Live Not by Lies

In his new book, Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher draws a comparison between the conditions which prevailed in Europe and Russia before the communist revolution in 1917 and the conditions which prevail in the contemporary West.

Dreher believes that the U.S. is ripe for a totalitarian takeover of our culture, though perhaps not of the murderous sort witnessed in virtually every communist country during the 20th century.

In his book he quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a victim of the Soviet prison camps known as "the Gulag." Solzhenitsyn described the totalitarianism of 20th century Soviet state and the horrific suffering of political and religious prisoners at the hands of the Soviet secret police (KGB).

These wretches had their skulls squeezed with iron rings, they were lowered into acid baths, they were trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs, they had red hot iron rods shoved up their colon, they had their genitals crushed beneath the boot of their torturers, they were kept from sleeping for days, subjected to thirst, and beaten to a pulp.

Other prisoners have testified to being starved and kept outdoors in freezing cold for hours with nothing on but their underwear.

This was communist totalitarianism (the word refers to the complete and total control of every aspect of a person's life by the state), and it's the logical endpoint of leftist ideology. It was vividly portrayed in books like Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago, Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind and films like The Lives of Others.

But Dreher isn't warning that this sort of mass scale barbaric brutality is coming to the West. What he sees on our near horizon is what he calls a "soft totalitarianism." It's more like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than George Orwell's 1984. It's a totalitarianism in which coercion is exercised by the masters of the culture who compel conformity through speech codes, fear of ruined businesses and careers, tax penalties, loss of opportunities and massive surveillance.

Nevertheless, the prevailing social conditions are so similar to those prior to 1917 in Russia that he's convinced that we should prepare for it.

Some of the conditions that he says make us vulnerable to a very profound restriction of our freedom are a loss of confidence in institutions like the family and government; the loss of belief in objective truth; waning religious commitment; the rise of identity politics in which someone is considered evil simply because of their race, gender, social class or religion; an unwillingness to transmit our heritage to the next generation and a perversion of such history that is transmitted (e.g. the 1619 project); alienation and isolation, especially among the young; and a diminution of the value people place on freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion.

Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), Dreher alleges, are playing the same role today that the Bolsheviks played in early 20th century Russia. Cancel culture puts at risk entire careers and the livelihoods of those who hold opinions contrary to those approved by the SJWs.

Add to all this the enormous potential for surveillance afforded by modern technology (imagine how easy it would be for all those smart devices in the home, like Alexa, to be programmed to monitor every conversation) and the untoward influence six giant tech companies - Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft - exert over our culture, and it's easy to see that we are precariously close to a precipice.

Here's one example of what's in store if the left continues to gain control over both our culture and our government. It doesn't appear in Dreher's book because it just came to light in the last day or so.

Some on the left have acknowledged that they're keeping an enemies list of people who worked for or otherwise supported Trump. The purpose of the list is to insure that those people have their careers ruined. The following is excerpted from the link:

Jennifer Rubin, a columnist at the Washington Post tweets:

Any R[epublican] now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into "polite" society. We have a list.

And she’s not alone in keeping a list. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted her approval of a project started by someone named Michael Simon, who’s keeping track of people who were Trump supporters. They’re finished.

Simon is a former Obama administration analytics guy who has started the “Trump Accountability Project” to keep a list of, as Democratic congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez calls them, “Trump sycophants.”

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets [sic], writings, photos in the future,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.

Simon responded, in a now-deleted tweet: "Yes, we are. The Trump Accountability Project (@trumpaccproject) Every Administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them – everyone."

One has to be alarmed by this sort of thing, even if one was originally skeptical of Dreher's thesis. It's all of a piece with the behavior of the left in the wake of every revolution in which they succeeded in toppling the established order going back to Paris in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949 and Cuba in 1959. The victors rounded up all those who opposed them, all those who refused to go along with the Marxist-Leninist program, and stripped them of their jobs, their careers, their homes, threw them into horrid prisons, tortured them and murdered them by the millions.

Our contemporary SJWs may not go so far as state sanctioned murder - Dreher doesn't think they will - but they have every intention of ending the careers and wrecking the lives of those who oppose them.

There's more about this group of political revenge-seekers ontheir website.

They make laughable President-elect Biden's promise to bring us all together in unity and harmony. Fat chance of that as long as his party harbors petty tyrants like these.

Some Thoughts on the Election

I write this on November 6th while the vote tallies in several major states are still incomplete. Nevertheless, assuming the trends which show Mr. Biden heading to the White House are correct the good news for conservatives is that the news isn't all bad.

I'm pretty sure that had voters judged Mr. Trump on the basis of what he has accomplished for the country and the world and not on the basis of his lamentable personal characteristics or the portrait the media has been at pains to paint of him - in other words, if Americans judged Trump like they judge their music and movie celebrities - the President would have won easily.

But be that as it may, the election results were in some respects encouraging for conservative Republicans and less so for Democrats. In fact, just about the only reason the Democrats have for rejoicing is that their candidate won the presidency. Everything else for them is rather bad news. Here's why:

1. The Democrats had high expectations for a "blue wave" which would sweep large numbers of Democrats into office at the national and state level and give them control of the nation's destiny for generations into the future, but the wave never materialized.

The Republicans appear to have retained control of the Senate despite having almost twice as many members up for reelection than did the Democrats (23/12). Republican control of the Senate will stifle any plans the Democrats may have had to "expand" the courts, add states to the union, abolish the electoral college and end the filibuster.

Moreover, any radical economic legislation, such as the Green New Deal, issuing from the House of Representatives will be Dead on Arrival in the Senate.

Any judges that Mr. Biden would have opportunity to appoint will have to be reasonably moderate since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell can block or slow walk any radical progressives which might come up for confirmation.

2. Contrary to expectations, the Democrats picked up no seats in the House and stand to actually lose a dozen or more which may slow down the legislative ambitions of the leftmost members of the chamber. They anticipated gaining as many as fifteen seats, but they've lost, at this point in the counting, about ten and may ultimately lose even more.

Since the minority party usually does well in mid-term elections when the other party holds the White House, the GOP may be poised to take back the House in 2022.

3. Also contrary to expectations, as of this writing, no state legislatures were flipped from Republican to Democrat, but one was flipped the other way.

Likewise with state governorships where the GOP picked up one.

4. The Democrats suffered a severe erosion in their base constituency, especially among Hispanics. Minorities voted for Republicans in numbers not seen since 1960. Barack Obama promised to bring the races together, but did little or nothing to accomplish it. Trump has made a surprising start, especially given the relentless media narrative that he's an inveterate racist.

There appears to be a tectonic shift taking place in American politics. Throughout much of the 20th century Democrats were seen as the party of the working class and minorities while Republicans were perceived to be the party of the wealthy corporate execs. Today that's reversing. Republicans are rapidly gaining traction with the working class and minorities and the Democratic party is populated with rich celebrities and fat cat CEOs from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and elsewhere.

