Good Billionaires

The staff at The Washington Free Beacon has come across an open letter sent to Senator Bernie Sanders by email after the Democratic debate in New Hampshire in which Mr. Sanders excoriated billionaires.

The email was signed by a group called Billionaires for Social Justice and a New World Government (although it features Mike Bloomberg's return address) and urges the senator to recognize that not all billionaires are evil, only those who support Republicans. In fact, a couple of them are actually vying for the Democratic nomination for president.

I've taken the liberty to copy the missive onto VP, but I guess I should tell you before you read it that it's actually an amusing satire concocted by the WFB staff (note Sanders' email address):

From: The Good Billionaires
Date: February 9, 2020 at 9:17:32 PM EST
To: Bernard1917@aol.com
Subject: A Plea for Humanity

Dear Senator Bernie Sanders,

We the undersigned represent a diverse constituency of American billionaires who support the Democratic Party. Some of us prefer to work behind the scenes creating dark money organizations pushing global disarmament and tribunal justice for the architects of the Iraq War.

Some of us have bought media operations, purchasing newspapers and Internet platforms to help amplify progressive voices above the noise of Fox News. Two of us are running for president like yourself.

But all of us have one thing in common: We are human beings. We put our pants on, one leg at a time with the help of a dedicated butler, like most Americans. Last Friday's debate in New Hampshire was hurtful and othering for all Americans with ten-digit wealth. For those of us who have fought hard for a progressive agenda, your campaign feels like a betrayal.

To claim that progressives must oppose Americans of enormous wealth is ahistorical. Should progressives have rejected Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his LGBT wife Eleanor? And should progressives cancel the Obama family? They didn’t begin their presidencies as billionaires, but wait till you see their Netflix deals for 2020.

Normally, we would not appeal to any campaign in such a public way. We believe in a big tent when it comes to centralizing the economy and engineering the culture. Many of us (well, actually just Tom Steyer) like you. But your attacks are doing real damage. Amy Klobuchar told us to stop contacting her until after the Nevada caucuses.

One of us had to cancel a private Beyoncé concert and wine tasting fundraiser for Mayor Pete Buttigieg last month. Do you have any idea how hard it is to schedule Beyoncé? You probably don't because Sidney Blumenthal tells us the last album you purchased was The Best of Peter, Paul and Mary.

We understand some of the anger inside the Democratic Party these days. We're angry, too. We're not saying you shouldn't attack any billionaires, we're saying you should stop attacking the good billionaires.

If you want to run campaign ads railing against Sheldon Adelson or Rebekah Mercer, we would happily pay for them. But we're the guys fighting for trans-equality, ending the fossil fuel industry, and destroying the state of Israel. Aren't these supposed to be your issues too?

So please, let's find a way to work this out. All of us would be happy to support your campaign if you're the nominee, but we can’t support someone who does rhetorical violence to the lived experience of billionaires. Your record is so strong when it comes to most minorities. We urge you to show the same sensitivity to Americans who have accumulated astronomical wealth.

In Solidarity,

Billionaires for Social Justice and a New World Government

It is peculiar that all those Democrats who had been haranguing us about the obscenity of "Big Money" in politics have, except for Bernie Sanders, grown strangely silent now that Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are in the race and promising to spend whatever it takes to defeat Donald Trump.

"Big Money" is bad, apparently, when it's Republican money and good when it's Democrat money.

Swinburne's Argument for the Soul

Richard Swinburne is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford University and one the most prominent of contemporary philosophers. In his recent book, Are We Bodies Or Souls? he takes up Descartes' argument for the existence of the soul and amends it slightly to remove one of the classical objections philosophers have made to it.

The result is a succinct argument for the existence of the soul in human persons. His argument goes like this:

1. I am a substance which is thinking.
2. It is conceivable (i.e. logically possible) that while I am thinking my body is destroyed.
3. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that 'I am thinking and I do not exist.'
4. I am therefore a substance which, it is conceivable, can continue to exist while my body is destroyed.
5. It is not conceivable (i.e. not logically possible) that a substance can lose all its parts simultaneously and yet continue to exist.
6. Therefore, I am a soul, a substance, whose only essential property is the capacity for thought.

How does the conclusion follow from the rest of the argument? According to 4. it's logically possible that I exist when my body ceases to exist, but according to 5. it's logically impossible that anything can continue to exist when every part of it is destroyed.

Therefore, there must be more to my existence than just the existence of my body. There must be something about me that can continue to exist when every part of my body is destroyed.

That other part of me must be, from 1. and 2., that part of me which thinks, i.e. a soul (or mind), and which I identify as myself.

Swinburne gives a cogent defense of this argument in the book, which, though he claims it to be written for a broad audience, would be rather hard going for someone with little background in philosophy.

Nevertheless, in an age in which the reigning view on these matters is a philosophical materialism which denies the existence of a soul or mind, Swinburne's book is refreshing.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. III)

This is the third and final part of our look at an essay by Richard Weikart, a professor of modern European history at California State University, in which he addresses the inability of naturalism to provide a coherent basis for ethics. See here and here for the first two installments.

In today's post we'll look at Weikert's critique of the attempt by biologist Jerry Coyne to derive ethics from biological and cultural evolution. He notes that Coyne's writing on this topic presupposes an objective moral standard, the existence of which he nevertheless denies:

Coyne is an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and a prominent atheist. In his 2015 book, Faith Versus Fact, Coyne argues that morality is the product of both evolutionary and cultural processes. He vigorously denies that there is anything fixed or objective about morality.

However, despite his moral relativism, later in his book Coyne inexplicably states, “Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most ‘religious’ morality.”

Apparently it escapes Coyne’s grasp that for one kind of morality to be superior to another, there has to be some yardstick outside both moral systems.

In other words, if human beings are the product of evolution then all of our behaviors are also the product of our evolutionary development. How then do we determine that charity is good and selfishness is bad if they're both the residue of the evolutionary process?

The only way we can make that judgment is if we compare the two behaviors to some objective standard to see which one conforms best to that standard. Yet Coyne's philosophy doesn't allow for the existence of such a standard so his judgments of good and bad are completely arbitrary.

Weikert continues:

When Coyne confronts specific moral precepts, he falls into the same contradiction. In a 2017 blog he argues that infanticide and assisted suicide should be permitted, and he insists that the increasing acceptance of them in our society is a sign of moral progress. He proclaims, “This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide [i.e., its legalization in some states and countries] are the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world.”

Now, some commentators (such as myself) would argue the exact opposite: that the increasing acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide is evidence of our moral decline. But laying aside whether I am right or Coyne is right on this specific moral issue, both of our moral claims — that there is moral progress or moral decline — imply that we are moving toward (or away from) some objective moral goal.

Unless there is an objective moral standard how does Coyne know that any behavior represents moral progress? All that he actually seems to be saying is that a behavior represents moral progress if it's a behavior that he likes.

