Three Christmas Symbols

Some people get a little miffed during the Christmas season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas, because it seems like an attempt by non-Christians to have the celebration without having to acknowledge the historical reason for it.

Every year there are signs and bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to the substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ, but historically it's not the letter X that's being substituted for Christ. Actually, the X is a shorthand for the Greek name for Christ (Christos).

The first letter of the Greek word Christos is Chi which looks like our letter X. There’s a long history in the church of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from the time of its origin, it has signified the opposite of any attempt to avoid naming Christ.

Gr: Christos

The irony is that probably a lot of people do use Xmas to exclude Christ from Christmas and have no idea what the origin of the word is.

-------

A popular Christmas tradition is to decorate one's home with a "Christmas" tree.

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

Modern Christmas trees originated during the Renaissance of early modern Germany. Its 16th-century origins are sometimes associated with protestant reformer Martin Luther, who is said to have first added lighted candles to an evergreen tree. The practice is believed to have spread among Luther's followers in Germany and eventually throughout Europe.

-------

No doubt the most popular Christmas myth is that of Santa Claus. There's a rich ancient heritage behind the Santa Claus story. The secularized, sanitized, contemporary version has its origin in Christian history, and specifically in a man named Nicholas.

Much exaggerated legendary material is connected with his life and ministry, but if nothing else, the legends tell us what values and beliefs the church held as important as they were projected onto Nicholas. To the bare minimum of facts, legend has supplied intriguing details through such writers as St. Methodius (patriarch of Constantinople in the 850s) and the Greek writer Metaphrastes in the 10th century.

The story goes that Nicholas was born in Lycia in southern Turkey in A.D. 280 to pious and wealthy parents who raised him to love God and taught him the Christian faith from the age of five.

However, his parents died suddenly when he was still young, and Nicholas was forced to grow up quickly.

Inheriting his family's wealth, he was left rich and lonely, but he desired to use his wealth for good. The first opportunity to do this happened when he heard about a father of three daughters who, through an unfortunate turn of events, was left destitute.

Without marriage dowry money, the daughters could be quite likely condemned to a life of singleness and prostitution, so Nicholas threw some small bags of gold coins into the window of the home (some traditions say down the chimney), thereby saving the children from a life of misery.

Later, Nicholas made a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land and upon returning home felt called to ministry. He was subsequently ordained and spent time at the Monastery of Holy Zion near Myra in Turkey until an old priest had a vision that he was to be the new bishop.

The congregation overwhelmingly approved him, and he became known for his holiness and passion for the Gospel, becoming a staunch defender of Christian monotheism against the paganism that prevailed at the temple to the goddess Artemis in his district.

Nicholas was imprisoned during the persecution of Christians under the Roman emperor Diocletian, savagely beaten, and later released under Constantine's Edict of Milan (313 A.D.). Those who survived Diocletian's purges were called "confessors" because they wouldn't renege on their confession of Jesus as Lord.

When Bishop Nicholas walked out of the prison, the crowds called to him: "Nicholas! Confessor!" He had been repeatedly beaten until he was raw, and his body was covered with deep bruises.

Bishop Nicholas was said to have intervened on behalf of unjustly charged prisoners and actively sought to help his people survive when they had experienced two successive bad harvests.

There was a widespread belief in those days, promoted by a theologian named Arias, that Jesus was actually a created being, like angels, and not divine. The Council of Nicea was convened by Constantine in 325 A.D to settle this dispute, and the Nicene creed, recited today in many Christian worship services, was formulated to affirm the traditional teaching about Jesus' deity and preexistence.

Nicholas and Arias both attended the council and the story goes that the two got into such a heated dispute over the true nature of Christ that punches were actually thrown. This may be a legendary embellishment, but whether it is or not, it certainly seems inconsistent with our normal image of jolly old St. Nick.

In any case, the actual story of St. Nicholas (Say the words "Saint Nicholas" quickly with a European accent and you'll understand how we got the name Santa Claus) is a lot different, and much more interesting, than the popular modern "fairy tales" surrounding him.

Christmas Magic

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding an incomprehensible idea, the idea of the Incarnation.

The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and we could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, that hope, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with mystery and magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending that the real source and traditional meaning of the night are irrelevant or that they're something other than what they really are.

People feel they should be joyful at Christmas, but they can't say why. They seem to be trying to manufacture some sort of artificial "Christmas spirit," just like they try to gin up a feeling of near-delirium on New Year's eve.

An analogy: Picture the celebrations of players and fans after winning the Super Bowl or the World Series, but imagine the revelry and rejoicing even though the game hadn't yet been played. It'd certainly seem nonsensical and strange, but this is pretty much what a secular Christmas is like. No "game" has been played, nothing has been won, there's really nothing to celebrate, but the merriment and partying goes on nonetheless. Why?

All the talk of reindeer, ads for cars, beer, and phones, all the insipid "holiday" songs and movies - none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. The "joy" seems phony, empty and forced.

Indeed, Christmas Eve is hollow without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

One of the things that makes Christmas "good news that will cause great joy for all the people," is that the One who came to dwell among us has made it so that we can break out of the prison-house of meaninglessness and hopelessness that enchains us if all there is to life is being born, enjoying a few good meals, suffering and dying.

Christmas represents the possibility that we can throw off the crushing weight of purposelessness, emptiness and despair that plague modern life. It reminds us that our lives can matter for eternity.

Lovely thought, that, and one of the good things about it is that it's never too late for the transformation to begin. One of my favorite Christmas songs is the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's version of What Child Is This on their album Lost Christmas Eve.

The line that I find most poignant and hopeful is when an older man, though dying, finds his life transformed by reflecting on the Christmas story and cries out, "To be this old and have your life just begin!"

Here's Rob Evan of TSO performing the song.

The Messengers

There are a lot of Christmas songs and movies out there that, unfortunately, have almost nothing to do with Christmas. The medieval Church allegedly co-opted a pagan festival and turned it into a celebration of the birth of Jesus, and now, it seems, our secular culture is seeking to take the celebration of the birth of Jesus and turn it into a secular festival.

In doing so, however, the true significance of the day is missed.

If you'd like to watch an artistically outstanding portrayal of the event that Christians around the world will celebrate this Saturday, if you haven't already seen it, you might check out a special titled The Messengers produced by the makers of The Chosen.

The Messengers depicts the birth of Christ as recounted by His mother Mary some fifteen years after His Resurrection and Ascension.

The story takes up the first 35 minutes of this video and opens with Mary Magdalene being secretly smuggled into the residence at which Jesus' mother was staying, the smuggling being made necessary because of the persecution the early Christians were suffering.

The actual story begins at the 1:24:45 mark:

After you watch, I highly recommend listening to the Bonner family sing O Holy Night. It's spectacular:

Why Christians Celebrate Christ's Birthday

In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we've posted on Viewpoint several times in the past, is a modest attempt to put the season into perspective [Some readers have noted the similarity between this story and the movie Taken, however, the story of Michael first appeared on Viewpoint over a year before Taken was released so the similarities with the movie are purely coincidental, although the similarities with my novel Bridging the Abyss, are not.]:

Michael, a member of a top-secret anti-terrorism task force, was the father of a teenage daughter named Jennifer, and his duties had caused him to be away from home much of the time Jen was growing up. He was serving his country in a very important, very dangerous capacity that required his absence and a great deal of personal sacrifice. As a result, his daughter grew into her late teens pretty much without him. Indeed, his wife Judith had decided to leave him a couple of years previous and took the girl with her.

