Should We Have Done It?

I saw the movie Oppenheimer the other night and, reflecting on it on the way home, thought that perhaps the film had been a bit over-hyped. The acting was indeed superb and the recreation of the 1945-era, particularly Los Alamos, was very well done, but the story moved too fast, the welter of characters would've been confusing for someone unfamiliar with the details of the Manhattan Project as well as the post-war political situation, and the sex scenes were insultingly gratutitous.

I also thought the film could've done a better job of explaining how a fission bomb works as well as the difference between a fission bomb and the fusion bomb that Edwin Teller wanted the Project to work on.

In any case, the movie did raise the moral concerns that many of those, including Oppenheimer, working on the bomb had, concerns that for some graded into actual anguish.

Should we have dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is it ever justifiable to deliberately target civilians in wartime? Was the use of such a destructive weapon immoral?

Having recently read James M. Scott's excellent account of the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities (Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb) it seemed to me that much of the controversy over the use of the "atomic bomb" was a bit odd.

After all, in terms of the human toll and the ruination of cities, the only difference between using the nuclear weapon and employing incendiary bombs was that the atomic bomb was much more efficient. It took just one bomb and one bomber to accomplish what thousands of incendiary bombs, hundreds of bombers and thousands of aviators wrought on Tokyo on March 10, 1945 and subsequently on 65 other Japanese cities in the months leading up to the August 6th attack on Hiroshima.

In the attack on Tokyo alone between 80,000 to 130,000 civilians perished in the conflagration. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined between 129,000 and 226,000 people died from the blasts. The question, then, is whether the intentional immolation of civilians with any weapon, conventional or nuclear, was morally justified.

In a column at National Review Rich Lowry focuses on the Hiroshima attack, but what he writes applies with equal relevance to the incendiary bombing campaign that preceded it. He argues that use of the atomic weapon was in fact the "right call."

The war was reaping a terrible harvest of human life. The Japanese atrocities against both American POWs and Chinese civilians were horrific. An estimated 2000 civilians were dying every day in Asia, largely from Japanese cruelties. The assaults on islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa cost thousands of young Americans and tens of thousands of Japanese their lives.

An invasion of Japan was thought by some war planners to be necessary to end the war and such an invasion was projected to produce up to a million American casualties and even more among the Japanese.

Lowry writes:

Whatever the number of American dead would have been — and perhaps there would have been no invasion after all if the projected costs were too high — there can be no doubt that Truman’s decision to drop the bomb saved American lives, whether it was 5,000, or 50,000, or 500,000.

Since, as the leader of the United States, that was his first responsibility, this alone should create a strong presumption toward dropping the bombs being the right call.

The awful truth is that the atom bombs weren’t that different in kind from the incendiary raids already undertaken by Curtis LeMay. Those raids didn’t come out of nowhere. The precision attacks of LeMay’s predecessor, Haywood Hansell, simply didn’t work. As Richard Rhodes notes in his classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, “in three months of hard flying, taking regular losses, Hansell had managed to destroy none of his nine high-priority targets.”

LeMay took over and worked the problem, revamping tactics and training, and settled on low-altitude firebombing.

The new approach proved hellishly effective. The raid on Tokyo in March 1945 killed more than 100,000 people and injured a million. A U.S. bombing survey said, in an arresting formulation, “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than any time in the history of man.”

LeMay kept going and at one point literally ran out of bombs. The justification for the campaign — that dispersed home industries made a significant contribution to Japan’s industrial effort — wasn’t wrong, although the bombing ranged much more widely.

According to James M. Scott in his recent book, Black Snow, LeMay’s bombers burned down more than 178 square miles of 66 Japanese cities, or an average of 43 percent of the area of the targeted cities.

“Along with home industries,” Scott continues, “America had damaged or destroyed six hundred factories, including twenty-five major aircraft plants, eighteen oil refineries and storage facilities, and six major arsenals.” Significant Japanese voices said after the war that the firebombing was an enormous and consequential blow to Japanese morale.

There’s really no moral case against the atom bombs that doesn’t also apply to the firebombing. So if both of these tactics were to be left off the table, what would remain?

Indeed, were there more moral alternatives to an invasion of the mainland? Lowry continues:

There was a blockade. Less spectacularly than the B-29s, U.S. submarines kneecapped the Japanese economy through their attacks on Japanese shipping. The U.S. was tightening the noose.

Already in 1945, Japan was looking down the barrel of mass starvation, with daily caloric intake constantly dwindling. A Japanese historian has noted that, “immediately after the defeat, some estimated that 10 million people were likely to starve to death.”

The new U.S. bombing campaign near the end of the war was going to go after the Japanese rail system, which would have made the situation immediately more dire. (The mining of Japan’s home waters to hamper shipping further was called, not subtly, Operation Starvation.)

The problem, obviously, with starving a country out is that lots of people are going to die. There are no fireballs, but there is incredible privation and death by the hundreds of thousands or millions all the same.

“Aerial bombardment inflicted,” [historian Richard Frank] writes, “civilian deaths in Japan measured in hundreds of thousands, but the direct and indirect effects of the blockade in China killed noncombatants by the millions, and the blockade against Japan aimed for the same ghastly results.”

Frank points out that there was a reason that, as recently as World War I, blockades were considered unethical, because they didn’t distinguish between civilians and troops.

The Soviets were about to declare war on Japan so maybe we should have let them invade, but it's hard to see how the Japanese would've fared better under Stalin's iron fist than under the American post-war reconstruction.

At any rate, if you're interested in this topic I encourage you to read Lowry's column. As we approach the anniversary of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6th and 9th, 1945) there'll probably be a lot in the news about the morality of what the United States did seventy eight years ago.

Missing Brain Parts

One of the most astonishing developments in neuroscience in recent years is the growing number of instances of researchers discovering cases of people who are missing parts of their brains that are responsible for certain functions but who are not missing the functions.

Denyse O'Leary writes about an example at Evolution News in which a girl lacks olfactory bulbs in her brain but nevertheless still has the ability to smell:

Ever since neuroscientists started imaging the brain, they’ve been turning up cases where people are missing brain parts we would expect them to need in order to do something — but they are doing that very thing anyway. One example, written up in Live Science in 2019, concerns women who are missing their olfactory bulbs but can still smell.

Researchers have discovered a small group of people that seem to defy medical science: They can smell despite lacking “olfactory bulbs,” the region in the front of the brain that processes information about smells from the nose.

It’s not clear how they are able to do this, but the findings suggest that the human brain may have a greater ability to adapt than previously thought.

The story is all the more remarkable when we consider that her sense of smell was especially good; that was why she had signed up for the Israeli researchers’ study. Deciding to pursue the matter, the researchers tested other women. On the ninth try, they found another left-handed woman who could smell without an olfactory bulb.

Missing olfactory bulbs are only one example of the brain's ability to adapt and compensate: Last year, Medical Express reported on a woman who lacked a left temporal lobe, believed to be the language area of the brain:

[The woman] told Fedorenko and her team that she only came to realize she had an unusual brain by accident—her brain was scanned in 1987 for an unrelated reason. Prior to the scan she had no idea she was different.

By all accounts she behaved normally and had even earned an advanced degree. She also excelled in languages — she speaks fluent Russian — which is all the more surprising considering the left temporal lobe is the part of the brain most often associated with language processing.

Eager to learn more about the woman and her brain, the researchers accepted her into a study that involved capturing images of her brain using an fMRI machine while she was engaged in various activities, such as language processing and math.

In so doing, they found no evidence of language processing happening in the left part of her brain; it was all happening in the right. They found that it was likely the woman had lost her left temporal lobe as a child, probably due to a stroke. The area where it had been had become filled with cerebrospinal fluid.

To compensate, her brain had developed a language network in the right side of her brain that allowed her to communicate normally.

The researchers also learned that [the woman] had a sister who was missing her right temporal lobe, and who also had no symptoms of brain dysfunction — an indication, the researchers suggest, that there is a genetic component to the stroke and recovery process in the two women.

