Presto!

An article at Evolution News and Views (ENV) reflects on the news that three European chemists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for having engineered simple molecular machines. According to the article:

• Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, France) in 1983 linked two molecular rings together.
• Sir J. Fraser Stoddart (Northwestern University, Illinois) in 1991 threaded a molecular ring onto a thin molecular axle and demonstrated that the ring was able to move along the axle.
• Bernard L. Feringa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) in 1999 got a molecular rotor blade to spin continually in the same direction.

These are amazing achievements, to be sure, and required incredible skill and genius to accomplish, but compared to the thousands of complex molecular machines that operate in every one of the cells of our bodies to keep us alive the machines these men built are quite simple.

So here's a question: If the highest human genius is required to design and develop relatively simple molecular machines, how did the far more complex machines in living things develop by unguided random chance with no input from an intelligent agent? Is such a development independent of intelligent guidance even possible?

One of the Nobel recipients, Bernard Feringa, was asked by the Prize Committee in a phone interview what inspired him to work on molecular machines. Interviewer Adam Smith asked him:

AS: So you describe your work as being inspired by nature? BF: Yes, of course. If you look at the cells in our body or the functioning of the organism, it is flabbergasting. It is fantastic to see how this intricate machinery works. And when I'm talking about motors, as we focus on motors, if you look at the essential functions in the cell, like cell division, like transport, like making your muscles move, bacteria that go to food .... it's all controlled by molecular motors, and so the biological motors, and the biological machinery, is so crucial to all these functions. And of course we get great inspiration from that, while we as chemists are extremely good in building all kinds of materials, and that is what intrigued me.

What sort of molecular motors is Feringa talking about here? Below are animations of three examples. You don't have to be a biologist to appreciate how marvelous these are and why Feringa seems to be grasping for superlatives to describe them.

Kinesin:

ATP Synthase:

Protein synthesizers:

These wondrous nanoscale machines leave one speechless. Language seems totally inadequate to the task of supplying adjectives to express one's amazement. How did such complex machines ever come about, especially on this scale of size? Maybe the Darwinians are right and they are just the products of natural processes acting solely by chance, but assuming one's mind is not already philosophically closed to the idea, it seems far more plausible to think that they were designed by an intelligent engineer of some sort.

Remember that on the Darwinian view most of these machines had to be present in the very first living cells which means they didn't have eons of time to evolve nor could they have been the product of genetic mutation and natural selection since they had to exist before the cells that housed them could survive to reproduce.

Yet students are often taught in school that unthinking nature, unguided by any purpose or intention, somehow produced these astonishing structures. It's as if Nature waved a magic wand, sprinkled some pixie dust, and, presto!, there they were.

And the same folks who tell us this also insist that the belief that these machines must have been engineered by an intelligent agent is unscientific and "superstitious." Why?

What's a Voter to Do?

So, on the one hand we have a candidate for president of the United States who is, from all appearances, an incarnation of Madame Defarge, Lady Macbeth, and Marie Antoinette all rolled into one, and on the other, a candidate who, in terms of sheer sordidness and vulgarity, rivals the first candidate's husband, and, indeed, rivals the first candidate herself.

Given the choice between repulsive and repugnant what's an American voter to do? There are several possible options, none of them good.

We could hope that both major candidates drop out of the race and that the mantle falls on the vice-presidential candidates to finish the election. The chances of this happening, however, are about the same as being struck by lightning on a clear day.

A more realistic hope, perhaps, is that Trump will drop out and Mike Pence will succeed him. Pence is, in my opinion, the classiest, most attractive - in several senses of that word - candidate in the race, and it'd be a relief to have him at the top of the ticket. Nevertheless, I doubt that anything short of a coronary thrombosis will get Trump to drop out of the race, and I certainly don't wish that upon him.

Meanwhile, there are arguments being put forth for not voting for either of them. To vote for the lesser of two evils, it's argued, is still to vote for evil, and no one should do that.

I understand the argument but think that in the end it doesn't succeed. In this election, unprecedented in the history of the nation for its loathsomeness, it could perhaps be said that one is not voting for the less unsavory of two amoral candidates. Rather one is voting against the more unsavory of two amoral candidates.

If that's a legitimate distinction (and maybe it's not) then it's incumbent upon us to decide which of the candidates is the most odious and vote to keep that person out of office. The problem, though, is that deciding which is worse presents real challenges to our objectivity, and our judgment is bound to be influenced, or even skewed, by the political ideology to which we adhere.

Alas, one of them will be our next president. May heaven help us.

Evolution and Ethics

Today's post is a follow-up to Thursday's post on the inconsistency of naturalistic ethics.

VJ Torley at Uncommon Descent reminds us of a passage from Thomas Huxley's essay Evolution and Ethics (1893) in which Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for ethics. One popular candidate for such a ground is the evolution of our species, but Huxley, despite his arrant fealty to Darwinian evolution, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,” when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution.

I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Huxley's right, of course. If the inclination to be kind and tolerant has evolved in the human species then so has the inclination to be selfish, violent, and cruel. So if evolution is to serve as our "moral dictionary" what grounds do we have for privileging kindness over cruelty? Both are equally sanctioned by our evolutionary history and thus we can't say that either is better or more right than the other.

Huxley goes on to dispense with the notion that the evolutionary development of our ethical sensibility can provide us with some sort of guide to our behavior.

There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called “ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittest’; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.

The problem is that, for naturalists, the processes of nature are the only thing they can look to for moral guidance. Having rejected the notion that there exists a transcendent, personal, moral authority, the naturalist, if he's to avoid nihilism, is left trying to derive ethics from what he sees in nature, which leads to what I regard as the most serious problem with any naturalistic ethics: There's simply no warrant for thinking that a blind, impersonal process like evolution or a blind, impersonal substance like matter, can impose a moral duty on conscious beings.

Moral obligations, if they exist, can only be imposed by conscious, intelligent, moral authorities. Evolution can no more impose such an obligation than can gravity. Thus, naturalists (atheists) are confronted with a stark choice: Either give up their atheism or embrace moral nihilism. Unwilling to do what is for them unthinkable and accept the first alternative, many of them are reluctantly embracing the second.

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

I had 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 a shocking epiphany that religious believers 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, An Amoral Manifesto

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The world, according to this new picture [i.e. the picture produced by a scientific outlook], is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends, money fame, art, science, and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center. Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….

Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions. Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative. W.T. Stace, The Atlantic Monthly, 1948

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We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality. Kai Nielson (1984)

What these thinkers and dozens like them are saying is that the project of trying to find some solid, naturalistic foundation upon which to build an ethics is like trying to find a mermaid. The object of the search simply doesn't exist, nor could it.