Weikert goes on to discuss a sociological study done by John Evans, a sociology professor at the University of California, that shows a correlation between one's worldview and one's view of human rights:

[Evans] divided people’s views of humanity into three broad categories: theistic, biological, and philosophical. The theistic view of humanity is characterized by the view that humans are created in the image of God. The biological view of humanity sees humans as the product of evolutionary processes and as exclusively physical beings. The philosophical view understands humans to be defined by their having certain traits, such as consciousness, the ability to plan their future, and so forth.

What Evans discovered was that people embracing the theistic view of humans have greater respect for human rights than those espousing the two secularist views. Evans, as a secularist who nonetheless believes in human rights, is clearly uncomfortable with his discovery.

This result should not be surprising since only the theist who believes that all human beings are created by God in His image and loved by Him have any basis for thinking that objective human rights could even exist. In any other worldview human rights are simply an arbitrary fiction men fabricate to make it easier to live together in society.

For Evans to believe in objective human rights requires a non-rational leap of faith out of his naturalistic worldview and into the worldview of the theist. He must piggy-back, as it were, on theism to get him to objective human rights while all the while rejecting the theistic assumptions that allow for those rights to exist in the first place.

Secularists like Evans want a kind of Christianity without God, but a Christianity without God provides no more solid foundation for ethics than any other worldview, and is just as nonsensical as every other system of thought that tries to hold on to beliefs about right and wrong in the absence of any objective standard for them.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. II)

Yesterday I discussed an essay written by Richard Weikert on how modernity, which is characterized by a naturalistic metaphysics that excludes God, led to the massive bloodletting of the 20th century.

I'd like to continue looking at Weikert's column today as he focuses on one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell was one of the most famous British philosophers of the twentieth century. In an essay written in 1903, Russell divulged a rather stark view of humanity:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

Because he viewed humans as merely “accidental collocations of atoms” and thus as merely the product of random processes, Russell complained that Christianity and other religions were wrong to believe that the earth and its inhabitants have a special place in the cosmos.

In 1925 he underscored this point by stating: “The philosophy of nature must not be unduly terrestrial; for it, the earth, is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. It would be ridiculous to warp the philosophy of nature in order to bring out results that are pleasing to the tiny parasites of this insignificant planet.”

If you didn’t catch it, those “tiny parasites” are you and I and all our fellow human beings.

This reminds one of the claim made by cosmologist Stephen Hawking that “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.”

Weikert continues:

In addition to denigrating humans as “tiny parasites,” Russell also stripped humans of any moral significance, claiming that morality was merely an expression of subjective desires or emotions. The moral command, “Thou shalt not kill,” according to Russell’s philosophy, does not really mean there is anything objectively wrong with murder. Rather, anyone making such a statement really means, “I don’t like killing.”

Moral statements are meaningless, Russell claimed, unless they are understood as merely an individual’s personal emotional preference. In his philosophy, then, Russell continually undermined any notion of objective morality or inalienable human rights.

Like most moderns, however, Russell couldn't live consistently with the entailments of his worldview. Having declared to the rest of us that there's no objective right nor wrong, Russell proceeded to live as if there is. He took a leap of faith, in other words, away from what his atheism told him was true and lived, at least to some extent, as if theism were true:

However, ironically, in his personal life he was an intense and committed moralist. In his Autobiography he stated that his whole life was animated by three passions: love, knowledge, and pity for human suffering. Indeed, in the same essay that he called humans “tiny parasites” with no cosmic significance, he also uttered the words, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

Russell’s passion for humanity also manifested itself in his opposition to nuclear arms. He even spent time in jail as a result of demonstrating for nuclear disarmament.

What was going on here? Was the arch-rational philosopher letting his emotions get the best of him? Whatever the explanation for this tension between his moral philosophy and his personal life, I am not the only one to notice the contradiction. In her memoirs about her life with her father, Russell’s daughter, Katherine Tait, called him a “passionate moralist” and an “absolutist” who would have been a saint in a more religious age in the past.

Ideas have consequences. If the consequences of our ideas, in Russell's case his atheism, are unlivable then there's doubtless something wrong with the ideas. Russell was not unaware of the tension:

Interestingly, now that we have access to some of Russell’s private correspondence, we also know that Russell was troubled by these inconsistencies in his life. In a private letter to a woman he loved he poured out his soul, explaining:

I am strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of all this, to my intense sorrow, pain to you must grow.

The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain — a curious wild pain — a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite — the beatific vision — God — I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found — but the love of it is my life — it’s like passionate love for a ghost.

At times it fills me with rage, at times with wild despair, it is the source of gentleness and cruelty and work, it fills every passion that I have — it is the actual spring of life within me. I can’t explain it or make it seem anything but foolishness — but whether foolish or not, it is the source of whatever is any good in me....At most times, now, I am not conscious of it, only when I am strongly stirred, either happily or unhappily.

I seek escape from it, though I don’t believe I ought to.

Russell's letter reveals the predicament of modern man. He recognizes his emptiness. He recognizes the contradiction between what his heart tells him is true and what his philosophy tells him he must believe. He has a profound inner yearning for God, but, despite being painfully conflicted, he simply will not yield himself to that which deep down he realizes has to be true.

Filled with angst from the tension between the emptiness within and the inability of his naturalistic worldview to satisfy it, he nevertheless refuses to conclude that his worldview is in error.

Russell's mistake, perhaps, was that he was looking for God to reveal Himself in some sort of supernal ecstacy or Pascalian emotional experience. But Russell, a man of reason and logic, had at his disposal all the intellectual and philosophical resources needed to justify a belief that God was real.

He didn't need the intense emotional revelation that Blaise Pascal experienced in order to jettison his atheism. All he needed was the willingness to submit to what his heart told him must be true, and that, for whatever reason, he was unable to do.

Monday we'll look at two contemporary figures whose thinking Weikert discusses in his essay.

The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. I)

Richard Weikert has an interesting piece at Equip.org in which he writes about how the assumptions of 20th century modernity, i.e. that there is no God and therefore no objective morality, led to the horrors of the Gulag and the Holocaust.

He begins with an overview of the ideas of Marx and how they led to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin:

In 1945, the year that World War II ended, C. S. Lewis published That Hideous Strength, the third book in his science fiction trilogy. In that work Lewis depicted the dangerous consequences of embracing secular worldviews. His warning came at a time when Stalin and Hitler had committed horrific atrocities in the name of secular worldviews.

Stalin, in the name of a Marxist worldview, slaughtered millions in his collectivization campaign and in the Great Purge. Marx, based on his atheistic position, had promoted environmental determinism, the view that human behavior is shaped by the environment. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin all believed that by altering the economy — specifically by eliminating private property — they could transform human nature, thus leading us into a society free from oppression, poverty, and strife.