It’s also come out that one in 4000 people lacks a corpus callosum. That’s the structure of neural fibers that transfers information between the brain’s two hemispheres. It would seem a pretty important part of the brain yet 25 percent of those who lack it show no symptoms. The others suffer mild to severe cognitive disorders.

Remarkably, some people have been found to be missing almost their entire cerebral cortex and are still leading normal lives. I wrote about one such case on VP some time ago here.

O'Leary believes that these phenomena are evidence that the brain is not all there is to our cognitive experience, that in addition to the material gray matter we also possess an immaterial mind. She concludes:

Neuroplasticity is perhaps best understood as the human mind reaching out past physical gaps and barriers in any number of inventive ways. And it raises a question: If the mind is merely what the brain does, as many materialist pundits claim, what is the mind when the brain … doesn’t? At times, the mind appears to be picking up where the brain left off.

Of course, if we do possess an immaterial mind then the metaphysical view called materialism, the belief that everything in the universe is just a manifestation of matter and energy, is wrong, and since materialism is a pillar of modern atheism, atheism cannot afford for materialism to be refuted.

2024

The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be very depressing. If you're a Democrat voter and Biden is the nominee you're very likely voting for whomever his running mate is, which at this point is Kamala Harris, and the prospect of a Harris presidency is enough to drive all but the left-most ideologues to utter despair.

If you're a Republican voter you're currently faced with the likelihood that Donald Trump will be the nominee. If so, and if he were to win the election, he would very possibly be unable to get anyone of any quality to serve in his administration. After all, who in his or her right mind would want to risk falling afoul of this man because they did something he didn't want them to do or didn't do something he did want them to do?

If you're not sure what I mean ask Mike Pence or Jeff Sessions.

If Biden wins, it's doubtful that he'd serve for very long, and if Trump wins it's doubtful there'd be anyone else in his administration but him.

At this point polls are pretty much meaningless, but nevertheless Jim Geraghty shares some interesting numbers that reflect the state of play at this moment in time. Geraghty writes:

In mid June in Arizona, Public Opinion Strategies (POS) found Biden beating Trump by two percentage points, while Ron DeSantis beat Biden by eight percentage points.

The same firm surveying at the same time found Biden beating Trump by three percentage points in Pennsylvania, while DeSantis beat Biden by three points.

In Georgia, POS found Biden beat Trump by two percentage points, while DeSantis beat Biden by three.

In Michigan, the same firm found DeSantis beating Biden by two percentage points, while Trump trails Biden by a point.

And in Nevada, POS found DeSantis beating Biden by two points, and Trump losing to Biden by four points.

Perhaps most surprisingly, in my home state of Virginia, POS finds DeSantis and Biden tied, while Biden is ahead of Trump by seven percentage points.

In fact, once you start looking at other states and other pollsters, you see a consistent pattern of DeSantis winning just a few percentage points more support than Trump does in head-to-head matchups with Biden.

In North Carolina, Opinion Diagnostics finds DeSantis winning over Biden by five percentage points, while Trump beats Biden by three points.

Over in Wisconsin, Marquette University polling found Biden beating DeSantis by two percentage points, but beating Trump by nine points.

Again, these numbers could easily change in the coming weeks and months, but they do show one thing. The media narrative that DeSantis is floundering is, like many media narratives, a pile of hog poop.

It'd be ironic, and perhaps politically suicidal, if these numbers hold up but the Republicans nonetheless insist on nominating Donald Trump. We'll see.

The Fog of Delusion

J. Budziszewski is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas. He had a short column in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago (paywall) in which he stated that, contrary to what some of our friends on the left like to imagine, we're already knee-deep in a "war" for the culture and sanity is losing.

Those in charge of the institutions of our nation - its churches, media, corporations, schools and governments - have largely embraced ideas that most people until the day before yesterday would've thought to be lunacy: that men can have periods and get pregnant, that men should be allowed to compete in girls' sports and use girls' rest rooms, that we can't say what a woman is, that it makes sense to use "they" and "them" when talking about a single individual, that it's perfectly okay to have men dressed as women dancing suggestively for children, that it's acceptable to give a child hormone blockers and permanently mutilate their bodies because the child is going through a period of gender confusion, etc.

I doubt very much whether very many people really believe these notions. I also doubt whether very many people really believe the major tenets of Critical Race Theory, for instance, that all whites and only whites are racist and that the stain of racism is indelible.

Yet somehow a relatively small minority has intimidated the majority into acquiesence. People are reluctant to stand up and say that all this is insanity and that anyone who truly believes it belongs in an asylum.

I say that I believe relatively few people truly believe this nonsense, but unfortunately the relative few who do believe it occupy positions of power and influence in our culture and have been successful in cowing many of the rest of us into silence.

Budziszewki continues:

It’s true that no one who has seriously studied American history believes the lies of critical race theory. Deep down, every one of us knows that biological sex is real. And yes, some who don’t believe in these insanities pretend that they do.

Nonetheless, many of those who press these manias are dead serious. That doesn’t mean they aren’t putting over a con. They capitalize on mania to gain status, wealth, and power—but it’s their mania, too.

They work desperately to remain in a state of denial, not to think about the obvious. The exhausting labor of self-deception pushes them into more extreme behavior. Just as lies beget lies, self-deceptions metastasize into new self-deceptions.

Moreover, they have on their side the president, universities, school boards, regulatory agencies, professional and athletic associations, many courts and churches, one of the major political parties and most of the media.

Their constituencies are made up largely of people to whom nothing else matters, and who spend their time—and often earn a comfortable living—trying to wear the rest of us down. Since the rest of us have other things to do, that isn’t difficult.

Ideas have consequences, however, and pernicious ideas often have pernicious consequences. So do pernicious practices like sexualizing children with "Drag Queen Story Hour" and surgical disfigurement of children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

Much of our culture has fallen into massive self-delusion and derangement, and those who haven't feel isolated and afraid to stand against the tidal wave of lunacy that's sweeping over our institutions. We think that we must be the only ones who don't see what everyone else claims to see, and that there must be something wrong with us for thinking that what the culture seeks to normalize we think to be perverse.

But we're not the only ones who believe that the culture is suffering from a form of insanity, however, and the more of us who are willing to call it what it is, the more likely the fog of delusion will lift and many people will start asking how they could have ever gone along with such bizarre ideas.

At least that's my hope, and I hope it's yours as well.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted on what Nobel winner in physics Eugene Wigner called the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" to explain the world. Today's post is something of a follow-up.

We often take for granted that the operations of nature can be explained in terms of mathematical equations. We learned in high school physics (if we took physics) that all physical phenomena are describable mathematically.

Mathematical patterns are ubiquitous in nature from quantum mechanics to the Fibonacci sequence in the whorls of disc flowers of a sunflower to the trajectories of planets in their orbits around the sun. Indeed, it's hard to think of any scientific phenomenon that can't be described mathematically.

What few of us ever do, though, is stop and ask why this should be so. Why is mathematics able to so accurately describe the world?

As the following five minute video points out, naturalism has no good answer to this question. The only satisfactory answer is one that involves an intelligent engineer, a mathematical genius who designed the universe according to a mathematical blueprint.

If some wish to say that this is just the way the universe is and that there's no need of deeper explanation they have to acknowledge that they're essentially admitting that they have no answer to the question, that it's just a bizarre coincidence.

Perhaps it is, but believing that it is requires a lot of faith in blind coincidence. Here's the video:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (Pt. I)

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly explicable by mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. It would indeed be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathphobic students may wince at a statement like this, but it gets worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must ultimately be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises.

In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

Sound of Freedom

The other evening I took my wife to the movies to see Sound of Freedom, a film about which I had heard considerable praise. When we arrived at the theater, however, we were told that the feature was sold out, no seats were available in the SOF auditorium, so we watched Mission Impossible instead.

The Tom Cruise movie was enjoyable, but I was surprised, given the advertising hype I'd seen for it, that only a handful of viewers were scattered throughout the theater.

Later that night I went online to order tickets for an afternoon showing of SOF a couple of days later, and we were able to get seats to see it then.

