Offering commentary on current developments and controversies in politics, religion, philosophy, science, education and anything else which attracts our interest.
The Federalist's Casey Chalk reviews Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft's new four volume introduction to philosophy titled Socrates' Children and it sounds excellent.
I've read a number of Kreeft's works in the past and always thought it was a worthwhile use of my time. He has a very winsome manner and always speaks and writes at a level any reasonably intelligent person can understand.
You can watch the video below of an excellent recent commencement speech Kreeft gave as a sample of his style. The speech was titled Ten Lies of Contemporary Culture.
Here's how Chalk begins his review:
I’m always surprised by the reactions I get when I tell people my interest (and sincere trust) in philosophy as a means of understanding the world and getting at the real truth. A lawyer friend told me an introductory university philosophy class convinced him there are no objective truths (that’s the same conclusion Steve Martin drew from his college philosophy courses).
A former colleague disparaged Aristotle — one of the greatest philosophers, and the originator of syllogistic logic — as absurd because of the Greek philosopher’s flawed physics.
Sadly, contemporary philosophy does the discipline few favors. The academy has made philosophy about as arcane as possible, persuading many that it is impractical and irrelevant for everyday purposes.
The philosopher of public imagination is a pretentious, condescending windbag, enamored with his own supposedly clever use of six-syllable words; or, perhaps, more charitably, a well-intentioned ideological zealot who believes it her mission to regularly remind everyone that they have terribly misunderstood themselves, each other, and the world.
It’s all too bad, really. Our society, government, and economy, not to mention every single human institution, all exist, function, and perpetuate themselves based on various philosophical premises — whether about ourselves, the natural order, or how we acquire knowledge.
We’re all doing philosophy (either well or poorly) all the time: every time we articulate an argument, conduct research, or even weigh options for spending our money. So it would certainly be nice if someone could help us better appreciate the connection between philosophy and our actual everyday experiences.
Thankfully, venerable philosophy professor and prolific author Dr. Peter Kreeft has done just that with his new four-volume series, Socrates’ Children: An Introduction to Philosophy from the 100 Greatest Philosophers.
I encourage you to read the whole column. It may even make you want to order the set.
News that the House Oversight Committee has discovered that Hunter Biden received some $20 million dollars from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs for doing nothing while his father was vice-president gives new meaning to the term "Bidenomics."
Incredibly, some in the media are still insisting that there's no proof that any of this money benefited Joe Biden in any way. These folks could look at the sky on a clear day and still not see the sun.
Democrats have been at pains to demand that conservative Supreme Court justices are culpable of failing to avoid the very appearance of impropriety by taking trips with wealthy supporters, but they're twisting themselves into knots to convince us that, although Hunter's conduct is regrettable, his father has been beyond reproach.
Set aside the testimony of Hunter's business associate Tony Bobulinski that Joe was getting a cut of the take, set aside the millions of dollars of income on Joe's 2017 tax returns whose provenience is questionable, set aside Hunter's own claims on his laptop that he was contributing to his father's support, the fact is that it's delusional to think that the people paying Hunter millions of dollars were doing it because they thought Joe's crack-addled son was such a good guy. They expected access to Joe himself and were getting it through Hunter.
In other words, the vice-president of the United States appears at the very least to have been colluding with his son in a massive bribery operation.
Anyone who wishes to pooh-pooh this and claim that this is jumping to unwarranted conclusions need only ask him or herself whether they'd have the same response were the people involved named Donald Trump and his son Don, Jr.
Noah Rothman at National Review wrote recently about the testimony given this week by Gold Star families of servicemen and women killed in the disgraceful rush to exit Kabul, in Afghanistan in August of 2021.
The seven bereaved family members spoke at an event convened by GOP Rep. Darrell Issa and testified about both their grief and Washington’s negligent conduct during and in the wake of the evacuation. Rothman writes:
[Their witness was] profoundly poignant. Their testimony has far-reaching implications, too, because the more we learn about the events that culminated in the attack on Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate, the more it looks like the Biden administration has whitewashed one of the deadliest days for American troops in their 20 years on the ground in Central Asia.
Recall what happened on August 26th, 2021. Learning that the Americans were precipitously pulling out of the country, terrified Afghans descended upon Karzai airport in a panicked attempt to get aboard one of the departing planes. The scene was chaotic:
At the time, President Joe Biden assured nervous observers of the disorder that the Taliban, which had recaptured Kabul just eleven days earlier, would provide security for the evacuees. Those guarantees proved insufficient to prevent one of the worst-case scenarios.
