The Socratic Method

Socrates (470–399 BC) was one of the most influential philosophers in all of human history. He himself never wrote anything but his unique mode of discourse, which came to be known as the “Socratic method,” remains as one of the great teaching styles and modes of inquiry still in use today.

Dr. Paul Herrick writes a good overview of Socrates' style as well as the details of his trial and death at Philosophy News. Here are some excerpts from his discussion of the Socratic Method:

At some point around the middle of his life...Socrates became convinced that many people think they know what they are talking about when in reality they do not have a clue. He came to believe that many people, including smug experts, are in the grips of illusion. Their alleged knowledge is a mirage.

Similarly, he also saw that many believe they are doing the morally right thing when they are really only fooling themselves—their actions cannot be rationally justified.

As this realization sank in, Socrates found his life’s purpose: he would help people discover their own ignorance as a first step to attaining more realistic beliefs and values. But how to proceed?

Some people, when convinced that others are deluded, want to grab them by their collars and yell at them. Others try to force people to change their minds. Many people today believe violence is the only solution.

None of this was for Socrates. He felt so much respect for each individual—even those in the grips of illusion and moral error—that violence and intimidation were out of the question. His would be a completely different approach: he asked people questions. Not just any questions, though.

He asked questions designed to cause others to look in the mirror and challenge their own assumptions on the basis of rational and realistic standards of evidence. Questions like these: Why do I believe this? What is my evidence? Are my assumptions on this matter really true? Or am I overlooking something? Are my actions morally right? Or am I only rationalizing bad behavior?

This may not seem like such a big deal but it is. Most of us have no desire to question our beliefs about important matters like religion or politics, and when someone does question us our response is often to get defensive and to just shout louder than the other person until the exchange ends in anger.

We see a form of this when college students shout down speakers with whom they disagree and refuse to let them speak (for a couple of examples see here and here).

Such behavior is not just rude and intellectually immature, it's a signal that the shouters have no good reasons for believing what they do and deep down realize that their beliefs can only prevail if the other side is denied a hearing. The cause of truth is ill-served by such tactics, but then the thugs who engage in this behavior aren't really interested in truth in the first place.

Herrick continues:

Looking in the mirror in a Socratic way can be painful. For reasons perhaps best left to psychologists, it is easy to criticize others but it is hard to question and challenge yourself. There are intellectual hurdles as well. Which standards or criteria should we apply when we test our beliefs and values?

Socrates, by his example, stimulated a great deal of research into this question. Over the years, many criteria have been proposed, tested, and accepted as reliable guides to truth, with truth understood as correspondence with reality.

These standards are collected in one place and studied in the field of philosophy known as “logic”—the study of the principles of correct reasoning. Today we call someone whose thinking is guided by rational, realistic criteria a “critical thinker.” Our current notion of criterial, or critical, thinking grew out of the philosophy of Socrates.

So, moved by the pervasiveness of human ignorance, bias, egocentrism, and the way these shortcomings diminish the human condition, Socrates spent the rest of his life urging people to look in the mirror and examine their assumptions in the light of rational, realistic criteria as the first step to attaining real wisdom. Knowledge of your own ignorance and faults, he now believed, is a prerequisite for moral and intellectual growth.

Just as a builder must clear away brush before building a house, he would say, you must clear away ignorance before building knowledge. As this reality sank in, his conversations in the marketplace shifted from the big questions of cosmology to questions about the human condition and to that which he now believed to be the most important question of all: What is the best way to live, all things considered?

Socrates’s mission—to help others discover their own ignorance as a first step on the path to wisdom--explains why he expected honesty on the part of his interlocutors. If the other person does not answer honestly, he won’t be led to examine his own beliefs and values. And if he does not look in the mirror, he will not advance. For Socrates, honest self-examination was one of life’s most important tasks.

When our most deeply-held beliefs are at risk, when we're confronted by compelling challenges to those beliefs, honesty is often difficult. Not only are our convictions at stake but so is our pride.

It's humbling to have to acknowledge that we've been wrong about a belief we've held. We resort to all manner of diversion, obfuscation and fallacy in order to escape the conclusion our interlocutor's argument may be leading us toward. We resist it, we refuse to believe it, regardless of the price we must pay for that refusal in terms of our intellectual integrity.

There's an old ditty that captures the psychology of this well: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

Socrates himself encountered this resistance to having one's beliefs challenged and paid with his life for having discredited the certainties of very proud and vain men. You can read about what happened to him in Herrick's column at the link.

Divine Hiddenness

There are two antitheistic (against the existence of God) arguments that non-theists have found particularly convincing over the last several centuries.

One of these is the problem of evil which has received perhaps its greatest literary expression in The chapter titled "The Rebellion" in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

The other argument, which is in some ways similar to the problem of evil (or suffering), is based on what philosophers call "Divine hiddenness" and which the Japanese Catholic Shusako Endo portrayed so powerfully in his novel Silence (See also the movie based on the book).

The technical form of the argument from Divine hiddenness can be found here, but in simpler English the argument goes something like this:

1. If a good God exists, He would not allow anyone who would otherwise believe in Him to remain ignorant of His existence and be lost for eternity.
2. There are people, however, who are ignorant of God's existence who would otherwise believe in Him if they knew of Him.
3. Therefore, there are people who would believe in God if they knew of Him who are lost for eternity.
4. Therefore, a good God does not exist.

Or, put more simply, because there are people who are innocently unaware of God's existence and who would believe in Him if they knew, therefore He doesn't exist.

This argument makes three questionable assumptions. It assumes that there really are those who are genuinely ignorant of God's existence; it assumes that those who are ignorant of God's existence will necessarily be lost for eternity; and it assumes that God could not possibly have overriding reasons for not revealing Himself in ways that persons ignorant of His existence, if such there be, would find compelling.

Each of these assumptions is doubtful, and in this form, at least, the argument is not very persuasive.

Perhaps a more psychologically compelling version of the argument is the one developed by Endo in his novel.

Roughly based on a true story, the novel describes the terrifying ordeal of a 16th century missionary to Japan who is put through mental tortures to persuade him to commit what seems to be a relatively minor act of blasphemy. He's required to step on a crude portrait of Jesus, and his refusal to commit this act of desecration is punished by Japanese samurai who subject innocent Christian villagers to unimaginable suffering until the missionary relents.

Despite his agonized prayers, however, there's no apparent answer from heaven. God seems silent, hidden, absent.

As emotionally gripping as this story is, in the end it doesn't demonstrate that God does not exist. The only thing it demonstrates about God is that He's sometimes, perhaps frequently, inscrutable, but believers already knew that.

It's interesting, too, that Endo's missionary, although crushed and broken by his ordeal, ultimately retains his belief in God.

To say that the argument from Divine hiddenness ultimately fails is not to minimize, however, its emotional and spiritual force.

God's seeming absence has been the cause of much anguish among many believers in the midst of great suffering and fear throughout most of human history. I have a friend who has drifted into agnosticism largely because of it.

A family member recently sent me a simple vignette that's a parable about the doubt materialists have about life after death but which actually, if perhaps inadvertently, also addresses the problem of Divine hiddenness. It goes like this:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only reasonable to believe that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

From the fact that the babies don't perceive her, don't see or hear her, it surely doesn't follow that she doesn't exist or care about them and their well-being.

The Universe Is Amazing

Recent studies have confirmed that the cosmos in which we live is in the grip of an accelerating force called dark energy which is causing the universe to expand at ever increasing speeds. This is bizarre because gravity should be causing the expansion, generated by the initial Big Bang, to slow down. Nevertheless, all indications are that it's accelerating. Science Daily has the story:

A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds.

The findings offer new support for the favored theory of how dark energy works -- as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.

"The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster," said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Dark energy is thought to dominate our universe, making up about 74 percent of it. Dark matter, a slightly less mysterious substance, accounts for 22 percent. So-called normal matter, anything with atoms, or the stuff that makes up living creatures, planets and stars, is only approximately four percent of the cosmos.

