Mr. Biden's Latest

Former President Trump has a penchant for making life much more difficult for himself than it needs to be. As is well-known he's currently in hot water for having stored documents classified Top Secret at his home in Mar-a-Lago. It's a crime for anyone to have classified documents in a private residence or office, and it's a much greater offense if the offender is a Republican. It's a crime against humanity if the miscreant is Donald Trump.

Bill Clinton's former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, was caught in 2003 pirating documents out of the National Archives in his socks, documents he subsequently destoyed, and received little more than a couple of "naughty, naughtys" from the authorities. Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, was discovered to have classified material on her phone and home internet server. She professed girlish naivete, was subjected to a bit of finger-wagging by the FBI, and sent on her merry way.

Donald Trump, however, is being threatened with a prison sentence.

Mr. Trump's successor in the White House, Joe Biden, went on 60 Minutes in late September and asked, with righteous indignation, how anyone, meaning Mr. Trump, could possibly be so irresponsible as to take classified information out of a government facility. To do so, Mr. Biden implied, is the zenith of recklessness and foolhardiness.

Now we learn that the self-righteous Mr. Biden has himself been stashing Top Secret documents willy-nilly about his various private offices and residences like a squirrel storing up acorns for the winter. Mr. Trump must be gloating.

Jim Geraghty provides a few details:

Back on November 2, 2022 — before the midterm elections — one of Biden’s personal lawyers, Patrick Moore, was at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located in D.C., going through old papers from Biden’s time as vice president.

We haven’t gotten much of an explanation as to why, two years into Biden’s presidency, this was happening. Did the coverage of former president Donald Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago spur someone on Biden’s team to worry that classified documents had gotten mixed in with Biden’s non-classified personal papers?

Did that make one or more of Biden’s staffers belatedly realize they had likely demonstrated the same irresponsibility?

The Washington Post reports, quoting people familiar with the matter, that “some of the classified material found in the Biden Penn Center office was marked top secret.”

Recall that the presence of security at a location, whether in the form of security guards, locks, or the U.S. Secret Service, does not mean it is considered secure for the storage of classified information. Classified documents are not supposed to leave government buildings, period.

Then, according to Attorney General Merrick Garland, on December 20, President Biden’s personal counsel notified U.S. Attorney John Lausch that additional documents bearing classification markings were identified in the garage of the president’s private residence in Wilmington, Del.

And this past weekend, President Biden’s lawyers found six more pages of documents with classification markings at the Wilmington residence.

The argument from the Biden team is that this situation is completely different from former president Trump’s because the current president and his people aren’t hiding anything. And yet, these documents were found before the midterms, and no one revealed any of this to the public until January 9.

What affect this will have on Mr. Biden's presidency is uncertain, but it doesn't help any politician when at worst they look like a criminal and at best they look like a buffoon.

The News for Russia Is Pretty Bad

What with all of the news here at home about President Biden's sundry pratfalls a lot of folks have lost track of what's happening in the Russia/Ukraine war. Here's an update courtesy of Strategy Page:

Russia is desperate for some good news out of Ukraine, where Russian forces have suffered one failure after another.

Sensing an opportunity, Russian forces have suffered heavy casualties trying to push Ukrainian forces out of a few key locations in the Donetsk province, which is part of Russian occupied Donbas. Russia has been using Wagner Group mercenaries for most of the attacks because these troops are more effectively led and willing to continue making seemingly suicidal attacks on Ukrainian forces.

The Ukrainian defenders are special operations troops whose orders are to inflict maximum casualties on the attacker while minimizing enemy advances and Ukrainian casualties.

December 28, 2022: Ukraine reported that at least 620 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded on the 25th. Many of the wounded have since died because Russia still lacks sufficient medical facilities inside Ukraine and lacks the transportation resources to fly casualties to better medical facilities in Russia.

Since the invasion began, 102,000 Russian troops have been killed, wounded or reported missing. Ukraine reports a growing number of Russian soldiers surrendering or deserting. These are often returned in prisoner exchanges.

A growing number of Russian prisoners of war resist being part of these exchanges because they deliberately deserted and face prosecution and prison if they return to Russia. Some of the Russian soldiers who were legitimate prisoners were prosecuted after being exchanged because the Russian government wanted more former prisoners jailed to discourage surrendering.

The current state of the Russian military cannot support any Russian military objectives in Ukraine, or anywhere else. What Russia lost in Ukraine will take years to replace. For example, most of the infantry officers the army had in 2021 have already been killed, captured or disabled in Ukraine.

There were no replacements for the lost infantry officers so Russia tried calling up retired officers and transferring non-infantry officers to lead infantry units. That did not work.

Another problem is the lack of NCOs (Non-Commissioned Officers). These have been a staple of Western armies for centuries and are often capable of replacing infantry officers lost in combat. Russia abolished NCOs a century ago and has not been able to rebuild that after more than a decade of trying.

Any New Russian Army will take years to create and currently the loss of officers and experienced soldiers has Russia depending on Belarussian instructors to train new Russian troops. This is done in Belarus to the extent possible because Belarus’s tiny army has much smaller training capability than the pre-2022 Russian army.

Almost all new troops in Russia get no training at all and are just given uniforms, assault rifles and transportation to Ukraine where they find few officers to lead them and not much in the way of supplies, especially food, to sustain them. Because of the dismal current situation, the announcement of a new Russian Army is seen as a morale building exercise for pro-war Russians and the few army personnel who still support the war.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine almost one year ago is on track to be one of the greatest military blunders in history, certainly since WWII. That he can survive this decision and the damage and humiliation that has been wrought on the Russian military because of it grows more unlikely with every passing month.

The Socratic Method

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herrick continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On MLK Day

One of the differences between Martin Luther King's approach to the race problem and that of many of those who celebrate him today is that many of our contemporaries see racial guilt as a collective stain whereas King saw it as individual and color-blind. To paraphrase Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the guilt for crimes of the past runs not through races nor through nationalities but through every individual human heart.