Another corollary of the Marxist worldview was that objective morality and human rights are non-existent. Marxists believed that morality was a tool of bourgeois oppression, so they did not believe in any objective human rights. Lenin explicitly argued that the ends justify the means. Any measures necessary to reach the final communist state were justified, in his view.

Because of their view of human nature and morality, Marxists saw people as things to be manipulated. Through labor camps Soviet communists hoped to re-educate prisoners to bring them into conformity to communist ways.

The Holocaust was also a consequence of a secular worldview:

Hitler’s atrocities also flowed from a dehumanizing worldview. Instead of environmental determinism, Nazism promoted biological determinism. It held that human nature and behavior are shaped by one’s biological traits, especially those associated with one’s race....Hitler believed that humans were locked in an inescapable struggle for existence that fostered evolutionary progress.

The only criteria to judge human behavior, he thought, was whether or not it helped foster evolutionary progress. Because he believed in biological inequality, especially racial inequality, this meant that measures to benefit those deemed biologically superior, along with policies to eliminate those considered biologically inferior, were morally justified.

There's much more to Weikert's essay, and I'd like to look at more of it over the next couple of days, but for now it's important to note that ideas have consequences and the consequences of the naturalism embraced by many moderns were particularly horrific. Modernity sought to exalt mankind, to apotheosize man, but by putting man in the place of God it actually dehumanized humanity. Instead of being created in the image of a God who loves us and endowed us with objective human rights, man was reduced to the level of a soulless brute.

Under the Stalinist and Hitlerian tyrannies, and the tyrannies imposed by lesser communists all over the globe in the 20th century, mankind was reduced to the level of cattle to be herded, manipulated and slaughtered whenever it suited the purposes of those who had the power to carry out their sick dreams.

And, let's note, given the truth of a naturalist worldview, a worldview that excludes God, there's no basis for saying that any of these slaughters was morally wrong. As atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins once observed, it's very difficult for one who holds to the atheistic view of reality to say that Hitler was wrong.

For anything to be objectively wrong there has to be an objective standard of goodness and there has to be accountability. Take away either of these, which atheism, of course, does, and the whole idea of objective right and wrong collapses. This is why Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong could murder over 100 million people in the 20th century and think that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing.

None of them believed butchering human beings was objectively wrong nor that they would ever be held accountable for doing it, and, if they were right about God, they were right about that.

More on Weikert's essay tomorrow.

The Transhumanist Dream

I sometimes ask my students if they wouldn't want to live forever and often receive the reply, even, strangely enough, from students who are religious, that they don't want to live forever. Yet so much that we do in life seems to be an attempt to stave off death. As someone once said, nobody wants to live forever, but nobody wants to die either.

If you had a terminal illness and a cure was discovered would you not want to avail yourself of the cure? Do not many of us exercise and diet in a perhaps futile effort to extend our years? The idea of eternal life is what gives most major religions their appeal (except for some of my students, apparently), and it's what drives a relatively recent secular movement called Transhumanism.

An article by Philip Bunn in which he discusses a book about transhumanism explains the goals of, and rationale for, the movement. Here are some excerpts:

Mark O’Connell’s excellent new book “To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death” follows the author’s interactions and interviews with self-professed transhumanists.

This eclectic collection of scientists, tech giants, journalists, and enthusiasts are prophets of a coming post-human species that embraces technology as the means to transcend present biological and psychological limitations. ...

The book serves a more important purpose than simply describing transhumanism, however: O’Connell’s interactions with transhumanists show that modern man is not prepared to argue against transhumanism. He must either accept it or find a theological alternative.

Man fears death, so must overcome it in some way. From this fear, the social scientists tell us, man creates fantasies about deities and paradises, resurrection and glorification. In its own way, transhumanism becomes religious insofar as it represents another in a long line of sets of belief adopted by man in hopes of overcoming his mortality. This time, man seeks help not from mystical transcendent beings but from his own will, instantiated in technology.

Some religious sects like Mormonism have made a place for transhumanist ideas, but transhumanists [are] clear that traditional Christian doctrine and transhumanism are largely incompatible.... However, on at least one point, the transhumanist and the Christian agree: death is an enemy to be conquered.

The Christian New Testament claims “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” Transhumanists concur, and propose that if death can be conquered through technology, death should be conquered through technology.

.... In his research, O’Connell encounters scientists who tell him that living to extreme ages will be possible soon, within his and his child’s lifetime. Some subjects interviewed even theorize that eventually we could theoretically “upload” consciousness and become more machine than man. ...

Like my students, O'Connell himself refuses to accept that an eternal life is desirable:

Despite hearing the arguments and understanding their source, O’Connell refuses to accept transhumanism. This is not because he thinks transhumanist ideals are unachievable, but because he cannot stomach the idea of living forever, or being himself in any other physical form. He ultimately objects not to the practicality of the transhumanist project but to the propriety of it.

O’Connell’s resistance to transhumanism culminates in a fascinating exchange in the book where O’Connell is forced to defend death and mortality as preferable to eternal life and vitality. He mounts standard arguments: Life’s brevity is what gives it value. Impending death makes our continued existence meaningful in some way. Also, life sucks; why extend it?

O’Connell’s transhumanist companions deftly deflect his objections. “There [is] no beauty in finitude,” they say. They argue that O’Connell’s qualms come from an essential human need to grapple with death and somehow justify it as good so we can avoid constant dread and despair. And, O’Connell admits, the transhumanists are right. There is something palpably absurd about defending death as some sort of human good....

Even if, as O’Connell theorizes, “the idea of meaning [is] itself an illusion, a necessary human fiction,” man has continued maintaining that illusion for millennia and seems to persist in preferring life to death. Unless O’Connell and others like him are prepared and able to convince the bulk of humanity that death is a happy end to be embraced, not fought against, it seems a choice has presented itself. This choice is between different religions that offer escape from death.

Transhumanism offers the materialist a religion through which to conquer death; other religions offer the same to those who have faith in gods other than technology.

Quite so, but death cannot be conquered completely through technology. Even were we to become machines no machine is indestructible. We will still die through accident, murder and war, and our deaths will be all the more tragic since we could have lived indefinitely longer than we did. A child's death is always much more grievous than that of an elderly person for that very reason.

Moreover, the sense of despair and grief at the death of loved ones would not be alleviated in a transhumanist world because there'd still be no hope, on transhumanism's atheistic materialism, of ever being reunited with those we've lost again. The loss would be eternal.

Perhaps the problem with the transhumanist project isn't the desirability of living forever. The problem is the indefinite extension of a meaningless life. Even if a few generations from now people were to live for two hundred years their lives would be no more meaningful or happier for being longer.

Meaning, significance, and purpose are what makes life worth living and these are not qualities we acquire by making ourselves more machine-like. To live just to live would be tedious and boring. Whether we live eighty years or eight hundred years the important question is "what are we living for?"