With Friends Like These

President Obama's signature accomplishment, the achievement for which he wishes most to be remembered, is passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Unfortunately for the President's legacy Obamacare is widely seen as a colossal failure.

It's one thing, however, for the centerpiece of Mr. Obama's presidential tenure to be criticized by his political foes, but it's something else altogether to have it criticized and mocked by his putative allies. When the ally is also a previous president in Mr. Obama's own party and the husband of the current candidate to be his successor, a woman he has thrown his support behind, the sense of betrayal must be especially galling.

Here's former president Bill Clinton calling Obamacare the "craziest thing in the world":

Much has been written of the intense dislike the Obamas and the Clintons have for each other, so it's not surprising that Mr. Clinton, who once declared that Obama should be serving him coffee, would publicly embarrass Mr. Obama, but to do it when he knows that Obama's support for his wife is crucial to her election is a bit surprising.

In any case, Mr. Clinton's analysis of the effects of Obamacare on the middle class is something that one hopes our legislature heeds. The Democrats have foisted a system on us that, despite President Obama's many promises to the contrary, forces many people to pay much more for much less coverage.

It is indeed a crazy system.

C.S. Lewis on the Inconsistency in Naturalistic Ethics

A student linked me to a post by historian Alan Snyder who highlights some of C.S. Lewis' thoughts on metaphysical naturalism in his famous book On Miracles. Snyder writes:

In his book Miracles, C. S. Lewis takes aim at “naturalists” who say that there is no “outside” reference [i.e., God] for calling anything good or evil.

When men use the words, “I ought,” Lewis notes, they are saying something about the essence of right and wrong that is built into the universe. In fact, naturalists should never use such terminology: “But if Naturalism is true,” he writes, “‘I ought’ is the same sort of statement as ‘I itch’ or ‘I’m going to be sick.'”

On naturalism there are no moral obligations and thus the word "ought" has no moral significance. If there are no moral duties then there's nothing anyone "ought" to do, at least not in the moral sense of the word "ought."

Lewis explains,

The Naturalist can, if he chooses, brazen it out. He can say . . . “all ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer world by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this.

There’s a slight problem, though, for those who attempt to explain good and evil in this way:

But then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though inconsistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusions, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. . . . They write with indignation like men proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like men recording that they personally like mild beer but some people prefer bitter.

Of course, if good and evil are illusions then there's certainly no reason why we should be concerned with either the illusion of good or the illusion of evil.

To use such terms when the user knows they don't refer to anything is a form of social coercion. Naturalists who employ the rhetoric of good and evil are simply attempting to compel, or trick, others into behaving in ways the naturalists prefer by calling their actions good or evil when in fact they're neither good nor evil - no more than are the actions of a wolf or falcon or any other predator. When one gull steals a morsel of food from another we don't call the gull or its behavior evil. Likewise, if we're just animals, if there's no transcendent moral order, why do we call an act like robbing an elderly lady evil?

Lewis adds:

Do they remember while they [naturalists] are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better world” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn?

Yet, as Snyder points out, the naturalist, unless he's also a nihilist, doesn't live consistently with his own professed ideology. Snyder concludes with another quote from Lewis:

My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like men.

Yes, they do, but when they do they admit the failure of their naturalism. A worldview that people can't live with consistently is seriously flawed.

How Presuppositions Shape Politics

Students at one of the schools at which I teach are engaged this week in a campus-wide symposium on politics. My classes had some gratifyingly energetic discussions today around the topic of political ideologies using as a springboard for conversation a Viewpoint post from last summer. That post highlighted some of the differences between the political left and right and limned those distinctions with broad, general strokes.

There are, of course, other ways to understand liberalism and conservatism, at least as the terms apply to American politics, and one of those is to focus on their respective anthropologies. That is, to examine their respective views on what it is to be human - what it is, in the metaphysical sense, to be man.

What follows is not true of all conservatives nor of all liberals, but I think it's fair to say that it is true of a great many, maybe even the majority, of both.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the anthropology of conservatives and that of liberals is that many conservatives tend to see man as bearing the image of God, possessing immortal souls, and as loved by God. This is significant because from this starting point those conservatives then:

• See human rights as divinely ordained and based in the will of God, and thus objective and inalienable.
• See man as fallen from his original estate and prone to sin. Thus follows the conservative skepticism of governmental power and the need for institutional checks and balances.
• See history as both meaningful, because it is the outworking of a Divine plan, and replete with lessons for the present because human nature doesn't change much.
• See science as a fruitful means of making sense of the world because the world was created by a rational being and yields its secrets to rational inquiry.
• See morality as rooted in a personal, transcendent moral authority who promulgates an unchanging moral law to which each of us is held accountable.

On the other hand, many liberals tend to see man as the product of the blind, impersonal, random process of evolution. For many liberals, particularly secular liberals, which perhaps comprise the majority, God plays little or no role in either the creation of the world or in human affairs. From this starting point, then, these liberals often:

• See human rights as the product of a consensus of enlightened thinkers.
• See man as basically good and malleable, and evolving toward ever greater capacities and perfections.
• See history as an indecipherable, meaningless flux of events about which we can know little and learn less, since humanity is constantly evolving and changing.
• See science as the only trustworthy source of knowledge and the pronouncements of scientists as authoritative, if not infallible.
• See morality as an arbitrary, relativistic set of arbitrary norms which have evolved to help us get along with each other. There are no objective moral absolutes and probably no accountability for how we live in this life.

These disparate worldviews have profound consequences. One's starting point largely determines where one winds up.

If, for instance, human rights are simply a human invention then they're grounded in little more than the will and whims of those in power. They're just words on paper. They have no objective existence and can be discarded or changed whenever someone has the power and desire to do so. Indeed, to accuse a government of violating the human rights of its citizens makes no sense if those rights are simply whatever the government decides they are.

Likewise, if human nature can be altered and molded then the temptation to use government to compel people to conform to the image decided upon by the elites becomes irresistible. Since there is no objective right to liberty the government can and should do whatever's necessary to create the utopian society. That, of course, leads to Orwellian dystopias.

Ideas have consequences and the bigger the idea the more far-reaching the consequences.

What's Really Real?

This is a post I've run before but am reposting since it's relevant to some topics my students and I have been discussing in class:

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries it was the consensus view among scientists and philosophers that reality, the universe, was fundamentally material. The belief was that everything was reducible to matter and energy and that if there was any immaterial substance, it was a property of matter. Thus, in this materialist view, there was no such thing as mind or soul that existed independently of matter. Mind, if it existed, emerged from matter.