Finally, after several years abroad, Mike was able to return home. He longed to hold his princess in his arms and to spend every possible moment with her to try to make up for lost time, but when he knocked on the door of his ex-wife's house the girl who greeted him was almost unrecognizable. Jen had grown up physically and along the way she had rejected everything Michael valued. Her appearance shocked him and her words cut him like a razor. She told him coldly and bluntly that she really didn't want to see him, that he wasn't a father as far as she was concerned, that he hadn't been a part of her life before and wouldn't be in the future.

Michael, a man who had faced numerous hazards and threats in the course of his work and had been secretly cited for great heroism by the government, was staggered by her words. The loathing in her voice and in her eyes crushed his heart. He started to speak, but the door was slammed in his face. Heartbroken and devastated he wandered the streets of the city wondering how, or if, he could ever regain the love his little girl once had for him.

Weeks went by during which he tried to contact both his ex-wife and his daughter, but they refused to return his calls. Then one night his cell phone rang. It was Judith, and from her voice Mike could tell something was very wrong. Jennifer had apparently run off with some unsavory characters several days before and hadn't been heard from since. His ex-wife had called the police, but she felt Mike should know, too. She told him that she thought the guys Jen had gone out with that night were heavily into drugs and she was worried sick about her.

She had good reason to be. Jen thought when she left the house that she was just going for a joy ride, but that's not what her "friends" had in mind. Once they had Jen back at their apartment they tied her to a bed, abused her, filmed the whole thing, and when she resisted they beat her until she submitted. She overheard them debating whether they should sell her to a man whom they knew sold girls into sex-slavery in South America or whether they should just kill her and dump her body in the bay. For three days her life was an unimaginable hell. She cried herself to sleep late every night after being forced into the most degrading conduct imaginable.

Finally her abductors sold her to a street gang in exchange for drugs. Bound and gagged, she was raped repeatedly and beaten savagely. For the first time in her life she prayed that God would help her, and for the first time in many years she missed her father. But as the days wore on she began to think she'd rather be dead than be forced to endure what she was being put through.

Mike knew some of the officers in the police force and was able to get a couple of leads from them as to who the guys she originally left with might be. He set out, not knowing Jennifer's peril, but determined to find her no matter what the cost. His search led him to another city and took days - days in which he scarcely ate or slept. Each hour that passed Jennifer's condition grew worse and her danger more severe. She was by now in a cocaine-induced haze in which she almost didn't know or care what was happening to her.

Somehow, Michael, weary and weak from his lack of sleep and food, managed to find the seedy, run down tenement building where Jennifer was imprisoned. Breaking through a flimsy door he saw his daughter laying on a filthy bed surrounded by three startled kidnappers. Enraged by the scene before his eyes he launched himself at them with a terrible, vengeful fury. Two of the thugs went down quickly, but the third escaped. With tears flowing down his cheeks, Mike unfastened the bonds that held Jen's wrists to the bed posts. She was weak but alert enough to cooperate as Michael helped her to her feet and led her to the doorway.

As she passed into the hall with Michael behind her the third abductor appeared with a gun. Michael quickly stepped in front of Jennifer and yelled to her to run back into the apartment and out the fire escape. The assailant tried to shoot her as she stumbled toward the escape, but Michael shielded her from the bullet, taking the round in his side. The thug fired twice more into Michael's body, but Mike was able to seize the gun and turn it on the shooter.

Finally, it was all over, finished.

Slumped against the wall, Mike lay bleeding from his wounds, the life draining out of him. Jennifer saw from the fire escape landing what had happened and ran back to her father. Cradling him in her arms she wept bitterly and told him over and over that she loved him and that she was so sorry for what she had said to him and for what she had done.

With the last bit of life left in him he gazed up at her, pursed his lips in a kiss, smiled and died. Jennifer wept hysterically. How could she ever forgive herself for how she had treated him? How could she ever overcome the guilt and the loss she felt? How could she ever repay the tremendous love and sacrifice her father had showered upon her?

Years passed. Jennifer eventually had a family of her own. She raised her children to revere the memory of her father even though they had never known him. She resolved to live her own life in such a way that Michael, if he knew, would be enormously proud of her. Everything she did, she did out of gratitude to him for what he had done for her, and every year on the day of his birth she went to the cemetery alone and sat for a couple of hours at his graveside, talking to him and sharing her love and her life with him.

Her father had given everything for her despite the cruel way she had treated him. He had given his life to save hers, and his love for her, his sacrifice, had changed her life forever.

And that's why Christians celebrate Christmas.

One Solitary Life

Most readers of Viewpoint have probably heard the vignette about the enormous historical impact made by the life of Jesus titled "One Solitary Life." It originated in a sermon delivered on July 11, 1926 by pastor and author James Allan Francis who was speaking to the Baptist Young People's Union in Los Angeles.

His message finished with a description of Jesus' impact on the subsequent history of the world, and the concluding excerpt went viral. It received global circulation and is still a powerful yet concise statement of the world-changing effect Jesus' short life has had over the last two millenia.

As we approach the Christmas season it's fitting that we share this three minute film adaptation of Francis' words produced by Illustra Media:

Astonishing Behavior

This wonderful video raises some fascinating questions:

How did the physiology necessary to camouflage itself like this arise through stochastic mechanisms like genetic mutation and natural selection? How did the behavior that these cephalopods display evolve by those same mechanisms?

If mutations affect DNA, and DNA generates proteins, and proteins create tissues and enzymes, etc. what is it that mutations act upon in the organism that gives rise to behavior? How does the octopus "know" to make itself look like the particular background it finds itself in, and how did, or could, such a phenomenon evolve through mechanistic processes that didn't "know" what they were doing?

The evolution of any behavior requires not just the appropriate genetic mutations to create the neural algorithms that control the behavior but also the physiological structures necessary for the behavior. These changes, moreover, must occur gradually over eons of time and pretty much simultaneously in a population of organisms, and, according to the naturalistic account, as a result of purely blind, undirected mechanisms.

If you keep all that in mind, you might find yourself strongly tempted to think that maybe the cephalopod's amazing abilities are the result of intelligent engineering of some sort and that naturalism, despite its popularity among intellectuals, offers completely inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.

The Language Chasm

An interesting short article by Michael Egnor at Mind Matters explores the difference between human language and the vocalizations of other animals. Despite having much of the hearing and vocal apparatus necessary for speech, animals are not capable of language.

Egnor begins by quoting science writer Tom Seigfried who states that:

It’s true that humans, and humans alone, evolved the complex set of voice, hearing and brain-processing skills enabling full-scale sophisticated vocal communication. Yet animals can make complicated sounds; parrots can mimic human speech and cats can clearly convey that it’s time for a treat.

Many animals possess an acute sense of hearing and are able to distinguish random noises from intentional communication.

Much of the physiological apparatus for hearing and speaking is found in all land-dwelling vertebrates — the tetrapods — including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles. “Humans share a significant proportion of our basic machinery of hearing and vocal production with other tetrapods,” Fitch writes in the Annual Review of Linguistics.

