturalistic world is the fundamental reason for most unbelief today. The other reasons listed above certainly don't seem to constitute adequate explanations of it.

Why Study Philosophy?

In the course of my teaching I sometimes encourage students to consider an undergraduate philosophy major or minor because I believe that a study of the questions philosophers address provides the most important background a thoughtful and intelligent student could acquire.

Students often ask, though, what they can do with a degree in philosophy. My reply is that most majors don't do anything professionally with their degree, but rather they find it excellent preparation for the sorts of careers they do choose to pursue. Employers in most occupations prefer to train their employees themselves in the skills they'll need, and most professions require graduate level work in a specific field. Undergraduate philosophy prepares a student well for either path.

A friend sent along a link to a post by Dr. Roy Clouser, author of the outstanding book The Myth of Religious Neutrality, and professor of philosophy at Trenton State College, in which he addresses these same questions. His post is entitled Why Major in Philosophy? and it contains a lot of good advice for a young high schooler or undecided undergrad who thinks they might enjoy philosophy but who isn't sure if it will prepare him or her for making a living. Clouser writes:

For most students arriving at college, philosophy is the one subject they've never had before so it's natural that it's one of the last they consider majoring in. It's also natural to wonder what the major is good for--after all, few people ever plan to be professional philosophers! Yet, year after year, students switch their major to philosophy, and others tell us they wish they'd discovered it sooner so they could have done so.

What these students discovered - surprising as it sounds - is that philosophy is the single most useful major in the entire undergraduate curriculum! (Yes, useful!)

It's true, of course, that not many people become professional philosophers. But neither do most history majors become historians or English majors go on to become novelists. The fact is that most students don't pick a major because they plan to make their living in that field. They choose a major based on their interests and on how well it will prepare them for the widest possible number of occupations after college. If you are deciding that way too, we can say this for certain: If you have the interest, philosophy is best possible major - hands down.

Let me explain.

Philosophy deals with theories about the most basic beliefs and values that people have. These include topics like the nature of reality and human nature, the nature and sources of knowledge and morality, the proper structure for society and government, and the nature of religious belief. It also studies theories about the nature of science, art, language, and law. In this way, every philosophy major is exposed to the most influential interpretations of the most important issues people face across the entire spectrum of human experience.

But more than simply learning about these issues, philosophy includes a keen training in logic and critical thinking - in the ability to argue and debate the truth of the various theories and viewpoints that are studied. It sharpens one's ability to spot difficulties, pose questions, and to weigh the evidence for and against the reasons given for any view on any topic. (A bank V.P. once told me that his logical training was the most valuable thing he got in his entire undergraduate education - even more valuable than his business courses.)

Even from this short description you may be able to see why a philosophy major is the best possible background for anyone who wants to deal with the public or who wants to write - whether as a novelist, or news reporter. It is also the very best major for those thinking of pursuing any sort of career in religion. And it should come as no surprise that law schools consider it the best background for the Law SAT and a career in law. (Speaking of standardized tests, the highest GRE scores consistently come from three majors: math, physics, and philosophy.)

But there's more. It seems that a solid background in the influential viewpoints over a wide range of issues, and an ability to think logically about them, is also splendid training for a career in business according to several top business schools. But what may be most surprising of all is that the records of some of the best medical schools show philosophy as the undergraduate major of some of their most outstanding alumni!

So, if you have doubts about the major that's best for you - especially if you are presently an undeclared major - why not make an appointment at the philosophy department to talk over your interests with one of our faculty? Philosophy might, at least, be the ideal minor subject for you even if you decide not to major in it.

I offer only one caveat. Philosophy departments, like departments in any of the humanities, often are loaded with instructors who favor a particular school or style of philosophy. Some of these styles may be deadly dull to students who expect their philosophy experience to be an exciting intellectual excursion into the best that's been thought and written about life's most important questions. The student contemplating a major or minor in philosophy would do well to check out what approach the department is inclined toward before committing him or herself to signing up.

The Unkillable Myth

William and Mary anthropologist Barbara King recently reviewed a new book by Alistair McGrath titled The Big Question: Why We Can't Stop Talking About Science, Faith and God, and criticized him for perpetuating what she calls the "unkillable myth" to which theists cling. The "myth" she has in mind is the conviction among many thoughtful people, theists and atheists alike, actually, that unless there is a purpose to the cosmos in general there can be no ultimate meaning to individual human existences.

King, who is herself an atheist, writes:

Here, yet again, is the unkillable myth, the persistent blind spot about atheism that apparently no amount of explaining can make go away. No matter how lucidly atheists explain in books, essays and blog posts that, yes, life can and does for us have meaning without God, the tsunami of claims about atheists' arid existence rolls on and on.

Where does this persistent (is it also willful?) misunderstanding come from?

Well, to answer her question, it derives from several sources, I think, one of which is the writings of atheists themselves.

