The Easter Miracle

The Christian world prepares to celebrate this Sunday what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply unbelievable.

It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns tell us, and in a scientific age everyone knows that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false.

Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from a circularity. He seems to base the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. However, we can only conclude that there's never been a reliable report of one if we know a priori that all historical reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles are impossible.

But set that dizzying circularity aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if a pot of hot water is added to a pot of of cold water the hot and cold molecules will eventually distribute themselves evenly throughout the container so that the water achieves a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible, nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of warm water into hot and cold portions, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is astronomically improbable, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern skeptics have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists by fortuitous accident.

They ground their belief in these things on the supposition that it's possible that there are an infinite number of different universes, none of which is observable, and in an infinite number of worlds even extremely improbable events are bound to happen.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the naturalistic origin of life, which is at least as improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Unlimited time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. To be sure, there's no evidence of other worlds, but part of the faith commitment of the modern skeptic is to hold that these innumerable worlds must exist.

The skeptic clings to this conviction because if it's not so then life and the universe we inhabit must have a personal, rather than a mechanistic, explanation and that admission would deal a considerable metaphysical shock to the skeptic's psyche.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos, why can't they also be invoked to explain "miracles" as well?

If there are a near-infinite series of universes, a multiverse, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem of cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypothesis be able to explain the spectacularly improbable fine-tuning of the cosmos and the otherwise impossible origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the incomprehensible precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the origin of life from mere chemicals, the resurrection of a dead man should present no problem at all. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead but rather with the claim that God deliberately raised this particular man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't admit that because in order to justify their rejection of the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is at least highly improbable, and that sort of proof is beyond anyone's ability to accomplish.

If, though, one is willing to assume the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to explain the properties of our universe, he should have no trouble accepting the existence of a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead.

After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 5

In the final episode of Secrets in the Cell Biochemist Michael Behe sums up the evidence and concludes that the best explanation for the design in nature is not that it was the product of random accidents but that it's the product of intentional engineering.

An article at Evolution News explains how we detect intentional design or agency. The writer, philosopher Stephen Meyer states that:

.... rational agents often detect the prior activity of other designing minds by the character of the effects they leave behind.

Archaeologists assume that rational agents produced the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. Insurance fraud investigators detect certain “cheating patterns” that suggest intentional manipulation of circumstances rather than a natural disaster. Cryptographers distinguish between random signals and those carrying encoded messages, the latter indicating an intelligent source.

Recognizing the activity of intelligent agents constitutes a common and fully rational mode of inference.

More importantly,...rational agents recognize or detect the effects of other rational agents and distinguish them from the effects of natural causes....systems or sequences with the joint properties of “high complexity” (or small probability) and “specification” invariably result from intelligent causes, not from chance or physical-chemical laws.

....complex sequences exhibit an irregular and improbable arrangement that defies expression by a simple rule or algorithm, whereas specification involves a match or correspondence between a physical system or sequence and an independently recognizable pattern or set of functional requirements.

By way of illustration, consider the following three sets of symbols:

• “nehya53nslbyw1`jejns7eopslanm46/J”
• “TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN”
• “ABABABABABABABABABABAB”

The first two sequences are complex because both defy reduction to a simple rule. Each represents a highly irregular, aperiodic, improbable sequence. The third sequence is not complex, but is instead highly ordered and repetitive. Of the two complex sequences, only the second, however, exemplifies a set of independent functional requirements — i.e., it is specified.

It's this "specified complexity" that's the indicator of an intelligence behind the sequence or message. It's an indicator of intentional design, and specified complexity is exactly what we find in the DNA code and the amino acid sequence in proteins.

In fact, the first cell must have been full of specified complexity, i.e. information, and it's getting more difficult with every new scientific discovery to think that nature, in producing the first living cell, accomplished the equivalent of a tornado in a junyard leaving in its wake a fully assembled, fully functional 747 jet airplane.

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 4

In the latest episode of Secrets of the Cell, biochemist Michael Behe points out a fact about evolution that may surprise many viewers. We've been taught for the last hundred years or so that evolution is a process that creates more complex organisms from less complex ancestral forms.

The mechanism for this is genetic mutation coupled with natural selection, producing new genes with new functions.

Scientists over the last several decades, however, have made an awkward discovery. Most change that we see in organisms is a result of genes being broken or damaged. In other words, living things devolve rather than evolve. It appears that life devolves from greater complexity to less complexity, but if that's the case how did it come to be that there was greater complexity in the genome at the outset?

Behe leaves this question unanswered, and, in fact, chooses not to raise it, so the viewer will have to answer it for him or herself:

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 3

There's a tiny insect called a leafhopper which has an anatomical structure that's simply amazing. Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe talks about it in episode 3 of Secrets of the Cell.

As we watch this video we might find ourselves asking how something like this could come about through undirected, mindless evolutinary processes. It's a fair question, but not one for which the Darwinian has a good answer.

Watch the video and see what you think:

Secrets of the Cell, Episode 2

In episode 2 of Secrets of the Cell biochemist Michael Behe explains what he means by the term irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is one of the key indicators of the intelligent design of life, and on classical Darwinian terms it's very difficult to explain how it could've ever evolved.

Indeed, the only serious attempt to refute Behe has been to deny that irreducible complexity actually exists in living things, but this hasn't been very persuasive.

The episode is only 5 minutes long and has some beautiful animations:

Michael Behe and the Secrets of the Cell

One of the most well-known figures in the Intelligent Design movement is a Lehigh University biochemist named Michael Behe. Behe is famous for his books Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution and Darwin Devolves, all three of which have contributed powerful critiques of the naturalistic Darwinian orthodoxy that reigns in our universities and popular media.

Intelligent Design is the notion that however life and the universe came to be, they both show exceedingly strong indications that they were designed by an intelligent agent or mind.

His critics have tried with very little, if any, success to undermine his arguments, and, to their chagrin, time and advancing scientific discoveries keep confirming his ideas and those of a growing number of philosophers and scientists who agree with him.

Behe's focus has been on the evidence for intentional design found in the living cell, and he's featured in a series of five short videos on this topic, geared to the layperson, titled Secrets of the Cell.

The videos are very well done, and since I've been so impressed with Behe's work over the years, I thought it might be good to show the series here on Viewpoint.

The introductory episode is below. The others will follow over the next few days:

Alien Hands and Free Will

This will sound very weird, but there's a phenomenon called alien hand syndrome that bears on the question of free will and determinism. Neuroscientist Michael Egnor explains the condition in an article at Mind Matters:

This neurological condition occasionally afflicts patients who have had split-brain surgery or other procedures or injuries that disconnect regions of the brain. They experience involuntary movements of limbs.

Most commonly it is the left arm, which seems to have a mind of its own. The classic example...is a patient who intentionally buttons her shirt with her right hand while her left hand follows, unbuttoning her shirt, which she doesn’t intend!

