Why Deny That Consciousness Exists?

Philosophical materialism is the view that everything that exists is reducible to material stuff. Energy, for example, is reducible to matter, and no independent immaterial substances like minds or souls exist, at least not in this universe.

Most materialists are such because they also embrace atheism (or philosophical naturalism) - the view, essentially, that nature is all there is - and they believe that atheism is most compatible with materialism.

One very perplexing difficulty with materialism, however, is posed by human consciousness. To simplify, when we have the experience of seeing the color red it's hard to explain how this phenomenon can be reduced to the material atoms and nerve fibers in the brain. There's nothing about atoms that can give rise to a sensation.

Sensations, or what's called phenomenal experience, seem to be both immaterial and inexplicable in terms of the material processes of the brain.

As Dutch philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup writes:

Phenomenal consciousness is seen as one of the top unsolved problems in science. Nothing we can — or, arguably, even could — observe about the arrangement of atoms constituting the brain allows us to deduce what it feels like to smell an orange, fall in love, or have a belly ache.

There's a vast gap between what we know about matter and what we experience when we see red, or feel pain or taste sugar. So, how does a materialist handle the difficulty? Kastrup explains:

Remarkably, the intractability of the problem has led some to even claim that consciousness doesn’t exist at all: Daniel Dennett and his followers famously argue that it is an illusion, whereas neuroscientist Michael Graziano proclaims that “consciousness doesn’t happen. It is a mistaken construct.” Really?

The denial of phenomenal consciousness is called — depending on its particular formulation — ‘eliminativism’ or ‘illusionism.’

Kastrup struggles to understand why someone would deny that they're really conscious:

[W]hat kind of conscious inner dialogue do these people engage in so as to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue? Short of assuming that they are insane, fantastically stupid or dishonest — none of which is plausible — we have an authentic and rather baffling mystery in our hands.

So, the materialist seeks to explain conscious experiences like seeing color, hearing music, smelling perfume, feeling pain, etc. either by denying that consciousness exists (eliminativism) or declaring them to be illusions (illusionism).

Kastrup examines the arguments for these ideas in his article to which the interested reader is referred, but I think there's at least a partial answer to Kastrup's "baffling mystery" that we can mention here.

Perhaps otherwise sensible people deny that they're conscious for the same reason that some embrace the strange idea of a multiverse. If we really do have a conscious mind that's not reducible to the material brain or if this exquisitely fine-tuned universe in which we live is the only one which exists, then the likelihood that materialism is wrong increases dramatically.

And if materialism turns out to be wrong then a major metaphysical prop holding up atheistic naturalism collapses. That's an outcome that must be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of denying that human beings are actually conscious.

How Fish Find Their Way Home

Ever wonder how spawning fish can return to the precise stream from which they emigrated years before? It's an astonishing feat made possible by an extraordinarily complex olfactory system that allows the fish to detect stream-specific chemicals in the water.

Somehow, pelagic species of fish like the sockeye salmon detect these chemicals in the ocean and follow them back to the stream in which they hatched.

This video uses computer animation to explain a little bit about the microscopic olfactory system that enables salmon to accomplish their amazing journey.

Of course, salmon aren't the only creatures with such a highly sophisticated sense of smell. Many insects are equally as gifted.

Whether in fish or in insects there are really just two live options for explaining how such systems arose: Either they're the product of thousands (millions?) of lucky and highly improbable genetic mutations over eons of time, or these receptor systems and neuronal circuits were somehow intentionally engineered.

Of course, we have no evidence that blind, purposeless mechanistic processes can produce systems like this by chance, but we do have lots of evidence right in front of us (our computers) and all around us (the wiring in our houses) that intelligent agents can do it.

As the great skeptic David Hume argued, we should always base our beliefs on our experience. If we have a uniform experience of a phenomenon occurring through natural mechanisms then we should be extremely reluctant to attribute the occurrence of such a phenomenon to non-natural processes.

Hume was arguing here against belief in miracles, but if his principle is sound it surely has broader application. We have a uniform experience of systems and circuits similar to those illustrated in this video being the work of minds but no indubitable, non-question-begging experience of such contrivances occurring through undirected processes.

Thus, an intelligent agent, an electrical engineer of sorts, would seem to be the most probable and thus the most reasonable explanation for the salmon's wonderful olfactory capacities.

For the biologically-minded there's more on the research into the salmon's abilities here.

Homologous Structures and Darwinian Evolution

One of the classic arguments on behalf of the theory that various taxa have evolved one from another is what biologists call homologous structures. Homologous structures are structures which are similar, have a similar origin in the embryo but which serve different functions in different animals. A good example is the pectoral fin of a fish, the foreleg of a horse, the arm of a human and the wing of a bird.

In each of these cases the skeletal structure is almost identical, but the appearance and function of the structure is quite different in each organism. This is assumed to be a strong evidence that these structures have evolved either from each other or from a common ancestor.

There are, however, problems with this idea.

This clever 8 minute video explains what homology is and why using homology as evidence for common ancestry is actually an instance of circular reasoning. It also does a good job of explaining why, despite its persistence in many high school and college textbooks, biologists are giving up on homologous structures as an argument for Darwinian evolution.

Thanks to Evolution News for putting us on to the video.

A Meditation on Martin Luther King's Birthday

Like many consequential leaders, Martin Luther King was complex. He was a man of enormous courage, almost preternatural vision and marvelous eloquence, but also vulnerable to some of the same failings that have beset many of the great men in our culture.

On the day we celebrate his birthday, however, we'd do well to focus on his virtues. King was a man resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America.

His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's a great sadness that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his hope for racial harmony has not, or rather not completely.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that today the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters, at least in those precincts of our society still in thrall to progressive identity politics.

For example, students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. The Obama Justice Department refused to prosecute blacks who denied others their civil rights, and any criticism of our previous president was interpreted by some as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than reasoned opposition to his policies.

Unfortunately, it may not be a stretch to say that people seem to be judged by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character as much today as at any time in our national history.

Nor do I think King would've been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it somehow stood apart from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of the American story. The civil rights movement was, after all, not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the American people realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded.

It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God who created us all in His image.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely upheld these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good, indeed, to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and, in any case, to realize that racism is a sin to which all races are prone and is not exclusive to the majority race.

Let's resolve to judge each other on the content of our character and our minds, and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll keep throwing up barriers between groups of people and never achieve the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

There is perhaps no better way to honor Doctor King today than to take the time to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail and to watch his "I Have a Dream" speech (below) and then to incorporate his words into our own lives as Americans.

Philip Goff's Panpsychism

Philosopher Philip Goff has gained some notice as an advocate of a view of reality called panpsychism, the theory that everything in the universe is comprised of particles which have rudimentary consciousness. When those particles arrange themselves in particular ways, such as in a brain, the thing which they comprise has conscious experience to a greater or lesser degree.

Goff talks about this idea in an interview with Gareth Cook published in Scientific American he discusses what this means.

Here are some excerpts:

GC: Can you explain, in simple terms, what you mean by panpsychism?

PG: In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it.

This doesn’t mean that literally everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality — perhaps electrons and quarks — have incredibly simple forms of experience. And the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.

It might be important to clarify what I mean by “consciousness,” as that word is actually quite ambiguous. Some people use it to mean something quite sophisticated, such as self-awareness or the capacity to reflect on one’s own existence. This is something we might be reluctant to ascribe to many nonhuman animals, never mind fundamental particles. But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.

Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe.

GC: You write that you come to this idea as a way of solving a problem in the way consciousness is studied. What, in your mind, is the problem?

PG: Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.

GC: How does panpsychism allow you to approach the problem differently?

PG: The starting point of the panpsychist is that physical science doesn’t actually tell us what matter is. That sounds like a bizarre claim at first; you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all kinds of incredible things about the nature of space, time and matter. But what philosophers of science have realized is that physical science, for all its richness, is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter, what it does.

Physics tells us, for example, that matter has mass and charge. These properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself.