All this began to change in the 20th century with the development of quantum physics, and as that century came to a close and the new century began a number of experiments were done which led physicists to believe that, in fact, mind is fundamental and that the material world is an emergent property of mind.

Rather than seeing the universe as a machine, as thinkers had done ever since Isaac Newton in the 17th century, the universe was now being viewed, in the words of Sir James Jeans, more like "a grand idea."

The following video gives a fairly good description of two experiments in physics which have led many (not all) scientists to agree with Jeans. The video moves quickly so you might wish to replay parts of it.

There's resistance to accepting the notion that the universe is a product of mind because such a view both refutes the materialism upon which atheism rests and fits nicely into a theistic view of the world (see the quote from physicist Alain Aspect below).

Nevertheless, this is an idea accepted by a growing number of quantum physicists. Here are a few quotes to illustrate:

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Max Planck (1944)

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Erwin Schroedinger.

“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality” Eugene Wigner 1961, Nobel Prize winner in 1963

"If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history." Philosopher Thomas Nagel

"What is more, recent experiments are bringing to light that the experimenter’s free will and consciousness should be considered axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory. So for instance, in experiments involving 'entanglement' (the phenomenon Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'), to conclude that quantum correlations of two particles are nonlocal (i.e. cannot be explained by signals traveling at velocity less than or equal to the speed of light), it is crucial to assume that the experimenter can make free choices, and is not constrained in what orientation he/she sets the measuring devices...To understand these implications it is crucial to be aware that quantum physics is not only a description of the material and visible world around us, but also speaks about non-material influences coming from outside the space-time." Antoine Suarez, 2013

"Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist)." Alain Aspect, 2007

So far from mind being a product of a more fundamental material reality, these thinkers have concluded that matter actually is a phenomenon created by mind. Thus, in their view, the fundamental reality in the universe, and perhaps beyond, is mind.

The Lie Ratchet

Sadly, it seems impossible to believe anything either of the candidates running for the office of President of the United States tells us. Neither of them seems to have any moral reservations or feel any guilt in lying to the American people, but whereas Mr. Trump's prevarications are brazen and crude, as befits his temperament, Ms. Clinton has developed mendacity into a sophisticated artform - an artistry refined, no doubt, by long years of practice.

Bill Whittle at Firewall analyzes the technique Ms Clinton employs to beguile the proletariat and the willingly credulous:

Watching this video, one can't help thinking that if lying were an Olympic event Hillary would have more gold medals than Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt put together.

Is Hillary Any Better?

The Clinton campaign and its media facilitators are making hay out Trump's juvenile insults of a Venezuelan beauty queen whom he twenty years ago called "Miss Piggy." The insight into Trump's character, or lack thereof, that we glean from this regrettable episode may well dissuade some people from voting for him. After all, anyone who treats women with the sort of vulgar disdain that Trump apparently has is not the sort of person one would feel comfortable voting for.

Unless the alternative is just as bad, or even worse. And, if what has been claimed about Hillary for decades is credible, it's hard even for a Donald Trump to match the maltreatment of women she has visited upon some of them.

Not only are women in her employ paid less than men, but she has throughout her career sought to destroy women she perceived to be threats to the political careers of either her or her husband.

When, for example, woman after woman came forward in the 1990s to accuse her husband of being a sexual predator - of exposing himself, of groping, even of raping them - Hillary Clinton led a behind the scenes effort to smear these victims of her husband's sybaritic impulses and to destroy their credibility in the public eye.

This is not hearsay. It's the testimony not only of the women themselves but also of loyal staffers in her employ. A piece in the Clintonophilic Washington Post, which actually strives to make Hillary look sympathetic, is nevertheless revealing insofar as it hints at how she treated her husband's paramours. Here are some excerpts:

Hillary Clinton has wrestled with allegations surrounding her husband’s infidelities for much of their 40-year marriage, including a sexual harassment lawsuit, a grand jury investigation and an impeachment vote centered on his untruthfulness about a relationship with a White House intern.

The Trump campaign has argued that the issue facing Hillary Clinton as a candidate is not the behavior of her husband but the role she played in shaping responses to accusers. She discredited claims later revealed to be true and worked behind the scenes to help manage the allegations, according to former aides.

In November, the issue surfaced again after the Democratic candidate sent out a tweet saying that assault victims deserve to be believed. At a public forum in December, a questioner confronted Clinton and asked whether her comment also applied to her husband’s accusers. “I would say that everybody should be believed at first,” she said, “until they are disbelieved based on evidence.”

When Bill Clinton launched a presidential run in 1991, his wife and senior staff considered how to deal with what came to be known as “bimbo eruptions.”

Hillary Clinton dismissed an accusation made by Gennifer Flowers, the singer who sold her story to a supermarket tabloid after having previously denied an affair. In an ABC News interview, she called Flowers “some failed cabaret singer who doesn’t even have much of a résumé to fall back on.” She told Esquire magazine in 1992 that if she had the chance to cross-examine Flowers, “I mean, I would crucify her.”

Six years later, Bill Clinton acknowledged a sexual encounter with Flowers.

As other women emerged, Hillary Clinton helped forge aggressive de­fenses.

Former White House press secretary George Stephanopoulos recalled in his memoir discussing [with Ms Clinton] a woman’s allegation published in Penthouse Magazine. He said that after her husband dismissed it as untrue during a meeting, Hillary Clinton said, “We have to destroy her story.” By July 1992, the campaign hired private detective Jack Palladino to investigate the accusers involved in two dozen allegations.

“She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies,” Stephanopoulos wrote, describing Hillary Clinton’s reaction.(emphasis mine)

While practicing law in 1975 Hillary Clinton defended a 41 year-old drifter accused of raping a 12 year-old girl named Kathy Shelton. Clinton knew the guy was guilty but got the charges reduced to illicit fondling and laughed about how she did it. In fact, she blamed the twelve year-old Shelton at trial for having encouraged the man even though there was no evidence Shelton had done any such thing.

Shelton, now 54, says Clinton is 'lying' when she claims to be a lifelong defender of women and girls.

Shelton said Clinton accused her during the case of 'seeking out older men', and demanded that the 12-year-old undergo a grueling court-ordered psychiatric examination to determine whether she was 'mentally unstable'.

'I don't think [Clinton's] for women or girls. I think she's lying, I think she said anything she can to get in the campaign and win,' Shelton said. 'If she was [an advocate for women and children], she wouldn't have done that to me at 12 years old.'