This last point is a fascinating detail. All that we can see with our telescopes makes up only 4% of what's out there. The rest is invisible to us because it doesn't interact with light the way normal matter does.

Here's another interesting detail. We don't know what the cosmic dark energy is, but we do know that its density is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120. That means that if the value of the density of this mysterious stuff deviated from its actual value by as little as one part in 10^120 a universe that could generate and sustain intelligent life would not exist. That level of precision is absolutely breathtaking.

Add to that the fact that the mass density, the total mass in the universe, is itself calibrated to one part in 10^60, and it is simply astonishing to realize that a universe in which life could exist actually came into being.

Imagine two dials, one has 10^120 calibrations etched into its dial face and the other has 10^60.

Now imagine that the needles of the two dials have to be set to just the mark they in fact are. If they were off by one degree out of the trillion trillion trillion, etc. degrees on the dial face the universe wouldn't exist. In fact, to make this analogy more like the actual case of the universe there would be dozens of such dials, all set to similarly precise values.

Here's another example courtesy of biologist Ann Gauger. Gauger quotes philosopher of physics Bruce Gordon who writes that,

[I]f we measure the width of the observable universe in inches and regard this as representing the scale of the strengths of the physical forces, gravity is fine-tuned to such an extent that the possibility of intelligent life can only tolerate an increase or decrease in its strength of one one-hundred-millionth of an inch with respect to the diameter of the observable universe.

To which Gauger responds,

That is literally awesome. That 1/10^8 inch movement is the same as 0.00000001 of an inch, or about the width of a water molecule, in either direction compared to the width of the observable universe. That is an incredible amount of very fine-tuned order — the relationship between the strong nuclear force and the gravitational force has to be that precise for stars and planets to form, and the elements that are necessary to support life.

Just one water molecule’s width compared to the width of the whole universe — if the ratio were just a little too little, stars’s lives would be cut short and there would be no time for life to develop; too much and everything would expand too fast, thus preventing star and planet formation.

No wonder fine-tuning is called one of the best evidences for intelligent design. People have proposed ways around the challenge, mainly to do with the multiverse hypothesis. But there are so many other instances of fine-tuning and design perfect for creatures like us that it begins to look like a genuine plan.

So how do scientists explain the fact that such a universe does, against all odds, exist? Gauger refers to the assumption held by some that there must be a near infinite number of different worlds, a multiverse. If the number of universes is sufficiently large (unimaginably large), and if they're all different, then as unlikely as our universe is, the laws of probability say that one like ours must inevitably exist among the innumerable varieties that are out there.

The other possibility, of course, is that our universe was purposefully engineered by a super intellect, but given the choice between believing in a near infinity of worlds for which there's virtually no evidence and believing that our universe is the product of intentional design, a belief for which there is much evidence, guess which option many moderns choose.

The lengths people go to in order to avoid having to believe that there's something out there with attributes similar to those traditionally imputed to God really are quite remarkable.

Roger Scruton's Conservatism

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who published more than 40 books in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics. He was interviewed shortly before his death in 2020 by Madeleine Kearns for National Review about his latest book which is titled Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, and he has some pithy things to say.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation with a few thoughts of my own interspersed:

Madeleine Kearns: In your most recent book, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, you provide a distilled synthesis of modern conservative thought. First, I’d like to begin with your book’s last chapter, “Conservatism Now,” in which you reference William F. Buckley Jr.’s first book, God and Man at Yale (1951).

In that book, which arguably launched the conservative movement in America, a 24-year-old Buckley wrote: “I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”

Do you think Buckley was correct? If so, what are these “other vital battles”?

Sir Roger Scruton: Yes, Buckley was right. There is the vital battle to defend fundamental institutions, such as marriage and the family, and to counter the censorship of all opinions that express an attachment to our cultural and political inheritance.

MK: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative?

SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.

MK: Why do many on the left consider conservatism to be inherently evil (rather than cuddly)?

SRS: The principal reason is that people on the left have illusions about human nature and think they prove their virtue by broadcasting those illusions. Anyone who punctures those illusions is therefore not just a spoilsport but a threat. What the self-declared “virtue” of the left amounts to can be witnessed in what happens to ordinary humanity when the left takes power.

I think here I would add to what Scruton says. A big part of the left's hatred for conservatives, IMO, stems from the fact that The left bases their policy prescriptions on emotivism and conservatives base theirs on reason and experience. For example, the left believes in their heart that socialism should work, but reason and experience demonstrate that it doesn't.

Thus, when people are shown that the ideas that they've invested their lives in are utterly wrong, it generates resentment, bitterness and ultimately hatred for those who show them to be wrong.

MK: Can one be a hopeful conservative without God?

SRS: Yes, but it helps to believe in God, since then one’s hopes are fixed on a higher reality, and that stops one from imposing them on the world in which we live.

Actually, I don't know how anyone can be a hopeful anything without God.

If there is no God what is there to hope for? What difference does it make what the world will be like after our deaths? Hoping that our descendents have a pleasant world to live in is a nice sentiment, but a couple of generations down the line you and they are utter strangers to each other, and their lives are just as pointless as are ours today. What does it matter to anyone living today whether the world's a better or worse place in 2100?

If there is no God, hopefulness seems quaint, meaningless, and out of place.

MK: You mention a reluctance on the part of some conservatives to self-identify as such. Surprisingly, perhaps, you include George Orwell and Simone Weil in this category. Can you explain why they, too, belong to the “great tradition”? How can you spot a conservative?

SRS: I try to explain this in my book. Conservatives reveal themselves through their care for ordinary human things, and their recognition of the fragility of decency and the need to protect it.

MK: How is Islam to be best accommodated in Western democracies?

SRS: By engaging Muslims in discussion and explaining to them that we live under a rule of law which is man-made, not God-bestowed.

It's not clear, however, why Islam should be specially accommodated at all. Western democracies have freedom of religion; that's all the accommodation the state should make for any religion.

If there's to be accommodation it should run the other way. Muslims should accommodate themselves to living in a country that holds constitutional values that their religion may make no allowance for.

In other words, the Muslim should accommodate him or herself to the laws and values of the land in which he/she chooses to live, not vice-versa.

Living in Unity

The pastor of one of the churches in my town, a man who considers himself a progressive, has put up Psalm 133:1 on the signboard outside his church: "How good and pleasant it is when people live together in unity."

Reading this as I drove by the other day caused me to reflect.

The sign is doubtless intended as a critique of the social and political hostilities that beset our nation and to serve as a pastoral adjuration to our townspeople, who are overwhelmingly conservative, to refrain from participating in these bitter conflicts.

Yet it was not conservatives but the left who split the country over the 2000 Bush/Gore election.

Nor was it conservatives but rather the left who refused to accept Trump's legitimacy in 2016 and spent four years dividing the country by trying to oust him from office with phony allegations of "Russian collusion" and sundry other mendacities.

Nor is it conservatives but rather the left who today attack anyone who follows their 2000 and 2016 example by questioning the legitimacy of Biden's election, and it's the left that has torn the country apart by attacking freedom of speech and religion as well as traditional views of marriage, gender, race and immigration and by trying to destroy the careers of anyone who opposes, or even just disagrees, with them.

Perhaps the pastor meant to post the message, "How good and pleasant it is when people acquiesce to the socialist/progressive agenda" but found it too long to fit on the signboard.

Of course, no one of good will would dispute that it is good and pleasant to live together in unity, but a man of the left might do well to understand that we live in a historical moment in which it is his political fellow-travelers who most of all need to hear and heed that message.

The Tyranny of the Crowd

Robert Kaplan, writing for the Wall street Journal, discusses a 1960 book by a scholar named Elias Canetti who, Kaplan says, "may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years."

The book is titled Crowds and Power, and it discusses among other things the role of technology in accelerating the decline of the West.

Kaplan points out that the mass movements of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, would've been impossible without the technological advances that made mass communication possible:

It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.

