When Does Life Begin? (Pt. I)

The leak of the pending SCOTUS decision in the Dobbs abortion case has once again stirred up the abortion debate and once again the claim is being circulated that "no one knows when life begins." It's not usually clear what the person making this claim means by it, so let's unpack it.

If it's meant literally the assertion belies an astonishing ignorance of biology. The ovum and sperm, the gametes that fuse to form a conceptus in a woman's womb, are living cells. They were produced by living persons, and the embryo that results is a living entity.

The point at which "life begins" is the point at which the first life appeared. Ever since then life has been a continuum. It’s simply bizarre to argue that we weren’t alive until we had a heartbeat or until we were born.

But maybe those who make this claim are talking about human life. Maybe they mean that no one knows at what point in the reproductive process a human being becomes a human being, but this, too, makes little sense.

What is a human being? Is it not an entity which possesses a specific genetic endowment? If so, the conceptus qualifies. After all, it's certainly a human conceptus - it's not a turtle or elephant conceptus - and it's certainly a being.

Nor is it, as we often hear, part of the mother's body. It's a separate being with a genetic makeup distinct from that of the mother. It's located in her body, but it's not part of her body.

Perhaps what's meant by the claim that "no one knows when life begins" is that no one knows when a developing individual becomes a person with all the rights appertaining to persons, including the right to life. If so, it'd be helpful if we had a definition of "person" with which there could be general agreement.

Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, who is pro-choice, gives us a definition we can use as a start. He says that, “I use the term ‘person’ to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future.”

I think this definition is inadequate, but to see why let’s reformulate his definition this way:

Definition (1): A person is a living being with the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will.

This, however, is a bit too broad for use in the abortion discussion. It would include at least some animals, and possibly aliens, if such there be, and it would certainly include God.

Since, however, neither animals, aliens nor God are subject to our laws concerning rights, like the right to life, perhaps we should specify that our definition refers to human beings.

Thus:

Definition (1a): A person is a living human being with the capacity to engage in acts of intellect, emotion, and will.

So, are all human beings persons under Def. (1a)? Clearly not. Human beings start out as a conceptus (in biology called a zygote), they develop into an embryo and thence into a fetus which has the form of a miniature human. If matters are allowed to proceed, the fetus becomes a newborn, a toddler, a child, adolescent, adult and eventually a corpse.

On Def. (1a) neither the conceptus (the fertilized ovum) nor the embryo and possibly not the fetus, at least in its early stages, would meet the criteria of being a person.

Yet even most pro-choice advocates would agree, I think, that Def. (1a) is inadequate. We'll consider some reasons why in tomorrow's post.

Race: Fact and Fantasy

Columnist Andrew Sullivan was invited a while ago to appear on Jon Stewart's show to discuss race, and, according to Sullivan, the show was something of a train wreck. He felt that he was ambushed, but more than that, Stewart delivered a monologue which, in Sullivan's opinion, grossly distorted the facts about race in this country.

Sullivan replied to Stewart's diatribe in his Substack column. I only discuss a portion of his piece which is a classic takedown of the arguments often made by those who wish to divide americans along racial lines.

He writes:

On the race question, Stewart has decided to go way past even Robin DiAngelo, in his passionate anti-whiteness....He argued that no one in America had been prepared to have an honest discussion about race — until the “reckoning” of 2020.

He also suggested that nothing had been done by whites to support African-Americans from 1619 (yes, he went there) … till now. The most obvious solution — reparations — was, he implied, somehow, absurdly, taboo.

His montage of “black voices” insisted that African-Americans are still granted only conditional citizenship, are still barred from owning property — “we don’t own anything!” — and ended with Sister Souljah — yes! — explaining that the thing that kills black people are not bullets, but white people.

This (Souljah) is the same moral avatar who once said: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Stewart then hailed Angela Davis — a proud Communist, with a particular fondness for East Germany’s suppression of dissent — and warmly thanked her as “Angela.”

But Stewart included not a single black voice of disagreement or nuance. He apparently believes that all black people hold the same view. And all white people just refuse to hear it.

Sullivan was far from finished with Stewart. He went on:

Jon Stewart’s insistence that Americans had never robustly debated race before 2020 is also, well, deranged. Americans have been loudly debating it for centuries. There was something called a Civil War over it.

His claim that white America has never done anything in defense of black Americans (until BLM showed up, of course) requires him to ignore more than 300,000 white men who gave their lives to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy.

It requires Stewart to ignore the countless whites (often Jewish) who risked and gave their lives in the Civil Rights Movement. It requires him to erase the greatest president in American history. This glib dismissal of all white Americans throughout history, even those who risked everything to expand equality, is, when you come to think about it, obscene.

There's more:

Stewart’s claim that whites never tried to ameliorate black suffering until now requires him to dismiss over $19 trillion of public funds spent in the long War on Poverty, focused especially on black Americans. That’s the equivalent of more than 140 Marshall Plans.

As Samuel Kronen has shown, it requires the erasure from history of “the Food Stamp Act of 1964, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the Social Security Amendments of 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Social Security Amendments of 1962, and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, and on and on.”

To prove his point, Stewart has to pretend LBJ never existed. That’s how utterly lost he now is.

Stewart then used crude metrics of inequality to argue, [Ibram X.] Kendi-style, without any evidence, that the only thing that can possibly explain racial inequality today in America is still “white supremacy.” Other factors — concentrated poverty, insanely high rates of crime and violence, acute family breakdown, a teen culture that equates success with whiteness, lack of affordable childcare — went either unmentioned or openly mocked as self-evident expressions of bigotry.

He then equated formal legal segregation with voluntary residential segregation, as if Jim Crow were still in force. And he straw-manned the countering argument thus: white America believes that African-Americans are “solely responsible for their community’s struggles.”

I don’t know anyone who believes that. I sure don’t. It’s much more complex than that. And it’s that complexity that some of us are insisting on — and that Stewart wants to dismiss out of hand in favor of his own Manichean moral preening.

His final peroration ended thus: “America has always prioritized white comfort over black survival.” Note: always. There has been no real progress; white people have never actually listened to a black person; America is irredeemably racist.

There's much more at the link, and it's devastating to the views held by Stewart and the CRT crowd. Anyone interested in the issue of race in America really should read all of it.

Race in America

Americans with short time horizons often think that racism in the U.S. is at unprecedentedly high levels. In fact, media incitements to the contrary, racism, at least white racism, is probably at historically low levels right now.

It's so difficult to find examples of white racism that race hustlers have tried to persuade us that the difficulty in finding it is proof of how insidious it is.

Here are some facts from an essay by Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch:

Last September, American support for interracial marriage hit an all-time high. Ninety-four percent of Americans approve not merely of interracial marriage, but specifically of marriages between white people and black people. I’m not sure it’s necessary for my purposes, but I’m happy to concede that the “real” number might be a bit lower.

Polling on such questions is always open to “social desirability bias”—people say what they think they’re supposed to say. But even if there’s some of that at work—and there probably is—that too is a good thing.

In 1958, when Gallup first asked the question, only 4 percent of Americans said they approved of interracial marriage. I’m sure some of those people were lying, too. In other words, what is considered socially acceptable to say—even to a stranger on a phone—has moved massively against racism.

As I’ve written many times, this is hardly the only data point about how America has become less racist since the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

For starters, we had a two-term black president and currently have a black vice president. In 1965, there were no black senators or governors and only five black members of the House of Representatives. In 2021, there were 57 black members of the House of Representatives, a statistically proportionate number to the black population (13 percent).

State legislatures are somewhat below that benchmark—about 9 percent in 2015—but even so, there are hundreds of them, most notably in the Old South. Georgia has 66, Mississippi 51, South Carolina 44, North Carolina 37, Alabama 31, etc.