What this offers us is a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, of marrying what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about matter from the outside.

There's much more from the interview at the link.

As crazy as his theory may sound, he might be onto something, but I think he nevertheless places himself in unnecessary metaphysical handcuffs.

Goff is a naturalist. His ontology doesn't allow for anything "supernatural" in or beyond the universe.

This is an unfortunate restriction, in my opinion, because his theory raises several questions which would seem to be unanswerable in a naturalistic framework. For example, where does consciousness in the universe come from? How did it emerge out of the Big Bang? Is the universe as a whole a conscious entity? If so, is not panpsychism really just pantheism?

If, on the other hand, the universe and every particle in it is more like an idea in the mind of God, as the philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) believed, then there would potentially be a unified answer to the above questions.

The consciousness in, or of, the universe would be the product of a conscious God. Each subatomic particle might then be viewed as something like a pixel of mind or consciousness which make up our reality somewhat like the pixels on a computer screen make up various images.

In other words, Goff's panpsychism may give us an interesting glimpse of reality, but his naturalism seems to place an unnecessary constraint on its fruitfulness.

Defending Sanders

I'm not a fan of Bernie Sanders. Indeed, I'm quite sure that Mr. Sanders, a Marxist socialist of the sort whose ideology has wrecked Venezuela and numerous other nations where it has been implemented, would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States were he to be elected president.

Yet I feel compelled in the name of fair play, reason and simple common sense to come to his defense in the contretemps over his alleged "sexism." His rival in the race for the Democratic nomination, Elizabeth Warren, has accused Mr. Sanders of the sin of sexual bigotry on the basis of an alleged remark he made to her in a private conversation two years ago.

Ms. Warren's surrogates are claiming that Mr. Sanders opined to Ms. Warren, whose ideology is much the same as Mr. Sanders' and which would have much the same baneful effects were she to become president, that "a woman could not be elected president in the United States."

When Ms. Warren's supporters alleged earlier this week that Mr. Sanders was a shocking bigot the progressive media went into a tizzy, wondering if the old socialist war horse really was as awful a human being as the allegation made him sound. It's hard to believe that these folks in the media often esteem themselves the intellectual elite of our society because even if Senator Sanders had actually made this remark - he denies having done so - it is on the face of it, perfectly innocuous.

There's a vast difference, as anyone floating about in the intellectual cream of society should know, between saying that a woman could not be elected president, and saying that a womanshould not be elected president. The former is a purely sociological observation, the latter is a statement that would indeed reflect a bias against women on the part of the one who makes it.

If what Mr. Sanders said, assuming he said it at all, is that a woman could not be elected president and meant it in the same sense that someone back in the fifties might've asserted that an African-American, or a gay, or a bachelor, or a Catholic could not be elected president, it suggests a prejudice on the part of the electorate, perhaps, but not on the part of the person making the observation.

For Warren's supporters to seek to make hay over what appears to be a manifestly innocent claim is, if not merely stupid, then really quite nefarious. It's dishonest and unfair to Mr. Sanders, but, then, after the way he was treated by the Democratic party in 2016 he's probably used to being unfairly treated by his Democratic colleagues.

Ethics Without God

A commenter at Uncommon Descent, in defense of the view that morality has no objective grounding since it's rooted in our evolutionary development, delivers himself of this head-scratcher:

Since the moral fabric is man-made, all we are doing is seeing it change, as it has done over the centuries. Sometimes history shows that the change has been for the good, and sometimes for the bad. But since civilization is thriving, it is reasonable to conclude that we have had more wins than losses.

What's puzzling about this is that if morality is man-made then what's the standard by which we can tell whether any change is good or bad? Doesn't this comment tacitly assume that there's an objective reference point, a moral horizon, as it were, by which we can tell whether we're flying upside down or right side up?

On evolutionary terms, of course, there is no objective referent. About that the commenter is correct. If human beings are the product of an unguided evolutionary process then morality is all man-made and therefore purely subjective.

If it's claimed that civilizational thriving is a measure of whether practices are good or bad we might ask whether the Aztecs and other civilizations which presumably thrived for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years after they introduced human and child sacrifice were doing something good.

The post at the link cites Lewis Vaughn's Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues which provides an excellent explanation of the differences between relativism, which Vaughn avers can be subjective or cultural, and emotivism. Some might want to quibble with his terminology, but it's very helpful nonetheless:

Subjective relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one approves of it. A person’s approval makes the action right. This doctrine (as well as cultural relativism) is in stark contrast to moral objectivism, the view that some moral principles are valid for everyone.

Subjective relativism, though, has some troubling implications. It implies that each person is morally infallible and that individuals can never have a genuine moral disagreement.

Cultural relativism is the view that an action is morally right if one’s culture approves of it. The argument for this doctrine is based on the diversity of moral judgments among cultures: because people’s judgments about right and wrong differ from culture to culture, right and wrong must be relative to culture, and there are no objective moral principles.

This argument is defective, however, because the diversity of moral views does not imply that morality is relative to cultures. In addition, the alleged diversity of basic moral standards among cultures may be only apparent, not real.

Societies whose moral judgments conflict may be differing not over moral principles but over non-moral facts.

Some think that tolerance is entailed by cultural relativism. But there is no necessary connection between tolerance and the doctrine. Indeed, the cultural relativist cannot consistently advocate tolerance while maintaining his relativist standpoint. To advocate tolerance is to advocate an objective moral value. But if tolerance is an objective moral value, then cultural relativism must be false, because it says that there are no objective moral values.

Like subjective relativism, cultural relativism has some disturbing consequences. It implies that cultures are morally infallible, that social reformers can never be morally right, that moral disagreements between individuals in the same culture amount to arguments over whether they disagree with their culture, that other cultures cannot be legitimately criticized, and that moral progress is impossible.

Emotivism is the view that moral utterances are neither true nor false but are expressions of emotions or attitudes. It leads to the conclusion that people can disagree only in attitude, not in beliefs. People cannot disagree over the moral facts, because there are no moral facts. Emotivism also implies that presenting reasons in support of a moral utterance is a matter of offering non-moral facts that can influence someone’s attitude.

It seems that any non-moral facts will do, as long as they affect attitudes. Perhaps the most far-reaching implication of emotivism is that nothing is actually good or bad. There simply are no properties of goodness and badness. There is only the expression of favorable or unfavorable emotions or attitudes toward something.

I'd probably want to say that all three of these are subsumed under the heading of subjectivism, i.e. the view that moral judgments are based on individual preferences and feelings and that cultural relativism is simply subjectivism writ large. Even so, the important point is that any moral assertion not based on an objective foundation is purely illusory. It's just a rhetorical vehicle for expressing one's individual tastes and biases and has no binding force on anyone else.

Moreover, there can only be an objective moral foundation if there is a moral authority which transcends human fallibility and weakness. In other words, unless there is a God there can be no objective moral values or obligations on anyone.

This is why moral claims made by non-theists don't make sense. They wish to deny the existence of God and yet implicitly hold views about morality that can only be true if God does exist. This video makes the point in an easy to follow manner:

A Physicist Talks ID

There's an interesting nine minute video of physicist Brian Miller being interviewed by a Polish think tank called En Arche in which Miller answers some questions about Intelligent Design and why he thinks what we know about science points strongly toward an intelligent engineer of life and the universe.

Miller focuses primarily on two phenomena, genetic mutation in living things and the origin of the first living cell, and gives succinct reasons for being skeptical both that mutations can produce large-scale changes in organisms and that a functioning, reproducing cell could've arisen from non-living chemicals at some time in the ancient past. Both phenomena, he implies, defy just about everything we know about science.

About the the possibility that genetic mutations, coupled with natural selection, could've produced large-scale changes in the architecture of an organism, he says this:

All mutations which have been observed which are non-harmful only allow for small-scale change while all mutations which could potentially change the architecture [of an organism] have been shown to be harmful.