While Shelton gave an anonymous interview to the Daily Beast in 2014, she said wants to start speaking out publicly, in part because 'I think a lot of people would look at [Clinton] in a different way' after hearing her story directly.

'I want to speak to the world. Out there at the White House, so everyone can hear me,' said Shelton. 'That's always been my thing since the anger's built up. I want to speak out like [Clinton] does, and let the whole world hear it.' During the case, Clinton accused the 12-year-old of 'seek[ing] out older men' and 'engag[ing] in fantasizing' in court affidavits, and later laughed while discussing aspects of the case in a recently-unearthed audiotape from the 1980s.

On the audiotape, Clinton indicated that she believed Taylor, her client, was guilty, saying that his ability to pass a lie detector test 'forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs'.

Nor is it just women who've been slimed and demeaned by Mrs. Clinton. According to a Daily Mail story Hillary was overheard calling mentally challenged children 'f*****g ree-tards' and caught on record blurting out the terms 'stupid k**e and 'f***ing Jew b*****d', while Bill called the Reverend Jesse Jackson a 'G**damned n****r':

Dolly Kyle - who was just 11 when she first crossed paths with Bill, dated him through high school and began sleeping with him once they graduated - published the claims about the Clinton couple's racial epithets and politics in her new book, Hillary: The Other Woman.

She writes of one occasion, when developmentally challenged children were having difficulty picking up the eggs at a traditional Easter egg hunt on the grounds of the governor's mansion during Bill's tenure in the Arkansas state house.

Reluctant hostess Hillary had enough.

'The frustrated Me-First Lady demanded, "When are they going to get those f*****g ree-tards out of here?"' Dolly writes.

Behind the Reverend Jesse Jackson's back, the Clinton duo called him, 'That G**damned n****r'.

It could be, of course, that Dolly Kyle is lying about all this in her book, although no one has denied the allegations or even claimed that it doesn't sound like the sort of language Ms. Clinton would employ. Nevertheless, the point is that if a close friend or former lover of Donald Trump had published allegations like this, if someone had alleged that Trump denigrated prominent blacks and degraded mentally handicapped children, every liberal news organization in the country would be devoting every resource they could muster to digging up more on the story. Ms. Clinton, however, gets a pass while the media clears the decks to cover Miss Piggy.

Science, Logic, and Feminism

Joy Pullman, senior editor at The Federalist calls attention to a Ph.D candidate who concludes in her dissertation that science is hostile to women and minorities because it requires them to think logically and to hold to the view that truth is objective. The doctoral candidate is a feminist, but I can't imagine anything more harmful to the cause of advancing opportunities for women and minorities than declaring that they lack the cognitive ability to think logically and do science. Yet that's evidently what she says.

Here's Pullman:

College science classes are hostile to women and minorities because they use the scientific method, which assumes people can find reliable truths about the natural world through careful and sustained experimentation, concludes a recent dissertation by a doctoral candidate at the University of North Dakota.

Laura Parson, a student in the university’s education department, reviewed eight science class syllabi at a “Midwest public university” and said she discovered in them a hidden hostility to women and minorities:

Initial exploration of the STEM syllabi in this study did not reveal overt references to gender, such as through the use of gendered pronouns. However, upon deeper review, language used in the syllabi reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women.

Even though the course syllabi contained no “gendered assumptions” about students or other overtly discriminatory implications, Parson writes, they display prejudice against women and minorities because they refuse to entertain the possibility that “scientific knowledge is subjective.”

I don't even know what it means to say that scientific knowledge is subjective. Does it mean that the acceleration of a falling object, for example, depends on how the experimenter feels about it?

Throughout her dissertation, Parson assumes and asserts that women and minorities are uniquely challenged by the idea that science can provide objective information about the natural world. This is an unfair assumption, she says, because the concept of objectivity is too hard for women and minorities to understand. “[N]otions of absolute truth and a single reality” are “masculine,” she says, referring to poststructuralist feminist theory.

Instead of promoting the idea that knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge as one that students acquire and use [to] make the correct decision.

So, in other words, using logic and the scientific method are inherently “male” ways of knowing that women and minorities cannot employ. Rather than rejecting this insulting view of women and minorities’ intellectual and rational capacities, Parson uses it as a pretext to advocate that science classes abandon the scientific method itself (which rests on the assumption that truth is unchanging and knowable) and all other “male” forms of oppression, such as “weed-out courses, courses that grade on a curve, a competitive environment, reliance on lecture as a teaching method, an individualistic culture, and comprehensive exams.”

There's much more on Parson's views at the link. The more one reads the more suspicious one becomes that this woman is putting everyone on, but assuming she's serious I have a question. If a white male doctoral candidate had written this dissertation what are the chances that it would not have been rejected out of hand by his outraged committee as both blatantly sexist and racist? Nil.

So why is Laura Parson not held to the same standard? Or are we now to think that not only should women not be held to the same standard as men in the field of science, they shouldn't be held to the same standard in matters of gender and racial bias either?

Hillary's Awkward Relationship with the Facts

It's a shibboleth of the left that our criminal justice system is infected with systemic racism. Hillary Clinton herself reaffirmed this article of liberal faith during the debate Monday night, but is it true? Heather MacDonald, author of The War on Cops and a writer for City Journal argues that the evidence simply doesn't support the claim. Here's part of what she says:

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the over-representation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Ms Clinton also sought to exploit the myth that "stop and frisk" is a racist police tactic, but MacDonald is having none of it:

Clinton claimed that “stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional.” [But] No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots. Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department’s practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal.

But why did the judge rule that police stops were "racially biased" in the first place?

Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn’t match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin’s view. Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City.

Whites are 34 percent of the city’s population, [but] they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run — meaning that someone has been shot — they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.

What Ms Clinton doesn't know, or doesn't want voters to know, is that "stop and frisk" is a blessing to minority residents of our urban neighborhoods:

Clinton claimed that stop-and-frisk was “ineffective” and “did not do what it needed to do.” [Yet] Felony crime dropped 85 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s in New York City; more than 10,000 minority males were spared the violent death that they would have experienced had homicides remained at their early 1990s levels. Stop-and-frisk was a crucial part of that crime drop, the longest and steepest on record; it’s hard to imagine anything more effective than New York’s proactive policing revolution. Stop-and-frisk deterred criminals from carrying guns. Equally importantly, it intervened in a range of other criminal behaviors. If an officer saw someone casing a store on a boulevard plagued with burglaries, or saw someone walking quickly behind an elderly lady in a neighborhood plagued with robberies, he would stop that person and ask a few questions. That stop may not have resulted in an arrest, but it could have averted the commission of a crime.