At 5:50 p.m. local time, a suicide bomber waded through the crowd at Abbey Gate and detonated an explosive belt, killing 13 American soldiers and wounding 45 more U.S. personnel. At least another 170 Afghan civilians also died in the attack.
Our government, in another of its steps toward destroying whatever credibility it has with the American people who pay their salaries, claimed that the attack was inevitable and unpreventable:
The Biden administration has affirmed in a variety of retrospective reports on the incident that it was little more than an unavoidable tragedy. An “After Action Review” released by the State Department in June conceded, “The airport gates were filled with potential dangers due to large, uncontrolled crowds and constant threats from ISIS-K and the Taliban,” and rather unhelpfully added that the deadly terrorist event those conditions facilitated only “underscored how dangerous the situation was.”
The danger, of course, was a direct consequence of the Biden administration's decision to abandon Kabul to the Taliban.
This assessment does not improve on the Pentagon’s assertion in February 2022 that the attack at Abbey Gate was inevitable. “Based upon our investigation, at the tactical level this was not preventable,” Brigadier General Lance Curtis told reporters.
The Gold Star families who spoke at Issa’s event this week were having none of it:
“To say it’s time to move on and there’s nothing more to be said as to the planning and the execution of how our country wrapped up a two-decade war, is an insult to all of us,” said the mother of Marine corporal Hunter Lopez.
“When our leaders, including the Secretary of Defense and our commander in chief called this evacuation a success, as if there should be celebration, it is like a knife in the heart for our families and for the people who came back and for every service member that served over this 20-year war,” Marine sergeant Nicole Gee’s grieving mother-in-law told attendees.
“I want the answers,” Marine corporal Humberto Sanchez’s mother demanded. “I want the truth. I want to go to sleep knowing my son did not die in vain. I want to know that this failure will not happen again.”
Were the deaths of Americans inevitable? Could it have been prevented? Certainly if the military was allowed by the Biden administration to keep sufficient forces in Afghanistan and allowed to use Bagram airbase instead of the indefensible Karzai airport in Kabul the outcome would've been much different, but Biden was in a hurry to evacuate our personnel, no matter how unwise his means of doing so, and consequently ignored the advice of his military commanders.
The Pentagon’s exculpatory final report contradicts the assessments offered by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the time of the attack at the gate. Fewer than 24 hours prior to that deadly bombing, Austin instructed Defense Department leaders to prepare for an imminent “mass casualty event.”
That heightened state of alert was justified by what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said was “significant” intelligence indicating that Afghanistan’s ISIS affiliate had prepared to mount a “complex attack” on NATO forces and their Afghan allies.
“I don’t believe people get the incredible amount of risk on the ground,” Austin said at the time.
On March 8 of this year, House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul led hearings into the events that culminated in the attack at Abbey Gate. Marine sergeant Tyler Vargas-Andrews testified at that hearing, and he told the committee that he believes the attack that took two of his limbs may not have been as unavoidable as the Pentagon claims.
“Countless Afghans were murdered by the Taliban 155 yards in front of our position,” Vargas-Andrews said of the conduct in which the Taliban was engaged just feet away from U.S. soldiers.
“We communicated the atrocities to our chain of command and intel assets, but nothing came of it.”
On August 22, 2021, Vargas-Andrews said he told his superiors that he observed enemy assets conducting a test run of an IED attack on the airport.
He said he later received intelligence relating to IED threats and a description of an aspiring suicide bomber and his associate — a description that precisely matched two figures whom Vargas-Andrews encountered hours before the fateful attack on August 26.
Vargas-Andrews was in a position to kill the men he was quite sure were suicide bombers, but his superiors would not allow it:
He requested permission to engage the targets. “The response,” he said, was that “leadership did not have the engagement authority for us. [They told us], ‘Do not engage.'” The suspect individuals soon disappeared in the crowd.
“To this day, we believe he was the suicide bomber,” Vargas-Andrews lamented. “Our expertise was disregarded. No one was held accountable for our safety.”