McGrath cites a couple of those atheist writings, and King quotes him, but she remains unpersuaded by the quotes. She says that just because there's no meaning to nature or the universe it's illogical to conclude that individual lives have no meaning. She posits two steps that theists take to arrive at this conclusion:

First is the understanding, emergent from evolutionary theory, that neither the universe as a whole, nor we humans within it, have evolved according to some plan of design. Cosmic evolution and human evolution unfold with no guiding hand or specific goals. Most atheists do accept this, I think.

Second is to embrace as a logical next step the idea that our own individual lives have no purpose or meaning. Do you know of any atheists who believe this? I don't.

Perhaps King doesn't read much atheist literature, but there are plenty of well-known atheist philosophers, novelists, and filmmakers who believe this. A partial list would include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Bertrand Russell, Hemmingway, Somerset Maugham, Woody Allen, and Jurgen Habermas.

To quote just one of these writers, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that "unless the point of life is to suffer, life has no point."

King adds:

Nor do I recognize the scientific communities of which I am a part — both online and offline — in McGrath's insistence that a "sense of cosmic pointlessness haunts many today, particularly within the scientific community."

But what about these famous words from Nobel Prize recipient Steven Weinberg?

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature .... We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

Or the insistence of the late Will Provine that,

There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.

Or the words of another Nobel recipient Francis Crick:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

What do any of these brilliant scientists mean if not that man is insignificant and that his existence has no more point or purpose than that of an insect?

Space precludes quoting other scientists such as Sigmund Freud, Bernard Rensch, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking, inter alia.

King continues:

An anthropological perspective teaches us that we humans are a quintessentially meaning-making species. We create love and kindness (hate and violence, too), and also work that matters. We recognize and protect (or, too often, harm) our sense of connection to other animals, to plants and trees, to all of nature's landscapes. What are those acts if not ones of meaning and purpose?

There are a couple of things to be said about what she asserts in the previous paragraph. First, an illusion of meaningfulness is not the same thing as real meaningfulness, subjective meaning is not the same as objective meaning, and proximal meaning is not the same as ultimate meaning.

Anyone can insert meaning of the illusory, subjective, proximal kind into his or her life, but this is like an elderly lady in the rest home who finds great satisfaction in doing jigsaw puzzles all day, who experiences delight every time she inserts the right piece and is pleased when she finishes. Then she dismantles it all, puts it back in the box and begins the next one. The puzzles give her life meaning of a sort, but what she does doesn't really matter. It just allows her to stave off boredom.

If meaning is something we make up then meaning is merely a pretend fiction, like a child's imaginary friend. We may think our lives matter, but how could they if everything ultimately perishes? Unless what we do matters forever it doesn't really matter at all. To insist that life is meaningful even though we all hurtle toward extinction is just philosophical whistling past the graveyard.

A Couple of Puzzlements

For as long as I can remember the left has been reminding us of the plight of the black underclass in America. Indeed, liberals may be said to have been the conscience of the nation on this issue. Black communities suffer from unemployment, bad schools, poverty, drugs, family breakdown, crime, etc. If someone were to suggest that blacks have it pretty good in the U.S. compared to almost anywhere else in the world, that blacks have come a long way since the days of Jim Crow, etc. they'd be hooted down by liberals and progressives for their naivete and insensitivity.

Yet, when Donald Trump stands before a white audience and repeats basically what the left has been saying for over fifty years, when he affirms that blacks suffer all the disadvantages the left has claimed they have, Hillary Clinton tweets that his statement "is so ignorant it's staggering."

It seems that for people like Hillary no matter what Trump says he's wrong for no other reason than that it's him that's saying it. What did he say about the plight of many blacks that was "ignorant"? What did he say that liberals, and conservatives, haven't been saying for decades?

It's interesting that in much of the subsequent criticism of Trump's speech no one actually tries to refute him on the basic facts, they only offer the rather juvenile retort that he's "ignorant," or question his sincerity, or quibble about the venue in which he said it:

To object to Trump's speech on the grounds that because it was delivered before a white audience his argument is therefore somehow invalid is absurd. Do his critics think that unless a couple hundred African Americans are physically present in the auditorium that African Americans can't be moved by Trump's message? Do they think that African Americans won't hear the message unless they're in the same room as Trump? Do they actually think African Americans don't own televisions and computers?

Or could it be that they know that a lot of African Americans really are wondering what indeed they have to lose by voting Republican and this possibility is making them increasingly nervous?

---------------

The nation was outraged that Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte and some friends committed vandalism in Rio and lied about it to the police. He's since been punished emotionally by public opinion and financially by being stripped of endorsement contracts. He may have ruined whatever future he might otherwise have had because of his dishonesty.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly lied to the nation about matters both great and small with the frequency and compulsiveness of a Tourette's sufferer. She's arguably been criminal in her handling of the nation's secrets, and her recklessness and negligence may have gotten people killed. Yet she's very possibly about to be rewarded by the American public with the presidency of the United States.

Why are people outraged over an athlete's relatively venial lie but seemingly indifferent to Mrs. Clinton's chronic flouting of the law and lies about far more serious matters?

