Double Standards, Etc.

The editors at National Review write concerning the Afghanistan debacle that,

It is bizarre that weeks into this crisis, no U.S. official has spoken harshly of the Taliban. Instead, it’s all hopefulness about the group turning over a new leaf. [Secretary of State] Blinken noted the Taliban’s commitment to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghanistan as a base, even though the Taliban have been in violation of their commitment to separate from al-Qaeda since the time they made it.

The liberal media is either silent about the administration's attitude toward the Taliban or they're puzzled, but they're far from being critical.

Which is strange since this is the same media that pummeled Trump for talking nice about North Korea's Kim Jung Un and Vladimir Putin. Surely the Taliban are as odious as Kim and more so than Putin.

It seems that the media standard for good and bad behavior is not what people do but who it is who does it. A Republican and a Democrat can perform the identical act and the Republican merits criticism and condemnation while the Democrat merits either silence, "understanding" or even praise.

Why is that?

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What was it that kept the thousands of desperate Afghans from pouring into the Kabul airport during the evacuation? Apparently it was in part a wall.

This is surprising since we were frequently informed during the Trump presidency that it's pointless to build a wall on our southern border to keep out the hordes of people who want to flood into the country because walls don't work.

Greece is building a wall to keep out refugees from Afghanistan and Hungary already has one which is working well. Israel built a wall to keep out Palestinian terrorists and it's been quite effective.

Whoever thinks walls don't work to keep people out (or in, as in the case of the awful Berlin wall) evidently hasn't thought about the matter very deeply.

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When a white cop shoots and kills an unarmed black person, especially if the victim is a woman, we undergo a season of national convulsion, trauma and introspection, but when a black cop shoots and kills an unarmed white woman the cop's identity is withheld, the media shows little to no interest, there are no protests, and the cop is quietly exonerated. Why the difference?

This is precisely what happened in the case of the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by a black Capitol police officer named Michael Byrd on January 6th.

Had Babbitt been black and the policeman white would the reaction of the media and the findings of the investigation have been the same? Would the investigation, including body cam footage as well as the officer's name have been kept secret from the public?

As it was, the media yawned, "anti-racism" activists and agitators busied themselves elsewhere, and the nation went about its business almost as if nothing happened. Why?

Why are we outraged, as in many cases we should be, at the death of unarmed blacks at the hands of white cops but serenely unconcerned when the races are reversed? Why are there no street murals of Ashli Babbitt? No demands to "Say her name"? No protests demanding justice for Ashli and the arrest of Officer Byrd?

One reason that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and received more votes in 2020 than any candidate in history except Joe Biden is because people are frustrated and angry with media double standards. To the extent that we are a divided nation it's to no small extent because much of the media has chosen to adopt the same role as the media played in the old Soviet Union, serving as a propaganda arm for one political party.

Why Assume the Universe has a Mathematical Explanation?

Perhaps the grandest pursuit of contemporary theoretical scientists is their search for a single theory that would explain all the laws of physics in a single equation. The quest is based on the assumption that there's a rational unity to the universe, that the universe can be completely explained mathematically.

Suppose, though, that the standard explanation for the origin of the universe, that it came into being in a massive expansion of mass/energy from a single infinitely dense point, is true. If so, why should scientists, or at least naturalistic scientists, assume that a mindless eruption of mass/energy out of empty space should obey the laws of mathematics? Where does the math that describes the world come from?

A fellow at Uncommon Descent quotes several very bright people on this question.

For example, there was this from Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner who wrote in 1960 that,

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.

Wigner also wrote this:

certainly it is hard to believe that our [mathematical] reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.

In a 1952 letter to his friend Maurice Solovine, Albert Einstein stated that the mathematical order of the cosmos and the fact that we can comprehend that order is something of a miracle:

You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world ... as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way .. the kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different.

Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only successfully rid the world of gods but “bared the miracles.”

The astonishing ability of human reason to comprehend the universe, the fact that the universe is explicable in terms of our mathematics, is very difficult to explain on any naturalistic view of the universe's origin. Why should scientists entertain the expectation and hope that that they'll eventually discover a single unified theory that explains everything? Why, on naturalism, should they assume that there's an underlying rational, mathematical structure to the cosmos?

The fact that there is such a structure makes sense on a theistic worldview but is simply a leap of blind faith on any naturalistic view.

As David Klinghoffer, writing at Evolution News, once put it:

Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn’t the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless?

Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe’s structure?

I would argue that the only finally reasonable ground for that assumption is the belief in an intelligent Creator, who has already thought into the world the very mathematics that the patient scientist discovers.

Whatever the case, it truly is remarkable that the universe lends itself to rational enquiry by intelligent minds. Is this just an enormously improbable coincidence or is Klinghoffer correct?

The Minimum Wage

Note: This post is a rerun of one originally written just before the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the restaurant industry, but it's still relevant today:

On Labor Day it's appropriate to revisit the debate over raising the minimum wage.

On the surface raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour seems like a simple solution to help unskilled, poorly educated workers struggling with poverty, but, like most simple solutions, raising the minimum wage has unintended consequences that hurt the very people it's supposed to help.

An article by Ellie Bufkin at The Federalist explains how raising the minimum wage has actually harmed many workers, especially in the restaurant industry.

New York state, for example passed a law several years ago requiring that businesses offer mandatory paid family leave and pay every employee at least $15 an hour, almost twice the previous rate. The results were predictable and indeed were predicted by many, but the predictions went unheeded by the liberal New York legislature.

Bufkin uses as an illustration a popular Union Square café called The Coffee Shop which is closing its doors in the wake of the new legislation. The Coffee Shop employs 150 people, pays a high rent and under the Affordable Care Act must provide health insurance.

Now that the owner must pay his employees twice what he had been paying them he can no longer afford to stay in business:

Seattle and San Francisco led New York only slightly in achieving a $15 per hour minimum pay rate, with predictably bad results for those they were intended to help.

As Erielle Davidson discussed in these pages last year, instead of increasing the livelihood of the lowest-paid employees, the rate increase forced many employers to terminate staff to stay afloat because it dramatically spiked the costs of operating a business.

Understaffed businesses face myriad other problems [in addition to] wage mandates. Training hours for unskilled labor must be limited or eliminated, overtime is out of the question, and the number of staff must be kept under 50 to avoid paying the high cost of a group health-care package. The end result is hurting the very people the public is promised these mandates will help.

Of all affected businesses, restaurants are at the greatest risk of losing their ability to operate under the strain of crushing financial demands. They run at the highest day-to-day operational costs of any business, partly because they must employ more people to run efficiently.

In cities like New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco, even a restaurant that has great visibility and lots of traffic cannot keep up with erratic rent increases and minimum wage doubling.

When the minimum wage for tipped workers was much lower, employees sourced most of their income from guest gratuities, so restaurants were able to staff more people and provided ample training to create a highly skilled team. The skills employees gained through training and experience then increased their value to bargain for future, better-paying jobs.

Some businesses will lay off workers, cut back on training, not hire new workers or shut down altogether. A Harvard study found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to approximately a 4 to 10 percent increase in the likelihood of any given restaurant folding.

How does this help anyone other than those who manage to survive the cuts? When these businesses, be they restaurants or whatever, close down it's often in communities which are "underserved" to start with, and the residents of those communities wind up being more underserved than they were before the minimum wage was raised.

Moreover, raising the minimum wage makes jobs heretofore filled by teenagers and people with weak qualifications more attractive to other applicants who are at least somewhat better qualified.

Workers who would've otherwise shunned a lower wage job will be hired at the expense of the poorly educated and unskilled, the very people who most need the job in the first place and who were supposed to be helped by raising the minimum wage.

Despite all this our politicians, at least some of them, still think raising the minimum wage is a social justice imperative, even if it hurts the people it's supposed to help.

Or perhaps the politicians know it's a bad idea, but they see advocating a mandatory increase in wages as a way to bamboozle the masses into thinking the politician deserves their vote.

Thin Blue Line

In a piece in the Wall Street Journal Heather Mac Donald informs us that police chiefs and elected officials in several municipalities around the country - for example, San Francisco, CA, and Middletown and Manchester, CT - have prohibited police officers from wearing the "thin blue line" patch on their uniforms.