The film has been very successful, taking in $85 million after two weeks, so how has it happened that theaters are packed to see a film for which there's been relatively little advertising and what publicity there has been is mostly word-of-mouth?

One reason is that the story - the rescue by an American immigration agent of two siblings who had been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery to pedophiles - is based on true events, well-told and very compelling.

Another reason, perhaps, is that the film eschews all of the PC claptrap with which larger production studios feel impelled to lard their films.

Nevertheless, despite the very important message of the movie - that child sex trafficking is a global epidemic to which the U.S. is not immune - the left is not pleased with it.

Their displeasure may be because the hero (played by Jim Caviezel) is a white, vaguely Christian, male, and a lot of the evil characters in the movie happen to be "People of Color," but the ostensible reason is that the film, dealing as it does with an issue prominently opposed by the right-wing QAnon folks, is alleged therefore to be "QAnon-Adjacent" and thus discreditable.

This is such a ridiculous criticism of the movie that it scarcely seems necessary to respond to it. It's like arguing that because humans are bipeds and brontosauruses were bipeds that therefore brontosauruses are "human-adjacent."

Anyway, if you'd like to see a good story go see Sound of Freedom, although due to the subject matter I wouldn't recommend it for children under 16.

Incidentally, watching SOF I couldn't help but see the parallels with my 2015 novel Bridging the Abyss (see the radio button at the top of this page). I wonder if the people who made SOF had read BTF.

Just kidding. Here's the trailer:

The Road to Totalitarian Tyranny

In her magisterial 1951 work titled The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian tyrannies grow out of the fragments of a highly atomized society comprised of lonely, alienated and isolated individuals who have lost faith in the institutions of their culture and who lack both a knowledge of, and appreciation for, their history.

Rod Dreher picks up on this theme in his more recent book Live Not by Lies. He writes that our contemporary young, despite the superficial connectedness they may feel as avid consumers of social media, are largely unhappy and isolated to a historically unprecedented degree.

Their loneliness and ennui manifest themselves in epidemic rates of teenage depression and suicide which psychologist Jean Twenge says have placed us "on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades." Much of the deterioration in the mental well-being of those born since 2000, she claims, "can be traced to their phones."

Walk into a restaurant or any gathering place where you might find groups of young (and maybe not-so-young) people sitting together and it's not unusual to see each of them alone in their own world, staring at their phones, or wearing ear buds or head sets that exclude any meaningful interaction with others.

I've visited people in their homes who keep the television on so loud conversation is all but impossible, and, of course, lonely people congregate in night clubs where the music creates a din over which it's impossible to talk. Even in a crowd we're often functionally alone.

Dreher says that modern technology and social media are just two of the forces creating the conditions for what he calls a decadent, pre-totalitarian culture. Along with social atomization, widespread loneliness, the embrace of radical ideologies, the erosion of religious belief, and the loss of faith in our institutions leave society "vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation."

Totalitarian tyrants will do all they can to destroy a sense of community in the people they oppress because community is a support system that encourages resistance. It's much easier to control people when they lack the sense of identity that comes from belonging to something bigger than themselves.

Where in our modern society do we find community? The family is disintegrating, churches are empty, neighborhoods are populated by people who frequently move on after a few years. The Covid pandemic closed schools disbanded sports teams and justified restricting gtherings to a couple dozen people. People who lived through the pandemic found it harder than ever to feel a sense of belonging to something.

When people lack community, a sense of belonging, they'll crave the fellowship and identity that an ideological commitment provides. They'll sign on to any movement that gives them a sense of importance and fills their otherwise empty lives with meaning, even if that meaning is an illusion.

It is precisely this promise of a meaningful life that propelled the Bolshevik communists to power in an effete Russia after 1917 and enabled the rise of Hitler in a worn out Germany in the 1930s.

As individuals in our culture become increasingly isolated, polarized and atomized we're becoming increasingly vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation. We seem to be slouching toward acquiescence to an all-powerful, all-controlling centralized state.

If we think it couldn't happen here then perhaps we understand neither history nor human nature nor the parlous condition of our contemporary culture

Why Naturalism Is Unreasonable (Pt. II)

Yesterday I laid out an argument to the effect that one is not rational to believe that naturalism, i.e. atheism, is true and finished with some quotes, many from naturalists themselves, acknowledging that, in the words of biologist J.B.S. Haldane,

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

Nor, if one's mental processes are in fact the result solely of an evolutionary process that selects for survival rather than truth, does one have epistemic justification for believing that naturalism is true since that belief was itself produced by cognitive faculties that evolved to promote survival rather than truth.

So how does the naturalist get around this apparent difficulty? Philosopher Jay Richards summarizes one common response:

If [the Darwinian natural selection] story is roughly correct, then there would seem to be a survival advantage in forming true beliefs. Surely our ancestors would have gotten on in the world much better if they came to believe that, say, a saber-tooth tiger, is a dangerous predator. And if they believed that they should run away from dangerous predators, all the better.

In contrast, those early humans who had false beliefs, who believed that saber-tooth tigers were really genies who would give three wishes if they were petted, would tend to get weeded out of the gene pool.

So wouldn’t the Darwinian process select for reliable rational faculties, and so give us faculties that would produce true beliefs?

On this account evolution would produce a propensity for holding true beliefs solely as a coincidental by-product of selecting for behaviors that are likely to increase the chances of surviving. There are several problems with this argument, however.

One is that it assumes as a matter of faith that a non-rational process like natural selection can produce the rational faculties exhibited in human reason. What justifies the belief that rationality can arise from the non-rational?

But the bigger difficulty, as Richards writes, is that:

....there are millions of beliefs, few of which are true in the sense that they correspond with reality, but all compatible with the same behavior. Natural selection could conceivably select for survival-enhancing behavior. But it has no tool for selecting only the behaviors caused by true beliefs, and weeding out all the others.

What Richards is getting at might be illustrated by a hypothetical example: Suppose two prehistoric tribes both encouraged the production of as many children as possible, but tribe A did so because they believed that the gods would reward those who produce many offspring with a wonderful afterlife.

Imagine also that tribe B had no belief in an afterlife but did believe that the more children one has the more likely some would survive to adulthood to care for the parents in their old age.

Natural selection would judge both of these tribes to be equally "fit" since the "goal" of evolution is to maximize reproductive success. Natural selection would only "see" the behavior, it would be blind to the beliefs that produced it. Thus, true beliefs would have no particular survival advantage over false beliefs, and cognitive faculties that produced true beliefs would not be any more likely to be selected for than faculties which produced false beliefs.

Richards concludes,

So if our reasoning faculties came about as most naturalists assume they have, then we have little reason to assume they are reliable in the sense of giving us true beliefs. And that applies to our belief that naturalism is true.

Put differently, the naturalist cannot rationally justify his belief in naturalism. He can only maintain his belief that naturalism is true by an act of blind faith.

On the other hand, if our rational faculties have been instilled in us by a rational Creator then we have good reason to think that our reason is a reliable guide to truth. The theist, therefore, has much better grounds for trusting that the rational process will lead to truth than does the non-theist.

Why Naturalism Is Unreasonable (Pt. I)

One of the major difficulties with the naturalistic (or atheistic) worldview is that it must explain how belief that naturalism is true is not self-refuting. For the purposes of this discussion naturalism, atheism, and materialism may all be considered synonyms.

The argument which concludes that naturalism is self-refuting goes something like this:

On atheism there is no God. Thus, our reasoning powers must be the product of a purposeless evolutionary process that was geared to survival, not for discovering truth.

If that's the case, if we can't trust our reasoning powers to lead us to truth, especially the truth about metaphysical questions, then we have no grounds for believing that atheism is in fact true.

So, although atheism may be true, one cannot rationally believe that it is.

This is ironic since most atheists argue that atheistic materialism is rational and theism is irrational, but, in fact, the opposite is actually the case.

Theism is the more rational worldview since the belief that we are endowed with a trustworthy reasoning faculty which can reliably lead us to truth only makes sense if theism is true.

Thus, the theist has grounds for believing that reason is trustworthy and is therefore rational in trusting his reason to lead him to truth, whereas the naturalist is irrational to believe that naturalism is true since she has no grounds for believing that her reason has led her to the truth about naturalism.