Perhaps Mr. Lochte should announce that he's a registered Democrat and take to wearing an I'm with Her button and and probably all will be forgiven.

Fortuitous Flukes

Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick once said that "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see (in their microscopes) was not designed, but rather evolved."

It's no wonder Crick thought biologists had to keep reciting this mantra to themselves. It seems so counterintuitive that the miniscule structures they've discovered over the last fifty years are the product of a mindless, purposeless, accidental processes. The design intuition, as protein biologist Doug Axe calls it, is so powerful in biology that biologists, when incautious, find themselves frequently slipping into language redolent of purpose and engineering.

As an example of one of those structures consider ATP synthase. ATP synthase is a cluster of molecular machines which manufacture a molecule called ATP (adenosine triphosphate). ATP is to cells what gasoline is to cars. It provides the energy for everything the cell does. Here's a short video which shows how ATP is produced by ATP synthase. Bear in mind that the video simplifies what is in fact a much more complex process:

This system must have evolved quickly soon after the first cells appeared and without the benefit of eons of random genetic mutation. To think it evolved purely by blind chance is something like thinking that if you put all the separate component parts of an iphone in a blender and ran the blender enough times you'd get a functional iphone. It's possible, in the same way that anything not logically contradictory is possible, that there are such fortuitous flukes, but it takes an awful lot of faith - blind faith, actually - to believe they've happened.

Vetting Immigrants (Pt. II)

Yesterday I called attention to a column in NRO by former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy who argued that there's no constitutional proscription on banning immigrants who hold to an ideology antipathetic to American culture or values.

I'd like to continue with McCarthy's article today. He states that:

You are not supposed to connect the dots and ask, “Well, how is it conceivable that any sharia-adherent alien could faithfully pledge allegiance to our Constitution?” .... Sharia is not religion. Sharia is a totalitarian societal structure and legal corpus that anti-American radicals seek to impose. Yes, their motivation for doing so is their interpretation of their religion — the fundamentalist, literalist construction of Islam. But that does not make sharia itself a matter of “religion” in the Western sense, even if vast numbers of Arab Muslims — for whom there is no cognizable separation of mosque and state — say otherwise.

By an almost logical necessity Sharia adherents must wish to ultimately establish a theocracy in which everything is subordinated to the principles of Islam. This is certainly not freedom of religion or of speech but quite the opposite. Nor can a sharia adherent agree to the principle that all persons are equal under the law nor that women are in all relevant respects equal to men. Quite simply, a sharia-inclined theocrat cannot consistently support the freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution.

McCarthy writes:

Two things flow from this. The first involves immigration. As we’ve previously demonstrated, there is no constitutional prohibition against considering religion in deciding which aliens to allow into the United States — immigration is a privilege, not a right; and our Constitution is security for Americans, not a weapon for aliens to use against Americans. Nevertheless, even if there were a constitutional bar against “religious tests,” sharia is not religion. There are no constitutional constraints against excluding aliens on grounds of anti-American political ideology. Excluding anti-Americans from America is common sense and was regarded as such for much of our history.

In a time of radical Islamic threat to our national security, Donald Trump is right to propose that aliens from sharia-supremacist areas be carefully vetted for adherence to anti-constitutional principles. Leftists — those notorious disciples of the Framers — claim this is unconstitutional. When shown it is not, they claim that it is against our “tradition” — being, you know, big fans of American tradition. When shown that this is not the case either, when shown that our history supports ideological exclusion of anti-Americans, leftists are down to claiming, “It is not who we are” — by which they always mean it is not who they are, and who they would force the rest of us to be.

It's the repeatedly asserted goal of radical Muslims to use democracy as a means to enable them to gradually acquire political power so that politicians, out of concern for their political viability, will pass laws that impose sharia.

It's not hard to imagine how this could be achieved. When the population of Muslims gets large enough they'll be seen as a voting block that needs to be appeased and catered to just like other such groups. To keep them loyal to the party in which they form a formidable part of the base their demands will be acquiesced to whenever that party is in power. At first these demands might seem minor, like freeing their schools from certain regulations, or allowing Muslim communities a measure of legal semi-autonomy so that they can impose sharia on their own people.

Eventually, as Muslim mayors and councilmen are elected to office sharia will be imposed city-wide, by fiat or ordinance, and a nation, which has for the last eight years looked the other way as its laws and Constitution were flouted time and again by its president and candidates for president, will have a hard time invoking the Constitution as a restraint on the inexorable imposition of sharia. Indeed, something like this transformational process is already well along in Europe.

McCarthy packs much more into his column. He explains, for example, how the left came to endorse the position that we should allow radicals to freely immigrate into the U.S. It's as interesting as it is important.

Vetting Immigrants (Pt. I)

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has written a powerful essay in National Review Online on the idea of vetting Muslim immigrants that I highly commend to you. He begins by denying as utterly false the notion that barring immigrants is by itself unconstitutional:

The U.S. Constitution allows barring would-be immigrants who would subvert our Constitution. Imagine an American government official, interviewing an alien seeking admission to our country from, say, Syria:

U.S. official: “Will you support the United States Constitution?”