Even so, Egnor argues, only humans have language. Here's part of his reasoning:

[Animals] can make and respond to signs—gestures, grunts and the like. A dog, for example, can respond appropriately to simple words directed at him (“Sit!” “Fetch!”). But all animal communication is symbols, that is, signals that point directly to an object.

In this case, the object is a simple expected action the animal is to perform immediately.

What animals cannot do is communicate using abstractions. They cannot use designators, — words employed abstractly as language. For example, a dog can be trained, by reward and punishment, to stay when told, “Stay!”

He associates the sound “s-t-a-y” with a behavior and performs the behavior. But he doesn’t know what you mean when you say “Let’s stay a bit longer on the beach,” “He extended his stay in Peru,” or “The judge issued a stay of the eviction order.”

Animals can only think concretely. Their thought is of particulars—the particular bowl of food, thrown stick, or warm bed. They don’t contemplate nutrition, exercise, or rest.

Humans can think abstractly, without any particular physical object in mind. For example, a vet might tell her client during an office visit, “Tuffy here needs to lose about 1.5 kg. I suggest a lower calorie kibble and more exercise—if possible, before bedtime.”

She can explain it to her client but not to the dog because it’s all abstractions about times, places, things, and concepts. Of course, he might recognize his name, “Tuffy,” and raise his ears slightly to see if he is being told to do something concrete.

Concrete thought needs no language because the concrete thinker focuses on a perceived object. Tuffy thinks of his bowl of food. If he were to think of nutrition, an abstract concept, he would need abstract designators as objects, not only to express his thought but even to think it.

In short, animals don’t have language because they don’t have abstract thought and thus have neither the capacity nor the need for abstract designators—words as language.

Language is a tool for abstract thinking and only human beings can do that.

The gap between animals and human beings is not just a narrow evolutionary jump. It's a chasm and there's no plausible explanation for how blind evolutionary processes could've bridged it.

The Kingdom of Speech

Yesterday I put up a post in which I noted that many researchers investigating the uniqueness of human language have concluded that it defies any naturalistic explanation for its origin. That post sent me back to one I did several years ago on the last book written by the late Tom Wolfe which was also on the mystery of human language and thought I'd repost it.

Here it is:

I've been enjoying Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the theory of evolution and/or the history of the study of linguistics. Michael Egnor at Evolution News concurs with this commendation, and goes even further. Rather than me telling you what the book is about, I'll quote Egnor:

Tom Wolfe has a new book, The Kingdom of Speech, and it's superb. Wolfe's theme is that human language is unique and is not shared in any way with other animals. He argues forcefully that evolutionary stories about the origin of human language are not credible.

In the first chapter of his book, Wolfe describes an article in the journal Frontiers of Psychology from 2014, co-authored by leading linguist Noam Chomsky and seven colleagues. Wolfe declares that:

"The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever," [researchers] concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we'll keep trying, they said gamely... but we'll have to start from zero again.

One of the [researchers] was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. "In the last 40 years," he and [others] were saying, "there has been an explosion of research on this problem," and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia....

One hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced, and they had learned...nothing....In that same century and a half, Einstein discovered the ...the relativity of speed, time and distance... Pasteur discovered that microorganisms, notably bacteria, cause an ungodly number of diseases, from head colds to anthrax and oxygen-tubed, collapsed-lung, final-stage pneumonia....Watson and Crick discovered DNA, the so-called building blocks genes are made of...and 150 years' worth of linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline discovered...nothing...about language.

What is the problem? What's the story?...What is it that they still don't get after a veritable eternity?

Wolfe provides a précis of his argument:

Speech is not one of man's several unique attributes -- speech is the attribute of all attributes!

Yet despite almost two centuries of speculations and hypothesizing we're no closer today to being able to explain what language is or how we come to have it than we've ever been. Indeed, Darwin and his votaries tried to come up with a plausible explanation and failed so utterly that scientists gave up for almost eighty years trying to explain it. Says Wolfe:

It is hard to believe that the most crucial single matter, by far, in the entire debate over the Evolution of man - language - was abandoned, thrown down the memory hole, from 1872 to 1949.

It's also hard to believe that it's been 72 years since 1949 and still no progress has been made on this question. Egnor writes:

And yet, as Wolfe points out, Darwinists are at an utter loss to explain how language -- the salient characteristic of man -- "evolved."

None of the deep drawer of evolutionary just-so stories come anywhere close to explaining how man might have acquired the astonishing ability to craft unlimited propositions and concepts and subtleties within subtleties using a system of grammar and abstract designators (i.e. words) that are utterly lacking anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Egnor, who is himself a neuroscientist, closes his piece with these words:

I have argued before that the human mind is qualitatively different from the animal mind. The human mind has immaterial abilities -- the intellect's ability to grasp abstract universal concepts divorced from any particular thing -- and that this ability makes us more different from apes than apes are from viruses.

We are ontologically different. We are a different kind of being from animals. We are not just animals who talk. Although we share much in our bodies with animals, our language -- a simulacrum of our abstract minds -- has no root in the animal world.

Language is the tool by which we think abstractly. It is sui generis. It is a gift, a window into the human soul, something we are made with, and it did not evolve.

Language is a rock against which evolutionary theory wrecks, one of the many rocks -- the uncooperative fossil record, the jumbled molecular evolutionary tree, irreducible complexity, intricate intracellular design, the genetic code, the collapsing myth of junk DNA, the immaterial human mind -- that comprise the shoal that is sinking Darwin's Victorian fable.

The charm of Wolfe's book is that it reads like a novel, which is the metier for which Wolfe is famous. It's free of scientific jargon, it's funny and contains some fascinating insights into several of the major figures in the history of the search for an explanation for the origin and nature of language. Plus, it's only 169 pages long.

All in all a great read.

The Extraordinary Gift of Human Language

Biologist Ann Gauger holds the heretical opinion, at least it's heretical in today's cockeyed culture, that among all life forms, human beings are exceptional. Here's a quick summary of some of the traits she lists as making us not just different from other mammals but radically, qualitatively different:

We have specific traits that are well outside the norm, so far outside the norm that some scientists see the gaps as unbridgeable. These include abstract thought, foresight, speech, art, music, sociality, theory of mind, manipulation of the material world, charity, wickedness, and religion.

There may be others I haven’t thought of. We see rudiments of these things in animals, but human abilities are orders of magnitude higher than animals (or lower in the case of wickedness). Our specific abilities are greater than are necessary for survival, so unless they are linked to other traits why should we have a Mozart or an Einstein or a Galileo? What we do as scientists is pretty esoteric, right? Is there a selective advantage to any of it?

Maybe at low levels, but being Shakespeare or understanding the molecular dynamics of ribosomes or however you would describe your work is purely gratuitous.

In other words, it's hard to see how or why natural selection would have sorted out from among our primitive ancestors a few who possessed the capacity to do calculus.

One of the most inexplicable uniquely human traits is our capacity for language. Gauger quotes the late psychologist David Premack who challenged anyone to:

...reconstruct the scenario that would confer selective fitness on recursiveness. Language evolved, it is conjectured, at a time when humans or proto-humans were hunting mastodons…Would it be a great advantage for one of our ancestors squatting alongside the embers, to be able to remark, ‘Beware of the short beast whose front hoof Bob cracked when, having forgotten his own spear back at camp, he got in a glancing blow with the dull spear he borrowed from Jack’?

Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness. A semantic language with simple mapping rules of a kind one might suppose that the chimpanzee would have, appears to confer all the advantages one normally associates with discussions of mastodon hunting or the like.

For discussions of that kind, syntactical classes, structure-dependent rules, recursion and the rest, are overly powerful devices, absurdly so.

Gauger also cites an abstract from a scientific article on language evolution at the website Scorched Earth which concludes that there's simply no evolutionary explanation for human language:

We argue ... that the richness of [speculations about how language evolved] is accompanied by a poverty of evidence, with essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.

We show that, to date,

(1) studies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity;

(2) the fossil and archaeological evidence does not inform our understanding of the computations and representations of our earliest ancestors, leaving details of origins and selective pressure unresolved;

(3) our understanding of the genetics of language is so impoverished that there is little hope of connecting genes to linguistic processes any time soon;

(4) all modeling attempts have made unfounded assumptions, and have provided no empirical tests, thus leaving any insights into language's origins unverifiable.

Based on the current state of evidence, we submit that the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever, with considerable uncertainty about the discovery of either relevant or conclusive evidence that can adjudicate among the many open hypotheses.

So, there is no plausible naturalistic explanation for how language arose in human beings, just as there's no plausible naturalistic explanation for the origin of life, or the origin of human consciousness, the origin of biological information or even for biological processes like meiosis, mitosis, metamorphosis, or sexual reproduction.

Nor can naturalism provide us with a satisfactory scientific account of cosmic fine-tuning or moral obligation.

When confronted with the most fundamental ontological questions naturalism simply shrugs its shoulders, and yet we're told by some that naturalism is nevertheless the most rational position to hold. Its chief competitor, the belief that there's an intelligent mind underlying the cosmos and all that it contains, we're told, is mere superstition.

We might be forgiven for suspecting that between these two worldview alternatives - unconscious, purposeless forces or an intelligent purposeful mind - the latter is actually the more rational explanation for the phenomena Gauger lists and the former is the more superstitious.

Two Excellent Books

Since our inception in 2004 VP has focused largely, though certainly not exclusively, on topics that lie at the intersection of science, philosophy and religion. These interests have led me this past year to two outstanding books that fit this profile well.

The first was philosopher of science Stephen Meyer's Return of the God Hypothesis which came out last spring and has received excellent reviews in places like the Wall Street Journal and The Claremont Review of Books. It is the sort of book that would lead most open minded readers to conclude that the scientific case for a designer of both the cosmos and life is exceedingly strong.

Meyer's argument is based on the overwhelming evidence for a cosmic beginning, the extraordinarily improbable fine-tuning of the constants and forces that make the universe suitable for life, and the massive obstacles facing any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life itself.

Each of these phenomena is much more likely to be the result of an intentional design than a series of astronomically improbable accidents. The arguments in Meyer's book make the denial of this assertion intellectually absurd.

The second of the two books is one that I've referenced in several recent posts (see here, here and here). It's a book titled Animal Algorithms by an expert in navigational systems named Eric Cassell. The posts to which I've linked will give the reader a sense of the amazing abilities that have somehow been programmed into animals, especially insects, and Cassell's explanation of these abilities in Animal Algorithms should be read by every biology student and teacher.

Here's an excerpt from a review of the book by Jonathan Witt at Evolution News:

In Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts author Eric Cassell explores the buzzing, migrating, web-spinning, and colony-building world of ingenious animals blessed with gobsmackingly impressive skills — in many cases, from birth.

How do blind mound-building termites know passive heating and cooling strategies that dazzle skilled human architects? What taught the honeybee its dance, or its hive mates how to read the complex message of the dance? How do monarch butterflies known to fly thousands of miles to a single mountainside in Mexico, to a place they’ve never been before?

The secret, according to author Eric Cassell: behavioral algorithms embedded in their tiny brains.

But how did these embedded programs arise in the history of life? There’s the problem for evolutionists. “Specified complexity, irreducible complexity, and the Cambrian explosion are inexplicable from a Darwinian viewpoint,” comments Baylor University computer engineer and intelligent design theorist Robert J. Marks. “In this book, Cassell masterfully adds animal algorithms to the list.”

Return of the God Hypothesis is excellent but hefty and in places a bit technical. Animal Algorithms is about 200 pages of fascinating explanation of what the latest research shows about animal behavior. Meyer's book is a must read for anyone who has an interest in the origin of life, or the origin and structure of the cosmos.

Cassell's book is must reading for anyone who has an interest in whether unguided Neo-Darwinian evolution can really provide a plausible explanation for the astonishing behaviors of living things.

They'd both make perfect Christmas gifts for someone whose interests lie along these lines.

Weaver Ants

In his book Animal Algorithms, Eric Cassell describes the amazing behavior of what are perhaps the most astonishing creatures on the planet - ants.

Somehow, in a brain so tiny that it's almost invisible to the naked eye, ants store the information that allows them, among other things, to farm, engage in warfare, practice slavery, exploit division of labor, build consensus, form castes, construct cities and architecture and use trigonometry, polarized light, and chemical tracks to navigate as well as employ a variety of chemicals (pheromones) to send and receive communications.

These behaviors require software algorithms whose origins are simply inexplicable in terms of unguided Darwinian processes like genetic mutation, natural selection and genetic drift.

Below are a couple of videos that describe the incredible abilities of one species of ants called weaver ants. As you watch keep in mind that none of these behaviors is learned, they're all innate, and each one requires a separate suite of genes and algorithms. Where did the information necessary to do all this come from?

What's especially astonishing is that these tiny creatures know instinctively to carry larvae to the leaves and to draw the silk from the larvae to sew the leaves together.

One argument against intelligent design is that it's not a scientific hypothesis, presumably since it posits a designer that's not subject to scientific scrutiny. Even so, consider this disjunctive proposition:

Either the behavior of weaver ants and other social insects is explicable in terms of blind, purposeless processes acting by chance in a coordinated fashion to produce the physiology and behavior seen in these videos, or the physiology and behavior are the result of intentional, purposeful and intelligent engineering.

If this proposition covers all the live options, and if the first disjunct is as astronomically improbable as Cassell's book makes it seem, then the second disjunct is most likely to be true. In other words, it's more probable that the physiology and behavior of ants is the product of intentional engineering than that it's the product of blind, purposeless processes.

If one doubts this conclusion one really should read Animal Algorithms.

Educational Philosophies: The U.S. and China

A Chinese mom doing graduate studies in America is dismayed by the quality of her son's education compared to that he'd receive in her native China. She wrote scathingly of her concerns in a piece for the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which she noted that the flaccid state of our educational system is putting us at a real disadvantage to the emerging economic and military competitor across the Pacific.

She writes:

As a Chinese doctoral student raising a young son in the U.S., I am mystified by how American elementary schools coddle students. In China, schools are run like boot camps. What do the therapeutic comforts America showers on its youth portend for a growing competition with China?

Good question, but what does she mean when she says that schools coddle students?