In other words, the two halves of the brain seem to have conflicting wills which suggests that the will is neither unitary nor free. Here's another example quoted in Egnor's piece:

Another example [is] related to food, where the right hemisphere was not pleased with what the left hemisphere had been cooking and threw a vial of salt on the food, to render it useless. These examples do seem to imply that will and awareness are indeed split, and there is a struggle for power between the two hemispheres, and thus the two sides of the body.

These examples seem, at least at first glance, to support the materialist view that all of our willful decisions are really the product solely of our material brain, but Egnor disagrees:

[A]lien hand syndrome doesn’t mean that free will is not real. In fact, it clarifies exactly what free will is and what it isn’t.

We have, broadly speaking, two kinds of volition. In common with animals, we have appetite. Appetite is volition that arises from material processes in the brain.

Appetite may or may not be entirely conscious, but it entails motor acts and perceptions linked to specifics of the environment—a keyboard, a button, a bowl of food, or a sexually attractive person. We, along with non-human animals, experience powerful appetites arising from brain processes (neurochemicals, action potentials, and the like) all of the time.

In fact, appetite is the only type of volition that non-human animals experience.

But human beings have another kind of volition as well. We have will, which, unlike appetite, does not arise from brain processes. Will follows from intellect, which is the human ability to think abstractly, without linking the thought to particular objects.

I may desire an extra slice of cake (appetite), but I think about how bad that would be for my nutritional health (intellect) and decide, based on my abstract concern for my health, to forgo the cake (will). My will can override my appetites.

Because will follows on intellect, which is an immaterial power of abstract thought, will is free, in the sense that it is not determined by physical processes such as brain chemicals.

Will is, of course, influenced by physical processes. If I’m really hungry and tired, I may decide to have that piece of cake anyway because my appetite has got the better of my compromised intellect. But I still chose to have the cake.

My choice was not determined by chemistry, although it was influenced by chemistry.

Egnor argues that alien hand syndrome is a phenomenon of appetitive volition rather than of the will:

All of the examples of alien hand syndrome involve particular acts—a hand unbuttoning a button or reaching for an object, and the like. This splitting of volition to do particular acts is splitting of the appetite, not splitting of the will.

There are no examples of splitting of the will— no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract intentions.

Now, I don’t mean that we don’t have times of indecision; of course we do. I mean that there are no examples of simultaneous distinct abstract decisions—say, to deliberately will justice and injustice at the same moment or to deliberately do differential calculus and integral calculus (one with the right hand, one with the left) at the same moment.

Will is metaphysically simple, in the sense that it has no parts that can separate completely from one another.

In fact, unity of will is more or less what we take to define an individual person. If there are two distinct wills, there are two distinct people. ‘Splitting of the will’ defies what we know to be true of human beings.

It is the abstract nature of will that distinguishes it from appetite and makes it free and metaphysically simple, incapable of being split. Alien hand syndrome is an example of splitting of appetite, which is a brain function driven wholly by material processes.

Thus, alien hand syndrome is not an exception to free will at all. In fact, a proper understanding of alien hand syndrome helps us understand what free will really is.

The fact that split brains can dictate conflicting unconscious behaviors does not seem to be a compelling argument against the existence of an immaterial will. After all, our brains dictate a lot of unconscious behaviors including heartbeats, digestion, the coordinated movements of a baseball player catching a fly ball, etc. All of these are "appetitive" volitions.

Egnor may well be correct in what he writes on alien hand syndrome, and what he says is important, but the most puzzling question of all is still unanswered and probably unanswerable: What, exactly, is the will?

Is Panpsychism the Solution to the "Hard" Problem?

Materialist scientists and philosophers have long sought to expel mind from science. Science, the argument goes, has no room for immaterial substances like mind that don't arise out of material substance like brains.

The problem these materialists have encountered, though, is that it's devilishly difficult to explain consciousness solely in terms of brain chemistry. The difficulty in explaining how feeling, sensation and meaning can be generated by electro-chemical reactions in a brain is called the "hard problem" of consciousness. Science writer Thomas Lewton explains:

It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it. And yet our brains are made of matter – so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter.

The question is, how? And if we can’t explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

How, indeed.

One option is to suggest that some form of consciousness, however fragmentary, is an intrinsic property of matter. At a fundamental level, this micro-consciousness is all that exists.

The idea, known as panpsychism, rips up the physicalist handbook to offer a simple solution to the hard problem of consciousness ... by plugging the gap between our inner experiences and our objective, scientific descriptions of the world.

If everything is to some extent conscious, we no longer have to account for our experience in terms of non-conscious components.

Panpsychism is growing increasingly attractive to philosophers who are mystified by the problem of explaining how matter can generate conscious experience. Few philosophers want to embrace the view called eliminative materialism that holds that consciousness is just an illusion, a view that strikes many as incoherent since even an illusion is hard to explain solely in terms of a material brain.

To the extent that panpsychism catches on it would mark the demise of materialism but not necessarily the demise of naturalism. If mind is a substance possessed by every particle of matter in the universe then consciousness can be explained by assuming that when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, as in a human brain, the quantity of mind it possesses gives rise to consciousness.

Even so, naturalism could still be preserved since the universe might still be a closed system which consists of two fundamental substances, mind and matter, rather than just matter. Thus naturalism could be saved even though materialism could not.

The problem for naturalism, though is this: it's but a short step from positing an all-pervasive mind filling the cosmos to embracing pantheism, and once the door is open to pantheism, naturalism is in trouble.

It'll find itself sliding down a slippery slope to full-blown monotheism.

Russia's Failure

No matter how it ultimately turns out, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been a military disaster for the Russians. They may ultimately prevail by sheer force of numbers and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of armor and planes, but the Ukrainians have humiliated them nonetheless.

Estimates of the cost to Russia of this adventure include, according to NATO sources, as many as 40,000 killed, captured or wounded Russian troops. Other losses as of March 29th are shown on this chart:

Rick Newman at Yahoo News offers some additional insights into Russia's logistical failures:

More stunning than numerical losses may be widespread evidence of incompetence and hollowness. Russian vehicles break down due to dry-rotted tires and poor maintenance. Units have abandoned dozens of multimillion-dollar tanks for lack of gas.

Russia seems to lack modern logistical tools such as cranes, pallets and fork lifts, crucial for moving materiel quickly and safely under stress, including combat. Camouflage efforts are primitive. Russian troops communicate over open radios, susceptible to interception, and loot Ukrainian homes and stores for basics such as food.

One unit of panicked Russian troops appears to have turned on its own leader, running him over with a tank. A top British intelligence official said Russia’s “command and control is in chaos.”

With all the effort Putin ostensibly put into creating a 21st century military why is there so much dysfunction? Newman continues:

Russia has...become a kleptocracy with endemic graft and plodding state agencies that make America’s federal bureaucracy look like a whiz-bang startup. In Ukraine, those shortcomings may have metastasized into disaster.

“Corruption is part of the political and economic system in Russia, and what we are seeing in Ukraine is part of the explanation,” Katarzyna Zysk, a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in Oslo, tells Yahoo Finance.

“The problem is there’s no accountability. We assume this continues to be part of the problem in the Russian military.”