Miller also explains in the video why the accumulation of small genetic changes cannot produce large changes in the phenotype of an organism.

It might be mentioned parenthetically that Michael Behe's recent book Darwin Devolves makes a compelling case for the hypothesis that most phenotypical changes (changes in the physical appearance of an organism) can be attributed to the loss of function in genes that already exist, not to the evolution of new genes.

As for the actual origin of living cells Miller says this:

Nothing in nature will ever simultaneously go to both low entropy and high energy at the same time. It’s a physical impossibility. Yet life had to do that. Life had to take simple chemicals and go to a state of high energy and of low entropy. That’s a physical impossibility.

Entropy is a measure of the level of disorder in a system. A low entropy system is one that is highly ordered or organized. What Miller is saying is that in nature high energy systems such as a functioning cell don't simultaneously become highly organized all by themselves, but that's what a living cell would've had to achieve if it was produced with no intelligent input or guidance.

Despite appearances the video is in English:

Thanks to Evolution News for the link.

The Strange Concept of Infinity

The following is excerpted from the book Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng. In this very interesting excerpt Cheng, who is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield, U.K., and is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explains why infinity is not a number in the ordinary sense and why we have to be careful in how we talk about it.

The passage begins with Cheng asking us to think about what we mean when we talk about infinity:

Mathematics is all about using logic to understand things, and we’ll find that if we’re not careful about exactly what we mean by “infinity,” then logic will take us to some very strange places that we didn’t intend to go....In the previous chapter I listed some beginning ideas about infinity.

Infinity goes on forever.

Does this mean infinity is a type of time, or space? A length?

Infinity is bigger than the biggest number.

Infinity is bigger than anything we can think of.

Now infinity seems to be a type of size. Or is it something more abstract: a number, which we can then use to measure time, space, length, size, and indeed anything we want? Our next thoughts seem to treat infinity as if it is in fact a number.

But if we treat infinity like a normal number we get contradictions:

If you add one to infinity it’s still infinity. This is saying

∞ + 1 = ∞

which might seem like a very basic principle about infinity. If infinity is the biggest thing there is, then adding one can’t make it any bigger. Or can it? What if we then subtract infinity from both sides? If we use some familiar rules of cancellation, this will just get rid of the infinity on each side, leaving

1 = 0

which is a disaster. Something has evidently gone wrong. The next thought makes more things go wrong:

If you add infinity to infinity it’s still infinity. This seems to be saying

∞ + ∞ = ∞

that is,

2∞ = ∞

and now if we divide both sides by infinity this might look like we can just cancel out the infinity on each side, leaving

2 = 1

which is another disaster. Maybe you can now guess that something terrible will happen if we think too hard about the last idea:

If you multiply infinity by infinity it’s still infinity. If we write this out we get

∞ x ∞ = ∞

and if we divide both sides by infinity, canceling out one infinity on each side, we get

∞ = 1

which is possibly the worst, most wrong outcome of them all. Infinity is supposed to be the biggest thing there is; it is definitely not supposed to be equal to something as small as 1.

What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be.

You can read more of Cheng's thoughts on infinity here.

Sometimes scientists trying to avoid the fine-tuning problem or an initial origin event of the cosmos say things like there's an infinite number of universes in the multiverse or that the cosmos is infinitely old. Cheng shows that we have to be very careful about such uses of the word.

In fact, one argument against the universe being infinitely old is that if it is infinitely old then there has been an infinite number of moments of time. But if so, then there was no first moment, because if time is infinite in the past whichever moment one designates as "first" will always have been preceded by an earlier moment, and, if there was no first moment there could have been no second, or third moment, etc. The consequence of this is that if there were no first, second, third etc. moments then we could never have arrived at the present moment. But, of course, we have arrived at the present moment, which means that the universe must not be infinitely old. It must have had a beginning, a first moment.

This, then, provokes the question, "If the universe had a beginning, what caused it?" Whatever the cause, it must have been outside of space, outside of time (because these are components of the universe), very powerful and very intelligent.

In other words, the cause must have been something like God.

Five Messes Mr. Obama Left Us

Young people tend to think that Barack Obama was a great president, maybe the greatest in American history, but this judgment is apparently based more on subjective reasons - his race and personal eloquence and charisma, etc. - than on objective evidence.

If one sets aside one's ideological and personal sympathies and looks objectively at the record of the Obama administration, as PJ Media's Matt Margolis does with just the administration's foreign policy, a quite different picture emerges.

Margolis discusses five foreign policy messes that Obama either caused or exacerbated and left for his successor to clean up. Here are the five with a summary of Margolis' comments about them and a couple of parenthetical comments from me:

1. Appeasement of Russia: Obama’s version of improving relations with Russia enabled annexation of Crimea, increased presence in the Middle East and propping up both the Assad regime in Syria and the Iranian mullahs, amongst other things.

Not even our own country’s national security was safe from Obama’s capitulation to Russia.The Obama administration bizarrely approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s Uranium mining capability to Russia, and utterly ignored Russian attempts to interfere with the U.S. election in 2016.

In fact, Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice gave a “stand-down” order in response to Russian cyberattacks in the summer of 2016.

2. Backing down from his Syrian Red Line: In August 2012, Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons by the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria would cross his “red line.” Almost exactly a year later, more than 1,400 Syrian people were killed by the regime with sarin gas. The red line was crossed, and Obama backtracked, playing down his “red line” comment, and trying to pass it off as not really his own red line, but the international community’s.

While Obama failed to enforce his line and hold the regime accountable, President Trump did not. When a major chemical attack occurred on his watch, Trump responded. Had Obama followed through on his red line, it’s likely that thousands of lives would have been saved.

Obama didn’t want to face the music with Syria, because he was hoping to reset relations with Russia — which was supporting the Assad regime.

3. Allowing the rise of ISIS: To say Barack Obama dropped the ball by failing to address the rise of ISIS is an understatement. Despite being warned in his daily intelligence briefings, he was quick to dismiss ISIS as a “jayvee team” in order to perpetuate the myth that he had contained the terrorist threat in the Middle East. (He was also cautioned that withdrawing our troops from Iraq was leaving a vacuum that bad guys like ISIS would quickly fill, which they did. RLC)

Obama’s misjudgment resulted in ISIS expanding its territory, taking control over large portions of Iraq, Syria and Libya. ISIS still remains a threat, but instead of expanding, they've been hit hard and lost territory and, thanks to a drastic change in strategy under President Trump, we've seen “100 percent” defeat of the ISIS caliphate in just two years.

4. War in Libya: President Obama decided to start an illegal war with Libya. They hadn’t attacked us or threatened us, but nevertheless, Obama, with the approval of Congress, sent troops to take part in what was a civil war.

(Margolis is being a bit unfair here. The Gaddafi regime was about to commit genocidal war against its domestic opponents which is why Obama sent troops and air power against him. That was a mistake, however, since other avenues were available to Obama short of military attack. His administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton simply wanted to get rid of Gaddafi so they were reluctant to pursue policies which allowed him to remain in power. RLC)

Libyan Muammar Gaddafi was by no means a good guy, but he voluntarily got rid of all of his weapons of mass destruction in December 2003 in response to the war in Iraq, and he was essentially contained. His death in that conflict resulted in the country’s destabilization and enabled the growth of ISIS in the region.

Obama’s Libya policy was a total quagmire, and even Obama described Libya as the "worst mistake" of his presidency for his failure to plan for a post-Gaddafi Libya.

5. The Iran nuclear deal: To be sure, the United States and Iran haven’t been on good terms for over forty years. That said, Obama’s appeasement of Iran, a terror state determined to destroy Israel and the West, made the situation much worse. President Obama claimed his nuclear deal with Iran would make America safer, but it was in fact a massive bribe in which the U.S. gave Iran billions of dollars of frozen assets in return for empty promises that did little to slow Iran's development of ballistic missiles and their nuclear program.