The collective view, that whites, for example, share moral responsibility for what other whites did to blacks in the past, is implicit in demands for reparations and other racial preferences, but it's nonsensical.

Suppose you are of English descent and you read about how some Englishman two hundred years ago committed some atrocity against a Frenchman, would you feel that you personally owed contemporary French some sort of apology?

Suppose you are a male and you read about the horrific murder of four Idaho college students by Bryan Kohberger, another male. Would you feel that you are somehow responsible because you shared the same gender as Mr. Kohberger?

Would you feel some shared responsibility if your name was also Bryan? What if your surname just by happenstance was Kohberger? How much guilt would you bear for the Idaho murders?

If you think you would indeed be in some sense responsible, why do you? And if you think it absurd to claim that you are in any way responsible, that one's nationality or gender or surname do not make someone guilty for crimes committed by others who have those things in common with you, why is your race uniquely different?

Specifically, why are whites collectively expected to repent for what other whites did to blacks two hundred years ago?

Does a black man in Philadelphia share guilt when a black man in Los Angeles murders a white man? If a black man's great, great grandfather murdered a white man's great, great grandfather, does the contemporary black man bear guilt for the crime?

If your brother commits a crime and is sent to prison is it just to imprison you as well if you had no part in the crime?

No one today is guilty for what people of their same race did to others a century or more ago. Guilt is individual, not collective. We'll have a much healthier, cohesive society when everyone follows Martin Luther King's example and acknowledges that simple fact.

Reversing the Aging Process

I thought this CNN article was quackery when I first saw the headline but reading the article convinced me that it's actually legitimate science.

David Sinclair, a professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research is working on reversing the aging process and has enjoyed some success with mice that will be published soon in the journal Cell.

A brief summary of the article goes like this: There are control molecules all along the strands of DNA which turn our genes on and off as well as repair them. Environmental factors like diet, pollution, chronic lack of sleep, etc. can affect the operation of these molecules so that our genes get damaged and the information contained in our genes gets corrupted, much like the information on a computer hard drive can be corrupted.

Amazingly, though, our cells apparently have the ability to reset the genes to an earlier, younger state, and research is being conducted to discover the trigger for this rest function.

Here are some highlights from the CNN piece:

“The astonishing finding is that there’s a backup copy of the software in the body that you can reset,” Sinclair said. “We’re showing why that software gets corrupted and how we can reboot the system by tapping into a reset switch that restores the cell’s ability to read the genome correctly again, as if it was young.”

It doesn’t matter if the body is 50 or 75, healthy or wracked with disease, Sinclair said. Once that process has been triggered, “the body will then remember how to regenerate and will be young again, even if you’re already old and have an illness. Now, what that software is, we don’t know yet. At this point, we just know that we can flip the switch.”

Sinclair Lab geneticist Yuancheng Lu created a mixture of three of four “Yamanaka factors,” human adult skin cells that have been reprogrammed to behave like embryonic or pluripotent stem cells, capable of developing into any cell in the body.

The cocktail was injected into damaged retinal ganglion cells at the back of the eyes of blind mice....The mice regained most of their eyesight.

Next, the team tackled brain, muscle and kidney cells, and restored those to much younger levels, according to the study.

“One of our breakthroughs was to realize that if you use this particular set of three pluripotent stem cells, the mice don’t go back to age zero, which would cause cancer or worse,” Sinclair said.

“Instead, the cells go back to between 50% and 75% of the original age, and they stop and don’t get any younger, which is lucky. How the cells know to do that, we don’t yet understand.”

Today, Sinclair’s team is trying to find a way to deliver the genetic switch evenly to each cell, thus rejuvenating the entire mouse at once.

What’s next? Billions of dollars are being poured into anti-aging, funding all sorts of methods to turn back the clock.

In his lab, Sinclair said his team has reset the cells in mice multiple times, showing that aging can be reversed more than once, and he is currently testing the genetic reset in primates.

All of that is fascinating, of course, but there's a downside as well:

But decades could pass before any anti-aging clinical trials in humans begin, get analyzed and, if safe and successful, scaled to the mass needed for federal approval.

Anyway, there's an interesting theological corollary to this work. Skeptics have long scoffed at reports in the Biblical book of Genesis of ancient people living for many centuries, but if environment plays a role in maintaining the integrity of the epigenome, if environmental changes can degrade our DNA, then long life spans in the pristine earth should not be surprising.

Then, as Genesis relates, after the occurrence of a global catastrophe the ages of the ancients went into a sudden decline which would again fit with Sinclair's theory of environmental changes corrupting DNA.

Maybe those old narratives aren't just legends and myths after all.

What Good Has Christianity Ever Done for Us?

In his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, atheistic historian Tom Holland observes that all that we cherish as goods in the West - our belief in human equality, human dignity regardless of gender or age, justice for all regardless of station, the trustworthiness of our reason as a guide to truth - all of these and more are the fruits of two millenia of Christianity, and to the extent they exist anywhere else on the globe it's due to the influence of Christianity.

Another atheist, philosopher Jürgen Habermas, once stated that,

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

I was reminded of Holland and Habermas - and others who've made similar observations - when reading the 2022 Erasmus Lecture (paywall) sponsored by the journal First Things and delivered by Anthony Fisher.

At one point in his talk Fisher cites a scene from an old Monty Python film, Life of Brian:

In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, John Cleese plays Reg, a member of the People’s Front of Judea. In a terrorist cell meeting, Reg asks rhetorically: “What have the Romans ever done for us?” His fellows respond with example after example of the benefits of Roman civilization.

“All right, all right,” Reg concedes. “But apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

For all the historical ignorance, revolutionary fantasies, and plain ingratitude of modernity, the debt of Western civilization to Christianity is much greater.

All right, all right. But apart from the sanity that sanctity brings to a world of sin; the building of hospitals, hospices, and leprosaria; the creation of the university and the most comprehensive primary, secondary, and tertiary school system in the world; the endowment and staffing of orphanages, aged-care homes, and other welfare institutions—apart from those things, what [has Christianity] ever done for us?