Russia’s annual defense budget is around $62 billion—less than one-tenth what the United States spends. Even then, secret bidding for military contracts and an overcomplicated military bureaucracy leave ample room for graft. In a couple of rare admissions, Russian military leaders have estimated that 20% to 40% of Russia’s military budget is stolen.

Former Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who now lives in the United States, said on Twitter on March 6, “the Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus.”

Newman has more at the link, but there are important lessons we ourselves need to draw from this, and one of them is that morality matters. A nation run by dishonest, avaricious people is like an oak tree diseased and rotted at it's core. It may look impressive, but its looks are no measure of its strength.

John Adams famously insisted that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other,” and his fellow Founding Father James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

The health of a nation is determined by the health of its moral culture. A culture which tolerates corruption among its elected leaders, their families and friends, will, like the dying oak, not fare well under stress.

Thought Control

In a column on his Substack page, Mike Mitchell argues that the current transgender obsession is a vehicle being used by the left to gain social control by controlling how we think. His whole column is worth reading but the crux of his argument draws a parallel with George Orwell's classic novel 1984.

Mitchell writes:

To demand that I refer to someone as a male who is self-evidently female is to demand that I deny my most fundamental capacity of perception and cognition. This is quite literally mind control—and all the more so when the willingness to use “preferred pronouns” is posed as a test of one’s moral character.

[It] brings to mind a passage toward the end of 1984 after Winston has been imprisoned and tortured for thoughtcrime and is trying to re-educate himself:

He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought…

He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:

TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past never had been altered...How easy it all was! Only surrender, and everything else followed.

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it...Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense.

There's much else in his essay worth taking the time to read, but here's one other important point:

Language is the most basic way of expressing rational thought, and the very nature of language requires that people acknowledge shared, fixed definitions. When I say the word “house” I am not referring to something that has four wheels and a transmission.

And when I, and the entire mass of English-speaking people throughout history, say the word “woman” I am not talking about a human being who was born with male anatomy.

If I can choose my own unique definition of “house” or “woman” then these words are useless as words. I cannot use them to communicate with other people.

In this case I would be isolated to a world that exists only in my own mind, a world where my understanding of reality is purely a projection of my own imagination.

Among those for whom English functions as a common language, the word for this state of mind is “delusional.”

To make another literary reference, we're like the crowd in Hans Christian Anderson's famous tale watching the emperor strut by stark naked. Our senses tell us he wears no clothes, his senses tell him he's wearing no clothes, but all of us are expected to speak and act as if he's wearing the finest robes in the kingdom.

Peer pressure and intimidation produce in us a wish to conform to what we can plainly see is false.

As Mitchell asserts, this is the dictionary definition of "delusional."

Sociological Misperceptions

A recent You Gov survey uncovered some interesting misperceptions that Americans have about their fellow countrymen. It found, for example that we tend to vastly overestimate the actual size of some population groups and vastly underestimate the size of others.

For example, what is the proportion of the population that is gay or lesbian? The survey found that respondents tended to put the number at 30% when, in fact, the actual number is 3%. Respondents also thought that 21% of the population is transgender when the actual number is 0.6%.

It's not just sexual minorities. We also seem to have a distorted picture of the numbers of religious and racial minorities in our country.

• Muslim Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%)
• Jewish Americans (estimate: 30%, true: 2%)
• Native Americans (estimate: 27%, true: 1%)
• Asian Americans (estimate: 29%, true: 6%)
• Black Americans (estimate: 41%, true: 12%)

Interestingly, a similar pattern exists in estimates of majority groups:

People tend to underestimate rather than overestimate their size relative to their actual share of the adult population. For instance, we find that people underestimate the proportion of American adults who are Christian (estimate: 58%, true: 70%) and the proportion who have at least a high school degree (estimate: 65%, true: 89%).

The most accurate estimates involved groups whose real proportion fell right around 50%, including the percentage of American adults who are married (estimate: 55%, true: 51%) and have at least one child (estimate: 58%, true: 57%).

One question that this raises is why our estimates are so skewed. You Gov offered some possible explanations:

Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media.

Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.

If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to.

Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52% of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39%, closer to the real figure of 12%. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40% of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31%, closer to the actual figure of 14%.

Personally, I suspect that our entertainment media play an out-sized role in creating these misperceptions. Television commercials and programming, for instance, commonly feature a high percentage of minorities, both racial and sexual, and rarely feature religious individuals or families of any denomination.

That exposure surely must influence Americans' perception of reality, at least among those who imbibe a lot of television programming.

There's much more data from this survey at the link.

What if Putin Actually Knows What he's Doing?

An article at a site called DNYUZ gives us some disturbing food for thought. It asks the question whether despite the appearance of serious blunders and incompetence, Vladimir Putin really in fact knows what he's doing in Ukraine.

Here's the lede:

Putin’s miscalculations raise questions about his strategic judgment and mental state. Who, if anyone, is advising him? Has he lost contact with reality? Is he physically unwell? Mentally? Condoleezza Rice warns: “He’s not in control of his emotions. Something is wrong.”

Several analysts have compared Putin to a cornered rat, more dangerous now that he’s no longer in control of events. They want to give him a safe way out of the predicament he allegedly created for himself. Hence the almost universal scorn poured on Joe Biden for saying in Poland, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The conventional wisdom is entirely plausible. It has the benefit of vindicating the West’s strategy of supporting Ukraine defensively. And it tends toward the conclusion that the best outcome is one in which Putin finds some face-saving exit: additional Ukrainian territory, a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality, a lifting of some of the sanctions.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if the West is only playing into Putin’s hands once again?

Yikes! What if..?

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s).

Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.

“Under the guise of an invasion, Putin is executing an enormous heist,” said Canadian energy expert David Knight Legg. As for what’s left of a mostly landlocked Ukraine, it will likely become a welfare case for the West, which will help pick up the tab for resettling Ukraine’s refugees to new homes outside of Russian control. In time, a Viktor Orban-like figure could take Ukraine’s presidency, imitating the strongman-style of politics that Putin prefers in his neighbors.

If this analysis is right, then Putin doesn’t seem like the miscalculating loser his critics make him out to be.

Well, maybe, but Putin already had control of much of eastern Ukraine and all of Crimea so why bother with Kyiv? Why not save himself a lot of blood and treasure and just begin extracting the minerals and petroleum in the areas he already controls, and if he wants that southern land bridge to Odessa, why squander so many military assets in the north?

The article goes on to speculate that,

It also makes sense of his strategy of targeting civilians. More than simply a way of compensating for the incompetence of Russian troops, the mass killing of civilians puts immense pressure on Zelensky to agree to the very things Putin has demanded all along: territorial concessions and Ukrainian neutrality.

The West will also look for any opportunity to de-escalate, especially as we convince ourselves that a mentally unstable Putin is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Within Russia, the war has already served Putin’s political purposes. Many in the professional middle class — the people most sympathetic to dissidents like Aleksei Navalny — have gone into self-imposed exile. The remnants of a free press have been shuttered, probably for good. To the extent that Russia’s military has embarrassed itself, it is more likely to lead to a well-aimed purge from above than a broad revolution from below.

