ISIL Has Lost 50,000 Troops

As news comes out of Syria of the horrifying conditions in Aleppo and the tragically ineffective policies pursued by the Obama administration, it might be more encouraging to turn to the war against Islamic terrorism waged against ISIL. On this front there is better news:

At least 75% of ISIS fighters have been killed during the campaign of US-led airstrikes. The campaign has winnowed ISIS' ranks to between 12,000 and 15,000 "battle ready" fighters, a top US official said on Tuesday.

The figures mean the US and its coalition partners have taken out vastly more ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria than currently remain on the battlefield, two years since the bombing campaign began. Last week a US official said the coalition had killed 50,000 militants since 2014.

Speaking at the White House Tuesday, Brett McGurk, the US special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, said the terror group is no longer able to replenish its ranks, predicting the number of fighters would continue to dwindle.

"The number of battle-ready fighters inside Iraq and Syria is now at its lowest point that it's ever been," McGurk said, describing the update he gave the President to reporters after the meeting. He noted that the flow of foreign fighters to ISIS had been stemmed by tighter surveillance and border controls.

The air campaign, led by the US and begun in 2014, has conducted 17,000 strikes against ISIS targets, McGurk said. The vast majority were conduced by US planes; only 4,500 were carried out by other members of the coalition.

The most recent targets included three ISIS leaders the US says were responsible for planning attacks in Paris and Brussels last year. They were taken out in Raqqa, ISIS' self-described capital in Syria.

There are believed to be about 3000 ISIL troops still holding out in Mosul which is under seige by the Iraqi army, most of whom will likely fight to the death. Here's an account from Strategy Page which explains why retaking Mosul is such a difficult task for the Iraqis:

December 13, 2016: After eight weeks the battle for Mosul has driven ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) forces from most of the city east of the Tigris River. It is slow going because, as was already known (from refugees and deserters) ISIL had planted thousands of mines and booby-traps and dug many kilometers of tunnels that allowed ISIL fighters to shift forces and supplies without risking an air or ground attack.

All this was taken into taken into account before the operation to take Mosul began on October 17th. What was unknown was how well the largely untested attack force would perform under this sort of relentless urban warfare. As far back as World War II it was known that taking a defended city usually meant it would take longer than expected and even if the attackers were superior in numbers and training they would lose as many men as the defenders.

In Mosul the attack force is losing a bit more than the defenders, in part because many of the attackers are Shia militia, who are more fanatic than disciplined and effective. The Iraqi special operations troops and most of the Kurds are more experienced and the other Iraqi army troops are somewhere in between. The situation is further complicated by the nature of the enemy, which is largely a force of men prepared to die fighting and have no problems using civilians as human shields and employing tactic to kill or delay the advance.

ISIL had over two years to prepare their defenses and even though the attackers have maps showing many of these defenses and mined areas they don’t know where all of this stuff is and it’s what you don’t know that will get you killed. While ISIL has lost over a third of their defending force in two months of combat, the attackers (about 20,000 on or near the front line and four times as many in support) suffered about ten percent losses (dead, missing, disabled and deserters) so far. The attackers keep their casualties down by using artillery and airstrikes as much as possible and advancing carefully. That slows things down and requires a lot of ammunition and expensive aerial operations. Meanwhile there are apparently some 3,000 ISIL men still in the city.

There's more on the Mosul operation at the link. President Obama, at least according to many of his critics, made three terrible blunders in the region.

1. His decision to announce the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and the subsequent withdrawal left a vacuum there that ISIL easily filled and has consequently cost tens of thousands of innocent lives.

2. His decision to threaten Syrian president Assad with severe consequences should he use chemical weapons on his own people - the so-called "red line" - was a huge mistake if Mr. Obama had no intention of backing it up, which he didn't.

3. The failure to impose a no-fly zone in Syria early on before the Russians got involved on Assad's behalf. It was possible early in the civil war to save thousands of lives by preventing Syria's air force from bombing civilians and even destroying their aircraft on the ground if need be. Mr. Obama chose to do nothing and the carnage and loss of American prestige and influence as a result has been incalculable.

The GOP's Political Hegemony

In 2008 pundits were declaring the Republican party to be all but dead. The future, we were told, is with the Democrats, particularly because the GOP base - old, white men - was dying off and the country was turning browner. Well, all of that may be true, but a strange thing happened during the last eight years. The country elected and re-elected a Democrat to the White House while simultaneously stripping Democrats of over 1000 elective offices across the nation, and, to rub salt into the wound, it doesn't look like things will improve in 2018, the year of the next major elections.

Throughout most of this recent election season we were given to believe that Trump would be a drag on the GOP ticket, especially the down ballot. Like so much else in this election, though, this prediction didn't turn out the way some prognosticators thought it would.

Here's Amber Phillips at The Washington Post with the gory details:

Republicans grabbed more of America's statehouses and governor's mansions during the Obama administration than at any time in the modern era. Republicans will still control an all-time high 69 of 99 state legislative chambers. They'll hold at least 33 governorships, tying a 94-year-old record. That means that come 2017, they'll have total control of government in at least 25 states, and partial control in 20 states. According to population calculations by the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, that translates to roughly 80 percent of the population living in a state either all or partially controlled by Republicans.

Things are just as good for the GOP at the federal level, where Republicans have reached the trifecta. They just won the White House, they've kept their majorities in Congress and they have a chance to reshape the Supreme Court to a strong conservative ideological leaning.

Democrats, meanwhile, will go into 2017 without any significant gains in Congress and with total control of just five states. (Republicans managed to tie Connecticut's state Senate, but a tie breaks for Democrats thanks to the state's Democratic lieutenant governor presiding over the chamber. So technically the state stays in Democratic control.)

The WaPo article features some fascinating graphics:

Phillips adds this thought:

Democrats are still soul searching for what went wrong on [November 8th]. But there are a few reasons that help explain Republicans' steady march to dominance over the past eight years. The simplest one is President Obama.

Indeed, while it's normal for the "out" party to pick up seats in midterm elections, the GOP gain during the Obama years was particularly pronounced -- more than 900 Democratic state legislators were defeated.

To make matters worse for the Democrats, in the election just past Republicans had to defend 23 Senate seats to the Democrats 13. It was widely expected that the Democrats would pick up several of these, but they did not. In the 2018 midterms, the Democrats will be defending 17 seats more than the Republicans will have to defend, and at least five of these are in states Trump won.

Here's a graphic that illustrates the predicament they're in:

The red states are states in which a Republican senator is up for re-election in 2018, the blue states are those in which a Democratic senator is standing for re-election.

When people look back at President Obama's legacy a decade from now there may well be very little to see. It's likely that the Affordable Care act will be dismantled, the Iran nuclear accord will be largely eviscerated, his numerous Executive Orders will be mostly rescinded, his onerous regulations on business will be eased, and his attempt to flood the country with illegal immigrants will be stanched. What will remain will be the precedent of the first black president, a huge national debt, a feckless foreign policy, and the shell of a Democrat Party that, having fallen into the hands of liberal/progressives, was repeatedly repudiated at the polls until forced to retreat to the coastal left-wing redoubts of New York City, California and a few satellites.