Kaplan then notes that,

The mass ideologies of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, represented a profound abasement of reason. Yet those ideologies reveal more than we’d like to admit about our own political extremes....Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity.

Condemning others, destroying others, compensates for one's own inadequacies and spiritual impoverishment. It fulfills one's need for power, self-importance, self-righteousness and purpose. It's a need that the individual is unable, by himself, to gratify but which can be satisfied by one's participation in "the crowd."

Here's Kaplan:

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.

Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”

There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own.

Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology—first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook —has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.

Social media amplifies the individual's sense of power. It amplifies all the worst characteristics of crowds (or mobs) which no longer need to be comprised of people physically present to each other as they did in the previous century. By folding solitary persons into a like-minded mass of anonymous individuals modern social media enables the otherwise impotent individual to slake his thirst for significance and meaning.

It also enables him to manifest his bitterness and vent his hatreds in politically effective ways.

Kaplan again:

There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.

But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies.

In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.

The need to parade one's own "virtue" is a major impetus behind "cancel culture." To condemn the sins of others, to humiliate them for their transgressions, is a means of drawing attention to one's own moral superiority. Social media mobs offer unprecedented opportunities for moral preening.

The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.

This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in the introduction to his recently released book The Dying Citizen:

...everything that we once thought was so strong, so familiar, and so reassuring about America has been dissipating for some time....Contemporary events have reminded Americans that their citizenship is fragile and teetering on the abyss....

If we soon tumble over the edge of that abyss it'll be hate-filled crowds of shrivelled souls on social media who'll be largely responsible.

Can we be Good Without God (Pt. II)

Yesterday we looked at an argument by biologist Jerry Coyne the gravamen of which was that morality is not contingent upon a transcendent moral authority such as God. I'd like to continue our critique of this argument in today's post.

Coyne writes that,

though both moral and immoral behaviors can be promoted by religions, morality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.

Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one.

Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK.

Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.

Coyne here adverts to the classic Euthyphro dilemma which, contrary to what he thinks, has been discredited by philosophers for centuries (see here, and here). It's unfortunate that Coyne is unaware of this, but it illustrates the hazard of experts in one field speaking dogmatically on matters in other disciplines.

But what he says next merits a more thorough response.

So where does morality come from if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness.

This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.

Assuming this is correct what makes the behaviors he mentions moral or right? If a chimp acted contrary to these tendencies would we think the chimp immoral? Would we call its actions evil or wicked? Why, then - if we're nothing more than hairless apes - do we call humans evil when they torture people or abuse children? We have an aversion to such things, to be sure, but aversion doesn't make something wicked.

And the conditions under which humans evolved are precisely those that would favor the evolution of moral codes: small social groups of big-brained animals. When individuals in a group can get to know, recognize and remember each other, this gives an advantage to genes that make you behave nicely towards others in the group, reward those who cooperate and punish those who cheat. That's how natural selection can build morality.

In other words we should be nice because we've evolved to be nice. This is fallacious. Philosophers since Hume have recognized that one can't derive an ought from an is. Because we've evolved a certain tendency, if indeed we have, it doesn't follow that we have an obligation to express that tendency.

As mentioned above, we've also evolved the tendency to be selfish and mean and a host of other unsavory behavioral traits. Are these behaviors morally right just because they've evolved? Should we consider cruelty good because it's an evolved behavior?

Coyne concludes with this thought:

Secular reason adds another layer atop these evolved behaviors, helping us extend our moral sentiments far beyond our small group of friends and relatives — even to animals.

This is silly. Secular reason says no such thing. What secular reason dictates is that I should look out for my own interests, I should put myself first, and use others to promote my own well-being and happiness.

That may entail that I give people the impression that I care about them in order to get them to assist me in my own pursuit of happiness, but people who are of no use to me are of no value to me. Thus, it'd be foolish of me to sacrifice my comforts to help some starving child in some other part of the world who will never be of any use to me.

Indeed, why, on Coyne's view, is it wrong to refuse aid to victims of poverty and starvation?

Atheistic philosopher Kai Nielson stresses this very point:

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view or that all really rational persons unhoodwinked by myth or ideology need not be individual egoists or amoralists. Reason doesn't decide here. The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me...pure reason...will not take you to morality.

Secular reason and evolution have no answer to the question why we should help those who are in no position to help us, at least none that doesn't reduce to the claim that helping others just makes us feel good. It's an ugly fact about naturalism that its logic entails such conclusions, and either Coyne knows it's ugly and doesn't want his readers to know it, or he has no idea.

In either case he should stick to biology.

Can We be Good Without God? (Pt. I)

Jerry A. Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago. He's also a prominent atheist who has written a book titled Faith Vs. Fact in which he tries to explain why theism is false.

A few years ago he wrote a column for USA Today in which he argued that belief in God is not necessary for one to live a moral life. He complains that:

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."

Coyne believes that human morality is a consequence of the evolutionary process coupled with human reason. God is unnecessary. There are at least four things wrong with Coyne's rejection of the belief that God is in some sense necessary for ethics. First, "God-given morality" is not incompatible with evolution. God could be the ground both of moral value and of evolutionary change.

There is a serious incompatibility, however, between "God-given morality" and Coyne's naturalism, i.e. his belief that the natural world is all there is. If naturalism is true then there is no God and thus no "God-given morality."

Second, no one argues that evolution could not, at least in theory, have bestowed upon us the sentiments Coyne lists. The problem is that if evolution is the source of these impulses then it's also the source of avarice, bigotry, cruelty, etc.

If we believe that evolution has produced all human behavioral tendencies, on what basis do we decide that one set of behaviors is good and the other bad? Are we not assuming a "moral dictionary", so to speak - a standard above and beyond nature by which we adjudicate between behaviors to determine which are right and which are wrong?

If so, what is that standard?

Third, if an impersonal, mindless, random process is the ultimate source of these behaviors it can't in any moral sense be wrong to act contrary to them. If moral sentiments are the product of natural selection and chance chemical happenstances in the brain there's no non-arbitrary moral value to anything.

Right and wrong reduce to subjective likes and dislikes, and that leads to moral nihilism.

Finally, in the absence of God in what sense are we accountable for our actions? And if we're not accountable, if there's no reckoning for how we behave, what does it mean to say that a given behavior is "wrong"? If there are no posted speed limits on a highway and no enforcement, what does it mean to say that one is "wrong" to go as fast as one wishes or thinks is prudent?

The most it can mean is that other people won't like it, but why should anyone care whether others approve of how he or she behaves?

We'll look at another aspect of Coyne's argument tomorrow.

Refuting the WAP

Over the years I've put up numerous posts on what's called cosmic fine-tuning, i.e. the idea that the forces, parameters and constants that make up the fabric of our universe must be exquisitely fine-tuned to unimaginable precision in order for the universe to be life-permitting.

The fact of fine-tuning is such strong support for the belief that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer that those who wish to evade that conclusion have been forced to come up with some pretty desperate counter hypotheses to rebut it.

One of these is the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinity of other universes, all different from each other. Given the assumption then a universe like ours, no matter how improbable, must exist. See here and here)

Another response to the fine-tuning phenomenon is what's called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP).

WAP proponents argue that the fine-tuning of the cosmos isn't anything to marvel at since if the cosmos wasn't fine-tuned no life would exist and we wouldn't be here to observe it. This argument sounds very peculiar, but it may be difficult to see exactly what's wrong with it. In fact, a number of very bright people have embraced it, but its popularity began to wane once philosophers began to give it some thought.

This eight minute video by Inspiring Philosophy explains why the WAP is more like a scientific card trick than a plausible scientific theory:

Moral Beliefs and Proper Basicality

One of the arguments we've made here over the years is that if there is no God the notion of moral obligation becomes meaningless. Apart from a transcendent ground for moral right and wrong, there can be no duty to act one way rather than another.