Numerous naturalists have acknowledged in one way or another that this is a problem. To illustrate the point here's a baker's dozen of quotations culled from philosophers and scientists, most of whom, so far as I know, are atheistic materialists:

• "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Steven Pinker
• Evolution selects for survival and 'Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.' Patricia Churchland
• "Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth." John Gray
• "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive." Francis Crick
• “With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.” Charles Darwin
• “Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum
• “According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman
• "We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin
• “[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich
• “We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins
• “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.” Lisa Feldman Barrett
• “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” J.B.S. Haldane
• "Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God." C.S. Lewis

So how does the naturalist address this apparent difficulty? We'll look at the most popular counterargument in Monday's VP.

Reasons for Optimism?

Jim Geraghty lists a number of developments that he says are reasons for optimism if one is a libertarian:

• School choice is on the march in more states, even though Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, chickened out of embracing it at the last minute. So far this year, lawmakers in 14 states have passed bills establishing school-choice programs or expanding existing ones, and six states now or soon will allow nearly all students to use public money to attend private schools. Some form of school choice exists in almost all states and the District of Columbia, even if those forms aren’t as widespread or expansive as school-choice advocates would prefer.
• Even with near-constant demagoguery that demonizes law-abiding gun owners, Americans’ Second Amendment rights are as secure as they’ve been in several generations.
• Marijuana has never been more legal or more easily accessed, and you can smell the consequences in the downtowns of many American cities.
• Americans are much more aware of the abuses of law-enforcement officials, much less likely to give government authorities the benefit of the doubt in public controversies, and more likely to believe that policing procedures require either minor or major changes.
• By historical standards, federal income-tax rates are low. Even some Democratic governors are signing income-tax cuts into law.
• Gay marriage is, legally, a settled issue.
• The death penalty is growing rarer over time.
• “Stand your ground” and other laws ensuring a right to armed self-defense are growing more common. “Laws in at least 28 states and Puerto Rico declare there is no duty to retreat [sic] an attacker in any place in which one is lawfully present.”
• The makeup of the Supreme Court ensures, at least for now, that six justices are likely to be skeptical about extensive interpretations of federal or state government power. Yes, justices can surprise you and sometimes disappoint you, but the government faces a more skeptical Supreme Court now than it did in 2013 or 2003 or 1993.

One of the distinctions between libertarians and traditional conservatives is that libertarians believe government should be minimally invasive in peoples' lives and that we should be free to do as we please as long as no one else is harmed (a very difficult standard to actually apply in practice) whereas conservatives hold that some behaviors are so corrosive to our culture and public welfare that government has a role to play in preventing them.

Conservatives want minimal government on economic matters but a more restrictive, activist governmental involvement in preserving traditional values. Libertarians want government to take care of national defense, defend our borders, regulate interstate commerce and otherwise leave citizens alone to work out their own solutions to problems.

If you're a libertarian you'll applaud the above bullet points, although at the link Geraghty mentions other reasons for libertarians to be concerned.

If you're a conservative you're probably not so sanguine about the marijuana, gay marriage and death penalty items, but the others are indeed reasons to be at least a little optimistiuc about the future of the nation.

The Reality of Evil

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 produced horrors that defy description. Serb soldiers raped Bosnian women and girls and butchered their men and even their babies by the tens of thousands. The record of their barbaric inhumanity is as hard to believe as it is to read, and is a sickening testament to the depravity that lies within the human psyche.

That so many men were capable of such cruelty is surely compelling evidence of human fallenness and the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece at the New English Review, a couple of years back offered some insight into the terrifying iniquity that plagues our world.

Francis reminds us that,

The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:

. . . All of us are his [God's] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.

When the crowd laugh at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it.

All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath. But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter.

All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on Naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!

Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?

The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:

. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.

Indeed there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them. An atheist like Leff has no grounds for believing that there is evil in the world. The most he can say is that there are behaviors he doesn't like.

The word "evil" has no meaning in a godless world other than as an expression of personal, subjective revulsion. Those who share Leff's unbelief have a choice. They can acknowledge that evil exists or they can continue in their atheism, but they can't do both.

Murmuration

In the past I've posted video of a spectacular ornithological phenomenon carried out by one of the most common birds in North America and Europe - the European starling. Starlings were introduced into North America in the early 1890s by a group who released 100 of them in Central Park, New York because they wanted North America to be blessed with every species of bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.

Every North American starling is descended from these original 100 birds, and the descendents have spread so far so rapidly that some birders consider them "trash" birds. If you have a bird feeder at home and use suet in the feeder starlings have doubtless visited it (and probably hogged all the food).

European Starling

Yet, even though some people consider them pests, there are places throughout their range where they perform one of the most beautiful aerobatic dances ever witnessed in nature. It's called a murmuration, and the photographers at Lad Allen Media went to Modesto, California to film it.

If you've never seen a murmuration you'll want to watch this five minute video. It not only shows beautiful footage of this amazing display but it also discusses the latest research into how these birds do it.

Enjoy:

Why They're Leaving (Pt. II)

Yesterday's post addressed the fact that Christian congregations are both aging and shrinking as more young people opt out, and we talked about some of the reasons for their disenchantment or disillusionment with the church.

Some of these "church refugees" still hold onto their faith or try other religions, but many abandon belief in God altogether. The question I'd like to explore today is, if these former Christians embrace atheism what does that move entail?

I'm of the opinion that atheists should actually want Christianity to be true since it fits our experience and self- understanding better than does atheism, but be that as it may, bear in mind that according to atheism, or naturalism, as it's sometimes called, we are completely material beings, atoms and molecules, whose bodies and brains are subject to the laws of physics.

If that's so, however, it would seem that some pretty depressing consequences follow. Here are a few:

• There's probably no free-will
• There's no enduring self or soul
• There's no human dignity or human rights
• There's no basis for hope for anything beyond physical death
• Following the previous point there's no ultimate justice
• There's no ultimate meaning or significance to our lives.

Consider what some notable atheists have said about this point about meaning:

"You were born for no purpose. Your life has no meaning. When you die you are extinguished.” Ingmar Bergman

“Life as a whole had no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, a chance combination of molecules; it then evolved through random mutations and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen for any purpose.” Peter Singer

“No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.” William Provine

“Man must at last awake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering and his crimes.” Jaques Monod

“We’re going to die, and our loved ones are going to die, and it wouldbe very nice to believe that that was not the end and that we would live beyond the grave and meet those we love again. Living without God is not that easy. And I feel the appeal of religion in that sense.” Stephen Weinberg

• Finally, there are no objective moral values or duties. Moral obligations are subjective and arbitrary.

Again, here are a few quotes from atheistic thinkers who acknowledge this perplexing difficulty:

"What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." Richard Dawkins

"What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after." Ernst Hemingway

"For the man of knowledge, there are no duties." Friedrich Nietzsche

On atheism there's no such thing as objective morality. What's moral for you may not be moral for others…Morality is an invention of human beings….it's a convention human beings have adopted to live together. Massimo Pigliucci (paraphrase)

This leads logically to nihilism but most atheists don't like the nihilistic implications of atheism so they actually live their lives more or less as if God exists even as they deny that He does. For example, every time they say that something is morally wrong or that we have a duty to help the poor they’re making judgments that only a theist can make.

It's as if they freeload on a theistic worldview until they think it no longer suits them then they jump off for a while. Or as someone once said they “sit in the lap of God so that they can slap Him in the face.”

At any rate, those folks who say they're abandoning the church and forswearing Christianity would do well to consider the implications of the alternatives before they do.

Why They're Leaving (Pt.I)

Christianity appears to be in trouble. Young people are leaving the church in large numbers. Seventy percent of young people raised in the church leave after high school. The numbers of “Nones”, those who claim no affiliation with any religion, are growing. Churches are becoming older and more female.

Why?

It certainly appears that our secular, materialistic, hedonistic culture is doing a better job of arguing against whatever Christian beliefs our young people grew up with than the church is in arguing for them. The culture is doing a more effective job of wooing young people away from the church than the church is of holding on to them.