I recently registered my son in the third grade at a New Jersey public school. Hattie had recently finished two years of elementary school in Chengdu, China, where he trotted off to school each day with a backpack stuffed with thick textbooks and materials for practices and quizzes. Here he leaves for school with little in his backpack other than a required “healthy snack.”

The first day he came home with a sheet of math homework: 35 addition problems. He finished in about a minute. On the second day, he was asked to write 328 in different configurations. He first wrote down 300+20+8, following the prompt, and then 164x2, 82x4 and 656÷2.

My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age. When he was 5, I taught him fractions. Two years later, I introduced him to algebra. It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children. Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests.

This is not a philosophy shared by American schools. On Friday night my son came home announcing in bewilderment that he didn’t have any homework. In China students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it.

How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists and engineers?

Well, the answer is, we won't. We've already decided that what children do outside of school is more important than what they do in school. Social activities, recreation, athletics all are greater priorities than learning.

Teachers know that if they assign homework many students simply won't do it, and there'll be no penalty for not doing it. If a teacher tries to impose a penalty of some sort he or she is likely to run afoul of both irate parents and unsupportive administrators.

Ms. Zhang continues her critique:

Chinese education pushes the young in directions that serve the party and the state. Youth are trained to be skilled laborers ready to endure hard work and brutal competition. Such political indoctrination is taught side by side with math and science.

American education is supposed to be about opening minds but appears not to fill them with much. Worse, young Americans are not prepared for the demands of being an adult.

This phenomenon started in higher education. For years attending American universities, I have been disturbed to watch colleges fabricate “anxiety” and “depression” in students who are not mentally ill.

Administrators have used grossly exaggerated terms such as “trauma,” and melodramatic expressions such as “I cannot begin to imagine what you have suffered,” to turn into a catastrophe what is best described as disappointment. This creates a culture of victimization.

The absurdity peaked after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Students from elite universities claimed existential despair, finding comfort in cocoa, coloring books and therapy dogs. Classes were canceled and exams postponed, all in the name of soothing 20-somethings who need to be learning how to adapt to reality as adults.

Chinese citizens enjoy mocking the Western “snowflakes.” Less amusing is what this trend means for the U.S. as China no longer hides its enmity for America.

Her analysis of American education would be funny were it not so serious.

It's hard to imagine the left, which largely controls education in this country, being overmuch concerned about competing with China. Competition in education, as in most other spheres of life, is anathema to the left, because it entails a hierarchy of ability and a perpetuation of socio-economic classes.

Progressives whose goal is "equity" and a classless society will never commit themselves to higher standards of educational excellence if it means that some will fail to measure up. Besides, an ignorant, uneducated citizenry is, they believe, much easier to manipulate.

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote: "A nation that expects to remain ignorant and free...expects what never was and never will be."

The Astonishing Hypothesis

Naturalism is the view that everything about us, our bodies and our thoughts, our brains and our mental sensations, can all be explained by, or reduced to, physics and matter. Nobel-prize winning biologist Francis Crick, in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, describes the view this way:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’

Nobel-Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg describes the implications of his naturalism as follows:

...the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature ... we even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years.

And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.

The twentieth century mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell pretty much agrees with Weinberg:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.

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

Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

Note that both Weinberg and Russell see clearly that their view leads either to the Scylla of nihilism or the Charybdis of despair. The only way to avoid these bleak consequences is through "wishful thinking," by which is presumably meant the belief that naturalism is wrong.

Why that belief is "wishful thinking," though, is hard to understand since there are very good reasons for thinking that naturalism is indeed wrong.

In any case, naturalism is itself not a product of scientific analysis. There's no preponderance of evidence in its favor. It's simply a metaphysical preference embraced by those who can't abide the notion that theism might be true.

Nevertheless, that aversion to theism is so strong that it beguiles brilliant people like Crick, Weinberg and Russell into wrapping their arms around a view of life that drains it of all hope, meaning, and moral significance.

When centuries from now historians look back at this period in our cultural story, I wonder if they won't think how odd it is that anyone would have preferred that naturalism be true rather than that it be false.

Spider Webs

This BBC time lapse video shows a spider spinning its web and implicitly elicits a deeply important question in the mind of the viewer.

Here are a few interesting facts about spiders gleaned from an article at Evolution News by Eric Cassell, author of Animal Algorithms, a book every biology student should read:

• Spiders can make different types of silk, depending upon its function. For example, the golden orb-weaver spider has seven kinds of silk glands, with six spinnerets. Some is used for spinning webs, but other types are used for wrapping prey and encasing eggs.
• The webs consist of sticky “catching threads”; radial “spokes” for holding the sticky threads; “bridge threads” that act as guy-lines for holding the web up; “signal threads” that inform the spider through vibrations sensed in the legs that prey is in the web; and “drag lines” for access into the web from her home.
• Spiders are able to determine both the angle and distance of the prey from the center of the web. They are able to determine the prey location using the same basic technique we use to determine the location of the source of sound. Humans use the difference in intensity of sound received by our ears to estimate the relative location. Spiders do something similar based on the intensity of vibrations received, in their case sensed through eight legs.
• Silk can be stronger than steel of the same thickness, can stretch more than rubber, and is stickier than most tape. A typical garden spiderweb is made of 65 to 195 feet of silk.
• Silk has been described as “easily the most remarkable building material on the planet, and it has one source: arthropods.”
• Despite great effort, humans have yet to produce anything functionally equivalent to silk. Through genetic engineering, attempts have been made to duplicate it without success.

The spider, Cassell states, "exhibits many characteristics of human engineering, and engineering of a very high order." The pattern of the web, how it is to be spun, the spider's predation behavior, all of this requires an enormous amount of information, and it's all innate, contained in a brain the size of a pinhead.

So, here's the question I mentioned in the first sentence: How did all of this, the anatomical, physiological and behavioral properties of spiders, evolve by blind, unguided processes. No one knows. Maybe that's because they didn't.

Why the Universe Cannot be Infinitely Old

One thorny problem for any naturalist metaphysics is that the consensus among scientists is that the universe came into being at some point in the past. If that's true then, for reasons discussed in this post, it's strong evidence for the existence of a creative, intelligent, transcendent, eternal, and personal first cause, i.e. either God or something very much like God.

If such a cause exists, of course, then naturalism is false, so naturalists, understandably chary about accepting the conclusion that their metaphysics is false, sometimes take refuge in the argument that the universe is infinitely old, past eternal, or beginning-less. The post linked to above offered scientific reasons for rejecting this argument, but there are philosophical reasons as well.

One of these is that an actually infinite set of any physical entities, whether they be moments, or atoms, or whatever, is probably impossible. Philosopher William Lane Craig explains in the following short video some of the paradoxes that arise in an infinite series of entities and why such a series is highly implausible:

Moreover, if the universe were in fact infinitely old it could never have arrived at the present moment.

Kirk Durston in an article at Evolution News and Views explains why:

The evidence from science points to a beginning for the universe. Some atheists, understanding the possible theological implications of a beginning, prefer to set aside science and assert that the past is infinite either in terms of the number of years this universe has existed, or in terms of a fantasized infinite series of universes in a multiverse....

In the real world, an infinite past means that if you were to set the current year as t = 0 and count back into the past, there would never be an end to your counting, for there is no year in the past that was the "beginning."