The Future of the Unskilled Worker

Here's a short but fascinating video that shows us what's coming for retailers, shoppers, and minimum wage earners:

When this technology is widely adopted what will the job prospects for minimum wage workers look like? Right. So what sense does it make for minimum wage workers to demand that they be paid even more? It's as if they're deliberately trying to give their employers the incentive to automate so they can avoid the hassle of having under-educated, unskilled employees demanding they be given more money.

An article by Jeffrey Dorfman at Forbes runs the numbers and finds that raising the minimum wage to $15 and hour will result in 13.7 million lost jobs, and that doesn't factor in the effect of being able to substitute technology for workers.

So who benefits from raising the minimum wage? Here's Dorfman:

So why would labor unions fight this fight, given that they may cost millions of the people they are supposedly fighting for their jobs? There are three obvious answers to this question.

First, government employees are increasingly the bulk of union workers (with public union workers on pace to pass private sectors ones in the next year to two) and government union workers likely will make up few of those lost jobs. Government workers have stronger job protection and work for employers who can force their “customers” to cough up more revenue.

Second, there are many union contracts which include automatic pay increases tied to changes in the minimum wage. Thus, many workers who already earn more than $15 per hour will still get raises thanks to these laws. For example, California teachers have a contract that ties starting pay to twice the minimum wage, meaning that once the new California law is fully effective in 2022 all public school teachers in the state will earn over $30 per hour.

Third, although millions of workers will lose their jobs, those who keep them get substantial pay gains. For unions, the increase in union dues from higher wages will likely more than offset the loss in dues from fewer jobs. In other words, union revenue is expected to increase. While some union workers (and many more non-union workers) will lose their jobs, those who keep their jobs win big enough for total dues payments to rise. So, if you are a union not overly concerned about the fate of those job losers, a $15 minimum wage has some definite upside.

It may strike some as a cynical analysis, but it has the ring of truth.

In any case, the video above illustrates pretty starkly what the future's going to look like for those who have no skills. They're simply not going to be in the picture. Which raises a very troubling question: What does a society do with millions more unemployed and unemployable people?

Gift Suggestion (Pt. II)

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a possible Christmas gift and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out in 2015. Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, 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."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God is no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Christmas Gift Suggestion (Pt. I)

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our twelve years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd. Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

The book is available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reader/reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.

Revolutionary

One of the most prominent scientists in the development of the theory of Intelligent Design is Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe. Behe first came to national and international notice with his book Darwin's Black Box in which he called attention to a concept called irreducible complexity. The basic idea is that there are numerous examples of biochemical systems and molecular machines in living things which are so constructed such that if they lacked just one part they would lose all functionality.

In other words, the system or machine has to have all of its parts present and operating in order for it to work, but, if this is so, it's a mystery how such systems could have evolved gradually by chance over long periods of time. Early versions of the system would lack parts that hadn't evolved yet and thus the prototype would be culled out by natural selection and thrown into the evolutionary wastebasket.

Various attempts have been made by Darwinian scientists to answer Behe's challenge to describe a plausible pathway by which these systems could have evolved, but few of them are persuasive and all of them are purely hypothetical.

In the process of promoting his idea of irreducible complexity Behe made famous the exquisitely tiny nano-machines that exhibit IR in the cells of all living things. Now a documentary has been made about Behe featuring his life and work. It's titled Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines, and the trailer of the film features a description of the most famous of the bio-machines, the bacterial flagellum, and also illustrates several others. Take a look:

The more one reads about the structure of life the more one is awed by the marvels one reads about and the harder it is to suppress the intuition that these things are designed. Indeed, Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick acknowledged the problem when he wrote that "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved."

Of course, if one has a prior commitment to naturalism then design by an agent simply doesn't fit into one's grand narrative and will be rejected out of hand. If one is more open-minded, however, the intuition that these things are designed is virtually irresistible.

Intentionality and Materialism

Many people believe that human beings are a composite of both mental and material substance. This view is called substance dualism and among philosophers it seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. Still, the currently dominant view among philosophers remains, at least for the time being, materialism. This is the view that everything, including us, is reducible to the constituents of material substance. Materialists deny that there's anything about us that's immaterial and affirm that electrochemical processes in the brain can account for all of our mental activity.

Philosopher Ed Feser argues that this view is simply false and he adduces something called intentionality as just one of several phenomena that cannot be explained as a function of matter or neurological processes:

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself.

Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general. Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc.

In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

The debate has fascinating implications. If there's more to us than just the chemicals that make us up, if there's something immaterial that's an essential element of our being, then is that immaterial mind (or soul) something that's not subject to death as physical matter is? Might there be something about us that continues to exist even after the body dies?

Materialists scoff at the idea, but materialism no longer commands the allegiance of philosophers like it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's too much it can't explain and intentionality is just one example.

Cellular Choreography

In my classes we've been looking at the design argument for the existence of God. One aspect of the argument is based on the amazing fact that each cell in living organisms is a factory consisting of thousands of biological machines directed and choreographed by information-rich instructions. Since we have a uniform experience of information (specified complexity) being produced only by intelligent agents, and no experience of information being generated by blind, impersonal forces, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the information in the biosphere is also the product of an intelligent agent.

The following excerpt from a longer video provides an example of the astonishing goings-on in the interiors of every cell in your body. The quality of the you tube version of the video is not good, but it's good enough.

Some questions we might ask about this include these: How do these molecular structures "know" what operation to perform and where to go to perform it? Where do the instructions (information) come from that direct and coordinate these operations, and how does such a system arise from a blind, mindless process like evolution? Indeed, how did these processes ever arise in the first cells before cells "learned" to reproduce? After all, natural selection, and thus evolution, doesn't kick in until cells can make copies of themselves. Yet many of these basic processes must already have been in place in the earliest cells or they wouldn't have survived to develop the ability to reproduce.

It's all very mysterious, but it certainly seems plausible to believe that this whole system was somehow designed. In fact, the only way to avoid that conclusion is to rule out design a priori, but why do that unless one's metaphysical commitment to naturalism is so strong that no rival hypothesis can be allowed to creep into one's thinking? If that's the case, though, one should give up any pretense of being open-minded.

Fine-Tuned Universes and the Multiverse

Physicist Leonard Susskind once claimed that there are only two live options for explaining the amazing precision in the structure of the universe's parameters and constants - either the universe was intentionally designed by a mind or there's a multiverse. Of course, a multiverse could also be the product of intentional design, but Susskind, like many of his naturalistic colleagues, sees an undesigned multiverse as the only real alternative to some kind of intelligent agency.

Why, though, limit the possible explanations to an intelligent agent or an unintelligent multiverse? Jonathan Witt at Evolution News explains:

On one side of the controversy are scientists who see powerful evidence for purpose in the way the laws and constants of physics and chemistry are finely tuned to allow for life -- finely tuned to a mindboggling degree of precision.

Change gravity or the strong nuclear force or any of dozens of other constants even the tiniest bit, and no stars, no planets, no life. Why are the constants just so? Here's what Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias concluded: "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say 'supernatural') plan."

Nobel Laureate George Smoot is another, commenting that "the big bang, the most cataclysmic event we can imagine, on closer inspection appears finely orchestrated." Elsewhere Smoot describes the ripples in the cosmic background radiation as the "fingerprints from the Maker."

