Time and Human Free Will

Philosopher David Johnson has written an interesting article in which he argues that the concept of block time eliminates the possibility of free will and that block time is almost certainly, he believes, the correct temporal picture of the universe since it's entailed by Einstein's theory of relativity.

What he means by block time is this: Our common sense view of time is that the past no longer exists and the future is not yet. All that exists is the present moment. According to the idea of block time, however, every moment - past, present, and future - exists now. Your future marriage is happening now and has been happening as long as the universe has existed.

Think of all these moments as the moments in a movie on a dvd. The universe is like the dvd and every moment in the movie exists simultaneously on the dvd. Or think of a movie on a reel of film. The whole movie exists simultaneously, but only the frame passing in front of the projector lens is experienced.

In any case, if the block theory is correct then the future exists now which means that it is already established, which means that we're not free to change it, which means that there's no free will.

Here's Johnson:

The first and most obvious “threat” that the block universe theory raises is to our free will. If what I will do exists before I even do it, it doesn’t seem I freely choose to do what I do....if the future already exists, only one action is possible. And on the block universe view, the future already exists. It’s as set as the end of a movie I am already watching....So, my choice to do the action is not free.

Johnson fleshes this argument out in his article and, if the block universe is an accurate description of reality, then I think most of what he says is correct, but he nevertheless draws a couple of conclusions that I think are mistaken. For instance he writes:

Now, it would still be possible to judge a person’s character—to recognize the difference between morally good and morally bad kinds of persons. But it wouldn’t make sense to judge them for having a bad character. Why? Because they didn’t freely choose to have the character they do; you could only judge (evaluate) the character itself. And if you recognize that it’s the character, not the person, that is the problem, you must approach reproaching them in an entirely different way.

The mistake here, in my opinion, is to assume that in a deterministic universe there are morally good and bad characters in the first place. If everything is determined, what does it mean to say that someone is morally bad? There can only be morality if people can choose between acts, but in a block universe there is no genuine choice and therefore no moral good or bad.

Further on he invites us to, "Imagine if people started doing good actions merely because they recognized them as good rather than because they fear they will be punished if they don’t."

Yes, but how is he defining good? And good for whom? However we define good, my good may conflict with the good of others so why should I not put my good ahead of theirs? Why is what's good for me not better and more important, at least for me, than what's good for someone else?

The block theory has its attractions, as does the common sense view (not the least of which is that we can't really escape thinking that time really is how our common sense pictures it), but one question it raises for me is this: If it's true and if, as philosophers like Johnson assume, we've evolved to fit our environment, why did we evolve in such a way as to completely misperceive the nature of the temporal world? Why did we not only evolve the illusion of past, present and future but also the illusion of free will?

After all, we certainly didn't need the common sense view of time in order to survive. Many other creatures probably have no sense of a past or a future and they survive pretty well.

Anyway, there's much else that's interesting in Johnson's essay. If you're fascinated by the philosophy of time you should check it out.

Pride Month and Corporate Hypocrisy

We're well into June, LGBTQIA+ "Pride Month", and undeterred by the Bud Light and Target fiascos, we're being beseiged by corporate endorsements of "Pride". One amusing aspect of this is the hypocrisy of corporations which loudly and proudly fly the rainbow flag here in the states but go mute about their enthusiasm for LGBTQIA+ causes in foreign lands in which they do business.

Jim Geraghty notes that many corporations which tout their gay rights sympathies here in America nevertheless find it inconvenient, or risky, to do so elsewhere.

Geraghty writes:

You will be amazed at how many big U.S. and multinational corporations who are enthusiastically celebrating “Pride Month” have significant operations in countries that criminalize homosexuality. It’s not just China and Saudi Arabia, and it’s not just manufacturing in countries such as Pakistan or Indonesia.

No, you’re going to be flabbergasted by which particularly controversial company at this moment has operations running in . . . Uganda, which just enacted what are probably the most anti-gay criminal laws on the planet. Corporate America gets to market to LGBT consumers stateside, and then turn around and make a bundle in some of the most anti-gay countries in the world, and apparently everyone is just fine with this systemic hypocrisy.

With so many problems, you might wonder who would want to do business in a place like Uganda. The answer turns out to be quite a few multinationals: Coca-Cola, Unilever, Diageo, Citibank, Hilton and Sheraton hotel chains and . . . Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Apparently, some corporations' principles stop at the waters' edge. Anheuser-Busch, Geraghty tells us, "operates breweries, factories, and distribution networks in a country, Uganda, that criminalizes homosexuality."

He continues:

For several years now, sharp-eyed observers have noticed that many multinational corporations add rainbows to their logos in the West, but keep them unchanged in the Middle East, where governments and the populaces are much less supportive of gay rights.

In Saudi Arabia, gay men get executed after their confessions are extracted during torture. The list of U.S. companies doing business in Saudi Arabia is like the Fortune 100.

Gays in China are subject to “censorship, surveillance and intimidation, at times even detention by police.” Just about every major multinational corporation operates in China and never speaks out against the policies of the Chinese government.

You know who’s got four “sourcing centers” located in China? Target. You know, the big box-store company that signed up a design company with a line of Satanist-inspired merchandise to help create the store’s 2023 “PRIDE” collection.

You know where else Target has a sourcing center? Karachi, Pakistan, where “same-sex sexual activity is prohibited under the Penal Code 1860, which criminalizes acts of ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’. This provision carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.”

Target also operates a sourcing center in Jakarta, Indonesia, where gay men get publicly flogged for violating Sharia law.

Big multinational corporations love standing up for gay rights, as long as it means more people buying their stuff. They are not interested in standing up for gay rights if it might cost them something.

Big American companies will throw their weight around in opposition to all kinds of state laws, from restrictions on explicit materials in school libraries to limitations on hormone treatments, but then turn around and avert their eyes from governments that literally execute people for being gay.

Disney objects to Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law. The company also has no problem staging “Disney on Ice” in Saudi Arabia.

Not that long ago, a Saudi court sentenced a man to 450 lashes for “setting up a Twitter account to promote and practice homosexuality.”

What this demonstrates is that vast swaths of corporate America have no fundamental, principled objection to violent anti-gay views, as long as the profits are high enough.

Indeed, one might think that were profit incentives high enough, many of these corporations would happily endorse laws in the U.S. mandating prison sentences for homosexual behavior. Their only principle, it seems, is profit.

But setting corporate hypocrisy about "Pride Month" aside, it's not at all clear why one's sexual proclivities should be a matter of pride in the first place. If one's sexual orientation is determined for us at conception and not freely chosen then why should it be any more a matter to be proud of than the size of our ears or the shape of our skull?

We might be happy or satisfied that we are the way we are, but expressing pride in something we really had nothing to do with and can't really help, if, in fact, we can't, seems narcissistic and not a little preposterous.

C.S.Lewis talks about pride in a chapter of his classic work, Mere Christianity. Lewis writes that of all sins pride is actually the worst:

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is pride....Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.... Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man....Power is what Pride really enjoys....Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Lewis was certainly correct in his assessment of pride, and perhaps especially when he notes that pride is really about power. In our day the power that's being sought by those who promote pride in their sexual inclinations is both political and social.