The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in his novel The Nausea describes a man sitting in a restaurant thinking to himself, "Here we are eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence, and there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Living forever would do nothing to fill the existential emptiness in the soul of modern man.

Whether we are materialistic transhumanists or we believe the traditional Christian version of eternal life the eternity to which we aspire must be meaningful and immensely satisfying. Otherwise, it'd be hell.

How Naturalism Undercuts Itself

Among the live options for worldviews on offer in modern times certainly one of the most popular among scientists, philosophers, and other academics is the view called naturalism. This view states that all that exists is ultimately explicable in terms of the sorts of explanations employed by scientists. In other words, nature and nature's laws are all there is, there's nothing else.

Most worldviews offer a Grand Story for how we got here. In naturalism the Story is some iteration of Darwinian evolution. Blind, natural processes generated life which evolved through genetic mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift to produce the rich diversity of life, including man and his marvelous powers of reason. The problem with this Story, though, is that according to philosopher John Gray (who is himself a naturalist) it's self-refuting.

In a piece in The New Republic critical of his fellow atheist Richard Dawkins Gray writes:

[T]he ideas and the arguments that [Dawkins] presents are in no sense novel or original, and he seems unaware of the critiques of positivism that appeared in its Victorian heyday.

One of the subtlest and most penetrating [critiques] came from the pen of Arthur Balfour, the Conservative statesman, British foreign secretary, and sometime prime minister. Well over a century ago, Balfour identified a problem with the evolutionary thinking that was gaining ascendancy at the time.

If the human mind has evolved in obedience to the imperatives of survival, what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of reality, when all that is required in order to reproduce the species is that its errors and illusions are not fatal?

A purely naturalistic philosophy cannot account for the knowledge that we believe we possess. As he framed the problem in The Foundations of Belief in 1895, “We have not merely stumbled on truth in spite of error and illusion, which is odd, but because of error and illusion, which is even odder.”

Balfour’s solution was that naturalism is self-defeating: humans can gain access to the truth only because the human mind has been shaped by a divine mind. Similar arguments can be found in a number of contemporary philosophers, most notably Alvin Plantinga.

Again, one need not accept Balfour’s theistic solution to see the force of his argument. A rigorously naturalistic account of the human mind entails a much more skeptical view of human knowledge than is commonly acknowledged.

Balfour's argument is sometimes a bit difficult to understand when encountered for the first time, but he says essentially that any trait selected for survival by natural selection can only coincidentally be a trait that aids in discovering truth. If human reason is the product of naturalistic evolution it would have been selected for because it somehow conferred survival value, not because it was a reliable guide to truth. There's no necessary connection between truth and survival of a species.

In her book titled Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism Secularism, and Other God Substitutes Nancy Pearcy quotes a number of naturalistic thinkers who make this point but who don't seem to realize that it undercuts their own naturalism. Pearcy writes:

Of course, the sheer pressure to survive is likely to produce some correct ideas. A zebra that thinks lions are friendly will not live long. But false ideas may be useful for survival. Evolutionists admit as much: Eric Baum says, "Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth."

Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not." The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false.

An example comes from Francis Crick. In The Astonishing Hypothesis, he writes that, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive."

But, Pearcy tells us, that means Crick's own theory cannot be relied upon to be true.

To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value.

The same thing is often said about morality. "It's an illusion," philosopher Michael Ruse wrote, "fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." But if all of these things are the illusory products of evolution how do we know that the theory of evolution and the naturalistic worldview it supports are not also illusions? Why should we think these things true if our thinking is as likely to lead us to falsehood as it is to lead us to truth? Pearcy continues:

A few thinkers, to their credit, recognize the problem. Literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, "If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? ... Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it."

On a similar note, philosopher Thomas Nagel asks, "Is the [evolutionary] hypothesis really compatible with the continued confidence in reason as a source of knowledge?" His answer is no: "I have to be able to believe ... that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct -- not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so." Hence, "insofar as the evolutionary hypothesis itself depends on reason, it would be self-undermining."

Pearcy goes on to show that Darwin himself, and many of his followers, argued that man's mind leads him to belief in God but that our minds, being the product of blind chance and selection, are too untrustworthy to credit that conclusion. Yet they never applied that same skepticism to the theory of evolution itself.

People are sometimes under the impression that Darwin himself recognized the problem. They typically cite Darwin's famous "horrid doubt" passage where he questions whether the human mind can be trustworthy if it is a product of evolution: "With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy."

But, of course, Darwin's theory itself was a "conviction of man's mind." So why should it be "at all trustworthy"?

Surprisingly, however, Darwin never confronted this internal contradiction in his theory. Why not? Because he expressed his "horrid doubt" selectively -- only when considering the case for a Creator.

In another passage Darwin admitted, "I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man." Again, however, he immediately veered off into skepticism: "But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?"

That is, can it be trusted when it draws "grand conclusions" about a First Cause? Perhaps the concept of God is merely an instinct programmed into us by natural selection, Darwin added, like a monkey's "instinctive fear and hatred of a snake."

In short, it was on occasions when Darwin's mind led him to a theistic conclusion that he dismissed the mind as untrustworthy. He failed to recognize, though, that to be logically consistent he needed to apply the same skepticism to his own theory.

Pearcy concludes the excerpt with a quote from Oxford mathematician John Lennox who wrote that according to atheism "the mind that does science ... is the end product of a mindless unguided process. Now, if you knew your computer was the product of a mindless unguided process, you wouldn't trust it. So, to me atheism undermines the rationality I need to do science."

One way to summarize all this is to say that you can believe your reason is trustworthy or you can believe in naturalistic evolution, but you can't believe in both.

The Problem of Personal Identity

One of philosophy's most fascinating puzzles is the question of personal identity. What is it about me that makes me me? Is it my body? Is it my brain? Is it the information in my brain?

If the body is constantly changing then in what sense does my self perdure through time? If my identity is just the contents of my brain how do I remain the same self over time as those contents change? What significant thing about me remains the same over time that keeps me the same person?

My fingerprints and my DNA stay relatively constant over time, of course, but are these what I'm referring to when I say "I"? Am I referring to my DNA or my fingerprints everytime I use the word "me" or "myself"?

The questions just keep coming. Suppose we say that it's our brains and their contents that make us who we are. Imagine that your body is dying but your mind is working well. Imagine further that doctors have, through amazing leaps in technology, developed the ability to transplant brains into different bodies. Suppose your brain is transplanted, at your request, into the body of a person named John who suffered a catastrophic brain injury. When you awaken from the surgery, who would you be, you or John?

Brain scientists know that if they cut the corpus callosum, the band of fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, two different centers of consciousness can be created. If either hemisphere is destroyed it's possible that a person could live on as a conscious being. Suppose your brain is transplanted in such a way that one hemisphere is placed in the body of John and the other hemisphere is placed in the body of Mary.