The patch honors fallen cops and recognizes the role police play in protecting society from anarchy, but detractors insist the symbol makes people of color feel unsafe.

Perhaps I'd feel differently if I lived in a minority community, but I have difficulty understanding why this is so. It seems somewhat like the ordinances in some communities prohibiting the display of the American flag in one's yard because it's said to be offensive to immigrants.

If people in minority neighborhoods harbor a fear of police it's hard to see how the patch would be more likely to trigger that fear than the uniform itself. African Americans in some cities doubtless have good reason to feel unsafe, but not because police are wearing a "thin blue line" patch.

Indeed, many of the officers who proudly wear that patch are themselves black and Hispanic.

Mac Donald points out that the overwhelming bulk of violence in cities like Chicago is not caused by the police but is in fact directed at both the police and innocent civilians by criminals. She writes:

Three days before the anti-patch vote, Officer Ella French was killed by a bullet to her head during a traffic stop. French and her two partners had pulled over an SUV for expired registration tags.

One of the SUV’s occupants, 21-year-old Emonte Morgan, allegedly fought with the officers and opened fire, killing French and critically wounding one of her partners with bullets to the brain, eye and shoulder.

Mr. Morgan was on probation for a recent robbery conviction, which a Chicago Tribune story characterizes as not a “serious” crime. His brother Eric, who was driving the SUV, was on probation for a theft conviction.

French and her partner were among the 78 people shot in Chicago over the Aug. 7-8 weekend, 11 of them fatally. Typical of the post- George Floyd urban mayhem, a child—this time a 4-year-old girl—was among the victims.

The carnage in Chicago is horrific. It's doubtless true that a soldier was safer in Afghanistan than are some residents of Chicago in their own neighborhoods:

Over Fourth of July weekend in Chicago, a 5-year-old girl, a 6-year-old girl, a 12-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy were shot, along with 104 others. On July 1, a 1-month-old infant was critically wounded in a mass shooting.

Three young men emerged from a Jeep Cherokee spraying bullets in several directions. A 15-year-old and six other victims were also shot, along with the baby. Hours earlier, a 9-year-old girl was shot in the head.

Chicago is no outlier. In Minneapolis, six children 10 and younger have been shot since late April, including two girls, 6 and 9, who were killed; two boys, 10 and 3, both critically wounded; and an infant.

None of these Minneapolis children were shot by a cop; they were killed by criminals....

I'm sure that the parents of those children would've been deeply grateful had officers wearing the offending patches been present to prevent the terrible tragedies that took their little ones' lives. People in these neighborhoods have every reason to live in fear, but fear of police brutality is, or should be, pretty far down the list:

Police officers aren’t making minority neighborhoods unsafe; criminals are. The four victims of fatal police shootings in Chicago in 2021, all armed, are 0.7% of the 538 homicide victims year to date.

Meanwhile, police - white, black and Hispanic - are being murdered at unprecedented rates:

Ambush assaults against officers rose 91% in the year after George Floyd’s death. More officers have been feloniously killed so far in 2021—50, as of Aug. 18—than in all of 2020, 2019 and 2017.

Suspect resistance is up, which will increase the chance of officer use of lethal force. On Aug. 13, a Chicago police officer was seriously wounded while being dragged by a car fleeing a car stop.

It's little wonder that cops have stopped trying to enforce the law in many jurisdictions. They're pulling back from enforcing traffic ordinances and pedestrian stops. In California and elsewhere they've stopped making arrests for shoplifting.

The job is exceedingly dangerous and rules that prohibit any expression of pride in what a police officer does, like the rule banning the thin blue line patch, merely sends the message that their risks and efforts aren't appreciated by the communities they serve, or at least by the bureaucrats who employ them.

What is it that stands between society and anarchy if not the police? They really are the thin blue line that keeps our society from spiraling into chaos, and it seems ridiculous for elected officials and law enforcement bureaucrats whose lives are not in jeopardy every time they venture out of their comfortable homes to go to work, to prohibit their officers from acknowledging that fact.

Liberalism, Classic and Modern

To young people just beginning to think about politics some of the terminology they hear can be quite confusing. For example, it's frequently stated that today's political conservatives are in fact classical liberals, which seems confusing.

The confusion is compounded, perhaps, when one learns that modern liberals have little in common with classical liberals, but they have much in common with progressives and are essentially identical with them.

From time to time I've posted on VP a description of the differences between the political left and right and a discussion of where communists, fascists, conservatives, socialists and liberals all fall on the political spectrum, but Jonah Goldberg in his excellent and very informative 2007 book Liberal Fascism offers another way to parse the difference between classical liberals, progressives, conservatives and modern liberals.

He writes:

In the past "liberalism" had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state.

This is what's called "classical" liberalism and today's conservatives are called that because they wish to return to or "conserve" this classical idea of human liberty. Small government and maximum individual freedom consistent with a healthy community.

Goldberg continues:

The progressives, led by [John] Dewey (1859-1952), subtly changed the meaning of this term...[construing it instead] as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation from old dogmas and faiths [particularly Christian faith and dogma].

For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a "constructive" citizen.

Progressivism arose in the early decades of the 20th century and was especially influential in the administration of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945). Progressives believe that problems are best addressed by a strong federal government, i.e. the state.

For this reason individual liberty should give way to the power of the state and that the most efficient government is one in which power is centralized in the federal bureaucracy, staffed by "experts."

Since progressives favor a powerful central government or state they're often called "statists."

An example of what progressives believed the state could and should do is outlined in Roosevelt's "second Bill of Rights" (1944) in which he declared that the state must provide,

a "new basis of security and prosperity," the right to "a useful and remunerative job," "a decent home," "adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health," adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment," and "a good education."

This second Bill of Rights remains, as Goldberg, says, "the spiritual lodestar of liberal aspirations to this day."

To achieve all this it's necessary that the state must expand in size and power and individual freedoms must therefore diminish. The government must become a national "nanny," providing citizens with life's necessities and protecting them from life's vicissitudes.

It's a view satirized in this short video, the first episode in a series of five:

This is not the role that classical liberals envisioned for government, but it is the role that modern liberals (progressives) believe government should fill.

Conservatives, are by nature wary of "big government." President Ronald Reagan, a conservative, famously quipped that "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Conservatives believe that the more government grows - the more authority it's granted over an individual's ability to make his/her own decisions - the more bureaucratic, unresponsive, expensive and oppressive it becomes.

In sum, then, conservatives are in many ways very much like classical liberals whereas contemporary liberals, or progressives, are statists and hold views about the role of government quite the opposite of the classical liberals of the Enlightenment.

Is the Brain a Transducer?

Joseph Epstein has an article in Discover Magazine in which he posits that the brain acts like a transducer which on occassion connects the physical world of our everyday existence with a completely different world that's otherwise closed off to us.

This is rather remarkable because Epstein is a materialist and for him to acknowledge the possibility of another world, a realm beyond the physical, is quite a concession. Nevertheless, he finds the evidence suggestive.

A transducer is simply a device which converts energy from one form to another. A microphone which converts sound energy to electricity and the speakers which convert electricity back to sound are both transducers. Our sense organs likewise are transducers, and Epstein thinks the brain may be as well.

He asks us to consider this possibility on the basis of some very strange phenomena recorded by neuroscientists. He gives us some examples in this excerpt:

A 2020 study summarizing the observations of 124 caregivers of dementia patients, concluded that in "more than 80 percent of these cases, complete remission with return of memory, orientation, and responsive verbal ability was reported by observers of the lucid episode" and that "[the] majority of patients died within hours to days after the episode."

The periods of lucidity typically lasted 30 to 60 minutes.

Some of the historical reports of lucid episodes are truly extraordinary.

Here is one of many cases reported by the German biologist Michael Nahm and his colleagues in 2012:

In a case published in 1822, a boy at the age of 6 had fallen on a nail that penetrated his forehead. He slowly developed increasing headaches and mental disturbances. At the age of 17, he was in constant pain, extremely melancholic, and starting to lose his memory. He fantasized, blinked continuously, and looked for hours at particular objects…. He remained in the hospital in this state for 18 days.