Political power is necessary to normalize whatever sexual desires people have by codifying them into law.

Social power is necessary as a means to intimidate anyone who may have reservations about the effects of the LBGTQIA+ agenda on the health of society into silence and conformity. People must be made to affirm the normalcy and "goodness" of the sexual agenda, whether they really think it to be good or not, and they must be punished, perhaps by losing their livelihoods, if they openly dissent.

The LGBTQIA+ Pride agenda is achieved, in other words, by turning us all into the sort of hypocrites which inhabit many of our corporate boardrooms.

Rousing the Conservative Dragon

Stanford historian Victor Davis Hanson has a column out in which he suggests that perhaps the conservative behemoth is stirring in this country and is about to put an end to the insanity that seems to have descended over our culture like a fog (my words, not his).

Here's his lede:

Conservatives and traditionalists are often exasperated at the ongoing woke cultural revolution in their midst. How can America be turned upside down, as it is, when there is little public support for the things happening around us?

They don’t see much backing for the current border policy and illegal immigration, yet it continues. Conservatives feel that most Americans reject the trend of biological men dominating female sporting events. They fear American jurisprudence has become now vastly weaponized and warped.

Certainly, former President Donald Trump will be more likely indicted by a politicized New York City prosecutor for supposedly overvaluing his net worth over a decade ago than would be a current violent street criminal clubbing a subway commuter.

In 2020 torching a federal courthouse or massing at the White House grounds, in efforts to get at the president, earned either few arrests and little or no jail time. In 2021, if one entered the Capitol and illegally paraded around like a buffoon, he could get a five-year prison sentence.

Traditionalists feel that sky-high energy prices, out-of-control urban crime, a depressed economy, high interest rates, and a politicized FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and Pentagon are all needlessly self-created messes.

How then did these extremist policies that have little popular support become institutionalized?

Hanson goes on to offer some answers to that question:

Conservatives, by their nature and unlike the Left, are more inclined to accept existing institutions rather than to radically alter or destroy them. They were asleep at the wheel in 2020, when left-wing-funded lawsuits radically transformed Election Day in many states into a mere construct. Some 70 percent of the electorate in key precincts voted by mail or early, with far fewer ballot audits or authentication.

They focus on nominating more conservative judges, not packing the court itself. They work to take back the Senate, not to end the filibuster or bring in two new states with four new senators.

Traditionalists often feel they have no time for politics. They prefer to focus on their families, jobs, communities, and churches. Until recently they shunned organized boycotts. They abhor massing outside the homes of left-wing politicians and judges.

They shrug and concede that universities, teachers, government unions, the corporate boardroom, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the media, entertainment, and professional sports are hopelessly activist and left-wing.

The environmental, social, governance (ESG), diversity, equity, and inclusion, and LGBQT+ agendas were unfathomable acronyms to Middle America and thus mostly ignored.

So conservatives often slept through the woke revolution.

Now, though, it seems that people are finally being roused from their slumber. Hanson cites the significant economic hit suffered by Target, Anheuser-Busch, Disney and perhaps others to come as signs that the conservative dragon has had enough.

You can read the rest of his column at the link. I hope he's right that we've had enough, but the problem is that cultural decline is on a ratchet. We accept so much deviance and then say "enough!" The decline pauses, but it has established a new baseline. It never recedes. A decade or so later, starting from the new baseline it proceeds to push the limits again and a new generation, having become accustomed to the level of deviance previously established, tolerates further decline.

At some point we become Sodom, if we haven't already.

But maybe not. Perhaps there'll come a time when our culture will wake up and roll back the moral, social and economic delusions under which we've been living. Hanson's column reminded me of the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence:

"...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

It might be germane to quote, too, the next sentence:

"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

We'll see.

Running the Movie Backwards

A student recently dug this old post out of the archive, and I thought I'd re-post it:

There is a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views invites us to imagine a scenario which illustrates this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards!

The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the simplest explanation for the phenomena in the video, certainly simpler than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell wants to relate this to the problem of undirected Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a professor describing the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class. “Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms was formed by pure chance with the ability to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were also able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors that crept in.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded into a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have reversed the pictures! You did it backwards” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

That's the problem with Darwinian evolution. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as sexual reproduction or butterfly metamorphosis, or create human consciousness or a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain, requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these things were the intentional product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

Of course, if a mind was somehow directing the process that would change everything.

Are We All Created Equal?

Yuval Harari is the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and a secular materialist who nevertheless recognizes the distressing shortcomings of his materialism. In Sapiens he notes that,

[T]he American Founding Fathers . . . imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of [human beings], and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.

In other words, when a secular modern speaks of ideals like justice and human rights, he or she is simply reciting contemporary fairy-tales. The ideals of which these folks speak are socially fabricated illusions employed to oil the gears of society to make it function better.

Indeed, the claim to be "fighting against injustice" is a foolish absurdity unless one is operating out of a Christian (or theistic) worldview. Every time our secular social justice warriors speak of "justice" and "equality" they're actually parasitizing the Christianity many of them reject.

Harari continues,

It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination, in which we are truly equal?

. . . According to the science of biology, people were not ‘created’. They have evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal.’ The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God.

Apart from Christianity there's no foundation for the principle of human equality and therefore no foundation for the idea of justice. Those who march down our cities' streets shouting "No Justice, No Peace" are yelling an empty, meaningless slogan, unless they're standing in a Christian worldview.

Those who complain of the injustice of income inequality, discrimination and racism are doing nothing more than emoting. They're expressing their displeasure with things as they are, but there's no more intellectual heft to their complaint than if they simply said "Ugh! I really don't like that."

The question they should be asked is why are these things wrong? Why are they "unjust," and why is injustice wrong? Unless they stand on a Christian understanding of the world, or at least a theistic understanding, they can have no coherent answer. One can be a secularist or atheist or one can believe that injustice and inequality are objectively wrong, but one can't do both.

Harari clearly recognizes the problem for secularists such as himself:

However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.

Every person carries a somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different environmental influences. This leads to the development of different qualities that carry with them different chances of survival. ‘Created equal’ should therefore be translated into ‘evolved differently.’

Just as people were never created, neither, according to the science of biology, is there a ‘Creator’ who ‘endows’ them with anything. There is only a blind evolutionary process, devoid of any purpose, leading to the birth of individuals.

It's intriguing that people can accept all that and still think it's somehow more sophisticated, virtuous or rational to live their actual lives as though it's all false. When a secular (or atheistic) materialist's life day after day repudiates the secular materialism he claims to believe, the one thing he can't claim is that his secular materialism makes sense.

The Fall of Constantinople

One persistent misapprehension concerning the long history between the Christian West and the Muslim East is that Muslims have been the victims of Christian persecution and oppression.

Anyone who has studied the history, as Raymond Ibrahim has, will realize, if they approach it objectively, that it has been Muslims who, for the last 1300 years or so, have sought to utterly destroy the Christian West and who have for most of that time waged a war of horrific slaughter, torture, rape, enslavement and desecration against Christians and Jews.