Vargas-Andrews’s allegations are serious, and they remain unaddressed by the Pentagon or the State Department. Vargas-Andrews and his fellow service personnel have every right to be frustrated with the Biden administration’s senior leadership, particularly given the flippancy with which they have regarded the notion that anything could have been done differently to prevent this disaster.
"Frustrated" seems a rather euphemistic adjective, especially as it applies to the Gold Star families. They should be irate at everyone in the chain of command who was responsible for this debacle, including the officer who refused Vargas-Andrews' request to take out the suspects, all the way up to the Commander in Chief.
Of course, the disaster that occurred on August 26, 2021, was preventable. As Army Command sergeant major Jacob Smith told House investigators, the soldiers and civilians who died at Abbey Gate would have survived that day if the Biden administration had not made the incomprehensible decision to reduce America’s footprint in Afghanistan down to a skeleton force such that it could no longer hold Bagram Airbase.
“The events that happened at Abbey Gate, I believe that would not have occurred at Bagram,” Smith said in June. “The defenses that Bagram held [with] the ability to see for hundreds of meters and the defense in depth of its control points — I do not believe the result would have been the same.”
That’s the long and short of it. Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence on maintaining as small an American presence as possible in Afghanistan ahead of the withdrawal date his White House negotiated with the Taliban created the conditions for a national humiliation culminating in the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers.
It was a preventable debacle, and there has not yet been a full public accounting of on-the-record claims that the suicide bomber who killed scores of Americans and Afghans could have been neutralized.
“These deaths were preventable,” Sergeant Gee’s mother-in-law mourned. “My daughter could be with us today.” America deserves to know for certain if she is right.
But as long as our media sees itself as an extension of the Democrat Party no one will ever be held accountable for what happened that day. As it is, despite this enormous "national humiliation", no one has lost his or her job. That's a symptom of an administration that just doesn't really care about the lives lost in our unseemly retreat from Kabul, and the thousands of Afghans subsequently tortured and murdered by the Taliban for cooperating with the U.S.
Biden's disgraceful retreat deserves to go down in American history as one of the most shameful acts of treachery and betrayal ever committed by an American president.
Biologist Ann Gauger, in an article at Evolution News, discusses three aspects of the world that C.S. Lewis thought eluded any naturalistic explanation or account.
The first of these is beauty. She writes:
Why should there be beauty? What is it for? We find joy in beholding something truly beautiful, a sense of awe even. And we never grow tired of that beauty, unless some spiritual sickness has entered and sapped us of all capacity for joy. Even more strange, it is a great pleasure to participate in the creation of something beautiful, something that moves other people, that brings joy to them.
Why should this be, that there is joy for the creator in the creative act and joy for the audience also?
Scientifically speaking, does beauty indicate design or un-design? The answer is this: there is no reason to expect random mutation and selection to produce beauty, and no particular reason for us to find certain things beautiful. Functional, yes. But the beauty we see does not necessarily correlate with safety or suitability for eating or mating. It has no particular survival value. Instead, beauty is a lovely surprise that points toward the transcendent Something that is the source of beauty.
The second aspect of the world that Lewis believed could not be adequately explained within a naturalistic framework is morality. Here's Gauger:
As [Lewis] observed, when people quarrel, they often appeal to moral standards: “You promised,” or “You shouldn’t treat people that way.” They appeal to these standards expecting to be understood.
Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Or even our belief that there is such a thing as right or wrong?
There are certain acts that are universally acknowledged to be morally wrong, such as the killing of innocent human beings. Where does such objective certainty come from? If someone says, “Well, we evolved that view,” then there is no reason to suppose it has any basis in objective truth. Any moral view selected for its survival value loses any claim to objective truth. Should it not be just as moral, if not more so, to kill innocent humans if it benefits you, under that scenario?
On the other hand, if we concede that we didn’t evolve morality, a lot of people then default to the position that there is no objective basis for morality. We must define it for ourselves. Why, then, do most people still choose to adopt the moral precept that it is wrong to kill innocent human beings?
All this argues for the objective reality of moral values, and for our innate sense of them, sometimes called the natural law. And the existence of objective moral law points toward a designer who set this law into our hearts.
Lewis' third point is the existence of human reason. Gauger explains:
The fact that we reason at all, and that our reason corresponds with reality, is a remarkable thing. Have you never thought that it should be surprising that our minds are capable of probing the deep things of the universe, and that the universe is constructed in such a way as to be discoverable? That it should be founded on laws that we can grasp and that surprisingly find a match with our abstract mathematics?