One caveat about this, though. The shift may be more a function of President Trump's popularity with blue collar workers and minorities than a function of their fondness for the Republican party. Unless the party learns something about governance from Mr. Trump, its popularity with these groups may prove ephemeral.

In any case, perhaps the biggest advantage of a Biden presidency for Democrats will be that he'll be able to revoke all of Mr. Trump's executive orders, the same orders which were largely responsible for the pre-pandemic economic boom. Despite his campaign promises and the pressure he'll be under from the progressive wing of his party, I'm not sure Mr. Biden is going to be eager to do that.

5. The media, both the news media and social media, as well as most pollsters, have taken an enormous and well-earned hit to their credibility. Having forecast a Democratic blowout they're left having to explain how they could've gotten it so badly wrong. Again.

6. Even if he serves his entire four year term (and that's a huge "if") Mr. Biden will almost certainly be a one term president. Mr. Trump could run again in 2024 if he wishes. He'd be the same age then as Mr. Biden is now, so his age shouldn't prevent him from running and winning.

Of course, this assumes that when the final vote counts are in and the lawsuits are all adjudicated Mr. Biden will have prevailed and Mr. Trump will have come up short. As of right now, however, that's by no means a certainty.

Naturalism, Utilitarianism and Egoism

My students are in the midst of discussing Utilitarian ethics as well as the view called ethical egoism so I thought I'd rerun this older post on the topic:

Peter Singer is a philosopher at Princeton who has gained substantial notoriety for invoking his utilitarian ethical principles to justify infanticide and animal rights. In a piece at The Journal of Practical Ethics the editors interview Singer and question whether utilitarians can, or do, live consistently with their own ethical philosophy.

Here's part of the interview:

Editors: Frances Kamm once said...that utilitarians who believe in very demanding duties to aid and that not aiding is the same as harming, but nevertheless don’t live up to these demands, don’t really believe their own arguments....She concludes that ‘either something is wrong with that theory, or there is something wrong with its proponents’.

What do you think about this argument? Why haven’t you given a kidney to someone who needs it now? You have two and you only need one. They have none that are working – it would make a huge difference to their life at very little cost to you.

Peter Singer: I’m not sure that the cost to me of donating a kidney would be “very little” but I agree that it would harm me much less than it would benefit someone who is on dialysis. I also agree that for that reason my failure to donate a kidney is not ethically defensible.... Donating a kidney does involve a small risk of serious complications. Zell Kravinsky suggests that the risk is 1 in 4000.

I don’t think I’m weak-willed, but I do give greater weight to my own interests, and to those of my family and others close to me, than I should. Most people do that, in fact they do it to a greater extent than I do (because they do not give as much money to good causes as I do).

That fact makes me feel less bad about my failure to give a kidney than I otherwise would. But I know that I am not doing what I ought to do.

This response raises several questions, but I'll focus on just one. Singer believes it's wrong not to give the kidney and he feels guilty about not doing so, yet why should he? In what sense is his violation of utilitarian principles morally wrong? Indeed, why is utilitarianism morally superior to the egoism to which he admits to succumbing?

To put it differently, if Singer chooses to be a utilitarian and donate the kidney while someone else chooses to be an egoist and keep his kidneys, why is either person right or wrong? Given Singer's naturalism, what does it even mean to say that someone is morally wrong anyway?

On naturalism there's no moral authority, except one's own subjective convictions, and no accountability, so in what way is keeping one's kidneys an offense to morality?

Elsewhere in the interview, Singer notes that his ethical thinking is based on the work of the great 19th century ethicist and utilitarian Henry Sidgwick and mentions that,

Sidgwick himself remained deeply troubled by his inability to demonstrate that egoism is irrational. That led him to speak of a “dualism of practical reason” — two opposing viewpoints, utilitarianism and egoism, seemed both to be rational.

In other words, the choice between them is an arbitrary exercise of personal preference, although Singer doesn't agree with this because he believes evolution affords grounds for rejecting egoism. It's hard to see how this could be the case, however, since it's difficult to understand how blind impersonal processes like random genetic mutation and natural selection could impose moral duties.

Nor is it easy to see how acting against the trend of those evolutionary processes can be morally wrong. How is one doing anything wrong if he chooses to act contrary to the way mutation and natural selection have shaped the human species? Why should he accept the ethical results of evolutionary history any more than we accept the physical limitations imposed on us by gravity when we go aloft in an airplane or hot air balloon?

The only reason we have for not putting our own interests ahead of the interests of others - as in the example of the kidney - and the only rational reason we would have for feeling guilt over our failure to consider the needs of others is the belief that such failures are a transgression of an obligation imposed upon us by a transcendent personal moral authority.

Singer lacks such a belief and can thus give no compelling explanation for his feelings of guilt nor any compelling reason why one should be a utilitarian rather than an egoist.

Putting One's Worldview to the Test

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live within it consistently. On this test the worldview called naturalism - i.e. the view that the natural world is all there is, no supernatural entities exist - falls short since many, if not most, naturalists find that they have to give up some beliefs and assumptions that are very difficult to let go. Among the things for which there is no room in a logically consistent naturalistic ontology are the following:

1. ultimate meaning in life
2. free will
3. objective moral right and wrong
4. the intrinsic value of human beings
5. objective human rights
6. mind/consciousness
7. an adequate ground for beauty, love and truth

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in a classical Christian worldview, it could be argued that they're actually entailed by that view. The logic of naturalism, though, compels one to regard them all as illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that. They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if they have free will.

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but in the way they live their everyday lives they affirm their reality over and over again. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, human rights, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage, because their own worldview cannot provide them.

But when one has to poach from competing visions of reality in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to be holding a rational, coherent worldview. To be consistent a naturalist should indeed be a nihilist and accept the emptiness, sterility and despair nihilism entails, yet even though some naturalists recognize these bitter fruits of their view of things, few can bring themselves to accept them. They embrace the naturalism while simply suppressing or ignoring the logical implications as if they don't matter.

For those who do accept the consequences of their naturalism, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that lies at the heart of naturalism. It's all worth it, they tacitly calculate, to be free of any obligation to a supreme being.

Naturalists are free to embrace this schizoid view of life, of course, but they're not free to live as if they can hold on to those existential needs while denying the only adequate ground for them and at the same time declare their worldview to be more rational than the Judeo-Christian alternative.

A Warning from Ancient Rome

As stores and shops in our cities board up in anticipation of riots in the wake of our election, as groups like Antifa and BLM and their enablers among the progressive left threaten to destroy our institutions and erase our heritage, and, as less violent but equally corrosive forces permeate academia and our pop culture, this post, first put up on VP a couple of years ago, seems appropriate:

Here are words of a man who lived over two thousand years ago in circumstances not too dissimilar from those we find ourselves in today. His words might cause us to pause and reflect. The man is Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the chief citizens of Rome in the first century B.C. and one of the most famous of all Romans. He writes:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

I hope Cicero was right that a nation can survive fools and the ambitious. I'm quite certain he's right, unfortunately, that a nation cannot survive corruption that starts and spreads from within. When the "pillars of the city," the institutions that bind us together and strengthen us as a people, are undermined we become like a massive tree that's hollowed out by years of internal decay and crashes to the ground in the next strong wind.