On the morning of the 19th day, he suddenly left his bed and appeared very bright, claiming he was free of all pain and feelings of sickness…. A quarter of an hour after the attending physician left him, he fell unconscious and died within a few minutes.

The front part of his brain contained two pus-filled tissue bags the size of a hen’s egg (Pfeufer, 1822)….

And another:

Haig (2007) reported the case of a young man dying of lung cancer that had spread to his brain. Toward the end of his life, a brain scan showed little brain tissue left, the metastasized tumors having not simply pushed aside normal brain tissue but actually destroyed and replaced it. In the days before his death, he lost all ability to speak or move.

According to a nurse and his wife, however, an hour before he died, he woke up and said good-bye to his family, speaking with them for about five minutes before losing consciousness again and dying.

If the brain is a self-contained information processor, how can we explain the sudden return of lucidity when the brain is severely damaged?

What if the variability is not caused by changes in processing power in the brain but rather by transduction effects? By changes occurring not in our local universe but in the [Other World]? Or by minor changes occurring at the point of connection? Or by changes occurring in brain structures that are essential to signal transfers?

Experiences of this sort were first summarized in a 1997 paper by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, later expanded into a book called Mindsight (1999). The paper and book describe the experiences of 14 people who were blind from birth and who had near-death experiences (NDEs), some of which included content that appeared to be visual in nature.

Soon after Vicki U. was in a near-fatal car accident at age 22, she remembered "seeing" a male physician and a woman from above in the emergency room, and she "saw" them working on a body. Said Vicki:

I knew it was me.... I was quite tall and thin at that point. And I recognized at first that it was a body, but I didn't even know that it was mine initially. Then I perceived that I was up on the ceiling, and I thought, "Well, that's kind of weird. What am I doing up here?" I thought, "Well, this must be me. Am I dead?"

Vicki had never had a visual experience before her NDE, and, according to the researchers, did not even "understand the nature of light." While near death, she also claimed to have been flooded with information about math and science. Said Vicki:

I all of a sudden understood intuitively almost [all] things about calculus, and about the way planets were made. And I don't know anything about that.... I felt there was nothing I didn't know.

About six weeks ago I posted a video of Vicki's story which is even more strange than Epstein suggests. Here it is:

Shakespeare has Hamlet say that there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our philosophy. There may well be much more to ultimate reality than we assume. We may be a bit like the boy in the bubble in the movie The Truman Show who's surrounded by a world of which he's completely oblivious.

In any case, it seems that with every passing year science is making it increasingly harder to think that the physical, material world apprehended by our five senses is all that there is.

Forever War

The decision by both the Trump and the Biden administration to quit Afghanistan after twenty years of conflict against Islamic jihadis has been accompanied by lots of talk of avoiding "forever wars." The assumption is that it's not in our interest to fight wars that seem to have no definite terminus and that it's foolish to do so. Superficially, this seems sensible, but it belies an ignorance of the history between Islam and the West.

Our popular media often condenses this history into several Crusades scattered over the space of several centuries and which they depict as acts of European aggression against Muslims living peacefully in the Middle East. For example, Wikipedia states that the Crusades were "a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period."

This is very misleading.

The Crusades were actually part of an effort to defend Christian Europe against the "forever war" waged by Islam from the time of its founding in the 7th century until the present day. Shortly after the prophet Muhammad rose to prominence in the 600s A.D. his followers went to war, first against pagans and Jews in the region and then against Christians in Egypt and North Africa.

Their conquests extended over a period of a thousand years and took them all the way across the African coast of the Mediterranean, through Spain and into southern France. They eventually also took what is modern day Turkey and advanced into eastern Europe and much of Russia.

These conquests were wars of aggression, primarily against Christianity, in which the conquered people were tortured, flayed alive, impaled on poles driven through their rectums, burned to death or buried alive, suspended by their ankles upside down and sawn in half from their crotch to their head, decapitated and otherwise massacred by the hundreds of thousands.

This is the fate that befell untold thousands of Christian males at the hands of the Muslims. Those women and children who weren't killed were taken as sex slaves, young boys being especially prized for the purpose. Others who survived were forced to become dhimmis, second class citizens made to pay the jizya, a tax that essentially bought them their lives.

Many others, depending upon circumstances, were given the choice of renouncing their Christianity and embracing Islam or being beheaded.

This is the horror Christians and others faced for a thousand years until roughly the early 1700s and still face today in those lands where Islam is ascendant. Every battle in this "forever war" was essentially an act of self-defense on the part of Christians motivated by appeals from their leaders to fight to protect their wives and children.

The Muslim aggressors were exhorted, on the other hand, to fight hard because if they prevailed they'd get plunder and slaves and be able to rape Christian women and boys. If they died in the effort they'd gain Allah's favor in heaven and experience perpetual sexual bliss from the houris - supernatural, celestial women, "wide-eyed and "big-bosomed," according to the Koran.

We bury our heads in the sand if we think we can avoid the "forever war." Wherever Islamists have the strength their war against the West will continue. Their prophet declared, "I have been commanded [by Allah] to wage war against mankind until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah."

There is indeed a forever war being fought against the West, and the aggressors are those Muslims who follow the words of Muhammad. It will never end as long as there are people who adhere to his teaching or as long as there are those who don't.

When Muslim armies are strong the war is fought militarily with rape, torture and plunder. When they are weak the war is fought via acts of terror, but it is always being fought.

It's a mistake to think that the various conflicts we've witnessed in the last fifty years - Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, etc. - and the various acts of terrorism - 9/11, and all the others - are discrete or isolated acts. They're all the ongoing expression of a single fourteen hundred year struggle by committed Muslims, seeking to follow the commands and example of Mohammad, to convert the world to the pure Islam of their Prophet.

We, like so many Europeans and Africans since the 7th century, delude ourselves if we think we can somehow retreat from the conflict, live in peace and security behind our oceans, and avoid those who demand that we convert or die. It's not an option that the Islamists, to the extent they are able, leave open to us.

For an excellent guide to the history of the conflict between Islam and the West I highly recommend Raymond Ibrahim's very readable account of eight decisive battles between Muslims and the West titled Sword and Scimitar.

His book reads like a novel and will be an eye-opener for those who have only a vague idea of the history of the last millenium and a half and will disabuse the reader of several myths, chief among which is that we can opt out of fighting a "forever war."

Making Us Proud

While our nation suffers through the humiliation of a hurried, chaotic exit from Afghanistan, an exit which could leave behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghans who helped us over the last twenty years, one group of Americans are a source of genuine pride and gratitude.

ABC News released some details of a harrowing mission undertaken by a team of former special ops troops to rescue an Afghan colleague and his family who was being hunted by the Taliban and threatened with death. The rescue of this one man and his family evolved into the rescue of over six hundred other Afghan special forces troops and their families.

It's an incredible story of human loyalty, bravery and the very best of the American spirit. It's almost certain to be written about in books and depicted on movie screens.

Here's an excerpt:

With the Taliban growing more violent and adding checkpoints near Kabul's airport, an all-volunteer group of American veterans of the Afghan war launched a final daring mission on Wednesday night dubbed the "Pineapple Express" to shepherd hundreds of at-risk Afghan elite forces and their families to safety, members of the group told ABC News.

Moving after nightfall in near-pitch black darkness and extremely dangerous conditions, the group said it worked unofficially in tandem with the United States military and U.S. embassy to move people, sometimes one person at a time, or in pairs, but rarely more than a small bunch, inside the wire of the U.S. military-controlled side of Hamid Karzai International Airport.

As of Thursday morning, the group said it had brought as many as 500 Afghan special operators, assets and enablers and their families into the airport in Kabul overnight, handing them each over to the protective custody of the U.S. military.

That number added to more than 130 others over the past 10 days who had been smuggled into the airport encircled by Taliban fighters since the capital fell to the extremists on Aug. 16 by Task Force Pineapple, an ad hoc groups of current and former U.S. special operators, aid workers, intelligence officers and others with experience in Afghanistan who banded together to save as many Afghan allies as they could.

"Dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women, were secretly moved through the streets of Kabul throughout the night and up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom," Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret commander who led the private rescue effort, told ABC News.

The White House has set what appears to be an entirely arbitrary date of August 31st (today) to have all troops out of Kabul. Once they're gone anyone, American, Afghan or European, still remaining in the country will either have to find their own way out or risk eventually being discovered by the Taliban or ISIS.

Yet, there's no special reason for the August 31st deadline.

Military experts insist that it could've been made clear to the Taliban that we would stay in Kabul until we had gotten everyone out even if this meant inserting more troops, and that the Taliban would interfere with this rescue at their peril. For reasons that are unclear, however, the Biden White House was loath to delay our exit.

To the extent many are being rescued from certain death it's because people like those described above, but others, too, Americans and Europeans, are acting independently of the White House, and sometimes against orders, to save all those they can. It's a fascinating story and one which, in the midst of what appears to be a debacle, Americans can be proud of. Read the rest of it at the link. UPDATE: This video is another example of how Americans are working independently of the government to rescue, in this case, over five thousand of their fellow Americans and Afghans from Kabul. The last five minutes or so are quite powerful, especially as an indictment of the incompetence of how this evacuation has been handled by the Biden administration:

The Day Afghanistan Died

There's much in Mr. Biden's abrupt abandonment of the Afghans for which Americans might be deeply ashamed, but for novelist and veteran Brad Taylor writing at National Review the worst was June 16th. For him this was the day Afghanistan died. Taylor writes:

The Afghanistan Commandos are the only force in the Afghanistan National Army (ANA) that actually fight and win. They have done so since we began building them, first with the CIA, then with our own Special Forces. They were known as the only force that had no tribal affiliation and were the only force in the country that would fight for the state of Afghanistan regardless of the human terrain.

And they were really good. At one point, toward the end, they were conducting upwards of 90 percent of all combat actions inside the country — strained to the breaking point but succeeding with the support of the United States.

And then we pulled the support.

There was a nationwide plan for Commando use, which, put simply, was that they would insert and clear out Taliban influence, and then would be replaced with regular ANA components to keep the area secure and out of Taliban control. To this, they had been very successful. On that fateful day in June, everything changed.

The Commandos assaulted a village called Dawlat Abad and routed the Taliban. They called in the ANA to take over, and the ANA refused to enter, afraid of the Taliban.

The Taliban regrouped and surrounded the village, pounding it with mortar fire and conducting a siege, until the small contingent of Commandos had no recourse but to surrender. Calls for air support went unheeded, because America had pulled the maintenance capability of the very aircraft that would have responded. There was no help coming.

Twenty-two Commandos surrendered to the Taliban. All 22 were summarily executed — on video. One of the men killed was a soldier named Sohrab Azimi. He was the son of an ANA general, trained in the United States, and engaged to be married to a United States citizen. He could have done anything with his life, but he chose to lead the Commandos.

He was the best and brightest of Afghanistan, and he was killed on the street with a bullet to the back of his head because his pleas for air support went unheeded.

The news of June 16 didn’t even create a blip in the United States. Nobody cared, but make no mistake, the average soldier or civilian in the Afghanistan hierarchy did.

Sohrab Azimi was a national hero in Afghanistan. He was like a cross between Captain America and Saladin. I read the story and felt horrible at the loss. When I thought about it pragmatically, the only thought that entered my mind was, “This is the end.”

And that was two months before the fall of Kabul. Perception in insurgency has a sway all its own. It becomes reality, and when the action happened, I saw the reality.

There's much more worth reading in Taylor's column, but I'll just add this excerpt,

The signal sent by our lack of support was precisely the perception that the Taliban wanted: You are all going to die. And the people in positions of authority both low and high took that to heart. Afghanistan was done on that date.

Maybe pulling out of Afghanistan was the proper thing to do, though I'm not of that opinion, but in any case, the way the Biden administration did it, precipitously withdrawing air support from Afghans who were fighting bravely while trusting us for air cover, will shame America for as long as our nation lasts.

Baffling Misjudgment

One can hardly believe the breathtaking miscalculations and misjudgments of our political and military leadership that have led to the chaos, confusion and death at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan not to mention the unknown but probable horrors being inflicted on Afghans and perhaps Americans elsewhere in that country.

Almost every bit of news about how the Biden administration has handled the evacuation from Afghanistan defies belief. The average American is incredulous that our leaders, supposedly the best and the brightest, the ones who promised to restore America to preeminence in the world, would've made some of the baffling decisions they have.

One of the latest of these was the decision to actually hand over to the Taliban a list of the names of Afghans who should be allowed entry into the airport. The list, of course, was an implicit acknowledgement that those whose names appeared on it were in one way or another helpful to the United States.

With the list in hand it's a lot easier for the Taliban to know exactly who to hunt down and execute.

Politico offers some details of the Biden administration's bizarre, if inadvertent, complicity in the probable murders of dozens of people who assisted us in our effort to bring Afghanistan out of the seventh century:

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that's prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country.

It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.

One defense official quoted in the Politico report called the Biden administration's decision to share the names with the Taliban "appalling."

"Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list," said the official. "It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean."

Indeed. One wonders how many of those whose names were on that list are still alive today or will be alive a month from now. One also wonders how anyone could possibly have thought that furnishing the murderous barbarians - who made no secret of their intent to kill any and all Afghans who cooperated with the U.S. - with such a list was a good idea.

One also wonders how many people will be willing to risk allying themselves with the United States in any future conflict. We have scarcely shown ourselves to be particularly trustworthy partners, and it's obvious that throwing in with the U.S., at least under this administration, is a very risky business.

Reason or Violence

Nathan Beacom at The Federalist makes the case that our polity faces two alternatives: Either we resolve our political disputes through reasoned debate and discussion or we'll settle them by violence. The latter alternative has been the preferred option throughout history of totalitarians and utopians who rely on force to impose their will.

On the contrary, the "Open Society," to borrow the title of a famous book by philosopher Karl Popper, relies upon the use of argument, but, Beacom cautions, if Americans lose the virtues that make an open society possible, they will soon find themselves under the boot of a tyrant.

There are a number of virtues which characterize discourse in an open and free society, perhaps the chief of which, according to Beacom, is humility:

Humility teaches that we, just like our neighbors, are prone to error, mistakes in argument, and ignorance. Humility is a disposition to recognize that reasoning towards the truth is a difficult process fraught with potential dangers and confusions.

[Humility] is actually a perquisite to real argument, for argument is not a matter of beating an opponent, but of working with a partner to come to an agreement about the truth of things. It is clear that the virtue of humility allows us to recognize that we need others to balance us, challenge us, and fill the gaps in our knowledge. This is how America’s founding figures generally understood the principle of tolerance.

The failure to develop this virtue is an invitation to violence. Indeed, the corresponding vice of dialectical pride is what lies at the heart of a tyrannical ideology.

The ideologue is so certain of her rightness that disagreement can only seem to be the result of an evil will, rather than a mere difference of opinion held in good faith. Evil is not to be reasoned with, but mocked and destroyed, so the opponent is not to be reasoned with, but forced into line.

I would add that a second virtue is a willingness to refrain from criticizing the "other side" for behavior one excuses in one's own side, especially when the behavior of one's own side is at least as bad as that of the opposition.

If, for example, I were to criticize a political candidate of the opposing party for his lack of honesty or competence, but enthusiastically support candidates in my own party who are equally deficient in these virtues, then not only do I forfeit the right to be taken seriously, I shut down communication with those in the other party. I lose credibility, and no matter how good my arguments may be, few people will be inclined to listen to them.

I think we witnessed this almost daily in the last two presidential elections wherein Republican and Democrat partisans each heatedly accused the other's candidate of offenses for which their own candidate was perhaps just as guilty, but whose guilt was ignored or explained away. The result is that Americans are more alienated from each other today, and our nation is probably more divided today than at any time since the late 1960s or maybe even since the Civil War.