In a recent article Ibrahim reminds us that Monday, May 29th was the 570th anniversary of the fall of the great city of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. The horrors these pious Muslims inflicted on the residents of the city in the name of Allah are sickening, but no one living in the West today should be ignorant of that history.

This is especially so given the recent rise of Islamic radicalism and the even more recent words of Turkey’s president Recep Erdogan, but let’s let Ibrahim tell the story:

While the West continues self-flagellating itself about its history, today, Turkey is celebrating a day when its ancestors slaughtered and raped thousands of people solely for the “sin” of being Christian.

Precisely 570 years ago today, on May 29, 1453, the Turks sacked and transformed the ancient Christian kingdom of Constantinople into Muslim Istanbul. And, as they do every year, Turks—beginning with their president—are saber rattling in commemoration of that “glorious” event.

No doubt, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—who, “coincidentally” enough, timed his latest presidential victory to coincide with this date—is today saying the same sorts of things he says every year. Last May 29, for example, he said, “As our ancestors buried Byzantium, let us hope that today, by building our vision for 2053 [the 600th anniversary of the sack of Constantinople], we also manage to put in the time warp of history the current Byzantines who are plotting against us.”

In order to understand the significance of this otherwise cryptic remark—most Westerners are today totally unaware of the history between Muslim Turkey and Christian Byzantium—some background is necessary.

Towards the end of the first millennium, the Turks, whose origins lay in the eastern steppes of Asia, had become Muslim and began to raid and conquer portions of Asia Minor, which was then and had been for a millennium Christian. By the end of the fourteenth century they had conquered it entirely and began eying Constantinople, just across the Bosporus. Although generations of Turks repeatedly besieged it, it would fall to Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II (pronounced “Mehmet”), Erdoğan’s hero.

But why did Muhammad II and his predecessors attack Constantinople in the first place? What made it an enemy to the Turks? The same thing that made every non-Muslim nation an enemy: it was “infidel”—in this case, Christian—and therefore in need of subjugating. That was the sole justification and pretext—the sole “grievance”—that propelled the Turks to besiege it (as their Arab counterparts did in the seventh and eighth centuries).

From the start, deceit was part of Muhammad’s arsenal. When he first became sultan and was too busy consolidating his authority, Muhammad “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their [the Christians’] friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of Constantinople.” Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”

Muhammad also exhorted his Muslim army with jihadist ideology once the siege commenced, including by unleashing throngs of preachers who cried throughout the Muslim camp surrounding Constantinople,

Children of Muhammad, be of good heart, for tomorrow we shall have so many Christians in our hands that we will sell them, two slaves for a ducat, and will have such riches that we will all be of gold, and from the beards of the Greeks we will make leads for our dogs, and their families will be our slaves. So be of good heart and be ready to die cheerfully for the love of our [past and present] Muhammad.

“Recall the promises of our Prophet concerning fallen warriors in the Koran,” Sultan Muhammad himself exhorted: “the man who dies in combat shall be transported bodily to paradise and shall dine with [prophet] Muhammad in the presence of women, handsome boys, and virgins.”

The mention of “handsome boys” was not just an accurate reference to the Koran’s promise (e.g., 52:24, 56:17, and 76:19); Muhammad II was a notorious pedophile. His enslavement and rape of Jacob Notaras—a handsome 14-year-old nobleman’s son in Constantinople, whom Muhammad forced into becoming his personal catamite until he escaped—was only one of the most infamous. Vlad III Dracula’s younger brother, “Radu the Handsome,” was also turned into Muhammad’s “boy toy.”

Or consider the lecherous behavior of Muhammad’s army once they had penetrated inside Constantinople (the following quotes are all from contemporary sources and eyewitnesses):

When they had massacred and there was no longer any resistance, they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions.… There were virgins who awoke from troubled sleep to find those brigands standing over them with bloody hands and faces full of abject fury.… [The Turks] dragged them, tore them, forced them, dishonored them, raped them at the cross-roads and made them submit to the most terrible outrages.… Tender children were brutally snatched from their mothers’ breasts and girls were pitilessly given up to strange and horrible unions, and a thousand other terrible things happened.

Because thousands of citizens had fled to and were holed up in Hagia Sophia—then one of the Christian world’s grandest basilicas—it offered an excellent harvest of slaves once its doors were axed down:

One Turk would look for the captive who seemed the wealthiest, a second would prefer a pretty face among the nuns. … Each rapacious Turk was eager to lead his captive to a safe place, and then return to secure a second and a third prize. … Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep.

The slavers sometimes fought each other to the death over “any well-formed girl,” even as many of the latter “preferred to cast themselves into the wells and drown rather than fall into the hands of the Turks.”

Having taken possession of the Hagia Sophia—which at the time of its capture had served as a cathedral for a thousand years—the invaders “engaged in every kind of vileness within it, making of it a public brothel.” On “its holy altars” they enacted “perversions with our women, virgins, and children,” including “the Grand Duke’s daughter who was quite beautiful.” She was forced to “lie on the great altar of Hagia Sophia with a crucifix under her head and then raped.”

Next “they paraded the [Hagia Sophia’s main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap … upon His head, and jeeringly cried, ‘Behold the god of the Christians!’”

Practically all other churches in the ancient city suffered the same fate. “The crosses which had been placed on the roofs or the walls of churches were torn down and trampled.” The Eucharist was “thrown to the ground and kicked.” Bibles were stripped of their gold or silver illuminations before being burned. “Icons were without exception given to the flames.” Patriarchal vestments were placed on the haunches of dogs; priestly garments were placed on horses.

“Everywhere there was misfortune, everyone was touched by pain” when Sultan Muhammad finally made his grand entry into the city. “There were lamentations and weeping in every house, screaming in the crossroads, and sorrow in all churches; the groaning of grown men and the shrieking of women accompanied looting, enslavement, separation, and rape.”

Finally, Muhammad had the “wretched citizens of Constantinople” dragged before his men during evening festivities and “ordered many of them to be hacked to pieces, for the sake of entertainment.” The rest of the city’s population—as many as 45,000—was hauled off in chains to be sold as slaves.

This is the man whom Turkey and its president honor—including by rededicating the Hagia Sophia, which had been a museum for nearly a century, back into a victory mosque. Then, Erdoğan had proclaimed in a speech:

The conquest of Istanbul [Constantinople] and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque are among the most glorious chapters of Turkish history.….The resurrection of the Hagia Sophia represents our memory full of heydays in our history.

From here one can better understand Erdoğan’s assertion, “As our ancestors buried Byzantium, let us hope that today, by building our vision for 2053, we also manage to put in the time warp of history the current Byzantines who are plotting against us.”

Of course, the Byzantines never “plotted” against the Turks’ ancestors; quite the opposite—the invading Turks deceived and then attacked them for no other reason than that they were “infidels” who rejected Islam and, as such, deserved to be slaughtered, raped, and enslaved.