Homicides and shootings in New York City rose 20 percent in the first half of 2015, thanks to the Scheindlin-induced drop in pedestrian stops. Then-police commissioner William Bratton responded with a massive deployment of overtime manpower to high-crime corners; officers used “command presence”—i.e., their mere presence on the street—to deter criminal behavior. This roll-out of manpower resources quelled the shooting spike and New York City ended 2015 with a 6 percent homicide increase. Other departments do not have the personnel available to them to make up for a drop in proactive policing.

Perhaps for the sake of the people living in these high crime neighborhoods the left should admit that our political correctness fetish is exacting a high cost in the maiming and killing of young blacks and Hispanics and let the police get the guns from those who are carrying them illegally, even if that means sometimes frisking innocent people. It can be demeaning to be frisked when one is completely innocent, but I should think that the innocent residents of New York and other cities would be willing to suffer a little indignity if it saves the life of just one black kid. Wouldn't you?

The Most Horrifying Threat

Perhaps the most dangerous threat facing our nation from abroad is not the annihilation of our cities in a nuclear holocaust or the threat of chemical or biological warfare. Rather, the most terrifying danger we face is easily the threat of EMP visited upon us by the Iranians or the North Koreans.

What, you may ask, is EMP? An article by James H. Hyde in The Federalist explains. The whole article is worth reading but here's the salient excerpt:

EMP stands for “electromagnetic pulse,” and it is truly devastating to anything and everything that has a microchip in it or is part of the crumbling, antiquated, and hopelessly snarled convergence of wires we call our electric grid.

An EMP-based weapon would do a good deal of damage. But if the last two DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea) tests involved thermonuclear devices, they could become Super-EMPs. When those are put aboard a satellite and detonated 300 miles above the center of the U.S., just one of them would...[throw] our urban and suburban populaces into abject panic and chaos.

As I write this, the DPRK has two satellites flying above us on a south to north trajectory....While no data stream has been detected coming from either “earth-based satellite” (according to the DPRK), it is not known whether nuclear devices are aboard those satellites or whether they are “test vehicles.”

Kim Jung Un's request for a satellite in higher orbit is particularly troubling: it means he could pack an EMP or Super-EMP device on it and put it into orbit over the U.S. Unless we take swift measures to “harden” our electric grid and military assets—and soon—America could become an endangered society. An EMP or Super-EMP detonated at an altitude of between 25 and 300 miles (the higher the better) would be cataclysmic.

The detonation itself would not harm us physically. The kinetic energy (radiation) would dissipate harmlessly in space. The increased gamma rays, however, would race toward earth in three waves, milliseconds apart. Electrons in air molecules in our atmosphere would be knocked out by gamma rays in massive numbers that then rush earthward. Once they came in contact with the ground, they would take out transformers in substations. Hyper-electrical pulses would snake along our electric lines, destroying transmission and distribution technologies as they go.

The immediate effects would be withering: planes in flight would start falling from the skies. Chemical plants that control hazardous materials would no longer be controlled, imperiling all who live nearby as their computerized technology fails. Most cars built after 1974 would lose power. Trains, especially those operating on electrified tracks, would come to a halt. Tens of thousands would be stuck in elevators nationwide....City populations living in skyscraper apartment buildings would no longer get water pumped to them. Bottled water would disappear from supermarket shelves on the first day. Most supermarkets are stocked for only three days worth of consumable inventory, especially meats and fresh vegetables.

Perhaps most vulnerable in the transmission and distribution system are huge transformers that are extremely hard to replace, and (as with so many other industries) no longer manufactured here. They now come from Germany and South Korea. These transformers are complex power regulators that take a year to build and cost $10 million. They must be shipped here and off-loaded to special trucks that can accommodate them. Each one can weigh over 400 tons. A standard 18-wheeler won’t do the job. Their tires would burst.

Plus, gasoline would become extremely scarce. Oil refineries would cease to function, so finding enough gas to power these huge trucks would be nigh impossible. We have some backup transformers here, but nowhere near enough to replace all of the damaged ones hit by an EMP. Estimates are that it would be at least a decade before we could replace enough transformers to get at least some electricity flowing.

But the devastation would not end there. In fact that would be the least of it:

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “There are 60 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 100 nuclear reactors in 30 states in the United States. Of these plants, 36 have two or more reactors.” Nuclear power plants are as dependent on power from the grid as any other energy-consuming entities. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency mandates that a one-week supply of diesel fuel be sustained at each nuclear plant to fuel the backup generators. But it’s useless if there are any computer chips running those generators. The only other possibility is to use battery backups for as long as possible. When those fail, even reactors taken offline need to be bathed constantly in cold water. Without generators or batteries to pump that water, there’s no way to cool the reactors or the spent-fuel-rod pools. Once the water boils off, it’s Fukushima times 100.

Regardless of how it’s done, few would survive an EMP attack. If we were to be hit by a Super-EMP, only those who have amply prepared by having renewable water supplies and food stores will have a chance.All of those reactors will melt down with the spent-fuel rods. Hydrogen will build up in the tops of the reactors, as it did in Fukushima, and if ignited would cause the same explosions we saw in Japan. With the Jet Stream flowing from west to east, radioactivity would cover the nation.

Given barbarous regimes of North Korea and Iran, the fanaticism of their leaders, and their hatred for the United States, we should assume that if they ever achieve the capability to detonate a nuclear device over this country, they'll do it, even if it means their own national suicide. If such a horrific event ever does occur then most North Americans will die and those who survive will find themselves living under 19th century conditions.

Some critics think fears of an EMP attack are overblown, and perhaps they are, but no one really knows. Even so, why are our media and presidential candidates talking about how many bankruptcies Trump has filed and how many women will vote for Hillary? Why are they not talking about how they'll protect us from what is potentially the most serious threat facing this nation in its history? Why are we such an unserious people?

Assuming a Can Opener

Author Eric Metaxis recounts the old story of a chemist, a physicist, and an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of soup:

Puzzling over how to open the can, the chemist says, “Let’s heat the can until it swells and bursts from the buildup of gases.” “No, no,” says the physicist, “let’s throw it off that cliff with just enough kinetic energy to split it open on the rocks below.” The economist, after thinking a moment says, “Assume a can opener.”

The humor of the story lies in the absurdity of the assumption. Of course, if there's a can opener then there's no problem getting the can opened, but what justifies the assumption that a can opener exists?