On the other side of the divide are those who insist with Harvard's Richard Lewontin that they simply cannot "let a divine foot in the door." In the case of the fine-tuning problem, they keep "the divine foot" out with a pair of curious arguments. Each involves a fallacy, and one of them the idea of a multiverse.

Here's what Witt says about the multiverse hypothesis:

A second tactic for countering the fine-tuning argument to design runs like this: Our universe is just one of untold trillions of universes. Ours is just one of the lucky ones with the right parameters for life. True, we can't see or otherwise detect these other universes, but they must be out there because that solves the fine-tuning problem.

Consider an analogy. A naïve gambler is at a casino and, seeing a crowd forming around a poker table across the room, he goes over to investigate. He squeezes through the crowd and, whispering to another onlooker, learns that the mob boss there at the table lost a couple of poker hands and then gave the dealer a look that could kill, then on the next two hands the mobster laid down royal flushes, each time without exchanging any cards. Keep in mind that the odds of drawing even one royal flush in this way is about one chance in 650,000. The odds of it happening twice in a row are 1 chance in about 650,000 x 650,000.

At this point, a few of the other poker players at the table prudently compliment the mobster on his good fortune, cash in their chips and leave. The naïve gambler misses all of these clues, and a look of wonder blossoms across his face. On the next hand the mob boss lays down a third royal flush. The naïve gambler pulls up a calculator on his phone and punches in some numbers. "Wow!" he cries. "The odds of that happening three times in a row are worse than 1 chance in 274 thousand trillion! Imagine how much poker playing there must have been going on -- maybe is going on right now all over the world -- to make that run of luck possible!" The naïve gambler hasn't explained the mobster's "run of luck." All he's done is overlook one reasonable explanation: intelligent design.

The naïve gambler's error is the same error committed by those who appeal to multiple, undetectable universes to explain the "luck" that gave us a universe fine-tuned to allow for intelligent observers.

Witt gives a couple more illustrations of what he sees as the fallacy in invoking the multiverse to explain the unimaginably high improbability of an undesigned universe being as fine-tuned as is ours, and you might want to check out his column if this topic interests you.

Return to Cosmic Specialness

Howard A. Smith is a lecturer in the Harvard University Department of Astronomy and a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He wrote a column for the Washington Post in which he argued that, contrary to much conventional wisdom, both the earth and life are exceedingly special and probably extraordinarily rare, if not unique. Here are some excerpts:

There was a time, back when astronomy put Earth at the center of the universe, that we thought we were special. But after Copernicus kicked Earth off its pedestal, we decided we were cosmically inconsequential, partly because the universe is vast and about the same everywhere.

Astronomer Carl Sagan put it this way: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Stephen Hawking was even blunter: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”

Smith, however, takes exception to this "principle of mediocrity":

The universe, far from being a collection of random accidents, appears to be stupendously perfect and fine-tuned for life. The strengths of the four forces that operate in the universe — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear interactions (the latter two dominate only at the level of atoms) — for example, have values critically suited for life, and were they even a few percent different, we would not be here.

The most extreme example is the big bang creation: Even an infinitesimal change to its explosive expansion value would preclude life.

This expansion value, in fact, is fine-tuned to a precision of one part in 10^10^123. It's a number impossible to comprehend.

The frequent response from physicists offers a speculative solution: an infinite number of universes — we are just living in the one with the right value. But modern philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and pioneering quantum physicists such as John Wheeler have argued instead that intelligent beings must somehow be the directed goal of such a curiously fine-tuned cosmos.

Smith goes on to explain why intelligent life is not likely to exist on other planets, no matter how many of them there are. He gives several reasons for this, but there are reasons he doesn't mention as well. Here are a few: A planet suitable for life has to have the right mass, period of rotation, be the right distance from its star, and have on it the right elements in ample supply. A life-sustaining planet must also have a moon of the proper size, it has to orbit a star of the right size and age, and be located in the right kind of galaxy and in the right place in the galaxy. In addition to all this it has to have been extremely lucky to have avoided life-destroying meteor impacts and other cosmic disasters.

Smith continues:

Some of my colleagues strongly reject this notion. They would echo Hawking: “I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.” Yes, we all have beliefs — but beliefs are not proof. Hawking’s belief presumes that we are nothing but ordinary, a “chemical scum.” All the observations so far, however, are consistent with the idea that humanity is not mediocre at all and that we won’t know otherwise for a long time. let us be grateful for the amazing gifts of life and awareness, and acknowledge the compelling evidence to date that humanity and our home planet, Earth, are rare and cosmically precious.

It seems that in light of the overwhelming evidence of fine-tuning more and more philosophers and scientists are abandoning the Sagan/Hawking position and coming around to Smith's point of view that life on earth is extraordinary, and that as huge as the universe is we are quite possibly the only intelligent beings in the whole of its vastness. It's a breath-taking thought.

More on the Death of Fidel

When Cuban dictator Fidel Castro died last week I did a post (11/28/16) titled A Tyrant Has Passed in which was mentioned some of the many crimes this man committed against the Cuban people. In reply, a student whose great-grandfather was one of those who suffered and was lucky enough to escape wrote to relate his fascinating story:

Castro’s death is great news for everyone around the world, especially my family. My great grandfather on my father’s side of the family is actually 100% Cuban, and so is my grandfather. When Castro was first gaining power, my great grandfather Juan Silva realized that Fidel was a vile man. Juan, a prestigious lawyer, began using whatever money he had to help people leave Cuba and escape the coming storm. Fidel discovered Juan’s actions and torched my great grandfather’s library. This was a heavy blow to Juan because from a lawyer’s standpoint, his library was paramount to his career.

Around the same time, Fidel vowed that he would execute the entirety of the Silva family. This was more than enough for Juan, so he gathered his family and his remaining finances and left Cuba for America. My grandfather, Alfredo Silva, was born in Cuba, but has lived in the United States for most of his life. He vowed never to return to Cuba unless Fidel Castro was deceased.

My grandfather grew up in a house in Punta Gorda, Cuba that Castro used as a summer home after Juan and his family fled the country. My grandfather’s health has been diminishing severely over the years, resulting in dementia. He’s now in his 80s and remembers more about his short time in Cuba than his whole life in America.

For old time’s sake, my father, two of my uncles, and my cousin have accompanied my grandfather back to his home in Punta Gorda. They had scheduled the trip months in advance, regardless of Fidel’s well-being. My father and grandfather left for Cuba on Wednesday, November 30th: only a few days after Castro’s death. I hope my grandfather can visit his old home in peace and that the members of my family who are in Cuba will have a wonderful and safe time.

There are perhaps millions of Cubans with stories like this about Castro which is why so many of them were celebrating in the streets of Miami and, more circumspectly, throughout Cuba, when news of Castro's death was announced.

Fine-Tuning Made Simple

Philosopher of science Robin Collins is one of the world's foremost authorities on cosmic fine-tuning, a topic that has popped up on Viewpoint pretty often. Way back in 1998, an essay by Collins titled The Fine-Tuning Design Argument: A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God, appeared in a collection of papers edited by philosopher Michael Murray titled Reason for the Hope Within. Collins' essay begins with this:

Suppose we went on a mission to Mars, and found a domed structure in which everything was set up just right for life to exist. The temperature, for example, was set around 70 °F and the humidity was at 50%; moreover, there was an oxygen recycling system, an energy gathering system, and a whole system for the production of food. Put simply, the domed structure appeared to be a fully functioning biosphere. What conclusion would we draw from finding this structure? Would we draw the conclusion that it just happened to form by chance? Certainly not.