So why is this? Perhaps it's at least partly because of an inability or unwillingness on the part of those who profess to believe the core doctrines of Christianity to explain them cogently to younger generations. As a consequence our culture is becoming increasingly hostile to Christianity, Christian values and Christians.

The irony in this is that on an intellectual level (as opposed to the emotional or hedonic level), the secular option makes very little sense.

We'll talk about why I think this tomorrow, but consider today some of the reasons people give for leaving the church:

1. They had a bad experience with church (disillusionment w/church leaders, etc.). Their doubts aren't taken seriously. Young people are told to just have faith, and nobody at the church can or will answer their questions.

2. Church is boring. There's no sense of purpose or mission. Christianity seems superficial and unconnected to their lives.

3. They perceive a conflict between science and Christianity.

4. Christianity is too strict (exclusivism, homosexual marriage, abortion, etc.).

5. They can't reconcile the standard concept of God with suffering, evil or hell.

6. Some young people just don't want it to be true.They want to be autonomous, they don't want to submit to a higher authority and they find the allurements of the world intoxicating.

#1 and #2 are simply reasons for finding a different church, not for leaving church altogether. #3 is a mistaken perception. There's no conflict between Christianity and science although there may be conflicts between some versions of Christianity and some scientific hypotheses.

#4 and #5 are tougher problems and the church needs to do a better job preparing clergy and laypeople to be able to answer them, but even if no one in the church can handle these challenges young people need to realize that what they've come to identify with Christian belief may actually be wrong, or at least not essential to Christianity. Lots of very devout men and women have disagreed on all these issues for centuries.

I'm not a psychiatrist but I believe #6 is probably the underlying reason why a lot of young people, and older people, leave the church.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel says in his book The Last Word that he is curious "whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God - anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn't particularly want either one of the answers to be correct ..."

He himself openly admits in the book that his disbelief is not a matter of reasoned thinking about the matter: "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

I suspect that Nagel speaks for a great many of those who've abandoned Christainity. It's not a matter of "reasoned thinking." It's a matter of believing what they most want to be true, and if someone just doesn't want there to be a God there's not much on the intellectual level that can be said to persuade them otherwise.

If our heart doesn't want to believe it's pretty certain that our mind never will.

I'll have a bit more on this tomorrow.

Why Our Moon Is Almost a Miracle

Astronomer Hugh Ross, in a 2014 article at Salvo, discussed some of the current theories on the formation of our moon. Those theories posit a collision between an object about the size of Mars with the early earth and require such an astonishing precision in the masses, momentum and timing of the colliding objects that it's almost literally incredible that it happened at all.

Our astonishment is magnified by the fact that our moon, which is virtually unique in our solar system in terms of the ratio of its size to that of the earth and its proximity to the earth, has to have almost exactly the properties it has in order for life to be sustained on earth.

Robin Canup, the author of one of the more popular theories on the moon's origin, wrote that, "Current theories on the formation of the Moon owe too much to cosmic coincidences."

And earth scientist Tim Elliott observed that the degree and kinds of complexity and fine-tuning required by lunar origin models appear to be increasing at an exponential rate. Among those who study lunar origin, he notes, "the sequence of conditions that currently seems necessary in these...versions of lunar formation have led to philosophical disquiet."

Ross adds that,

Thanks to the exquisitely fine-tuned nature of this impact event, the collision:

1. Replaced the earth's thick, suffocating atmosphere with one containing the perfect air pressure for efficient lung performance, the ideal heat-trapping capability, and the just-right transparency for efficient photosynthesis.
2. Gave the new atmosphere the optimal chemical composition to foster advanced life.
3. Augmented the earth's mass and density enough to allow it to gravitationally retain a large, but not too large, quantity of water vapor for billions of years.
4. Raised the amount of iron in the earth's core close to the level needed to provide the earth with a strong, enduring magnetic field (the remainder came from a later collision event). This magnetic field shields life from deadly cosmic rays and solar x-rays.
5. Delivered to the earth's core and mantle quantities of iron and other critical elements in just-right amounts to produce sufficiently long-lasting, continent-building plate tectonics at just-right levels. Fine-tuned plate tectonics also performs a crucial role in compensating for the sun's increasing brightness.
6. Increased the iron content of the earth's crust, permitting a huge abundance of ocean life that, in turn, can support advanced life.
7. Salted the earth's interior with an abundance of long-lasting radioisotopes, the heat from which drives most of the earth's tectonic activity and volcanism.
8. Produced the moon, which gradually slowed the earth's rotation rate so that eventually advanced life could thrive on earth.
9. Left the moon with a just-right mass and distance relative to the earth to stabilize the tilt of the earth's rotation axis, protecting the planet from rapid and extreme climatic variations.
10. Created the moon with the just-right diameter and the just-right distance relative to the earth so that, at the narrow epoch in solar-system history when human life would be possible, humans on earth would witness perfect solar eclipses, which would help them make important discoveries about the solar system and universe.

If we didn't have a moon like the one we have we wouldn't be here, and yet the existence of our moon is such a highly improbable occurrence that anyone who studies it is almost overwhelmed by how fortuitous it is.

No wonder, then, that so many of the people who study it, astronomers like Ross, believe that the earth/moon system, just like virtually every other aspect of cosmic architecture, is not an accident, but is rather the intentional product of an unimaginably intelligent and powerful engineer.

There's much more in Ross' article. It was written nine years ago which leads one to wonder how much more we know about the moon today that adds to the breathtaking scope of coincidences that were known in 2014.

Another Welcome Court Decision

The recent SCOTUS decisions affirming freedom of religion and speech and ending affirmative action were certainly noteworthy and welcome, but another decision by a lower court may turn out to be just as consequential.

During the pandemic the Biden administration colluded with and pressured social media platforms to censor any messages which ran counter to the administration's narrative about Covid 19 and the vaccines that were being promoted by people like Anthony Fauci.

Both Missouri and Louisiana took the government to court, arguing that their role in pressuring these platforms to censor content violates the free speech protections guaranteed by the first amendment. Judge Terry Doughty, Chief U.S. district judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, agreed.

A piece at PJ Media explains what happened:

In a landmark ruling in Missouri v. Biden, Doughty struck back hard against what he called “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Doughty even began his decision by quoting the most famous adage regarding the importance of the freedom of speech: “I may disapprove of what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it,” a statement that is often attributed to Voltaire but which Doughty credits to the early twentieth-century English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall.

Doughty declares that “in their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”

He noted that “Plaintiffs allege that Defendants, through public pressure campaigns, private meetings, and other forms of direct communication, regarding what Defendants described as ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ have colluded with and/or coerced social-media platforms to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms.”

Specifically, Doughty declared that:

Plaintiffs allege that Defendants suppressed conservative-leaning free speech, such as: (1) suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 Presidential election; (2) suppressing speech about the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin; (3) suppressing speech about the efficiency of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns; (4) suppressing speech about the efficiency of COVID-19 vaccines; (5) suppressing speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; (6) suppressing speech about the security of voting by mail; (7) suppressing parody content about Defendants; (8) suppressing negative posts about the economy; and (9) suppressing negative posts about President.

Doughty likened the Biden administration to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” and ordered numerous top federal officials and agencies to cease all contact with social media firms that could potentially interfere with First Amendment-protected speech.

Doubtless the administration will appeal Doughty's ruling since the nation's present leadership, whose totalitarian impulses impel them to arrogate to themselves as much power over what people can say and do as they can, will seek to recoup their lost ground. It's a travesty that the folks we've elected to protect our freedoms are actually disdainful of the very freedoms they're sworn to preserve and disdainful of the Constitution which guarantees them.

This became particularly clear, as the article notes, when "the Biden regime established its ill-fated and quickly disbanded Disinformation Governance Board" whose mission was to identify “disinformation”, i.e. anything that deviated from the administration's position on an issue, "to circumvent the First Amendment and to hoodwink Americans into thinking that the crushing of dissent was a valuable service."

Kudos to Judge Doughty for actually standing against this erosion of our rights and holding the would-be censors in check.