Metaxis compares this story with its convenient assumption of the existence of a can opener to the controversy surrounding the origin of life. He writes:

The way Darwinists approach the origin of life is a lot like that economist’s idea for opening the can. The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection explains everything about life, we’re told—except how it began. “Assume a self-replicating cell containing information in the form of genetic code,” Darwinists are forced to say. Well, fine. But where did that little miracle come from?

Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in his book “Signature in the Cell” why this may be Darwinism’s Achilles heel. In order to begin evolution by natural selection, you need a self-replicating unit. But the cell and its DNA blueprint are too complicated by far to have arisen through chance chemical reactions. The odds of even a single protein forming by accident are astronomical. So Meyer and other Intelligent Design theorists conclude that Someone must have designed and created the structures necessary for life.

Darwinian naturalists, however, simply assume a can opener. They assume, despite the complete and utter lack of empirical evidence, that something existed somewhere that somehow organized the first replicating cell.

When someone believes something despite the lack of supporting evidence we sometimes derisively call that blind faith. It's ironic that those who believe that the extraordinary complexity and functionality of life are evidence of an intelligent agent are accused of having "blind faith" by the same people who believe that nature waved a magic wand and fortuitously brought living things into being by accident from a chemical soup even though no evidence has ever been adduced that would support the claim that this is even possible.

Those who direct the pejorative of blind faith at those who posit an intelligent agent behind the origin of living things would do well to first examine a few of their own beliefs before they find themselves embarrassingly hoist with their own petard.

Cruz's Letter

A lot of people were stunned and disappointed when Senator Ted Cruz announced on Friday that he was going to vote for Donald Trump. During the primaries Trump insulted Cruz, his wife and his father and earned the enmity of the legions of Cruz supporters across the country. Unfortunately Trump won the nomination, but despite having pledged early on to support whomever the nominee turned out to be, Cruz has been understandably loath to do so publicly. Until now.

His decision has elicited a lot of comment from the #NeverTrump folks in the GOP. People have accused him of selling out his principles or of making a political calculation, but neither of these allegations is the most charitable interpretation of Cruz's decision.

If people supported Cruz because they believe he's that rare breed, a principled politician, why not give him the benefit of the doubt that his endorsement was dictated by principle? Why not think that the man was going to swallow his pride, set aside the personal insults, and do what he believed was best for the country?

Other critics have argued that, setting principle aside, this was a terrible political mistake, but it's not clear to me how this might be. Cruz is already the next most popular politician in Texas after the Governor, and few people will remember his endorsement of Trump or hold it against him in 2020 should he run again for president. Moreover, the Trump crowd will be much more likely to support him four years from now because of his endorsement of their man this year.

If Hillary wins in November, Cruz will be in a good position to run against her as a candidate that Trumpers and conservatives both can support. If Trump wins in November he'll be 74 in 2020 and probably not eager to put himself through the wringer again. Cruz would be in a good position, having gained the good graces of Trump's minions, to compete with Mike Pence for Trump's mantle.

But I want to give Cruz the benefit of the doubt and say that he did it, not as a result of some crass political calculation, but for the reasons he actually stated. Here's an excerpt from the letter he sent out:

I’ve made this decision for two reasons. First, last year, I promised to support the Republican nominee. And I intend to keep my word.

Second, even though I have had areas of significant disagreement with our nominee, by any measure Hillary Clinton is wholly unacceptable — that’s why I have always been #NeverHillary.

Six key policy differences inform my decision. First, and most important, the Supreme Court. For anyone concerned about the Bill of Rights — free speech, religious liberty, the Second Amendment — the Court hangs in the balance. I have spent my professional career fighting before the Court to defend the Constitution. We are only one justice away from losing our most basic rights, and the next president will appoint as many as four new justices. We know, without a doubt, that every Clinton appointee would be a left-wing ideologue. Trump, in contrast, has promised to appoint justices “in the mold of Scalia.”

For some time, I have been seeking greater specificity on this issue, and today the Trump campaign provided that, releasing a very strong list of potential Supreme Court nominees — including Sen. Mike Lee, who would make an extraordinary justice — and making an explicit commitment to nominate only from that list. This commitment matters, and it provides a serious reason for voters to choose to support Trump.

Second, Obamacare. The failed healthcare law is hurting millions of Americans. If Republicans hold Congress, leadership has committed to passing legislation repealing Obamacare. Clinton, we know beyond a shadow of doubt, would veto that legislation. Trump has said he would sign it.

Third, energy. Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s war on coal and relentless efforts to crush the oil and gas industry. Trump has said he will reduce regulations and allow the blossoming American energy renaissance to create millions of new high-paying jobs.

Fourth, immigration. Clinton would continue and even expand President Obama’s lawless executive amnesty. Trump has promised that he would revoke those illegal executive orders.

Fifth, national security. Clinton would continue the Obama administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism. She would continue importing Middle Eastern refugees whom the FBI cannot vet to make sure they are not terrorists. Trump has promised to stop the deluge of unvetted refugees.

Sixth, Internet freedom. Clinton supports Obama’s plan to hand over control of the Internet to an international community of stakeholders, including Russia, China, and Iran. Just this week, Trump came out strongly against that plan, and in support of free speech online.

These are six vital issues where the candidates’ positions present a clear choice for the American people.

If Clinton wins, we know — with 100% certainty — that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country.

My conscience tells me I must do whatever I can to stop that.

We also have seen, over the past few weeks and months, a Trump campaign focusing more and more on freedom — including emphasizing school choice and the power of economic growth to lift African-Americans and Hispanics to prosperity.

Finally, after eight years of a lawless Obama administration, targeting and persecuting those disfavored by the administration, fidelity to the rule of law has never been more important.

The Supreme Court will be critical in preserving the rule of law. And, if the next administration fails to honor the Constitution and Bill of Rights, then I hope that Republicans and Democrats will stand united in protecting our fundamental liberties.

Our country is in crisis. Hillary Clinton is manifestly unfit to be president, and her policies would harm millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is the only thing standing in her way.

He could've also mentioned the corruption at the Department of Justice and the IRS which would doubtless continue under a Democratic administration, but the reasons he lists seem adequate to justify his decision. Why not take the man at his word?

Is Free Will an Illusion? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took a look at philosopher Stephen Cave's essay on free will which appeared in The Atlantic last June. Cave quoted several neuroscientists who believe that our sense that we freely make the choices we do is in truth an illusion and that our choices are actually the product solely of chemical reactions occurring in the brain which are themselves the product of our genetic endowments or the environmental influences that have acted upon us throughout our lives. This view is called determinism.