Beacom continues:

The many ways in which the discussions of our own day fail in this fundamental virtue of argumentation indicates a dangerous seed of violence. Calling names, imputing bad motives, mockery, and the anger and emotivism that characterizes many of our public arguments are a failure of humility and fellow-feeling. Those who lack this virtue in conversation also, when in power, commit violence against their opponents.

It is unclear whether social media has accelerated the atrophy of these virtues or merely made it more apparent, but inasmuch as the discussions we see on Twitter and Facebook are typified by precisely the vicious tendencies we seek to avoid, we have reason to be a bit concerned.

Today we see the growing prevalence of radical movements in politics. On the Right there is a pull towards populism, nationalism, and even fascist tendencies. On the Left there is a growing draw towards Marxism and related radical programs. These ideologies are both distinguished by a rejection of the fundamental dialectical virtues.

I'd quibble with Beacom that the pull toward fascism is really a characteristic, both historically and contemporaneously, of the left, but I certainly agree that when people give up on argument, when neither side is willing to listen to the other, first we just stop talking to each other and then we ultimately resort to force - either via the judiciary, the military, or the mob - to impose our will on the other.

At that point comes the death of the free and open society which dies by a kind of asphyxiation.

There's more in Beacom's essay. Check it out at the link.

Testing Darwinian Predictions

In order for a hypothesis to be considered a sound scientific theory it has to satisfy several criteria. Perhaps the most important of those is that scientists must be able to make testable predictions based upon the hypothesis. That is, if we assume the hypothesis is true, what sorts of consequences might we expect to occur and what sorts of experiments can we conduct to test whether those predictions hold true?

The central, foundational prediction of Darwinian evolution is that if all living things, especially those with complex genetic codes, evolved over billions of years from an original primordial cell with very simple genetic codes then the genetic material, DNA, must have a virtually unlimited capacity for variation. Otherwise, how did a simple genome in a primitive cell give rise to the highly complex genome in a mammalian cell?

Yet, according to geneticist and philosopher Kirk Durston in the 15 minute video below, every time this key prediction is put to the test, it's found to fail. Despite the ability of researchers to accelerate evolution in the lab and to simulate natural selection, every attempt to confirm this foundational prediction of Darwinism has hit a wall beyond which variation results in the death of the organism.

Durston asserts that such failures have made Neo-Darwinian evolution the most falsified theory in the history of science that still maintains a grip on the allegiance of a majority of scientists. He also explains why, in his opinion, this state of affairs exists.

A second prediction that follows if Darwinism is true is that the genetic information encoded in the cells of living organisms must have started at near-zero and increased until it reached the present state of affairs in which there are entire libraries of information contained in the nucleus of every cell in the body of every "advanced" organism. Durston points out, however, that this prediction is completely at odds with what we actually see happening in the world.

To the extent that there's variation within a taxon of organisms, it's due, as Michael Behe points out in his book Darwin Devolves, to a kind of devolution, a breaking of genes and an actual reduction of information.

Durston goes into more detail in the video, and all of what he says is easy for the non-biologist to understand. At the end he hints at several fascinating questions that arise from what has gone before:

If evolutionary variation is in fact due to a loss of information then doesn't that mean that originally there wasn't near-zero information present in the biosphere but rather a vast amount of information that has subsequently suffered degradation to one extent or another? And if there was a vast amount of information present at the very beginning of life, where did it come from and how did it get there?

These are intriguing questions for which naturalism has no plausible answer.

Discussing the Mind's Reality

An article at Mind Matters invites us to imagine a hypothetical conversation arising at a party between a materialist and a dualist.

Materialists believe that "mind" is merely a word we use to describe the functioning of the human brain. It's what the brain does. The mind is to the brain like digestion is to the stomach. Just as there's no organ or immaterial substance in us called "digestion" so, too, there's no immaterial substance called mind.

Dualists believe that, there is something about us that's immaterial and which works in concert with the body (brain) in order to produce the phenomena of our conscious experience.

The debate is important because what one believes about this "mind/body" problem affects much else that one believes.

For example, if one is a materialist it's much harder to maintain a belief in free will (and thus moral responsibility), life after death (since there's nothing to survive the death of the body), personal continuity of the self (since if we're only material substance and that substance is in constant flux, what is it that makes us the same self over time?), or God (since God is an immaterial mind).

If one is a dualist of one sort or another, it's much easier to accommodate each of these in one's overall belief system.

Here are just three of the materialist claims presented in the Mind Matters article along with brief responses to each.

Claim: The mind just emerged, slowly over eons, from the brain.

Response: The mind cannot just “emerge from” the brain if the two have no qualities in common — the one is immaterial, the other material.

Claim: Brain damage shows that the mind is really just the brain. Damage the brain and the mind goes … poof!

Response: That might be a good argument if things always happened that way. But a common treatment for severe epilepsy is to split the brain in half. The patient usually suffers only minor disabilities. Some people think and speak with only half a brain.

Modern neuroscience is also shedding light on the minds of people in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). The preferred new term is “disorders of consciousness.”

For example, in one study, “Remarkably, five patients were able to willfully modulate their brain activity, suggesting that, though unable to express any outward signs of consciousness at the bedside, they could understand and follow the researchers’ instructions.”

Generally speaking, people in a coma can hear and understand us.

Brain damage is a serious business, but it hardly shows that the mind is not real. Modern neuroscience enables us to identify many instances of humans struggling to express themselves using the available resources. That’s sometimes called neuroplasticity.

Claim: Don’t most professional neuroscientists say that the mind is just the brain?

Response: Many scientists believe that, not because of evidence, but because they are materialists. Thinking it through carefully, the idea doesn’t even make sense, as neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out: “How do we believe that there are no beliefs?

If eliminative materialism (a form of materialism that claims that conscious experience is an illusion) is true, then their own belief in eliminative materialism isn’t a belief. It’s a physical state, a certain concentration of neurochemicals that we (the uninitiated) foolishly call a belief. In fact, the mind’s reality is consistent with neuroscience.

It’s not popular with many neuroscientists but that's (because of philosophical or theological reasons, not scientific reasons).

Read the rest at Mind Matters where you'll also find links to support each of the assertions made above.

Mr. Biden's Competence

Dan McLaughlin at National Review has written what may be the definitive article on the history, character and qualification of Joe Biden to be president of the United States. Here's his lede:

Joe Biden has badly, visibly bungled America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. He has compounded the problem with his sluggish and dishonest public statements. This has gone so badly that even people and institutions that are normally sympathetic to Biden and his party have noticed.

American allies have been appalled, and vocal about it. What is slowly dawning on people is that Biden’s critics were right about him all along. Not since James Buchanan has America had a president who came so prepared by experience for the job, yet had so little clue how to do it.

McLaughlin offers much about Biden that everyone knew, or should've known, but which didn't seem to matter to a lot of voters last November. Biden wasn't Trump, and he didn't send mean tweets, and that's apparently all that mattered to many Americans.

I'll reluctantly skip over McLaughlin's treatment of Biden's history and character and excerpt from what he writes about Afghanistan:

American allies have been aghast at this performance, given that we acted unilaterally and high-handedly in ending a collective NATO operation, and did so with little consultation with them.

In his Monday speech, Mr. Biden made only a glancing reference to NATO and none to America’s European allies in his account of the conflict. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly had to wait a day and a half after requesting a call with the President to get Mr. Biden on the phone.

The Washington Post, maybe the newspaper with the most important readership among the center-left Washington establishment, published a column on Thursday titled “Withdrawal from Afghanistan forces allies and adversaries to reconsider America’s global role”:

President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan has triggered a globe-spanning rethink of America’s role in the world, as European allies discuss their need to play a bigger part in security matters and Russia and China consider how to promote their interests in a Taliban-led Afghanistan. . . .

In the European Union, which held an emergency session of foreign ministers on Afghanistan on Tuesday, officials offered rare criticism of Washington for risking a flood of refugees to their borders and the return of a platform for terrorism in Central Asia. . . .

Germany’s conservative candidate to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, Armin Laschet, on Tuesday called the withdrawal of forces “the greatest debacle that NATO has experienced since its foundation.”