Fireflies

On Monday I mentioned that sexual reproduction poses a very difficult problem for Darwinian evolutionists who believe that such a process developed gradually in a step-by-step fashion. That such a complex means of reproduction would arise when a much simpler asexual method already existed is a troublesome enigma for evolution.

Here's another: bioluminescence. Numerous creatures have it, but how and why it came about is very perplexing on any naturalistic view of things.

There's no apparent selection pressure for such a feature, many creatures get along just fine without it, yet it appears in organisms from crustaceans to insects to fish.

This brief video explains how bioluminescence works in one very common insect - the firefly. Enjoy this excellent presentation of the biology and chemistry behind nature's own fireworks display:

Completely Missing the Point

It is simply false to assert, as many critics are doing, that 303 Creative v. Elenis means that Christians can deny services to LGBT folk. If a gay person wants to buy an item from a Christian vendor, ride in a taxi driven by a Christian cabbie, or secure a repair from a Christian plumber the businessperson is still obligated to provide that service.

What they're not now obligated to provide is a message that violates their conscience.

If the state cannot compel someone to recite the pledge of allegiance because the pledge violates their conscience, why should a web-designer be compelled by the state to design a message they find morally repugnant?

Would liberals demand that a black web-designer be compelled to create affirming messages for a klansman, or a muslim designer be required to create messages that promote Zionism? Probably not, but for some reason they think it outrageous that Christians can decline to create messages that offend their moral understanding.

Recently a small business owner posted signs in his or her windows saying that, since the Supreme Court ruled that businesses “can discriminate,” the business would not sell merchandise to Trump supporters and would only sell to churches that display pride flags.

This bit of moral preening completely misconstrues the 303 Creative decision and reflects poorly on the intelligence of the business' owner.

Even so, in response to the sign others have taken to social media to put their lack of intellectual acuity on display for the world to see:

“I own a few businesses and if I know that someone is a Trump supporter, I will refuse service!” one Twitter user said in response to the photo. "I don’t need that evil person’s money! Their lifestyle goes against my faith.”

“I wish I owned a retail business, so I could refuse to serve Conservative Christians on religious grounds,” said some liberal on Twitter.

“Gonna open a business and refuse to serve Christians,” remarked another.

Another wrote, “I am going to start a business and refuse to serve homophobic, heterosexual Christians.”

This is just weird. The Supreme Court didn't rule that businesses can discriminate. What the Court actually did was rule that the state cannot compel speech.

As the PJ Media article linked to above notes:

When the state insists that a professional must create something that violates their personal or religious beliefs, that’s a violation of their First Amendment rights. That is entirely different from a business refusing to sell merchandise to someone — which is flat-out discrimination.

In fact, neither Lorie Smith of 303 Creative nor the baker Jack Phillips ever denied service to gay customers; they only refused to create messages that celebrate a lifestyle going against their religious beliefs.

The ruling makes clear that nondiscrimination laws remain firmly in place, and that the government has never needed to compel speech to ensure access to goods and services.

Evidently, distinctions of this sort are a bit beyond the capacity of some social media warriors to grasp.

Happy Birthday America (Whatever's Left of You)

The Miracle of Sexual Reproduction

One of the most difficult things to explain in biology is the appearance of sexual reproduction. Lots of organisms reproduce asexually and they do just fine, so why did such a complex process as sexual reproduction arise and how did it come about through purely natural processes?

In order to reproduce sexually an organism has to, inter alia, develop meiosis, it has to develop an entire suite of hormones, organs and anatomical structures, and it has to develop behaviors that trigger hormonal responses in its potential mates.

To catch a glimpse of the sheer complexity of just one aspect of this astonishing means of reproduction watch this marvelous five minute animation of mammalian (human) fertilization and consider all of the engineering that had to go into designing this process. Then ask yourself what the chances are of such a phenomenon being produced by mindless, blind and purposeless coincidence.

If any of the numerous structures or complex chemical reactions in this process failed to develop fertilization would either be impossible or exceedingly less likely.

Any naturalistic account of the evolution of this phenomenon would be indistinguishable from a miracle, but since naturalism excludes miracles the appearance of sexual reproduction is, for the naturalist, a mystery. On the other hand, the alternative to naturalism, theism, explains the appearance of sexual reproduction as the consequence of the purposeful action of an intelligent agent who designed this process with goals in mind.

When we watch the video it certainly seems that everything that occurs in the fertilization of a human ovum is goal-directed, purposeful and extraordinarily improbable on the naturalistic assumption that its evolution was a fortuitous accident.

For a fuller explanation of the content covered by the video check out this piece at Evolution News.

A Step Toward the Color-blind Ideal

The Supreme Court's decision to rule in favor of Students For Fair Admission (SFFA v. Harvard) and end the practice of affirmative action in college admissions has produced a ton of commentary on both left and right. The left thinks it's a terrible decision and the right thinks it's long overdue.

I agree with the latter. Here are two quick thoughts on the ruling:

First, it seems to me that anyone who thinks that affirmative action should be maintained in perpetuity is implicitly saying that, in their opinion, black and Hispanic students simply can't compete intellectually with whites and Asians, which itself seems to be a racist point of view.

It may be that in some cases some black students are suffering the residual effects of Jim Crow and the consequent difficulties their ancestors faced in trying to accumulate wealth, but why does that justify discriminating against Asian students whose parents and grandparents arrived on these shores with nothing but the clothes they were wearing.

And if dire economic conditions faced by one's ancestors explain why blacks underperform academically why do first generation Asian students consistently finish at the top of their high school classes.

Moreover, affirmative action is itself a form of racism since it bases benefits on skin color to the detriment of those who are not black. In a society in which the ideal is equal treatment under the law it's past time for it to go.

Second, it's the role of the Supreme Court to evaluate cases which come before it according to their conformity to or compatibility with the Constitution. It's peculiar that in so many of the dissenting opinions, both from the Court's minority as well as media types, both in last year's Dobbs ruling and this year's cases, there's rarely, if ever, any mention of the Constitution.

In other words, objections to the majority's decision seems to be based largely, if not exclusively, on the subjective preferences of those who oppose it, but subjective preference has no place in the Supreme Court's decisions. If the Court's ruling cannot be assailed on Constitutional grounds then there simply are no dispositive arguments to be made against it.

Colleges and universities should admit students the same way their basketball and football teams select athletes - according to their merit. Other factors like economic disadvantage, etc. can certainly be factored in to the admissions process, but there's no reason why these other factors can't be color-blind.

It's fashionable on the left to deride the ideal of a color-blind society, but unless we learn to look past color we'll continue to fragment and balkanize. Social cohesion is incompatible with identity politics.

The Cost of Mitigating the Effects of Global Warming

Bjorn Lomberg is a social scientist who focuses on the economics of climate change. He acknowledges that global warming is real, that it's to some extent anthropogenic (man-made) and constitutes a serious problem, but he's skeptical about much else that we read in the media and hear from certain scientists about the problem.

Imprimis, a free-subscription publication of Hillsdale College, recently ran a piece by Lomberg based on a speech he gave for the college in which he challenged a number of popular beliefs about climate change.

For instance,

• The number of hurricanes which actually make landfall since 1900 is declining, not increasing. The same is true for the number of severe storms striking the U.S. (Category 3 or above). 2022 was the second lowest year on record for such storms.
• Despite the wildfires in Canada and the attendant haze over much of the U.S. wildfires are also decreasing.
• The number of people who die each year from climate-related causes such as drought, storms, wildfires floods and extreme temperatures was about 500,000 in the 1920s, 18,000 in 2010 and 11,000 in 2022.

The decline in deaths is due to the fact that we've become wealthier and have thus built better technology. Thus, even if climate change is producing more severe weather events such as tornadoes our ability to predict and track them saves lives and property. The the most efficient and cost-effective way to cope with whatever climate change is occurring, Lomberg argues, is economic and technological development.

In addressing climate change there are two costs we must consider - the cost to our society incurred by the damage produced by climate effects and the cost incurred by attempts to mitigate them.