Russia’s new energy riches could eventually help it shake loose the grip of sanctions.

But all of this could've been accomplished, couldn't it, without losing 15,000 soldiers. There's no doubt that Putin wants all that the article says he does, but he certainly appears to have wanted a lot more that it looks like he's not going to get. The question now is whether the West will pressure Zelenskyy to grant Putin in a peace deal what he couldn't win on the battlefield.

If that's what happens it would be a disgrace even worse than our ignominious withdrawl from Afghanistan.

What Are They Afraid of?

Materialists deny that there's anything that cannot be explained in terms of material substance and the laws of physics. The incredibly complex, information-laden biological world, they argue, as well as the astonishingly fine-tuned cosmos which life inhabits are both the unintended product of chance and physics.

Their metaphysics allows for no mind or intelligence behind it all nor, they insist, is there any reason or evidence for supposing that any such non-material, non-natural intelligence exists.

William J. Murray offers a dissenting view in a comment at Uncommon Descent. He poses an interesting thought experiment.

Suppose we landed on a planet in a different star system, and on an otherwise barren planet we found a massive, self-sustaining and self-replicating metallic machine comprised mainly of alloyed materials found nowhere else on the planet other than as a material manufactured by the machine for it’s own duplication and repair, what would be the materialist’s reaction?

Further, what if the machine was run by a library of code and a code-processing system?

Would they accept the machine as evidence of non-human intelligent design? If they found no archaeological evidence on the planet supporting the idea that an intelligent race of beings at any time in history constructed that machine, would they turn to naturalistic explanations? Would they insist that somehow humans had been there before and left the machine without any other trace of their presence?

Or, would they come to the conclusion that an intelligent agency of some sort designed and built the machine, even though they didn’t know what that intelligent agency was?

At the very least anyone in this situation would have good reason for supposing that some non-human intelligence had been at work on that planet. But we ourselves are in an analogous situation on this planet since we are surrounded by much the same sort of machines, albeit biological machines, as Murray describes.

Or consider the fine-tuning of the universe:

[W]hat if we were exploring space in distance areas of the galaxy and came across a habitat floating in space, perfectly balanced to be self-supporting for a rich and diverse spectrum of life. Let’s say this habitat is enclosed by some form of unknown energy with no apparent source. Everything in the habitat is finely tuned for the flourishing and preservation of that life.

Would the materialist conclude that there must be countless other such habitats floating around, produced by some as yet unknown unintelligent process, each tuned differently and most not capable of supporting life? Or, would they conclude that some intelligent agency must have designed and built the habitat for the purpose of sustaining life? Would they insist other humans must have built it? Would they ever even imagine that a non-human intelligence might be responsible?

Of course they would unless they were so obsessively determined to avoid that conclusion, unless they found that conclusion so repugnant that they'd refuse to accept it no matter how much evidence were available to them. But then, of course, they would be behaving irrationally, perhaps even insanely.

One might conclude that the materialist's refusal to accept the evidence that Murray describes is motivated by fear of what that evidence points to.

Murray again:

[M]aterialists contort themselves as if they are headed toward some horrible, painful experience simply by admitting this [that the universe appears to be intelligently designed].

They do similar such contortions when confronted by the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of subjective morality, when admitting that objective morality must exist, and admitting that consciousness exists beyond the material, commits them to no [particular] spiritual or religious doctrine whatsoever. It’s just admitting what evidence indicates and what is logically necessary....

Why fight it tooth and nail? Why contort, obfuscate, and run from these things? Why deny the obvious and the logical to the point of saying such foolish things like “consciousness is an illusion” or “morality is subjective”, when they cannot even act or speak as if such things are true?

Good questions. What are they afraid of?

The Fine Structure Constant

There are a lot of mysteries in our universe. Two that are especially puzzling are the nature of time and the origin and nature of human consciousness, but there are others, of course. One such is something physicists call the fine structure constant.

Astrophysicist Paul Sutter explains that this constant is "a measure of the strength of the interaction between charged particles and the electromagnetic force. The current estimate of the fine-structure constant is 0.007 297 352 5693, with an uncertainty of 11 on the last two digits. The number is easier to remember by its inverse, approximately 1/137."

There are several peculiarities about this number.

First of all, no one knows why it has the value it does or where it comes from. It's value seems awkward and ungainly and is completely unexplained. No current theory predicts it.

Sutter states that,

We have no explanation for the origins of this constant. Indeed, we have no theoretical explanation for its existence at all. We simply measure it in experiments and then plug the measured value into our equations to make other predictions.

Second, unlike other constants in nature this one has no units. It's not measured in any dimensions or units like meters/second or miles/hour.

Third, it has to have the precise value it has for the universe to be able to sustain life. As Sutter explains,

If it had any other value, life as we know it would be impossible. And yet we have no idea where it comes from....Change that number, change the universe. If the fine-structure constant had a different value, then atoms would have different sizes, chemistry would completely change and nuclear reactions would be altered.

Life as we know it would be outright impossible if the fine-structure constant had even a slightly different value.

It's truly remarkable that such a finely-tuned parameter would exist, and indeed there are dozens, if not hundreds of similarly fine-tuned values to the forces and constants in the universe. This chart shows the exactitude with which two such forces, the strong nuclear force and the strength of electromagnetism (i.e. the fine-structure constant), must be calibrated in order for a life sustaining universe like ours to exist:

Note that the axes on the above chart are logarithmic, every increment represents an increase by a power of ten. To plot these parameters on a standard scale the chart would have to be enormous.

It also compares just two of the hundreds of parameters that must be set with exquisite precision in order for the universe to be the kind of place in which life could exist.

Such precision could just be a lucky accident, of course, or it could be the consequence of intentional engineering. If we were to be guided by experience and nothing else, I think it safe to say that we'd dismiss the first alternative as quite literally incredible.

Sutter has more on this at the link or if you prefer you can watch him discuss the fine-structure constant on this 16 minute YouTube video:

Infinity Is Weird

The following is excerpted from the book Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, by Eugenia Cheng. In this very interesting excerpt Cheng, who is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield, U.K., and is Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, explains why infinity is not a number in the ordinary sense and why we have to be careful in how we talk about it.

The passage begins with Cheng asking us to think about what we mean when we talk about infinity:

Mathematics is all about using logic to understand things, and we’ll find that if we’re not careful about exactly what we mean by “infinity,” then logic will take us to some very strange places that we didn’t intend to go....

Infinity goes on forever.

Does this mean infinity is a type of time, or space? A length?

Infinity is bigger than the biggest number.

Infinity is bigger than anything we can think of.

Now infinity seems to be a type of size. Or is it something more abstract: a number, which we can then use to measure time, space, length, size, and indeed anything we want? Our next thoughts seem to treat infinity as if it is in fact a number.