Weren't we told during the campaign that Mr. Biden would heal the rift with NATO that President Trump had caused? In fact, as Mclaughlin states, it appears that Biden lied to our allies about his intentions:

President Joe Biden told key allies in June that he would maintain enough of a security presence in Afghanistan to ensure they could continue to operate in the capital following the main U.S. withdrawal, a vow made before the Taliban’s rapid final push across the country, according to a British diplomatic memo seen by Bloomberg.

Biden promised U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders at the Group of Seven summit in Cornwall, England, that “critical U.S. enablers” would remain in place to keep Kabul safe following the drawdown of NATO forces, the note said. British officials determined the U.S. would provide enough personnel to ensure that the U.K. embassy in Kabul could continue operating.

Critics in the British Parliament were scathing on Biden’s “dishonour.” As the BBC summarized the reaction in the British press:

A number of papers also highlight anger at Joe Biden — with the Daily Telegraph headline: “Parliament holds the president in contempt”.

The BBC, hardly a redoubt of hawkish or right-wing sentiment, has been blasting away at Biden all week. North America editor Jon Sopel, for example, thundered:

The shambolic unravelling of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan comes from a yet to be written textbook of “how to lose at everything”.

Warnings hadn’t been heeded, intelligence was clearly totally inadequate, planning was lamentable, execution woeful. . . .

Did no-one think that it might have been better to have ordered the withdrawal for the dead of winter when Taliban forces weren’t there, poised to fill the vacuum? . . .

After the bewildering events of the past few days, how exactly is America back?

Politico found reactions in Europe to be something on the order of scales falling from their eyes:

Until Sunday, Europe thought Joe Biden was an expert on foreign policy. Now, the American president’s decision to allow Afghanistan to collapse into the arms of the Taliban has European officials worried he has unwittingly accelerated what his predecessor Donald Trump started: the degradation of the Western alliance and everything it is supposed to stand for in the world.

Across Europe, officials have reacted with a mix of disbelief and a sense of betrayal. Even those who cheered Biden’s election and believed he could ease the recent tensions in the transatlantic relationship said they regarded the withdrawal from Afghanistan as nothing short of a mistake of historic magnitude.

“I say this with a heavy heart and with horror over what is happening, but the early withdrawal was a serious and far-reaching miscalculation by the current administration,” said Norbert Röttgen, chairman of the German parliament’s foreign relations committee. “This does fundamental damage to the political and moral credibility of the West.”

Here's Clarissa Ward of CNN reporting from Kabul airport declaring Mr. Biden's withdrawal an utter failure of planning:

But at least he isn't Trump, and he doesn't even tweet at all. So he has that going for him.

You must read the rest of McLaughlin's essay at the link. It's an education that's well worth the ten minutes it takes.

Did Unguided Forces Produce Mitosis?

The Veratasium video below illustrates just a fraction of the complexity of the process of cell division, a process that's going on in our bodies billions of times each day. The video depicts conventional cell division (mitosis), but meiosis, the cell division that produces ova and sperm, is even more complex.

Now this marvelous process came about either as the result of wholly unguided, random events, like monkeys pecking at a typewriter and somehow by chance producing a copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet, or, like Shakespeare's Hamlet it came about as a result of the intentional design of an intelligent mind.

There's really no third option. Mitosis is the end result of either guided or unguided processes. If one opts for the first choice then the obvious question is who or what is the intelligent mind that guided its development.

If one opts for the second choice then the obvious question is where an unguided process, like biological evolution, for example, acquired the information necessary to input into the creation of such an amazing duplication mechanism.

Information, the kind that programs computers or programs cells to reproduce themselves, comes, as far as we have experience of it, only from minds. Physical forces can create complex arrangements, like the distribution of pebbles left by the tide on a beach, but information that specifies a function, that specifies instructions for an operation in a computer or a cell, an operation like mitosis, only comes from minds.

Anyway, here's the video:

Diversity Is Not a Strength

Among the platitudes frequently uttered by our friends on the left is the refrain that diversity is a strength, that diversity enriches our culture, that diversity is, or should be, a preeminent value and goal among the institutions of our society.

Well, diversity does indeed carry with it a number of benefits, but it's not in itself a strength, nor a source of strength. In fact, diversity is a centrifugal social force which flings all the various social elements away from each other. Diversity weakens rather than strengthens the body politic, and that weakness must somehow be compensated for in a diverse society or else the society will find itself being ripped apart.

Our differences can readily create polarizing barriers between social groups. When we don't speak the same language or share the same race, ethnicity, religion, history, or values we easily become isolated and alienated from each other, balkanized in our own communities.

We tend to associate with people with whom we share commonalities. We naturally prefer the company of those who are most like us, and we frequently feel uncomfortable in the presence of those who aren't. We tend to wall ourselves off from them.

Our diversity, so far from bonding us together, tends instead to disconnect us from each other.

It's those things we share in common that unite us, which is why sports teams all wear the same uniform and the military makes their recruits do everything they do during their training together. It's one way they build a sense of team.

In order to counteract that centrifugal force a diverse society like ours needs some sort of tether, a kind of gravitational force, to pull us together and preserve a sense of team.

If we truly want to develop a sense of togetherness, of family, its imperative that we stop fixating on our differences, that we reject identity politics, for example, and focus on the qualities we share. Every difference is like a moat that potentially separates us, but every commonality is a bridge that potentially joins us together.

Those who insist upon stressing our differences, who keep picking at the scabs of our history, who seek to build moats are, intentionally or unintentionally, encouraging us to despise each other and making us weaker as a nation. Our strength comes from building bridges, from seeking to genuinely love each other.

Christopher Bedford at The Federalist writes:

Our differences without unifying mores — an anthem, a language, a border, a history, a Constitution, a faith in God — make us weak, and this is deadly.

Roger Scruton, one of the finest philosophers of the past half-century, explained the danger succinctly in the stirring and controversial BBC documentary “Rivers of Blood:”

All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbors, our countrymen: those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.

There are many things that make us different, but let's stop obsessing on these, much less celebrating them and start celebrating the things we all share in common, especially those things we all share in common as Americans.

On the Occasion of the Death of Steven Weinberg

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer wrote a piece on Steven Weinberg for the Jerusalem Post on the occasion of Weinberg's death last month.

After summarizing Weinberg's considerable contributions to physics and our understanding of the universe, Meyer suggests that Weinberg's metaphysics somewhat less brilliant than his physics:

His death also marks the twilight of an increasingly dated view of the relationship between science and religion.... Weinberg wrote many popular books about physics in which he often asserted that scientific advance had undermined belief in God – and, consequently, any ultimate meaning for human existence.

The First Three Minutes, his most popular book published in 1977, famously concluded: “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.”

Nevertheless, many such religious skeptics have yet to recognize the most important reason to reject science-based atheistic polemics: The most relevant scientific discoveries of the last century simply do not support atheism or materialism. Instead, they point in a decidedly different direction.

In The First Three Minutes, Weinberg described in detail the conditions of the universe just after the Big Bang. But he never attempted to explain what caused the Big Bang itself.

Nor could he. If the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time had a beginning – as observational astronomy and theoretical physics have increasing suggested – it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of an adequate physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe.

After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy – no physics – would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.

Meyer goes on to discuss how such considerations have led a number of prominent scientists and thinkers to conclude that there must be a creator and that this creator must transcend space, time and matter.

Indeed, the only way to avoid that conclusion is to posit that the universe just popped into existence uncaused, a leap of faith and credulity in comparison to which belief in a transcendent creator seems almost axiomatic.

It's interesting that Weinberg's scientific beliefs were often strongly shaped by his aversion to theism. Meyer tells us that the inference to a creator who caused the Big Bang initially repelled Weinberg (and many others) from accepting the Big Bang, opting instead for the spatio-temporally infinite universe entailed by the Steady State theory.

Meyer states that before Weinberg eventually succumbed to the evidence for the Big Bang he embraced the Steady State theory because, in Weinberg's words, “the steady state is philosophically the most attractive theory because it least resembles the account given in Genesis.”