Apart from ending human sacrifice, cannibalism, slavery, infanticide, and the chattel conception of women and children; the explication of a sublime moral code and vision of the virtuous person; the shaping of our language and discourse; the promotion of literacy, printing, and libraries; the sponsorship of much science, medicine, and technology, and of traditions of art, music, literature, and architecture; the development of much of Western common, civil, and constitutional law; and the establishment of a corpus of theological and philosophical thought that has provided metaphysical grounding for our politics and so much else—apart from all that, our secular antagonist presses, what have the [Christians] ever done for us?

The point made by Holland, Habermas and Fisher is that so much that we take for granted in the West we would not have ever had were it not for the Christian worldview that began 2000 years ago and has largely influenced the West for the last 1700 years.

It's good to remember this when people take Christianity to task for the sins of the Church. It's also edifying to ask on what other moral grounds would anyone be able to assert that the Church was wrong to, say, torture and burn people at the stake during the Inquisition or more recently for clergy to sexually abuse boys, or to commit any of the other crimes, real or imagined, imputed to the Church.

Take away the Christian understanding of the dignity of the person created in the image of God, take away the Christian understanding of human rights and what foundation is the critic standing on to criticize or condemn Christianity?

Certainly none of the offenses mentioned above would've been considered morally reprehensible in ancient Greece, Rome or Egypt. None of them would be thought to be wrong under Hindu morality or under strict Islamic law or according to the moral practices of the Orient.

The critic's moral judgment upon Christianity is unwittingly based on the residuum of two thousand years of Christian teaching that the critic has absorbed and adopted without even realizing it. He rejects Christianity while oblivious to the fact that apart from Christianity he has no basis for whatever moral beliefs he brings to bear to discredit Christianity and the Church.

To their credit, Holland and Habermas recognize this and acknowledge it which causes one to wonder why they don't abandon their atheism and become Christians.

They might claim that they just can't bring themselves to believe Christianity is true, but that would be a very odd response. It would mean that they're basing their whole way of life on principles they believe to ultimately be arbitrary and false, even as they celebrate those principles.

Why would anyone knowingly do such a thing?

From Head Transplants to Brain Transplants

In the past I've written about the work of Sergio Canavero, an Italian neurosurgeon who was attempting to perform full head transplants (HT), taking a viable head from a dying body and affixing it to a viable body with a dying brain.

For the past few years he's been working in China where there's less squeamishness in the government about such experiments, and although he claims that the procedure works, he's been unable to present verification of his claims.

Now comes word that Canavero is working on a much more complicated surgery - brain transplants (BT):

In 2017,... Canavero and Chinese colleague Xiaoping Ren [reported] a head transplant rehearsal with human cadavers. A live volunteer subject, a Russian man with a genetic degenerative muscle atrophying disease, pulled out of the planned procedure in 2019.

Also in that year, ... Canavero and Ren ... reported a successful spinal cord repair in animals.

Canavero told Motherboard he’s not free “to talk about the HT project that unfolded in China, other than saying it works.”

In his latest paper [see here] —which is co-edited by himself and Ren—Canavero describes how to theoretically remove one person’s brain to place it into the skull of either a clone or a donated and brain-dead “immunoconditioned” body.

In addition to describing a “robotic scoop with retractable tines” that would pluck the brains from their skulls, Canavero also provides possible solutions to several outstanding questions surrounding brain transplants, including nerve and vascular reconnection methods.

“The unavailability of technologies that can successfully rejuvenate an aged body suggests that it is time to explore other options,” the paper notes. “Contrary to common lore, a full BT is achievable, at least theoretically.

Of course, further extensive cadaveric rehearsals will be necessary, followed by tests in brain-dead organ donors (as e.g., done recently in kidney xenotransplants). New surgical tools will have to be developed. With appropriate funding, a long-held dream may finally come true.”

But an HT is much simpler than a BT. Why undertake the more difficult procedure?

Canavero makes the point that putting an aging head with sagging skin, fading eyesight, hearing, teeth, etc. on a younger body doesn't allow the patient to enjoy the full benefit of the more youthful body. Transplanting the brain into the complete body would be more desirable:

The ultimate goal of such a procedure would be to extend the number of years a person could enjoy living in a “pristine body,” Canavero writes in his paper.

....Problematic or not, there is big interest in extending human life, and an entire branch of science and pseudoscience dedicated to “transhumanism” and life extension, including among Silicon Valley elite. These methods include everything from taking specific substances to “young blood” transfusions, cryogenics, and attempts to recreate humans as immortal AI.

Some of my students have objected to such a procedure on ethical grounds. In their opinion, transplanting a head or brain is more morally problematic than transplanting a heart or liver.

Whatever the validity of the ethical objections may be, one question that a BT raises is who, exactly, is the recipient after he or she has received the new brain?

Is the recipient now the person whose brain he/she has received or is the recipient the same person with a new brain, just as patients who receive a new heart are still the same person they were before they received the heart?

Or is the recipient a new person altogether?

Where does "personhood" reside, anyway? In the brain or in the body? Or both?

If you believe individuals have a mind and/or a soul does the BT recipient now have a new mind or soul? If the individual whose brain has been donated had committed a crime or owed a debt is the recipient now liable for those?

If the recipient was married are they still married to the same spouse after the procedure?

Canavero has yet to show that what he proposes can be actually be done, but assuming that it can, it raises perplexing philosophical questions in the matter of personal identity.

What the HFC Won

The Republican House members had a lot of difficulty electing Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker of the House last week, finally getting him the necessary 218 votes to secure a majority and win the gavel after fifteen ballots.

McCarthy needed 218 votes to gain a majority of the House members in order to be elected, but there are only 221 GOP members and twenty of the conservative members refused to vote for McCarthy, so McCarthy had to cut some deals in order to get their votes.