Now atheistic philosophers, no doubt weary of having their theistic colleagues point out to them the nihilistic implications of their atheism, have adopted a strategy to answer this criticism of the attempt to develop an atheistic ethics or morality. A paper in Faith and Philosophy (available by subscription only) authored by Erik Wielenberg, makes the bold claim that moral beliefs are what epistemologists call properly basic.

Properly basic beliefs are beliefs which do not require that they be based on any other beliefs. We are within our epistemic rights to hold them even if we can give no reasons or evidential support for them.

Traditionally, many philosophers held that such things as my belief that I'm experiencing pain-like sensations in my tooth (beliefs evident to the senses), that I had cereal for breakfast (memory beliefs), or that I exist (beliefs that are incorrigible or can't be wrong) are all properly basic.

It's self-evident, Wielenberg claims, that cruelty is wrong and kindness is right. There's no need to defend or justify that belief, and no one with properly functioning cognitive faculties would deny it. Thus, there's no need to ground moral beliefs in God or anything else. They're just brute facts and that's all there is to it.

This is a clever move, especially since some Christian philosophers want to assert that belief in God is also properly basic. Wielenberg compares the basicality of belief in God to belief that, say, cruelty is wrong. He then goes on to argue that if belief in God is properly basic then so, too, is a belief that cruelty is wrong.

Now if moral beliefs are indeed, properly basic then it will do no good to ask what the atheist bases his beliefs upon. He'll simply answer that there's no need to justify them or warrant them. Kindness is better than cruelty and that's the end of the matter.

But I'm not so sure. What does it mean to say that something is wrong if there is no God? Presumably it means that you shouldn't do it, but if we ask why we shouldn't, the answer is simply that you just shouldn't.

Suppose I can profit from harming someone and get away with it. Why is that wrong? Wielenberg replies that it just is, that most people agree that it is, and that no further reasons are necessary. This strikes me as inadequate and question begging.

Moreover, setting that aside, the problem is not so much with beliefs about this or that moral act but with the notion of moral obligation. An obligation is something which binds us to act. It must be imposed.

If there is no God then what obligates us to behave one way rather than another? If one person is kind and another is cruel what obligates the first to behave the way he does and obligates the second not to behave as he does?

How can we have a moral duty if there is no transcendent moral authority to impose that duty and to enforce it? In lieu of God where does such a duty come from and why should I feel bound by it?

Finally, what can it mean to say that a behavior is wrong if there's no sanction for performing it?

If there were no law enforcement or judicial system laws would be meaningless. If there's no God then to whom, or what, are we accountable for our acts? Society? Ourselves?

Why should anyone care what society thinks, and if I impose the obligation on myself, surely I can release myself from it if it proves inconvenient.

If Wielenberg is correct, to say that cruelty is wrong is simply to say that a lot of people don't like it, but what people like and don't like can hardly be the ground for what's moral, much less for moral obligation.

The fact remains that moral obligation can only exist in a world in which there is a transcendent moral authority. Atheists can live just the same as theists in terms of their ethics. They can adopt the very same values, but if they chose to adopt the opposite values they would be neither wrong nor right to do so.

In a Godless world, there simply is no wrong or right. There are just things that people, like any other animal, do.

The Hard Problem Is Really Hard

Philosophers of mind speak of two kinds of problems involved in the study of consciousness. The first, the "easy" problem, is mapping which parts of the brain are involved in producing our various mental experiences.

In other words, when you see a red surface or feel a pain which part of the brain is activated by that experience. The "hard" problem, so named by David Chalmers in 1995, is the problem of explaining what sensations like red or pain actually are and how a material brain can produce an immaterial sensation like color or sound.

The "hard problem" is, in other words, the problem of explaining what consciousness is and where it comes from.

Michael Hanlon at Aeon elaborates:

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Dennett wrote that: ‘Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.’ A few years later, Chalmers added: ‘[It] may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.’ They were right then and, despite the tremendous scientific advances since, they are still right today.

I do not think that the evolutionary ‘explanations’ for consciousness that are currently doing the rounds are going to get us anywhere. These explanations do not address the hard problem itself, but merely the ‘easy’ problems that orbit it like a swarm of planets around a star.

The hard problem’s fascination is that it has, to date, completely and utterly defeated science. Nothing else is like it. We know how genes work, we have (probably) found the Higgs Boson; but we understand the weather on Jupiter better than we understand what is going on in our own heads. This is remarkable.

Consciousness is in fact so weird, and so poorly understood, that we may permit ourselves the sort of wild speculation that would be risible in other fields....We can speculate that it is consciousness that gives rise to the physical world rather than the other way round. The 20th-century British physicist James Hopwood Jeans speculated that the universe might be ‘more like a great thought than like a great machine.’

Idealist notions keep creeping into modern physics, linking the idea that the mind of the observer is somehow fundamental in quantum measurements and the strange, seemingly subjective nature of time itself, as pondered by the British physicist Julian Barbour.

I don’t know. No one does. And I think it is possible that, compared with the hard problem, the rest of science is a sideshow.... The hard problem is still the toughest kid on the block.

Perhaps, as Denyse O'Leary muses at Mind Matters, the problem with trying to solve the hard problem is the underlying materialistic assumption that consciousness is explicable in terms of material substance, that somehow matter (the brain) produces consciousness.

Perhaps things are the other way around. Perhaps mind is fundamental and matter is somehow a product of immaterial mind.

O'Leary writes,

Almost certainly, the human mind is not a material entity but an immaterial one, like information. If we accept that, we can perhaps convert it from an opaque mystery that can never yield any results because we are on the wrong track to a mystery that is difficult but solvable in principle because we are now looking in the right places.

Philosophical Idealism

My students will be discussing philosophical idealism this week so I thought it'd be appropriate to rerun this post from earlier in the year: Bruce Gordon is one of the most brilliant and accomplished thinkers alive today. Among other things he's a historian and philosopher of science and was interviewed recently by another scientist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, on a number of topics, including philosophical idealism.

Gordon is one of a growing number of philosophers who find idealism a compelling hypothesis. The interview begins with Dr. Gordon explaining George Berkeley's (1685-1753) version of idealism:

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

Bruce Gordon: There are a lot of different varieties of idealism, and rather than go through a laundry list of its variations, let me just start with the kind of idealism that I would be an advocate of, which is an ontic theistic idealism, essentially a form of idealism that is probably most closely identified with the Anglican Bishop, George Berkeley.

George Berkeley 1727

Basically, it’s the idea that material substances, as substantial entities, do not exist and are not the cause of our perceptions. They do not mediate our experience of the world.

Rather, what constitutes what we would call the physical realm are ideas that exist solely in the mind of God, who, as an unlimited and uncreated immaterial being, is the ultimate cause of the sensations and ideas that we, as finite spiritual beings, experience intersubjectively and subjectively as the material universe....So we are, in effect, living our lives in the mind of God.

And he is a mediator of our experience and of our inner subjectivity, rather than some sort of neutral material realm that serves as a third thing between us and the mind of God, so to speak.

The discussion then turns for a bit to Plato's notion of idealism as expressed in his theory of Forms.

Plato believed that every particular thing that exists has an ideal essence or form that exists in some abstract realm of reality. Every chair, for example, is recognizable as a chair because it "participates" in the perfect abstract form of "chairness," every tree is recognizable as a tree because it "participates" in the perfect form of "treeness."

Likewise with everything, including humans.

Later Christian Platonists argued that these essences, or forms, or ideals existed not in some abstract realm but rather as ideas in the mind of God, and this, it seems, is Gordon's view as well.

Michael Egnor: There are, I believe, other kinds of idealism. For example, idealism by German philosophers. And how does that differ from Berkeleyan idealism?

Bruce Gordon: Well, .... [Immanuel] Kant (1724-1804) advocated a kind of epistemic, as opposed to ontic, idealism. Kantian idealism is entirely compatible with the existence of material substances, even though they are inaccessible as things in themselves.

So for Kantian idealism, you’ve got a self that .... precedes and grounds all of our experience. And our perception of reality, then, is governed by the innate structure of the human mind.