This is a very unscientific reason for a scientist to embrace a theory. After all, if Young Earth Creationists are susceptible to criticism for sinning against science by allowing their view of Genesis to inform their science, why is it not also a sin against science for men like Weinberg to allow their view of Genesis to inform their science?

Weinberg is correct, though, about the implications of the Big Bang. Here's Meyer:

Fellow Nobel laureate and physicist Arno Penzias – whose discovery of the “cosmic background radiation” helped kindle Weinberg’s interest in Big Bang cosmology – noted the obvious connection between the Big Bang and the concept of divine creation. As he argued, “the best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.”

Weinberg's own work led him to discover some of the astonishing fine-tuning of the universe, but once again he sought other explanations to account for this remarkable feature of the cosmos and to avoid the implication that it's the product of a Designer. Meyer again:

To explain such extreme “fine tuning” without recourse to a transcendent “fine-tuner,” Weinberg favored the postulation of a multiplicity of other universes, an idea he acknowledged as speculative. The “multiverse” concept portrays our universe as the outcome of a grand lottery in which some universe-generating mechanism spits out trillions and trillions of universes – so many that our universe with its improbable combination of life-conducive factors would eventually have to arise.

Yet, multiverse advocates overlook an obvious problem. All such proposals posit universe generating mechanisms that themselves require prior unexplained fine-tuning – thus, taking us back to the need for an ultimate fine-tuner.

Meyer concludes his column with this:

On his passing, Scientific American’s tribute to Weinberg described how scientifically literate people need to learn “to live in Steven Weinberg’s pointless universe.”

Yet Weinberg’s own research built upon, or helped to make, two key scientific discoveries – the universe had a beginning and has been finely-tuned from the beginning – that do not imply a purposeless cosmos.

Arguably, they point, instead, to a purposeful creator behind it all.

The Human Immune System

Aside perhaps from the brain there's no system in the human body as complex as the immune system.

The 10 minute animation below gives an overview of just some aspects of the system, but there's so much complexity involved in our immune responses that it would take more than 10 minutes to cover it all.

The immune system is an astonishing feature of our bodies, one that we largely take for granted and don't think much about until something in it goes awry. It's so amazingly complex and so dependent upon massive inputs of information that to believe it somehow arose through blind mechanistic processes requires a herculean exertion of one's will and a suspension of every ounce of skepticism.

In fact, the case could easily be made that it takes far more credulity, far more blind faith, to believe that the immune system is a fortuitous accident than to believe that it was designed by a mind.

After all, we have abundant experience of minds developing information-rich and complex systems, but we have no experience of such systems being produced by unguided processes and purposeless, goalless forces.

Between two possible competing causes, whichever one is the best explanation of a particular phenomenon is the cause we should accept.

In the case of the immune system the cause of this beautifully organized, highly complex, information-rich system is either a very long sequence of extremely improbable, unguided genetic "accidents," or it's a mind.

The former is something of which we have no experience. We have no experience of complex information systems being produced by mindless, atelic processes, but we experience minds producing such systems every day in our technological world.

Given that all of our experience makes mind the more rational explanation it seems that the only reason anyone could have for choosing unguided, natural processes as the cause of our immune systems is that they've a priori ruled out mind as an explanation, but that's an irrational, question-begging move.

It's like saying that the immune system must be the product of blind natural processes because the alternative, mind, simply cannot be the cause. But how do we know that it can't be the cause?

Here's the video:

Incomprehensible Precision

Ethan Siegel is a physicist who writes a regular column on science for Forbes magazine. In a recent column on the structure of the universe he mentioned that the expansion of the universe is proceeding at just the right rate to permit a universe that can give rise to life:

If the expansion rate is too small for the stuff within it, the Universe rapidly recollapses. If the expansion rate is too large for the stuff within it, the Universe rapidly dilutes so that no two particles will ever find one another.

Only if the Universe is “just right,” and I hope you’re saying “just right” the way you would when you tell the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, can the Universe expand, cool, form complex entities, and persist with interesting structures within it for billions of years.

If our Universe, at the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang, were just a tiny bit denser or just a tiny bit less dense, or conversely expanded just a tiny bit more or less quickly, our own existence would have been a physical impossibility.

A universe with lower mass density would not form stars and planets. It's expansion would be so rapid that gravity would not be able to coalesce dust into stars.

If the density of matter at the beginning of the universe's existence were the tiniest bit greater the increase in gravity would cause all stars to be much larger than the Sun. Such stars emit very high intensity radiation and are subject to rapid changes in temperature and luminosity, characteristics which would render any planets orbiting them unsuitable for life.

Slightly more mass in the early universe would've slowed the expansion such that all stars would become black holes and neutron stars. The density near the surface of such bodies would exceed five billion tons per teaspoonful. Atoms, molecules and life would all have been impossible.

If the density of the early universe were not almost exactly what it is we would not have either the right amounts or the right diversity of elements, and the expansion rate of the universe would've been either too great or too small.

So how finely calibrated must the mass density have been in the early stages of the universe's development to produce a life-permitting universe? Physicists have calculated the value to have been one part in 10^60.

This is a tolerance so incomprehensibly precise that according to astronomer Hugh Ross it's like an almost invisible fleck of paint on an aircraft carrier. If we compare this ship to the universe in its earliest moments, removing the fleck or adding one like it would make the carrier uninhabitable.

Or, to use a different analogy, the universe's mass had to be so precise at the beginning that if it deviated by the mass of a single dime it never would've been able to support life.

Moreover, as mentioned above, the rate at which the universe expands is also fine-tuned to a value of no less than 1 part in 10^90 and perhaps as high as 1 part in 10^120. To get an idea of the magnitude of just the lower of those two values, in the entire universe - 200 billion galaxies each with a 100 billion stars plus planets, dust, etc. - there are "only" 10^80 atoms.

The chances of a blindfolded person selecting by chance a specially-marked atom from anywhere in the universe are 10 billion times better than a universe just happening to chance upon the expansion rate necessary for living things to exist in it.

Imagine some sort of meter with a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion calibrations. Turning a knob points a dial to precisely one of them, but if the dial was off by just one calibration the meter wouldn't work at all. That's roughly analogous to the fine-tuning of both the mass density and the expansion rate of the universe.

And these are just two of the dozens of finely-tuned constants, forces and parameters that must be set at these exquisitely precise values in order for life to be possible in our universe.

In the words of the the brilliant physicist Fred Hoyle, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."

If that's so, the next question is what or who could that superintellect possibly be?

Smart Power

Jim Geraghty has an excellent column at National Review on the hubris of Democrat administrations of the last thirty years and their utter failure to understand the world as it is.

You really should click on the link and read the whole thing, but in case you don't here are a few excerpts:

As the U.S. mission in Afghanistan ends in disaster and the Taliban returns to rule with wanton and widespread cruelty again, it is time to once and for all cast away the notion that the Democrats are the party of “smart power” abroad.

Every four years, a Democratic presidential candidate pops up and reminds us that he — or, one cycle, she — represents the smart party when it comes to foreign policy. These Democrats boast that they’re not isolationist, like Donald Trump, and they’re not unilateralist cowboys, like George W. Bush. They, and their top advisers, assure us that they are right, tough, smart, nuanced, and sophisticated.

And every four years, the U.S. foreign-policy establishment — think-tank wonks, retired diplomats, columnists and authors, certain retired generals — almost uniformly swoons at these Democratic presidential candidates’ keen grasp of a complicated and dangerous world. And these top Democrats are not shy about telling us how they understand the world better than anyone else does.

Sadly, too many Americans trust them.

"But something odd happens," Geraghty writes, "whenever the self-identified 'smart' Democratic foreign-policy thinkers come to power. Somehow, randomly — through no fault of their own, they insist — disaster strikes."

As its eight years came to a close, the Clinton administration assured Americans that it had “defined a new security agenda that addresses contemporary threats.” There was no mention of that once-obscure extremist who steadily and gradually expanded his power until he commanded a worldwide army of Islamist terrorists, probing for holes and weak spots in America’s open society — detonating truck bombs in New York City, leveling embassies, blowing up U.S. Navy ships.