Instead, we would unanimously conclude that it was designed by some intelligent being. Why would we draw this conclusion? Because an intelligent designer appears to be the only plausible explanation for the existence of the structure. That is, the only alternative explanation we can think of–that the structure was formed by some natural process–seems extremely unlikely. Of course, it is possible that, for example, through some volcanic eruption various metals and other compounds could have formed, and then separated out in just the right way to produce the “biosphere,” but such a scenario strikes us as extraordinarily unlikely, thus making this alternative explanation unbelievable.

The universe is analogous to such a “biosphere,” according to recent findings in physics . . . . Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the “fine-tuning of the cosmos” . . . For example, theoretical physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies–whose early writings were not particularly sympathetic to theism–claims that with regard to basic structure of the universe, “the impression of design is overwhelming” (Davies, 1988, p. 203) . . . .

As the eminent Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson notes, "There are many . . . lucky accidents in physics. Without such accidents, water could not exist as liquid, chains of carbon atoms could not form complex organic molecules, and hydrogen atoms could not form breakable bridges between molecules" (p. 251)--in short, life as we know it would be impossible.

Scientists call this extraordinary balancing of the parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe the "fine-tuning of the cosmos." It has been extensively discussed by philosophers, theologians, and scientists, especially since the early 1970s, with hundreds of articles and dozens of books written on the topic. Today, it is widely regarded as offering by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God. For example, theoretical physicist and popular science writer Paul Davies--whose early writings were not particularly sympathetic to theism--claims that with regard to basic structure of the universe, "the impression of design is overwhelming" (Davies, 1988, p. 203).

Similarly, in response to the life-permitting fine-tuning of the nuclear resonances responsible for the oxygen and carbon synthesis in stars, the famous astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle declares that:

I do not believe that any scientists who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars. If this is so, then my apparently random quirks have become part of a deep-laid scheme. If not then we are back again at a monstrous sequence of accidents. [Fred Hoyle, in Religion and the Scientists, 1959; quoted in Barrow and Tipler, p. 22]

Collins then goes on in his essay to give five examples of cosmic fine-tuning. In each case, had a particular parameter, such as the initial expansion rate of the universe or the strength of gravity, varied by incomprehensibly minute amounts the universe would never have formed.

It's all absolutely breath-taking if the universe is designed by an intelligent agent, but it's literally incredible, at least for me, to think that it's all just a "lucky accident."

Soul Survival

Usually when people talk about the soul and life beyond the death of the physical body they draw looks of incredulity and even scorn from fashionably skeptical materialists, but when a scientist as prominent as physicist Roger Penrose talks about it, well, then the skeptics should at least listen.

Penrose's theory is that the soul consists of information stored at the sub-atomic level in microtubules in the body's cells. At death this information somehow escapes the confines of the microtubules and drifts off into the universe. He claims to have evidence to support this hypothesis, and perhaps he does. I haven't seen the evidence, but I'd like to know how the information "knows" that the body has died and what mechanism controls it. I'd also like to know what the information is about, how it functions without a physical body, and what disembodied information leaking out into the universe "looks" like.

Anyway, I'm not altogether skeptical of Penrose's theory. I've long advocated the view that, if we do have a soul (as a substance that's neither physical nor mental - neither body nor mind), that it consists of information. In this I'm in agreement with Penrose.

Where I differ from him is that in my view the soul is the totality of true propositions about a person - an exhaustive description of the person at every moment of his or her existence. It's the essence of the person. But whereas Penrose locates the information in cellular microtubules I posit that the information is located in a vast database, i.e. the mind of God. In God's mind there is, so to speak, a "file" containing a complete description of every person who has ever lived. Since the information is located in the mind of God it's indestructible - immortal - unless God chooses to destroy it. Each of us is therefore potentially eternal.

To take this line of thinking one more step, perhaps when our physical bodies die our "file" is "downloaded," in whole or in part, into another body situated in a different world, or at least in a different set of dimensions than what we experience in this world. It would be a different kind of body, perhaps, but a body all the same.

On this view, the soul is not something wraith-like that's contained in us, but rather it's "in" God. As with a computer file, he could choose to delete it altogether or to express it in any "format" he sees fit.

In any case, if this hypothesis is at all close to describing the way things are, the death of our bodies is not the death of us, and if physical death is not the end of our existence, that changes everything.

No Follow-Up Attack

Why was there no significant follow-up attack by Islamists after their devastating attack on 9/11? The man who interrogated the terrorist who planned and organized 9/11, James B. Mitchell, gives an answer that may surprise. The strategist who planned the 9/11 attack, Kalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), was captured by American forces and subsequently interrogated. According to an article in The Federalist Mitchell described the response he got when he put the question to Mohammed this way:

Far from trying to draw us in, KSM said that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as we had the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut — when, KSM told Mitchell, the United States ‘turned tail and ran.’

‘Then he looked at me and said, ‘How was I supposed to know that cowboy George Bush would announce he wanted us ‘dead or alive’ and then invade Afghanistan to hunt us down?’’ Mitchell writes. ‘KSM explained that if the United States had treated 9/11 like a law enforcement matter, he would have had time to launch a second wave of attacks.’ He was not able to do so because al-Qaeda was stunned ‘by the ferocity and swiftness of George W. Bush’s response.’

It was Bush's application of enormous military might in Afghanistan that aborted any attempt to hit the U.S. again, but that doesn't mean that the Islamists have given up. Mohammed forecast exactly what we're seeing happen in the U.S. and Europe today:

KSM explained that large-scale attacks such as 9/11 were ‘nice, but not necessary’ and that a series of ‘low-tech attacks could bring down America the same way ‘enough disease-infected fleas can fell an elephant.’ ’ KSM ‘said jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States’ and ‘wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws’ until they were strong enough to rise up and attack us. ‘He said the brothers would relentlessly continue their attacks and the American people would eventually become so tired, so frightened, and so weary of war that they would just want it to end.’ ‘Eventually,’ KSM said, ‘America will expose her neck for us to slaughter.’

The article closes with this thought:

“America may not be in a religious war with him, but he and other True Muslims are in a religious war with America,” KSM said. “He and his brothers will not stop until the entire world lives under Sharia law.”

Never mind that, we're told, compassion requires of us that we bring into the country as many "True Muslims" as we can. If they eventually rise up, like the fellow at Ohio State, or the couple in San Bernadino, or the guy at Fort Hood, or the shooter in Orlando, or any number of other examples here and in Europe, and slaughter our children, well, then, maybe we deserve it for being infidels. Or for being foolish.

The Alt Right Is Not All Right

Denyse O'Leary writing at Mercator Net notes that the media has become fixated during this election season on a group calling itself the alt right (alternative right) and points out an interesting fact about their views. The alt right is comprised of white supremacists and those who practice sundry other bigotries and they've placed some in the liberal media, O'Leary argues, in a bit of a bind.