Syrian alien: “Well, sure, except that I believe the government should be overseen by a caliph, who must be Muslim and male, and who must rule in accordance with Islamic law, which no man-made law may contradict. None of this ‘We the People’ stuff; Allah is the sovereign. Non-Muslims should not be required to convert to Islam, of course, but they must submit to the authority of Islamic law — which requires them to live in the second-class status of dhimmitude and to pay a poll tax for that privilege.” “I also believe women must be subservient to men, and that men are permitted to beat their wives if they are disobedient — especially if they refuse sex, in which they must engage on demand. There is no such thing as marital rape, and proving non-marital rape requires testimony from four male witnesses. Outside the home, a woman should cover herself in drab from head to toe. A woman’s testimony in court should be worth only half of a man’s, and her inheritance rights similarly discounted. Men should be able to marry up to four women — women, however, are limited to marrying one man.” “Oh, and Muslims who renounce Islam should be put to death . . . as should homosexuals . . . and blasphemers . . . and adulterers — at least the ones we don’t let off with a mere scourging. The penalty for theft should be amputation of the right hand (for highway robbery, the left foot is also amputated); and for drinking alcohol, the offender is to be scourged with 40 stripes.” “There are a few other odds and ends — you know, jihad and whatnot. But other than that, will I support the Constitution? Sure thing.”

U.S. official: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. That’s not supporting the Constitution. That would be destroying the Constitution.”

Syrian alien: “Yeah, maybe so. But it’s my religion.”

U.S. official: “Oh, your religion. Why didn’t you say so? I thought you were spouting some anti-American political ideology. But as long as you say it’s your religion, no problem. C’mon in!”

This conversation is impossible to imagine because . . . it would be honest.

Sally Kohn, a commentator at CNN, has apparently already accepted dhimmi status. She recently rebuked Trump for his wish to control Muslim immigration by claiming that there are lots of Muslims who embrace sharia who are also progressives.

This sounds oxymoronic, and Kohn has been hammered on twitter for her remark. Sharia and progressive are, or certainly should be, mutually exclusive descriptors. There's now a tongue-in-cheek petition circulating to get Kohn, who is herself a Jewish, lesbian feminist, to spend a week in a sharia-compliant country to see what she thinks of the progressive treatment Jews, women and gays receive there. Apropos Kohn's belief that sharia is compatible with progressive political views, last month I wrote the following (slightly amended):

One thing I think we can say about sharia is that it's not what Westerners would call "moderate" or "progressive."

Suppose you found yourself among a group of people which, it eventually became clear to you,...

• held approximately the same views about gays as the Westboro Baptists, only worse.
• held approximately the same views about women as Jim Crow era southerners held about blacks.
• held approximately the same views about Jews as did the Nazis.
• held approximately the same views about freedom of religion as medieval inquisitors.
• held approximately the same views about freedom of speech as the North Korean government
• held approximately the same views about human equality as advocates of the Hindu caste system.

Would you call the group "moderate"? Would you call them "progressive"? Yet these are views held by large numbers of mainstream Muslims, not just in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but in Europe and the U.S. A Pew poll found that a majority of American Muslims prefer sharia, and one in four accepts the use of violence against other Americans who give offense to Islam, for instance, by caricaturing Mohammed.

I intend to look at some other aspects of McCarthy's NRO piece in tomorrow's Viewpoint. Meanwhile, I hope you'll read his column.

Can't Be Bothered

President Obama has been the recipient of a lot of criticism lately for not visiting Louisiana after the worst flooding since Hurricane Katrina. He apparently had to choose between the people of Louisiana and his golf game and he chose golf.

I actually don't fault him too much for not going to the flood devastated region. Such an act is largely symbolic anyway. What Mr. Obama should be criticized for, and harshly, is choosing to play golf with rich people on Martha's Vineyard after having indignantly slammed President Bush for not visiting Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. To refuse to do what one has self-righteously condemned someone else for not doing is the zenith of hypocrisy:

That a politician holds others to a standard to which he refuses to adhere himself is not news, I guess.

But maybe I was too quick to assume that Mr. Obama declined to go to Louisiana. Maybe he managed to combine golf with a trip to the disaster region. Matt Drudge has what seems to be photographic proof that indeed the president did show up to render aid in one flooded area:

I don't know, maybe the photo is spurious. It's puzzling, though, why neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton chose to go to Louisiana but Donald Trump did. I thought the Democrats cared about the little guy and Trump was the callous one. Who would have guessed?

Whatever Works Is Right

When a culture abandons objective morality in favor of subjective relativism they usually wind up as pragmatists. That is, whatever works to produce the desired ends is right. Achieving the ends justifies whatever means.

Thus the liberal media supinely gave Obama all the latitude he needed to attain the goals they all shared whatever damage it may have done to the Constitution and the principle of the rule of law.