The deal was so bad that Obama didn’t even attempt to get Senate ratification for it. Multiple violations of the deal were ignored, Iran was never held accountable for those violations, and the money kept flowing. Obama was so desperate to achieve the deal that not even an attempted bomb plot on American soil earned a reprisal from the Obama administration. Violations continued under Trump, who ultimately got us out of the deal and restored sanctions.

These are only President Obama's foreign policy missteps. His domestic and economic measures only managed to make the picture of his tenure in office look bleaker.

It's Trump's Fault?!

Over the last couple of days we've been treated to one of the most ludicrous arguments ever advanced in the history of American politics. In the wake of the drone strike on Iranian terrorist leader Qasam Soleimani, recall, the Iranians launched a missile barrage against American targets in Iraq. The attack was deliberately intended to harm no one, but the Iranians were prepared for an American response nonetheless.

When a Ukrainian airliner with 176 people aboard took off from Tehran airport a couple of hours later, Iranian anti-aircraft batteries evidently mistook it for an American cruise missile or bomber and shot it down. At least this is where the evidence so far seems to point. All 176 passengers and crew were killed.

It was a tragic error, but in the hours and days since that disaster President Trump's critics (see here and here) have advanced the thesis that it is he who is responsible for the shootdown, or that he at least bears partial responsibility for the deaths of those people. This is so risible an allegation that one wonders how it is that anyone can make it and keep a straight face.

It's Trump's fault, his detractors claim, because by killing Soleimani he initiated an exchange with Iran that led to heightened tensions and the hair-trigger response of a poorly prepared Iranian missile crew.

There are at least three problems with this:

1. The claim that Mr. Trump started hostilities completely ignores the reason why Soleimani was targeted in the first place. It ignores the fact that intelligence revealed that he was planning attacks on Americans in Iraq and Syria. It ignores the fact that six hundred servicemen were killed and thousands of others were maimed in the aftermath of the Iraq war by roadside bombs supplied by Soleimani for precisely that purpose. It ignores the recent attack on our embassy in Iraq and ignores the fact that Soleimani was in Iraq illegally.

It ignores the fact that last month, a U.S. defense contractor was killed and others were wounded in an Iran-linked rocket attack in northern Iraq. In response, the U.S. military carried out “precision defensive strikes” in Iraq and Syria, on sites housing Kataeb Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. The strikes killed 25 fighters.

Days later, hundreds of protesters, including members of Iranian-backed militias, stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad—one of the most heavily fortified U.S. diplomatic missions in the world. The attack raised the specter of the 2012 Benghazi attack in which four Americans died.

2. The responsibility for the deaths of those airline passengers and crew rests solely with the Iranian military. They made the decision to fire the rocket without confirming the identity of the airplane. President Trump had nothing to do with it.

3. The critics' are making an argument the logic of which is of this sort: A thug threatens to shoot a pedestrian on a city street. A policeman in defense of the pedestrian shoots the thug who staggers to his car, gets behind the wheel and promptly collides with another vehicle causing injury and death in the other vehicle. According to President Trump's critics the cop is responsible for those deaths because he shot the thug. If he hadn't shot him, the critic argues, there would've been no collision.

According to this reasoning criminals on the streets and terrorists around the world should be able to work their despicable deeds with impunity because if we defend ourselves against them, who knows what harm may ensue?

It's depressing that we live in a time when not only does an attack on the world's top terrorist need to be defended (By the way, did Obama have to defend killing Osama bin Laden? Why not? How was killing Soleimani more egregious than killing bin Laden?), but also in a time when Americans are more interested in blaming their president for a tragic mistake made by another country than they are in condemning that nation's government for creating a climate of terrorism and instability which leads to such mistakes being made.

Why Delay?

A quick thought on the impeachment delay. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is refusing to pass the articles of impeachment along to the Senate so the Senate can begin a trial of the President. She states that she will not send the articles to the Senate until she's assured that the trial will be fair.

A lot of commentators have pointed out the hypocrisy in this. The House Democrats told us repeatedly that they had to rush the hearings through and draft the articles of impeachment because this president was such a threat to the nation and the world that there was no time to waste.

They couldn't even wait for the courts to decide if the witnesses they wanted to call were required to appear before Adam Schiff's committee.

But now that the House has voted to impeach Mr. Trump Ms. Pelosi feels comfortable in taking her good old time advancing the articles of impeachment along to the Senate. Why?

She has stated that she will not send the articles over to the other branch until she's convinced that the trial will be "fair," whatever that means.

But suppose Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn't give her the assurances she's seeking. Does that mean that she'll never send the articles of impeachment to the Senate? If so, what does that do to the Democrats' argument that this is a matter of the gravest urgency? And if she will eventually send the articles, even without those assurances, then why wait?

None of what she's doing makes sense, at least not on the surface. Perhaps she's gambling that delaying the trial will somehow persuade a few Republican senators to agree to her insistence that witnesses - witnesses that the House refused to call or refused to wait until the courts ordered them to appear - be called by the Senate.

Maybe, but the longer she waits the more likely it is that impeachment gets overtaken by other events, like the Iran business, and the American public loses interest in it altogether.

Will Religious Liberty be at Risk if Secular Democrats Gain Power?

Casey Chalk at The Federalist cites a Washington Post op-ed by a scholar named Paul Djupe in which Professor Djupe asks why white evangelicals fear that atheists and Democrats would strip away their religious rights.

The reasons Djupe gives to account for this "fear" - conservative propaganda and psychological projection of what evangelicals would do to atheists had they the power - are unconvincing. The simplest explanation is that the last decade or so has provided us a track record that gives disturbing insights into the thinking of secularists who wield political power.

Chalk mentions several examples:

1. The Department of Health and Human Services, as part of the Affordable Care Act, mandated in 2011 that certain employers provide all FDA-approved contraceptives, including abortifacients, in their health insurance plans. The narrow religious exemption did not include religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns that manages homes for the elderly poor across America, nor businesses such as Hobby Lobby.

A district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit ruled against the Little Sisters of the Poor, and it was only in 2016 that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the lower court and secured the liberties of the religious order. Hobby Lobby won in a separate 2014 case.

2. Over the last decade and a half, a number of jurisdictions, including the state of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have targeted Christian adoption agencies that refuse to place children with same-sex or unmarried couples. Many of these adoption agencies have since closed.

3. The pro-choice organization NARAL, a prominent supporter of Democratic candidates, opposes conscience laws that allow medical practitioners to exempt themselves from activities, such as abortion or euthanasia, that violate their religious beliefs.

4. Several Democratic presidential candidates have declared their support for legislation that would prohibit employers — including Christian schools or organizations — from maintaining rules about their employees’ sexual behavior. When the media reported that Vice President Mike Pence’s wife Karen had taken a position at an evangelical Virginia school that prohibits employees and students from homosexual behavior, left-leaning secular media ruthlessly attacked her.

Also, a cake baker in suburban Denver, despite the U.S. Supreme Court upholding his religious liberty in 2018, is still facing harassment by the state of Colorado because he refuses to participate in a gay wedding.

Djupe references research he conducted which found that atheists were more likely than evangelicals to agree that groups with which they disagree should still be permitted to exercise various liberties, but this finding is unpersuasive.

The question is not how the average neighborhood atheist would respond over the phone to a pollster's question probing his or her degree of tolerance, but rather what this same individual would be willing to go along with should more radical fellow unbelievers accede to power.

The record of the last decade shows that evangelicals may well have legitimate cause for concern.

Hitler's Ethics

About ten years ago Richard Weikart published a study on the roots of the moral thinking of Adolf Hitler, a review of which is posted at Evolution News and Views. Here's an excerpt:

One of the most controversial parts of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was the segment where Ben Stein interviewed the history professor Richard Weikart about his book, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany.

Darwinists went apoplectic, deriding Stein and Weikart for daring to sully the good name of Darwin by showing the way that Hitler and German scientists and physicians used evolutionary theory to justify some of their atrocities, such as their campaign to kill the disabled.