The difficulty is that those who call themselves alt right rely for their racist rationalizations upon Darwinian assumptions about human evolution. The conundrum for the liberals is figuring out how to criticize the racism without criticizing the Darwinism which undergirds it.

After explaining who the few dozen adherents of the alt right are, and arguing that it's at most a fringe movement, she goes on to explain its connection to Darwinism:

Alt right figure Frank Hilliard, writing at movement journal Counter-Currents, states that, “The Alternative Right Belongs to the Darwinians”:

It’s because, as Darwinians, we think the nation should exist as a gene pool, since we come from a European background, a European gene pool. We think the same argument should apply to other ethnic and racial groups. Thus, we support the Kurds in their demand for a country of their own. We support Israel as a land for the Jews, Japan as a land for the Japanese, Congo for the Congolese, and so on. Each race/ethnic group is like an extended family for the people in it, and this large extended family should have a home of its own.

If that sounds vaguely like different species of animals having different ecological niches, well yes, it’s more or less the same idea.

One of the libels being flung around by the media is that Christians are drawn to the alt right, but this is a witless libel. The ideas of human equality and the imago dei are Christian concepts that preclude any serious Christian from aligning with any supremacist movement, whether white or black. Those concepts form the intellectual springboard for the modern rejection of racism, but, crucially, they're unsupportable given the naturalistic worldview of which Darwinism is one of the chief buttresses. Not only was Darwin himself a white supremacist, but on Darwinian naturalism, there's no moral basis even for saying racism is morally wrong.

Moreover, many Christians are one or another sort of creationist, and creationists are going to view any attitude or behavior that finds its justification in Darwinism with intense suspicion. Thus, O'Leary writes:

Clearly, few American Christians — or middle Americans generally — identify with the alt right. But mainstream media suspect they do. Coming to terms with defeat [in the past election], they will continue to react by lumping creationist Christians who oppose mandatory unisex washrooms with Darwinian racists as an "alt right" menace.

[So] how should we respond to the use of the term “alt right” in a way that implies that all social conservatives (or suspected Trump voters) are racists? We might begin by asking what, exactly, the speaker understands the term to mean. If it is used as the alt right proponents themselves use it, then anyone who is not committed to Darwinian survival of the fittest cannot be alt right. For example, no creationist of any kind could be alt right.

Darwinists have long argued vehemently that it's a perversion of their theory to attach racist implications to it, yet Darwin himself was clearly a racist. He wrote this in the Descent of Man in 1874:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [aborigine] and the gorilla. (p.178)

If the alt right is comprised of people who wish to take Darwin to his logical conclusion to justify their racism, how do his philosophical acolytes in the media criticize them without criticizing Darwin and Darwinism? It's an awkward position they find themselves in to be sure.

A Theory in Crisis

The Spectator, a weekly British political magazine, has published a column in which various contributors list their "best books" of 2016. Novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson was deeply impressed with a book that I also found to be a fascinating read - Michael Denton's Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. Denton is a geneticist who argues in his book that Darwinian mechanisms like natural selection and genetic mutation are wholly inadequate to explain features of living things like the diversity of leaf shapes, the pentadactyl limb, feathers, the emergence of language and much else.

For example, human cognitive capacities like sophisticated mathematical ability seem to have been present in the brains of the earliest humans and yet were dormant for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years until relatively recently. This persistence of an ability that was never used is inexplicable on the Darwinian view that no function can either emerge or persist if it is of no benefit to the species.

Here's what Wilson writes about Denton's book:

Michael Denton’s Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (Discovery Institute Press, £16.80). A sequel to his 1985 book — Evolution: A Theory in Crisis — this takes us up to date with the dazzling developments of life sciences over the past 30 years. Denton is a sceptic about Darwin’s theory of evolution on purely scientific grounds.

It is hard to see how anyone reading his book could not be persuaded. Paleontology provides abundant evidence of evolution within species, but none of one species morphing into another. Denton is fascinatingly clear in his exposition of the science of genetics, and how it destroys the Darwinian position. A truly great book.

Despite its scientific subject matter Denton's book is surprisingly accessible to the intelligent layman and would make an excellent Christmas gift for anyone who is both a reader - admittedly a vanishing breed - and/or scornful of contemporary challenges to the Neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, a type which also seems to be diminishing given the cogency of so much of the current criticism of naturalistic Darwinian explanations in biology.

A Tyrant Has Passed

Young people might be wondering why Miami's Cuban community is jubilant at news of the death of Fidel Castro, the Cuban President for Life. The reason has to do with why there are so many Cubans in Miami in the first place.

Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 after a bloody revolution, and the blood never stopped flowing. Thousands of Cubans were executed, tens of thousands more languished and died in hellish prisons. The island nation which had been a popular resort became under Castro a concentration camp for its citizens who never stopped trying to flee even though for many it meant death in the Gulf of Mexico. Many others made it across the water to Florida where they, their children and grandchildren have made their homes for the last fifty years, separated from family members, many of whom remained behind to be slaughtered by Castro's firing squads.

Despite his horrific oppression of the Cuban people Castro was a hero to the American left, just as was the cold-blooded mass murderer Che Guevera. Even as Castro was torturing and killing those who sought to flee or who opposed his communist policies, he was receiving fawning coverage from our liberal media and celebrities in the U.S.

Liberals pooh-poohed reports of his bloody tyranny and reminded us that, after all, the Cuban people enjoyed high literacy rates and good health care under Fidel's dictatorship, as if that made acceptable in their minds his brutalities and cruelties.

William Doino Jr. writing in First Things quotes Yale historian Carlos Eire who was angered by President Obama's decision a year ago to reestablish diplomatic ties with Cuba:

I am furious, in pain, and deeply offended by those who laud this betrayal of the Cuban people as a great moment in history. My family and native land were destroyed by the brutal Castro regime. In 1959, as an 8-year old, I listened to mobs shout ‘paredon!’ (to the firing squad!) I watched televised executions, and was terrified by the incessant pressure to agree with a bearded dictator’s ideals.

As the months passed, relatives, friends and neighbors began to disappear. Some of them emerged from prison with detailed accounts of the tortures they endured, but many never reappeared, their lives cut short by firing squads.

I also witnessed the government’s seizure of all private property—down to the ring on one’s finger—and the collapse of my country’s economy. I began to feel as if some monstrous force was trying to steal my mind and soul through incessant indoctrination.

Doino goes on to write:

Eire escaped the regime when he was eleven, one of the lucky 14,000 children able to get out through Operation Pedro Pan. Some were joined by their parents later, but many were not. “Although my mother did manage to escape three years later,” writes Eire, “my father remained stuck for the rest of his life. When he died, fourteen years after my departure, the Castro regime prevented me from attending his funeral.”

The basic facts of Fidel Castro’s fifty year reign-of-terror... are these:

As soon as Fidel emerged from the Sierra Maestra Mountains with his band of revolutionaries, having overthrown the corrupt and widely detested General Fulgencio Batista, Castro was treated as a conquering hero. His romantic image as a liberator of the oppressed convinced many reporters, academics, celebrities and even religious to believe he was a genuine social reformer, when he was anything but that.

As Georgie Anne Geyer reveals in her biography, Guerilla Prince: The Untold Story of Fidel Castro, Fidel has always been a deceiver, an egoist and a thug. From his earliest days as a radical university student, Castro had an attraction to violence and totalitarianism (modeling himself after Mussolini), and once his ambitions to take over Cuba came true, he put his beliefs into practice.