Ape brains that evolved to hunt prey and run from lions should not be expected to do higher-order mathematics or particle physics. Yet our brains are fitted for the task, as deep as we need to go. Our brains and our abilities go so far beyond what survival requires that no evolutionary explanation could possibly account for the things we can do.
If evolution is all there is, then rationality hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Natural selection may favor the fastest or strongest or most fertile, but it doesn’t care about syllogisms or propositions or inferences. And if all we have is an evolved feeling that our minds are trustworthy, then our minds aren’t trustworthy.
She quotes Lewis:
All possible knowledge . . . depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really “must” be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them — if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work — then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.
Her argument is that "naturalism has cut itself off at the knees." She adds that,
Naturalism depends on the idea that science has discovered the truth about the world — what the world really is — namely, that it is nothing but matter and energy, particles in motion, and neurons firing, with consciousness an epiphenomenon and free will an illusion. But see — on what basis do they claim to know? Science is supposed to be a logical enterprise that interrogates the natural world and discovers its hidden reality using reason and logic, which naturalism cannot justify as being reliable.
Just so. We can add to what Gauger wrote the words of atheist philosopher John Gray who stated that,
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.
And in his book On Miracles Lewis wrote this:
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.
It's a marvel that a worldview, naturalism, that's so intellectually thin would nevertheless be so attractive to so many intelligent people.
When Charles Darwin first propounded his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859 he had no idea that biological cells were so astoundingly complex. He thought they were just tiny globs of undifferentiated protoplasm, and with that understanding Darwin didn't foresee any difficulty in cells arising mechanistically in "some warm little pond."
Throughout the 20th century, however, great strides were made in understanding the structure and function of the enormous diversity of cellular components, among which are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny molecular machines made of proteins. As biologists elucidated one cellular subsystem after another it became increasingly difficult to believe that life was the product of blind, purposeless chance, even though many scientists, clinging to their faith in metaphysical naturalism, insisted that it was.
That this is an act of faith is clear from the fact that no one today has any idea how the first cells from which all other living things are believed to have evolved ever originated.
An example of the sheer difficulty in explaining how cells could've formed essentially by chemical accident is given to us by the motor protein called kinesin.
As you watch this video keep in mind that no one knows how such a remarkable system on such a miniscule scale could have ever come about through purely natural, unintelligent processes. It would be like trying to imagine how a functional computer could be assembled by the random mixing of its component parts.
Among the many questions this video raises is, how does the kinesin "know" to carry the vacuole and "know" to carry it in only one direction?
Watch the clip and be amazed at this incredible machine:
The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel is always worth reading and her recent column on Special Counsel Jack Smith's indictment of Donald Trump is no exception.
Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country.
Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.
Consider how many politicians might already be doing time had prosecutors applied this standard earlier.
Both Al Gore and George W. Bush filed lawsuits in the 2000 election that contained bold if untested legal claims. Surely both candidates had advisers who told them privately that they may have legitimately lost—and neither publicly conceded an inch until the Supreme Court resolved the matter.
Might an ultimate sore winner have used this approach to indict the loser for attempting to thwart the democratic process?
And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation.
It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments.
What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021.
The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosi said.
Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop.
Ms. Strassel goes on to give a number of other examples: Stacey Abrams falsely disputed her loss in the Georgia Governor's race in 2018. Rep. Adam Schiff and a host of FBI fabulists and prevaricators tore the country apart with the Russian collusion hoax they foisted on us for four or five years.
Somehow, though when Trump lies it's different. Strassel adds this:
The press is rooting for the special counsel to go after Republican lawmakers who on the basis of Mr. Trump’s claims objected to slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021.
Let’s line them all up, including dozens of Democrats who objected to slates in 2001, 2005 and 2017—on the basis of lies and with the purpose of conspiring to obstruct (as the Smith indictment puts it) “the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified.”
Of course, doing so would cross a line that separates mature republics from third world authoritarianisms, but that's where the Democrats and the leftist media appear intent on taking us. They don't seem to care if they devastate what has become the greatest social, political and military experiment ever to exist in the history of civilization, in fact many of the leftmost of their number would dearly love to see it, as long as they wield the power in whatever manages to emerge from the ashes.