This is the message implicit in a recent column by Victor Davis Hanson in which he highlights an article by Peter Beinhart in the New York Times in which Beinhart expresses his fear that a President Trump may behave in the same above-the-law fashion as did Barack Obama, but in the service of causes disagreeable to liberal/progressives.

In other words, it's not flouting the law that upsets the Peter Beinharts of the world, it's the end for which one abuses the law that gives progressives like him anxious moments.

Hanson notes how, now that the Obama presidency is coming to a close, progressive organs like the NYT are belatedly, and rather weakly, expressing misgivings about his roughshod trampling of the Constitution:

I and many others, long ago in the pre-Trump age, cited the quite dangerous trajectory of Obama’s constitutional overreach. That worry is now shared apparently by the New York Times. Suddenly in year eight, its editors fear that someday another president, perhaps one less sensitive, more uncouth than Obama, might find his exemplar useful, but for less exalted progressive purposes.

Thus the Times has characterized Obama’s overreach as “bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency.” And more ominously it notes, “But once Mr. Obama got the taste for it, he pursued his executive power without apology, and in ways that will shape the presidency for decades to come.”

One wonders where this fastidious concern for executive overreach was seven years ago. Hanson follows with an adumbration of some of the ways in which President Obama has placed himself above the law over the course of his tenure:

Long before the arrival of Donald Trump on the current election scene, many noted with alarm efforts to circumvent the Congress with Obama’s “pen and phone” executive orders and nullification of existing law — whether the executive-order amnesties and non-enforcement of the border that he had warned he could not do before his reelection, given that they would be the work of an autocrat, or his allowance of sanctuary cities’ Confederate-like nullification of existing federal law, or his arbitrary reelection-cycle, non-enforcement of elements of his own Affordable Care Act, or virtual rewriting of laws in federal bureaucracies such as the EPA, or the quite dangerous politicization of agencies such as Lois Lerner’s activity at the IRS or the Eric-Holder/Loretta Lynch Justice Department or his divisive Chavista braggadocio (“get in their faces,” “punish our enemies,” “bring a gun to a knife fight,” “you didn’t build that,” etc.).

Obama understandably grew confident that he could nullify or ignore existing federal law, on the assurance he was doing so on transformative grounds and thus would be largely exempt from press scrutiny. And he was largely proven right in his reliance on media collusion.

Because the media and others accepted the ends Mr. Obama strove to achieve by his actions they remained largely silent about his means. Now, faced with the possibility that a Donald Trump might employ similar means to achieve very different ends, the left is aghast at the prospect and are just now discovering that they really do hold to the principles of constitutional democracy and the rule of law after all.

There's a word for this, and it rhymes with "autocracy." Here's Hanson's conclusion:

In sum, violations of our constitutional freedoms could arrive in the form of a crude and blustering populist on the 2017 horizon; but far more worrisome is the fact that the dangers are already here, having arrived insidiously in the form of a suave constitutional-law lecturer, who assumed that because he was stamped as progressive, familiar, and one of the cultural elite, a liberal press would willingly overlook the means he employed to obtain their shared ends. The press corps need not worry that their freedoms will be taken away by Trump, given that for some time they have been only too happy to give them up.

There's much more good stuff at the link.

PC Is Harming Science

Alex Berezow at American Council on Science and Health cites a paper by Nathan Cofnas in the journal Foundations of Science in which Cofnas argues that political correctness is stifling science. Berezow writes:

To support his case, Mr. Cofnas focuses on the taboo subject of group differences in intelligence, which he says is suppressed by those who believe that even discussing the topic is “morally wrong or morally dangerous.”

Those who embrace such a viewpoint obviously do so with the honorable intention of preventing discrimination. However, the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions. Such misguided efforts to maintain perfect equality can hamper the advancement of knowledge. Mr. Cofnas states:

[W]hen hypotheses are regarded as supporting certain moral values or desirable political goals, scientists often refuse to abandon them in the light of empirical evidence.

Is he right? Absolutely, yes.

Not only do intellectuals refuse to abandon politically correct beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence, but simply questioning them can ruin a person’s career. Lawrence Summers’ tenure as president of Harvard was cut short because he suggested that there are intellectual differences between men and women. As a result of such punitive pushback, some researchers are afraid to investigate differences between male and female brains, which certainly exist. Without a doubt, this reticence is holding back the field of neuroscience.

A similar chilling effect can be seen in climatology. The only politically correct belief regarding the climate is that humans are 100% responsible for everything bad that happens and that the Four Horsemen are already marching toward Earth. Questioning that apocalyptic and unscientific belief has resulted in multiple researchers being labeled “climate deniers.” Climatology would greatly benefit from the more skeptical approach of so-called “lukewarmers,” but far too many are ostracized and demonized.