When people are conditioned by those who want to see us fall, people who want us to lose trust in our government, our courts, and our traditional freedoms, when our citizens, especially our young, are alienated, isolated and atomized by their obsession with impersonal technology, when the citizenry is encouraged to no longer value or respect family, religion, school and the Constitution, when everyone is propagandized to believe that a large majority of citizens is ineradicably corrupted by racism and every manner of phobia, and when what matters most is our own personal happiness best achieved through entertainment, hedonism and the accumulation of consumer goods, then we, like that tree, like ancient Rome, will be too corrupt to withstand stresses imposed either from within or without.

One way to avoid that fate, perhaps, is to recognize the many voices in our culture whose rhetoric is designed to erode our confidence and faith in the institutions and principles that made America great (I don't mean that to sound Trumpian).

The second thing is to stand up to those voices, to refute them, repudiate them or ignore them altogether.

The third thing is to get about the business of repairing the damage that has already been done to the "pillars of the city."

If enough people commit themselves to this project then perhaps we can avoid the fate that Rome suffered. If not, if, as Cicero puts it, we lose the will to resist the ideological toxins in our culture then how will we keep the human wolves at bay?

Six Perplexing Problems in the Philosophy of Science

Mathematician Granville Sewell has a piece at Evolution News in which he lists six evidences of purposeful agency in the structure of the universe and the emergence of life. Not only are these strong evidences for what philosophers call intelligent design, but they also constitute six very difficult problems in the philosophy of science.

Sewell introduces his six with this:

The ACLU speaks for much of the media and of academia when it says the theory of intelligent design “simply says that some things that seem very complex could not have happened based on natural causes. So where it sees complexity, it declares that it must have been created by a supernatural entity. This is not science.”

Oh really? Is that all there is to it? Not exactly. Below is a modest attempt to provide a summary of the main scientific evidences for design in our world, for those who have been told that such evidence does not exist.

The six lines of evidence he lists and discusses are these:

1. The Fine-Tuning of Conditions on Earth
2. The Fine-Tuning of the Physical Laws of the Universe
3. The Origin of Life
4. The Evolution of Humans
5. The Origin of Human Consciousness
6. The Beginning of Time

He gives an explanation of each of these at the link, which the reader is encouraged to check out, and each of them is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic understanding of things.

Another example he could have mentioned (although perhaps he subsumes it under #1 and #2) is the extraordinary fitness for life of many of the atoms on the periodic table.

In his recent book The Miracle of the Cell geneticist Michael Denton explains how the chemistry of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous as well as several heavier elements is precisely what it must be in order for there to be living things of even minimal complexity and that this chemistry must've been baked into the universe at the very outset of its existence, long before any life appeared.

It is, Denton says, a "primal blueprint" for life.

Similarly to the other books in his series of which it is a part (Firemaker, Wonder of Water, and Children of Light) Denton takes us in The Miracle of the Cell on an excursus into the cell to show us that had not these elements had precisely the properties they do, living cells would be quite impossible.

He concludes his fascinating book (fascinating, but perhaps not for readers with scant background in chemistry or biology) with these words,

I believe that when the path [from chemistry to life] is finally elucidated, it will turn out to be extraordinary, one of the greatest scientific wonders, revealing a far deeper teleology [purpose] in nature than all the elements of natural fitness for the cell and for life documented so far.

Even more, I believe that the elucidation of that fateful route [to living cells] will be of far greater intellectual consequence than any other discovery in science since the birth of science in the sixteenth century. Indeed, I believe that the path, when discovered, will prove to be so obviously indicative of a profound teleology in the very ground of being that it will prove a watershed in the history of thought.

Conversely, if instead it is eventually established that there is no purely natural path across the great gulf from non-life to life, and that only the additional exertion of an intelligent agent could have assembled the first cell on Earth, that will be equally a watershed in human thought.

For readers with the equivalent of a high school education in chemistry or an undergraduate level education in biology almost every page of Denton's book contains captivating descriptions of the exquisite fine-tuning of the atoms and molecules necessary for the construction of a functioning biological cell.

I highly recommend it to readers with the appropriate background.

Why We Need the Electoral College

One of the many issues at stake in tomorrow's election is the fate of the electoral college. Democrats want to do away with it and Republicans want to keep it, but many voters, unfortunately, have no idea what the electoral college is and why it matters.

To help us understand this institution here's a short five minute video that explains how the electoral college works and why it's important. The video was originally made about five years ago so some of the references to political figures may seem a little anachronistic, but that doesn't detract from its message.

It's disturbing that there's so much support on the left for abolishing the electoral college. One gets the feeling that those who wish its demise do so because it's an impediment to their electoral success. If they can't win playing by the traditional rules then they want to change the rules.

That same sentiment is also at the root, it seems, of the desire among many Democratic leaders to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices and to grant statehood to Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

If a Democratic president appointed two or four more progressive justices they'd have a permanent majority on the court which would allow them to circumvent Republican legislatures.

If both D.C. and Puerto Rico became states the overwhelming likelihood is that they would elect Democratic senators which would give Democrats an almost invincible majority in the Senate for at least a generation.

As I said, there's a lot at stake in tomorrow's election.

Three Things to Think about Before You Vote

We've all heard, probably more than once, that Tuesday's election may be the most consequential election of our lifetimes. I don't think that that's an exaggeration, but whether it is or isn't, I doubt that there are many who will vote on Tuesday who are still undecided as to whom they'll cast their ballot for.

Indeed, almost 70 million voters have already decided and have taken advantage of early voting to express their support for their favored candidates.

Nevertheless, for those who haven't yet voted here's a short (less than 3 minutes) video from Dennis Prager that might be helpful. It's titled Three Things to Think about Before You Vote:

Also, I'd like to take the liberty to recommend a couple of previous VP posts that might be helpful. This one explains the differences between the various political ideologies such as conservatives and progressives, a matter which many find confusing and which, hopefully, this post will clarify.

This post, on the other hand, explains why I'm voting the way I am.

What's Wrong with Socialism?

Conservative politicians and talk show hosts frequently level the accusation that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and pretty much the rest of the elites in the Democratic Party are socialists. The charge is either true or not far from the truth concerning many of the people it's directed at, but unfortunately not just a few people, especially younger voters, have only a vague idea what socialism actually is and why Americans should reject it.