Have you survived the operation? If so, are you now two people? If you're only one person, which person are you, John or Mary? Is it possible to be more than one person simultaneously? If so, if you committed a crime before the operation, should both John and Mary go to jail for it?

If we adopt a skeptical view and say that there is no personal identity but rather that the self evolves over time and we're not the same person today that we were ten years ago, then how can anyone be held responsible for promises they made or crimes they committed ten years ago? If we are not the same person who committed the crime then to punish us would be to punish an innocent person, would it not?

A theist might resolve this perplexing problem by claiming that our identity resides in our soul, not in our body or our brain, at least not completely, and that our soul is independent of whatever body or bodies it "inhabits." But how would a materialist or naturalist who has no belief in any non-material constituents to the self, who has no belief in souls, resolve the problem?

Perhaps their only recourse is to deny the existence of any significant self altogether, as did the philosopher David Hume, and declare that your self is just a bundle of perceptions that you experience from moment to moment.

Or they could maintain with biologist Francis Crick that you are nothing but a pack of neurons.

Unfortunately, neither of these options seems very satisfying nor plausible.

The Progressive Contempt for Science

When in the West science began to replace religion as the focus of Man's faith, atheistic naturalists saw it as a wonderful, "enlightened" development. But now postmodern progressives, probably most of whom are themselves atheists, are laying siege to the basic assumptions upon which modern science was built - its belief in objective truth and the preeminence of rational inquiry - and the success that science has enjoyed over the last four centuries is threatened to be undone, not by the church, but by progressives.

For postmodern progressives the goal is to obliterate all distinctions of race, class and gender since all such distinctions are forms of "oppression." Logic and rationality are the tools of white, male patriarchy and therefore must go. The concept of objective truth interferes with the free play of individual subjectivity and personal autonomy and must therefore also go.

There are other, better ways to learn about the physical world, we're told, than through the racist, sexist assumptions that the world only reveals its secrets through the application of reason and the methods of white male-dominated science.

Denyse O'Leary has an article about this state of affairs at Mercatornet where she states that, "Considering how many atheists see science as a worthy successor to religion, they should think carefully about the current progressive assault on the core values of science."

Here are a few examples from O'Leary's essay:

In 2012, science journalists Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell, authors of Science Left Behind, noted that “if it is true that conservatives have declared a war on science, then progressives have declared Armageddon.”

Five years ago at Scientific American, Michael Shermer pegged the progressive approach to some environmental issues as a liberal war on science. Campbell and Berezow wrote in New Scientist (2013), “Conservatives rightly get a bad rap for anti-science policies. But progressives can be just as bad” because progressive ideology “is riddled with anti-scientific feel-good fallacies designed to win hearts, not minds.”

Though they claim common cause with liberals ... today’s progressive movement is actually socially authoritarian.”

Science, we are told by one source, is “inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women.” (Laura Parson, dissertation, University of North Dakota).

Parson is not a lone voice. We hear that objectivity, along with “scientific,” “valid,” “reliable,” and “rationality,” is racist and sexist, a mere veneer for white male power (P.L. Thomas. “White Men Of Academia Have An ‘Objectivity’ Problem,” HuffPost June 14, 2017).

Darwinian atheist Jerry Coyne complains, “These misguided people argue not only that there is no objective reality, but that attempts to find and teach it are sexist: that such endeavors are masculine ones, and that the methods of science themselves make the discipline sexist and patriarchal.”

Some progressives also tag science as a form of colonialism. Here again, as atheist neurologist Steven Novella makes clear, science’s core values, not individual scientists’ cultural failings, are under assault. Unfortunately, Dr. Novella responds by arguing that science is inherently anti-colonial because “the very essence of science is to seek objective truth that is separate from the assumptions of any particular culture.”

Does he not grasp that “objective truth” is precisely what is under assault?

The drive to encourage members of underrepresented minorities to consider a career in science is being subtly transformed into the claim that the thinking patterns of science are by nature oppressive. Let’s take math, for example. In a recent teacher training text, we learn of “critical mathematics” (“mathematics for social justice”), which sounds very much like a way of distracting attention from the hard work of abstract thinking in favour of other—doubtless laudable—achievements that are not relevant to learning math.

Similarly, there is a move afoot to abolish the algebra requirement for community college, fetchingly termed “Say Goodbye To X+Y” by NPR: “Algebra is one of the biggest hurdles to getting a high school or college degree — particularly for students of color and first-generation undergrads.”

That’s no surprise, considering that these students are far more likely to have attended failing public schools. The trouble is, reforming public schools that have failed for decades means head-on conflict with powerful interest groups. Instead, we are told that white privilege is bolstered by teaching math (Fox News). At The Atlantic, we hear that “school systems ought to support math educators in deconstructing and discarding the white frame of mathematics education.”

Moving beyond racial politics, some progressives disparage mathematics because its fundamental aims do not include inculcating progressive thought.

Overall, the progressive invasion of science and math education can only leave many students who are already shortchanged in math and science further behind.

O'Leary offers links to the examples she cites in her article, only about half of which is summarized above. I encourage you to read the whole thing. The trends she highlights, should they ever catch on, will surely destroy science, and anyone who is grateful for the standard of living that modern scientific discovery has given us and who is hopeful that the future will hold even more blessings should be very troubled by the desire of so many to tear it all down in the name of building an oppression-free society.

Reading her article I was reminded of G.K.Chesterton's famous observation that when men cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

Another Assault on Religion in America

The other day I wrote about Attorney General William Barr's Notre Dame speech last October in which he pointed out how religious liberty in the U.S. is under assault. The post was scarcely up for two days before news came of a troubling example of what Mr. Barr was talking about.

Two Florida banks, Wells Fargo and Fifth Third, are pulling their donations, some $5.5 million, from a program designed to help many poor, minority children who attend private Christian schools. The program provides tax-credit scholarships for more than 100,000 children 70% of whom are black, Hispanic or multiracial.

Why did the banks end their participation in the program? Joy Pullman at The Federalist explains:

Fifty-eight percent of the children who participated in this program in 2015-16 had single mothers. Their average family income was $25,550, near the federal poverty line. Researchers found that “on average, students who choose the scholarship were struggling academically in their prior public school,” and that these struggling children bump up their achievement to match that of richer kids with better schools within several years of joining the program.

The banks ended their support for the poor minority children after a harassment campaign by the Orlando Sentinel. The newspaper went after Christian schools in articles accusing them of hating LGBT people due to religious teachings about sex that are shared by the majority of the world’s faithful, including Muslims and Jews. Then the newspaper contacted major donors to the scholarships, including Fifth Third and Wells Fargo, to pressure them into recanting. It worked.

“After the [Orlando Sentinel] story ran, Fifth Third changed its mind,” the Orlando Sentinel article on the banks’ withdrawal from the donations says.