The conservatives, members of what's known as the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), refused to add their votes to McCarthy's total until they were able to wrangle from him guarantees that he would initiate a number of reforms in the House rules and procedures that conservatives have pressed for for years, but which the Democrat Congress under Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to give them.

Finally, after four days of voting, the HFC got assurances for most of what they wanted and what this cadre of conservatives won will make the House of Representatives a much more functional body. And despite their mockery of the Republicans' days-long inability to elect a Speaker, many Democrats and much of the liberal media know that the House will be a better institution for the concessions the HFC won.

Emily Jashinsky at The Federalist provides us with an outline of what the HFC reforms will entail:

• As has been reported, it will only take a single congressperson, acting in what is known as a Jeffersonian Motion, to move to remove the speaker if he or she goes back on their word or policy agenda.
• A ... committee will be convened to look into the weaponization of the FBI and other government organizations (presumably the CIA) against the American people.
• Term limits will be put up for a vote.
• Bills presented to Congress will be single subject, not omnibus with all the attendant earmarks, and there will be a 72-hour minimum period to read them.
• The Texas Border Plan will be put before Congress. From [the website] The Hill: ‘The four-pronged plan aims to ‘Complete Physical Border Infrastructure,’ ‘Fix Border Enforcement Policies,’ ‘Enforce our Laws in the Interior’ and ‘Target Cartels & Criminal Organizations.’’
• COVID mandates will be ended, as will all funding for them, including so-called emergency funding.
• Budget bills would stop the endless increases in the debt ceiling and hold the Senate accountable for the same.

These are good initial steps toward making Congress a body that serves the interests of the American people rather than a body that serves the interests of its members, and we should thank the Freedom Caucus for their resolve in not bending to the pressure they were put under by the media, and indeed their fellow Republicans, until they won this agreement.

Power and Anger

Columnist David French laments how today's conservatives seem to have evolved from the hope and freedom of the William F. Buckley/Ronald Reagan years to the power and anger era of the Donald Trump/Marjorie Taylor Green era.

He doesn't put it in quite those terms, but he's correct that there's a lot of anger on the right today than there once was. It might be worthwhile, however, to spend a little time exploring precisely why this is. What has happened over the past five or six decades that animates those who believe that dialogue and compromise are no longer efficacious and must be shelved in favor of the pursuit of political power and the exercise of political partisanship?

Quite clearly, it seems to me, many on the right have come to recognize both how the left has been waging the cultural/political war for at least a century, and they've come to believe that the left's goal is not merely to make the U.S. a better country but to tear it down altogether.

If this seems too strong consider that theoreticians of the left like Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals) and Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Tolerance), as well as many lesser figures, have openly acknowledged this as their goal.

The left wages the struggle by capturing the nation's cultural institutions, particularly the media, the academy, the bureaucracy and the courts, turning the latter two into legislatures which the people are largely powerless to influence.

The right sees the decline of our culture as the result of a purposeful effort by the left to create atomized individuals, moral chaos, and to realize the supremacy of their own power. The pattern is similar to that followed by almost every tyrant and totalitarian since the latter half of the 19th century. In fact, the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote presciently about it in his novel The Demons (1871).

In any case, conservatives see all this as profoundly unjust. The left's ideas are being forced upon the people, and the people feel helpless against that imposition. This impotence breeds fear and frustration, and fear and frustration breed anger and a desire for power to offset the perceived threats to the culture, traditions and moral health of the nation.

So, French is correct that the right seems to be angrier than it was in the Reagan years (when the left was mocking Reagan as an "amiable dunce" and "war-monger").

He's correct that the right is angrier today after a highly qualified Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork, was humiliated and rejected by Democrats in the early nineties, and other nominees since, e.g. Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have had their reputations sullied in the left's all-out attempt to destroy them and their nominations because they were perceived as threats to the left's arrogation of power.

He's correct that the right is angrier today than it was sixty years ago when they could send their children to school without having them indoctrinated into the left's sexual, racial and climatological agenda.

He's correct that the right gets angry today when they're told, on pain of being labelled bigots, that they have to believe that men can get pregnant, that males and females should share private spaces like lavatories and locker rooms and that their daughters should be compelled to compete in sports against physically superior males. They're angry, too, that their children are being taught that they're racists by virtue of being white and that they're headed for a climate Armageddon in their lifetimes.

He's correct that it makes many on the right angry when they see a president sworn to uphold the law do nothing about the flood of illegal migrants across our southern border, when they see leftist prosecutors sworn to enforce the law releasing criminals back on to the streets, when they see January 6th rioters given years-long sentences for trespassing while rioters in 2021 who destroyed millions of dollars worth of property and murdered over thirty people have not even been prosecuted, and were even allowed to take over substantial chunks of a couple of major cities.

He's correct that the right is angrier today as they witness our country spending trillions of dollars we don't have, much of it on pork, and saddling our grandchildren with a debt that'll seriously undermine their future standard of living.

He's correct that the right is angry when they see peoples' livelihoods destroyed by arbitrary, capricious and foolish regulations such as school closures, vaccine mandates and pipeline cancellations.

He's correct that the right is angrier today than it was decades ago when one had the freedom to voice one's opinions without fear of losing one's employment, or being "doxxed" or having one's children harassed and vilified at school.

He's correct that the right is angrier today than a few decades ago when folks on the left weren't demanding unjust reparations and racial and gender preferences, when no one was demanding that they forfeit their 2nd amendment right to defend themselves and their families, and when hostility toward Christianity and Judaism (but, strangely, not toward Islam) was not a fact of everyday experience.

The left has all but completed their "long march through the institutions" and their century long program to "fundamentally transform" the country, as Barack Obama once put it, so, I agree with French that the right today is angrier than it used to be.

The anger may be regrettable, but it's certainly understandable. Noting that it exists is important, I suppose, but more important is understanding why it exists.