In an attempt to help correct this gap in the public's understanding I offer this allegory to which everyone should be able to relate:

Imagine that you're in a college class and the class is scheduled to take a test soon. You and your friends study hard. You form a study group. You review the Zoom recordings of the class lectures. You read and reread the textbook assignments. You stay up all night the night before making sure that you've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's.

Meanwhile, others in the class blow it off. They don't study, they play video games instead and spend their time texting their friends and sleeping.

Test day arrives. When you get your papers back you and your friends have all scored A's and B's and the sluggards have scored D's and F's. It's a familiar story to many students, and here's where the socialism metaphor comes in.

Your professor thinks it's unfair that you and your friends did so much better than your classmates. After all, the professor intones, you went to better high schools, you had the advantage of having better study habits, your upbringing made you more disciplined and instilled in you a strong desire for success. The students who didn't do so well may have had none of these advantages. It's not fair that your privileged background should cause you to do better than those who are less privileged.

Therefore, the professor concludes, he's going to take points from your scores and give them to the students who got the D's and F's so that everybody winds up with a C.

When the next test comes around you and your friends decide that working hard doesn't matter, so you don't put nearly as much effort into your preparation as you did the last time. Meanwhile, your less motivated classmates certainly have no incentive to work harder since they do well enough to suit them by just goofing off. The scores come back and they still have D's and F's, but although you and your friends have the highest scores in the class, they're only C's.

When the professor redistributes the points everyone, including you, now has a D.

By the time the third test is administered nobody is motivated to work hard to prepare. The redistribution of "wealth" has sapped you and your friends of all incentive to put forth any serious effort. After all, why work hard when you can't achieve any more than those who don't?

Translate this into economics and you have socialism.

This short video makes the same point differently:

Does Evil Exist?

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 produced horrors that defy description. Serb soldiers raped Bosnian women and girls and butchered their men and even their babies by the tens of thousands. The record of their barbaric inhumanity is as hard to believe as it is to read, and is a sickening testament to the depravity that lies within the human psyche.

That so many men were capable of such cruelty is surely compelling evidence of human fallenness and the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece at the New English Review, a couple of years back offered some insight into the terrifying iniquity that plagues our world.

Francis reminds us that,

The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:

. . . All of us are his [God's] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.

When the crowd laugh at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it.

All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath. But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter.

All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on Naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!

Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?

The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:

. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.

Indeed there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them. An atheist like Leff has no grounds for believing that there is evil in the world. The most he can say is that there are behaviors he doesn't like.

The word "evil" has no meaning in a godless world other than as an expression of personal, subjective revulsion. Those who share Leff's unbelief have a choice. They can acknowledge that evil exists or they can continue in their atheism, but they can't do both.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

This post is a rerun of one I originally wrote in 2016:

In the mid-1980s a sociologist by the name of Neil Postman wrote a book that was destined to become a classic in cultural criticism. The book was titled Amusing Ourselves to Death, and it was Postman's thesis that television dumbed down everything and that our politics would eventually be transmogrified by that medium from a serious exercise in selecting the people who would guide our national destiny into little more than a frivolous spectacle.

Journalist Paul Brian has a column at The Federalist which amplifies Postman's prescient prognostication and in which he argues that television is corrupting not just our politics but our very ability to think:

Postman saw today’s click-craving, faux-outrage 24/7 news cycle slouching over the field of satellite dishes to be born from decades away. Even though the Internet Age was not yet upon him, he saw where the path of everything-as-entertainment was leading: to people having shorter average attention spans than goldfish, to a continuous present where contradictions and context are just minor details of no great interest.

“With television we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present,” Postman writes. “In a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit.”

In foreseeing the climate that would pave the way for pure-celebrity candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura, and Donald Trump, not to mention the elevation of politicians like President Barack Obama to celebrity status, Postman surely deserves his reputation as the Nostradamus of the digital age.

The game show sets upon which our candidates stage their debates, the sporting event atmosphere that the media creates, the melodramatic "countdowns" to the debates and elections, the fascination with sexual scandal, the focus on whether some trivial development will help or hurt a candidate rather than on whether it's really even relevant to the issues that should concern us, all conspire to stifle thought.

Campaigns are no longer vehicles for helping voters understand issues and discern truth so much as extravaganzas exploited by the media to attract viewers who wish merely to be entertained.

Serious discussion of issues requires thinking and the strenuous exercise of reason, but that's not a promising way to garner ratings among the unthinking masses of television viewers. Better to package campaigns and candidates in a political version of Survivor:

We now live in a political climate where politicians embrace fame. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes national news for being photographed shirtless. Trump hires a media provocateur as his campaign CEO, prompting speculation his plan is to form a media empire if his presidential run doesn’t pan out. Hillary Clinton’s supporters fret that her appearance on Kimmel received lower ratings than reuns of Teen Moms and Friends (but she’s trying to increase star power by hanging out with Justin Timberlake).

Amusing Ourselves to Death essentially champions Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World over George Orwell’s vision in 1984.

“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no 'Big Brother' is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think,” Postman writes.

“In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours,” Postman prophesies with dark humor. Orwell saw a future where books were banned, Huxley one in which there was no need to ban books because nobody wanted to read them in the first place.

The media beguiles us into focusing on which candidate has made the most serious gaffe or committed the greatest outrage against social orthodoxy or articulated the cleverest put-down. We receive constant reminders as to who looks old, who looks tired, who looks frumpy. What the candidate would actually do if elected is barely given a thought by a media determined to seduce us with breathless reports of a candidate's eloquence, style, charm, and afflatus, but rarely analyzing in any serious way the quality of a candidate's ideas.

They seem determined to amuse us to death.

Postman endeavors to prove that ... when books and print newspapers were the sole source of information, discourse was “generally coherent, serious and rational.” But in the Age of Television (elsewhere he calls it the Age of Show Business), political discourse in particular has become “shriveled and absurd,” reliant on context-free snippets of information and entertaining spectacles and gaffes.

And it's not just our politics which suffers from this infatuation with the trivial, frivolous and mindless. Sporting events are turned into multimedia assaults on the senses and intellect with halftime rock bands and fireworks and meaningless side-line interviews involving vacuous questions posed by witless "reporters." Many church services feature epilepsy-inducing strobe lights, artificial stage fog, deafness-inducing high decibel "worship" music, and flamboyant preachers whose message, even if it's occasionally worth hearing, is often obscured by the medium in which it's presented.

One example of mind-dulling news reportage, albeit one of minor importance, is the radio news report that features a snippet of often unintelligible background noise from some foreign trouble site. Sometimes it's screaming sirens, or machinery noise, or people yelling in a foreign tongue. Listeners aren't supposed to ask what the actual purpose of playing that particular sound bite could possibly be, they're just supposed to allow it to anesthetize them into an acquiescence to the pointlessness of it.