“In 1942,” Marian Tupy, who runs the invaluable HumanProgress.org, wrote a few years ago, “some 68 percent of white Americans surveyed thought that blacks and whites should go to separate schools.

By 1995, only 4 percent held that view. In 1958, 45 percent of white Americans would ‘maybe’ or ‘definitely’ move if a black family moved in next door. By 1997, that fell to 2 percent.”

In surveys asking whether you would be opposed to a neighbor of a different race moving next door, America doesn’t come out as the least racist country in the world, but we do far better than many countries. We beat Germany and France (3.7 percent), Spain (12), Italy (11.7), Mexico (11.4), Russia (14.7), China (18), Turkey (41.21!), and even Finland (6.8).

My only point is that America has made monumental and, to a significant degree, historically unprecedented racial progress.

It's one of the tragic flaws of human nature that we seek to divide ourselves along differences, but race is only one of those differences. We segregate ourselves along religious, gender, political, socioeconomic, geographical, ethnic, and linguistic lines. Blacks do it, whites do it, pretty much everyone does it, but for some reason we think it's especially problematic when the divides fall along racial lines and when whites are the perpetrators.

It's been said that the United States is the best place in the world to live if you're black and it's not hard to see why. There's more opportunity here for blacks than there is in any other country in the world, even predominately black countries, especially predominately black countries.

This is why millions of non-whites are seeking to emigrate to the United States. It's certainly not because they think that the U.S. is a racist hell-hole. It's because they know that they have more opportunity to succeed here than anywhere else in the world.

In summary, there are two things I wish to stress about race in America: There's far less racism in this country in 2022 than we're led to believe, and blacks are just as guilty of what racism there is today as is any other race.

When our media and race-hustlers seek to ladle on the racial guilt by recounting stories, many from over fifty years ago, about racial injustices, simply ask yourself, or them, why, if the contemporary U.S. is so awful, so many non-white people are trying desperately to get in.

The Peregrine Falcon

Each spring the fastest bird in the world, the Peregrine falcon, nests in a man-made box on a ledge on the Rachel Carson Building in Harrisburg, PA, and each year a series of cameras records the progress of the chicks and all the goings-on in the eyrie.

The falcon had been on the brink of extirpation in North America due to the accumulation of pesticides in their bodies which caused them to produce thin-shelled eggs which broke prematurely in the nest. But since the 1970s the bird has made an impressive comeback due to the banning of the pesticides and the help of wildlife biologists who've done a marvelous job of managing these magnificent raptors.

The Peregrine can dive on prey at up to 200 mph and hits its target so hard that, if it doesn't grab it, it knocks it out of the air.

The Harrisburg Peregrine pair currently has four young and can be observed via the falcon cams here. If you're lucky when you tune in you might see the adults feeding the voracious nestlings. These young birds are still a couple of weeks away from venturing their first flight.

Meanwhile, the following video provides some interesting information on the Peregrine, although if you don't like seeing violence in nature perhaps you ought not watch it.

The Dobb's Decision

One of the arguments, if it can be called that, promoted by critics of the apparent pending Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case is that if the Court can overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) then it could also go on to overturn Griswold (1965), which established a right to buy contraception, Loving (1967), which struck down laws against interracial marriage, and Obergefell (2015), which struck down laws against same-sex marriage.

I expressed doubt that this may qualify as an argument against Dobbs because it doesn't offer any reason to think that Roe was grounded in the Constitution or that the Supreme Court has no good reason to overturn it.

The draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion takes pains to emphasize that the Dobbs decision has no bearing on any other matters. Alito states at least three times that Dobbs is relevant only to Roe and the subsequent 1992 Casey decision, and is not to be understood as setting the predicate for a challenge to any other precedent. He writes:

None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion. They do not support the right to obtain an abortion, and by the same token, our conclusion that the Constitution does not confer such a right does not undermine them in any way.

Whether these other cases were rightly decided or not, the fact that they may come under scrutiny is, in fact, no argument for why Roe should not have been reconsidered. If Roe is bad jurisprudence, as even many pro-choice scholars cited by Justice Alito in the leaked draft of his opinion have acknowledged it is, then it should be overturned regardless of whether it sparks subsequent reconsideration of other decisions.

As David Garrow writes in a column at the Wall Street Journal (paywall):

Justice Alito takes clear pleasure in citing by name the many liberal legal scholars who have dismissively criticized Roe’s reasoning, and he twice calls Roe’s constitutional discussion “exceptionally weak." That’s a conclusion with which even historians who fervently back abortion rights can’t cavil.

The Supreme Court is not supposed to be a legislature. It's not supposed to be a political vehicle for gratifying the esires of the masses. It's role is to decide whether laws enacted by political bodies like legislatures conflict with the Constitution.

When its own judgments are found to be in conflict with the Constitution, as in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which upheld racially segregated public facilities, then those judgments should be overturned, as Plessy was in Brown v. Board of Eduxcation (1954).

The Roe decision was a usurpation of the role of the legislature. Citing only the most tenuous constitutional warrant, it established a right to an abortion, overruling the laws of many states, simply because many people wanted it.

The current Court has apparently decided that its predecessors exceeded their constitutional authority in establishing this right, that there was no basis in the Constitution for creating a right to abortion, that Roe was thus wrongly decided and should no longer be the law of the land.

If the leaked Dobbs decision turns out to be an accurate picture of where SCOTUS stands, the citizens of the fifty states will now decide whether, and to what extent, to permit abortion in their states. Pro-choice advocates insist that polls show the overwhelming majority of people want abortion to be legal, which, if true, should alleviate their concerns about overturning Roe since majorities of voters will decide to keep it legal.

The hysterical reaction on the left, however, belies their own confidence that their claim to have a strong majority on their side. Indeed, a Gallup poll taken last year showed that 32% of the people think abortion should be "always" legal, 19% thought it should never be legal, and 48% thought it should be sometimes legal.

In other words, 67% disapprove of the current status of abortion in this country which, in most states, allows abortion for any reason at any time up to birth.

Whatever the actual statistics may be, the current Court appears to be returning the decision as to whether and to what extent abortion should be legal to the people to decide. In a constitutional republic that's where it should've been all along.

Putin's Famine

One of the many insidious consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the global food shortage and potential famine that it will precipitate. Jim Geraghty writes about it at National Review. He quotes Senator Roy Blunt (R., MO):

You can find different numbers on this, but roughly 25 percent of all the wheat exports in the world come from Ukraine and Russia, about 20 percent of all the corn exports in the world. 90 percent of the sunflower cooking oil comes from there, and a lot of fertilizer comes from there right now from Ukraine, which is the bigger partner in that food distribution of the two countries.

And nothing is coming out of Ukraine. Nothing is coming out of the port at Odessa. Nothing is coming out of the port at Mariupol and hasn’t since the Russian invasion began.

This has huge impact on the whole world but particularly on Africa, food in Ukraine, food in Africa. What’s in the silos in Ukraine right now is not getting out. And Ukrainian farmers aren’t getting crops planted for this year.

Geraghty adds this important note:

Keep in mind, even if the Russian invasion ended tomorrow — and it won’t — there’s still the issue of the hundreds of anti-ship mines now floating around in the Black Sea, a few of which have ended up drifting into the territorial waters of Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania. It’s not going to be safe to send cargo ships through those waters for a long time.

Moreover,

But the global fertilizer shortage is likely to reduce crop yields in a lot of places, which means we may be dealing with a worse problem in the coming months and years. Using less fertilizer usually translates into fewer crops.

Nor are we immune to the consequences of this problem here in North America:

The cost of the fertilizers farmers across Mid-Michigan use has doubled, and in some cases tripled. No joke, manure is absolutely a hot commodity.