Common Misconceptions about the Crusades

It's common to hear people cite the Crusades as a terrible debacle and a stain on the history of Christian Europe, and while there definitely were horrible atrocities committed by some undisciplined mobs, especially against the Jews in the Rhine valley of Germany, the history of the Crusades is much more complex than some history textbooks would have us believe.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Crusades, and the belief that they were unprovoked attacks against innocent Muslims who were minding their own business in the faraway Middle East is one of them.

Steve Weidenkopf had an article at Crisis Magazine a few years back titled Crash Course on the Crusades in which he lamented the historical distortions and fabrications about the Crusades in the popular culture. He began his essay with this lede:

The Crusades are one of the most misunderstood events in Western and Church history. The very word “crusades” conjures negative images in our modern world of bloodthirsty and greedy European nobles embarked on a conquest of peaceful Muslims.

The Crusades are considered by many to be one of the “sins” the Christian Faith has committed against humanity, and together with the Inquisition the two comprise the go-to cudgels for bashing the Church.

While the mocking and generally nasty portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders on the big screen ranges from Monty Python farce to the cringe-worthy big budget spectacles like Kingdom of Heaven (2005), it is the biased and bad scholarship such as Steven Runciman’s History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones (of Monty Python acclaim) that does real damage.

From academia to pop-culture, the message is reinforced and driven home with resounding force: the Crusades were bad and obviously so. The real story is of course far more complicated and far more interesting.

It is worth our time to be versed in the facts and especially to recall the tremendous faith, sacrifice, and courage that inspired the vast majority of the Crusaders to act in defense of Christendom.

Weidenkopf then sought to set the record straight by debunking the following five myths:

• The Crusades were wars of unprovoked aggression.
• The Crusades were about European greed for booty, plunder and the establishment of colonies.
• When Jerusalem was captured in 1099 the crusaders killed all the inhabitants – so many were killed that the blood flowed ankle deep through the city.
• The Crusades were also wars against the Jews and should be considered the first Holocaust.
• The Crusades are the source of the modern tension between Islam and the West.

None of these beliefs, despite being widely held, is true, or at least not the whole truth. I encourage readers to go to Weidenkopf's article and read what he says about each of them. As you might expect, the actual history is much more complex and far less damning of the Crusaders than it has been portrayed by those who wish to grind anti-Catholic axes.

For those looking for an excellent and very readable book on this topic I highly recommend God's Battalions by Rodney Stark and Sword and Scimitar by Raymond Ibrahim.

Infinity As Theological Metaphor

A short piece in the Wall Street Journal by a lawyer named Mike Kerrigan does a lovely job of tying together the mathematical concept of infinity with a couple of theological ideas.

Kerrigan mentions that his son Joe is a senior math major in college and that over dinner recently Joe was discussing the concept of infinity:

He said that between integers—say, 1 and 2—there are infinitely many real numbers, like 1.1 and 1.265. Such thinking scared me straight into law school at his age, yet somehow I grasped it now, if only conceptually.

“Like the Incarnation,” I offered. An instance of the Creator, while remaining fully God and fully man, entering into his creation: the infinite bounded by the finite.

“I suppose,” Joe answered, checking my catechism against his set theory. Then he said something even trippier.

Although whole numbers can be listed out to infinity, the hypothetical list of real numbers is necessarily larger than the hypothetical list of whole numbers. Not all infinities are equal.

Infinity and infinity-plus? Had that notion entered my mind in college, I’d have reclined in darkness with a cold compress on my head. I didn’t get the underlying math but, thinking I understood the broader concept, parried with another analogy: “Like higher and lower degrees of heavenly perfection.”

Long ago I’d accepted how a shotgun shack in heaven’s outermost borough was good enough for a sinner like me. Joe concurred, and when he did, I was relieved.

The rest of the article is an amusing read although you may need a subscription to access it.

In any case, it highlights an interesting point about mathematics - at it's most arcane and abstract it gives us insight into the nature of the Creator.

We gain similar insight in quantum physics where, to take just one example, we learn that the light of our everyday experience behaves as a wave and also as a particle, and which it shows itself as depends on the nature of the observation that we make of it.

It seems paradoxical to think that light can be an immaterial wave and a material particle at the same time, just as it seems paradoxical that God can be God and human at the same time. Yet the former is a truth of physics and the latter a truth of Christian theology.

The nature of light, like infinity, teaches us something very interesting and important about the nature of God.

Necessitists and Contingentists

Philosopher/theologian William Lane Craig writing on Origin of Life researchers:

One interesting thing about origin-of-life research is that scientists tend to divide into two camps on this subject: what I would call necessitists and contingentists.

Necessitists claim that given the laws of nature, the origin of life from chemicals is inevitable. Life is necessary, not in the logical sense, but in the nomological sense, that is, the laws of nature make it unavoidable that life will originate.

By contrast, contingentists maintain that the origin of life is an enormous accident, an event so improbable that it is unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the observable universe. The sufficient conditions for the origin of life on Earth just happened to come together against all odds.

The contingentists criticize the necessitists as holding to a sort of closet theism: a God has written the origin of life into the very laws of nature. The necessitists accuse the contingentists of making the origin of life into a miracle.

So both sides accuse each other of holding surreptitiously to belief in God—which is the mortal sin in these discussions!

Realizing this distinction between necessitists and contingentists helps us to understand why some scientists speak so confidently about the inevitability of the origin of life from chemicals: they are committed to the view that life is necessary, even though there is no scientific evidence for this claim.

Instead, most researchers recognize that the origin of life on Earth is a highly improbable, singular event.

The Necessitists put their faith in the existence of laws which, as far as we know, have never been discovered whereas Contingentists put their faith in pure chance and serendipity.

If blind faith is belief in something for which there is no evidence then both Necessitists and Contingentists must possess an extraordinary amount of blind faith.

Dissenters from Darwinism

One of the top stories in theoretical biology in 2022 is the growing schism between traditional Darwinian evolutionists and those biologists who are growing increasingly disenchanted with the ability of the standard Darwinian model to explain the data.