But if we treat infinity like a normal number we get contradictions:

If you add one to infinity it’s still infinity. This is saying

∞ + 1 = ∞

which might seem like a very basic principle about infinity. If infinity is the biggest thing there is, then adding one can’t make it any bigger. Or can it? What if we then subtract infinity from both sides? If we use some familiar rules of cancellation, this will just get rid of the infinity on each side, leaving

1 = 0

which is a disaster. Something has evidently gone wrong. The next thought makes more things go wrong:

If you add infinity to infinity it’s still infinity. This seems to be saying

∞ + ∞ = ∞

that is,

2∞ = ∞

and now if we divide both sides by infinity this might look like we can just cancel out the infinity on each side, leaving

2 = 1

which is another disaster. Maybe you can now guess that something terrible will happen if we think too hard about the last idea:

If you multiply infinity by infinity it’s still infinity. If we write this out we get

∞ x ∞ = ∞

and if we divide both sides by infinity, canceling out one infinity on each side, we get

∞ = 1

which is possibly the worst, most wrong outcome of them all. Infinity is supposed to be the biggest thing there is; it is definitely not supposed to be equal to something as small as 1.

What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be.

You can read more of Cheng's thoughts on infinity here.

Sometimes scientists trying to avoid the cosmic fine-tuning problem or an initial origin event of the cosmos say things like, "There's an infinite number of universes in the multiverse," or that "The cosmos is infinitely old." Cheng shows that we have to be very careful about such uses of "infinite."

In fact, one argument against the universe being infinitely old is that if it is infinitely old then there must have been an infinity of moments of time. But if so, then there was no first moment, because if time is infinite in the past, whichever moment one designates as "first" will always have been preceded by an earlier moment, and, if there was no first moment, there could have been no second, or third moment, etc.

The consequence of this is that if there were no first, second, third etc. moments then we could never have arrived at the present moment. But, of course, we have arrived at the present moment, which means that the universe must not be infinitely old. It must have had a beginning, a first moment.

This, then, provokes the question, "If the universe had a beginning, what caused it?" Whatever the cause, it must have been outside of space and time (because these are components of the universe), very powerful and very intelligent.

In other words, the cause must have been something like God.

Love Thy Neighbor

I'm currently reading a book on the war in Bosnia in the early 90s. The book is titled Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass. Maass was a war correspondent for the Washington Post who witnessed unimaginable atrocities perpetrated by Serbs upon Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics in the Balkans.

As Maass recounts the cruelties these people inflicted on their neighbors, co-workers, even family members, the reader is benumbed by the horrors.

How could people who socialized with each other, went to school with each other, worked cordially side by side with each other, suddenly turn on them en masse, torturing, raping, and murdering them?

Then we turn on the evening news and watch stupefied as the reporters recount the terrors the Russian forces are deliberately visiting upon civilians in Ukraine, bombing a theater, for instance, in which hundreds of children were taking shelter, crushing some 300 of them under the rubble.

We thought that the cruelties of al Qaeda and ISIS were horrific, that the brutalities of Africans against their fellow Africans are appalling, but the Arabs and the Africans were savages from whom such behavior was to be expected. Yet their crimes were and are no less odious than the crimes wreaked by Europeans upon each other. ISIS and Boko Haram are no more savage than were the Germans in the early 40s, the Serbs in the early 90s or the Russians today.

I mention this because there's a conceit among many of our secular friends that man is basically good and if only he could be placed in an Edenic environment of equity and equality there'd be no crime, no inhumanity, no injustice.

This belief goes back to the French thinker Rousseau, and it's one superstition that moderns hold that is massively contradicted by the empirical evidence.

Much of our own experience tells us that human beings are certainly not inherently good, we are in fact just the opposite. As the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah wrote some 2600 years ago, "The heart of man is desperately wicked. Who can understand it?"

The Jewish journalist Dennis Prager takes issue with the rosy, Roussean view of human nature. He writes:

In the 20th century alone, more than a hundred million people — civilians, not soldiers — were murdered by vile regimes and their vile followers.

These include the approximately 20 million killed in the Gulag Archipelago; the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda; the genocidal murder of Armenians; the deliberate starvation of about 60 million Chinese; the Japanese mass rape of Korean “comfort women” and hideous medical experiments on Chinese civilians; and the torture and murder of approximately one out of four Cambodians.

And that is only a partial list.

Virtually every serious thinker in history knew people were not basically good. They knew about the universality of slavery and the tortures and rapes that accompanied slavery. They knew how men behaved in wartime.

Were all the people who engaged in these evils aberrations? In fact, most were quite normal. The aberrations in history have been the truly good individuals.

To cite the Holocaust, the Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and others who aided the Holocaust, let alone those who did nothing, were normal people. The handful who aided Jews were the aberrations.

And what about childhood bullying? Are fat, or slow, or unattractive boys and girls generally treated with kindness and empathy? The question is rhetorical.

And what about child sexual abuse? The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence.

Quite remarkable for a world of basically good people.

If experience teaches us anything about human nature it is that we are, as a race, inherently hateful and vicious. Despite the claims of some that humanity is "every day in every way getting better and better" we're not much better now than we were a thousand or two thousand years ago.

Our civilization is just a thin veneer over the heart of a brute, and all one need do to verify this claim is to read history and today's newspapers.

Mr. Putin's Doom

A column by Douglas London in The Wall Street Journal (Subscription required) argues that Vladimir Putin will be undone by people in his own government who will be vulnerable to Western intelligence services seeking to "turn" them.

London, who spent 34 years in the CIA's clandestine service, writes:

Espionage is a predatory business, and there’s blood in the water. Mr. Putin’s self-inflicted damage has done more to turn his own people against him than anything the West could have done.

Mr. Putin’s disastrous choices are causing military strategists to reconsider which tactics could be used against Russia’s overrated and underperforming armed forces. Political experts and economists are rethinking tools for punishing malign behavior. Other potential aggressors—namely China—must take notice. If your job is cultivating spies, I suspect that recruiting must be good....

Resurrecting the Soviet empire, as Mr. Putin wants to do, brings with it the same forces that prompted most of the Warsaw Pact’s best CIA agents to turn against the Kremlin. Agents across the Soviet bloc often shared the same desire: to inflict whatever harm they could.

They took up the fight not for money, but to undermine a toxic system that enriched a corrupt elite, wrought suffering and economic stagnation, and occasionally brought the world to the brink.

Mr. London goes on to tell us about Russians in the old Soviet Union who spied for the West because they were embittered at how their families had suffered under Kremlin corruption or because they were disgusted with Soviet aggression in places like Czechoslavakia.

He then continues:

Mr. Putin has delivered a rival intelligence officer a great gift: a precipitating crisis. The desire to take control over their own destiny amid crisis drives people to spy. Intelligence officers take advantage of that desire to secure an agent’s cooperation through inspiration, trust and means to make a difference.

Mr. Putin’s bumbling has provided the crisis, Ukrainian courage the inspiration, and the response of the U.S. and its allies the trust and tools for Russians to strike back.

Some of the CIA’s best agents have been volunteers who finally are pushed over the edge by a life-altering event and offer their services to an intelligence service....Thanks to Mr. Putin’s deplorable behavior, I expect an increase in Russian volunteers who have toyed with the idea of doing something to better Russia’s future and might now be receptive to an encouraging nudge.