Geraghty has a lot more important insight into this problem at the link, but I'll close with this:

Few of these problems are expected to be short-lived. The numbers in the latest World Bank assessment are eye-popping:

Energy prices are expected to rise more than 50 percent in 2022 before easing in 2023 and 2024. Non-energy prices, including agriculture and metals, are projected to increase almost 20 percent in 2022 and will also moderate in the following years. Nevertheless, commodity prices are expected to remain well above the most recent five-year average.

In the event of a prolonged war, or additional sanctions on Russia, prices could be even higher and more volatile than currently projected. . . . Wheat prices are forecast to increase more than 40 percent, reaching an all-time high in nominal terms this year. That will put pressure on developing economies that rely on wheat imports, especially from Russia and Ukraine.

The human cost of this is staggering, with the number of people around the world at risk of famine jumping from 45 million to anywhere from 53 million to 65 million.

Right now, there’s probably some cold-hearted isolationist saying, “Yes, yes, this is all very sad, but how is this America’s problem?”

Well, hungry people do things that well-fed people do not. They protest and they riot. Hungry people move across borders as refugees. They are more easily recruited into terrorist or extremist groups. Hungry populaces are more likely to turn to demagogues promising an easy solution. Where there is hunger, there is conflict.

A lot of people around the world are going to die because one power-mad narcissist, Vladimir Putin, took it upon himself to invade a country that was no threat to him or the Russia over which he presides as dictator.

If that's not evil then the word has no meaning.

Cephalopod Camouflage

We've posted this wonderful video on Viewpoint in the past, but I thought newer readers might like to see it because it raises some fascinating questions:

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

If mutations affect DNA and DNA programs for the production of 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 purely mechanistic processes?

Anyway, keep in mind as you watch the video that, on naturalism, these creatures evolved these marvelous capabilities purely by mindless, undirected random mutations in their genome.

If you don't keep 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 some intellectuals, offers disappointingly inadequate explanations as to how living things came to be the way they are.

The Leak

Someone leaked a draft of the Supreme Court's decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization which apparently overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The leak is certainly a betrayal of trust and a failure of professional ethics on the part of the leaker and the act is possibly criminal.

Whoever did it, whether affiliated with the Court's liberals or with the conservatives, deserves to have his or her legal career ended. If any of the Justices had anything to do with it they deserve to be impeached. The guilty party has done profound damage to the integrity of the Court.

But beyond that, the reaction of many on the left to the news that the Court appears poised to allow states to craft their own laws on abortion is deeply disappointing.

To see why it's disappointing check out this compilation of tweets from various lefties put together by Jordan Boyd at The Federalist.

Over and over those who express outrage over the Court's ruling - which is not yet official and won't be until the summer - call for violence, destruction, and threaten the Justices and their families. This is how barbarians practice politics: Give us our way or else we'll burn everything down and threaten you and your families with violence.

In all of the tweets that Ms. Boyd catalogues there's no evidence at all of any argument, no reasons are given to cause anyone to think that the Court has wrongly interpreted the Constitution in Dobbs, and no Constitutionally based defense of Roe against Justice Alito's scathing critique of that 1973 decision.

Rather what we see are very angry people forsaking rational argument and giving way to their rage over the fact that in the future they may have to travel to a different state for the opportunity to dismember their unborn baby.

Some aver that the Court is declaring war on women. They seem oblivious to the fact that for the last fifty years there's been the equivalent of a war on the unborn that has cost some 60 million fatalities. Besides, it seems odd that the same folks who insist that they don't know what a woman is are now telling us that there's a war against them.

They're also warning that democracy is imperiled by returning to the states and their citizens the right to decide whether abortion will be permitted and under what circumstances it will be permitted, as if allowing the people, through the ballot box, to make this decision is somehow anti-democratic.

Among Ms. Boyd's collection of tweets there are many which call for "burning everything down," even as the left has loudly and persistently condemned the violence of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. I hope in the days ahead to read numerous repudiations from progressives of their fellow progressives who are calling for mob violence today, but I won't be surprised if those repudiations never materialize.

(By the way, doesn't Twitter forbid calls for violence and mayhem on its platform, or did that all change when Elon Musk took over?)

In any event, Alito's majority decision clearly states why Roe was wrongly decided. It'll be interesting to see whether any of those who want the abortion regime to continue will offer a compelling case - based on the Constitution, not on emotion - for thinking that Alito is wrong.

Scapegoats

Spencer Lindquist at The Federalist explains what holds the leftist coalition together given that it's comprised of so many disparate interests. It's a common hatred of non-leftist scapegoats:

One would think that natural political discord would occur between those who want to “eat the rich” and the rich themselves, or between those who abide by a patriarchal sexual ethic and a movement that endured a collective aneurysm when Florida told them teachers couldn’t talk about sexuality with elementary schoolers.

The natural splintering of this leftwing coalition is delayed through what the French philosopher Renee Girard referred to as the scapegoat mechanism.

Through the scapegoat mechanism, internal social conflict between groups or individuals can be deferred by identifying a villain, the scapegoat.

The scapegoat is held responsible by the conflicting parties, who mutually, although not always consciously, cast the blame on those who simultaneously fulfill the role of the victim and the villain.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains: “the victim must be thought of as a monstrous creature that transgressed some prohibition and deserved to be punished.

In such a manner, the community deceives itself into believing that the victim is the culprit of the communal crisis, and that the elimination of the victim will eventually restore peace.”

We see this scapegoat tactic employed frequently by the Iranian mullahs who divert blame for their egregious misgovernance by attributing all their misfortunes to the machinations of the Great Satan, i.e. the U.S, and the Little Satan, Israel.

So who are the scapegoats vilified by today's leftists? Lindquist writes:

Masculine men are turned into scapegoats when they are dubbed toxic, sexist enforcers of patriarchy. Christians similarly face accusations of oppressing women and those who are LGBT.

White people are also approved targets, thought to be inherently racist and privileged, simultaneously the beneficiaries and the managers of an intangible but ever-present system of oppression.

Even stable nuclear families are to be viewed with skepticism, either for perpetuating gender roles or straining the environment by daring to have kids.

Of course, anyone who effectively and persistently stands in the way of the left's march through the institutions on its way to total dominance and control of the culture is also subject to execration. Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, the list is lengthy.

Anyone on the list, or even moderately sympathetic to someone on the list, is considered a "deplorable" a "racist," "sexist," "bigot," or any of sundry "-phobes." The tactic is as intellectually absurd as it is vicious, but it's also very effective, especially when the bulk of the media and higher education constantly reinforce it.

You can read the rest of Lindquist's piece at the link. He closes it with this:

The simplest way to expose the incongruity of the leftwing coalition is to merely ask questions that highlight the absurdity of the progressive bloc.

Raise ethical inquiries about abortion or transgenderism among Democrat-aligned Muslims, or ask Austin tech workers why they support H1B visa programs that threaten their job security.

Ask progressive white women if they truly believe that they and their “white tears” will be able to maintain their rapidly deteriorating status among the oppressed and the immunity that comes with it.

Question radical feminists who rage against toxic masculinity, asking why they support mass immigration from highly patriarchal Islamic countries. Or ask a Seattle communist what the appropriate tax rate is for the millionaire who funded the neoliberal candidate he ended up voting for.

It'd be interesting to see how these folks would respond to these queries, but as Lindquist cautions, "This must be done without trafficking in the same dangerous divisiveness that the left used in their ascent to power, without engaging in scapegoating ourselves."

Elon, the Left and Free Speech

The reaction to Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter has certainly been interesting. The possibility that Twitter will now be a platform on which there's minimal censorship has some on the left in a tizzy.

They think free speech means that racist, sexist and homophobic epithets will become common currency on Twitter. They liked the way things used to be when people whose ideas and tweets they didn't like could be exiled from the social gathering place.

Under the old regime, for example, Twitter suspended the accounts of right-leaning users at a rate four times that of left-leaning users:

A recent MIT and Yale-led study of politically engaged U.S. Twitter users in both parties found that 36 percent of the Republican accounts studied had been suspended in the six months after the 2020 election vs. 8 percent of Democrat accounts.