The standard model states that all living things have descended from a simple original cell over vast periods of time through genetic mutation, natural selection and genetic drift. But that model is coming under increasing skepticism from within the biological community.

The dissension gained public notice when science journalist Stephen Buranyi did a piece last summer in The Guardian in which he outlined the problems facing the traditional view. David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has a summary of Buranyi's lengthy article which can be read in its entirety here.

Klinghoffer observes that, "The headline from the left-leaning British daily asks, “Do we need a new theory of evolution?” Answer in one word: yes. The article is full of scandalous admissions."

He then adds this quote from Buranyi's column in which he highlights in boldface some of those "scandalous admissions" of which most people in the public and students in the nation's biology classrooms are completely unaware:

Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection….

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. 

And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance.

But how exactly these processes interact — and whether other forces might also be at work — has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”…

[T]his is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline.

“The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up.

Klinghoffer comments:

“Absurdly crude and misleading”? A “classic idea” that “has so far fallen flat”? “A fairytale we need to finally give up”? Scientists locked in a desperate struggle for “professional recognition and status”? What about for the truth?

The problem, at least in large part, is that most scientists work on the assumption of materialism. They cannot, or will not, allow for any explanations that involve non-natural, non-physical forces or interventions. This commitment to materialism was famously articulated by biologist Richard Lewontin:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

As long as the operation of a mind is ruled out a priori biologists are going to struggle to make sense of life. The words of the early 20th century philosopher/psychologist William James come to mind in this context:

A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.

The refusal to allow the possibility of intelligent agency as a biological explanation is a good example of what James was talking about.

Religion, Race and Damar Hamlin

Monday night when Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest during the NFL game between the Buffalo Bills and the Cincinnati Bengals two things happened that revealed something illuminating about our society:

1. Despite being inculcated with the message that our society is growing increasingly and irreversibly secularized the word "prayer" was on a lot of lips during Hamlin's struggle for life, and many actually turned to it, both on and off the field.

People who never heard of Damar Hamlin before his collapse prayed for him. Despite what people say and how they live, more people seem to actually believe in the existence of a personal God who answers prayer than will admit to it.

Secularism offers no hope to people, and the prayers for Hamlin were, in fact, a repudiation of a worldview that has nothing to offer but hopelessness.

2. Counting hospital staff, team doctors, trainers and EMTs probably a couple dozen people worked feverishly to save the life of this black man. Most, if not all, of them were white as doubtless were a significant portion of the hundreds of thousands who prayed for him.

Will the media note that? They should even though it doesn't fit the prevailing progressive narrative of a deeply racist country filled with whites who are inherently racist just by virtue of being white.

Perhaps our society is not as far gone as some of us have feared and others have hoped.

Hume's Objection

One of the objections to the argument for God's existence based on the apparent design of the universe was first presented by Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776) in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

In Hume's day the argument from design was often couched in the form of an analogy. The way the universe is structured and works is like a great machine and just as machines are the product of intelligent engineers it's reasonable to assume that the universe is also the product of an intelligent "engineer."

Hume disagreed. He argued that when we see a machine we conclude that it was designed by an intelligent engineer because we have knowledge of other machines which we know to have been designed by intelligent agents. The universe, however, is unique. There's no other universe to which we can compare it and therefore we can say nothing about how it came to be.

We can conclude that this piece of lead will melt at 621 degrees F because there are other pieces of lead whose properties have been studied and we are justified in assuming that this piece of lead is like those pieces.

But as far as we know this universe is the only universe there is so we have nothing else to compare it to. It's unique and therefore we are not justified in analogizing it to anything else.

Hume's argument, however, is unconvincing. As Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne writes,

[Hume's] objection has the surprising ...consequence that [scientists] cannot reach justified conclusions about such matters as the size, age, rate of expansion, and density of the universe as a whole (because it is a unique object); and also that [scientists] cannot reach conclusions about the origin and development of the human race (because as far as our knowledge goes, it's the only one of it's kind)....uniqueness is relative to description. Every object is unique under some description.

Indeed, each human being is in some ways unique and thus, on Hume's argument, cannot be analogized to anything else, but this is silly. Every object has properties similar to other objects - size, mass, inertia, etc. - and the universe is an object in many ways similar to the objects it contains.

Like other objects it has size, mass, density, age, temperature, and so on and can thus be analogized to other objects.

When we study the properties of the universe and find that they are fine-tuned with such extraordinary precision that had they deviated from their actual value by the most infinitesimal amounts the universe either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be a suitable haven for life anywhere within it, we're overwhelmed with the sense that this state of affairs cannot be just luck.

To believe it is luck is similar to believing that a roulette wheel that lands on the same number a 100 times in a row did so just by chance.

Nothing else in our experience that has the degree of precision (if anything else does) of the dozens of basic parameters and constants of the universe (e.g. the strength of gravity or the force of electromagnetic repulsion) is ever believed to have arisen by chance. It's existence is always imputed to an intelligent mind.

Thus, contra Hume, it's reasonable to assume that the universe is also the product, not of chance, but of an intelligent mind.

"Hatred Is the Foundation of Our Religion"

In a column at PJ Media Raymond Ibrahim, a historian and expert on Islam, observes that one of the differences between Islam, Christianity and Judaism is that the latter two religions are predicated on love - love for one's God, one's neighbor, even one's enemy - whereas Islam is predicated on hatred for anyone who refuses to accept Islam or who disparages it in any way.

He cites several recent examples of devout Muslims who murdered their own kin because they were insufficiently pious:

Most recently, a 30-year-old Muslim man stabbed his own mother in the throat with a knife in France. After characterizing the incident as an “attempted murder,” local authorities said that the “accused has admitted to the crime,” which he “committed for personal and religious reasons.”

Further underscoring the latter reason — “religion” — the Muslim would-be matricide was heard crying, “Allahu Akbar.”

Two months earlier, also in France, a Muslim man, 25, beheaded his own father, 60, with a knife. When police arrived on the scene, the Muslim patricide was also heard crying, “Allahu Akbar” while fleeing the scene.