Discussions about the causes of homelessness also fall under the purview of the PC police. The politically correct explanation is that homelessness is the result of poverty. While obviously a factor, often left out of the debate is the fact that, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 20% to 25% of homeless people are severely mentally ill, a prevalence that is roughly four times that of the general population. The same group estimates that 38% and 26% of homeless people are dependent on alcohol and drugs, respectively. In fact, NCH states that, “Substance abuse [is] the single largest cause of homelessness for single adults.”

Berezow could have added to his examples of how science is stifled by political correctness the furor and opprobrium heaped upon sociologist Charles Murray for his 1994 book The Bell Curve which argued that there are disparities in average IQ between different races.

Or he could have mentioned the threats of legal sanction leveled at anyone who dares to suggest that transgenderism or homosexuality may, in some cases, be a treatable disorder, or the professional difficulties encountered by scientists who are skeptical of Darwinian explanations of origins.

Berezow closes with this:

Certainly, many — perhaps most — people prefer to ignore reality in favor of feel-good fallacies. Mr. Cofnas believes this phenomenon is rooted in a “deep human impulse to conflate facts and moral values.” In other words, (positive) statements that describe the world as it is are often interpreted by people as (normative) statements that prescribe the world as it ought to be.

This fundamental confusion distorts debate and impedes progress.

Indeed, there should be nothing off limits to scientific inquiry. Scientists should be free to follow the evidence wherever it leads and let the factual chips fall where they may. To place certain areas of inquiry out of bounds because honest research may lead to conclusions that are socially or politically inconvenient or morally unpalatable to some people is to be guilty of the same crime against the intellect of which the Church has often been accused for its punishment of Galileo.

Doomed?

This column will either dishearten you or elate you depending upon your ideological preferences. In my opinion it's very sad because it reflects a society that has grown coarser and more intolerant than that in which many of us grew up.

It's written by Wayne Rossiter, a biologist at Waynesburg University and is titled, Why Conservatism is Doomed to Extinction. Rossiter writes:

The future sits in our classrooms. This is not a novel observation. For decades, perhaps even centuries, the academies have slowly guided public consciousness. Generation by generation, our young people have been exposed and sensitized to the “issues” at play in their society. When the academic culture is dominated by one view for a sustained period of time, that view holds sway over the future. And so it is. But why is a graduate of the class of 2017 more likely to don a Che Guevera T-shirt than a Ronald Reagan one (knowing almost nothing about either)? As recently publicized by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times,

We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives. Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

One might ask, to what social effect? The phenomenon is well known, and can be broadly explained by the words of Yuri Bezmenov (a KGB defector),

It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. . . this is the minimum number of years which requires [sic] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words Marxist-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. . . For example, your Leftists in the United States, all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of subversion, only to destabilize the nation.

Bezmenov was of course talking about “ideological subversion.” But is it really so different than what takes place on our campuses each day?

Rossiter goes on to describe a letter he received from a student at a large state university which he chooses not to identify. After recounting several instances of uncomfortable interaction with fellow students his correspondent says this:

There was one major conservative who spoke during my freshman year . . . [he] was invited by my liberty-minded club to speak about the dangers of political correctness in academia . . . At the lecture, dozens of students shouted out and interrupted [him] to the point where he had to stop speaking in order for them to calm down. Eventually, a few students stood up and smeared fake blood on themselves, screaming that [he] represented hatred. The room fell to chaos for a solid five minutes and, while yelling expletives and making obscene hand gestures, the protesters left a beautiful mess of red paint for the custodial staff to clean up . . . We later discovered that one of the official school ‘diversity centers’ sent out a mass email encouraging protests.

Rossiter adds:

Those not nodding their heads in shared experience with this student might doubt the prevalence of this sort of thing. Consider that our public universities don’t mind inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak (Columbia University), but line up to sign petitions against Condoleezza Rice (Rutgers University). One was a former provost of Stanford, but served in the Bush administration, while the other vows to annihilate Israel and claims no homosexuals even exist in his country.

While attending one of our fine universities, a student might take courses like “Stupidity 101” (Occidental) or “Politicizing Beyoncé” (Rutgers); course work sure to impress employers. While there, they can hear why post-birth abortion should be permitted up to the toddler age (Peter Singer, Princeton), why we should hope for a mass pandemic or world war and that “everyone who gets to survive needs to bury nine” (Eric Pianka, Texas Tech), or perhaps why this “should be the last generation” of humans on planet earth (Steven Pinker, formerly at Harvard).

And let’s not forget institutionalized sexual deviance. Students attending Columbia University are able to go on a university website (www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/), which encourages and even offers locations for hook-ups, group sex, torture fetishes, and how to choose your favorite sex toy. Not to be out done, UCLA sponsored an on-campus showing of Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, a high budget porn film. All you needed to get in was a student I.D. At Northwestern, an “explicit after-class demonstration” for a Human Sexuality course offered students a live public demonstration of “a naked non-student woman being repeatedly sexually stimulated to the point of orgasm by the sex toy.