Some attribute the disparity to the alleged "misinformation" disseminated by users on the right, yet the definition of misinformation seems to be any point of view which deviates from the progressives' approved opinion.

If a user tweets information about Hunter Biden's laptop, for example, or expresses skepticism about climate change, or the ability of men to get pregnant, or the efficacy of Covid lockdowns, they risk being locked out of their Twitter account.

Musk bought the company ostensibly to end this bias, to make the platform more tolerant of divergent views, and now the left seems to be in a panic. Liberals have sounded alarms, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) anticipating an “explosion of hate crimes” and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calling the deal “dangerous for our democracy.”

Employees have quit, others have threatened to sabotage the site, and thousands of users have closed their accounts.

Musk doesn't consider himself a conservative, rather he sees himself as somewhat of a classical liberal or libertarian. He recently tweeted this illustration that shows him pretty much where he's always been on the political spectrum, while the left has moved much further toward the extreme left:

Musk is surely correct that the center has shifted leftward over the last two decades as many liberals adopted very far left positions on race, immigration, economics and sexuality. And free speech.

Free speech, once championed by liberals in the 60s and 70s is simply not a cherished value on the left anymore. They seem to value only speech with which they agree.

They claim their dislike for Musk's takeover is due to the fact that, as they believe, he'll allow hate speech to thrive on the platform. Of course, much hinges on how one defines hate speech, a term that's often conflated with any criticism of any leftist person or position.

In any case, the fact that thousands of users chose to leave now rather than wait to see what sort of platform Twitter becomes reinforces the suspicion that these people simply aren't interested in, and don't value, free expression. They want a platform on which only people who think just like them are allowed, and they want to be able to exclude any opinions or arguments which might nudge them out of their ideological comfort zone.

What they don't want, it seems, is for Twitter to become a genuine marketplace of ideas. Perhaps that's for good reason. When orthodoxies are allowed to be challenged they're sometimes found to be intellectually wanting.

The last thing the left can afford is to have their orthodoxies openly subjected to logical analysis and criticism. That, from their point of view, would be a calamity.

Nanomachines

My classes are talking about the relative expanatory merits of theism and naturalism when it comes to the rich information content of living things. I thought it might be useful, therefore, to rerun an older post on this topic: An article at Evolution News and Views (ENV) reflects on the news that three European chemists have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for having engineered simple molecular machines. According to the article:

• Jean-Pierre Sauvage (University of Strasbourg, France) in 1983 linked two molecular rings together.
• Sir J. Fraser Stoddart (Northwestern University, Illinois) in 1991 threaded a molecular ring onto a thin molecular axle and demonstrated that the ring was able to move along the axle.
• Bernard L. Feringa (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) in 1999 got a molecular rotor blade to spin continually in the same direction.

These are amazing achievements, to be sure, and required incredible skill and genius to accomplish, but compared to the thousands of complex molecular machines that operate in every one of the cells of our bodies to keep us alive the machines these men built are quite simple.

So here's a question: If the highest human genius is required to design and develop relatively simple molecular machines, how did the far more complex machines in living things develop by unguided random chance with no input from an intelligent agent? Is such a development independent of intelligent guidance even possible?

One of the Nobel recipients, Bernard Feringa, was asked by the Prize Committee in a phone interview what inspired him to work on molecular machines. Interviewer Adam Smith asked him:

AS: So you describe your work as being inspired by nature?

BF: Yes, of course. If you look at the cells in our body or the functioning of the organism, it is flabbergasting. It is fantastic to see how this intricate machinery works.

And when I'm talking about motors, as we focus on motors, if you look at the essential functions in the cell, like cell division, like transport, like making your muscles move, bacteria that go to food .... it's all controlled by molecular motors, and so the biological motors, and the biological machinery, is so crucial to all these functions.

And of course we get great inspiration from that, while we as chemists are extremely good in building all kinds of materials, and that is what intrigued me.

What sort of molecular motors is Feringa talking about here? Below are animations of four examples. You don't have to be a biologist to appreciate how marvelous these are and why Feringa seems to be grasping for superlatives to describe them.

Kinesin:

ATP Synthase:

Protein synthesizers:

Topoisomerase

These wondrous nanoscale machines leave one speechless. Language seems totally inadequate to the task of supplying adjectives to express one's amazement.

How did such complex machines ever come about, especially on this scale of size?

Maybe the Darwinians are right and they really are just the products of natural processes acting solely by chance, but, assuming one's mind is not already philosophically closed to the idea, it seems far more plausible to conclude that they were designed by an intelligent engineer of some sort.

Remember that on the Darwinian view most of these machines had to be already present in the very first living cells which means they didn't have eons of time to evolve nor could they have been the product of genetic mutation and natural selection since they had to exist before the cells that housed them could survive to reproduce.

Yet students are often taught in school that unthinking nature, unguided by any purpose or intention, somehow produced these astonishing structures. It's as if Nature waved a magic wand, sprinkled some pixie dust, and, presto!, there they were.

And the same folks who tell us this also insist that the belief that these machines must have been engineered by an intelligent agent is unscientific and "superstitious." Why?

Bacterial Factories

A couple of weeks ago we reran the five episode video series titled Secrets of the Cell featuring Lehigh biochemist Michael Behe.

Now episode six has been released. Unlike the earlier episodes which were about five minutes long, episode six is about 17 minutes and explores the fascinating abilities of bacteria, particularly bacteria which can orient themselves along a magnetic field.

What Behe presents is truly fascinating and raises some profound philosophical questions. For example, if Darwinian evolution is true how did such amazing complexity and abilities ever arise just through unguided, purposeless processes that had no goal in mind?

Even if genetic mutation and natural selection could be invoked to explain how a bacterium diversified into numerous different forms, a highly questionable concession, how did the first bacterium or the first living, reproducing cell arise before mutation and natural selection could kick in?

The first cell must itself have been extremely complex, and yet it's construction must've been like the spontaneous construction of a functional computer by a tornado swirling through a parts factory.

If factories such as are shown in the video are impossible without having been designed by an intelligent mind or minds, how could a factory such as is found in each bacterium ever be constructed apart from the engineering of an intelligent agent?

Watch the video and decide for yourself:

The President's Pander Ploy

President Biden senses a massive repudiation of his presidency coming in November and has cynically decided he can essentially "buy votes" for his party by canceling student loan debt. Such a move, he evidently hopes, would entice multitudes of grateful recipients into voting for Democratic candidates in the Fall.

Perhaps, but such a move on his part would be a gross injustice to the millions of people who worked long hours at a job, or even two, while going to school in order to pay their way or to pay off their loans.

If Mr. Biden chooses to have taxpayers pick up the tab for the loans of those who just completed their schooling, or simply refused to pay on their debt, then he's essentially making saps of those who did the right thing and met their responsibilities.

Jim Geraghty writes about this at National Review. He says,

If you borrow money and sign a contract promising to pay it back, then you must pay it back, or you will suffer serious long-term financial consequences. Or at least, that’s the way it used to work until Democrats decided they could win a lot of votes by just waving a magic wand and declaring that people didn’t have to pay their student debt back.

If you take out a loan to buy a house, you must pay it back over time, with interest. If you take out a loan to buy a car, you must pay it back over time, with interest. If you take out a loan to pay for a college education, you must pay it back over time, with interest.

You signed a contract. You knew the terms going in — or at least you were supposed to know them. You’re supposed to read the documents you sign. You knew the payments you were going to have to make and when you would have to make them. If you don’t want to deal with the financial pressure of debt, don’t take out the loan.