That the Muslim men in both of these examples from France deemed it fit to cry Islam’s ancient, jihadist war cry — which literally means “my god is greater than your x, y, z” — indicates that, whatever their quarrel, these Muslim men at least believed that, in slaughtering their parents, they were acting on behalf of or vindicating Islam.

This was certainly the case of another, well-documented case of Muslim parricide. In September 2022, a Muslim man bludgeoned his mother and father to death in Nigeria.

The reason? “My parents don’t like the prophet Muhammad because I adore him, [and] they called me a mad [crazy] person,” Munkaila Ahmadu, 37, explained in a video recorded by police. “[So] I killed them, because they refuse[d] to accept the truth concerning the prophet Muhammad. I killed them because they abused the prophet and their punishment is death — there is no repentance for any person who abused the Prophet.”

He is certainly not alone in such logic. After a Muslim mob stoned and burned to death a Christian college student, Deborah Emmanuel, who was accused of blaspheming Muhammad, a Muslim cleric justified the atrocity by saying, “When you touch the prophet we become mad [crazy] people...Anyone who touches the prophet, no punishment — just kill!”

Showing no remorse whatsoever for murdering his father (70) and mother (60), Ahmadu instead boasted of how “I will [soon] be free because Allah is with the righteous person; that is why I am not worrying over my action...I am now in police custody because, by human thinking, I did a wrong thing but in the sight of Allah and the Prophet what I did is the right thing” (emphasis added).

Is this true? Unfortunately, yes. “Executing” those who “blaspheme” against the prophet of Islam is as old as Islam itself and traces straight back to Muhammad, who was the first to call for the slaughter of those who mocked or called him “mad.”

But even beyond the issue of blasphemy, another of Muhammad’s doctrines — that of al-wala’ w’al-bara’ (which can be simply translated as “love and hate”) — requires Muslims to hate anyone perceived to be in opposition to Islam.

Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse of this doctrine. As Osama bin Laden once concluded after quoting that verse: "Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion."

Similarly, after citing Koran 60:4, the Islamic State confessed to the West that “we hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers.” As for any and all political “grievances,” these are “secondary” reasons for the jihad, ISIS said:

The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizya and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you (emphasis added).

There's more at the article including citations and links to the claims Ibrahim makes in his piece.

To be sure, not all Muslims harbor such hatred in their hearts for those who don't feel about their religion the way they do, but consider: There are almost two billion Muslims in the world today. If only 10% of them hold to a strict view of their religion that's 200 million people who would eagerly kill you and your family for religious reasons and probably several hundred million more who would not mind seeing it happen even if they wouldn't do it themselves.

Does this intense hatred make prospects for some future rapprochement between Islam and the West, particularly Christianity, an illusory hope? We should certainly hope not. Our hope should be that the majority of the world's Muslims prevail in their wish to live in peace with the rest of humanity, including those who do not hold to their religious beliefs.

For those who enjoy history, or who believe that the conflict between Islam and the West is the product of Western exploitation and oppression, I highly recommend two of Ibrahim's most recent books, Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West. They both read like novels, and they're both very enlightening.

Nature, Nurture and the Epigenome

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another mystery is how strings of amino acids can tell cetain types of cells to move to distant parts of the body, or tell certain chemicals in the cell to move to other parts of the cell. To compound the mystery why should anyone think that all these things and many, many more all evolved by chance through a blind, undirected process like Darwinian evolution.

If the Darinians expect us to believe it they ought to give us a possible explanation rather than vague promises that someday the explanations will all be forthcoming.

Champion Prevaricator

Congressman-elect George Santos, a Republican from New York, has a problem, or rather several problems. He's currently being investigated for what amounts to a financial miracle, having become a millionaire virtually overnight.

He's also, it appears, a pathological liar having lied about almost everything of importance in his background. You can read the details here.

His political opponents are enjoying the scandal, of course, but it is amusing to read tweets from very liberal people like Sam Stein, who tweeted on December 22: "Is there any precedent at all to this George Santos situation? Has Congress ever had someone with so many remarkable biographical holes?"

Now this question is amusing because although Stein thinks that Santos' prodigious talent for lying is unprecedented, it's clearly not. The answer to his question is, why, yes, there is precedent. Tom Elliot on his Twitter page lists about thirty biographical lies told by a single politician over the course of his career.

The politician who has amassed this astounding record of mendacity is, of course, the current President of the United States.

Jim Geraghty mentions just seven of the lies Elliot documents in his Morning Jolt column. He writes: A few days ago, Tom Elliott listed all of the tall tales, sketchy claims, likely hallucinations, and outright lies offered by Joe Biden over the years. Among the highlights were Biden’s claims that:

• he was arrested during a civil rights march;
• he spent part of a summer working as a tractor-trailer driver;
• he was arrested while trying to meet Nelson Mandela;
• his son, Beau, was killed in Iraq (Beau Biden passed away after battling brain cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.);
• he graduated “top of his class” in college (he in fact graduated “near the bottom”);
• he hit a 368’ home run in one of the congressional baseball games;
• his first job offer was from an Idaho timber company.

Geraghty provides links to all of these confabulations at his column, and you can find more at the link to Elliot's Twitter page. Reading Elliot's list and comparing it to Santos' record, it's really hard to pick out a champion prevaricator between the two.

Anyway, most politicians lie, of course, but lying on the scale Santos did should disqualify him from serving in a position of public trust. But if that principle applies to Santos, if lying about one's biography is grounds for removal from office, it should also apply to everyone in public office, and especially to the President of the United States.

Repressive Tolerance

There's lots of talk nowadays about "tolerance," although the conversation has morphed quite a bit from what it was just a couple of years ago. It used to be that we were enjoined by progressives to be tolerant of those who disagreed with us, who held political or religious opinions at variance with our own or who adopted a lifestyle that others may have thought immoral.