It is astonishing that, despite the mountains of debt students accrue to attend university to prepare them for a career, they nevertheless waste their time and their money on classes like these that ultimately prepare them for nothing. As Rossiter puts it:

This is the story of the student attending modern American university, and it is precisely why your child should not. We no longer teach thoughtful disagreement, intelligent and respectful debate or love, compassion and tolerance. More disconcerting is the broad malaise Americans feel about the state of our universities. The shrug of the shoulders and lack of alarm is telling.

We are now three solid generations along in this indoctrination. Just the amount of time Bezmenov believed it would take to undo American values. In my estimation, we have already sped past the last exit on this highway to collapse, and it seems clear that the extermination of conservative thought in America is imminent. Hold on to your hats, it’s about to get fun!

I agree that conservatism is facing difficult challenges. An ideology that emphasizes hard work, self-reliance, self-discipline, and moral rectitude will always be at a disadvantage to one that offers the opposite of these virtues. An ideology which urges us to put the welfare of our country ahead of the welfare of our racial, gender, age, or economic group will always be less appealing than one that panders to our sense of tribal entitlement.

The task ahead for conservatives is difficult because it requires of us that we persuade people to think with their reason rather than their emotions. Sadly, those who find such a prospect attractive will always be substantially fewer than those who find it too daunting and therefore uncongenial.

A Glossary

On Monday I suggested that it might be useful to post a glossary of terms frequently encountered in a discussion of the issue of the ultimate origin of the cosmos and of life. The following is certainly not exhaustive, but I hope it's helpful to readers who may not be familiar with the terms of the debate but wish to be:

1. Metaphysical claim - A claim that does not lend itself to empirical confirmation. For example, the claim that selfishness is wrong or that rainbows are beautiful.

2. Scientific claim - A claim that can be tested by observation. For example, the claim that disease is caused by bacteria or that oxygen is a by-product of photosynthesis.

3. Cosmology - The study of the history and structure of the universe.

4. Cosmogeny - A subdiscipline of cosmology which studies the origin of the universe.

5. Biogenesis (or Abiogenesis) - The study of the origin of life from non-life.

6. Biological evolution - The process of variation and diversification in organisms. The term is usually used as a synonym for macroevolution which is the large-scale, molecules-to-man view which holds that all life forms have developed from a single ancestral cell. Microevolution is a small scale variation within a particular group or taxon such as is seen in the diversity of types of dogs for instance.

6a. Naturalistic evolution - The view that evolution is a purely physical, unguided, random process.

6b. Materialism - The view that everything in the universe is ultimately reducible to material stuff.

6c. Physicalism - The view that everything in the universe can ultimately be explained in terms of the laws of physics.

6d. Theistic evolution - The view that although evolution is a naturalistic process it is somehow initiated and/or directed by God.

6e. Theism - Nowadays usually used as an abbreviation for monotheism it's the belief that there is one, personal, transcendent God.

6f. Deism - The belief that there's a God which is impersonal and/or uninvolved in the world.

7. Creationism - The view that God purposefully created the world.

7a. Evolutionary - Another term for theistic evolution (see above)

7b. Progressive - The view that God intervenes at various points in the created order to advance or change the direction of the evolutionary process.

7c. Special – The view that God created everything in six days as described in Genesis and that subsequent to the creation week relatively small changes have occurred within the created “kinds” or major taxa.

7c1.Young earth - The form of special creation that holds that the days of creation week were literal twenty four hour days and that creation occurred relatively recently (approx. 10,000 years ago).

7c2. Old earth - The form of special creation which gives a more figurative interpretation to the Genesis days and which accepts the scientific consensus on the age of the earth and the universe.

8. Intelligent Design - The view that the cosmos and living things show empirical evidence of having been intentionally designed. ID, as such, makes no claims as to who or what the designer was nor how, nor how long ago, it acted. It is, therefore an error to call ID religious or a form of special creationism.

Naturalism and Incoherence

I was listening to a podcast discussion yesterday between two philosophers, one an atheist and one a theist, on the topic of whether or not naturalism is incoherent. Disappointingly, the discussion quickly devolved into an exchange over whether or not God exists and never did get around to exploring the original topic.

Maybe it's just as well because I think the topic title is slightly misconceived.

A concept is incoherent when it contains mutually contradictory features. For example the concepts of a married bachelor, or a giant pygmy, or a round square are incoherent because the first term in each contradicts and precludes the second and vice-versa.

But naturalism itself is not incoherent in this way. There don't appear, to me at least, any internal contradictions in the view that nature, as can be described by science, is all there is.

However, this is not to say that there are not coherence problems in trying to live as a consistent naturalist. Many who adopt a naturalist worldview find themselves unable to live with it.