The message is clear; jihadist ideology dominates the highest echelons of Turkey. Hating, invading, and conquering neighboring peoples—not due to any grievances but because they are non-Muslim—with all the attending atrocities, rapes, destruction, and mass slavery is apparently the ideal, to resume once the sunset of Western power is complete, which, according to Erdoğan’s own daughter, Esra, is any day now. Just recently she tweeted “There is little left for the Islamic crescent to break the Western cross”—an assertion more fitting of ISIS than the daughter of a president who works as a “sociologist.”

Meanwhile, because Americans are used to seeing statues of their own nation’s heroes toppled—for no other reason than they were white and/or Christian, and therefore inherently evil—the significance of Erdoğan’s words and praise of Muhammad II—who as a nonwhite Muslim is further immune from Western criticism, as that would be “racist”—remains lost to them.

I've reproduced Ibrahim's article in full because I think it's enormously important that we get the history right. Readers interested in a thorough account of the history of the long war waged by Islam against the West might want to read Ibrahim's two excellent works on the subject - Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West.

A Strange Combination of Beliefs

Derek Parfit was, in the estimation of some, one of the greatest philosophers of the last fifty years, perhaps even all-time. His biographer, David Edmonds, states that in his later years he focused on moral philosophy because he was disturbed by an attitude held by many philosophers who shared his materialistic worldview.

Edmonds writes that...

he grew increasingly upset that many serious philosophers believed that there was no objective basis for morality. He felt that he had to demonstrate that secular morality - morality without God - was objective and that it had rational foundations....He genuinely believed that if he failed to show this his existence would have been futile. And not just his existence. If morality was not objective, all of our lives are meaningless.

It strikes me as very odd that Parfit was so concerned about moral questions and wrote about them extensively, since he was a determinist who denied the existence of free will and a materialist who disbelieved in an afterlife and moral accountability. Given those two beliefs it's hard to see how morality can be anything other than an illusion, as many of his fellow materialists have claimed.

But Parfit clung to the hope that his life was not meaningless, that somehow moral values and duties enjoyed objective reality and were binding upon us. He went to his grave in 2017 believing this even though despite his prodigious academic output, he never really succeeded in making his case.

Edmonds' biography (Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality) is very well-written and - for philosophers, anyway - very interesting. I'm sure I'll have more to say about Parfit in future posts, but today I'd like to tease out a few of the implications of materialistic determinism for morality.

For instance, if materialism (i.e. atheism) is true then it follows that in human beings there's no immaterial substance such as mind or soul, and it follows from this that there's no free will since we'd just be collocations of atomic particles which are individually and collectively governed by physical laws. There's no freedom in, or control over, the molecular reactions that occur in our brains which produce our choices.

Moreover, if there's no mind/soul it's difficult to see what makes us the same person who was conceived in our mother's womb. We've certainly changed since then, we're made of more and different cells and we have no memory of our conception, so in what sense are we that person? Indeed, in what sense are we the same person we were just ten or twenty years ago?

And if we're not the same person who, let's say, took out a house mortgage twenty years ago, why should we be obligated to pay it back now?

Additionally, if there's no free will then it's hard to see how we can have moral obligations since an obligation presupposes the ability to perform it. I can't have a duty to do something that's impossible for me to do, and if my will is not in some sense free then it's impossible for me to do other than what I've been determined by my genes and/or environment to do.

The feeling that I can freely choose at this moment to either keep writing or take a break really is just an illusion.

Furthermore, if there's no free will and if there's no soul it's hard to see how there can be any dignity in being human. Our dignity derives, in part, from our ability to choose. It's one of the qualities that make us different from other animals. If we can't choose then we're simply flesh and bone robots and there's no particular dignity in that.

Likewise, if there's no free will and no soul then there's no accountability for how we act. What sense does it make to say that we have a duty to be kind, for example, if there's no ultimate sanction for being cruel? Why is cruelty "wrong"? What does the word "wrong" even mean, anyway?

Finally, if we have no free will, if everything is determined by forces beyond our control, then our belief in determinism is the product, not of its truth, but of our childhood experiences or a gene we inherited from our great grandfather. Why then should we believe it? Why, for that matter, should we believe anything? How do we avoid surrendering to nihilism?

If, on the other hand, both materialism and determinism are false, if there's something else about us that transcends our physical being but somehow works in conjunction with our brain, all of these questions may have at least a partial resolution.

The mind/soul may persist beyond the death of the material body and may be the seat and source of both the continuity of the self and human freedom. There may be a transcendent moral authority which holds our soul (i.e. us, our essence) accountable for the choices that it facilitates in this life. If so, then Parfit's belief that there are objective moral norms would be true, even if he himself had no good basis for thinking it was, and there's no need to surrender to nihilism.

But all of this depends upon materialism, determinism and atheism being false. Parfit wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to hold to the belief they're true and still insist that moral duties are objective and external to ourselves.

Parfit was not unique in being a moral philosopher who also believed that determinism, materialism and atheism were all true, but even though the combination isn't unique, it's still very strange.

A Time to Honor Courage

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but it's appropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its year-long mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God this Memorial Day.

The Difficulty with Naturalism

I concluded yesterday's post with the remark that many of the vexing problems of philosophy, e.g. the free will problem, problems of ethics and of course the mind/body problem, arise because of the assumption that we are nothing other than material beings.

This belief is called materialism, and it's the consequence of a worldview called naturalism - the belief that the natural world is all that exists. Naturalism is the contrary of theism which is the belief that there is a personal God. These are the two dominant worldviews in the Western world today.

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live consistently with the consequences entailed by it. Naturalism fails this test since many, perhaps most, naturalists find that they have to give up things that are very difficult if not impossible to live without. Among the items for which there is no room in naturalism are the following:

1. ultimate meaning in life
2. free will
3. objective moral right and wrong
4. intrinsic value of human beings
5. an adequate basis for human equality
6. mind/consciousness
7. belief that love is more than just a neurochemical response
8. an adequate ground for objective beauty and truth
9. an adequate ground for human rights

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in a classical Christian worldview, it could be argued that they're actually entailed by that view. The logic of naturalism, however, compels one to regard them all as either subjective and arbitrary or complete illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that.

They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives do have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if they do have free will, as if their love for their families is more than just chemistry, as if there really are objective human rights, etc.

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but in the way they live their everyday lives they affirm their reality over and over again. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage because there's no room for them in naturalism.

But when one has to pilfer one's deepest convictions and values from competing visions of reality in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to holding to a rational, coherent worldview. To be consistent a naturalist should be a nihilist and accept the emptiness that that entails, yet even though some naturalists see that, few bring themselves to accept it.

For those who do, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that naturalism makes possible, but this is a liberation from the only adequate ground that could sustain those profound human needs.

For many who yearn for liberation from a cosmic Creator, either the consequences don't occur to them, or if they do, they're often ignored as if they don't exist. Naturalists are free to do this, of course, but they're not free to declare their worldview rational if they do.

Materialism and the Teleporter Thought Experiment

One muddle that materialists find themselves in has to do with the philosophical problem of personal identity. This is the problem raised by trying to assess what it is about us that makes us who we are. What is it about us that makes us uniquely us?