Immanuel Kant 1768 

What Gordon is saying here is that Kant believed that a material world existed but that everything we know about it is based on our sensory perceptions which produce ideas or sensations in the mind. Our mind is so structured as to create these ideas, but the ideas may be nothing at all like the thing they represent.

In other words, what we know about the "thing in itself" is the sum of the ideas (or sensations) we have of it in our minds. We can't know it as it exists independently of our perceptions of it.

For example, our minds, upon seeing, smelling and tasting chocolate, generate the ideas of a certain color, fragrance and flavor, but these ideas are in our minds, they're not in the chocolate. The chocolate itself doesn't have color, it simply reflects certain wavelengths of light. Likewise, it doesn't have fragrance or flavor. It simply exudes chemicals which interact with our senses to produce the ideas of fragrance and flavor in our minds.

As Kant put it, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am."

Bruce Gordon: So we never experience reality in itself, which he called the noumenal world, but only reality as it appears to us, a ... phenomenal reality that is ordered by the innate structures of the human mind.

Kantian idealism and its descendants are, in many ways, an epistemic form of idealism, whereas the Berkeleyan form of idealism is ontic.

By this Gordon means that Kant's idealism had to do with what we can know about the world whereas Berkeley's idealism had to do with the ontology of the world - what was actually real and what reality was like. Gordon adds:

[Berkeley's Idealism is] a denial that there is material substance and [is instead] an embedding of reality in the mind of God, such that it is finite spiritual beings experiencing the reality brought into existence by this unlimited, uncreated, immaterial being.

Berkeley's idealism, then, was different from Kant's. Berkeley held that there was no material world at all. Everything we experience we experience as ideas in our minds, ideas which are presented to our minds by the mind of God.

As Berkeley himself says, “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind.” This may seem bizarre at first reading, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.”

It's interesting that in the last fifty years or so many physicists have embraced idealism. They're persuaded by developments in quantum mechanics that reveal that at the subatomic level many properties of the entities scientists study at that level don't exist until they're observed.

For instance, the 20th century scientist Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, once stated that,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

And Sir James Jeans, in his book The Mysterious Universe, wrote that, "The universe is beginning to look more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists, but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks since the doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally a projection of the mind of God.

Is the Eye Poorly Designed?

One frequently employed argument against the theory of intelligent design is that if living things are indeed the product of intelligent agency the designing agent must not be all that competent since some biological structures appear to be quite poorly designed.

The argument goes back at least to David Hume (d. 1776) in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and modern skeptics point to the human eye as an almost paradigmatic illustration of Hume's claim. The light sensitive cells in the eye, it has long been thought, are facing the wrong way in the retina.

Yet, as research on the eye continues it looks more and more as though the eye is, in fact, optimally designed for the role it plays in vision.

Here's a short video which makes this point quite well:

The optimality of the eye's design coupled with the fact that complex eyes have been around since the cambrian and have no fossilized ancestral predecessors, leads to the conclusion that this very complex structure arose with relative suddenness in the history of life and apparently de novo.

That's pretty hard to explain on any naturalistic theory of origins.

What Is a Person?

Yesterday's post examined some arguments frequently employed in defense of a woman's right to abort a pregnancy and gave some reasons why I felt those arguments were inadequate.

As a young man I myself was pro-choice for a time, but was persuaded that there were no very good arguments for that position, or, more precisely, the arguments adduced on behalf of the right to choose were, when placed on the scales of reason, outweighed by the arguments made by pro-lifers on behalf of the "weakest among us."

In fact, I couldn't understand why liberals, who always took the side of the weak and defenseless, nevertheless abandoned the weakest and most defenseless when it came to this issue. It seemed both odd and hypocritical.

Anyway, I want to examine one more argument today.

It's often conceded that although the unborn fetus is indeed a human being (a claim that was the topic of the previous post) it's nevertheless not a person until it's born, and since it's a person which has rights, including the right to life, an individual's right to life does not outweigh the mother's right to bodily autonomy until the moment of birth when the individual then becomes, somehow, a person.

This may seem at first hearing to be a sensible argument, but it's fraught with pitfalls. The argument hinges, obviously, upon what we mean by a "person." We cannot simply define "person" as a human being who has been born since that begs the question. It assumes as settled the very matter that's under debate.

A better definition sometimes embraced by philosophers goes something like this: A person is a living human being which has the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will.

This seems to capture what we normally think of when we think of persons, but there are cases which are troubling. Does a newborn infant possess these capacities? If not, does the infant's lack of personhood provide a basis for legalizing infanticide?

What of human beings who are in a reversible coma? They lack the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will. Do they cease to be persons as long as they're disabled? Would someone not still be guilty of murder if they killed a reversibly comatose human being?

Of course they would, so perhaps we need to amend our definition to say something like: A person is a living human being who has the capacity, or potential capacity, to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will. This definition would confer personhood on both newborns and the reversibly comatose, but it would also confer personhood on the individual at every stage of her development all the way back to when she was a tiny conceptus.

Adopting this definition would therefore pose a perplexing difficulty for the pro-choice advocate who seeks to base his position on reason rather than emotion.

I argued in the previous post that the contention that the unborn fetus is not a living human being is biological nonsense, and if the foregoing definition of "person" is reasonable, the claim that the unborn are not persons is simply false. That is, we should assume it's false until presented with a more plausible definition of person which doesn't beg the question.

But what of those tragic individuals who are irreversibly comatose? It could be argued, although I don't make the case here, that the definition of person could be amended one more time as follows: A person is a living human being who has the capacity, potential capacity or former capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion and will.

If that is a reasonable definition of a person, and I would suggest that it's incumbent upon the one who denies that it's reasonable to explain why they think so, then it follows that a person just is a living human being and has a presumptive right to life from the time of conception.

This is not to say that no circumstances could ever supercede that right, but it is to say that whatever such circumstances might be, they should certainly be more compelling than that the child just isn't wanted.

Not Human

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a couple of cases this Fall that will once again bring abortion back into the news. Indeed, one of the cases centers around a Texas law restricting abortion that has already created national controversy.

I thought it appropriate, therefore, to rerun two posts that originally appeared on VP in 2019 that address some of the issues involved in the debate over abortion. The first follows and the second will be up tomorrow:

There are several deeply flawed arguments frequently adduced whenever the topic of abortion is discussed, and several of them popped up the other day on CNN's Primetime with Chris Cuomo show.

CNN contributor and former New York City politician Christine Quinn argued, for instance, that “When a women is pregnant, that is not a human being inside of her. It is part of her body."

This is a stunning assertion. What, exactly, does Ms Quinn think that it is that resides in the mother's womb if not a human being?

The embryo or fetus is most certainly a "being" of some sort, and it is most certainly human. It's surely not a frog or cow embryo that's growing inside the mother's body, nor is it a cyst or tumor.

It has the genetic composition of a human being even if it's not as big as an adult human nor look exactly like an adult human. After all, size and looks are not what makes a human being human. If they were then neither dwarfs nor toddlers would be human beings.

Nor is it part of her body like, say, an appendix is. The developing human being has its own DNA signature, it's own blood type, sex and race, all of which may be different from that of the mother.

If it were just a part of the mother's body why is it, as Chris Cuomo observes, that mothers who abort often agonize over their decision? Do people agonize over whether to destroy a tumor or excise an appendix?

The argument that the unborn child is not human and can therefore be disposed of however the mother wishes is pretty much the same argument that was used to enslave blacks and to exterminate Jews. Once a particular group is dehumanized it's easy to rationalize killing them.

Another claim that often arises in discussions about abortion (though not in the present one) is the contention that "No one knows when life begins." This statement reflects an utter ignorance of biology. Life is a continuum going back to the first living cell, and there's no stage in the procreation process from that first cell to the most recently born child in which there's any doubt about the organisms and cells involved being alive.

Two living adults produce living gametes which fuse to form a living conceptus, which in turn differentiates into a living child. At no point are any of these entities not biologically alive.