Mr. Putin will use intimidation, violence, repression and bribery to combat counterintelligence risk and will reward blind loyalty from the incompetent and opportunistic sycophants who lord over his system. But these measures will only create incentives for the brave to act — and it takes only a few to make an extraordinary difference.

It is tragic what Mr. Putin has wrought in Russia. As London notes, he has in a few weeks undone 30 years of progress for the Russian people.

There was a growing middle class in Russia whose members were enjoying a standard of living much improved over what they had suffered through during the Soviet era. Now their money is worthless, their sons are dying by the thousands in a war that few understand, Russia's vaunted military has been humiliated and reduced to slaughtering civilians, and soon food, medicine, and all manner of consumer goods will be scarce in Russia.

In conditions like these disillusioned generals and government bureaucrats will be thick on the ground, and not a few of them, perhaps, will be eager to be recruited by Western agents. When they are Mr. Putin's reign of terror, and possibly Mr. Putin himself, will be nearing an end.

Russian Morale

Hot Air's Allahpundit has a summary of the effects that the war in Ukraine is having on Russian morale. He mentions a story in the N.Y. Times (paywall) which cites a video interview posted online on Monday by Igor Girkin, a former Russian F.S.B. intelligence officer and head of the Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.

Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence agency and the former “defense minister” of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a “catastrophically incorrect assessment” of Ukraine’s forces.

“The enemy was underestimated in every aspect,” Mr. Girkin said…

“We can definitively say that nothing is going to plan,” countered Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst. “It has been decades since the Soviet and Russian armies have seen such great losses in such a short period of time.”…

The failures in Ukraine have started to create fissures within Russian leadership, according to Andrei Soldatov, an author and expert on Russia’s military and security services.

The top Russian intelligence official in charge of overseeing the recruitment of spies and diversionary operations in Ukraine has been put under house arrest along with his deputy, Mr. Soldatov said.

Even Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, who vacations with Mr. Putin and has been spoken of as a potential presidential successor, has suffered a loss of standing, according to Mr. Soldatov’s sources.

Allahpundit adds this:

Another retired Russian general who leads a group of retired and current service members issued a statement in January, before the war, claiming that an invasion would be “pointless,” would alienate Ukraine forever, and conceivably would even threaten Russia’s existence. When the Times caught up to him this week, he said curtly, “I do not disavow what I said.”

For former Russian military leaders, the fiasco in Ukraine must be personal to some degree. After all, it’s not just conscripts who are dying under Ukrainian fire. At least 15 officers with the rank of captain or higher have reportedly been killed in less than a month.

Western military experts have puzzled over that, concluding that it would be impossible absent a serious breakdown in Russian capabilities.

There must be a failure of operational security — i.e. western penetration of Russian battlefield communications — on top of a failure of organization at the front lines. Top commanders are putting themselves in harm’s way to try to restore order in the ranks and some are paying for it with their lives.

With Russia deprived of some of its most skilled commanders, the military’s morale problem will get worse.

Yes, and one wonders what those surrounding Mr. Putin in the Kremlin are thinking about all this.

Ukrainian intelligence intercepted a Russian communication that indicates morale aamong the troops is very low:

Fascinating, claimed intercepted call from Russian officer near Mykolaiv to superiors in Russia. He says:
- This is worse than Chechnya
- 50% of troops have frostbite
- They can’t evacuate the dead
- Don’t have enough tents
- RU plane dropped a bomb on their own position 🧵 pic.twitter.com/3KjGrqD5jZ

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) March 23, 2022

- Troops don’t have body armor. When one complained to commander was told “son, be strong”
- This special operation is a “madhouse”
- Being told not to destroy buildings - it’s insanity. Unless we destroy everything and turn into dirt along with the civilians, nothing can happen

— Dmitri Alperovitch (@DAlperovitch) March 23, 2022

Ukrainian commander in Mykolaiv tells us Russians are abandoning many vehicles near the city. "They have no will to fight. They don't even have food. It's -10 with snow here, they don't want to be here."

— Neil Hauer (@NeilPHauer) March 11, 2022

How long will these Russian troops put up with this before they all just decide to leave, regardless of what their officers tell them?

Near Death Experiences

In my class yesterday we talked a bit about NDEs (Near death Experiences) so I thought it'd be helpful to rerun a post from a couple of years ago on that topic:

A discussion at Mind Matters between Robert Marks and Walter Bradley, both of whom are scientists, focuses on the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and contains some interesting insights into these events.

The term "Near Death" seems to be misleading. Scientists have documented over 3500 cases over the past several decades in which people have been not just near to death but completely, clinically dead - no heartbeat or brain waves - but from which they returned to life.

More astonishing, upon regaining their life they were able to relate to their medical staff what had happened while they were dead.

In the past, these sorts of accounts were dismissed as hallucinations, wishful thinking or even fabrications, but so much evidence in support of their veridicality has accumulated over the last thirty years that they're being taken much more seriously today. The question contemporary researchers are trying to answer is not whether the experience is genuine but rather what exactly is going on when someone has one of these.

So far any natural, physical explanation has proven elusive. NDEs remain a mystery.

To the extent that NDEs are indeed genuine, they constitute a powerful argument for two claims that are incompatible with materialism.

First, if someone is having an experience which includes thoughts, sensations and recall while his or her brain is completely shut down - dead - it strongly suggests that more than the brain is involved in thinking, sensing and remembering. NDEs are an emphatic pointer to the existence of an immaterial mind or soul.

Second, NDEs offer a compelling reason to believe that physical death is not the end of our existence, that there's more beyond this life and that death is a bridge to that further existence, much, perhaps, like childbirth is a bridge between two separate existences.

This short video offers a fascinating example of an NDE. A woman born blind lost her life, temporarily, in an accident and recounts what happened in the hospital. If she's telling the truth then it certainly detracts from the credibility of materialism's claim to be an adequate account of what it is to be a human being:

Plot to Poison Putin

There've been a number of stories in the media of late discussing what's claimed to be a plot to poison Vladimir Putin. According to one of the articles, the plot was discovered by Ukrainian intelligence.

However the plot was discovered, and by whomever, I can't imagine that if there were such a plot it would be leaked to the world. Why would the Ukrainians want to alert Putin to an attempt on his life by publicizing the plot if it were indeed genuine?

In any case, here are some excerpts from the article:

The Chief Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine has said that "a group of influential" Kremlin insiders have been plotting to oust Putin. The goal of the "Russian elite" is to supposedly remove the president from power as soon as possible before restoring economic ties with the West.

According to the brief, the Ukrainian intelligence service also claims that a successor to Putin has already been lined up in the shape of FSB director Oleksandr Bortnikov, reports The Mirror. Powerful insiders are allegedly dismayed at the ramifications of the war and the sanctions imposed on the Russian economy.

The Chief Directorate of Intelligence said: "It is known that Bortnikov and some other influential representatives of the Russian elite are considering various options to remove Putin from power. "In particular, poisoning, sudden disease, or any other 'coincidence' is not excluded."