Taxpayers have already bent over backwards to accommodate those with student loan debt:

The federal government has postponed repayments of student loans seven times since the start of the pandemic; no one has been required to pay back a student loan since March 13, 2020. Interest rates on those loans during this period dropped to zero, and collections on defaulted loans stopped.

Mr. Biden proposes to forgive as much as $10,000 per borrower. One of the ironies of this plan is that it will largely benefit those who least need it:

...forgiving $10,000 per borrower would most benefit whites under the age of 40 who have graduate degrees and live in high-income, majority-white neighborhoods. This is one of the most Democratic-leaning and outspoken progressive demographics in the country.

This is a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the Democratic Party’s Twitter class.

If you paid back your student loans in recent years, there is a good chance you were a chump. You paid money that Uncle Sugar was going to come along and cover if you had just waited. You should have spent that money on other things you would have enjoyed and defaulted on your payments, waiting for the federal government to come along and say, “Don’t worry, the taxpayers have this covered.”

If you currently owe a lot on your mortgage, your car payments, your home-improvement loans, or any other loan, and you’re diligently and responsibly making your monthly payments . . . well, you are kind of a sucker, too, because you borrowed money that you had to pay back, instead of taking part in Joe Biden’s free-money program.

The Democratic Party claims to be all about equity and fairness, but where is the fairness in this proposal? Not only does it make the most responsible borrowers "chumps" for being responsible it makes them doubly chumps because as taxpayers they will now be helping to subsidize those who'll benefit from Mr. Biden's cynical political pandering.

Perhaps the whole idea will backfire. Perhaps the millions who are being played for suckers will be so outraged at the injustice of what's being proposed that they'll vote against the Democrats in November. That, at least, would be condign karma.

How Much Brain Do We Need?

There's a fascinating article at Wired by Grace Browne who tells us of a woman in her fifties who for privacy reasons goes by her initials EG and who, amazingly enough, is missing the left temporal lobe of her brain. What's amazing about this is that the left temporal lobe is thought to be involved in language processing, and yet...

missing a large chunk of her brain has had surprisingly little effect on her life. She has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian—a second language–so well that she has dreamed in it.

She first learned her brain was atypical in the autumn of 1987, at George Washington University Hospital, when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. The cause was likely a stroke that happened when she was a baby; today, there is only cerebro-spinal fluid in that brain area.

For the first decade after she found out, EG didn't tell anyone other than her parents and her two closest friends. “It creeped me out,” she says. Since then, she has told more people, but it's still a very small circle that is aware of her unique brain anatomy.

Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.)

EG was eventually put in touch with Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT who studies language, and the two hit it off. Browne writes:

Just how remarkably little effect the uniqueness of EG’s brain has on her day-to-day life shows how sheerly expendable big chunks of our brains can be. Fedorenko points to a surgical practice called hemispherectomy used for children with epilepsy whose condition does not respond to medication.

The practice entails removing the half of the brain where the seizures are taking place, and these children have been shown to retain typical cognition. “If you can remove half of a brain and you work fine, that suggests there's a lot of bits in our typical brains that are redundant,” says Fedorenko.

“There's apparently a lot of stuff in our brain that is fully redundant, which is—engineering-wise—a pretty good way to build the system.”

The reality is that if the brain is damaged, it will often find a way to rewire itself.

Remarkably, EG’s sister is missing her right temporal lobe and is largely unaffected by it, suggesting there's likely some genetic component to the early childhood strokes that can explain the missing brain regions, Fedorenko says.

This raises a few questions. One is how much of the brain can one lose and at what stage of life can one lose it without it having any serious effect on one's ability to function? Evidently, much, or even most, of what is going on in our cognitive experience is not totally dependent on the brain.

The orthodoxy among materialists is that our cognitive functions are due solely to the material brain in our heads. In their ontology there's no room for an immaterial mind. Yet, if they're correct why would we evolve more brain matter than what we need to survive and function?

Another question is how did this ability to rewire itself and develop redundancy ever evolve by random mutations and natural selection? As Fedorenko says, “There's apparently a lot of stuff in our brain that is fully redundant, which is—engineering-wise—a pretty good way to build the system.”

Indeed, but blind, mindless processes like Darwinian evolution don't engineer systems. Intelligent engineers do.

It's remarkable that when talking about living things scientists find it very difficult to avoid using the language of intelligent design. Perhaps that's because the intuition that living things are intentionally designed for a purpose is so overwhelmingly powerful.

Rethinking Sex

Mary Eberstadt, writing at The Washington Free Beacon, reviews a new book by Christine Emba titled Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Emba is a columnist at the Washington Post and, according to Eberstadt, her book ...

performs the public service of wondering aloud whether everything done by "consenting adults" is by definition ducky. To the contrary, myopic focus on "consent," as the author observes, overlooks the sulfurous realities of today’s mating market.

Once, noncriminal but still noxious sexual misdeeds would have resulted in social ostracism, or frontier justice meted out by male relatives—or both.

Now, thanks to the slithering of pornography into young pockets everywhere, such acts have not only been normalized.

Judging by an eye-opening number of the book’s anonymous stories, they have in some cases become the sine qua non of male company itself.

Emba recounts numerous tales of rather awful sexual maltreatment of women at the hands of young men who, she says, are otherwise "great guys":

"She really didn’t like the choking, Kirsten explained, but she really liked him."

This sentence, which ought to have been the book’s subtitle, captures the awfulness afoot in one swoop. Several recent studies cited by the author prove the nauseating point: More and more women consent to sex only to endure unexpected violence after saying yes.

The example of choking is just for starters .... Suffice it to say that among some subset of today’s men, verbal and physical abuse have apparently become the new candy and flowers.

The book evidently flouts the current orthodoxy that holds that no sexual behavior is deviant:

Emba performs another civic mitzvah in saying aloud that there is something wrong with this picture, thus giving permission to other women (and men) who think the same. The crux, as she writes, is that "consent" can be misused to justify anything, including nonconsensual sadism—because in the new order of things, "abuse can be hidden or left uninterrogated as someone’s private ‘kink.’"

Assuming the book’s accounts are representative—and there is no reason to think otherwise—today’s mating scene makes Hugh Hefner & Co. look vanilla.

"We’re Liberated, and We’re Miserable," as the title of one chapter summarizes. Author Emba also transgresses by suggesting that right and wrong might apply even in the time of Tinder; in the words of another chapter title, "Some Desires are Worse than Others."

Not surprisingly, the message has received pushback in the New York Times, and elsewhere, for menacing the holy bovine of "sex positivity"—as if "sex positivity" amounts to anything more than putting up with your guy watching porn and trying gross things out on you while you pretend not to care.

I urge readers to peruse the rest of Eberstadt's column at the link.

Our culture is saturated in pornography and pornography is corrosive to romance. It heightens male expectations while simultaneously cheapening women. Toward the end of her column Eberstadt writes:

Once, the price of living with men included doing their dishes and raising their children. As part of that deal, what might be called "spouses with benefits" became a thing.

Many thereby managed to ease into death and old age together, surrounded by loving faces. Today, by contrast, with sex "always on the table," as the author observes, the joys of motherhood and fatherhood and lifelong companionship have become luxury goods that few young adults seem to know how to buy; amazingly, in this book that is all about sex, hardly anyone mentions marriage or children.

Outside certain vibrant religious subcultures, mass confusion reigns, and stone-cold abuse becomes rationalized as mere collateral damage. As the author puts it, paraphrasing the thoughts of the choked interviewee, "it was the bargain one made in order to leap off the dating app carousel into the arms of an otherwise great guy."

Certainly there are still lots of men out there who are not sexual deviants (a word frowned upon by the mavens of today's sexual fashion), but the pornification of our culture has shifted the spectrum of male sexual expectations and desires quite decidedly toward the perverse.

A note to female readers of VP: If your boyfriend is into pornography you can be assured that it will eventually lead your relationship to no place that's good.

Do You Believe in Coincidences?