Some critics even denied that the Nazis believed in Darwinism at all. Weikart challenges his critics to examine the evidence in his fascinating sequel, Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, which examines the role of Darwinism and evolutionary ethics in Hitler's worldview.

In this work Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler's evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler's immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race.

Hitler's evolutionary ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination.

It's hard to see how anyone can deny that the attempt to base an ethic on naturalistic Darwinism can lead to anything but a "might makes right" ethic. If what's right is what has evolved in the behavior of the human species then whatever human beings do - rape, violence, theft, bigotry - all must be right, and if they are, then whoever is the strongest gets to impose his will on all others. That's exactly what the Nazis thought and practiced.

Either morality is rooted in an omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being or there's no objective moral standard at all. If evolution is to be our standard then we are left with the ethic of the barbarian and savage - what's right is whatever feels right to me. This is egoism, i.e. the belief that one should put one's own interests ahead of the interests of others, and egoism, of course, leads inexorably to the ethic of "might makes right."

Hitler's "morality" was completely consistent with his rejection of a belief in a personal God. Hitler was who every atheist would also be if he/she a) had the power and b) were logically consistent.

Thankfully, few of them are both powerful and consistent, but in the 20th century some were. Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot in addition to Hitler were all atheists who had complete power within their sphere and acted consistently with their naturalistic, materialistic worldview.

The consequences were as horrific as they were predictable.

Why the Universe Has to Be Big

Astronomer Hugh Ross has an article at Salvo that should fascinate anyone interested in chemistry, biology or the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe that makes life on earth possible.

It begins with a challenge frequently levelled at those who believe the universe is intentionally engineered by an intelligent agent to permit life to exist. If so, some who dissent from this view ask, why is the universe so vast? Why are there so many galaxies? Isn't such a huge universe wasteful when a much smaller universe would suffice?

Ross explains that a smaller universe would not have sufficed, and that the universe has to be as large as it is and as massive as it is in order for carbon-based life to exist anywhere in it. The article can be summarized as follows:

In order for life to exist, at least life as we know it, there has to be carbon and oxygen, and in order for these elements to exist there had to be a very precise amount of mass to the universe in its early stages of development. Here's why:

At the beginning of the universe, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was rapidly expanding. Since mass exerts gravitational pull, the rate at which the universe expanded was determined by how much gravity there was acting as a drag on the expansion and this was determined by the amount of mass.

As the universe expanded it cooled. At one point the cooling reached the temperature range in which hydrogen atoms, the only atoms that existed in the early universe, began to fuse together to form other elements. This temperature range is between 15 million and 150 million degrees Celsius.

How long the expanding universe remained in this temperature range depended on how much matter there was to slow down the expansion. Too little matter and the universe would have passed through this range too quickly to form much else besides helium. Too slowly, and all the hydrogen would have fused into elements heavier than iron. Carbon and oxygen would have been very scarce.

In other words, to get the elements necessary for life, specifically carbon and oxygen, the expansion rate had to be just right, which means that the gravitational pull slowing the expansion had to be just right, which means that the amount of matter in the universe had to be just right. That amount of matter happens to be precisely the amount of matter bound up in the stars and galaxies we see in our telescopes.

In order to allow time for the production of carbon and oxygen, but not too much time, the expansion rate had to be calibrated to the astonishing value of one part in 10^55.

To get an idea of how precise this is imagine a dial face with 10^55 calibrations (one with 55 zeros). Now imagine that the dial has to point to exactly one of those calibrations for the universe to have carbon and oxygen. If the dial deviated by just one increment no carbon and oxygen would form. That's breathtaking, but in order to achieve that degree of precision of the expansion rate the universe had to have just the amount of matter that is today bound up in stars and galaxies that it in fact does have.

Indeed, the total amount of matter in the universe had to itself be fine-tuned to an astonishing precision of one part in 10^59.

So, the universe has to be as big as it is and as massive as it is in order for us to be here in this tiny corner of a galaxy located in a tiny corner of the universe. Little wonder that many people conclude that it can't all just be a cosmic accident, that there must be an intelligent mind behind it all.

Ross goes on to explain how the amount of carbon we find on earth is also fine-tuned. Just a bit more or a bit less carbon and life on earth would not exist, at least not life forms higher than bacteria. The article is not long and it's very much worth reading in its entirety.

Meanwhile, check out this video to get an idea of how big the universe actually is and how small we are. Each circle represents 10x the diameter of the previous circle:

The Soleimani Affair

For years Qassam Soleimani has been sowing death across the Middle East. His Al Quds Force, a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Army, has been responsible for developing and supplying the explosive devices planted along roadsides that claimed over 600 American lives and hundreds maimed during the Iraq war and its aftermath. He was recognized as perhaps the world's leading terrorist, and had the blood of thousands on his hands.

Much of the world, certainly Middle Eastern governments, are grateful that the American military has taken him out, even though they may for domestic political reasons not feel it safe to publicly say so. The Iranians, meanwhile, are threatening the United States with retaliation despite the fact that killing Soleimani was itself a retaliation for recent rocket attacks on an American base in Iraq that killed one American civilian and injured several military personnel.

The Iranians apparently believe that they should be able to kill Americans with impunity and are outraged if an American president disagrees.

In any case, the Iranians are in a bit of a bind. If they harm American citizens or interests they risk an overwhelming response from the American military, so whatever they do, it would seem, must be done in such a way that they have plausible deniability. But a retaliation which Iran denies perpetrating will not satisfy the hotheads and fanatics in Iran who want their government to strike hard at the Great Satan. But if to appease the fanatics Iran hits back in such a way as to make their responsibility obvious then they're inviting massive punishment from the U.S.

Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online has a piece titled So Far Iran Is Making All the Blunders in which he analyzes the situation as it stands at the moment.

Here are a few excerpts:

For all the current furor over the death of Qasem Soleimani, it is Iran, not the U.S. and the Trump administration, that is in a dilemma. Given the death and destruction wrought by Soleimani, and his agendas to come, he will not be missed.

Tehran has misjudged the U.S. administration’s doctrine of strategic realism rather than vice versa. The theocracy apparently calculated that prior U.S. patience and restraint in the face of its aggression was proof of an unwillingness or inability to respond. More likely, the administration was earlier prepping for a possible more dramatic, deadly, and politically justifiable response when and if Iran soon overreached.

To retain domestic and foreign credibility, Iran would now like to escalate in hopes of creating some sort of U.S. quagmire comparable to Afghanistan, or, more germanely, to a long Serbian-like bombing campaign mess, or the ennui that eventually overtook the endless no-fly zones over Iraq, or the creepy misadventure in Libya, or even something like an enervating 1979-80 hostage situation.

The history of the strategies of our Middle East opponents has always been to lure us into situations that have no strategic endgame, do not play to U.S. strengths in firepower, are costly without a time limit, and create Vietnam War–like tensions at home.

But those wished-for landscapes are not what Iranian has got itself into. Trump, after showing patience and restraint to prior Iranian escalations, can respond to Iranian tit-for-tat without getting near Iran, without commitments to any formal campaign, and without seeming to be a provocateur itching for war, but in theory doing a lot more damage to an already damaged Iranian economy either through drones, missiles, and bombing, or even more sanctions and boycotts to come.

If Iran turns to terrorism and cyber-attacks, it would likely only lose more political support and risk airborne responses to its infrastructure at home.

Iran deeply erred in thinking that Trump’s restraint was permanent, that his impeachment meant he had lost political viability, that he would go dormant in an election year, that the stature of his left-wing opponents would surge in such tensions, and that his base would abandon him if he dared to use military force.

We are now in an election year. Iran yearns for a return of the U.S. foreign policy of John Kerry, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power, the naïveté that had proved so lucrative and advantageous to Iran prior to 2017.

The Iranians could agree to act like a civilized nation and return to meaningful nuclear disarmament talks, but that would be a humiliation. Alternatively, they could bide their time and wait for a less resolute administration in Washington, but the sanctions are bleeding them, and the longer they go on the more unstable the regime in Tehran will become.