Postman and Brian, I think, are right. We're not a people who want to think. We're a people who want to be able to avoid thinking, especially about politics and religion. We really want only to be distracted and entertained. Brian quotes Postman:

“Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice,” he writes. “The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

A Beautiful Dance

In the past I've posted video of a spectacular ornithological phenomenon carried out by one of the most common birds in North America and Europe - the European starling. Starlings were introduced into North America in the early 1890s by a group who released 100 of them in Central Park, New York because they wanted North America to be blessed with every species of bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.

Every North American starling is descended from these original 100 birds, and the descendents have spread so far so rapidly that some birders consider them "trash" birds. If you have a bird feeder at home and use suet in the feeder starlings have doubtless visited it (and probably hogged all the food).

Yet, even though some people consider them pests, there are places throughout their range where they perform one of the most beautiful aerobatic dances ever witnessed in nature. It's called a murmuration, and the photographers at Lad Allen Media went to Modesto, California to film it.

If you've never seen a murmuration you'll want to watch this five minute video. It not only shows beautiful footage of this amazing display but it also discusses the latest research into how these birds do it.

Enjoy:

The Problem of Consciousness

There are two phenomena in the universe which are as mysterious as they are commonplace. One is time and the other is human consciousness. Despite their ubiquity in our lives no one really knows what either of them actually is.

Consciousness is particularly problematic for those who embrace a materialist ontology, i.e. those who believe that everything that exists is reducible to material "stuff" like atoms and molecules.

Consciousness, however, seems to refute this belief because whatever consciousness is it's not material nor is it something, like gravity, that matter could produce.

This video does a good job of explaining the problem. If you watch it you'll hear the term physicalism. For the purposes of the video physicalism is synonomous with materialism.

To give a sense of the state of our ignorance about the nature of consciousness and how consciousness arises in human beings consider the following quotes from philosophers and scientists who work in the fields of philosophy of mind and neuroscience:

• "But the hard problem of consciousness [The intractable difficulty of explaining how something material like electrochemical reactions in a brain can produce conscious experience like the sensation of pain is referred to as the “Hard Problem” of consciousness] is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run." David Barash, atheistic materialist and evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington.
• “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.” Jerry Fodor, Rutgers University philosopher.
• “Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.” Roger Wolcott Sperry, Nobel neurophysiologist.
• “Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.” Nick Herbert, physicist.
• “No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians’ hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it.” Larry Dossey, Physician and author.
• “I think the idea of (materialists) saying that consciousness is an illusion doesn’t really work because the very notion of an illusion presupposes consciousness. There are no illusions unless there is a conscious experience or (a conscious person) for whom there is an illusion.” Evan Thompson, philosopher.

Perhaps the difficulty arises because so many thinkers in the field are trying to squeeze consciousness out of matter when in fact that's like trying to squeeze orange juice out of a turnip. Perhaps, too, it is the materialist's adamant refusal to accept the existence of immaterial mind that is at the root of their difficulty.

Four Questions about Free Will

An article at Mind Matters lists and discusses four questions concerning free will that often arise in conversations on the topic.

Here are the four with a brief summary of the discussion. For the complete discussion see the article:

1. Has psychology shown that free will does not really exist? No, in fact the experiments of Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) show just the opposite. We've discussed these experiments on VP in the past, for instance here.

2. Is free will a logical idea? Yes, in fact denying it is often illogical. If all our decisions and beliefs are determined then our denial of free will is the inevitable product of our genes and childhood influences of which we may be only dimly, if at all, aware. We may think we have good reasons to disbelieve in free will, but whatever those reasons are they likely play a very minor role in our disbelief.

3. Would a world without free will be a better place? No, it'd be a dystopia in which there's no guilt, no moral obligation, no human dignity and in which people would inevitably come under the tyranny of totalitarian "controllers."

4. Are there science concepts that support free will? Yes, the concept of information is one. Check out the original article to see why.

It's interesting that the conviction that we're free seems almost inescapable. Even people who are determinists can't shake it.

Philosopher John Searle, for example, writes that, "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."

John Horgan, a writer for Scientific American, states that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will."

So why do many people deny that we're free? Perhaps the overriding reason is that they have embraced a metaphysical materialism that eliminates from their doxastic structure anything that cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics. Those laws are strictly deterministic, thus our intuition that we're free must be an illusion.

The next question we might ponder is why should anyone embrace materialism? Perhaps the answer to that is that the alternative, the belief that there are immaterial substances like minds, puts one on a slippery slope to belief in God and that belief is just not tolerable for many moderns.

Better to deny that we have free will, the thinking goes, than to open the door of our ontology to supernatural entities.

Accounting for an Exquisitely Calibrated Universe

The book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Cosmos by cosmologists Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis discusses the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the forces, parameters and constants that comprise the structure of the universe. Here's a video trailer that introduces the theme of their book:

The trailer suggests that there are four possible explanations for this incomprehensible level of precision, but for reasons I'll explain in a moment, there really are only three.

The first is that something about the universe makes it a logical necessity that the values cosmologists find are in fact the only possible values a universe could have. There is no reason, however, to think this is the case. There's nothing about the universe, as far as we know, that makes it impossible for gravity or the strong nuclear force, to take just two examples, to have slightly different strengths.

The second explanation is that even though it's astronomically improbable that any universe would be so fine-tuned that living things could exist in it, if there are other universes, all with different parameters, universes so abundant that their number approaches infinity, then one like ours is almost bound to exist. This option goes by the name of the multiverse hypothesis.

The difficulty with this idea is that there's no good reason to believe other universes actually do exist, and even if they do why should we assume that they're not all replicas of each other, and even if they're all different whatever is producing them must itself be fine-tuned in order to manufacture universes, so all the multiverse hypothesis does is push the problem back a step or two.

The third explanation is that our universe is the product of a very intelligent agent, a mathematical genius, which exists somehow beyond the bounds of our cosmos.

There are actually two varieties of the third option. One is to say that the designer of the universe is a denizen of another universe in which technology has advanced to the point that it allows inhabitants of that world to design simulations of other universes.

The trailer treats this as a fourth option but since it posits a designer who resides in some other universe it's actually a combination of the second and third options and suffers some of the same difficulties as the multiverse hypothesis. It also assumes that computer technology could ever simulate not only an entire cosmos but also human consciousness, which is certainly problematic.

The other version of the third explanation is to assume that the designer of our universe is not some highly accomplished computer nerd in another universe but rather that it is a transcendent, non-contingent being of unimaginable power and intellectual brilliance who is the ultimate cause of all contingent entities, whether universes or their inhabitants.

Which of these options is thought most attractive will vary from person to person, but philosophical arguments won't settle the issue for most people. Human beings tend to believe what they most fervently want to be true, and what they most want to be true is often whatever makes the fewest demands upon their autonomy and their lifestyle.

The Tyranny of the "Tolerant"

The Wall Street Journal ran a column a couple of weeks ago by Joseph Epstein which was headlined "The Tyranny of the 'Tolerant.'" In his column Epstein argued that tolerance, once a reasonable virtue among liberals, has been transformed by the contemporary left into an oppressive form of tyranny.