Moreover, to insist, as many often do, that a child becomes human at birth is absurd. It's a delusion to think that something magical happens to the fetus as it's being birthed that somehow transforms it from subhuman one moment into a fully human being the very next moment. What, precisely, occurs during the voyage down the birth canal that effectuates this transformation?

Anyway, here's video of the exchange (Well, "exchange" is a bit euphemistic as a description of what follows) between Cuomo, Quinn and their pro-life antagonist, former senator Rick Santorum:

The Most Rational Bet

Imagine that you're a contestant on a game show and that the game consists of placing a sealed box in front of you and being told that the box contains either $1,000,000 or $1. There's a 50/50 chance of either. You have to guess which it is, and if you choose correctly you get to keep whatever it is that you guessed. Suppose further that refusing to guess at all is the same as guessing $1.

Those are the terms of the game. What would you do? Would you play? Which option would you choose?

Suppose you were told that the odds were not 50/50 but rather 100 to 1 that there was $1 in the box. Which option would you choose then?

The reasonable thing to do, of course, is to guess that there's a fortune in the box regardless of the odds. If you're right you gain $1,000,000, and if you're wrong you lose almost nothing. If, on the other hand, you bet that there's $1 in the box and you're right you gain very little, but if you're wrong you lose out on a fortune. To bet on the $1 seems irrational and foolish.

This is, broadly, the argument proposed by the brilliant French physicist and philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17th century that's come to be known as Pascal's Wager. In Pascal's version the choice is between believing God exists and committing one's life to Him or declining to believe He exists. As with the box and the fortune, Pascal says that if you believe and you're wrong you lose relatively little, but if you believe and you're right you gain an immeasurable benefit.

By "believe" Pascal doesn't intend a simple intellectual assent but rather he means a placing of one's trust in the one in whom he believes. Nor is Pascal offering this argument as a "proof" that God exists. Nor does he assume that one can simply choose to believe or even should choose to believe as a result of a calculation of the benefits and liabilities. What he's saying is that belief, if one has it, makes perfect sense.

In other words, the skeptic who declares theistic belief to be irrational is simply wrong. The theist has everything to gain and relatively little to lose. The skeptic has relatively little to gain and everything to lose, so whose position, Pascal might ask, is the more rational?

This argument has triggered a lot of reaction, much of it negative. There are a number of objections to it, and although most of them are pretty weak, some of them are not. Susan Rinnard a philosopher at Harvard, did a video on Pascal's argument which does a pretty good job in just a few minutes of explaining the Wager and which offers a version of the argument that avoids some of the pitfalls of the original:

For those interested in reading an excellent treatment of the Wager with responses to the major objections Michael Rota's book Taking Pascal's Wager is one of the best resources out there. It's certainly much better than most of the stuff one finds on Pascal's Wager on YouTube.

The Unexamined Life

In their book When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People philosophers Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro have a chapter on the events surrounding the trial of Socrates. It's during his trial that Socrates utters his famous dictum to the jurors that the unexamined life is not worth living.

On the surface, what Socrates means by the unexamined life is a life in which one "never questions things, least of all his own actions and plans." Nadler and Shapiro describe it as a life "spent in front of the television watching junk and eating crap."

But, these authors insist, Socrates is really saying more than this since it's possible that an unexamined life can be heroic, as in the case of Achilles who never did much rational introspection and allowed his life to be governed by his passions.

Socrates is employing a bit of hyperbole, they argue, to press home the point not that the lives of those who neglect the relevant kind of examination or questions are worthless, but rather that they're living a less than fully human life. They're failing to live up to their fullest potential as human beings.

The man or woman who neglects to think seriously about life's most important questions is squandering one of the gifts that make humans more than just brute animals - our rationality. Such people are "like a thoroughbred racehorse that spends its days in a stable."

If that's so then what are some of the questions one should ponder, not just in a once and done fashion, but throughout their lives?

One such question, surely, is how should we live? What is the best way of life for a particular man or woman? Another question follows from it - what is a morally good life? What is the right thing to do in a particular situation? What ought I to do and how can I know?

These lead to other questions such as what gives my life meaning? What is the nature of justice and what is love? What do I think about death?

These are just a few of the things everyone might give more than a little thought to as they approach adulthood and as they go on to live out their lives. The paramount questions, though, are what do I believe about God, why do I believe whatever it is I believe, and what are the consequences of my belief or unbelief for everything else I believe?

Indeed, how one answers most of life's ultimate questions depends upon how one answers the question about God.

Unfortunately, many people never really spend much time thinking about these things. They're like philosophical tumbleweeds allowing themselves to be blown in whichever direction the winds of life take them. Their lives and projects are often shallow and superficial, spent in the pursuit of frivolities and trivial amusements.

At least that's the subtext of Socrates' claim. I leave it to you to judge whether he's correct and whether you think he's being fair.

Faith and Blind Faith

Physicist Michael Guillen has an interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which he argues that the "central conceit" of naturalism (atheism) is that "it is a worldview grounded in logic and scientific evidence. That it has nothing to do with faith, which it associates with weakness. In reality, faith is central to atheism, logic and even science."

He goes on to mention that atheism was his own belief during much of his earlier academic life:

I became an atheist early in life and long believed that my fellow nonbelievers were an enlightened bunch. I relished citing studies appearing to show that atheists have higher IQs than believers. But when I was studying for my doctorate in physics, math and astronomy, I began questioning my secular worldview.

In the course of this exploration he learned three things about worldviews:

First, ... all worldviews are built on core beliefs that cannot be proved. Axioms from which everything else about a person’s perception of reality is derived. They must be accepted on faith.

Even reason itself—the vaunted foundation of atheism—depends on faith. Every logical argument begins with premises that are assumed to be true. Euclid’s geometry, the epitome of logical reasoning, is based on no fewer than 33 axiomatic, unprovable articles of faith.

As has been pointed out in this space on other occasions, the naturalist must assume that our reason evolved to make us more fit to survive, it didn't evolve for the purpose of finding truth. Thus, both the theist and the atheist must accept by faith that reason is a reliable guide to truth.

The theist accepts that because the theist believes that reason is a gift from the Creator who is Himself reasonable. The naturalist believes reason is the result of a mindless process that by sheer chance produced the rational faculty that by a fortuitous coincidence sometimes helps us find the truth.

Second, ... every worldview—that is, every person’s bubble of reality—has a certain diameter. That of atheism is relatively small, because it encompasses only physical reality. It has no room for other realities. Even humanity’s unique spirituality and creativity—all our emotions, including love—are reduced to mere chemistry.

Third, ... without exception, every worldview is ruled over by a god or gods. It’s the who or what that occupies its center stage. Everything in a person’s life revolves around this.

For the naturalist, god is the cosmos, humanity, the state, or oneself. It is what they consider to be of ultimate importance and to which they pledge, consciously or unconsciously, their fealty and devotion.

What naturalists fail to grasp is that almost everything we believe, we believe to a greater or lesser extent by faith. Very little that we believe in life can be proven to be true. We can only accumulate more and more evidence in the belief's favor.

Of course, people, whether religious or secular, often believe things on the basis of little or no evidence. To believe something despite the lack of evidence is "blind faith," but true faith is believing (and perhaps trusting) despite the lack of proof.

Atheists like biologist Richard Dawkins are fond of saying that theisms like Christianity require "blind faith" whereas naturalism is based upon empirical evidence, but neither clause in that claim is true.

There's plenty of evidence for the main themes of theistic belief, so, if one insists on evidence to justify belief, there's plenty there to warrant it.

On the other hand, naturalists believe, and must believe, a host of things for which there's no evidence at all.

They believe that life originated through purely unguided, mechanistic processes, that the universe came into being from non-being, that there are an infinity of other universes besides our own, that moral and aesthetic judgments are actually meaningful assertions despite lacking any objective ground for them, that there are no immaterial substances like minds, that their reason is a reliable guide to truth, that the laws of physics apply consistently throughout the universe, and much else.