The first to fall victim to his violent impulses were his political opponents, who were executed en masse, after show trials, by Nazi-like firing squads. But Castro’s long-time allies also became targets. Huber Matos, Manuel Urrutia and Carlos Franqui—who all worked with Castro to overthrow Batista—were soon demonized, jailed or exiled because they opposed Communism and envisioned an independent Cuba. Castro, who had assured the world in 1959 that he was not a Communist, immediately proved he was exactly that, suddenly announcing he was a Marxist-Leninist and would be till his dying day.

The consequences for Cuba and the world have been profound. Once in power, Castro banned the democratic elections he once promised, expropriated private property, created a one-party Communist state, and ruthlessly suppressed all forms of dissent and opposition. He dismantled the once thriving Catholic Church, crushing its educational system, expelling hundreds of priests, and forcibly indoctrinating baptized believers with atheism and Marxism. It is this fractured and persecuted Church that Pope Francis is now trying to revive, against huge obstacles in a police state.

Having willfully turned the island into a Soviet satellite (and well before America’s ill-advised Bay of Pigs invasion), Castro welcomed the shipment of Soviet nuclear missiles there, provoking a crisis that nearly incinerated the world. He sent his troops to fight—and needlessly to die—for tyrannies abroad, and supported anti-American terrorist and revolutionary movements across the globe. He allowed desperate Cubans to drown at sea, rather than allow them to properly emigrate. And all the while, he lived a life of luxury, even as he bragged about being a champion of Cuba’s poor.

The number of deaths attributable to Castro’s regime is thought to be in the tens of thousands, though some say that is a conservative estimate. The attempt to erase these memories is a crime, and no one who cares about the Cuban people, past or present, should allow a diplomatic accord to succeed in doing so.

Anyone wishing to understand what Cuba was like for anyone Castro saw as an enemy might read Armando Valladares' account of his own experience titled Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag. It's hard to imagine that human beings can be as cruel as were Castro and his henchmen to Valladares and thousands of others.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sent condolences and expressed their sadness that Fidel is dead. I wonder if they'd have done as much for Adolf Hitler.

Readers

The Pew Research Center has some dispiriting news for those concerned about the future of the American republic:

About a quarter of American adults (26%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.

Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high school degree or less are about three times as likely as college graduates (40% vs. 13%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey shows that these less-educated adults are also the least likely to own smartphones or tablets, two devices that have seen a substantial increase in usage for reading e-books since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)

Adults with an annual household income of less than $30,000 are about twice as likely as the most affluent adults to be non-book readers (33% vs. 17%). Hispanic adults are also about twice as likely as whites (40% vs. 23%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months.

Older Americans are a bit more likely than their younger counterparts not to have read a book. Some 29% of adults ages 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 23% of adults under 50. In addition, men are less likely than women to have read a book, as are adults in rural areas compared with those in urban areas.

I know people are busy, but it's disappointing to learn that one in four Americans hasn't had the time or inclination to read at least one book in the past year, especially when one factors in the suspicion that those who report that they have read a book have read something like Fifty Shades of Gray.

In any case, permit me a suggestion. The New Year is just a bit over a month away. One marvelous resolution we could all make would be to read at least six books in the coming year or, even better, to join a monthly book club. The mind is a wonderful gift, and reading and talking about what one has read is a great way to keep it strong and fit.

Thomas Jefferson once said that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free ..., it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."

A healthy nation requires that its citizens be people enthusiastic to learn and committed to the life-long project of cultivating their minds. Books are a great way, perhaps the best way, to accomplish that.

12%

One of the pressing questions bedeviling political observers in the wake of the recent election has been why so many people whose values seem to be antithetical to those of Mr. Trump nevertheless voted for him. Indeed, he received 84% of the evangelical Christian vote while Hillary Clinton received only 12% of that demographic. Why? Perhaps it's largely because Christians have watched their values and liberties wash away like bare topsoil in a rainstorm over the last eight years and they believed a Clinton presidency portended four more years of the same. Donald Trump may not be much of a Christian, he may represent a lot of what evangelicals reject in contemporary culture, but they saw in him the only hope for stanching the erosion.

Another reason so many evangelicals voted for Trump, I think, forms the implicit subtext in an article at The Federalist by Mary Katharine Ham.

Ham points out that when Christian business men and women refuse to participate, as a matter of religious principle, in gay or lesbian weddings they're socially excoriated and legally crushed by courts unsympathetic to religious freedom.

But when a fashion designer declares that she'll refuse as a matter of political principle to sell her clothing to Melania Trump she's hailed as a heroine.

This kind of hypocrisy has frustrated evangelicals for a long time and they didn't believe a Clinton administration would be likely to do anything to change it. Indeed, many were convinced it'd only get worse under a President Clinton.

Here are some excerpts from Ham's essay:

Of the many things the Trump administration in waiting has made cool again, add private businesses refusing service to customers based on moral objections.

Friday, fashion designer Sophie Theallet, who has dressed the current first lady Michelle Obama, offered a preemptive refusal to hypothetically dress the next first lady, Melania Trump, should she ask for some of her clothes— presumably not the ones available at The Gap. In her unsolicited letter, Theallet informed the world that a person who did not ask for any of her clothes would not be getting them.

“As one who celebrates and strives for diversity, individual freedom and respect for all lifestyles, I will not participate in dressing or associating in any way with the next First Lady,” the letter reads. “The rhetoric of racism, sexism, and xenophobia unleashed by her husband’s presidential campaign are incompatible with the shared values we live by.”

“I encourage my fellow designers to do the same,” it goes on.

Of course, among those shared values is the right to live by one's own conscience and religious liberty, but should someone choose to make a floral arrangement for a gay wedding I wonder if Ms Theallet would champion their right not to participate in an event they see as immoral.

In refusing service to Trump, Theallet appealed to “individual freedom” and the idea of her art as an expression of the company’s “artistic and philosophical ideals.” Her announcement was called “noble,” “patriotic,” and “admirable integity.

But these are the same arguments the left and media have dismissed from Baronelle Stutzman, a Washington florist who thinks making custom bouquets for a same-sex marriage doesn’t comport with her personal beliefs. In appealing to the state Supreme Court after a three-year legal battle, Stutzman’s lawyer argued this week “that arranging flowers is artistic expression protected under the First Amendment. Stutzman — a Southern Baptist — would have been more than happy to sell prearranged flowers out of the cooler because that was ‘not custom expression.'”

A judge “questioned just what message is being expressed when Stutzman creates her floral designs.” No doubt no one will wonder whether Theallet’s expression is art and entitled to the protection of individual liberty and conscience against government compulsion.

A pair of New Mexico wedding photographers learned their photography was not deemed artistic expression enough when they lost a state Supreme Court appeal to a ruling compelling them to photograph same-sex wedding ceremonies.

Theallet’s triumphant and unnecessary announcement is also the mirror image of the Memories Pizza saga of 2015. In the spring of 2015, the proprietor of a tiny business seeking no publicity whatsoever, and located in the middle of Indiana, was approached by a member of the press about hypothetically catering the hypothetical wedding of a hypothetical gay couple.