There's more at the link, including links to other sources. As I indicated above, I'm skeptical about this report which appears to be tabloid sensationalism, but it could nevertheless have the effect of stoking a lot of suspicion and paranoia among Putin's inner circle.

It has been reported previously that Putin already uses food tasters to make sure his food isn't tainted, so suspicion of his colleagues is apparently already well-advanced.

But whether the plot is genuine or not, I have a question for my pacifist friends who believe that killing someone is always wrong. If the story were true, and the plot succeeds, would the plotters have been wrong to murder Mr. Putin?

In other words, is it wrong to murder in order to save the lives of innocent people? If the reader of this post is a pacifist or knows someone who is, this question might lead to an interesting ethical conversation.

The Gorgeous Peacock Spider

There's a fascinating article at Evolution News about a taxon of spiders endemic to Australia called the Peacock spider. There are some 60 species of Peacock spider, and they're gorgeously patterned.

The colors are produced not by pigments but by tiny scales with microscopic curves and gratings that refract and diffract light to separate and reflect various wavelengths. This works somewhat in the same way that a film of oil on a surface produces an array of iridescent hues.

Studying the color-producing structures in these arachnids has given scientists ideas for new color technologies.

Here's a video of the mating displays of several species of these spiders set to music. It's astonishing to consider that these spiders are less than 5 millimeters in size and that the information that directs their displays, plus all the other behaviors in which the spider engages, as well as the production of the vari-colored abdomens is all packed into a brain that's smaller than a pinhead:

Here are a few more interesting questions and points raised in the article:

The artistic patterns on the males’ abdomens seem gratuitously beyond anything necessary for mating. Drab animals get by just fine; why the excessive color and beauty? And why the dozens of variations among different species? We could be forgiven for imagining a designing intelligence with an artist’s eye.

Aesthetic considerations, furthermore, lead us to ask why human beings are the only ones who get excited about the mating dances of an unrelated species. Does that speak to human exceptionalism? We don’t see any other animals, except the female spider, watching the performances, but people by the millions are fascinated by these tiny animals that have nothing to do with their own “fitness.”

What is the evolutionary explanation for the quality of charm? Of humor? Or enchantment? We don’t eat them or train them to do our work. How did our curiosity, sense of humor, and love for beauty “evolve”?

“Who knew that such a small critter would create such an intense iridescence using extremely sophisticated mechanisms that will inspire optical engineers,” said Dimitri Deheyn, Hsuing’s advisor at Scripps Oceanography and a coauthor of the study.

“As an engineer, what I found fascinating about these spider structural colors is how these long evolved complex structures can still outperform human engineering,” said Radwanul Hasan Siddique, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and study coauthor. “Even with high-end fabrication techniques, we could not replicate the exact structures. I wonder how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place!”

We might all wonder this as well. Especially might we wonder "how the spiders assemble these fancy structural patterns in the first place" if we limit ourselves to thinking that this amazing creature must have evolved these gaudy patterns and complex behaviors through an unguided, random process like Darwinism.

Our Amazing World

Here's a brief video from Lad Allen that presents some amazing facts about the number of stars in our universe, the number of grains of sand in the world and the number of molecules of water in a single drop.

Whether you're inclined to agree with the conclusion of the video or not, the physical facts it presents are not in dispute, and they are mind-blowing.

The video is only five and a half minutes long, but it will surely fill you with a sense of wonder at the size of the universe, both astronomically and microscopically:

Trying to Play it Safe

Is China abandoning its "limitless" partnership with Russia? In one sign that Vladimir Putin has "jumped the shark" It seems that his erstwhile Chinese BFFs are having second thoughts.

An article by HotAir's Allahpundit certainly suggests that China is reassessing its betrothal to Russia and Mr. Putin:

— On Monday, the Chinese ambassador to Ukraine met with authorities in Lviv to say that China “will respect the path chosen by Ukrainians because this is the sovereign right of every nation.” He also promised Chinese help with Ukrainian economic development after the war.

— The same day, Jake Sullivan held “intense” talks for seven hours with a Chinese official in Rome warning Beijing of consequences if it rescued Russia’s war in Ukraine by supplying Putin with military and economic aid.

— Last night, a German paper reported that the Russian foreign minister was en route to China for a visit when his plane mysteriously made an about-face and returned to Russia. It’s unclear why, but some speculate that Chinese officials may have decided they didn’t want the bad optics of meeting with him at the moment.

— This morning, the White House announced that Biden will speak with Xi Jinping directly tomorrow about the prospect of China providing Russia with aid.

— Today, a change has been detected in the tenor of Chinese media’s coverage of the war. CGTN is a state-run network with chapters in the west, a sort of Chinese version of RT. They ran multiple segments about Ukrainian civilians being killed within the past 24 hours and made no bones about who was responsible.

A cynic might say that it's not the human rights abuses and atrocities perpetrated by the Russian forces in Ukraine that have the Chinese feeling a bit anxious. After all, their own record with regard to the horrors perpetrated on the Uyghurs and others in China is not particularly heartwarming.

Rather, China is probably upset that the Russian invasion appears at this point to be an abject failure. The Chinese don't want to be associated with a fiasco, but neither do they want to file for divorce from their incompetent significant other just yet.

On the other hand, if it looks to them like Ukraine might actually prevail in this war they don't want to completely alienate themselves from Mr. Zelenskyy either.

The Chinese are walking a geopolitical tightrope, and they doubtless realize that a single misstep will be most unfortunate for them.

Read the HotAir article for more on China's predicament.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

In his great work The Republic the Greek philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C.) relates an allegory that is doubtless the most famous tale in all of Western philosophy and probably discussed in every introductory philosophy course.

In the allegory Plato invites us to imagine a cave in which prisoners have been chained since childhood. Behind them is a fire and between the fire and the prisoners there are men walking back and forth carrying burdens. The fire casts shadows of these men on a wall which the prisoners have all their lives been facing.

The prisoners see the shadows and hear the echoes of the men's voices and they mistakenly believe that these shadows and muffled echoes are reality. It is, after all, all they've ever known. They confer honors on each other for their ability to contrive clever interpretations of the shadows.

One prisoner, however, is released from his chains and dragged up and out of the cave where he beholds the world in the light of the sun. At first he can scarcely open his eyes, accustomed as they are to the darkness, but gradually he's able to see that a world that's infinitely richer than the world of the cave.

He won't believe his eyes but gradually he realizes that the world of the cave is all illusion, that the world he sees in the light of the sun is the true reality.

He would take pity on his comrades still chained in the cave. He would care nothing for the honors they value. He would count it all so much empty and meaningless chatter. All that would matter to him is the brilliance of the sun and the beauty and variety of the world.

He might even return to the cave to tell his fellows what he has seen, but they wouldn't believe him. They'd think he'd lost his senses, and if he tried to persuade them to join him outside the cave they may even kill him.