If the Sentinel alleged that Christians teach hatred of LGBT people they completely mischaracterized Christian teaching. Moreover, the mischaracterization was either malicious or foolish. It'd be like characterizing a parent who believes her grown daughter is wrong to cohabit with her boyfriend as therefore hating her daughter. It's ridiculous, but poor children will now be paying for the paper's shallowness.

Moreover, it's an indication of the hypocrisy of the Orlando Sentinel that they singled out Christian schools and apparently expressed no concern over what Muslim schools teach their children about sexuality. Perhaps the "journalists" at the Sentinel calculated that Christians are a much safer target for economic punishment than are Muslims.

Pullman notes in conclusion that,

Meanwhile, publicly funded venues across Florida, including state universities, host Drag Queen Story Hour, and numerous public schools across the state, including public universities, teach students that it’s possible to change one’s sex from female to male or vice versa. One school district even threatened a male gym teacher for refusing to watch a female student in the locker room, a situation that is still unresolved.

Apparently, anything sexual is okay in Florida except the belief that some things sexual are not okay.

It's Odd to Deny Free Will

Jerry Coyne is a University of Chicago biologist and a philosophical materialist. This means that he believes that everything that exists is reducible to material stuff and that there are no immaterial substances like minds or souls. If it's true that we're solely made up of matter then it's very difficult to see how we could have free will since matter is determined by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Coyne recently gave a talk at Williams University in Maryland where he elaborated on this consequence of a materialist worldview. Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor comments on Coyne's views in a piece at Mind Matters where he opens his critique with this:

When the history of modern materialism is written, it will be a catalogue of almost incomprehensible folly. The striking irony is that many of the most strident claims by materialists are not merely empirical and logical nonsense; much of materialism is self-refuting.

It's self-refuting, Egnor argues, because if all that's going on when we think or when we choose is electrochemical processes in the neurons in our brains, how can those processes be true or false? A chemical reaction is neither true nor false, it has no truth value at all.

Thus the claim that "materialism is true" is nonsense. It's what philosophers call a category mistake. Truth is a property of propositions, not chemical reactions.

Egnor employs this same criticism against Coyne's claim that our choices are not free but are determined by physical causes:

[T]he assertion that materialism is true is the implicit denial that materialism, or anything else, can be true.

Coyne’s assertion—determinism is true and free will is an illusion–is a proposition. That is, he has made a statement that can be true or false. If Coyne is right, then his own denial of free will is wholly the product of physical and chemical processes—action potentials, neurotransmitters, and the like. But physical processes are not propositions.

The secretion of dopamine at a synapse is neither true or false. It is merely a secretion of dopamine.

Thus, Coyne’s claim that his own ideas are wholly determined by physical and chemical processes is inherently a claim that his ideas have no truth value—they are neither true nor false. Coyne himself, and his (material) “ideas,” are just chemicals in motion.

So when Coyne denies free will based on his belief in determinism, he is telling us that his claim lacks truth value. And in that, and that only, he is right.

It might be more correct to say that if a materialist claims either that materialism is true or that determinism is true, the objective truth value of the claim is purely coincidental, arising as it does from a neurochemical matrix in the brain which does not possess the ability to intentionally generate truth claims. In other words, it might actually be a true description of the world, but if so, it's just a lucky coincidence that it's true.

Whether anyone in Coyne's audience was persuaded to believe that it's true or not is not because Coyne's claim corresponds to the way the world is but because the neurochemical matrix in the listener's brain produced a decision to believe or disbelieve.

In any case, there's something peculiar about a university professor presenting a lecture in which he implicitly asserts that the position for which he's arguing, the claim he wants his audience to believe, is really neither true nor false, yet that's pretty much what Coyne and other determinists do.

The Most Important Speech of the 21st Century

Thomas Jefferson once observed that no nation can expect to remain ignorant and free. He might have added, were he inclined that way, that neither can a nation expect to reject its Judeo-Christian heritage and remain free. Tragically, rejecting that heritage is exactly what's happening in Europe and the U.S.

Attorney General William Barr addressed this melancholy historical development and the baneful consequences it's having in a remarkable lecture at the Notre Dame school of law last October. What he said is so important that it should be read in its entirety - several times - but I'll just mention a few excerpts in this post.

Here are a few of the many pearls in his talk:

In the 20th century, our form of free society faced a severe test. There had always been the question whether a democracy so solicitous of individual freedom could stand up against a regimented totalitarian state. That question was answered with a resounding “yes” as the United States stood up against and defeated, first fascism, and then communism.

But in the 21st century, we face an entirely different kind of challenge. The challenge we face is precisely what the Founding Fathers foresaw would be our supreme test as a free society.

They never thought the main danger to the republic came from external foes. The central question was whether, over the long haul, we could handle freedom. The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.

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By and large, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the classical Christian tradition. These practical statesmen understood that individuals, while having the potential for great good, also had the capacity for great evil.

Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large. No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.

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Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground. In 1965, the illegitimacy rate was eight percent. In 1992, when I was last Attorney General, it was 25 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. In many of our large urban areas, it is around 70 percent.

Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.

As you all know, over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses. That is more casualties in a year than we experienced during the entire Vietnam War.

I will not dwell on all the bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has brought with it immense suffering, wreckage, and misery. And yet, the forces of secularism, ignoring these tragic results, press on with even greater militancy.

Among these militant secularists are many so-called “progressives.” But where is the progress?

We are told we are living in a post-Christian era. But what has replaced the Judeo-Christian moral system? What is it that can fill the spiritual void in the hearts of the individual person? And what is a system of values that can sustain human social life?

The fact is that no secular creed has emerged capable of performing the role of religion.

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We have all thought that after a while the “pendulum will swing back.” But today we face something different that may mean that we cannot count on the pendulum swinging back.

First is the force, fervor, and comprehensiveness of the assault on religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.

These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy, but also drown out and silence opposing voices, and to attack viciously and hold up to ridicule any dissenters.

One of the ironies, as some have observed, is that the secular project has itself become a religion, pursued with religious fervor. It is taking on all the trappings of a religion, including inquisitions and excommunication.

Those who defy the creed risk a figurative burning at the stake – social, educational, and professional ostracism and exclusion waged through lawsuits and savage social media campaigns.

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Part of the human condition is that there are big questions that should stare us in the face. Are we created or are we purely material accidents? Does our life have any meaning or purpose? But, as Blaise Pascal observed, instead of grappling with these questions, humans can be easily distracted from thinking about the “final things.”

Indeed, we now live in the age of distraction where we can envelop ourselves in a world of digital stimulation and universal connectivity. And we have almost limitless ways of indulging all our physical appetites.

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In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct becomes so high that society ultimately recoils and reevaluates the path that it is on. But today – in the face of all the increasing pathologies – instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have the State in the role of alleviator of bad consequences. We call on the State to mitigate the social costs of personal misconduct and irresponsibility.

So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the State to set itself up as the ersatz husband for single mothers and the ersatz father to their children.