Epstein starts off with this question:

[I]n the current day, who is more intolerant, more close-minded and unforgiving, more malicious than those who officially pride themselves on their tolerance for sexual difference, minority mores, protest in all its forms—namely, those who march under the banners of the woke, the politically correct, the progressive?

Epstein is correct in declaring that the left is home today for the least tolerant people in our society, but how did we come to this sorry pass? He explains that the genesis of the left's contemporary intolerance, like most of our cultural dysfunctions, traces back to the 60s:

Herbert Marcuse, of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, published an essay in 1965 with the provocative title “Repressive Tolerance,” in which he argued that “liberating tolerance” would entail “the withdrawal of toleration of groups and assembly from groups and movements” on the right, while encouraging all aggressive movements on the left.

Marcuse's recommendation has been embraced by the modern left and enjoys a prominent place in their field operations manual.

Here's how the current tyranny of the "tolerant" manifests itself in our culture:

Use the wrong word, have a political flaw in your past, fail to line up for the next obviously good cause, and the tolerant will be the first to come after you. They may not be able to burn you at the stake...but they will make sure you don't get the job, promotion, prize or leg up. They will instead see you castigated, fired, consigned for life among the mean, ignorant and lumpen.

He goes on to list five opinions and views — one could add many more — that the "tolerant" absolutely won’t tolerate:

• That abortion is, somehow, anti-life and thus might just be wrong.
• That the final word isn’t in on climate change, let alone what, if it exists, ought to be done about it.
• That racism isn’t systemic but the absence of fathers in African-American families is, with 70% of black births being out of wedlock.
• That sexual reassignment surgery and transgendering generally is a ghastly solution to what possibly isn’t truly a problem.
• That most government programs for the improvement of the human condition are unlikely to be effective and in many cases exacerbate the illnesses they set out to cure.

Anyone reckless enough to openly express any of these opinions publicly is at best regarded as a stupid rube - "deplorable" in Ms. Clinton's felicitous formulation - and at worst an evil, dangerous enemy of society in need of being shamed, prosecuted, persecuted, shouted down, fired from their jobs and personally and financially ruined.

The self-righteousness, judgmentalism and cruelty of these folks would make the religious inquisitors of the Middle Ages envious. Epstein states that they are possessed of a "strong sense of their own virtue."

They are convinced they are on the right side: the side of social justice, of generosity of spirit, of sensitivity, of goodness and large-heartedness generally. They think themselves the cognoscenti, in the know, superior in every way. They are the best people, and they darn well know it.

Of course, so did the inquisitors. It's one thing, Epstein notes, to laud oneself for the superiority of one’s own opinions and quite another to want to destroy others for what one deems the moral inadequacy of theirs.

In the current political climate this is what those who pride themselves on their tolerance are all too happy to do. What is unprecedented, and unhappily becoming a contemporary condition, is the intolerance of the ostensibly tolerant for even the slightest disagreement.

Hence the refusal of our once most august universities to allow speakers whose views their students and faculties find uncongenial. Hence the organization of what are in effect lynch parties devoted to tearing down statues and insisting on the renaming of schools and institutions. Hence the McCarthy-like search through people’s pasts for unfashionable opinions with which to destroy their reputations.

It is profoundly ironic that a political ideology, progressive liberalism, that started out in the 19th century encouraging open-mindedness, personal autonomy and freedom of speech and thought has morphed into something out of George Orwell's 1984.

In fact, the story of the evolution of modern "progressives" from classical liberals to tyrannical neo-Marxists and fascists sounds very much like the story Orwell narrates in his other famous novel, Animal Farm. Both books should be required reading for every college student in today's America.

The Difficulty Intentionality Poses for Materialism

Many people believe that human beings are a composite of both mental and material substance. This view is called substance dualism and among philosophers it seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. Still, the currently dominant view among philosophers remains, at least for the time being, materialism.

Materialism is the view that everything, including us, is reducible to matter and the atoms that make matter up. Materialists deny that there's anything about us that's immaterial. They deny that we possess an immaterial mind or soul, and they insist that electrochemical processes in the brain can account for all of our mental activity.

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

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

Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general.

Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

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

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

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

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

Who Is the Simulator?

A lot of very smart people think that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix. Consider these two excerpts from a 2016 BBC article on the subject:

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk asserted that the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced to describe what people like Musk and Kurzweil believe is going on. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

A second, more popular, scenario, however, seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely, so how can the existence of such an exquisitely calibrated universe be explained? 

There are two options compatible with naturalism. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse consisting of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty, speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. 

In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago. 

I'm reminded of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Nice Nihilism

In his book The Atheist's Guide to Reality Alex Rosenberg unequivocally promotes a scientistic view of knowledge.

"Scientistic" does not mean "scientific," rather it's a cognate of a view called "scientism" which claims that science is the only guide to truth about the world and human existence. If a claim cannot be demonstrated empirically, using the tools of science, then it's not something that we can know, and in fact is not even something we should believe.

In Rosenberg's view physics "fixes all the facts" about what is and what can be reasonably believed. This is sometimes called "physicalism." Not all scientists are scientistic or "physicalists," many of them hold that there are truths about the world that science is not equipped to discover, but Rosenberg thinks this is neither good science nor good epistemology.

Rosenberg is no dummy. He's the chairman of the philosophy department at Duke University and demonstrates in his book a considerable breadth of learning. He also strives to be rigorously consistent. Given his belief that physicalism is the correct way to understand reality it follows that there is no God, no miracles, no soul or mind, no self, no real meaning or purpose to life, no meaning to history, no human rights or value, no objective moral duties - only what he calls a "nice nihilism."

By "nice nihilism" Rosenberg means that nature has fortuitously evolved in us a tendency to treat each other well despite the fact that doing so is neither a moral duty nor in any way "right." That, for the one who embraces Rosenberg's scientism, is the only glimmer of light in an unremittingly dark world, and even this little glimmer is beset with problems. Here's one:

If our niceness is the product of impersonal undirected processes like evolution then it cannot have any moral purchase on us. That is, it can be neither right nor wrong to be "nice." Some people are and some aren't, and that's the end of the matter.

Evolution has also evolved numerous behaviors that are not "nice." If we are the product of mindless evolution then there's really no way to morally discriminate between "niceness" and rape, torture, lying, racism, etc. All of these behaviors have evolved in our species just as niceness has and we have no basis for saying that we have a moral duty to avoid some behaviors and embrace others.

In other words, on scientism, there are no moral obligations and there's nothing which is wrong to do. Niceness is no more right, in a moral sense, than cruelty.

Rosenberg admits all this, but he thinks that we need to face up to the fact that these are the consequences of adopting a scientistic worldview, and a scientistic worldview, in his mind, is the only intelligent option in a world in which there is no God.