No matter how long you counted, you would still have an infinite number of years ahead of you to count and, if you were to look back at the set of years you have already counted, it would always be finite.

In other words, if the universe is infinitely old then, if you began counting back from the present moment, you could never count back to a starting point. No matter if you counted forever you would never reach a first moment of the universe.

Likewise, neither could you count forward from infinity past to the present moment. If the universe extends infinitely into the past and contains an infinity of past moments then no matter how many of those moments tick by the present moment would never arrive.

Put differently, in order for a series of moments to arrive at the present there has to be a starting point, but if the past is eternal then the necessary starting point keeps receding further and further into the past and in fact does not exist at all. If there's no initial moment then there's no second moment, and if no second then no third, and so on, and if all this is so, then there is no present moment either.

But obviously there is a present moment, so it would seem that the assumption of a past eternal universe is false.

Durston goes into more detail than this, but the implication is clear. If the universe is not past eternal then it had a beginning. And if it had a beginning it had a cause. And any cause of the universe must have the properties listed above, all of which is to say that a finite universe is strong evidence that theism is true.

Will Roe Go?

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case which has the possibility of resulting in the overturn of Roe v. Wade. SCOTUS will probably deliver their judgment in late June or early July.

Roe is the 1973 decision in which five justices found lurking somewhere in the Constitution a right for women to kill their unborn babies if they so chose.

A lot of folks on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate are concerned that the present Court will find that no such right exists anywhere in the Constitution, and a lot of people on the pro-life side are equally concerned that the Court will manufacture some reason not to overturn Roe.

I'm not a legal scholar, but for my part I can't imagine that the Founding Fathers inserted language into some Constitutional nook or cranny that endowed women with such a right, and a lot of pro-choicers agree, including the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who acknowledged that Roe was bad law.

The role of the Court is to rule on what the Constitution says, not on what the justices wish it said or imagine it to say, but that seems to be what they did in 1973 when, in an act of legal prestidigitation, they produced from the Constitutional hat a right to abort a pregnancy.

In any case, if Roe is overturned it will not end abortion in America, but it will return to each of the states the responsibility of deciding what restrictions, if any, they wish to place on it. Some states will permit abortion on demand up until birth, maybe even after. Others may prohibit it almost entirely. Most will land somewhere in the middle.

The point is that it will be left to the people of each state to decide, through their legislatures, what they want the law to be. This is how a democratic Republic is supposed to work.

By overruling the states in the Roe decision five Justices on the Supreme Court stripped millions of citizens in this country of the right to determine their own laws on an issue the Court had no Constitutional warrant for removing from the purview of the states.

As Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) writes:

It [the abortion controversy] won’t be settled for a few years. But then it will settle. This path—overturning—is the closest America will get to justice and democratic satisfaction on this issue. Overturning Roe would mean returning a furiously contested national issue of almost 50 years standing to the democratic process.

This wouldn’t “solve” the problem or “end” the struggle. It would bring the responsibility for solving and ending it closer to the people. In the short term it would cause new disruption and renewed argument, as Roe itself did when it negated abortion statutes in 46 states and the District of Columbia.

... It will take time to play out. Politicians who stray too far from true public opinion, as opposed to whatever got burped up in a recent poll, will fairly quickly face backlash at the polls.

It's possible that the Court chooses to allow Roe to stand in some form, but if they don't overturn it now they're just kicking the can down the road, ensuring continued cultural battles and guaranteeing that many more cases come before them in the future.

Who Designed the Designer?

Philosopher of science Jay Richards is a proponent of intelligent design, i.e. the view that the universe and life show evidence (lots of it) of having been intelligently engineered. Richards asserts that one of the most frequent objections he encounters, one raised in fact by Richard Dawkins in his best-selling book The God Delusion is, "If the universe and life are designed then who designed the designer?"

Laypeople can be forgiven for asking the question because it seems common-sensical, but someone of Dawkins' stature should know better and he took a lot of heat from philosophers, even philosophers sympathetic to his metaphysical naturalism, for his evident lack of philosophical sophistication.

Here's a short video in which Richards addresses the question:

It's worth noting, I think, that the attempt to use this question as an indictment of the intelligent design hypothesis is misguided for other reasons besides those Richards gives.

Let's look at the first part of the question: "If the universe and life are designed...." implies a willingness to accept for the sake of argument that the universe is designed, but as soon as he's granted that the naturalist has gotten himself into trouble.

Once it's conceded by the naturalist, even if only hypothetically, that the universe is designed then whether there's just one designer or an indefinite number doesn't much matter. Naturalism would stand refuted since naturalism holds that the universe is self-existent.

Moreover, to posit more designers than what's necessary to explain the universe is a violation of the principle that our explanations should contain the minimum number of entities necessary to explain what we're trying to explain - in this case, the universe. So the simplest, and therefore the best, explanation is that there's only a single designer of the universe.

There's no good reason to think that anyone who believes there's a designer of the universe must allow for an infinite regress of designers.

We might also point out that the universe is a contingent entity. Now contingent entities require a necessary being as their ultimate cause and a necessary being is, by definition, not itself dependent upon anything else for its existence.

So, if the universe was designed by a non-contingent being then it makes no sense to ask what designed that being. Nothing designed it. If it were designed it would be contingent upon whatever designed it.

Finally, it should be noted that if there is an intelligent designer it must not only be a necessary being, but it must also transcend space and time because these are aspects of the designed universe. Therefore, the designer must be non-spatial and non-temporal. It must also be very intelligent and very powerful. In other words, it must be something very much like God.

Given all this, the naturalist would be better off resisting the temptation to ask "who designed the designer." It's a question which carries far less polemical punch than they think it does.

Unthinkable in Fifty Years

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week on a case out of Mississippi that could very well overturn Roe v. Wade and/or Casey v. Planned Parenthood. If that should happen the laws governing abortion abortion would then be left to each state to decide.

The Court's decision will probably not be announced until late June, but the controversy surrounding the possibility that the current abortion regime may be undone brought to mind a post I did a couple of years ago which featured a claim by an English professor and writer named Karen Swallow Prior who argued that fifty years from now abortion will be "unthinkable."

Here's the post:

Vox.com has been running a series in which guests are invited to offer their opinion on something commonly experienced today that they think will be considered unthinkable in fifty years. Some sample selections are "eating meat", "youth tackle football", "self-driving cars", etc.

In her submission, English professor Karen Swallow Prior believes that just as we look back today at chattel slavery and wonder how people could ever have justified the idea of owning other human beings, fifty years from now people will shake their heads as they look back at the practice of abortion on demand.

Here's the lede for her argument:

The list of those who have had few or no legal rights throughout history is staggering: women, children, orphans, widows, Jews, gays and lesbians, slaves, former slaves, descendants of slaves, those with leprosy, undocumented immigrants — to name a few.

Nothing marks the progress of any society more than the expansion of human rights to those who formerly lacked them. I believe that if such progress is to continue, prenatal human beings will be included in this group, and we will consider elective abortion primitive and cruel in the future.

The eradication of abortion may be difficult to imagine. But consider how difficult it would have been for our grandparents to foresee a culture in which nearly one in four women has an abortion by age 45. Certainly, some factors leading to this situation reflect real and substantial progress for women: greater equality, more work options, improved understanding of sexuality, and increased moral agency.