Here are a few more excerpts, with my commentary, from Cave's article:

Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance. This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side.

And little wonder. If determinism is true there really can be no moral obligation, nor any real moral right or wrong. Morality is based on the notion that we are free to choose between options. If no such freedom exists then neither does morality. It's merely an illusion, as Cave's words suggest.

Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has wrestled with this dilemma throughout his career and come to a painful conclusion: “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will. Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this.

Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower. Only the initiated, behind those walls, should dare to, as he put it to me, “look the dark truth in the face.” Smilansky says he realizes that there is something drastic, even terrible, about this idea—but if the choice is between the true and the good, then for the sake of society, the true must go.

In other words, Smilansky can't live with the implications of his materialist worldview. It forces an untenable conflict between what's true and what's good, but any worldview that is unlivable is also unviable. Instead of saying that truth must go maybe he should be saying that his materialism must go. It's stunning that someone would cling so tenaciously to his worldview that he'd be willing to deliberately sacrifice the truth rather than give it up.

[N]euroscientist and writer Sam Harris,...in his 2012 book, Free Will, set out to bring down the fantasy of conscious choice. Like Smilansky, he believes that there is no such thing as free will. But Harris thinks we are better off without the whole notion of it.

According to Harris, we should acknowledge that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. “They didn’t pick their genes. They didn’t pick their parents. They didn’t make their brains, yet their brains are the source of their intentions and actions.” In a deep sense, their crimes are not their fault. Recognizing this, we can dispassionately consider how to manage offenders in order to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending. Harris thinks that, in time, “it might be possible to cure something like psychopathy,” but only if we accept that the brain, and not some airy-fairy free will, is the source of the deviancy.

Accepting this would also free us from hatred. Holding people responsible for their actions might sound like a keystone of civilized life, but we pay a high price for it: Blaming people makes us angry and vengeful, and that clouds our judgment.

Harris' view is actually better than Smilansky's since Harris at least says that we should embrace the truth, at least as he understands it, and acknowledge that there's no free will nor any entailments of free will such as moral responsibility. This would perhaps free us from being "angry and vengeful," but at what cost? A world in which no one was seen as guilty (or praiseworthy), where no one was seen as morally responsible for anything they did, would quickly devolve into chaos. Moreover, who gets to define what "deviancy" is? One man's deviancy is another man's passion, and if determinism is true why should any deviancy be suppressed or "rehabilitated"?

These men are aware that there's a genuine conflict between free will, moral responsibility and materialism, but their solution is to hold tenaciously to materialism and have done with truth, free will, and/or moral responsibility. This is a bit like the obese man whose weight has caused his blood pressure to elevate and who chooses to address the problem by refusing to have his blood pressure taken. Maybe what the obese man should do instead is shed the weight, and maybe what the materialist should do is shed his materialism.

Is Free Will an Illusion? (Pt. I)

One of the most intractable of all philosophical questions over the centuries has been the question of whether we really have the freedom to make genuine choices or whether our choices are the product simply of environmental or genetic factors over which we ultimately have no control. In other words, do we have free will or are we determined - programmed by physics and chemistry - to choose the way we do?

A friend passed along a recent and very interesting article in The Atlantic by philosopher Stephen Cave who explores the question and, perhaps unintentionally, illustrates how one's worldview influences the philosophical positions one takes.

Here are just a few excerpts from Cave's essay:

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

We know that changes to brain chemistry can alter behavior—otherwise neither alcohol nor antipsychotics would have their desired effects. The same holds true for brain structure: Cases of ordinary adults becoming murderers or pedophiles after developing a brain tumor demonstrate how dependent we are on the physical properties of our gray stuff.

Throughout his article Cave simply assumes materialism is true. Of course, if it is true then obviously only the material brain can be responsible for our mental activity. But why think materialism is true? Cave never tells us but rather just seems to assume everyone, or at least all intelligent people, accepts it. If, though, it's not true and we do have immaterial minds then it could be that brains and minds work in tandem like the television set and the electromagnetic signals that the set receives and converts into an image. Fiddling with the set will disturb the image, but that doesn't mean that the set is all there is to the production of the image. Cave continues:

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

This is not quite correct, however. What Libet (who himself believed we have free will) showed was that even though electrical activity in the brain precedes our awareness of the need to make a decision, we still have the ability to overrule the decision that the brain has selected for us. (See here)

The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This is the contemporary scientific image because many neuroscientists embrace metaphysical materialism. In other words, it's their metaphysics that causes them to embrace this picture, not their science. If one has concluded that everything that exists is comprised of matter and energy then whatever explanation for our cognitive processes one invents will ultimately be based on nothing more than atoms and energy.

The really critical question, then, is whether there are good reasons to accept materialism, but, since materialism is, in fact, a metaphysical preference, that's not a question science can answer. More on Cave's article tomorrow.

Snowflakes and Censors

Oklahoma Weslyan University President Dr. Everett Piper's brief essay last Fall titled This is Not a Daycare, It's a University went viral.

The University of Chicago's Dean of Students, Dr. John Ellison raised eyebrows nationwide when he sent a letter last month cautioning incoming freshmen not to expect safe spaces and trigger warnings.

It's an astonishing development that such sentiments and expectations are so unusual that when they're expressed they become newsworthy.

Why are so many students so sensitive and fragile that they must be treated like emotional hemophiliacs to whom the slightest bruise to their self-esteem could prove fatal?

Indulge me in a bit of speculation. Maybe the deeper problem is not so much one of fragility, though it is that, but insecurity. I suspect that a lot of kids in the last couple of generations are profoundly insecure because they've grown up during a time of great instability and erosion of two institutions which had been traditional sources of security and comfort for children - the family and the church.

When children grow up in unstable homes, when they grow up with few adult role models to give them discipline and love, when they lack the structure and moral instruction provided by good parents and good churches (and good schools), and when they grow up in a culture that has largely abandoned the notion of truth, they may tend to be so desperate for love and attention that they come to see their needs as at the very center of the universe around which all else should orbit.

Maybe that analysis is all wrong, but it's as good an explanation as any I can think of for why someone thinks she can treat other people as this young woman at Yale thinks she has the right to treat her professor.

For the background to this encounter go here. It's sad reading, given that the provocation for her demeaning tirade seems, sub specie aeternitatis, so trivial. There are four other videos of this professor's encounter with his students here. Someone has labelled students who are so sensitive that the least transgression of their emotional ambit precipitates a meltdown snowflakes. They dissolve when touched.