I think he's right about this, actually, and argue in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss (see the links at the top of this page) that the consequences he outlines in The Atheist's Guide to Reality do indeed follow from atheism, but that should hardly be construed as a commendation of atheism.

The atheist who lives, as many do, as if none of the consequences mentioned in the third paragraph exist is living out an irrational delusion, most likely because he can't live consistently with the logical and existential entailments of what he believes about God.

A belief that leads to consequences and conclusions one cannot consistently live with, however, stands in serious need of a thorough reexamination.

Follow-up to Yesterday's Post

On yesterday's post I wrote about Sabine Hossenfelder's claim that free will is an illusion. Whether one is persuaded by her argument or not, it seems to me that everyone, including Hossenfelder, should hope that she's wrong.

Ideas have consequences, and there are a number of reasons why the consequences of determinism being true, or at least the belief that determinism is true, are at best awkward and at worst corrosive to a healthily functioning society.

If determinism is true, i.e. if we really have no free will, if our choices are the inevitable product of our strongest motives which are themselves the product of the totality of influences that have acted upon us throughout our lives and/or our genetic inheritance, and if it is the case that at every moment there's only one possible future, then it would seem that several unfortunate consequences follow.

Some of these were mentioned in yesterday's post, but I'll reiterate:

1. Reward and punishment are never deserved. Imagine the most heinous crime you can think of. On determinism the perpetrator of that crime does not deserve punishment. Society may "choose" to punish him, but only to deter others from committing similar crimes and/or to protect the rest of us from the criminal who may commit such a crime again if he's not removed from society.

Reward and punishment can only be deserved if we are somehow responsible for choosing what we do, but if choice is an illusion and we could not have done otherwise than we've done then the idea that someone "deserves" something is an error.

2. There can be no moral obligations or duties. It makes no sense to say that someone "ought" to do X if he can only do Y. The words "ought" and "should" imply the ability to choose to do X. If determinism is true we can only do what we've been "programmed" to do by our environment and/or our genes.

Moral obligation is contingent upon free will. We can't have a duty to do what we simply cannot do.

3. If determinism is true there's no good reason to believe it's true. On determinism, our beliefs are determined by environmental and genetic influences that we're mostly unaware of, but if this is why we believe what we believe then truth and logic are largely irrelevant. They may have played some role in shaping our beliefs, but we have no way of knowing whether they did or how much of a role they played.

The determinist has been predestined by physical events occurring since the origin of the universe to believe in determinism. It's not a matter of weighing the evidence and choosing determinism because there is no genuine choice to be made. Further, the person who rejects determinism can't be criticized since she was determined to do so by all the influences that have acted upon her. She didn't really "choose" to reject anything.

4. Human dignity is contingent upon our ability to make significant choices. If that ability is illusory then we're little more than flesh and bone machines and there's no room in such a view for human dignity. This is why the 20th century psychologist B.F.Skinner, a determinist, wrote a book titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

His argument in the book is that we are little more than glorified laboratory mice responding to positive and negative reinforcers in our environment, and, that being so, we need to get beyond the notion that there's any special dignity in being human. There's no dignity, after all, in being a somewhat enhanced version of a mouse. It is instead rather degrading.

5. The belief in determinism is very difficult to live with consistently. Science writer John Horgan writes that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will. Philosopher John Searle declares that, "We can't give up the conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it."

If we find that we can't live consistently with a belief we should interpret that as an indication that our belief is in some way deficient or incoherent and needs to be modified or abandoned.

Is Free Will Merely an Illusion?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a brilliant physicist whose videos usually explain some aspect of physics. In this 11 minute video she argues that free will is an illusion, that it's contrary to the laws of physics and that belief in it is unscientific.

Hossenfelder's argument might be summed up in this claim:

These laws have the common property that if you have an initial condition at one moment in time, for example the exact details of the particles in your brain and all your brain’s inputs, then you can calculate what happens at any other moment in time from those initial conditions. This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.

I think there are at least three problems with her argument.

First, she's basing her conclusion that free will is an illusion on an unprovable metaphysical assumption, the assumption that materialism is true. If it is true then determinism does seem to be the most reasonable position. If, as she claims, all we are is particles of matter then it's not hard to believe that - like planets, stars and every other material object in the universe - we're totally in thrall to physical laws.

However, there's no compelling reason to accept her assumption that materialism is true. She holds it simply as a metaphysical or psychological preference, and if materialism is false, if human beings possess immaterial minds not subject to physical determinism and which work somehow in concert with the material brain, then our overwhelming conviction that we have freedom of choice may not be an illusion at all.

In fact, the conviction of freedom is one reason for thinking that there actually is more to us than just our material selves. In any case, in lieu of a compelling reason to think materialism is true, her argument for determinism is unconvincing.

The second problem is that if materialism is true then our beliefs are merely the epiphenomena of particles whizzing around in our brains, and there's no reason to think that truth, especially truth about metaphysical matters, can emerge from mindless particles banging against each other.

Thus, given her belief in materialism, Hossenfelder has no good reason to think that her metaphysical beliefs are true, including her belief in materialism.

Moreover, if everything is determined then our beliefs are determined, and it follows that Hossenfelder's belief in materialism is a product of influences, many of them unconscious, that have acted on her throughout her life.

Given those influences it was inevitable that she'd be a materialist, but if her belief in materialism is largely the product of the unconscious effects of childhood experiences why should we be expected to accept an argument that reduces to something like "given my childhood experiences I [Hossenfelder] am convinced that materialism/determinism are true"?

Likewise, if materialism and determinism really are true but her listeners nevertheless reject them, they're not being irrational because their rejection is a decision that they were predetermined ever since the Big Bang to make. They could not have done otherwise. No decision we make in life could have been other than what it is.

There's no scientific argument that can demonstrate that materialism is true and good reasons to think it's not, but many scientists like Hossenfelder take it as their starting assumption because they find it psychologically congenial. Her entire argument for determinism, however, is predicated upon that assumption. It's the reason she privileges her faith in the laws of physics over the powerful experiential intuition that we're somehow free, and it's the reason she concludes that the powerful intuition of freedom must be an illusion.

Here's a third problem with her presentation.

In the video (8:05) she mentions moral behavior, but she's careful not to talk about it in terms of right and wrong acts. She's correct to avoid this language because if materialism/determinism are true there can be no moral right or wrong. People do what they're determined to do and though there may be a kind of responsibility in the sense which she explains it, there's no moral responsibility and no moral guilt.

If my behavior harms others they may not like it, and if they have the power to punish me they will, but that doesn't mean that I've done anything for which I should feel guilt or remorse. Humans, if we are determined, should no more feel remorse for harming others than a shark feels remorse for attacking a surfer.

The fact that we know what we're doing when we harm another and the shark doesn't know makes no practical difference. If we were programmed, as it were, to harm others and couldn't have done otherwise, then our awareness of what we're doing is irrelevant. There's no moral guilt, and feelings of guilt and remorse are merely a psychological trick played on us by nature.