But rights for women that come at the expense of unborn children aren’t true liberation; they merely, as one writer put it, enable the “redistribution of oppression.”

Prior goes on to make the case that a fetus is a human being entitled to the same rights as humans which have been born and that pro-choice advocates tacitly acknowledge this when they declare that they want abortion to be "safe and rare." Why should it be rare if it's just a benign medical procedure like an appendectomy? Who would bother to insist that they want appendectomies to be rare?

It's also ironic that those who declare themselves firmly on the side of science will twist themselves into pretzels denying the science that shows the tiny form in the womb to be a developing child.

Ultrasound technology and prenatal surgical interventions provide dispositive scientific evidence that what's in the mother's womb is not some alien blob of tissue and extravagant gender reveal parties and the insuppressible personality of the child in the womb offer psychological confirmation to an increasing number of mothers that what they're carrying is in fact a baby.

Prior concludes with this:

Our modern-day willingness to settle for sex apart from commitment, to accept the dereliction of duty by men who impregnate women (for men are the primary beneficiaries of liberal abortion laws), and to uphold the systematic suppression of sex’s creative energy and function are practices that people of other ages would have considered bizarre.

As we enter late modernity and recognize the limits of the radical autonomy and individualism which have defined it, the pendulum will correct itself with a swing toward more communitarian and humane values that recognize the interdependency of all humans.

When we do, we will look back at elective abortion and wonder — as we do now with polluting and smoking — why we so wholeheartedly embraced it.

We will look at those ultrasound images of 11-week old fetuses somersaulting in the waters of the womb and lack words to explain to our grandchildren why we ever defended their willful destruction in the name of personal choice and why we harmed so many women to do so.

It will be interesting, for those still around in fifty years, to see whether abortion will be to those alive then what slavery is to us today.

Interested readers can peruse Prior's full column at the link.

The Left's Race Problem

Recently a white cop shot a 61 year-old man in a wheelchair, in the back, nine times. The man had shoplifted and refused to cooperate with the officer and so the officer shot him. Nine times. In the back. It was pretty much a one day story in the media.

There was no consequent violence in the streets, no calls to defund the police, no outpouring of grief for the shoplifter.

Several days ago a man named Darrell Brooks drove his vehicle into a crowd at a Wisconsin Christmas parade, killing six, including an 8 year-old child:

Investigators allege Darrell Brooks Jr., 39, turned into the parade route in Waukesha on Nov. 21 and swerved the vehicle side-to-side without slowing down as he struck dozens of people.

That was a two day story. There was no talk about race or racism in the progressive media, despite the fact that Brooks' social media was filled with racial hate and vitriol.

So why the reticence? In the first case a white cop shot and killed a white wheelchair-bound victim. The media evidently saw no opportunity to use this incident to incite racial animosities so they quickly lost interest.

In the second case, the driver was black and the victims were all white, but this, too, did not fit the media narrative of a virulent white supremacy stalking the land looking for black victims. So after a day or two they let pretty much let the story fade out.

So here's your homework assignment: Imagine in case number one that the wheelchair bound victim had been black, and imagine in case number two that the races of the driver and his victims had been reversed. What do you suppose the media reaction would've been then, and what would the state of our cities be as you read this?

It probably doesn't take much imagination to picture the difference in the media's reaction to these horrors were the circumstances as we imagined them, and, if the response to the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake are any indication, it's quite likely our cities would be ablaze right now.

Which might lead one to wonder why our major media yawn at crimes that would have them churning out condemnations and deprecations of white society had things been the other way around.

Is it not itself racist to be relatively indifferent to murders that would elicit moral apoplexy were the races reversed, and isn't this unequal treatment at best irresponsible? Is it not a contributing source to the deep racial resentments and polarization in our society when the crimes of whites are maximized and similar crimes perpetrated by blacks are minimized?

And why is so much of our society so eager to racialize everything that they were calling Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist despite the fact that there was nothing at all racial about the shooting in which he was involved?

Jason Riley (I shouldn't have to mention that Riley is black, but in today's climate I guess I better) writing at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) says this:

The same press outlets that portrayed Mr. Rittenhouse as a white supremacist have had remarkably little to say about the racial identity of Darrell Brooks, the black suspect in Wisconsin who is accused of plowing his car through an annual Christmas parade last month and killing six people, including an 8-year-old boy, all of whom were white.

Given the suspect’s history of posting messages on social media that called for violence against white people and praised Hitler for killing Jews, you’d think that his race and the race of his victims would be relevant to reporters.

Race is all anyone would be talking about if a white man had slammed his vehicle into a parade full of black people. Yet suddenly the left has gone colorblind.

Liberals want us to believe that racial disparities in police shootings and incarceration rates stem from a biased system and have little to do with racial disparities in criminality. They want to talk about so-called hate crimes that involve white assailants and black victims, but not those involving black assailants and white or Asian victims.

They want headlines to read “White Cop Shoots Black Suspect,” even when there’s no evidence that the encounter was racially motivated. This is playing with fire.

Riley's right, and no amount of rationalization by those on the left can excuse the irresponsibility of their tendentious behavior.

A Short Presentation on the Moral Argument

As has oft been stated here on VP there's an argument to be made for the existence of God based on the near-universal belief that there are objective moral duties which we're all obligated to perform.

The argument, put simply, goes like this:

• If there is no God there can be no objective moral wrongs, duties or obligations.
• There are objective moral wrongs, duties and obligations.
• Therefore, there is a God.

By "objective moral wrongs" is meant something that we have a duty not to do regardless of whether or not we believe we have that duty.

Those who wish to avoid the conclusion of this argument will often challenge one or both of the premises. They'll argue contra the first premise, for example, that objective moral duties exist independently of God because they result from our evolutionary past, or are derived from human reason or from human conscience.

This short video featuring Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft considers these and other objections to the Moral Argument and finds them all inadequate. None of them can provide a satisfactory ground for objective moral duties.

The only satisfactory basis for objective moral rights and wrongs is a transcendent, perfectly good moral authority who has the power to hold us accountable for how we live. Here's Kreeft:

In other words, if one believes there are objective moral duties but also believes there's no transcendent ground for those duties, there's an intellectual tension in their worldview. One of those beliefs must be false, but it doesn't seem plausible that the first one is.

Nature, Nurture and the Epigenome

Philosophers, psychologists and scientists have long debated whether our behavior is largely the product of environmental influences (nurture) or mostly the consequence of our genetic make-up (nature). Modern discoveries in biology have confirmed the suspicion of many that it's probably a combination of both.

Research on rats suggests that environment can actually change an animal's genome (the genetic composition of an organism) and thus influence much of its behavior.

The part of the genome that appears to be affected by environmental factors is not the actual DNA, which is the chemical basis for our genes, but rather molecular tags (called methyl groups) that attach along the DNA and act as switches turning certain genes on and off.

These tags are collectively referred to as the "epigenome," and this five minute video explains how it's believed that the environment affects these elements of our genetic make-up.

The mystery, at least it's a mystery to me, still remains how the proteins coded for by our genes translate into behavior. How do strings of amino acids generate a behavior like licking the young, building a specific type of nest or migrating to a specific tree thousands of miles away (see yesterday's post)?