There's no evidence for any of these beliefs and lots of evidence, in some cases, against them. They're all instances of "blind faith."

Guillen adds this:

When I was an atheist, a scientific monk sleeping three hours a day and spending the rest of my time immersed in studying the universe, my worldview rested on the core axiom that seeing is believing. When I learned that 95% of the cosmos is invisible, consisting of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” names for things we don’t understand, that core assumption became untenable.

As a scientist, I had to believe in a universe I mostly could not see. My core axiom became “believing is seeing.” Because what we hold to be true dictates how we understand everything—ourselves, others and our mostly invisible universe, including its origin. Faith precedes knowledge, not the other way around.

Here's a short video featuring an interview with the very prominent agnostic astronomer, the late Robert Jastrow, who discusses his own struggle to maintain his agnosticism in the face of the theistic implications of the empirical evidence that scientists were discovering:

Lots of Questions

Jim Geraghty at National Review has lots of questions about President Biden's vaccine mandate that he announced on September 9th. The mandate, when implemented, would require all employees of businesses with 100 or more employees to be either fully vaccinated or tested at least once a week for Covid-19.

At the time he confused a lot of people by declaring that, “We’re going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers. We’re going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America.” If the vaccines work then the vaccinated are already protected against the unvaccinated, aren't they? But set that quibble aside.

As Geraghty notes, we're two weeks along, and the agency that was to issue the regulations for this mandate, OSHA, has yet to do so. Evidently, reducing the spread is not as urgent as Mr. Biden suggested.

Here's Geraghty:

Almost immediately, businesses had a lot of questions about how this new mandate was going to work. What is considered documentation for proof of vaccination and how will booster vaccinations be factored into compliance? Must an employee be “fully vaccinated” in order to work?

How will the requirements address natural immunity? Will individuals that have contracted COVID-19 be required to be vaccinated or submit to testing requirements?

Will the requirements only apply to vaccines that are fully approved by the FDA? (The other day in my local pharmacy, a guy said he had gotten one shot of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine in the United Kingdom and wanted to know whether Pfizer or Moderna was compatible with it.)

What are the consequences of falsifying one’s vaccination status, and does responsibility rest with the individual or employer? If an employee takes a COVID-19 test but the results are not yet available, is the employee allowed to continue to work pending the results?

Should employees choose not to vaccinate, is the company or employee responsible for securing and paying for testing? Will paid time off be required for weekly tests?

Perhaps the reason OSHA (and why is OSHA responsible for this mandate, anyway?) hasn't delivered the answers to these questions is that the folks tasked with developing it see what a quagmire of bureaucratic muck they'd be walking businesses into.

Did Mr. Biden think about all this before he issued his statement? Did he consider not only the complicated mess he was imposing on OSHA and the burden he was placing on businesses, but also the constitutionality of what he was doing?

Did he plan this out at all? Did OSHA even know they were going to be told to shoulder this responsibility before the announcement was made?

Mr. Biden has an odd manner. He sometimes makes stern public pronouncements with a steely, Clint Eastwood-like resolve, but then nothing seems to come of them. It's as though as soon as he walks away from the podium he forgets that he ever said what he said.

Sometimes, as with his tough talk about the Taliban and his determination to get all Americans out of Afghanistan, the consequences of the lack of follow-through are awful.

Maybe in the case of the vaccine mandate the consequences of letting the whole thing drop down the memory hole will be agreeable to everyone concerned.

Butterfly Beauty

Here's a beautiful 9 minute video on butterfly anatomy which will give you a deeper appreciation for these lovely insects that we see everywhere in our world and usually take for granted.

Whether you agree with the conclusion of the filmmakers that butterflies are intentionally and intelligently designed or you believe that they came about through purely blind, random mechanisms like natural selection, the sheer beauty of the engineering and design of these creatures is breath-taking.

The intuition that what we see in the natural world was purposefully designed is so powerful, however, that Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick felt compelled to remind us that, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved."

In other words, those who observe the realm of nature must, through an exertion of will, convince themselves that it's all an accident, the result of an astonishingly improbable string of coincidences.

Here's the vid:

If you enjoy the butterfly video you'll also enjoy this one on birds:

In his 1996 book The Blind Watchmaker biologist Richard Dawkins stated that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” (italics mine)

Both Crick and Dawkins believe that the appearance of design and purpose in the realm of living things is an illusion. In order to avoid succumbing to the illusion we have to persuade ourselves that the compound eye, tongue and scales of the butterfly are not for anything. They serve a function but have no actual purpose.

These and every other structure in living things evolved step by step by blind, mindless undirected processes and found themselves at each stage put to particular uses until they finally reached their present form which happens to have a useful function.

Well, maybe so, but it takes a lot of faith, a lot of blind faith, in the efficacy of dumb luck to believe that it could produce a butterfly or a bird.

Scathing Rebuke

Meghan McCain has left The View and is now writing for the Daily Mail. Her first column is a scathing rebuke of the man she once counted as a friend and whom she supported in the last presidential election.

She writes:

Eight months since President Biden was sworn into office, the anticipation of a tone change and 'return to normalcy' has utterly disappeared. The man I once considered a friend and confidante has morphed into a feckless and unreliable leader I no longer recognize.

He gives all the signs of stubborn cantankerous naiveté, surrounded by idiotic sycophants anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes around politics should easily recognize as the worst type of corrupt bureaucrats.

Biden's policies have broken with his rhetoric of unity to create more division and distrust. Inflation has exploded. Americans are paying more at the pump and the grocery and soon for their kids' holiday toys. The schools are supposed to be reopened, but in-person learning is inconsistent and can be pulled away with the speed of a positive test.

The vaccine booster shots, which Biden promised at the beginning of the month, ran into a brick wall of FDA policy. New government mandates are testing the limits of executive power.

The man who promised he would shut down the virus, not the country, is doing the opposite.

Ms. McCain is just getting warmed up. Her indictment of her erstwhile friend continues:

You can see the discrepancy just turning on the television, where on Sunday morning Dr. Fauci and his fellow government spokesmen speak in terms of limiting our lives, restricting our travel, mandating masks, requiring boosters and vaccine card checks just to go to a restaurant, and just a few hours later, you can see stadiums filled with tens of thousands of unmasked football fans cheering together for hours.

Many of those cheering fans, who stand for the anthem and honor the flag, are the same people our media looks down on, and who Biden and his White House sycophants blame for continued Covid case numbers, despite no proof whatsoever that they are the source of continued illness.

So they berate them, call them fools, suggest they are insurrectionists, and blame them for their own failed policies, as a blatant attempt to distract from the fact that they literally have officials resigning in protest from the FDA over their interference in public health science.

The bureaucracy, the media, and this White House are out of touch with reality. They don't have a plan. They don't know what to do. They're trying to throw money at the problems, but deep down, they know this won't solve anything.

She could've mentioned, but didn't, the debacles in Afghanistan and on our southern border. She also could've mentioned, among other things, the Hunter Biden scandal which has been simmering for over a year but now threatens to burst into flames engulfing "the Big Guy," in a conflagration of corruption.

McCain closes with these words:

He is on the path to become worse than Jimmy Carter, who author Steve Hayward described as a man who ran for office promising 'a government as good as the people' and ended his term by saying the people were no good.

The American people are good. I believe in them. And I believe they deserve a better class of leader.

McCain, a Republican (her father was a U.S. Senator, a presidential candidate, a fighter pilot and Vietnam war POW) has good reason for having placed her hopes in Mr. Biden. Donald Trump insulted her father gratuitously, tastelessly and stupidly, even after McCain pere was dead. So Meghan's disdain for Trump and consequent support for Biden is understandable.

What's less understandable is why so many other Americans believed, despite the lack of any evidence in Mr. Biden's long public record, that he would be a competent leader.