Our belief that we are in some sense free, if we have that belief, is a properly basic belief. We're rational to hold it - given the powerful intuition we have that we really are free - unless and until we're faced with a compelling defeater for that belief. Hossenfelder's presentation is only compelling if one accepts her materialism, but why think materialism is true?

She doesn't tell us.

What Exactly Is "Court-Packing"?

High ranking Democrats have repeatedly threatened to "pack" the Supreme Court if they regain the White House and the Senate, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have repeatedly refused to say whether they'd go along with such a move if they were to take office in January.

Biden, feeling pressure to say something about his stance on this issue, recently mumbled that he's not a fan of court packing, which was about as tepid and non-committal an answer as one could imagine.

Democrats prefer to change the subject when the matter of court packing is brought up and one way they're doing this is by changing the meaning of the term.

The phrase "packing the court" refers to a gambit undertaken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when an uncooperative Supreme Court was stifling his presidential initiatives on the grounds that they were unconstitutional. Roosevelt threatened that he would appoint up to six more Justices to the Court (the Constitution doesn't specify the number of Justices) and that these would be Justices more amenable to the president's wishes.

By increasing the number of Justices, people who would serve for the rest of their lives, from nine to fifteen Roosevelt and the Democrats hoped to do an end run around the Constitution and the legislature and have their way politically for generations.

Roosevelt never carried out his threat, but now that President Trump is filling vacancies with Justices who esteem the Constitution and who believe that the proper role of courts is not to make law but to interpret it, the Democrats are in a panic and are pledging to do what FDR only threatened.

They realize, however, that it might look bad with the voters prior to the election to explicitly promise to destabilize the country in this fashion, so Biden and Harris are refusing to talk about it, offering instead the lame excuse that if they said what they'd do then that would become the issue, which, of course, it would and should.

Mr. Biden even declared that the voters "don't deserve" to know what he'd do before the election and that he'd deign tell us what he'll do after he's elected, a statement as full of arrogance and contempt for the American people as Speaker Pelosi's claim during the Obama administration that if Congress wanted to know what was in the Obamacare bill the House would have to pass it to find out.

A more brazen tactic emerging in recent days is to redefine what's meant by "court packing." Vice-Presidential candidate Kamala Harris led the way on this as Gerard Baker at the Wall Street Journal observes:

Sen. Kamala Harris rolled out the first try at a new defense last week when Vice President Mike Pence (rather than, say, the moderator) challenged her to justify the [court packing] proposal.

“Let’s talk about packing the court then,” she said, and an eager nation edged forward on its collective couch to hear, at last, the refined Democratic justification. But all we got, after a false story about Abraham Lincoln and a court vacancy in 1864, was an attempt to redefine the term “court packing” (delivered with trademark smiling condescension). She claimed it meant appointing insufficient numbers of nonwhite judges.

Well, claiming that court packing is having too many white people on the federal bench is a creative riposte, but it's not at all what the term means. Other Democrats quickly realized, however, that redefining the term was a fruitful way to neuter the issue, much like redefining what constitutes a criminal act is one way to reduce crime.

Baker continues:

Now a second redefinition has emerged. In a barrage of comments over the weekend, Democrats and their supporters have alleged that their plan for the court is no different than what Republicans have been doing for the past few years—“packing” the judiciary with Republican-appointed judges.

The message has been widely disseminated and is now being regurgitated at volume. Democratic politicians and Biden supporters in the media have been parroting it. Sen. Mazie Hirono, always a reliable vehicle of whatever Democrats have been instructed to say, told CNN: “I’m really concerned about the court packing with the ideologically driven nominees now sitting on the court.”

So, if the president appoints too few people of color or too many conservatives that's what we're supposed to think court-packing is. In other words, court packing occurs when Republicans follow their Constitutional mandate to nominate Justices that they believe will uphold the Constitution regardless of the race of the nominee.

If the Democrats actually do add more Justices to the Court then the next time the Republicans control both the White House and the Senate they'll do likewise producing an escalating judicial "arms race" until we eventually have a hundred Justices sitting on the Supreme Court. By that time the Constitution will have long since ceased to have any legal significance.

Once upon a time Joe Biden recognized the stupidity of doing what he refuses to disavow today. In 1983 he said this:

President Roosevelt clearly had the right to send to the United States Senate and Congress a proposal to pack the Court. It was totally within his right to do that. He violated no law. He was legalistically absolutely correct. But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. (emphasis mine)

That version of Joe Biden was wiser in 1983 than the version running for president today. Today's version has apparently sold out to the radical left-wingers in his party who are increasingly promoting that "bonehead idea."

What Postmoderns Assume

It's commonly observed that we live in a post-Christian, postmodern culture, and that many of the assumptions of pre-moderns and moderns are no longer viable in today's Western societies. But what does this mean? What are the postmodern assumptions about man and contemporary life that comprise the postmodern worldview?

In his book Flight from the Absolute Canadian scholar Paul Gosselin lists a dozen or so that are most prominent. Here's a partial listing which I've taken the liberty of putting in my own words:

1. Humans are solely the product of evolutionary processes and as such are a part of nature and can claim no special status. This is an assumption postmoderns have borrowed from modernity.
2. Human nature is not fixed but is subject to evolutionary change caused by natural, cultural and political forces.
3. There is no source of objective moral laws, no divine moral authority, and thus no absolute universal moral truth or objective, absolute truth of any kind.
4. Since truth is a cultural construct, all cultures and all religions have their own valid truth perspectives and all should be tolerated and celebrated.
5. Since truth is subjective, one's feelings are as reliable a guide for life as is human reason.
6. The material world is not all there is. The supernatural exists and is worthy of our attention, although traditional Christian doctrines are often too constricting.
7. The idea of Western superiority and the concept of Progress must be rejected.
8. Salvation and the meaning of life is found in individual self-fulfillment. Man is morally autonomous, free to pursue his fulfillment in any fashion he chooses.
9. No behavior, especially sexual behavior, is wrong as long as it's fulfilling to the individual and doesn't hurt others, at least not too much. No one has the right to judge the choices of others, especially their sexual choices.
10. Feelings of guilt should be seen as vestiges of an obsolete past and ignored or suppressed.

Gosselin doesn't mention this, but several of these assumptions appear to contradict each other, yet they're all widely accepted in our culture. To be sure, their acceptance, even given their inherent contradictions, is understandable given the almost universal acceptance of assumption #1 among our cultural elites.

Everything else follows, psychologically if not exactly logically, from that assumption. Indeed, it all follows from one word in #1, the word solely.

If man is not just the product of blind natural processes, but rather is the intended product of an intelligent agent who perhaps works through natural processes, then everything else in the postmodern worldview can be called into question. In fact, it may not be too much to say that the majority of our differences today arise from #1 and the word solely.

It's amazing how much a single, solitary word can entail.