For example, the Biden administration has declared a goal of "net zero" in carbon emissions by 2050, but it's highly unlikely that could ever be achieved given the exorbitant economic burden that would impose on the country. To realize just a 20% reduction in carbon emissions would cost each American $75 per person ($300 for a family of four) per year.

A 40% reduction would cost about $500 per person annually, a 60% reduction would cost $2000 per person per year, and an 80% reduction would mean that each person would be assessed $5000 each year. To get to 95% reduction of carbon emissions would cost each person about $11,000 every year - $44,000 every year for a family of four.

It's not surprising that those who promote "net zero" don't mention the costs involved.

But what's the cost of climate disasters relative to the cost of policies to mitigate them?

The worst case scenario for global warming, assuming we do nothing to prevent it, is a 7.4 degree (Fahrenheit) rise in global mean temperature by 2100. Such an increase would result in a decline of 4% in global GDP, but at the same time the OECD, World Bank and several other organizations project an increase in the wealth of the average person by 450 percent. Thus, if nothing was done to mitigate the effects of global warming and the worst case scenario came to pass the average person would still be much better off.

In dollar amounts the economic cost of doing nothing would be about $140 trillion. If we undertake efforts to mitigate the harm and reduce the temperature increase from 7.4 degrees to 5.3 degrees, the economic damage done as a result of the higher temperatures would still be about $110 trillion, but the cost of efforts to keep the increase to 5.3 degrees, assuming that China, India and Africa all participate, would be about $100 trillion.

In other words, the cost of keeping the global temperature increase to below 5.3 degrees is equal to or greater than the cost of the harm that such an increase would entail.

The sweet spot appears to be an increase of 6.75 degrees. This would produce economic damages in the neighborhood of $110 trillion, and to keep the increase from exceeding this value would cost the nations of the world about $20 trillion.

Mr. Biden's "net zero" is economically unrealistic. Limiting temperature rise to 3.9 degrees would still result in about $50 trillion in economic damage, but would cost almost $400 trillion to achieve.

These calculations demonstrate why the Paris Climate Accords are such a dumb deal and why President Trump was wise to withdraw from them. Even if all signatories, including China and India, do as they agreed to do, an unlikely prospect, the accords would only deliver about 11 cents of climate benefit for every dollar spent.

The media almost always focuses on the cost of the damage that would result from global warming but almost never reports on the costs of even minimal mitigation. It's good that people like Lomberg are around to give us that side of the story.

Looking Foolish

Yesterday I mentioned that liberals like Mr. Biden display an astonishing lack of self-awareness, dishonesty and/or hypocrisy when they express outrage at attempts to remove salacious materials from spaces like public school libraries where young people and children might be exposed to them, yet folks on the left have themselves been the chief censors and book-banners in our culture.

Another example of this inability or refusal to see the fault in oneself that one criticizes in others is in a recent speech by Barack Obama in which he stated that "It’s very hard to sustain a democracy when you have such massive concentrations of wealth" in the hands of a relative few people.

Mr. Obama warns us that great wealth possessed by some while others have little is destabilizing to a democratic system, but as Jim Geraghty at National Review observes, "The obvious criticism of Obama here is that he and his wife are walking, talking, 'massive concentrations of wealth.'"

Geraghty explains:

Obama and his wife signed the largest book deal in history, $65 million, for their memoirs. The Obamas signed a separate production deal with Netflix worth an estimated $50 million. The Obamas’ production company, Higher Ground, signed a $25 million deal with Spotify that lasted three years.

Barack Obama reportedly makes as much as $400,000 per speech, but reportedly made almost $600,000 for speaking at a conference in Colombia. Michelle Obama makes $200,000 per appearance.

The Obamas rent a mansion in Kalorama (a neighborhood in Washington, D.C.); bought a mansion and estate in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; bought another house in Rancho Mirage, Calif.; and still have their old home in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.

In April 2010, then-president Obama declared, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” Apparently, Obama hasn’t reached that point yet.

Yet another instance, once again, is Mr. Biden who repeatedly lectures us about the need for the wealthy to pay their "fair share" of taxes yet his own son Hunter, who has been gifted millions of dollars by China, Romania and Ukraine, is being essentially excused by our justice system for not having paid his taxes over a period of several years.

Did it occur to Mr. Biden how ridiculous it sounds to tell Americans that they need to pay their fair share while a very compliant and complacent IRS essentially gives his son a pass for ducking the taxes he owed on his ill-gotten fortune?

It'd be a good practice for a politician - or anyone, for that matter - to always ask themselves whether what they're about to say applies also to themselves. Doing so might seriously limit the number of times they make themselves look foolish.

Those Dastardly MAGA Book-Banners

The American left seems to be living in a fantasy land. President Biden recently warned us all that "MAGA extremists" are lining up to repeal some of our basic freedoms - the freedom to love whom you wish, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, the the freedom to vote and freedom to read the books that you want to read.

Each of these claims is absurd as Barton Swaim points out in a recent Wall Street Journal column, but let's just focus on his allegation that the Right wants to ban books.

Swaim tells us that,

The American Library Association recently claimed in a report that 2,571 books were “challenged” in American libraries last year. These challenges the ALA calls “attempted book bans,” nearly all of which involve a request by a patron that a public library or school library remove a book from its shelves because it is obscene or otherwise offensive.

I’m not sure such requests are improper—young-adult fiction has become sexually avant-garde and shockingly coarse over the past two decades. Anyway, to ask that a taxpayer-supported library not facilitate children’s access to a sexually explicit book isn’t to “ban” it. An interested patron may buy it and read it in public if he wishes.

Further, as Micah Mattix noted in his Substack of April 26, there are 117,341 libraries in the U.S., 76,807 of which are public elementary- and secondary-school libraries. “Some books are challenged multiple times,” Mr. Mattix explains. “Others are challenged once. How many unique books and resources were challenged last year? 2,571. How many challenges were filed in total? 1,269.”

If, as seems likely, some libraries reported several challenges, that means less than 1% of all libraries received even a single challenge. Other organizations, particularly PEN America, assert that local and state governments are eagerly “banning” books, typically those of female, black, gay and transgender authors.

All such statements engage in the verbal legerdemain of defining as a “ban” any request that children at a public institution not have access to books about sex.

The amusing irony in Mr. Biden's demagoguery is that "cancel culture" and genuine book-banning have for decades been a standard modus operandi of the Left.

It wasn't all that long ago that the Left was demanding that classics like Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird be banned because they were deemed racially insensitive. It also wasn't very long ago that liberal secularists wanted to banish books on intelligent design from school libraries because these books challenged Darwinian orthodoxies, and these same folks have been tireless in their efforts to get Bibles tossed from every public school classroom that might still harbor one.

Swaim mentions some more recent examples of the hundreds he could draw from (See here for instance):

This strange urge to tremble at the presence of imaginary beasts is accompanied by an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The closest thing to real book bans in the U.S. today is perpetrated by precisely the sort of people who bewail book bans.

Major publishers have canceled books by authors ranging from J.K. Rowling to Sen. Josh Hawley because they ran afoul of progressive sensibilities.

Amazon refuses to sell Ryan Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally” (2018), a measured and serious critique of the transgender movement.

In 2021 the American Booksellers Association sent out paperback copies of Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage,” on the same subject. Activists targeted the ABA, and the trade group issued an obsequious apology for the alleged offense.

ALA and PEN America say nothing about these attempts literally to ban books.

Mr. Biden is aware of none of this, but the people who write his speeches for him certainly should be. If they are aware and fulminate against MAGA book-banners anyway, then they're dishonest hypocrites. If they're not aware then they're incompetent.

Either way, the nation needs better leaders than the unfortunate crew we have now.

Are We Alone in the Cosmos?

This is the second of two posts on the question of extraterrestrial life, especially intelligent life. Yesterday's post addressed the question of the theological ramifications of discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and today's offering considers the reasons for being skeptical that such life exists anywhere in the cosmos but on earth.

Since the mid-twentieth century it's been the accepted assumption that the universe must be teeming with life. So many stars out there. So many stars like our sun. So many planets must be orbiting them. There must be billions of planets with living things many of which are biologically and technologically advanced.