As anyone who has spent much time on most college campuses during the last couple of years can attest, the term "social justice" has achieved an almost iconic status. It's a term that glides easily from the lips of many young college progressives, but it's a term which often defies attempts by those who invoke it to explain.
In that respect it's much like "systemic racism" or just plain "racism". The terms are easy to wield as rhetorical weapons, but they're not so easy to define.
So what exactly is social justice? Jonah Goldberg, the author of two excellent books, Liberal Fascism and Suicide of the West, offers a succinct explanation in a brief video at Prager U. which you can watch here:
Simply put, social justice is at best an empty progressive shibboleth and at worst a code word for a recrudescent communism which is too embarrassed by its manifold failures to go by its real name.
Indeed, at least one of the founders of the social justice organization Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, has acknowledged that she and her fellow organizers are communists steeped in Marxist-Leninist ideology.
What's sought by these people is not "justice" at all but rather its opposite. There's no justice in taking what one person has worked hard his whole life to attain and giving it over to another who may not be willing to work at all, but that's the logic behind social justice nostrums such as racial reparations.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the Christian says "All that's mine is yours." The socialist says "All that's yours is mine."
One wonders how many of the more academically successful of those students who are demanding "social justice" would think justice had been served if points were subtracted from their grades and awarded to students who didn't do as well so that everyone got a C.
Law professor and liberal Democrat Alan Dershowitz has an interesting take on the recent indictment of Donald Trump by federal prosecutor Jack Smith.
Dershowitz argues that if Mr. Smith loses the case he's bring against Mr. Trump he will himself be vulnerable to being charged with conspiring to punish Mr. Trump for exercising a right, free speech, guaranteed by the Constitution.
If Trump is found to have had a legal right to say the things he said on January 6th, whatever one thinks of the wisdom of his speech, then Smith will be ipso facto guilty of conspiring to "injure" Trump by sending him to jail for it.
Here's an excerpt from the linked article:
Let me explain to you why [Smith is taking a huge risk],” Dershowitz said. “The [Constitution is violated when] two or more persons conspire to injure and deny somebody the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured him by the constitution.
What if a court ultimately rules that Donald Trump had a right under the First Amendment to make his Jan. 6 speech and to do what he did?
Then Jack Smith will have conspired to deny him of that right. That’s how serious this is.”
Dershowitz continues his criticism of Smith's indictment:
“Jack Smith … deliberately, willfully and maliciously leaves out the words that President Trump spoke on Jan. 6 in his terrible speech. which I disagree with, but what he said was, ‘I want you to assemble peacefully and patriotically,’”
Dershowitz added, “Jack [Smith] leaves that out. That is a lie, a lie, an omission lie and if you’re going to indict somebody for telling lies, don’t tell lies in the indictment.
If you’re going to indict somebody for denying people their constitutional rights, don’t deny them their constitutional rights by indicting them for free speech. That’s how hypocritical this is.”
The potential violation of Mr. Trump's First Amendment rights isn't the only danger for Smith:
Dershowitz earlier said that Smith’s indictment targeted Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel, by naming attorneys who represented Trump as unindicted co-conspirators....
“So ... this is a very, very dangerous indictment, dangerous to the First Amendment and also dangerous to the Sixth Amendment because it directly goes after Trump’s lawyers, names them as unindicted co-conspirators without giving their names, but basically says they’re criminals for giving him advice on how to challenge the election.”
So, Smith better win his case against Trump or else he may find himself prosecuted for serious crimes against Trump and his attorneys. This hazard certainly makes his allegations against Trump an example of grabbing hold of a tiger by its tail.
You can see the video of Dershowitz making his argument at the link. The video makes it pretty clear that Jack Smith's case is exceedingly weak.
It'd be great if this actually develops into something. The UK Daily Mail reports that researchers have developed a drug that kills all solid tumorous cancer cells while leaving other cells unharmed.
Here are a few excerpts from the article:
The new molecule targets a protein present in most cancers that helps tumors grow and multiply in the body. It is significant because this protein - the proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) - was previously thought to be 'undruggable'.
The drug was tested on 70 different cancer cells in the lab - including those derived from breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin, and lung cancer - and was effective against them all.
The pill is the culmination of 20 years of research and development by the City of Hope Hospital in Los Angeles, one of America's largest cancer centers.The medicine is code-named AOH1996 after Anna Olivia Healy, who died in 2005 from a deadly childhood cancer aged nine.