Crystal O’Connor politely declined this nonexistent request while making clear the business has no trouble serving gay customers outside a wedding ceremony: “If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” she told WBND-TV after Indiana passed a religious freedom bill protecting such objections.

O’Connor’s expression of her own philosophical ideals was met with such negative national attention and aggressive backlash that the family-owned pizzeria closed for more than a week.

Ham's article features a number of tweets from Theallet's admirers all praising her for taking such a bold and principled stand. Meanwhile, Christians are facing bankruptcy, loss of their businesses, or enormous fines if they take a stand for what they believe. I wonder how much Theallet's "courageous" posturing is costing her.

Thanksgiving Wishes

I'd like on this Thanksgiving Day to wish all of our readers a wonderful holiday and to express my hope that we'll all take time to reflect upon the significance of the day. Perhaps one way to initiate that meditation is to cite the words of President Ronald Reagan on the Thanksgiving of 1985. Reagan said this:

Good morning, everyone. You know, the Statue of Liberty and this wonderful holiday called Thanksgiving go together naturally because although as Americans we have many things for which to be thankful, none is more important than our liberty. Liberty: that quality of government, that brightness of mind and spirit for which the Pilgrim Fathers braved the seas and Americans for two centuries have laid down their lives.

Today, while religion is suppressed in perhaps one third of the world, we Americans are free to worship the Almighty as we choose. While entire nations must endure the yoke of tyranny, we are free to speak our minds, to enjoy an unfettered and vigorous press, and to make government abide by the limits we deem just. While millions live behind walls, we remain free to travel throughout the land to share this precious day with those we love most deeply – the members of our families.

My fellow Americans, let us keep this Thanksgiving Day sacred. Let us thank God for the bounty and goodness of our nation. And as a measure of our gratitude, let us rededicate ourselves to the preservation of this: the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I think it is true that when we cease to be grateful for the liberties President Reagan mentions we'll soon cease to have them. Liberty is a fragile thing, and there will always be those who wish to limit it or to deprive us of it altogether. Only a people who appreciate their liberty are worthy of it, and only a people who are grateful for it deserve to keep it.

How Thanksgiving Became a National Holiday

Ever since the presidency of George Washington Americans had been celebrating days of thanksgiving, but they had been declared mostly by the states for the states. On September 28th, 1863, a 74 year-old magazine editor named Sarah Hale wrote to President Abraham Lincoln urging him to declare a nation-wide observance.

During his administration President Lincoln had issued many orders similar to this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he had ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving. Hale, however, wanted him to have the "day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival," an observance for which she had campaigned in her magazine, Godey's Lady's Book, for 15 years.

She explained, "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritive fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution." Prior to this, each state scheduled its own Thanksgiving holiday at different times, mainly in New England and other Northern states. President Lincoln responded to Mrs. Hale's request immediately, unlike several of his predecessors, who ignored her petitions altogether.

According to an April 1, 1864, letter from John Nicolay, one of President Lincoln's secretaries, this proclamation was actually written for President Lincoln by Secretary of State William Seward. A year later the manuscript, in Seward's hand, was sold to benefit Union troops. Here's Lincoln's proclamation:

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this Third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the Unites States the Eighty-eighth.

By the President: Abraham Lincoln
William H. Seward,
Secretary of State

In some respects the proclamation reads as if it could have been written today. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Undercutting Defeater?

Scott Adams who draws the Dilbert cartoons said several things on his blog in the wake of the Trump election that I thought were interesting. His main point was that the aspersions being cast on Trump voters by those who voted for Hillary make little sense, which was itself an interesting argument, but not what I want to talk about in this post. What I want to think about here are these sentences:

Humans did not evolve with the capability to understand their reality because it was not important to survival. Any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.

This is a revealing assertion for two reasons. It's a view widely held by Darwinian thinkers and, if it's true, it casts grave doubt on the rationality of belief in evolution. It actually undercuts that belief.

If Adams is correct then the vast majority of our beliefs about reality could be, for all we know, illusions which have become fixed in the human population because they promote the survival of the species. If this is so then we really can't trust any of them, especially our metaphysical beliefs, to be true. And, since our belief in evolution is one such belief, we have no grounds for believing it itself is true.

In other words, the belief that nature selects traits or beliefs that promote survival rather than truth undercuts belief in natural selection. It could well be just another of Adams' illusions.

I don't want to make too much of this because Adams, though a very bright guy, is a cartoonist and not a scientist or philosopher of science, so he doesn't speak with any special authority on matters in these fields. Even so, to the extent his words reflect a common assumption about Darwinism, they should give Darwinians pause.

Who Said This?

Of the following American presidents or presidential candidates - A. Donald Trump, B. Hillary Clinton, C. Barack Obama, D. George W. Bush, or E. Bill Clinton - which one said this:

All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.

That's why our administration [will move] aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.

In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace ....

We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

If you answered E. Bill Clinton give yourself a star. He delivered these words in his 1995 State of the Union Address.

If you thought that surely it must have been Donald Trump don't feel bad, it could've been, but the point is that Trump's views on illegal immigration today are pretty much where the Democratic party was twenty years ago. In fact, Bill Clinton got a standing ovation by his fellow Democrats when he spoke those words.

So why does Trump get booed and Clinton get cheered when both men hold very similar views on illegal immigration? Is it that people think Trump is serious about stopping it but Bill Clinton wasn't? Or is it that some people either simply don't recognize their inconsistency or don't care about being consistent?

Here's video of the relevant portion of President Clinton's speech:

Moral Dissonance

A 25 year-old British woman named Zara-Jayne Moisey was arrested in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on charges that may astonish you. What happened was this: Miss Moisey was staying in a hotel in Dubai where she was raped by two British men. She reported the rape to the authorities and they promptly arrested her for having had extra-marital sexual relations which is a crime in UAE. Here's an excerpt from the story in The Mirror

After posting an online appeal for help, Zara's mum Sue Barber wrote: “Please help my daughter. She was raped while on holiday. She reported this to the police and now she is being held on the grounds of sexual activity outside marriage. We are not a rich family and cannot afford to pay for the defence she so desperately needs. I am going out of my mind with worry.”

Radha Stirling, founder and director of Detained in Dubai, said the nation's treatment of rape victims is "tremendously disturbing". She said: "The UAE has a long history of penalising rape victims. It is still not safe for victims to report these crimes to the police without the risk of suffering a double punishment. Police regularly fail to differentiate between consensual intercourse and violent rape. Victims go to them expecting justice, and end up being prosecuted. They not only invalidate their victimisation, they actually punish them for it."

The Foreign Commonwealth Office has confirmed it is "supporting a British woman" and will "remain in contact with her family."

Her parents are of course frantic and have been able to visit their daughter who has been released on bail, but they need money to finance her legal fees. The two accused rapists are also out on bail. You can read about it at the link.

The question I'd like to ask in relation to this is, why do we think it's wrong to imprison this woman for being raped? Is it not because we believe that even though Arab culture is in many ways different from our own, justice is a universal moral imperative and injustice, in any culture or society, is wrong? Yet many Americans have accepted the idea that we have no right to judge what other cultures do, or that we have no right to say that our ways of doing things are better than other ways of doing things.