In fact, as Hanson points out, they have no good options. Their miscalculation was to think that they could, through terrorist attacks, make it so uncomfortable for the U.S. to stay in Iraq that we'd just give up and go home. They didn't expect Trump to respond to their fatal rocket attack in any significant way.

Hanson has more on the Iraqi options, none of them good, at the link. He concludes with this:

In sum, a weaker Iran foolishly positioned itself into the role of aggressor, at a time of a shot economy, eroding military strength, waning terrorist appendages abroad, and little political leverage or wider support. China and Russia are confined to hoping the U.S. is somehow, somewhere bogged down. Europe will still lecture on the fallout from canceling the Iran Deal, but quietly welcomes the fact that Iran is weaker than in 2015 and weaker for them is far better. China wants access to Middle East oil. Russia has never objected to a major producer having its oil taken off the world market. Moscow’s Iranian policies are reductionist anti-American more than pro-Iranian.

The current Iranian crisis is complex and dangerous. And by all means retaliation must be designed to prevent more Iranian violence and aggression rather than aimed at a grandiose agenda of regime change or national liberation. But so far the Iranians, not the U.S., are making all the blunders.

Philosophy Is Crucial

Philosopher Robert Pasnau penned an entertaining column at The Stone a number of years ago in which he discussed the low esteem in which philosophy is held in some academic precincts.

Here's his lede:

Morale these days has fallen pretty low along the corridors of philosophy departments. From one side, we get the mockery of the scientists. Freeman Dyson calls philosophy today “a toothless relic of past glories.” According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, majoring in philosophy “can really mess you up.” Stephen Hawking declares that “philosophy is dead.”

From another side, we have to cope with the apostasy of our own leading figures. John Searle describes the field as being in “terrible shape.” Peter Unger says that philosophers are “under the impression that they’re saying something new and interesting about how it is about the world, when in fact this is all an illusion.”

What’s going on? Has philosophy gone horribly amiss? Or are there broader cultural factors at work, perhaps something to do with a general decline in respect for the humanities?

Philosophers have always been the subject of ridicule, both from within and without.

René Descartes thought the entire discipline — up until his arrival, at least — had failed to make any important progress. A century later, David Hume wanted to take most of what philosophers had written and “commit it to the flames.” Such scorn goes all the way back to the origins of the subject.

Thales, who many consider the first Western philosopher, was reputed to have been so distracted while out on his evening walk that he once fell into a well. Falling to the bottom of a well is presumably no laughing matter, even when it happens to a philosopher. But the Thracian servant girl who discovered him is said to have reacted not with concern but scorn; she ridiculed him for being so oblivious.

Thales, as it happens, was a founding figure not just for philosophy but also for science. Indeed, the usual reason given for his fall is not that he was ogling the girl (as some readers today might suspect of a philosopher) but that he was studying the stars.

For the next 2,000 years, the sciences were assumed to be a part of philosophy — indeed, what the philosopher mainly did was to pursue science. And that is precisely what they were mocked for: always pursuing and never attaining.

Pietro Pomponazzi, a Renaissance philosopher, cautioned his students that their field would be the greatest of careers but for two things. One, of course, was that philosophy did not pay. The other was that it constantly failed to achieve results, and so rather than being a serious discipline, it was more like “playing with toys.”

Several centuries later, Charles II is said to have himself toyed with the philosophers, asking them to explain why a fish weighs more after it has died. Upon receiving various ingenious answers, he pointed out that in fact a dead fish does not weigh anything more.

One aspect of philosophy that makes it unpopular with some academics is that it tends to impose boundaries on them. It seeks to draw lines of demarcation separating science from non-science, right from wrong, beautiful from non-beautiful, knowledge from non-knowledge, justice from injustice, truth from falsity, meaningfulness from nonsense.

This is a problem because practitioners in other disciplines don't like non-practitioners calling them out for transgressing boundaries set by the non-practitioners. Yet without this service rendered by philosophers no discipline could function, no progress could be made and every pursuit would be reduced to intellectual chaos and nihilism.

Philosophy is absolutely crucial to the life of the mind and indeed to the achievement of any kind of advanced civilization.

Why I Am a Christian (Pt. II)

Yesterday I sketched some of the reasons that I remain a theist. Today I'd like to do the same for why I remain a Christian theist. Or, better, following the 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, why I continue to strive to become one. Although there are more, here, in brief outline, are six reasons why I embrace Christianity:

1. The beauty of the story. The Christian account of history is a beautiful love story that tells how, moved by love for mankind, God gave Himself to ransom His beloved and to share eternity with "her" together. It's the greatest love story ever told. If it's not true it should be. We should all want it to be, and I marvel that so many want it not to be true.

2. The beauty of the lives of those who have taken the teaching of Jesus seriously. Cardinal Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict, has said that,“I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth…are the lives of the saints and the beauty that the faith has generated.” When Ratzinger mentions the lives of the saints he's talking about men like Maximilian Kolbe and women like Mother Teresa.

He's talking about the people George Eliot mentions in her novel Middlemarch when she has a character observe that, "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

It is because of 2000 years of anonymous people trying to live as Jesus enjoined us to live that we have hospitals and clinics, orphanages and schools, charitable organizations and so much more. Atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas acknowledges this when he writes that, "Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."

3. The beauty of grace. Author Philip Yancey wrote that he left the Christian faith as a young man because there was so little grace in his very strict church. He eventually came back to the faith because he could find grace nowhere else. It's certainly not found in today's secular progressive PC Cancel Culture where people get reported by interns to their employer's Human Resources department for wishing co-workers a Merry Christmas.

Christianity, properly understood, is a way of life teeming with forgiveness and reconciliation, i.e. grace, among ourselves and between God and us. Grace is enormously attractive, and it's the essence of Christianity.

4. The beauty of the moral core. Christianity (or more accurately, Judeo-Christianity) is based on two "laws": Love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. There's nothing simpler, more elegant or more beautiful. The whole moral teaching of the Bible is summed up in those two rules. To love others is to do justice and to display compassion - for the poor, for those with whom one deals in business, for our co-workers and our neighbors.

5. The fact of the Resurrection of Jesus. Skeptics have tried for centuries to explain it away, but every attempt to provide a naturalistic interpretation of the historical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as found in the New Testament sounds more fantastic than that a miracle actually did occur and that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead. The Resurrection of Jesus is the keystone in the arch of Christianity. It is the confirmation that everything Jesus taught about Himself, this life and the next is true.

6. The beauty of the hope of eternal life. Some folks are content to accept physical death as the end of their existence, but this, for me, is difficult to understand. It's difficult to understand why we continue to invest enormous resources in extending human life through medical technology and do so much to extend our own individual lives through healthy living but care so little about life that we're indifferent to the possibility of enjoying it forever.

To have loved family and friends, to have loved life, and not be thrilled with the hope that there's an even richer, more wonderful existence beyond this one, an existence which we might share with those from whom we've been separated by death, an existence in which those who have suffered will be rewarded and those who caused their suffering will be held to account, strikes me quite frankly as strange.

For these reasons and others, especially the simple but paramount fact that I believe Christianity is true in all its essential aspects, I remain committed to it.

Why I Am a Christian (Pt. I)

In 1927 British philosopher Bertrand Russell gave a talk titled Why I Am Not a Christian in which he laid out the reasons why he was, in fact, not a Christian. The talk was subsequently published as a pamphlet and then a book and has become prescribed reading among secularists throughout the Western world. It's really quite peculiar that it achieved the popularity that it did given the fact that the reasons Russell adduces for his atheism are, for the most part, singularly unconvincing.

In any case, I thought I'd like to compose a Viewpoint post on the topic Why I Am a Christian. To be sure, these aren't the reasons why I became a Christian but rather some of the reasons why I have remained one.

First, though, let me briefly sketch some of the reasons why I remain a theist.