Plato's parable works on many different levels. For Plato the man who escapes the cave is the philosopher who escapes the realm of darkness and shadows and apprehends the world in the light of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. When the philosopher returns to the cave to seek to enlighten his fellow prisoners they refuse to listen to him and, perhaps like Socrates, he may even be put to death.

For Christians for two thousand years the cave represents the present world with its empty and meaningless pursuits and illusions. The sun is the absolute Good, Beautiful and True, i.e. God, and the world illuminated by this "Sun" is the really real.

When the "prisoner" seeks to persuade his fellows that they're wasting their lives debating about shadows when there's a beautiful, meaningful life awaiting them outside the cave, they often think he's gone insane, and, as has happened to millions throughout the last two millennia, they may even kill him.

Plato's allegory of the cave has endured for 2300 years because, whatever his original intent, it neatly captures a deep truth about reality and the human condition.

Why St. Patrick Is Celebrated

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, will celebrate their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day today. We're indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating.

As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 A.D., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later.

Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery.

Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages.

Throughout the continent unwashed illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin.

Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on.

Book of Kells

For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud or stone huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

Irish scriptoria

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed.

Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own.

Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that beset them a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter.

From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish - a legacy from Patrick. It's worth pondering what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGael (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Just War Theory

I thought it it might be helpful to look at the current war in Ukraine in terms of what philosophers and theologians call Just War theory.

From the time of Augustine (c.400 A.D.) many Christian philosophers and theologians have thought about the question of the demands and restrictions the Gospel imposes on the use of force.

One result of that thinking has been a list of criteria that must be satisfied in any situation in which force, particularly military force, is contemplated. This is called jus ad bellum (justice in going to war).

These criteria generally include the following:

1. Just cause. Examples of a just cause for the use of force include: Defense against an unjust invader; Protection of family, home, or other innocent victims from direct harm; Recovery of goods unjustly taken; Protection of constitutional rights and liberties from government encroachment; Defense of allies who have been unjustly attacked, etc.

2. Just intent. The purpose of the war must be to establish peace or to protect the innocent. Hatred, economic gain, or the exercise of power are all illicit reasons for using force against another.

3. Legitimate authority. The war must be declared/waged by a legitimate government authority. A war declared by a terrorist organization like ISIS is by definition unjust.

4. Reasonable prospect of success. Deliberately protracted wars or wars initiated with no reasonable hope of success are unjust.

5. Last resort. When it's clear that no measure short of the application of force will avail, or that an attack upon one's nation is imminent, war is justified provided the other criteria are met. This requirement is problematic in that it's always possible to imagine yet another set of peace talks, etc. that could be embarked upon and which would delay war indefinitely.

Thus, governments have to exercise reasonable judgment in determining whether they have actually exhausted all practical options and have been left with no realistic alternative to war.

Just War theory also requires that wars not only be warranted by these stringent criteria (jus ad bellum) but that when fought they be conducted according to certain guidelines (jus in bello: justice in war). The two chief criteria of jus in bello are:

1. Discrimination. Civilians should never be deliberately targeted. This follows from the Christian imperative to be compassionate and merciful. It entails that prisoners not be mistreated and that property and livelihoods not be unduly or unnecessarily damaged.

2. Proportionality. The means employed must be no more brutal or violent than what is necessary to secure victory. It would be unjust to slaughter defeated and retreating enemy soldiers if they no longer pose a threat. It would be a disproportionate response, and therefore unjust, to respond to a cross-border raid with nuclear weapons.

As is no doubt obvious, the heat and stress of war and incipient war may create a lot of gray areas for those seeking to hold to the criteria of Just War, and there's often much room for differences in interpretation. Nevertheless, those who wish to wage war justly will strive to hew as closely to these principles as the exigencies of war permit.

Even so, I think it's clear to anyone who's been following the war in Ukraine that Russia is waging an unjust war. They fail the jus ad bellum test, particularly criteria #1,2 and 5, and they also fail the first criterion of the jus in bello test. The response of the Ukrainians is compatible with criteria #1,2,3, and 5 of the jus ad bellum test and #1 of the jus in bello test.

None of the other criteria really apply to their struggle.

The Russians from Vladimir Putin on down to those infantry troops who are shooting and raping civilians are war criminals, and one hopes that the world will not forget their crimes and return to the status quo ante once this conflict is over.

Those responsible for the death, terror and destruction visited upon the Ukrainian people should remain international pariahs as long as they live and as long as history is written.

Valor on the Cheap

One of the uglier and more irrational responses to the Russian atrocities in Ukraine is the attempt by people here in the West generally and the U.S. in particular to vent their frustration and anger by punishing anyone in any way associated with Russia.

Sometimes this nonsensical reaction is borne of righteous indignation, but often it's merely an attempt to showcase one's own moral righteousness.

It's an attempt, at least by some, to affirm their own valor without ever having to risk anything.

Tommaso Dorigo discusses some such efforts in a column at Science 2.0. He writes:

What reason can there be for firing an artist based on his or her nationality? .... given the presently ongoing prosecution of opposers of the Russian regime, who are we to blame anybody who refuses to publicly proclaim they disagree with their country's actions?

Musicians, athletes, para-olympiad atlethes - there seems to have been an escalation, a competition for the most absurd ban....

But we have reached the top with the recent suggestions, now circulating in the world of fundamental research, that scientists should stop collaborating with Russian colleagues, stop publishing papers with them, etcetera. What nonsense! Science unites countries - are we now going to take that attitude back, and create a divide?

Who do we think we are hurting if we stop collaborating with our Russian colleagues, if not the whole world?....

There are hundreds of Russian colleagues who are just as sorry as we are for the recent events in Ukraine, if not more. Many of those colleagues have even signed a letter that condemns the actions of their government, and in so doing they have exposed themselves to the risk of being fired, or even imprisoned.

And what is our attitude now - do we stop working with them? What do we think we are going to achieve by cutting ties with people who, exactly like us, consider the progress of human knowledge their mission in life?....

If we consider ourselves above the idea of countries having the right of invading other countries, if we believe that women and men are equal on both sides of the border, if we believe that what unites us (humanity, and love for knowledge and art) is more than what divides us (language, habits); if the feeling of wasting lives of Ukrainians as well as of Russians makes us weep the same tears, we have to stop this....

If we are against war we cannot be in favor of cutting collaboration and positive interaction among peoples, which can and should exist regardless of the decision of a warmonger that happens to rule one of these peoples....

What matters is what you can do to stop the war. If you can't do anything of that sort, then sit down and stop taking decisions that have nothing to do with that, and all to do with petty revenge.

The attempt to punish people who have nothing to do with Putin or his crimes, just because they are Russian, is inhumane and stupid. Even many of those boys who were sent to Ukraine by Putin didn't want to go, they don't want to be where they are nor doing what they're doing. Whether they survive or die their fate is tragic.

Those who seek to put on display how much they despise the horrors Putin is inflicting on both Russians and Ukrainians by punishing those who are completely innocent are behaving like brutish primitives. They need to be made to realize that wisdom and justice consist in judging people as individuals and not as members of a particular race, nationality or religion.