If this is one's conviction, if all cultures and cultural practices are "valid" within that culture and we have no right to criticize them, then the person who believes that has disqualified him or herself from saying that even an injustice such as we see in the Moisey case is wrong. If someone nonetheless believes that it is indeed wrong to imprison a rape victim then their moral sentiments are at war with their cultural or sociological convictions, and they can't rationally continue to hold these two contradictory sets of beliefs.

Unfortunately, a lot of people will resolve the tension in circumstances like these by suppressing their moral intuition that justice is an imperative in every cultural setting. Their commitment to relativism and multiculturalism prohibits them from giving voice to what deep down they truly know: It's wrong to do what's being done to Zara-Jayne Moisey whether it's done to her in Beijing, London, Zimbabwe, New York, or Dubai.

Maybe a better way to relieve the dissonance in situations like this is to conclude that one's commitment to relativism and multiculturalism, though well-intentioned, is simply wrong.

Post-Truth America

Denise McAllister at The Federalist puts her finger on one of the tragedies of our post modern age - the loss of belief in objective truth.

The present age, she points out, has come to be labelled the post-truth era and to the extent the designation is accurate it has been calamitous in numerous ways.

McAllister writes:

Oxford Dictionaries has picked “post-truth” as its word of the year, citing that “a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse” was the driving force that increased the word’s use by 2,000 percent.

It defines post-truth as “relating or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This word, publishers say, has “become ‘overwhelmingly’ associated with politics.”

.... What I find particularly fascinating regarding Oxford Dictionaries’ announcement is the reaction from liberals. Suddenly, people who hold to philosophies that actually undermine and reject objective truth are deeply concerned about emotions dictating facts.

This last sentence is important. Several generations of students have been taught by liberal post modern professors to be skeptical of any and all truth claims. Now, with Trump's ascendancy and the evidence that his lies didn't mean much to his supporters, some of these same people who were so eager to abandon the notion of objective truth in their academic work are now wringing their hands over the apparent fact that truth no longer matters to a large segment of our population.

McAllister drives home the irony of this crucial epistemological development:

I’d like to cut through the fog and focus on a foundational issue that is driving this chaos.

I have to ask [all those] fretting about fake news and post-truth in this election season: Where have you been all these years as America has abandoned truth for relativism especially in higher learning (and now in all levels of education)? Haven’t you been paying attention as we have put emotion over facts in just about every sphere of society? Our nation has been abandoning objective truth for more than a century! What did you think would result?

This sudden outcry against post-truth reminds me of the vapors so many had when they heard the [obscene Trump] tape. Suddenly, people who had been telling us there’s no right and wrong—no objective values or morality by which we can judge others—switched gears and became Puritans in a flash. This is the phenomenon I find truly amazing, and it’s just more evidence of the subjectivism that has been consuming our country for decades like cancer, eating away every part of civil society.

My response to those to those now worried about this “post-truth society” is “You reap what you sow.” This abandonment of objective facts for emotion is the inevitable result of our culture’s unrelenting commitment to moral relativism. This is the chaos that comes as a result. Look at it, soak it in, and maybe you’ll learn something.

Post-truth is not the fault of social media or of current politics. These are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is an American society that has closed its mind to objective truth and is now being forced to live with the conflict and chaos that ensues.

Relativism, subjectivism, and materialism are all bankrupt philosophies. Yet these are what drive our culture and politics. When objective truth and values are abandoned, there are no unifying principles of truth or morality that bind together the vast number of disparate individuals and groups that inhabit our nation.

Reason, objective morality, and principles of equal justice, truth, love, freedom for the individual, and limited government (to name a few)—these are objective realities. But we turned our backs on objective truth and embraced subjectivism, pluralism, and relativism, hiding them under the cloak of tolerance. We abandoned our principles. Now all we have is the many, with nothing to make us “one.” America’s greatness stems from its commitment to e pluribus unum—out of the many, one. Out of the many states, one nation. Out of the many races, religions, and backgrounds, one people. To achieve that—to bind together all these subjective entities into a functioning and civil whole—we need objective principles to which we are all committed.

Of course, our abandonment of objective truth has a cause - secularism. There can only be objective values if those values are rooted in the transcendent. Eliminate all reference to transcendence and society's left with nothing in which to anchor its moral, political and aesthetic values. They simply float like untethered balloons drifting along on the breezes of social fashion.

McAllister goes on:

The fact is when everyone defines truth for himself, there are no ties that bind. If I decide something is true for me, based on how I feel, then it is true. This is all I have if I have rejected objective truth. All I have are my subjective experience, feelings, and natural impulses. These become truth for me, just as your subjective feelings become truth for each of you. In the end, we are ruled, not by a common commitment to truths to which we all are bound or a commitment to exercise reason as we pursue truth, but by our own individual feelings.

The result is chaos and conflict, because there is no real common ground. For there to be common ground, you would have to be committed to something objective, a truth outside of yourself that is the same for everyone. This conflict can’t be avoided if society rejects objective truth and reason.

What is truly frightening is that human beings can’t remain in a state of chaos, so they look to a savior for peace, unity, and security. In a world that has abandoned a common commitment to objective truth, the only savior, the only path to unity, is an individual or group of individuals with enough power to control everyone else. The motivation of their will to power, just as with all who abandon truth, is to satisfy their own feelings and feed their own natural appetites. Principles and truth play no role. “The object of power is power,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.”

“Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao [objective truths and values],” C. S. Lewis wrote in “The Abolition of Man,” “or else we are mere nature [creatures ruled by emotions and natural impulses] to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses.”

There's much else of value in McAllister's essay, and I urge you to read it all. She concludes with this thought:

If we truly want to make America great again, if we really want peace and prosperity, we must return to the foundational principles and truths that made our nation great in the first place. If we want unity—e pluribus unum—we have to abandon subjectivism and once again embrace objective truth and morality. If we don’t, America will be transformed into a brave new world where truth is defined by the powerful.

Her words are, if you'll pardon the pun, objectively true, and they're certainly worth reflecting upon.

Meaningful Gift-Giving

We've spoken on this site before about the wonderful work that the Preemptive Love Coalition is doing with refugees from ISIS in Iraq. PLC is a marvelous relief agency which, in addition to the heart surgeries and other medical care it provides for Iraqi children, seeks to help refugees get on their feet and become self-sufficient.

This year they've come out with a modest catalog of gifts crafted by refugees which are available for purchase and which would make Christmas giving extra-meaningful this year.

Their crafts may seem a little pricey, but keep in mind that what you spend on the gift is actually a contribution to the well-being of the men, women and children who make them.

You can view the catalog here, but if you scroll down on the catalog page you can view an expanded, downloadable catalog.

PLC makes this promise:

Empowerment starts with listening. Displaced families know better than we do what they need to rebuild their lives. We seek to empower them in ways that honor their vision for the future and complement the skills they already possess.

We also believe in honoring your generosity, as you share your heart for remaking the world with us. That’s why we make every effort to use your gift for the purpose or item you indicate. If we receive additional donations beyond what’s needed for a specific area, we will use the excess amount to empower refugees where needed most.

I'm sure that the recipient of one of these gifts, no matter how simple, would find their heart warmed to have it explained to them where it has come from, who made it, and why you chose to give it to them on Christmas.