But if so, where are they?

As time went on and more and more discoveries were made about the geo-physical properties that must obtain for a planet to produce and sustain life, the first seeds of doubt began to germinate. Books like Rare Earth by Ward and Brownlee and Privileged Planet by Gonzalez and Richards began to feed those doubts.

Cosmologists are loath to conclude that earth-bound life is unique in all the cosmos, but the chances of another planet meeting all the criteria that a planet must meet in order to sustain life are so vanishingly slim that some of them are admitting that it may be so. We may be all alone.

Ethan Seigel at Forbes tentatively suggests the formerly unthinkable in a recent essay. He writes:

When it comes to the question of extraterrestrial life, humans optimistically assume the Universe is prolific. After all, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about Earth, and life not only took hold here on our world, but evolved, thrived, became complex and differentiated, and then intelligent and technologically advanced.

If the same ingredients are everywhere and the same rules are at play, wouldn't it be an awful waste of space if we're alone?

But this is not a question that can be answered by appeals to either logic or emotion, but by data and observation alone. While our investigations have revealed the existence of an enormous number of candidate planets for life, we have yet to find one where intelligent aliens, complex life, or even simple life is known to exist. In all the Universe, humanity may truly be alone.

He goes on to state that,

• somewhere between 80%-100% of stars have planets or planetary systems associated with them,
• approximately 20%-25% of those systems have a planet in their star's "habitable zone," or the right location for liquid water to form on their surface,
• and approximately 10%-20% of those planets are Earth-like in size and mass.

A substantial fraction of stars out there (around 20%) are either K-, G-, or F-class stars, too: Sun-like in mass, luminosity, and lifetime. Putting all these numbers together, there are around 10^22 potentially Earth-like planets out there in the Universe, with the right conditions for life on them.

Unfortunately, the assertion that there's nothing special about earth is very misleading. There are many more conditions that must be met for a planet to be suitable for life than the ones he lists. Here are just a relative few to give an idea of the complexities involved:

In order to support life in its solar system a star must be located within a fairly narrow region in the galaxy. It can't be too close to the center, where radiation would be intense, nor too far away where it would revolve at dangerous speeds around the galactic pinwheel.

The star has to be rich in heavier elements, and has to be fairly remote from other stars in the galaxy. It has to be a middle-aged star of relatively constant luminosity, not too big and not too small, not too old and not too young. [Siegel does mention this requirement above]

In other words, stars suitable for sustaining life are relatively unusual in our galaxy, but this is just the beginning. The star has to possess a planetary satellite capable of generating and sustaining life and this means that the [candidate] planet has to have perhaps hundreds of precisely-tuned properties.

It has to be just the right distance from its star which means it has to revolve around the star at just the right speed. It has to have a nearly circular orbit and the right tilt to its axis. It has to be just the right mass so that its gravity will hold oxygen in the atmosphere but not hold slightly lighter noxious gases like ammonia. It has to rotate on its axis at the right speed, lest the temperature differences between day and night be too great, and it must possess a shifting crust.

It must also have ample water and carbon, among other things, and also a large moon which has to be at just the right distance from the planet to stabilize its wobble. It must also be in a solar system where it's protected from meteorites by large gravitational vacuum sweepers like Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn, and so on.

As the number of parameters that must be just right in order for a planet to be able to support life increases the chances of such planets existing in great numbers in our galaxy decrease.

Seigel seems to feel the weight of all this and concludes with this paragraph:

But how did life arise to begin with, and how likely is a planet to develop life from non-life? If life does arise, how likely is it to become complex, differentiated, and intelligent? And if life achieves all of those milestones, how likely is it that it becomes space-faring or otherwise technologically advanced, and how long does such life survive if it arises?

The answers may be out there, but we must remember the most conservative possibility of all. In all the Universe, until we have evidence to the contrary, the only example of life might be us.

And if we are in fact the only conscious, sentient beings in the physical universe, then Oumuamua is not the product of alien life forms, and we can be skeptical about reports of alien visitors in UFOs.

All this strongly suggests that we are in some sense special, that we were intended, and if there are alien life forms with a high degree of technological sophistication we can be pretty sure that they didn't just arise through serendipitous natural processes.

We can be pretty sure that they were intended, too.

Theological Implications of Discovering Extraterrestrial Life

A reader interested in some of the controversy surrounding the space rock Oumuamua and whether the apparent rock is, as some have speculated, actually designed by intelligent extraterrestrial beings to serve as an exploratory craft. The reader posed a couple of very good questions about this.

Oumuamua

 

 

He wanted to know what I thought of the possibility that Oumuamua is actually an engineered space craft of some sort, and also what I thought would be the theological implications of discovering that there really are other civilizations elsewhere in the cosmos.

These are interesting questions and since there may be others who wonder about them and since I've posted about these topics in the past, I thought I'd rerun a couple of those posts.

Today I'm putting up one that gave my response to the matter of the theological implications of the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Actually, the post summarizes the thinking of a chemist named Kirk Durston. He takes a position that may seem counterintuitive to some readers, so see what you think.

Here's what I posted in May of 2018:

Although it's hard to see exactly why, many people are of the mind that if scientists ever discovered life on other planets it would be a devastating blow to theistic belief. It's apparently thought that theism, particularly Christian theism, entails the belief that life was created only on earth and nowhere else and that the discovery of life in some distant locale would thus refute theism.

Protein chemist Kirk Durston has a different take on the matter, though. He argues that if life were ever to be discovered elsewhere in the universe it would be a devastating blow, not to theism but to atheism.

Here is the gravamen of his essay:

When it comes to the idea that life spontaneously self-assembled itself in the past, thousands of our brightest minds have worked on the problem for over half a century with no prospect of success in the foreseeable future. In fact, the more we learn, the more we realize how difficult the problem is. The challenge is three-fold. First, we have to figure out how intelligent scientists can create a simple life form from scratch in the lab.

Second, having done it ourselves, we have to see if realistic natural processes can do the same thing. The third problem is vastly more difficult: figure out how the information to build life forms gets encoded in these self-replicating molecules without an intelligent programmer. We are still working on the first problem, with no hint of success on the horizon. That might be significant, right there.

A 2011 article in Scientific American, “Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue how life began,” summarized our lack of progress in the lab. Of course, there are plenty of scenarios, but creative story-telling should not be confused with doing science, or making scientific discoveries. With regard to “thousands of papers” published each year in the field of evolution, as Austin Hughes wrote, “This vast outpouring of pseudo-Darwinian hype has been genuinely harmful to the credibility of evolutionary biology as a science.”

Evolutionary biologist Eugene Koonin, meanwhile, calculates the probability of a simple replication-translation system, just one key component, to be less than 1 chance in 10^1,018 making it unlikely that life will ever spontaneously self-assemble anywhere in the universe. His proposed solution is a near-infinite number of universes, something we might call a “multiverse of the gaps.” ....Indeed, we would need a vast number of universes all working on the problem to get lucky enough to see life spontaneously assemble itself in just one of them.

The probability of life spontaneously self-assembling anywhere in this universe is mind-staggeringly unlikely; essentially zero. If you are so unquestioningly naïve as to believe we just got incredibly lucky, then bless your soul.

If we were to discover extraterrestrial life, however, then we would have had to get mind-staggeringly lucky two times! Like the forensic detectives at the lotteries commission, a thinking person would have to start operating on the well-founded suspicion that “something is going on.”

The discovery of extraterrestrial life would be the death knell for atheism, at least for the thinking atheist. On the other hand, such a discovery should not be in the least surprising, if there is a supernatural Creator who has designed the universe to support life, and has brought about life and beauty throughout the universe, even if no human ever gets to see it.

Durston's last two paragraphs bear emphasizing: Life elsewhere in the cosmos would not be especially surprising given the truth of theism, but on the assumption that atheism is true the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be breathtakingly astounding.

It's truly ironic that so many of those who fervently hope to find evidence of extraterrestrial organisms are themselves metaphysical naturalists, i.e. atheists. These folks are apparently eager to find evidence that their most important metaphysical commitments are wrong. That just seems odd.