Consider the following thought experiment proposed by the late philosopher Derek Parfit in his book, Reasons and Persons:

A man walks into a teleporter, a device much like the contraptions on the old Star Trek television series which dematerialize a person in one location and rematerialize him in another. The man pauses for a moment while the device scans the physical state of every single molecule in his body.

In a few seconds, his entire physical being — his brain, heart, blood vessels, cells, genes, and even the contents of his stomach — will be annihilated and instantaneously recreated from new materials in another teleporter on Mars.

From his perspective, he'll arrive at his destination with no lapse in consciousness, no pain, not even a single hair out of place.

In what sense, then, is the person who materializes on Mars (call him person B) a different person from the person who was on earth (person A)? If person B is a different person from person A because B is made from different atoms, then are not we different persons than the person we were when we were conceived, or when we were born?

If we are different persons because the passage of time has caused us to incorporate new matter into our bodies such that no atoms remain that were in our bodies twenty years ago, suppose you take out a 30 year mortgage to buy a home. After twenty years go by why should you be responsible for paying the balance? In what sense are you the same person who took out the loan?

Suppose person A is not annihilated so that A continues to exist when B materializes on Mars. Are there now two versions of the same person? Imagine that A commits a crime. Is it fair to hold both A and B responsible for the offense?

These puzzles arise as a consequence of the initial assumption made by materialists that all there is to us is the matter that makes up our bodies along with whatever epiphenomena arise from that matter. But if, on the other hand, we are fundamentally an immaterial mind or soul that possesses a body and which somehow constitutes our essential self, perhaps this self remains unaffected by the dematerialization of the body since the scanning machine could only duplicate material substance but cannot duplicate immaterial mind.

If so, person B would lack a mind or soul and not even be a person but rather a sort of zombie replica of A.

Perhaps along these lines lies a solution or at least a partial solution to the teleporter problem and the problem of personal identity. In any case, materialism certainly can't solve the problem. Indeed, many of the vexing problems of philosophy, e.g. the free will problem, problems of ethics and of course the mind/body problem, arise because of the assumption that we are nothing other than material beings.

Mocking Catholic Nuns Is Just Fine with the Dodgers

Like Anheuser Busch, the makers of Bud Light, the Los Angeles Dodgers have grabbed the tar baby of transgender politics and now are doubtless rueing their decision.

First they invited a group of drag "performers" who call themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to participate in their "Pride Night" but rescinded the invitation when outrage ensued. Then they reextended the invitation when LGBTQ+ groups threatened to withdraw from "Pride Night".

Their apology and reinvitation were about as obsequious and grovelling as one might imagine. An article at Fox News explains:

The Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday decided to invite the Sisters of Indulgence back to their Pride Night event next month after initially removing the left wing group of so-called "trans nuns" from their honoree list.

"After much thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities, honest conversations within the Los Angeles Dodgers organization and generous discussions with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Los Angeles Dodgers would like to offer our sincerest apologies to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, members of the LGBTQ+ community and their friends and families," the organization said.

"We have asked the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to take their place on the field at our 10th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night on June 16th. We are pleased to share that they have agreed to receive the gratitude of our collective communities for the lifesaving work that they have done tirelessly for decades.

The Sisters said they will indeed be honored with the Community Hero Award they originally were to receive.

"In the weeks ahead, we will continue to work with our LGBTQ+ partners to better educate ourselves, find ways to strengthen the ties that bind and use our platform to support all of our fans who make up the diversity of the Dodgers family."

Apparently, most of their life-saving work centers around gay sex and drugs. According to Wikipedia their charitable work involves the promotion of safe sex, raising money for HIV/AIDS and breast cancer research, the Gay Games, Haight Ashbury Free Clinics, and raising the "first legal $1000" for a city proposition to legalize medical marijuana. Worthy, perhaps, but hardly "heroic".

Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence

 

If the Dodgers truly want to honor nuns who have actually performed wonderful, heroic work among children, the poor, and the elderly they might consider inviting real nuns to their stadium. Why invite men who are actually mocking Catholic nuns and Christianity with not only the manner in which they comport themselves, but also by the name of their group and some of the names they go by themselves?

TownHall's Mia Cathell has more although it's behind a paywall. Here's a sample:

Among the abhorrent actions of the worldwide "Order," whose motto is "Go forth and sin some more!"—a perversion of Jesus's command from John 8:11, "Go and sin no more," co-founders "Sister Vicious Power Hungry B*tch" and "Sister Missionary Position" wore the habits of a Roman Catholic convent to a gay nude beach, and in 2007, they tricked the archbishop of San Francisco into giving them the Eucharist during Holy Communion.

This past Easter Sunday, they hosted a "Jesus and Mary-themed striptease" where a pole dancer was "writhing upside down on a large wooden cross." Half-naked men were also there competing to be crowned the "hunkiest" Jesus along with contestants vying to win the group's longtime "Foxy Mary" contest.

According to Hot Air the group also features a "twerking Jesus."

Perhaps the reader will think that I'm making too much of this, but ask yourself: Suppose a group of white men dressed up in blackface, called themselves something like Brothers of Perpetual Shiftlessness and paraded themselves around in the most racially stereotypical manner. Would anyone think this was anything but grossly insulting, racist behavior, even if the group performed charitable work in the black community? Would such a group be invited by the Dodgers to participate in a hypothetical minority pride night?

Why is mocking nuns - perhaps the most innocent, selfless people in our society - by a bunch of sexual obsessives and libertines any different, and why does a major league baseball team - in a league so afraid of offending a small group of Native Americans that they changed the name of one of their franchises - have no qualms about offending millions of Catholics and other Christians?

The Greatest Human Rights Atrocity of Our Time

Here's a sickening statistic: In the past year, over 2,000 church buildings were attacked, looted, and forcibly closed across the globe, and over 5,600 Christians were martyred for believing in and not denying Christ. Nor was last year particularly exceptional. Every year for the past three decades thousands of Christians have been beaten, raped, tortured, martyred, lost their livelihoods or had their property destroyed.

Given the ongoing persecution of Christians around the world I thought I'd rerun a post from a couple of years ago that illustrates this greatest human rights atrocity since the Holocaust. Here it is:

The recent massacre of over 250 worshiping Christians by Muslim terrorists in Sri Lanka is a reminder that the slaughter of Christians is by far the greatest human rights atrocity of our time, and strangely, one about which much of the American media is silent.

A column by Kirsten Powers, written in the wake of last weekend's horror in Sri Lanka, is worth highlighting.

Powers reminds us of the slow-burning holocaust occurring today around the world but particularly in Muslim and officially atheistic countries. It's the oppression, torture and murder of tens of thousands of Christians whose only crime, like the Christians in ancient Rome, is that they refuse to accept the religion of those in power.

The details are horrifying. It's perhaps the greatest human rights crisis of the last sixty years, but our political leadership and media seem to have little to say about it.

Here are a few excerpts from Powers' essay:

Some of the most harrowing stories about how Christians are persecuted have come from the African country of Eritrea, which Open Doors lists as the twelfth worst country in the world for Christian persecution.