In what is a remarkable set of coincidences six of Russia's infamous oligarchs have succumbed to what RedState archly refers to as an outbreak of Jeffrey Epstein syndrome.

Since the invasion of Ukraine five oligarch's have committed "suicide" and one committed suicide in January. Several of them are alleged to have killed their wives and children before taking their own lives.

Newsweek's Giulia Carbonaro has the story. I'll just excerpt a few lines about each case from her more detailed account.

Two Russian oligarchs were found dead this week alongside their family in luxurious homes in Russia and Spain, with the two cases discovered within 24 hours of each other.

Both deaths are believed by police to be cases of murder-suicide, but the evidence supporting these theories is muddled by the fact that the events happened so close together, with the two oligarchs the last of several who have been found to have died by suicide since the beginning of the year.

Here's a list of all the Russian oligarch who have been found dead in mysterious circumstance since January.

Sergey Protosenya

The body of Sergey Protosenya, former top manager of Russia's energy giant Novatek, was found together with those of his wife and daughter on Tuesday in a rented villa in Spain, where the family was reportedly on holiday for Easter.

The 55-year-old millionaire was found hanged in the garden of the villa in Lloret de Mar by Catalonian police, Spanish media reported, while his wife and daughter were found in their beds with stab wounds in their bodies.

Vladislav Avaev

Just a day before the body of Protosenya was found in Spain, on April 18, former vice-president of Gazprombank Vladislav Avaev was found dead in his multi-million apartment on Universitetsky Prospekt in Moscow, together with his wife and daughter.

The apartment was locked from the inside and a pistol was found in Avaev's hands, leading investigators to explore the theory that Avaev shot his wife and his 13-year-old daughter before killing himself.

Vasily Melnikov

According to police investigations mentioned by Kommersant, Melnikov—who reportedly worked for the medical firm MedStom—was found dead in March in the apartment together with his wife Galina and two sons. They had all died from stab wounds and the knives used for the murders were found at the crime scene.

Kommersant reported that investigators concluded that Melnikov killed his 41-year-old wife and 10-year-old and 4-year-old children before killing himself, but neighbors and relatives struggle to believe this theory. According to the Ukrainian media outlet Glavred, Melnikov's company was suffering huge losses because of Western sanctions.

Mikhail Watford

Ukrainian-born Russian tycoon Mikhail Watford was found dead in his home in Surrey in the U.K. on February 28th.

Watford—who had changed his name from the original Tolstosheya—was ... found hanged in the garage of his home by a gardener, according to The Daily Mail.

Alexander Tyulyakov

On February 25, Gazprom's Deputy General Director of the Unified Settlement Center (UCC) for Corporate Security, Alexander Tyulyakov, was found dead in a cottage near St. Petersburg, as reported by the Russian newspaper Gazeta.

Tyulyakov's body was reportedly found hanged in the apartment's garage. Police found a note next to his body that led investigators to believe the oligarch had died by suicide. Leonid Shulman

The first death linked to Russian energy giant Gazprom dates back to before the Russian invasion of Ukraine had even started, in January.

At that time, 60-year-old Gazprom's top manager Leonid Shulman was found dead in the bathroom of a cottage in the Leningrad region, next to a note that led police to believe he died by suicide, according to Gazeta and Russian media group RBC.

It's possible, of course, that all these men, overcome with despair, killed themselves and, in several cases, their wives and children, within a couple months of each other. Perhaps suicide in Russia is contagious. Then again, given Mr. Putin's brutal history with domestic critics, perhaps there are other explanations for this sudden rash of deaths.

Deterring Nuclear War

Robert C. O’Brien is a former national security advisor (2019-2021) and current CEO of American Global Strategies, LLC. He had a column in the Wall Street Journal (paywall) this week in which he outlined a strategy for avoiding nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine.

He wrote:

If Ukrainian forces push Russia out of the Donbas and even Crimea, there would be no way for Mr. Putin to hide Russia’s humiliating loss from its people. If such an outcome became likely, would he use one of his thousands of “tactical” or “battlefield” nuclear devices to take out Kharkiv, Odessa or even Kyiv in an attempt to save face and end the war on terms he dictates?

This possibility is surely on the minds of President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and his staff.

The time is now to deter Russia from “escalating to de-escalate.” The U.S. must unambiguously communicate to Moscow what lies ahead if it goes down this terrible path.

Mr. Putin and his supporters need to understand that if he detonates a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, the U.S. response will be swift and significant—far exceeding the limited export sanctions under consideration around the world in response to Russian atrocities in Bucha.

O’Brien does not suggest that, in the event of a nuclear strike against Ukraine, we, or NATO, retaliate against Russia with nuclear weapons of our own, but the U.S. should be prepared to take other serious actions quickly. He goes on to list several options:

• Clear the Russian navy’s two remaining Slava-class cruisers, their escort ships and submarines from the Mediterranean. This could be accomplished by a diplomatic démarche followed by more-forceful action if necessary to enforce compliance.
• Eliminate Russian air and military assets in Syria and Libya on the same basis. The U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have the ability to do so fully within hours if Russia refuses to withdraw its forces to its homeland.
• Entirely dismantle all pipelines used to transport Russian oil and gas to the West, quashing even the hope of future sales to Europe. Military assets could assist civilian engineering companies to accomplish this task with dispatch.
• Advise all non-Western nations, including China, that purchasing Russian oil would result in massive punitive tariffs by the U.S., Japan and the European Union that would effectively decouple their economies from the industrial world.
• End Russian dreams of earning hard currency by servicing Iran’s nuclear industry. The idea that the West would stand by while Iran develops its own tactical nuclear capacity should be dismissed. The U.S., Israel and their Arab allies would be positioned to give the ayatollahs a short window to completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear program under an intrusive inspection regime.
  
  If the ayatollahs decline, as they likely would, the key elements of Iran’s nuclear program could be dismantled by the full air power of the regional alliance arrayed against them.

Mr. O'Brien notes that these are only some of the steps that could be taken if Mr. Putin employs nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but that the urgent priority is to communicate them to the Kremlin now.

To not dissuade Putin from the use of tactical nuclear weapons now is to risk an escalation that could ultimately involve the entire world in nuclear war:

The same strong and well-messaged deterrence that kept the free world safe from nuclear attack during the long years of the Cold War must be restored to avert a nuclear tragedy in Ukraine. If it isn’t, the risk of Russian miscalculation will rise—as will the even greater risk of nuclear escalation beyond Ukraine.

Of course, if either of the first two steps were employed, then we'd certainly be at war with Russia and it would certainly involve nuclear weapons.

Better to let Putin know that that's where his first use of nukes in Ukraine would take us than to let him think that he could get away with using them.

Richard Taylor's Argument from Intentionality

Philosopher Ed Feser summarizes an interesting argument for the intelligent design of the human brain that was originally proposed by the late philosopher Richard Taylor in his classic work Metaphysics (1963). Feser writes:

Taylor begins by asking us to ... suppose you are traveling by train through the UK and, peering out the window, you see an arrangement of stones in a pattern that looks like this: THE BRITISH RAILWAYS WELCOMES YOU TO WALES. You would naturally assume that the stones had been deliberately arranged that way by someone, in order to convey the message that you are entering Wales.

Now, it is possible in theory that the stones got into that arrangement in a very different way, through the operation of impersonal and purposeless natural causes. Perhaps, over the course of centuries, the stones gradually tumbled down a nearby hill, and each one stopped in a way that generated just that pattern.

This is, of course, extremely improbable, but that is irrelevant to Taylor’s point and he allows for the sake of argument that it could happen.

Taylor’s point is rather this. Even if you could reasonably entertain the latter possibility, what you could not reasonably do is both accept it as the correct explanation of the arrangement of stones and at the same time continue to regard that arrangement as conveying the message that you are entering Wales.