For example, most of us desire a number of what might be called existential qualities in our lives, none of which can be sustained under naturalism:

• We desire meaning in our lives. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, wrote in Man's Search for Meaning that men can't live without meaning. Yet on naturalism, there is no meaning to be found anywhere in the cosmos, just "blind, pitiless indifference" in the words of Richard Dawkins.
• We desire to ground our moral judgments in something solid, but on naturalism morality is "just an illusion, fobbed off on us by our genes, to get us to cooperate with each other" according to Michael Ruse. Nothing is really right or wrong in a moral sense. It's just useful or not in promoting the survival of the species.
• We desire justice, but on naturalism death is the end and the selfish and cruel have the same fate as their victims - extinction. Unless there's accountability for our actions justice is a fiction.
• We desire dignity, but on naturalism we're just animals, gobs of protoplasm in thrall to our genes, with no free will and no real specialness. In the words of Stephen Hawking "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes puts it this way: "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." On naturalism no lives matter.
• We desire to live, but on naturalism we all die and when those we love are gone they're gone forever. The late Will Provine of Cornell University writes: "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death...no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will."
• We desire happiness, but on naturalism the fate of most humans who've ever walked the earth has been simply to be born, suffer, and die. There are moments of pleasure, Woody Allen once said, "but they don't add up to anything."

Most people who believe that the natural world is all there is, however, can't live consistently with these implications of their basic assumption. They're like a person who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. They live their daily existence as though their lives were meaningful, as though there were such things as justice, dignity, and morality, but then they switch into their alter ego and insist that the only thing that could actually make any of these possible - i.e., God - doesn't exist.

There's an incoherence in naturalism, to be sure, but it's not found in the concept. Rather, it's found in the attempt to live as though the concept were true.

Retiring Theistic Evolution

John Farrell, writing at Forbes, quotes a number of Catholic scientists who embrace evolution but who wish to see the term "theistic evolution" retired from the lexicon. Their reasons are interesting.

The term has traditionally referred to the belief that evolution is in some way a God-ordained process that nevertheless appears to follow purely natural laws. In other words, theistic evolutionists (TE) differ from Intelligent Design (ID) folks in that IDers hold that there's ample evidence that the evolutionary process, to the extent that it has occurred, has been engineered by an intelligent agent whereas TE holds that even though evolution is a result of God's will you can't deduce that from the empirical evidence. According to TE there's no observable difference between God-ordained evolution and purely naturalistic evolution. God's role is discerned only through the eyes of faith.

So what do the people Farrell quotes have against the term "theistic evolution"? Here's what Stacy A. Trasancos, who has a PhD in chemistry and is a Catholic with her own blog about religion and science, writes:

Think about it. If you are a believer, it is already implied that you see all biological and physical processes as created and held in existence by God. You do not need “theistic” in front of biological terms. Who speaks of theistic reproduction? Or theistic gestation, theistic meiosis, or theistic menstruation? Plus, to qualify a biological process as ‘theistic’ implies that the opposite is possible, that God may not be involved in creating certain laws of nature.

Trasancos' objection, I think, is off the mark. The reason for employing the qualifier "theistic" in front of the word "evolution" is to distinguish that view from naturalistic evolution, i.e. the view that evolution is a process resulting from purely purposeless, physical influences and independent of any superintendency by a transcendent intellect. Pace Trasancos, the word "theistic" is a perfectly reasonable clarifier unless one assumes that all evolution is a purely naturalistic phenomenon, but why assume that?

Naturalistic evolution presents itself as a defeater for theism, and the conflict between the two is a worldview-level clash. There is no such controversy raging at the organismic level so no qualification or clarification is needed at that level.

One Catholic scientist who does believe that evolution is a wholly naturalistic process is Brown University biologist and author Kenneth R. Miller:

To me, and in the minds of most people who use the term, it implies that a god had to pre-ordain the outcome of the evolutionary process or at the very least guide it along to produce the world of today, including human beings his chosen creatures. I don’t believe that at all. Evolution is a fully-independent natural process driven by chance and necessity.

Miller, who professes Roman Catholic theism, sounds nevertheless very much like an 18th century deist, seeking to carve out in the world a major sphere of activity from which God is excluded. It's understandable, therefore, that he would object to being called, as he often is, a theistic evolutionist because he doesn't sound like a theist at all.

Farrell quotes Miller further:

The very fact that so many feel obliged to attach a statement about religious faith to evolution implies that evolution itself is a religious process, or at least has a special religious significance that other fields of science do not have. I reject that premise.

I think Miller is here poisoning the well a bit by introducing religion into what is in fact a discussion of issues in the philosophy of science.

Theistic evolution is a philosophical position, it's not necessarily religious, though religious people could hold it, nor do theistic evolutionists necessarily turn evolution into a "religious process."

To assert that the universe was designed and created by an intelligent agent is not to make a religious claim, although it certainly may have religious implications. After all, consider that those philosophers who assert that the world is really a computer simulation designed by intellectually advanced denizens of some other universe are not considered to be making religious claims. It's a mistake to assume that all talk of God, design, or creation is necessarily "religious."

One reason there's so much misunderstanding surrounding the question of origins, particularly the evolution/creation debate, is that there's so much misunderstanding about what the terms used in the discussion actually mean. Perhaps in an upcoming post we'll review some of the terminology to help facilitate understanding of this very important issue.