Now the talk in progressive circles is all about what Herbert Marcuse back in the 60s was promoting as "repressive tolerance." Marcuse argued that tolerance and freedom of speech should not extend to those who hold retrograde political views, views that other groups find offensive or harmful. He insisted that freedom of speech was a subterfuge that elites employed to enable them to maintain power and as such should not be accorded the cherished status that has traditionally been conferred upon it.

In the educational sphere, in particular, Marcuse wrote that measures of repressive tolerance,

...would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.

In other words, if you believe in maintaining a strong military defense, if you believe that America is the greatest country ever to grace the planet, or if you disagree that social security should be increased or perpetuated, you should be denied the ability to voice your views.

This, in good Orwellian fashion, Marcuse labels genuine freedom of thought. He goes on to write that,

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted. And when this perversion starts in the mind of the individual...the efforts to counteract his dehumanization must begin...with stopping the words and images which feed his consciousness.

To be sure, this is censorship, even precensorship, but openly directed against the more or less hidden censorship that permeates the free media.

So, if tolerance means that people should be allowed to argue against what Marcuse thought to be a better form of life, in his case Marxism coupled with sexual freedom, then those arguments should be repressed. People must not be exposed to well-reasoned arguments if those arguments may be so cogent as to persuade the hearer to reject the ideology of the left.

Marcuse made this case in 1965 in an essay titled Repressive Tolerance, but it's bearing fruit today in social media, the academy, and news organizations like the New York Times where any opinion that wanders beyond the bounds of acceptable progressive orthodoxy is quashed.

One of the arguments that the progressive left makes in support of "repressive tolerance" - which is, ironically, a fascist notion - is based on a misuse of a footnote in philosopher Karl Popper's famous 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. John Sexton at HotAir.com explains that the footnote, which some leftists have seized upon to promote repression of deviant ideas and street violence, is being abused:

[Popper's] idea was pretty simple: If society is completely tolerant, then the intolerant will rule society because there will be no one willing to stand up to their intolerance. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a tolerant society to be intolerant toward those who are themselves intolerant.... You can probably see how this plays into certain Antifa arguments about “punching Nazis” and using street violence against the intolerant.

Popper called this the paradox of tolerance: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Popper added, however, that,

In this formulation, I do not imply...that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

In other words, as long as people are willing to debate and discuss and have conversations about their disagreements, as long as they don't seek to impose their views by violent means, we must insist on tolerance and the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. It's only when people opt for violent coercion that tolerance comes to an end.

Here's Popper:

But we should claim the right to suppress them [those who eschew dialogue and resort instead to force] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

The fascist left, including Antifa, seizes on this as a justification not only for suppressing contrary ideas but also for violence, yet it's pretty clear that Popper was claiming that resort to violence is justified only when the other side refuses to engage in fair debate and chooses instead to substitute "fists and pistols" for reason and logic. It's also pretty clear that it's the extremists on both left and right in our current social landscape who fit the profile of those of whom Popper was speaking.

The extremist rejects argument because at some level he knows that neither facts nor reason are on his side. He senses the rational inadequacy of his position so he rejects reason and rationality rather than give up his position or subject it to rational scrutiny.

The only truth he recognizes is whatever he feels most strongly to be true, and since his feelings are self-authenticating and self-validating there's no point in debating them. He needs only to force you to accept his "truth," and if you refuse then you must be compelled, with violence, if necessary, to submit.

After all, if you disagree with the progressive left then you must be a racist bigot, and you should be silenced or have your face smashed. If you disagree with the extremist right then you must be part of the conspiracy to undermine America and you deserve to get stomped on.

That's unfortunately where we are today in America.

Antony Flew's Conversion

Antony Flew (1923 – 2010) was an atheistic British philosopher, perhaps the most influential atheist in the 20th century. He insisted that one should presuppose atheism until evidence suggesting a God was adduced, but he didn't think any such evidence existed. 

However, Flew was serious about following the evidence, and in 2004 he changed his position, and stated that he now believed in the existence of an Intelligent Creator of the universe. This conversion shocked fellow atheists.

Flew never publicly embraced any particular religion and claimed to be a deist, but keeping with his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believed in the existence of a creator God.

In 2007 a book outlining his reasons for changing his position, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind was written by Flew in collaboration with Roy Abraham Varghese.

In the book Flew says this:

I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this Universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source.

Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than half a century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science.

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature.

When I finally came to recognize the existence of a God, it was not a paradigm shift, because my paradigm remains, as Plato in his Republic scripted his Socrates to insist: “We must follow the argument wherever it leads.”

The leaders of science over the last hundred years, along with some of today’s most influential scientists, have built a philosophically compelling vision of a rational universe that sprang from a divine Mind. As it happens, this is the particular view of the world that I now find to be the soundest philosophical explanation….

The French polymath Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) said four centuries ago that there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not already dead set against it. Unfortunately, a lot of people today are ignorant of the evidence, in some cases, perhaps, culpably so, and some really are dead set against it.

Fantastic Design (Pt. 2)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper I get into it. Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here's another question: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Furthermore, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

And how is all of that produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution?

Fantastic Design

I'm currently reading Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD and came across an excerpt from the book at Uncommon Descent that I thought would be worth sharing.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents over a billion or so years of genetic mutation and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's most probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's the excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.

Two Noels for Christmas Eve

I thought it fitting on Christmas eve to post what is perhaps my favorite Christmas hymn. Christmas hymns, or carols, came to be called "noels" by the French based on the Latin word natalis, which can mean "birthday" or "of or relating to birth."

Eventually the word found its way into English in the 1800s and is frequently used today either as a synonym for Christmas carols or for Christmas itself.

As sung by Dave Phelps this noel captures some of the magic, mystery and power of Christmas. I hope you enjoy it and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful, magical Christmas filled with the love, peace and blessings of God:

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

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Christmas Magic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Rob Evan of TSO performing the song.

Three Symbols of Christmas

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

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

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

Gr: Christos

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

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

Painting by Marcel Reider (1898)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Solitary Life

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

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

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