There must be some connection between physical proteins and an organism's behavior, but if it's known I've never seen it explained.

The "Miracle" of Monarch Migration

Every year an estimated 100–200 million monarch butterflies migrate two thousand to three thousand miles between the United States/Canada and Mexico. While there are other populations of monarchs, including in western North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Australia, the population in eastern North America is the best known because of its amazing migration.

Monarch Butterfly

For example, they're the only butterfly species known to make a two-way migration.

They can travel between 50 to 100 miles a day during their 3000 mile journey to Oyamel fir forests in the Mexican mountains nearly two miles above sea level.

They roost in the trees in a dozen or so of these mountain areas from October to March, often returning to the same tree in which their ancestor roosted the previous year.

In late summer in northeastern North America dwindling food supply and shorter days trigger the Monarch's migratory impulse. A generation that has hatched after mid-August begins the trek south for wintering grounds they've never been to before. Most summering Monarchs live for about two to six weeks, but this migrating generation can live up to nine months.

The migrants travel during the day and roost at night, often in the same trees that previous generations used as roost sites during their migration.

During the summer their range covers close to 400,000 square miles, but when they finally arrive in Mexico they squeeze into territories of less than half a square mile.

Monarch's roosting in Mexican Oyamel fir trees

One of the most amazing aspects of this is that these butterflies, with brains the size of a pinhead, can navigate so unerringly across thousands of miles of terrain. Researchers believe that they use a complex system which involves ultraviolet sunlight, a magnetic compass, the position of the sun and an internal clock.

Their internal clock tells them the time of day. In the morning when the sun is rising they navigate to the west of it. At noon they fly toward it and in the afternoon they fly to the east of it. This strategy keeps them flying due south as depicted in these figures:

Another amazing fact is that the generation that made the long trip from the northeast and over-wintered in Mexico is not the generation that returns to the northeast. This generation begins the trip back in the spring but they reproduce and die along the way.

The second generation continues the migration, but they, too, reproduce and die along the way. It's the third generation that makes it back to the summering grounds in the northeast, but they also reproduce and die, so it is their offspring that begin the cycle all over again in August.

There's an interactive feature here that shows the Monarch's pattern of migration. All of this raises questions:

How does each year's crop of butterflies "know" the route to take to get back to the same trees in Mexico that their ancestors left from when they've never done it before?

How do those butterflies born along the return trip "know" to continue the migratory flight and "know" which direction to take?

What is the source of the information needed for these insects to complete this astonishing journey?

And how would all this have come about through a blind, purposeless process like natural selection and genetic mutation?

Comparisons of migratory monarch genomes with the genomes of non-migratory monarchs has revealed that some five hundred and thirty genes are involved in migratory behavior so that means that in the history of the species there must have been a minimum of five hundred thirty genetic mutations, all of which were random but which fortuitously produced the ability to successfully make this migration.

Moreover, Monarchs are believed to have evolved about two million years ago so the migrating variety must've split off from the ancestral stock sometime thereafter. Thus, at the most, those 535 mutations must've accumulated within the last two million years, a very short time for all that evolution to have taken place - at least it's a very short time if the evolution were unguided by any outside intelligence.

If this all came about naturalistically that would be almost miraculous, which is ironic since naturalism discounts miracles.

It's possible, of course, that this migratory behavior could've evolved by unguided, purposeless processes, in the same sense that it's possible that elephants could've evolved the ability to fly, but it takes a king-sized portion of blind faith to dogmatically insist that it did.

Media Disinformation

Gerard Baker at WSJ offers a catalogue of stories that have been promoted by the progressive media in recent years, all of which turned out to be false.

According to so much of what we read and heard:

• Kyle Rittenhouse is a domestic terrorist.
• Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist.
• Donald Trump won in 2016 only because he colluded with the Kremlin.
• Nick Sandmann, the boy from Covington Catholic High School on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was an entitled white bigot.
• Mr. Trump said the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville were “good people.”
• Last year’s riots were mostly peaceful.
• Unarmed black men are routinely shot in huge numbers by police officers.
• The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian plot.

Every one of these assertions by the media was false. So were these:

• Inflation isn’t a problem.
• Andrew Cuomo was America’s greatest governor.
• Republican-run states are killing people with their anti-science Covid policies.
• A white man killed a succession of Asian-Americans in Georgia in a fit of racist rage.
• Russians offered cash bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers.
• Anyone who suggested the pandemic started in a Chinese laboratory was a racist.
• Mr. Trump’s postmaster general was stealing mailboxes.

Baker could've added many more examples, including the media's willingness to believe Jussie Smollett and, in 2006, Crystal Magnum in the Duke lacrosse case.

The stories were false and the media that perpetrated them often knew they were false, but they kept pushing them anyway. If it were the case that this only happened occasionally and that when it did the media were quick to correct their story, that would be forgivable, but that's obviously not what usually happens.

As in the Trump/Russia collusion case the media pushes the falsehood until they can no longer sustain it and then they quietly move on to the next fabrication. No apology, no regret, and usually no retraction.

It's why the late Rush Limbaugh often likened them to drive-by shooters who leave their victims bleeding in the street while they speed off to find their next victim.

Why do they do this? There seem to be three possible answers. Either they're simply not very bright, or they're not very honest, or they're maliciously trying to tear people, and our institutions, down by any means necessary.

A fourth possibility is that they're actually all three.

In any case, it'd be folly to naively accept whatever we hear on network or cable television, or read on social media and in the major leftist journals. Too many of these people are unconstrained by any sense of a duty to tell the truth.

It may be hard to believe that they would lie to us so deliberately and so earnestly, yet when it happens over and over again with rarely, if ever, any sign of remorse or indication of professional embarrassment one has to be at least suspicious that the falsehoods are deliberate and that we are being purposely deceived.

Perhaps the best response is not to give up trying to know what's going on in the world but rather to develop a healthy skepticism, especially toward those sources of information which have a track record of promoting stories and allegations which later are shown to have been false.

Credibility, after all, is something that must be earned and scrupulously maintained. Too much of our media has squandered any reputation they may have had for integrity and forfeited the trust of honest, thinking people.

Another Gift Suggestion

Yesterday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out four years ago.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century …. They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look. They're available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

A Modest Christmas Gift Suggestion

Is there someone on your Christmas shopping list you think might enjoy reading a novel which blends philosophy, religion, and a crime story all together on a college campus during football season? If so, you might consider giving them a copy of my book In the Absence of God.

I know the foregoing sounds like a shameless plug, but Absence encapsulates a recurring theme throughout our seventeen years here at Viewpoint. It's a fictionalized argument for the proposition that naturalism affords little or no basis for either moral obligation or ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd.

Naturalism, to put it succinctly, is an existential dead-end, for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare described it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In the Absence of God is set on a mid-sized university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist in one of his classes, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the individual perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways none of them could have foreseen when the semester opened.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It's often said that ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

< /br> You can read more about In the Absence of God by following the link at the top of this page. It's available at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds, and also at Amazon (paperback and kindle), where reviewers have given it 4.5 stars, and at Barnes and Noble (paperback and nook).

I hope you'll consider putting it and/or it's companion novel Bridging the Abyss (about which more tomorrow) on your Christmas shopping list.