The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with the wreckage. While we think we are solving problems, we are underwriting them. We start with an untrammeled freedom and we end up as dependents of a coercive state on which we depend.

There's so much more to what Barr said that I encourage you to read the whole thing. His address may well be the most important speech thus far in the 21st century, this century's version, perhaps, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's commencement address at Harvard in June of 1978 which it would also be worthwhile to read.

The Man Who Saved 62,000 Jews

Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and this week is a good time to learn a little bit about some of the brave men and women who undertook to rescue Jews from the Nazis bent on exterminating every man, woman and child of them.

Names like Raoul Wallenberg, Oscar Schindler, Corrie Ten Boom, Maximilian Kolbe, Irena Opdyke and so many more come to mind, but one man and his wife with whom I was not familiar was the subject of an article in The Federalist written by Amy Lutz.

The couple was Carl and Trudi Lutz (no relation to Amy), and they're credited by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. with having saved over 62,000 people during the war. Carl was a Swiss-American who worked for the Swiss diplomatic corps prior to WWII.

I encourage you to read the full article at the link to learn his background, but he was posted to Palestine before the war and then during the war to Budapest, Hungary. Here's the account of what he did once he found himself in Budapest:

[An] incident occurred during Lutz’s time in Palestine that would forever alter his perception. One day while standing on the roof of their apartment, Lutz and his wife Trudi saw four Jewish men lynched in the street. The next day, Lutz wrote a letter to his brother in which he said the following, “As I swore to the victims, as they suffered hits and stabs, that one day I would speak up for them.”

That opportunity would come soon enough. In 1942, Lutz transferred to Budapest, where he resided when the Nazis arrived in Hungary in March 1944. Lutz recalled the protective papers he used to assist German Jews in Palestine and determined they could be used to protect Hungarian Jews from being sent to Auschwitz. While it was unlikely anyone could find a way from Budapest to Palestine in the chaos and terror of 1944-1945, those holding the protective papers were considered to be under Swiss protection and exempt from deportation.

Lutz procured 8,000 protective “units” but realized his efforts would be for naught if he did not ensure that the Nazi forces ruling Hungary would honor them. He scheduled a meeting with a high-ranking Nazi official who had just arrived in Budapest, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann, one of the Third Reich’s leading facilitators of the Holocaust, was a bit taken aback by the request from the well-dressed, albeit soft-spoken diplomat. He even used their initial meeting as an opportunity to mock Lutz, comparing him to Moses attempting to rescue his people. However, Eichmann did pass along the request. Soon after, Lutz received word that Germany would authorize the 8,000 protective papers, in part because of Lutz’s previous work in Palestine [on behalf of German civilians trapped there when hostilities broke out].

Lutz immediately launched a plan to rescue far more than 8,000 people. While Eichmann assumed the 8,000 “units” Lutz requested meant 8,000 individuals, Lutz instead determined that “units” meant “families,” thereby increasing the number of people he could protect. He immediately began to disseminate the papers throughout Budapest.

Forged Swiss protective documents also began to appear in the city, but Lutz looked the other way. He also placed 76 buildings under Swiss diplomatic protection, where he was able to house thousands of Hungarian Jews who had lost their homes and property. Lutz frequently stepped in to rescue individual Hungarian Jews, once jumping in the Danube river to rescue a Jewish woman shot by fascist militia.

Eichmann eventually discovered Lutz’s deception in late 1944. Instead of refusing to authorize any neutral protective papers, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators hatched a devious plan. They brought Carl and Trudi Lutz to a brickyard, where Hungarian Jews were kept prisoner before deportation to Auschwitz. The authorities forced the Lutzes to identify forged Swiss protective papers, and they complied to preserve the authority of the legitimate papers.

While the couple attempted to falsely validate the more convincing forgeries, they could not do so for all the papers. Hungarian Jews with documents that could not be validated were no longer protected from deportation and were sent to their death. The experience haunted Carl and Trudi Lutz for the rest of their lives.

In a 1949 report, Lutz summarized his motivations behind his rescue efforts, writing that he did not consider himself a “Christian in name only” and therefore found it a “matter of conscience” to rescue the Hungarian Jews “condemned to die.”

Carl Lutz  in 1944

There's more to their story which you can read at the link. Carl and his wife divorced after the war, and he died in 1975 largely unknown and forgotten.

Naturalism, Morality and C.S.Lewis

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

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

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

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

Lewis explains,

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

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

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

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

To use such terms when the user knows they don't refer to anything is a form of social coercion. Naturalists who employ the rhetoric of good and evil are simply attempting to compel, or trick, others into behaving in ways the naturalists prefer by calling their actions good or evil when in fact they're neither good nor evil - no more than are the actions of a wolf or falcon or any other predator.

When one gull steals a morsel of food from another we don't call the gull or its behavior evil. Likewise, if we're just animals, if there's no transcendent moral order, why do we call an act like robbing an elderly lady evil?

Lewis adds:

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

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

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

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

Most Pro-Life President in History

I have a friend, a pro-life Christian, who despises President Trump. When I ask him why, he cites Trump's dishonesty and bad manners. Well, I reply, it's true that Mr. Trump is given to playing fast and loose with facts, and that he often would be better advised to resist the temptation to tweet, but what, I ask my friend, is the alternative for someone who holds the views he does?

Would he rather we have a president, like, say, Hillary Clinton, who appoints judges who would restrict religious freedom, who would continue to strip away protections for the unborn and who would continue to send millions of taxpayer dollars to organizations like Planned Parenthood that promote "a woman's right to choose"?

Given the choice between a president whose promiscuous taradiddles are sometimes embarrassing and one who would continue the annual destruction of over a million unborn babies, most of them either black or female, how could a pro-life Christian like my friend wish for the latter?

But would Mr. Trump actually be any better on this the most salient human rights issue of our time than Ms. Clinton or any of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination in 2020?

Well, according to some of the folks who took the trouble to attend Saturday's March for Life (You didn't know there was such a march? You must get your news from CNN.) Mr. Trump is the most pro-life president in our history. He's certainly done more for the cause than any other president in the last fifty years, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Mr. Trump hasn't always aligned himself with pro-lifers, however. In his previous life he was pro-choice, but becoming president has wrought a transformation in the man.

Whether or not the transformation is a political ploy, as his detractors allege, is really quite irrelevant. By appointing judges to both the federal bench and the Supreme Court who have a jaundiced view of the constitutionality of current abortion jurisprudence he has done more to reverse the tide on abortion than anyone else in his office has ever done.

He also, by appearing in person at Saturday's March, became the first president ever to have done so. It was a dramatic expression of solidarity with the movement.

Ben Domenech at The Federalist writes:

Trump spent most of his career as a limousine liberal on the issue of abortion. With some rare exceptions, his entire public history on the issue was pro-choice. His attitude largely seemed to disregard the matter, subsidiary to his more consistent interests in trade policy and the like. But since his election, it is impossible to say he has been anything less than the most successful pro-life president in the nearly half a century since Roe v. Wade.