In his 2013 book, The Global War on Christians, reporter John L. Allen Jr., writes that in Eritrea, Christians are sent to the Me’eter military camp and prison, which he describes as a “concentration camp for Christians.” It is believed to house thousands being punished for their religious beliefs.

Prisoners are packed into 40’x38’ metal shipping containers, normally used for transporting cargo. It is so cramped that it’s impossible to lie down and difficult even to find a place to sit. “The metal exacerbates the desert temperatures, which means bone chilling cold at night and wilting heat during the day....believed to reach 115 degrees Fahrenheit or higher,” Allen writes.

One former inmate...described [it] as “giant ovens baking people alive.” Prisoners are given next to nothing to drink so “they sometimes end up drinking their own scant sweat and urine to stay alive.”

The prisoners are tortured, sexually abused, and have no contact with the outside world. One survivor of the prison described witnessing a fellow female inmate “who had been beaten so badly her uterus was actually hanging outside her body. The survivor desperately tried to push the uterus back in” but couldn’t prevent the inmate’s excruciating death.

The situation is different but no less horrific in North Korea and Syria.

The worst persecutor of Christians is North Korea, where an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 followers of Jesus are suffering in prison camps for “crimes” such as owning a Bible, going to church, or sharing their faith. In November 2013, it was reported that 80 prisoners were publicly executed, many for possessing Bibles.

Syria, ranked as the third-worst country by Open Doors, has devolved in the last year to a horror show for Christians. The Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea noted in December 2013 a message she received from a contact in Syria who reported, “Kidnapping, killings, ransom, rape . . . 2013 is a tragedy for Christians in Syria.

All Syrians have endured great suffering and distress. The Christians, however, often had to pay with their lives for their faith.

Our bishops and nuns have been kidnapped, our political leader killed by torture. After our Christian villages have been occupied, our churches have been destroyed and even mass graves were found in Saddad. [T]he Islamists have put [to] the Christians the alternative: Islam or death. Why [is] the West just watching?”

Powers closes her piece with this:

At a December 2013 speech to a conference organized by Georgetown’s Religious Freedom Project, Allen told the audience, “I always ask Christians in countries [where persecution occurs], what can we do for you? The number one thing they say is, “Don’t forget about us.”

It would certainly be welcome if our leaders in Washington would show the world that they haven't forgotten these wretched martyrs and that they care as deeply for them and their circumstances as they do for, say, immigrants seeking to enter our country illegally.

Do Our Lives Ultimately Mean Anything? (Pt. II)

This is the second of two posts on an article by former pastor and now atheist Ryan Bell on his claim that God is not necessary for our lives to be meaningful. In Saturday's post (scroll down to view) it was observed that not only do most theists disagree with him but so, too, do a lot of notable atheists.

Today's post continues the discussion:

I once had a teacher colleague who is a talented illustrator who teaches high school biology. He draws wonderful pictures with colored markers on his whiteboard - pictures of living creatures of all sorts that are so well drawn it can take your breath away to look at them. Then, when the lesson is over, he takes a rag and erases the board and it's as if those beautiful works of art were never there.

On atheism death is like that rag. It's the big eraser that blots out all that we've done in this life and renders it all futile.

Bell, of course, doesn't see it that way:

Popular Christian theology, on the other hand, renders this life less meaningful by anchoring all notions of value and purpose to a paradise somewhere in the future, in a place other than where we are right now.

Ironically, my Christian upbringing taught me that ultimately this life doesn't matter, which tends to make believers apathetic about suffering and think that things will only get worse before God suddenly solves everything on the last day.

This is simply incorrect. It's remarkable that he grew up believing that this life doesn't matter. In Christian theology everything one does in this life has implications for the next.

Nor are Christians apathetic about suffering. Indeed, Christians believe that there's meaning to suffering. Such a belief is alien to atheism, however, which sees suffering as the pointless consequence of living in a cold, impersonal world.

Here's atheist biologist Richard Dawkins on the subject:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Bell continues:

It struck me this year that nihilism is a disease born of theism. Some people have been taught to expect meaning outside of this world beyond our earthly experiences. When they come upon the many absurdities of life and see that it's "not as advertised," an existential despair can take hold.

But if this is true why does that existential despair afflict atheists but not theists? Theists do not succumb to that despair because the absurdities of life, on theism, are the result of man's repudiation of God.

Life is indeed absurd for the atheist. It's a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. But for the theist there's a theme to history, a denouement. God has a plan, the theist believes, and in the end all will be made clear, it will make sense. The atheist believes that there is no God and none of it makes sense.

Consider these statements:

• "There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death….There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will…." – biologist Will Provine
• "What will come from what I am doing now, and may do tomorrow? What will come from my whole life? Otherwise expressed—Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything? Why should I do anything? Again, in other words, is there any meaning in my life which will not be destroyed by the inevitable death awaiting me?" - Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy describing the thoughts that plagued him in his atheist years.

Yes, but "the problem is not solved by inventing a God in which to place all our hopes," Bell insists, "but rather to face life honestly and create beauty from the absurd."

The solution Bell urges upon us is to just make the best of an inexplicable existence and then die. This is a prescription for hopelessness in the face of the absurdity of life. One way to frame the absurdity is to understand Bell's advice as enjoining us to live as if God existed even though he doesn't.

He concludes with these thoughts:

Without dependency on a cosmic savior who is coming to rescue us, we are free to recognize that we are the ones we're waiting for. If we don't make the world a fair and habitable place, no one else is going to do it for us. Our lives matter because our choices affect others and our children's future.

Life does not need a divine source in order to be meaningful. Anyone who has seen a breathtaking sunset or fallen in love with another human being knows that we make meaning from the experiences of our lives; we construct it the way we construct any social narrative.

Free from false expectations we are free to create purpose, share love, and enjoy the endless beauty of our world. We are the fortunate ones. There is no need for fear to have the last word.

This is all difficult to understand. How does the fact that our choices affect others and our children's future make them meaningful in any but a trivial sense? They're no more meaningful than the decision by the band on the Titanic to keep playing while the ship sank.

Woody Allen was quoted in an article in Time magazine as he reflected on the question of the meaning of life. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is," he says. "You see how meaningless … I don't want to depress you, but it's a meaningless little flicker."

If anything, there's something refreshing in [Allen's] resistance to the platitudes about simple things making life worthwhile that so often pass for philosophy. It's not that Allen is unable to enjoy himself; it's that he's convinced the moments don't add up to redemption.

"You have a meal, or you listen to a piece of music, and it's a pleasurable thing," he says. "But it doesn't accrue to anything."

Unless what we do matters forever, it doesn't really matter at all. If the existence of humanity has no meaning then it's hard to imagine how the existence of individual human persons can have meaning.

As the novelist Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:

If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus an individual's] life has no meaning.

These are gloomy ruminations, but if atheism is true so are Maugham's words. The atheist can refuse to think about it or pretend, like Bell, that it's not so, but both alternatives seem to be examples of what French existential philosopher Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith. They're forms of self-deception.