Clinton’s decision-making on Osama bin Laden was so sterling that Sandy Berger was left stuffing official documents in his socks at the archives.

In Syria, the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers declared a foreign-policy “red line” about the use of chemical weapons . . . and then stood and watched as Assad gassed his own people. The Syrian civil war killed so many people that the world couldn’t get a reliable estimate, and waves of refugees poured into Europe, destabilizing European politics.

Bashar al-Assad said he got rid of his chemical weapons, and the Obama team chose to believe him.

The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers offered Russia a “reset,” convinced that the Putin regime would come around now that the dreaded cowboy unilateralists were gone. Nearly two terms later, Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, was left appealing to the consciences of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

“Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you? Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin?” The answer is no, and that answer was clear long before 2016.

The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers insisted they had safely withdrawn from Iraq, and dismissed this group called ISIS as just the “jayvee team,” and then watched as the “jayvee team” created the Islamic State in the empty vacuum and set about committing genocide and launching and inspiring terrorist attacks all around the world.

The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers patted themselves on the back for “leading from behind” in Libya and then watched as American diplomats and security personnel got killed while begging for assistance in Benghazi. The U.S. has not had a significant diplomatic presence in Libya since 2014.

Russia rolled into Crimea, but the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers didn’t really do much. Russian forces shot down a civilian passenger airliner over Ukraine, but the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers dithered until the world’s anger faded. China repeatedly violated its treaty agreements, but the Obama administration believed Chinese promises to honor its commitments in the future.

Iran seized ten U.S. sailors in international waters, paraded images of their capture on state-run television, and the Obama administration thanked the regime for releasing them.

Iran built secret nuclear facilities, but the self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers didn’t really do much. The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers pledged that the U.S. would never accept North Korea as a nuclear state . . . after North Korea tested nuclear weapons. The self-identified “smart” Democratic foreign-policy thinkers seem to think that the primary obstacle to peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is that past American presidents just haven’t tried hard enough.

Every four years, the message is the same: Trust us, we’re the ones who know what we’re doing.

And yet, the oddest thing happens — the Democratic foreign-policy establishment gets in power, and a short while later, so many things go wrong.

One month ago, the president of the United States stood before this country and assured Americans that, “the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more competent in terms of conducting war.” “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Of course, all of what Mr. Biden assured us would not happen has happened over the last few days, and as if to underscore Geraghty's point Nancy Pelosi declared that the Taliban better be careful about how they treat women because world opinion will censure them if they're not. What planet is she living on? Does she really think that these brutes care about what a bunch of effete Westerners say about them at their soirees?

And the same people who have brought us this profoundly shameful debacle in Afghanistan now want us to trust them when they tell us that passing a $4 trillion spending bill will be great for the country. No thanks.

The President's Self-Inflicted Crises

Mr. Biden's average approval rating is currently hovering at 50% and trending downward. There are probably a number of reasons for the decline - rising inflation, the ambiguous messages from the administration about Covid, rising rates of violent crime, and despite the president's attempt to talk tough, the perception that he's really just a malleable figurehead for the far-left of his party.

A piece at Hot Air suggests that there are at least three crises responsible for his declining approval which the Biden administration has brought upon itself through it's own incomprehensible incompetence: Immigration, Afghanistan, and inflation. To these might be added a few more: a resurgent pandemic (though it's not a self-inflicted crisis), and the ongoing soap opera that is the Hunter Biden saga.

Anyway, at least two of the foregoing crises appear at this point to be complete disasters. The first of these is the president's immigration policy, or rather the lack thereof.

From the link:

The crisis on our southern border began shortly after President Biden took office. President Trump had managed to stem the flow of migrants by building a border wall, increasing support for Border Patrol, and getting Mexico to use its military to block migrants from traveling north.

Most importantly, Mr. Trump sent a clear message that the days of open borders were over.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris struck a much different tone, which has paved the way for the present crisis.

Before taking office, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris signaled their intent to stop deportations. Once in office, President Biden began rolling back immigration enforcement and proposed a plan to legalize millions of illegal residents without first funding basic border security priorities.

These actions have sent a clear message of openness to migrants, who are now crossing the border at a rate of 6,000 per day.

Illegal border crossings have increased every month under President Biden. In June, Border Patrol recorded 178,000 border arrests – a 571 percent jump from June 2020. In July, officers in the Rio Grande Valley arrested 20,000 border crossers in a single week – the most ever recorded. Border arrests have now already reached their highest since 2000 and are on track to reach 1.8 million this year.

And these arrests are just a partial snapshot of the situation, as many others are crossing our borders undetected.

This chaotic situation could get even worse because of a recent decision by the Mexican government. This past week, Mexico announced it will no longer take back non-Mexican migrant families who have been caught by U.S. border agents.

This is a major shift from last year, when President Trump struck a deal with Mexico to have asylum seekers “remain in Mexico” while their applications were being processed. President Biden has clearly failed to exert the pressure needed to obtain Mexico’s help in solving the border crisis.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently admitted that the situation is unsustainable:

“A couple of days ago I was down in Mexico, and I said look, you know, if, if our borders are the first line of defense, we’re going to lose and this is unsustainable,” Mayorkas said Thursday, according to the audio obtained by Fox News’ Bill Melugin through a Border Patrol source. “We can’t continue like this, our people in the field can't continue and our system isn’t built for it.”

Entry into the U.S. from Canada is still closed (until Aug. 21st), but hundreds of thousands are waltzing across our border with Mexico and being transported all around the country at taxpayer expense with no apparent concern for Covid infections. Why?

As Bryan Preston notes, either President Biden is surprised by this massive influx of immigrants or he's not. If he is surprised he's incompetent because everyone else saw this coming. If he's not surprised then he's criminally negligent and grossly irresponsible.

If Biden's immigration non-policy can be fairly called a disaster, there are no words to describe the moral recklessness and horrific consequences of his decision to abandon millions of Afghans to the meager mercies of the Taliban.

On July 8th, Mr. Biden delivered himself of this piece of quasi-prescient prose: "The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely." Well, tragically, that's exactly what the Taliban are doing as you read this:

Thousands of Afghans have fled their homes amid fears the Taliban will again impose a brutal, repressive government, all but eliminating women’s rights and conducting public amputations, stonings and executions.

The latest U.S. military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months [Update: The Taliban entered Kabul yesterday].

The Afghan government may eventually be forced to pull back to defend the capital and just a few other cities in the coming days if the Taliban keep up their momentum. [Update: Afghanistan's president Ashraf Ghani has fled the country]

The onslaught represents a stunning collapse of Afghan forces and renews questions about where the over $830 billion spent by the U.S. Defense Department on fighting, training those troops, and reconstruction efforts went — especially as Taliban fighters ride on American-made Humvees and pickup trucks with M-16s slung across their shoulders.

Meanwhile, President Biden has gone on vacation in Delaware, and Afghans allied with the U.S. have been relegated to begging acquaintances here to try to find them and their relatives safe passage out of the country before they fall into the Taliban’s hands and are executed.

It's probably too late for many of them to escape, and it's hard to imagine the fear these people must be experiencing not only for themselves but for their loved ones. Yet Mr. Biden told us the other day that he has "no regrets."

Thousands of Afghans who helped us will be, or are being, tortured and slaughtered by the Taliban. Young girls will once again be consigned to the burka, forbidden to go to school and forced to "marry" Taliban fighters.

It didn't have to be this way. There was no good reason for Mr. Biden's precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. had suffered no combat casualties in that country in the last year and a half, and it's been noted that American soldiers were safer in Afghanistan in 2021 than are policemen in many major cities in the U.S.

Nor is the fact that we've been there for two decades by itself a compelling reason to have left. We've been in Japan, Germany and South Korea since WWII and show no signs of leaving any of those countries.

As with immigration, either President Biden is surprised by the collapse of the Afghan military or he's not. If he's surprised he's incompetent because many others saw this coming.

If he's not surprised, if he knew what would happen when he announced our immediate withdrawal, then he's morally culpable of a horrific betrayal, and the blood of all those Afghans we've abandoned will stain his legacy for the rest of history.