There are two live options in the contemporary Western world, theism and naturalism (atheism). Agnosticism is sometimes considered an option, but agnosticism is simply atheism by another name. Atheists are persons who consciously or willfully lack belief in a God, and, since agnostics lack a belief in God, agnostics are atheists, albeit of a softer variety than those who explicitly deny that God exists.

Between atheism and theism, then, which best explains the facts of our experience of the world and life? For me there's no contest. The best explanation, as I see the world, is that a personal, moral Being exists and has created the cosmos. I hold this opinion because there are numerous facts about the world and human life that seem to me far more plausible or probable on theism than on atheism. Consider the following ten examples:

1. Human rights - Why, on naturalism, should anyone think that humans have rights that others are obligated to respect? Why think that tyranny or the holocaust are evil? Why think that we have a duty to do justice to others? On a naturalistic explanation of human existence the notion of human rights is nothing more than a comforting fiction. Only theism gives us a sound basis for them as Thomas Jefferson noted in the Declaration of Independence where he affirmed that our rights come from our Creator.

2. Human equality - What, on naturalism, provides grounds for thinking that humans are in some sense equal or should be treated as such? We have no reason for cherishing the notion of gender or racial or legal equality on a naturalistic understanding of the origin of our species, but, on theism, we're all equally loved by God who requires us to value and love each other in the same way.

3. Meaning or significance - If the cosmos as a whole has no meaning what meaning can anything in it have? Is the meaning of our lives something we just make up, like children conjure an invisible friend to salve their loneliness? Human life can only mean anything if humans have a telos or purpose, and that telos can only be given to us by God. Nothing in nature can confer upon human beings significance or meaning.

4. Consciousness - How do matter and energy, mere electrochemical reactions in the brain, give rise to sensory experiences like sweetness, fragrance, pain or color? What are these sensations anyway? Where does the meaning of the sound of a siren or the flashing lights at a railroad crossing come from? What enables these physical events to be invested with a meaning and how does mere matter create their meaning? These phenomena strongly suggest that the material self is not all there is to us, but if we are possessed of immaterial minds it's difficult to see how they could be the product of a physical process like evolution. It seems more plausible to believe that such entities trace their provenience back to an original Mind.

5. Objective morality - Why think that it's wrong to just live for oneself or to adopt an attitude of might makes right? Why think that it's wrong to adopt a survival of the fittest attitude toward the poor? Why believe that it's objectively wrong to be cruel to children and animals? If we believe that these things are wrong, as I do, then we must conclude that there are objective moral rights and wrongs, but that can only be the case if there's an objective moral standard. No such standard exists in the naturalistic worldview. Only theism affords such a standard, the character of a perfectly good God.

6. Human free will - How, on naturalism, do we justify the powerful conviction that we have free will? How can mere matter, if that's all we are, be free to override or circumvent the laws of physics? We can't live consistently with the belief that we're not free, but the naturalistic worldview entails that free will is merely an illusion. A worldview with which it's so difficult to live consistently is deeply suspect.

7. Biological information - Living things are brimming over with information. Everything in an organism - DNA, proteins - is governed by information. It seems to me much more probable that libraries of information such as exist in every living cell are the result of an intelligent Mind than that they're the result of mindless, purely random, accidents in nature.

8. Cosmic fine-tuning - The universe is comprised of dozens of constants and forces whose strengths are set to exceedingly precise values. Had those strengths deviated from their actual values by unimaginably tiny amounts, in some cases by one part in 10^120 either the universe would not exist or life in it would be impossible. Thus the existence of a life-sustaining universe is extremely improbable and the existence of no universe or one that's life-prohibiting is astronomically more likely. It seems to me, then, that it's more probable that such precision is the product of intelligent, purposeful engineering than that it's the product of an incomprehensibly improbable fluke.

9. Mathematical structure of nature - The universe is not only explicable in terms of math, it appears to many scientists to actually be mathematics. It seems to me more probable that the mathematical nature of the universe is attributable to a Mind than to sheer dumb serendipity.

10. The origin of the universe - The universe evidently came from nothing, at least nothing that's allowed in a naturalist ontology. How does something come from nothing? How does something begin to exist and remain in existence uncaused? It seems more reasonable to me to think that the universe has a cause that's not part of the aggregation of contingent things that comprise it. Thus, the cause of the universe would be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, very powerful, very intelligent and possess necessary being (since were it contingent it'd be part of the universe).

In sum, theism seems to me to be a much more plausible explanation for the existential facts of life as well as for the nature of the world in which we live. Whenever I'm beset by doubts about the existence of God I reflect on the above facts and am reminded that it seems far more probable that the world and human experience are the product of a personal intelligence than that they're the product of nothingness plus chance.

But even if there is a God why think that Christianity is true? Why not just hold to a bare theism? Why embellish it with the narratives found in the New Testament gospels? I'll attempt an answer to that question tomorrow.

2019, Best Year Ever

As we close out 2019 perhaps we should resist the temptation to say "good riddance," since that remark will only make us seem uninformed about where matters actually stand in the world at the end of the second decade of the 21st century.

It's true that many social indicators in the U.S., such as the levels of drug abuse, loneliness, suicide, divorce, single motherhood, teenage pregnancy, mass murders, mental illness, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Islamic fanaticism and terrorism, all make it seem as if our age is unprecedentedly bad. Yet New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof joins a host of experts when he writes that 2019 was in fact the best year human beings have ever experienced.

Here are a few excerpts from Kristof's column:

If you’re depressed by the state of the world, let me toss out an idea: In the long arc of human history, 2019 has been the best year ever. The bad things that you fret about are true. But it’s also true that since modern humans emerged about 200,000 years ago, 2019 was probably the year in which children were least likely to die, adults were least likely to be illiterate and people were least likely to suffer excruciating and disfiguring diseases.

Every single day in recent years, another 325,000 people got their first access to electricity. Each day, more than 200,000 got piped water for the first time. And some 650,000 went online for the first time, every single day.

Perhaps the greatest calamity for anyone is to lose a child. That used to be common: Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27% of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4%.

I fear that the news media and the humanitarian world focus so relentlessly on the bad news that we leave the public believing that every trend is going in the wrong direction. A majority of Americans say in polls that the share of the world population living in poverty is increasing — yet one of the trends of the last 50 years has been a huge reduction in global poverty.

As recently as 1981, 42% of the planet’s population endured “extreme poverty,” defined by the United Nations as living on less than about $2 a day. That portion has plunged to less than 10% of the world’s population now.

Every day for a decade, newspapers could have carried the headline “Another 170,000 Moved Out of Extreme Poverty Yesterday.” Or if one uses a higher threshold, the headline could have been: “The Number of People Living on More Than $10 a Day Increased by 245,000 Yesterday.”

Many of those moving up are still very poor, of course. But because they are less poor, they are less likely to remain illiterate or to starve: People often think that famine is routine, but the last famine recognized by the World Food Program struck just part of one state in South Sudan and lasted for only a few months in 2017.

Diseases like polio, leprosy, river blindness and elephantiasis are on the decline, and global efforts have turned the tide on AIDS. Half a century ago, a majority of the world’s people had always been illiterate; now we are approaching 90% adult literacy. There have been particularly large gains in girls’ education — and few forces change the world so much as education and the empowerment of women.

He concludes with this:

When I was born in 1959, a majority of the world’s population had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. By the time I die, illiteracy and extreme poverty may be almost eliminated — and it’s difficult to imagine a greater triumph for humanity on our watch.