The thoughtful, honest atheist is in an awkward position since he really should be hoping with all his heart that he's wrong about his atheism.

Do Our Lives Ultimately Mean Anything? (Pt.I)

Since ancient times philosophers, poets, and other thinkers have pondered the question of what purpose there is, if any, to human existence, what meaning there is to individual human lives.

Meaning is a difficult notion to define. We usually think of it as a purpose or significance that endures and gives us satisfaction. If that's a helpful description then perhaps we can think of meaning as either proximal or ultimate. Watching daytime television may provide the viewer with a temporary or proximal purpose and satisfaction but it's ultimately empty.

The important question is, can there be ultimate meaning if death terminates our existence? Both theistic and atheistic thinkers have tended to reply in the negative. Both agree that if there is no God then there's no ultimate meaning to life.

They differ, though, in that theists tend to think that if there's no ultimate meaning then the proximal meanings we impart to life are, at bottom, illusory. Unless what we do matters forever, the theist argues, it doesn't really matter at all.

A lot of atheists agree with this but not all. Some atheist thinkers want to assert that even if there's no ultimate meaning to our lives we can still have a satisfying life while we're here, and that's meaning of a sort, indeed it's all the meaning they need.

An example of this view can be found in a column by a former Seventh Day Adventist pastor by the name of Ryan Bell who discusses why he gave up belief in God and why he's convinced that one can have a meaningful life without God. I'd like to examine Bell's reasons for his latter claim in this and the next VP posts.

Bell writes:

One question I've been repeatedly asked is how my life has any meaning without God. While I had heard dozens of Christian apologists claim that meaning cannot be found without God, I had a curious experience. My appreciation for life and its potential increased when I stepped away from my faith.

Atheists are often accused of being nihilists or absurdists. Absurdism is a school of thought arguing that humanity's effort to find inherent meaning in life is futile. Nihilism goes further and in doing so becomes a mood or a disposition as well as a philosophical frame of mind. Nihilism says that nothing matters at all.

"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose," writes William Lane Craig, a Christian apologist.

Craig is a Christian and might be expected to hold this view, but there are dozens of thoughtful atheists who have voiced essentially the same melancholy sentiments. Here, for example, is Czech writer Milan Kundera:

A life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible or beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.

We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.

Nor is Kundera an isolated example. A sampling from the pens of other atheist writers could include the following:

• "Life is a short day’s journey from nothingness to nothingness." – Ernst Hemmingway
• "The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless." - Woody Allen, filmmaker (Hannah and Her Sisters)
• "The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life." – Theodosius Dobzhansky, biologist
• "Our only significance lies in the fact that we can look out on the universe and it can’t look back on us." – Will Durant, historian
• "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal." Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher
• "Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful." Albert Camus, novelist
• "Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness." – Clarence Darrow, lawyer
• "Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose." – Bernard Rensch, biologist
• "I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher (Nausea)
• "The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick since objectively neither has any existence." Sigmund Freud, psychologist

So how does Bell respond to such depressing views held by his fellow atheists? He writes:

But my experience is that acknowledging the absence of God has helped me refocus on the wonderful and unlikely life I do have. This realization has increased my appreciation for beauty and given me a sense of immediacy about my life.

As I come to terms with the fact that this life is the only one I get, I am more motivated than ever to make it count.

I want to experience as much happiness and pleasure as I can while helping others to attain their happiness. I construct meaning in my life from many sources, including love, family, friendships, service, learning and so on.

Yet if atheism is true the things he lists are nothing more than electro-chemical reactions occurring in his brain. How can chemical reactions generate true meaning rather than just the illusion of meaning? Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick seks to disabuse us of our pretensions that our feelings and emotions are in any important sense meaningful:

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

Moreover, if death is the end, the most that the things Bell mentions can provide is some sort of proximal meaning, they cannot give our lives ultimate meaning. On atheism the universe is a random whirl of impersonal and purposeless atoms, but nothing comprised solely of the impersonal and purposeless, such as are we on this view, can have any purpose or significance.

Conscious beings can while away the hours engaged in diversions like work, collecting stamps, gardening, doing crossword puzzles, loving our families, or learning about how the cosmos works, but it's hard to see how any of it matters much if the footprints we make in life get washed away by the tide of death, as they assuredly do if death is the complete annihilation of the conscious self.

It's perhaps fitting to close with a quote from philosopher Bertrand Russell who wrote about this stark truth in an apologetic for his atheism titled A Free Man's Worship:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

So far from life being meaningful, Russell argues that, in the absence of God, our lives are built on a foundation of despair.

More on this Monday.

Men Have Forgotten God

David Klinghoffer at Evolution News has posted a piece based on a famous speech by Soviet writer and dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn.

Klinghoffer writes:

Forty years ago this month, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn accepted the Templeton Prize, but immediately turned about and delivered a blistering, prophetic speech that you should take some time now to read. It’s fearless — he even goes so far as to denounce the year’s previous winner for appeasing Communism. That cannot have pleased his hosts.

His theme, on May 10, 1983, was that the East and the West had in their different ways surrendered disastrously to atheism.

Klinghoffer goes on to explain that Solzhenitsyn's speech provided the theme for a talk by philosopher Stephen Meyer who recalled the Russian's speech in his recent presentation at the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith.

He quotes Meyer's opening:

I think all of us have a sense that our culture is in some serious trouble and that, in many, many ways, the wheels are coming off.

And it happens that this year is the 40th anniversary of a very significant speech that was given by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident. And this was his famous “Men have forgotten God” speech.

And in this speech he told the story of the words spreading across the Soviet Union, across Russia, Mother Russia, at the time of the Bolshevik takeover. And that the old people were telling him repeatedly, “These things are happening, these great disasters have befallen Russia, because men have forgotten God.”

And this is a passage from his speech. “While I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen “Russia, men have forgotten God. That’s why this is happening.”

Now, we have many disasters befalling America, if we’re clear-eyed and honest with ourselves. We have a near epidemic level of teen suicide. We have an anxiety epidemic. We have mass shootings. We have family breakdown, out of wedlock births. We have a confusion about gender identity, even a fluidity idea that is resulting in medical mutilation of young people. Promiscuity, illegitimacy, abortion. It’s getting kind of depressing, I realize.

But I could go on, and the crime waves, the fentanyl deaths. There are disasters befalling America. And the question I want to ask tonight is if these disasters, any of them, all of them, some of them, have something to do with our having forgotten God?

Yet Meyer, the author of Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, has encouragement to share, writes Klinghoffer:

The history of science since Darwin has done much to corrode traditional faith, leaving us vulnerable to the hopelessness that plays out in numerous ways across our culture. But while the media keep the fact well hidden, the scientific basis for atheism has suffered major reversals.

Meyer explains why he's hopeful:

There is a tremendous change taking place in science and philosophy, and it’s taking place at the highest levels of scientific and philosophical discourse. It’s still controversial, it’s still contentious, but what’s driving it are major changes in philosophical thinking and also major discoveries that have been made in science.

I just want to tick off three with a brief description of each to get our conference going.