A Simulation from Pure Thought

Several years ago philosopher Nick Bostrom put forward the notion that the universe and everything in it is actually a massive simulation designed by humans living in the distant future. A recent article at Mind Matters discusses an update of Bostrom's original idea.

The Mind Matters article plays off an earlier piece at Big Think by Paul Ratner.

Philosopher Nick Bostrom famously considered this in his seminal paper “Are you living in a computer simulation?,” where he proposed that all of our existence may be just a product of very sophisticated computer simulations ran by advanced beings whose real nature we may never be able to know.

Now a new theory has come along that takes it a step further – what if there are no advanced beings either and everything in “reality” is a self-simulation that generates itself from pure thought?

Bostrom imagined that the universe was physical but that humans in the future had achieved such a high degree of technological prowess that they were able to design computer programs which simulated the world we now inhabit and us as well.

Even the process of evolution itself could just be a mechanism by which the future beings are testing countless processes, purposefully moving humans through levels of biological and technological growth. In this way they also generate the supposed information or history of our world. Ultimately, we wouldn’t know the difference.

The current hypothesis, though, is that the universe is not material at all but is pure thought. It's an "idea" that has somehow generated itself.

The hypothesis takes a non-materialistic approach, saying that everything is information expressed as thought. As such, the universe “self-actualizes” itself into existence, relying on underlying algorithms and a rule they call “the principle of efficient language.”

Under this proposal, the entire simulation of everything in existence is just one “grand thought.”

How would the simulation itself be originated?

It was always there, say the researchers, explaining the concept of “timeless emergentism.” According to this idea, time isn’t there at all. Instead, the all-encompassing thought that is our reality offers a nested semblance of a hierarchical order, full of “sub-thoughts” that reach all the way down the rabbit hole towards the base mathematics and fundamental particles.

Physicist Sir James Jeans anticipated something like this all the way back in 1930 when he wrote that, “The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.”

Denyse O'Leary (under the pen name "News") at Mind Matters points out the significance of this:

The most significant element of this new theory is surely that it is explicitly a theory of “panconsciousness” and non-materialism. Thus it bears comparison with newer theories of consciousness, which are explicitly panpsychist.

Panpsychism is the view that everything in the universe from the largest stars to the tiniest particles are all conscious to one extent or another. Panpsychism has been around for a long time but is becoming more mainstream now because the classical materialism (or physicalism) of the 19th and 20th centuries simply cannot explain many of the phenomena that scientists are observing, especially in quantum mechanics.

O'Leary continues:

However off-the-beaten-track this ... hypothesis may seem, it does solve two problems:

First, it offers an account of consciousness that conforms to what we experience. Materialist accounts generally fail at that. Famously, Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett describes consciousness as a user illusion. It’s not really there. Which prompts the question, whose illusion is it then? The [new theory] sees human consciousness as a sub-thought of a grand thought.

Agree or disagree, that is somewhat closer to what we experience.

Second, the researchers’ approach — that the universe simulates itself into existence — gets rid of the problem of infinite regress (what simulated the universe?), in the same way that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” gets rid of it.

Of course, as noted above, anything that simulates itself into existence as “one grand thought” might as well be God.

What O'Leary is saying is that if consciousness is indeed the ultimate reality, if the universe is a grand thought, if information is the fundamental stuff of the world, then there must be a mind in which the thought resides and which is the source of the information out of which the world is constructed.

That mind must transcend the universe of space, time and matter and it must also possess unimaginable knowledge and power. Indeed, as O'Leary states it would seem to be almost indistinguishable from God.

The more science discovers about the world, the more untenable the old naturalistic materialism of the last two centuries seems to be and the more compelling is the conclusion that God, or something very much like God, has created the universe and is holding it all together.

Something From Nothing

When scientists back in the 1930s discovered that the universe was expanding and that it must've originated from an infinitely small point, i.e. out of nothing, it shook the world. If the universe - all of space, time, matter, energy and the laws which govern these - arose out of nothing then whatever caused this phenomenon must itself be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and the author of those laws.

Moreover, it must be incomprehensibly powerful to create a universe and unimaginably intelligent to create one of such mathematical beauty and precision.

For many this was intolerable since it had too much in common with the notion of a creator God, a notion that a lot of naturalistic scientists thought had been laid to rest back in the 19th century. Now here it was rising up again as an implication of what came to be known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

As long as the universe could be thought to be infinitely old it was possible to escape the implications of a cosmic beginning, but the Big Bang eliminated that option. The universe evidently had a beginning in time, was therefore not infinitely old, and the question of what could've brought it into being was once again on the table.

A new episode in the Science Uprising series explains how the Big Bang theory puts to rest alternative theories and supports the idea of a cosmic creator.

David Klinghoffer explains the symbolism of the masks worn by the video's narrators.

The mask is a reference to the 2005 film V for Vendetta, inspired in turn by the historical English rebel Guy Fawkes, and a comic by David Lloyd, who is right when he says it has become “an icon of popular culture,” “a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny.”

The symbolism of masks has evolved in the meantime, but the tyranny of scientism has remained a constant, or in fact grown more perverse and obnoxious, making the series of short videos more relevant than ever. Episode 7, debuting now, explains why the Big Bang — the idea of a cosmic beginning — has been resisted by atheists, yet why the best science demands it.

The video is about 9 minutes long and features philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, whose recent book Return of the God Hypothesis does an excellent job of explaining how the origin of the universe, as well as the universe's design and the origin of life all point to a transcendent intelligence.

Did You Enjoy Your Weekend at the Beach, Mr. President?

Mr. Biden spent the weekend at the beach. Perhaps he was able to relax, but it's hard to see how when, as he soaks up the sun, he reflects on the human suffering and chaos for which his policies are responsible.

Reports out of Afghanistan tell us that the Taliban are methodically hunting down and executing anyone who worked for the West, and that their barbaric savagery extends even to beheading nine and ten-year old children.

In retaliation for the suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed thirteen American servicemen and women and over a hundred Afghans the military launched a drone strike at a vehicle loaded with terrorists. Except there were no terrorists in the vehicle, only seven children, an aid worker and two other adults, all of whom were blown to bits.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Americans are still trapped in Afghanistan and in danger of their lives.

On the home front thousands of illegal immigrants, encouraged to swarm into the U.S. by Mr. Biden's decision to undo his predecessor's measures to prevent just such a humanitarian calamity, are camped out under a bridge that spans the Rio Grande river in Del Rio Texas.

The migrants seem to be mostly Haitians fleeing the awful conditions inflicted upon them by both nature and their fellow Haitians. Drugs and children are being trafficked across the border, no one is tested for Covid and the situation is chaotic, pretty much like President Biden's evacuation from Afghanistan.

Moreover, the legislation the president anticipated to be his signature achievement, the $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill loaded with goodies for just about every conceivable constituency, both seem to be dead in the water. The problem isn't so much the Republicans but recalcitrant moderates and progressives in Mr. Biden's own party.

And then there's the widespread resistance to Mr. Biden's perplexing mask mandates, at least if the crowds at college and pro football games this weekend are any indication. Having told us the vaccines are safe and effective, we're then told that vaccinated individuals still must wear masks to protect themselves from the unvaccinated. I'm not sure how to make sense out of that.

On top of all that confusion, nose-thumbing and tragic news was yet another foreign policy bungle. The French were so upset with the Biden administration for deviously undercutting them on a deal to sell Australia $100 billion worth of submarines that they've called their ambassador home.

It's almost unprecedented for allies to recall ambassadors from each other's countries, and it's another example of how the Democrats' claim to have regained the respect of our allies after those "disastrous" Trump years and to have replaced the Trump administration with "grown-ups" looks laughable given how the "grown-ups" have botched almost everything they've touched in the nine months they've been in office.

Anyway, it must've been hard to enjoy the sun and surf amidst all of that failure, but the president had help. Much of our media, which would've been hysterical had any of the above happened during the previous administration, seems to have been vacationing at the beach along with Mr. Biden and blissfully uninterested in the calamities that the presidential sunbather has wrought.