The arrangement could intelligibly be conveying that message only if there is some intelligence behind its origin, which brought it about for the purpose of conveying the message. If, instead, the arrangement came about through unintelligent and purposeless causes, then it cannot intelligibly be said to convey that message, because it could not in that case intelligibly be conveying any message at all.

Random, mindless processes do not and cannot convey a message, of course, so if one believes the stones mindlessly fell into the pattern Taylor describes then one cannot believe that they convey a message. Feser continues:

I hasten to emphasize again that Taylor’s point has nothing whatsoever to do with probabilities, and in particular nothing to do with how likely or unlikely it is for arrangements of the kind in question to form via natural processes. He allows, for the purposes of the argument, that that could happen.

His point is rather that, no matter how complex and orderly are the arrangements of physical components that might be generated by purely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, they could never by themselves generate something with intentional or semantic content. (This way of putting things is mine rather than Taylor’s.)

This is not a point about probabilities, but rather a conceptual and metaphysical truth. [Stones have no] inherent connection with any semantic content we might decide to convey through them. The content they might have must derive from a mind which uses them for the purpose of conveying such content.

Delete such a mind from an explanation of the arrangements of stones..., and you delete the semantic content along with it.

The stones by themselves have no meaning apart from a mind that arranged them in the pattern they're in. If no mind was involved, if the pattern arose through natural, physical processes like wind and erosion, the pattern would have no meaning at all.

It would not be about anything, and you would have no reason to trust its accuracy or truth. But what does this have to do with the Intelligent Design of our brains? Feser goes on:

Taylor then asks us to consider our perceptual and cognitive faculties. These, too, we take to have intentional or semantic content. We have visual experiences such as the perception that there is a cat on the mat, auditory experiences such as the perception that someone has just rung the doorbell, and so on. We have the thought that there will be rain tomorrow, the thought that two and two make four, and so on.

We take it that a visual experience like the one in question is not merely the presentation to the mind of an array of colors and shapes, and that the auditory experience in question is not merely a sequence of sounds, but that the experiences convey the messages that the cat is on the mat and that someone is at the door.

Of course, we might be misperceiving things, but that is not to the point. The point is that the experiences do convey those messages, whether or not the messages are accurate. Similarly, we take it that when we “see” or “hear” a sentence like “There will be rain tomorrow” as it passes through our imaginations, this is not a mere string of internally apprehended sounds or shapes, but conveys the meaning that there will be rain tomorrow.

Now, Taylor is happy to allow for the sake of argument that, as with the arrangement of stones you see out the train window ... our sensory organs and neural structures may have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes, such as evolution by natural selection. He is not interested in challenging the probability of such explanations.

The arrangement of stones you see out the train window ... seem purposeful, but Taylor allows that that may be an illusion. Similarly, he allows that our sense organs could seem to have a purposeful arrangement and yet be purposeless for all that.

His argument has nothing at all to do with how likely or unlikely it is that the appearance of purpose could arise from purposeless impersonal process.

What he is concerned about instead is the case where we suppose our sense organs and neural processes to have genuine purpose, and in particular where we suppose our perceptual experiences and thoughts to have genuine intentional or semantic content. And he wants to make a point that parallels the point he made about the arrangement of stones.

We could take the deliverances of our sense organs and neural states to have genuine intentional or semantic content. Or we could take those organs and states to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless natural processes. What we cannot reasonably do is both of these things at once.

In particular, we cannot intelligibly both take these cognitive faculties to have arisen through entirely impersonal and purposeless processes and at the same time regard them as having genuine intentional or semantic content – as conveying any message about cats on mats, the ringing of doorbells, rain tomorrow, or anything else.

Delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of the arrangement of stones, and you delete any semantic content along with them. Similarly, if you delete mind and purpose from your account of the origin of our cognitive faculties, then you delete any intentional or semantic content along with them. You can have one or the other account, but not both.

Now, our cognitive faculties do in fact have intentional or semantic content. We really do have perceptual experiences with the content that the cat is on the mat, thoughts with the content that it will rain tomorrow, and so on.

Since this is intelligible only on the supposition that our cognitive faculties originated via some mind and its purposes, there must be some intelligent being that brought us about with the aim of having our cognitive faculties convey to us information about the world around us.

Feser goes on to consider several objections to Taylor's argument and shows that they all fail.

To summarize: Either our cognitive faculties were designed by a mind or they arose purely naturalistically through some mindless evolutionary process. If they arose through a mindless process then, like the rocks on the hillside, they can have no meaning, there's no message to be gleaned, and we'd have no reason to trust them or any of the ideas they produce.

If we think, on the other hand, that our cognitive faculties are generally reliable and that the ideas they produce do have meaning (intentionality) then we have to conclude that they're not the product of mindless forces but are instead the product of an intentional agent who designed them for the purpose of discerning meaning in the world.

Naturalism fails to give a plausible account for how our minds can reliably detect meaning, whether it's in our sensory observations (I see a tree in the yard, I hear a sweet melody, I smell a familiar scent) or in abstract ideas like my idea of free will or moral goodness).

If our cognitive faculties arose as a merely natural coincidence, then like the stones coincidentally rolling into the pattern, we have no reason to place any confidence in the ideas they produce, including, ironically enough, the very idea that they're the result of purely mindless processes.

Orthodox Phony

One of the biggest boosters of Russia's murderous invasion of Ukraine is Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. It's unfathomable how someone who calls himself a Christian can support the barbarity of Vladimir Putin's attempt to destroy Ukraine and slaughter its people, but Kirill has a history of supporting Russian military adventures:

In October 2015, Russia’s newly launched military intervention in defense of embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received a clerical blessing. Patriarch Kirill, the powerful leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, declared the operation “a responsible decision to use military forces to protect the Syrian people from the woes brought on by the tyranny of terrorists.”

....Seven years later, Kirill and his loyal clergy now deliver sermons about their country’s role in another righteous, holy battle. It doesn’t matter that many Ukrainians weathering the brunt of the Russian war machine are Kirill’s co-congregants — there are some 12,000 parishes in Ukraine subject to the church in Moscow.

As Russia embarks on a new large-scale offensive in the east of the country, Kirill has articulated little concern about the millions of Ukrainian lives hanging in the balance.

Instead, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has sounded the same sort of ominous and profoundly ideological rhetoric as Putin. He cast the fight as a religious and national drama, an existential battle of good and evil, a clash between Russo-Slavic tradition, values and unity and the corrupting foreign influences festering at Russia’s border.

"We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” the patriarch said in a sermon on March 6.

Kirill went on, claiming God was on Russia’s side ....

Hundreds of Orthodox priests in Ukraine and elsewhere, though, are less impressed. More than 320 of his fellow clerics signed a letter last week accusing Kirill of “heresy” for his warmongering and demanding he be brought before an ecclesiastical tribunal to be deposed.

“Kirill committed moral crimes by blessing the war against Ukraine and fully supporting the aggressive actions of Russian troops on the Ukrainian territory,” they wrote. “It is impossible for us to remain in any form of canonical submission to the Patriarch of Moscow." (The political tensions between Russia and Ukraine had already led to a split within the latter’s Orthodox community, with some congregations no longer associating themselves with the Moscow patriarchate.)

And counterparts elsewhere have made Kirill aware of their disquiet, too. In a video call last month with Kirill, Pope Francis warned against the use of the Christian cross to justify an invasion and war — Kirill recently presented an icon to a Russian commander in charge of a number of divisions fighting in Ukraine.

“Once upon a time there was also talk in our churches of holy war or just war,” the pope is reported to have told Kirill last month. “Today we cannot speak like this.”

To the extent he is a Christian at all, Kirill is a very unChrist-like Christian. Not only is he supporting Putin's war crimes in Ukraine, he's also a former KGB agent:

Forbes reported on February 20, 2009 that, "Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization.

Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies."

Further reporting from March 7, 2022 from The Guardian's Emma Graham-Harrison interviewed local Ukrainians for their opinions about Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The response was mostly a pessimistic view of Kirill and his motives towards Ukraine based on his past as a KGB agent:

Like many Ukrainians who no longer trust the Russian-linked churches in their country, Yuir is particularly wary of the Moscow Patriarch, Kirill, who according to material from Soviet archives was a government agent before the fall of the USSR. "Kirill is a KGB guy, and he supports all aggression against Ukraine," he said, but asked not to give his last name, worried like many in the town about community tensions about the church. "He’s a bastard, not a religious leader.

Moreover, he appears to be one of those super wealthy oligarchs who've profited handsomely from their support of the Putin regime. His net worth in 2006 was $4 billion. It was also revealed in 2020 that an investigation had unearthed several millions of dollars in real estate belonging to Patriarch Kirill.

In other words, like so many medieval popes, the Patriarch is a fraud, and many of his colleagues in the Russian Orthodox Church know it.

The Lengths to Which People Go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To which Gauger responds,

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on NDEs

One of the more fascinating developments in neuroscience and philosophy of mind over the last decade or so is the increasing credibility researchers are imputing to what they call Near Death Experiences (NDEs).

What makes these experiences so fascinating is the credence they give to the belief that human beings are more than just their physical, material body and that there's something else about us, something which is conscious and can have subjective experience, that survives the death of the body.

One explanation of these events, which are sometimes experienced after clinical death, is that they're really just hallucinations, but a recent study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences discounts this possibility.

The article is not free, but according to a summary at a site called Brain Tomorrow the main finding is that these events don’t have much in common with the experiences someone has if they’re hallucinating or using a psychedelic drug.

The study found that people who recount an NDE typically report the occurrence of five different events:

• A separation from their body with a heightened, vast sense of consciousness and recognition that they’re dying
• They “travel” to a different location
• A meaningful and purposeful review of their life, involving a critical analysis of all their past actions — basically, their life flashes before their eyes
• Going to a place that feels like “home”
• Returning back to life

Hallucinatory phenomena aren't so consistent over diverse individuals nor do they usually trigger a positive and long-term psychological transformation in the person, but hallucinations do.

One aspect of the study that might bear on whether these experiences are truly out-of-body or whether they're explicable in terms of a still functioning but flat-lined brain is that, according to one of the researchers, “...brain cells do not become irreversibly damaged within minutes of oxygen deprivation when the heart stops. Instead, they ‘die’ over hours of time.”

In any case, as NDEs become more widely studied and as medical technology allows the resuscitation of more people whose bodies die, it will be interesting to see whether the evidence continues to lead away from a materialist explanation of the human person or whether it will lend increasing support to the view that we have a mind or soul and that our existence continues beyond our physical death.

For more on this topic see here.

An Awkward Relationship with Truth

President Trump had a reputation for saying things that simply failed to correspond to reality, and many people thought President Biden would bring to the White House a welcome change in this regard.

Boy, were they mistaken. In the prevarication sweepstakes it's hard to say which of the two men is the frontrunner, but given that we're only sixteen months into the Biden tenure, it seems safe to say that by the time he's done in office, old Joe will be the undisputed GOAT among presidential taradiddlers.

Jim Geraghty documents some of Mr. Biden's more egregious affronts against the truth:

By the time Omicron arrived and as runaway inflation had become the most pressing problem facing the country, Americans had heard a lot of assurances from President Biden that the problems on Americans’ minds weren’t as bad as they looked, or would be short lived, or that he and his team had everything under control.

• “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”
• “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist. That’s totally different.”
• “I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, who is better trained, better equipped, and more re- — more competent in terms of conducting war.”
• “The Taliban is not the south — the North Vietnamese army. They’re not — they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability. There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy in the — of the United States from Afghanistan.”

It wasn’t just that Biden’ pledges and promises were contradicted by subsequent events; it’s that the contradiction came quickly, indisputably, vividly, and memorably. It is as if the weatherman assured you that it wouldn’t rain, and then you survived a hurricane.

Under Biden, long-simmering problems like the border, or crime, suddenly take a turn for the much worse, while the seemingly oblivious president tells his favorite not-quite-true story of riding a million miles on Amtrak for the 30th time.

In the past year, Biden has claimed he used to drive a tractor-trailer; that he was arrested during the civil-rights movement; that “for four years, I was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania” (he never taught a class and was paid nearly $1 million to be a guest lecturer); that, “during the Six-Day War,” former Israeli prime minster Golda Meir wanted him to be her “liaison between she and the Egyptians about the Suez”; and that he nearly hit a home run in the congressional softball game (he grounded out and struck out).

Is Biden senile? The problem in attempting to answer this question is that it’s hard to separate a near-octogenarian’s failing memory with Biden’s long history of exaggerations, half-truths, and lies.

As David Harsanyi tracked, in previous years Biden claimed to have been shot at, participated in sit-ins, represented the Black Panthers in court, and attended law school on a full academic scholarship, and he also claimed that everyone on Capitol Hill calls him “Middle Class Joe” as a derisive nickname — claims that either have no corroborating evidence or have been proven false.

Geraghty links to all of this in his column so you should go there if you want to follow up on some of his claims.

Whether senility is the appropriate diagnosis or not, Mr. Biden is clearly confused, which is quite alarming given that he's ostensibly the most powerful man in the world. After a recent speech, for example, he appears to attempt to shake hands with someone who's not there:

The suspicion is growing that someone else, or perhaps several others, are making decisions for him and that he's just a figurehead. Geraghty hints at this when he notes that:

On any given day, Biden can say something that his staff later emphatically insists is not his administration’s policy or position.

Just recently we have been informed that Biden’s shouting “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” does not mean that the Biden administration believes Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power, and that Biden’s repeated declaration that Putin is committing genocide does not mean that the Biden administration is accusing Vladimir Putin of committing genocide.

We are stuck with a president who does not speak on behalf of his own administration.

Little wonder that his approval ratings are about as dismal as these things can possibly be.

John Updike's Meditation on the Resurrection

The American novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was not only a great writer, he was something of a paradox. The recipient of two Pulitzers and many other prestigious awards, he wrote stories that some consider at least mildly pornographic, stories which reflect his own marital infidelities, but despite his flaws he seems nevertheless to have been devoutly Christian.

A poem he wrote in 1960 titled Seven Stanzas at Easter reflects his piety. Updike makes the point that if one is a believer he/she should really believe. No wishy-washy liberal protestantism for him. The resurrection of Christ was either an actual, historical, physical return to life of a man who had been actually, historically, physically dead or else the whole story doesn't really matter at all.

None of this "Jesus' body actually, permanently decomposed, but he rose in the sense that his spirit lived on in the hearts of his followers" nonsense for Updike. Either it happened objectively, literally, physically or Christianity is a fraud.

About that he was surely correct. As the Apostle Paul wrote (I Cor. 15:16-20):

If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have only hoped in Christ in this life, we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. (italics mine)

Here's Updike's poem:

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Best wishes to all my readers for a very meaningful Resurrection Day tomorrow.

An Allegory for Good Friday

As Christians observe this the most solemn day of the church year, the day traditionally called Good Friday, it might be helpful for both Christians and non-Christians alike to reflect on one aspect, though certainly not the only aspect, of the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus.

We might facilitate this reflection by means of an allegory, not an allegory in words but in a 30 minute film.

The video isn't in English so it's subtitled. It also may not be easy to understand what's going on in the beginning, but as the story unfolds it becomes clear enough. It's very powerful, very emotional, and sensitive viewers are cautioned. For those who have eyes to see, it dramatically portrays something of what happened behind the scenes, as it were, on Golgotha.

It might be good today to spend some time contemplating the father, his son and who those people on the train were and are.