The material universe had a beginning, the universe has been fine-tuned for life from the very beginning, and there is evidence of design in life, in particular the big infusions of digital information that have been infused into our biosphere since the beginning of the universe.

One great historian of science says that the idea that God created the universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than any time in the last 100 years. In my book (Return of the God Hypothesis), I go a little further than that and say that the postulation of a transcendent, intelligent, and active creator, the kind of creator we find in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, provides the best overall explanation for biological and cosmological origins, where everything came from.

Our world is steeped in evil because our world thinks that the idea of God is superfluous or risible. It's a mistake that is having horrific consequences. Here's Solzhenitsyn:

Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” That is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.”

Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth.

We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. The entire 20th century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction.

This plunge into the abyss has aspects that are unquestionably global, dependent neither on political systems, nor on levels of economic and cultural development, nor yet on national peculiarities.

And contemporary Europe, seemingly so unlike the Russia of 1913, is today on the verge of the same collapse, for all that it has been reached by a different route. Different parts of the world have followed different paths, but today they are all approaching the threshold of a common ruin.

There's more at the link. Solzhenitsyn's acceptance speech can be read here and Meyer's 30 minute address to the conference is below.

Ukraine's Lessons for China

An interesting column at Strategy Page offers a number of lessons that the Chinese - who are currently threatening an invasion of Taiwan - will likely have drawn from Russia's Ukraine debacle.

Here are some of the points the column makes:

Even before Russia actually invaded Ukraine, China advised that such an operation would be unwise. Russian leader Vladimir Putin ignored that advice, which implied that Putin did not have an accurate assessment of what the Russian military was actually capable of.

Russia insists that Ukraine is part of Russia and must be reunited with the motherland. China has a roughly similar situation with Taiwan.

The Ukrainian experience has already persuaded most Taiwanese that they could reliably defeat or disrupt Chinese attack plans.

China, Taiwan and the United States are all studying the Ukraine War for useful lessons and one of the few they could all agree on was that the huge quantities of artillery ammunition expended exceeded peacetime estimates. This can have an impact on a Chinese attempt to seize Taiwan by force.

Taiwan has been increasing its weapons and munitions stockpiles for years as well as training more men for combat duty. While China has long planned to use over a thousand ballistic missiles and lots of airstrikes, they still have to get troops onto the island and deal with Taiwanese ground forces.

At that point both sides would be depending on artillery a lot and the Ukraine War has demonstrated that a lot more artillery ammunition is needed than anyone planned for. Transporting that extra artillery ammunition ashore in Taiwan complicates Chinese logistical planning and delays its readiness to attack.

The Ukraine War also demonstrated the importance of motivation and morale. The Taiwanese identify with the Ukrainians while the Chinese note that they and Russia are basically police state dictatorships while Ukraine and Taiwan are democracies that are highly motivated to innovate and fight to preserve their way of life.

China would also suffer much more than Russia from any economic problems an attack on Taiwan would lead to. China, like Russia, has internal economic and population problems. China’s working age population is shrinking and that is having an impact on the military because not enough Chinese are willing to serve.

One of the economic risks associated with China attacking Taiwan is the economic backlash and damage to China. Western sea power will immediately block Chinese imports and exports for at least the duration of hostilities, and sanctions will block or greatly diminish those for longer.

Worse, the ensuing worldwide financial and economic chaos will dramatically reduce Western demand for Chinese products long-term. China’s economy is far more dependent on its exports than the West is on imports from China.

Next is the unique position of the Taiwanese electronics industry, which is the sole or primary manufacturer of several key electronic components. China and the rest of the world are very dependent on Taiwanese computer products.

Destruction of Taiwanese computer products industries during an invasion would result in world-wide economic disruptions for several years before America, Japan and South Korea could replace Taiwan’s former production.

Taiwan has made veiled threats of destroying the plants producing those unique products at the onset of any Chinese attack. This issue will become more prominent during the immediate run-up before the invasion, and cause increasingly greater anxiety and turmoil in both Western and Chinese markets as they prepare for both the loss of Taiwan’s unique products plus all Chinese imports and exports for an uncertain period.

China’s economy would suffer most of all because China is as dependent on the West for Taiwanese electronics, and on Western imports of China’s non-electronic products that would plunge due to lack of Western demand during a recession.

The West would certainly not export its computer electronics to China given that China would have caused such economic chaos, and China lacks the ability to manufacture its own advanced electronics without imports of key Western components and materials.

There's much more of interest at the link. One consideration that the Chinese must be factoring into their calculations that Strategy Page doesn't mention is that the United States military is probably going to be at its weakest for the next five to eight years so if the Chinese are concerned about our military response to an invasion of Taiwan they must see their window of opportunity opening now.

Wittgenstein's Poker and the Resurrection of Jesus

In October of 1946 a group of highly accomplished philosophers and intellectuals gathered in a room at King's College, Cambridge to hear two of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century engage in a rather odd colloquy.

The two principals were Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Popper had prepared a paper critical of Wittgenstein's view that there were no genuine philosophical problems, only linguistic puzzles.

According to a book I'm currently reading titled Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, as Popper was reading his paper, Wittgenstein, who had a reputation for not listening to papers all the way through, as well as for rudeness and arrogance, interrupted Popper, and an acrimonious exchange ensued.

As the back and forth grew increasingly heated Wittgenstein picked up a fireplace poker and began waving it around. Shortly afterward he threw down the poker and left the room.

On these major points there was unanimity among eye-witnesses, but on the details there were discrepancies. Some claimed the poker was red hot, others that it was cool. Some say Wittgenstein only used it to make his point, others, including Popper, allege that he threatened Popper with it.

Some say he left after angry words with Bertrand Russell who was serving as a moderator, others, including Popper, asserted that he stormed out after Popper gave as an example of an obvious moral principle that one shouldn't "threaten visiting speakers with pokers." Some claim that Popper only said this after Wittgenstein had left the room.

Some insist that he slammed the door, others that he left quietly.

I find this episode interesting because even though the details diverge among the witnesses, the main facts are not in dispute. No one, not even the most skeptical reader of the book, would ever dream of concluding that because there are discrepancies in the telling of the tale that therefore it's all fiction.

Yet this is exactly how some scholars react to the accounts in the New Testament of the Bible, particularly the accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus. We're told that because the reports we have of this event seem to disagree in this or that detail, because there seems to be some confusion among the alleged eye-witnesses as to what, exactly, they saw, therefore the whole thing is rubbish.

It's like saying that because there are discrepancies among the eye-witness reports of the Wittgenstein/Popper contretemps that therefore there was no actual disagreement, that Wittgenstein didn't really wave a poker about or leave early, or that there was, in fact, no meeting at all between these two worthies.

Perhaps the witnesses were hallucinating or otherwise mistaken about the whole affair.

In other words, even if it's true that there are minor discrepancies in a historical account that does nothing to impugn the reliability of the overall narrative, particularly when there's overwhelming evidence that the major events described in that narrative actually happened.

No historical record is 100% accurate in every detail, and to require that degree of accuracy from historical documents is to relegate all history to the realm of unreliable fiction.