In any case, I wonder if Yale considers this student's outburst to be hate speech because it certainly sounds hateful.

Speaking of hate speech, I didn't realize that Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" is hate speech, but on some campuses it is, and there are people out there, such as the woman in the following video, who believe it must be censored:

I'm reminded of the words of the leftist MIT professor Noam Chomsky who once said that "If we don't believe in freedom of speech for people we despise we don't believe in it at all." Evidently, at least some on the left no longer believe in free speech at all. This is ironic since it was the left which demanded free speech back in the sixties in order to get their message out. Now that they've been largely successful in not only getting their message out but having it prevail, they want to shut down free speech for everyone who doesn't agree with them.

It seems that for at least some on the left freedom is just a tool that only they are allowed to use.

Reflections on the News

If I had my way there are two terms upon which I'd have the media place a moratorium, those being lone wolf and radical extremist. The first is used as promiscuously by media talking heads as some millenials use the word "like." Listening to media grandees discuss terrorist incidents is a variation on the infamous Chinese water torture. One finds oneself gritting one's teeth in anticipation of the next mention of a "lone wolf" much as the torture victim tenses himself in anticipation of the next drop of water striking his head with the force of a hammer. Surely the vocabularies of these ladies and gentlemen is not so depauperate as to prohibit them from employing from time to time a synonym.

The second term, radical extremist, is simply inapt. Islamic terrorists who seek to kill non-Muslims are no more radical extremists than are Christian Amishman or missionaries radical extremists. The pacifist Amishman and the evangelical missionary are simply trying to live out what they believe the New Testament calls Christians to do. They're seeking to emulate the one whose followers they desire to be. In precisely the same way the Islamic terrorist is simply striving to fulfill the injunctions imposed upon him by the Koran, among which are the duty to hate the infidel and kill him wherever he can, and to emulate the example of violence and terror set by the one whose followers they desire to be. The Islamic terrorist is not an extremist, he's a purist.

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There's been another tragic police shooting. A female police officer appears to have shot and killed an unarmed man, apparently for no very good reason. It's national news now, and the Federal Department of Justice is even investigating. This is interesting because a couple of years ago in a town near where I live another female officer shot and killed an unarmed man, apparently for no very good reason, and it never became more than a local story and no federal investigation took place. So what's the salient difference between the two cases? Why does the media promote one story into the national headlines and onto nationwide evening news shows but not the other one?

Could it be that it's because the media never misses an opportunity to stir up racial hostility? I ask this because the only difference between the earlier case and the more recent one is that, although in both instances the officer was a white female, in the earlier case the victim was a white male and in the latter case he was a black male. Apparently, it's media policy when a cop kills a white man to yawn and roll over, but when a cop kills a black man, the media rouses itself to herald the news so that maybe they can incite a protest or, with luck, a violent riot. I know this sounds harsh, but what else could be their motive for treating these two stories so differently?

The fact is that the media is largely a liberal institution and the left has a vested interest in keeping the racial pot simmering. Racial unrest and dissatisfaction gets other liberals elected to political office, aggrandizes the left's power, and gives media folks lots of conflict narratives, their favorite theme, to write and talk about. Racial tension is not so good for the rest of us, but it's bread and butter for liberal politicos and journalists.

The Language Problem

I've been enjoying Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the theory of evolution and/or the history of the study of linguistics. Michael Egnor at Evolution News and Views concurs with this commendation, and goes even further. Rather than me telling you what the book is about, I'll quote Egnor:

Tom Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and it's superb. Wolfe's theme is that human language is unique and is not shared in any way with other animals. He argues forcefully that evolutionary stories about the origin of human language are not credible.

In the first chapter of his book, Wolfe describes an article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology from 2014, co-authored by leading linguist Noam Chomsky. Wolfe declares that:

"The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever," [the authors] concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we'll keep trying, they said gamely... but we'll have to start from zero again. One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. "In the last 40 years," he and the other seven were saying, "there has been an explosion of research on this problem," and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia....

One hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced, and they had learned...nothing...In that same century and a half, Einstein discovered the speed of light and the relativity of speed, time and distance... Pasteur discovered that microorganisms, notably bacteria, cause an ungodly number of diseases, from head colds to anthrax and oxygen-tubed, collapsed-lung, final-stage pneumonia... Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the so-called building blocks genes are made of ...and 150 years' worth of linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline discovered... nothing...about language. What is the problem? What's the story?...What is it that they still don't get after a veritable eternity?

Wolfe provides a précis of his argument:

Speech is not one of man's several unique attributes -- speech is the attribute of all attributes!

Yet despite almost two centuries of speculations and hypothesizing we're no closer today to being able to explain what language is or how we come to have it than we've ever been. Indeed, Darwin and his votaries tried to come up with a plausible explanation and failed so utterly that scientists gave up for almost eighty years trying to explain it. Says Wolfe:

It is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man - language - was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

It's also hard to believe that it's been 67 years since 1949 and still no progress has been made on this question. Egnor writes:

And yet, as Wolfe points out, Darwinists are at an utter loss to explain how language -- the salient characteristic of man -- "evolved." None of the deep drawer of evolutionary just-so stories come anywhere close to explaining how man might have acquired the astonishing ability to craft unlimited propositions and concepts and subtleties within subtleties using a system of grammar and abstract designators (i.e. words) that are utterly lacking anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Egnor, who is himself a neuroscientist, closes his piece with these words:

I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities -- the intellect's ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing -- and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses. We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language -- a simulacrum of our abstract minds -- has no root in the animal world.

Language is the tool by which we think abstractly. It is sui generis. It is a gift, a window into the human soul, something we are made with, and it did not evolve. Language is a rock against which evolutionary theory wrecks, one of the many rocks -- the uncooperative fossil record, the jumbled molecular evolutionary tree, irreducible complexity, intricate intracellular design, the genetic code, the collapsing myth of junk DNA, the immaterial human mind -- that comprise the shoal that is sinking Darwin's Victorian fable.

The charm of Wolfe's book is that it reads like a novel, which is the metier for which Wolfe is famous. It's free of scientific jargon, it's funny and contains some fascinating insights into several of the major figures in the history of the search for an explanation for the origin and nature of language. Plus, it's only 169 pages long. All in all a great read.

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. III)

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

Bottum writes that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. II)

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

Bottum writes that:

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

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

Bottum continues:

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

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

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

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

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

Premoderns and Postmoderns (Pt. I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottum continues:

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

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

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

Bottum again:

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

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

More tomorrow.