As someone who usually tends to see the glass as half-empty, however, I'm inclined to think that human beings will somehow botch it all up, but until then here are a few more impressive statistics from the Brookings Institute to brighten your New Year's day:

• In 1870 the average European life expectancy was 36 years. Globally, the figure was 30 years. Today, the numbers are 81 and 72 years respectively.
• In 1820 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today it's only 10%.
• In 1800 43% of the world's children died before their fifth birthday. Today it's 4%.
• In 1816 only 0.87% of the world's people lived in a democratic society. Today it's 56%.
• In 1800 people living in France, at the time one of the world's richest countries, lived on 1846 calories per day. In Africa, the contemporary world's poorest continent, people now live on an average of 2624 calories per day.
• In 1800 88% of the world's population was illiterate. Today only 13% are illiterate.
• GDP per person has risen globally by 52% since 2001, while infant mortality dropped 38% worldwide.
• Since 2001 life expectancy around the world has risen 6% and people in sub-Saharan Africa are living a full decade longer than they did prior to 2001.
• At the same time hunger has declined 33% globally since 2001, and undernourishment has decreased 27%.

Despite all the negative indicators it's hard to dismiss these statistics. Perhaps Dickens could've been writing about the present era when he opened The Tale of Two Cities with the lapidary observation that the years about which he wrote - ironically, they were the years shortly before 1800 - was both the best of times and the worst of times.

What We Stand to Lose

Secularists of various stripes applaud the decline of Christianity in the modern era, but should they? Set aside the question whether Christianity is true and ask instead the question what will be lost when Christian influence is all but gone?

Put the question this way: What are the values that Western democracies cherish? At a minimum they would include:

1. Human equality (including that of women and minorities) under the law
2. Tolerance of dissent
3. Separation of church and state
4. Social Justice (charity, concern for the poor)
5. Freedom of speech
6. Freedom of religion

There are others, but just limiting ourselves to these, what other comprehensive belief system or worldview offers a ground for these values? Certainly not Islam which rejects all of them with the possible exception of #4 (but even here concern for the poor often extends only to other Muslims of one's own sect).

Nor does naturalism (the worldview held by many secularists that says that the natural world is all there is) offer any support for any of these. On naturalism we are the product of blind, impersonal forces that have shaped us to survive competition with our competitors. There is nothing in this process which in any sense mandates any of the values listed above. There's no reason, on evolutionary grounds, why any society should value any of them over their contraries.

But, it might be argued, evolution has equipped us with reason, and reason dictates that these values afford the best way to order a society. We don't need Christianity to instill or ground these values, according to this argument, reason can do the job.

This, however, is simply not true. Reason can perhaps help us find the best way to exemplify these values, but it cannot decide whether or not a society should incorporate them. To prefer a society which upholds them over and against one which does not is simply an arbitrary preference. It is to say that a society which exhibits these values is better than alternative polities because, well, most of us just happen to have a fondness for these values.

Moreover, aside from providing a solid grounding for those political values, Christianity bestowed additional blessings on the West. There's a consensus among scholars that the vast majority of the world's best art and music has been inspired by Christian assumptions. These also furnished the motivation for the development of schools, orphanages, hospitals and charitable organizations throughout Europe and North America and provided the fertile philosophical soil in which modern science could germinate and thrive.

To the extent that other worldviews have inspired their followers to notable cultural achievements, generally speaking they have neither amounted to much nor been sustained for long without somehow piggy-backing on Christianity.

Naturalism and Islam may some day succeed in extirpating Christian influence, but the world they would create will look very much like either the Stalinist dystopia of Orwell's 1984 or the Islamic dystopia of ISIS. It might not happen abruptly - an airliner can glide a long way after having exhausted its fuel, and the higher its altitude the longer it can remain aloft before crashing to earth - but it won't remain airborne indefinitely.

Similarly, one or the other of these two bleak dystopias represents the future that awaits us a generation or two after the fuel of Christian assumptions has finally been drained from the West.

Our Postmodern Moral Crisis

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?” The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here.

Toner writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.” The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution.

We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

We have always flouted moral standards but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, yet that's where large segments of our culture are headed in these postmodern times.

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime.

The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter. The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.” We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

• If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.
• If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.
• A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.
• Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever we wish.

Unless there is a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there is no such thing as a moral obligation.

As the great Russian novelist Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

The price we pay in a secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals. It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas meant when he said that,

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner continues:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power.”

Indeed. You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality is not good.

Critical Thinking

Mary Tillotson at The Federalist presents a good lesson in critical thinking. Her immediate context is the application of a critical eye toward news reports and op-eds, but what she says is sound advice for any aspect of life.

In fact, she says so many good things about each of the eight points she makes that I've only space enough to consider a couple of them.

Tillotson begins with an anecdote about a grad class she was taking that was engaged in a discussion of thinking critically about issues like "diversity, racism, and fear-mongering." She writes:

I had a hard time believing lack of critical thinking was a big problem until another student said we live in a time when race relations are worse than they ever have been, and everyone just nodded. Having grown up seeing old photographs of drinking fountains labeled “white” and “colored” and learning about the horrors of the antebellum South, I was stunned. There is a huge difference between “needs improvement” and “never been worse.”

When someone says something like what that student said they're probably not really thinking at all, much less thinking critically. In this case the students are likely just agreeing with the rest of the class in order to be congenial, polite or to be recognized by others as holding the right opinions.

Anyway, here's Tillotson's first point:

1. Know Your Narrative

Everyone has a worldview. Objectivity is a real thing and truth does in fact exist, but the existence of truth doesn’t mean we’re all good at seeing it. If you want to think critically, the first step is to know where you’re coming from.

Indeed, it's also good to know where the other person is coming from. Knowing a writer or speaker's own worldview helps immensely in "reading between the lines" of what they're saying.

Think of something evil that happened recently and consider these questions in that context. How do you explain good and evil behavior in people? Did the perpetrator act because he was a bad person or was he just a person who made a bad choice? Are there “good people” and “bad people,” or are we all prone to evil?

She elaborates on these questions, but one she doesn't mention that I think is helpful is to ask whether one even believes that "evil" exists. If so, what makes an act evil and what are some examples of it in our day?

Our answers to these questions will go far in helping us to understand both ourselves and others.

2. Predict, But Don’t Trust, Your Emotional Response

My high school psychology teacher passed out slips of paper to our class one day and asked us to raise our hands if we thought the sentence on our slip was true. We read, shrugged, agreed, and all raised our hands. It turned out we didn’t all have the same sentence: half of us had “People who are more cautious than average make better firefighters” and the other half had “People who are less cautious than average make better firefighters.” So we discussed various cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases also exist outside psychology classrooms. When you hear something bad about someone you already don’t like, you’re much more inclined to believe it. Likewise, when you hear something bad about someone you like, you’re more inclined to disbelieve, dismiss, or downplay it. This is called confirmation bias....You can’t eradicate it, but you can be aware of it.

Confirmation bias occurs everywhere and we all fall victim to it, unfortunately. Not only are we more likely to believe something bad about someone we don't like and something good about people we do like, but we're also more likely to believe a claim is true if it supports a political, scientific, philosophical or religious position we already hold than if it doesn't.

Tillotson makes an excellent suggestion about this:

When you hear a fact (or a “fact”) about someone, consider how you would react if that exact same thing were said about someone else. Put the opponent’s name in the sentence and observe your emotions.

At this point, you may become aware that your emotions are holding different people to different standards. This is an important step toward thinking with your brain and not with your emotions.

We certainly saw this happen a lot in the last election cycle, and it's still happening three years later. Critics of the president, for example, are engaging in discourse that, had similar discourse occurred during Barack Obama's presidency, would have elicited howls of indignation from the same people.

One of the best intellectual disciplines we can develop is the ability to give people and positions we don't favor the benefit of the doubt and to ask, as Tillotson suggests, whether we would be saying or thinking or doing what we are if the person or position at issue were the person or position we favored.

For example, would those who excused Donald Trump's dishonesty or name-calling during the 2016 presidential campaign have excused similar behavior had it been Hillary Clinton instead of Trump caught in the lie or name-calling? We know in fact that they did not. People on both sides of the electoral divide were far too willing to excuse in their candidate what they saw as reprehensible in the other candidate.

Tillotson has more good advice on how to be a critical thinker, and I urge you to read the rest of her essay at the link.