Instead of trying to find the middle path as George W. Bush did on stem cells, instead of having any reluctance for defunding Planned Parenthood via the Reagan rule, Trump has viewed this as a binary process without any gray area. Either we fund abortions or we don’t. Either we name pro-life judges or we don’t. Either we call it like it is or we don’t. In each case, Trump’s tendencies toward shocking the polite conventions of politics has served pro-lifers well.

An abortion law regime that did represent the country would allow for legal bans after the first trimester as well as requirements for informing parents, and a variety of other limitations. This is the reality in most of Europe – in fact, their restrictions start even earlier. But the holy nature of Roe reduces this argument to the margins. This has to end.

It is the most fundamental question for us, whether the preborn lives that take root here are unique persons, with the right to draw breath and live, or whether they are non-persons, “lives unworthy of life”, “human weeds” as Margaret Sanger called them, whose destruction is a public good.

Tristan Justice, also at The Federalist, writes about how Trump has won over the skeptics in the pro-life movement:

“I was a little skeptical at first,” said rally attendee Ken Berman sporting a pro-Trump hat, but added that after three years of Trump in the White House, his concerns have largely been abated by the appointment of conservative judges.

Donald Sweeting, the president of Colorado Christian University which brought about 200 students to the march, also said he was skeptical but that Trump had earned his trust on abortion.

“There’s never been a president to challenge the abortion industry quite like Trump,” Sweeting said.

Marjorie Dannenfelser president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group endorsing pro-life candidates for office.

Dannenfelser admitted that she too, was skeptical at first of Trump’s commitment to pro-life issues and actually opposed Trump in the beginning. Four years ago, Dannenfelser even wrote a letter to Iowa voters urging Iowans “to support anyone but Trump,” in the 2016 Republican caucus because when it came to abortion, “Mr. Trump cannot be trusted.”

“He was my last choice until he became my first choice,” Dannenfelser told The Federalist, but said she came to “completely embrace” Trump through the election after extracting “concrete commitments.”

Since Trump was sworn into office, the president has held up his end of the bargain, championing pro-life policies and appointing two conservative Supreme Court justices offering pro-life activists hope that the days of Roe v. Wade could be numbered.

Meanwhile, Democrats have become increasingly radical on the issue of abortion:

For example, Democrats in the Virginia statehouse are currently considering a bill that would amend the Virginia Constitution to make abortion access a permanent legal right. Last January, they presented a bill that would repeal restrictions on abortion, allowing terminations up until the moment of birth, which Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam also backed.

Last year, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the “Reproductive Health Act” into law, a similar bill allowing late term abortion.

During the November Democratic debate, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who supports few restrictions if any on abortion said there was no room for pro-life Democrats in the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately, Ms. Warren's intolerant and exclusionary views haven't yet reached my friend's ears. I wonder what he'll say when they do.

A Few Good Questions

Elizabeth Warren has never declined an opportunity to pander to any group she thought the tactic might influence to vote for her, but it caught up with her the other day in an encounter with an angry dad that might plague her for the rest of the campaign.

According to PJ Media,

Elizabeth Warren was confronted at an Iowa town hall event by a voter who wanted to know if he could get back the money that he paid for his daughter's college education since Warren's running on forgiving student loan debt. "My daughter is in school," he said. "I saved all my money just to pay student loans. Can I have my money back?" Warren replied, "Of course not!"

The man continued to push Warren for an explanation for why some people can have a free education while others have to pay. "So you're going to pay for people who didn't save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?" he asked. "My buddy went out and bought a car and went on vacation, but I didn't. I saved my money. He made more than I did. I worked a double shift...so you're laughing at me," he said to Warren, who seemed to be smiling.

She denied laughing but didn't seem to have an answer to the perfectly logical question the voter had. Warren's only response was "I appreciate your time."

The man walked away in disgust as well he might've. Warren's debt forgiveness "plan" is a fraud. It only applies to current loan debt. Students who borrow money for college in the future will not be covered. In other words, Warren is trying to bribe the current crop of college students into voting for her with a promise to wipe away their debt.

The dad asked a very good question, of course, and it's one that goes beyond just college tuition. Legal immigrants to this country are asking the same question of Democrats who want to grant amnesty to those who came here illegally.

How is it fair to those who waited for years and did everything the right way to have others do everything the wrong way and be declared legal? How is it fair to those who are still waiting for their applications to be adjudicated to have people by the thousands jump ahead of them in line, like so many fare-jumpers on the New York subway, and still be let in ahead of those who are waiting?

Why doesn't the media ever ask a Democrat this question?

Speaking of questions the media chooses not to ask, here's another one: Up until this election cycle the Democrats never passed up an opportunity to condemn big money in politics and to criticize the Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, which permits it. Big money was corrupting the political process, they insisted, but that was until Democrat billionaires Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg got into the race and began spending their fortunes on ads castigating Donald Trump.

Bloomberg has promised to spend a billion dollars to defeat Trump even if he's not the nominee.

Suddenly, there was total silence about big money in politics from Democrat politicians and the media as their erstwhile criticisms just evaporated like morning fog.

So here's the question: Where are all those principled Dems who argued that it was crucial to the survival of our democracy to get big money out of politics now that big money is being used to help them get elected?

It's a funny sort of principle that only applies in cases where it doesn't harm one's own interests.

A Universal Cancer Cure?

Researchers at Cardiff University report a very encouraging discovery in cancer research which they believe has "enormous potential" for curing a broad array of cancers.

The Cardiff team discovered a particular type of immune cell in the body, called a T-cell, that could find and kill a wide range of cancerous cells in the lab, including lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells, without harming normal tissues.

This is marvelous news because although T-cells are already being used against certain specific types of cancers, this new find would make it possible to develop T-cells that could potentially be employed to kill many cancer types that current T-cell technology is not very effective against. Current treatments are not very successful, for example, against cancers that form tumors.

What makes the Cardiff team's discovery a great advance is that they were able to isolate a receptor on a T-cell that can identify and bind with many different types of cancer cells and which would act something like a missile guidance system that would direct the T-cell to the cancerous cell and destroy it.

The way T-cell cancer treatments work is that a blood sample is taken from a cancer patient and the T-cells are extracted. A virus carrying the gene for the cancer-finding receptor molecule would then be used to insert that gene into the T-cell.

The genetically modified cells are then grown in vast quantities in the laboratory and put back into the patient where the T-cells go to work hunting down and killing cancer cells in the patient's body.

Unfortunately, the research has only been tested in animals and on cells in the laboratory, and more safety checks would be needed before human trials could start.

Nevertheless, if the trials are successful, it could be that in a few years far fewer people will be dying from cancers for which there currently is no good treatment.

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.