The researchers found the pill prevented cells with damaged DNA from dividing and from making a copy of faulty DNA, causing cancer cell death, known as apoptosis, but it did not interrupt healthy stem cells.
The results will now need to be replicated in people. The drug is currently being tested on humans in a Phase 1 clinical trial at City of Hope.
Assuming the clinical trials show no serious side-effects and successful destruction of tumor cells this drug has enormous life-saving potential considering all the types of cancers that it's believed to be effective against.
What an amazing blessing it would be if it works on humans!
Mollie Hemingway tells us why Devon Archer's testimony before the House of Representatives is another nail in the coffin of Joe Biden's reputation and possibly his presidency. She
writes:
Devon Archer, a longtime business partner and close friend of Hunter Biden’s, told congressional investigators Monday that at a meeting in Dubai on Dec. 4, 2015, top executives of Ukrainian energy concern Burisma asked Hunter Biden and himself for help from D.C. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden’s dad, Joe Biden, was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president as well as his point person on Ukraine.
Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and Vadym Pozharski, a Burisma executive, wanted to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired as he was investigating the company for corruption, Archer told members of Congress.
At the time Archer and Hunter Biden were being paid $83,000 a month to sit on Burisma's board and do nothing. Neither man had any expertise in energy production, but both, especially Hunter, had valuable influence in Washington.
Hunter Biden put Zlochevsky and Pozharski on a call with “D.C.,” and although Archer clarified that he was not part of the phone call so couldn’t possibly know for sure who was on the other end of the line, he also admitted that Joe Biden did meet and speak more than 20 times with various business associates who were paying for access to the Biden family.
Anyway, not long after that call Shokin was fired, and Hemingway marvels at what an amazing coincidence it would be if it weren't Joe Biden to whom that call was made.
Mr. Biden even bragged that he was personally responsible for getting the prosecutor fired. In fact, he claimed he had bullied the Ukrainian government into firing the investigator by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he got what he wanted.
Here's what he said publicly:
And I [Joe Biden] was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t. So they said they had — they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to — or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president.
The president said — I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired.
Burisma wanted Shokin fired. Hunter arranged a phone call to "D.C." and a few months later Joe Biden is boasting that he got Shokin fired.
Here's a question that might be asked of our Democrat friends who may be determined to defend Joe Biden against the allegation of corruption: "What would you be saying about this set of facts if the man doing the boasting was Donald Trump and the son being payed $83,000 a month was Don, Jr.?
Would you not be saying that the evidence of criminality was overwhelming? If so, and you know you would, why are you unwilling to draw the same conclusion about Joe Biden? And if your only answer amounts to some version of "Biden is a Democrat and Trump is a Republican," why should your opinion on anything else carry any weight with anyone ever again?
You've demonstrated, after all, that you have no more intellectual integrity than the Bidens have moral integrity.
There's an article at Salvo by astronomer Hugh Ross that should fascinate anyone interested in chemistry, biology or the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe that makes life on earth possible.
It begins with a challenge frequently leveled at those who believe the universe is intentionally engineered by an intelligent agent to permit life to exist. If so, some who dissent from this view ask, why is the universe so vast? Why are there so many galaxies? Isn't such a huge universe wasteful when a much smaller universe would suffice?
Ross explains that a smaller universe would not have sufficed, and that the universe has to be as large as it is and as massive as it is in order for carbon-based life to exist anywhere in it. Ross' article can be summarized as follows:
In order for life to exist, at least life as we know it, there has to be carbon and oxygen, and in order for these elements to exist there had to be a very precise amount of mass to the universe in its early stages of development. Here's why:
At the beginning of the universe, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was rapidly expanding. Since mass exerts gravitational pull, the rate at which the universe expanded was determined by how much gravity there was acting as a drag on the expansion and this was determined by the amount of mass.
As the universe expanded it cooled. At one point the cooling reached the temperature range in which hydrogen atoms, the only atoms that existed in the early universe, began to fuse together to form other elements. This temperature range is between 15 million and 150 million degrees Celsius.
How long the expanding universe remained in this temperature range depended on how much matter there was to slow down the expansion. Too little matter and the universe would have passed through this range too quickly to form much else besides helium. Too slowly, and all the hydrogen would have fused into elements heavier than iron. Carbon and oxygen would have been very scarce.
In other words, to get the elements necessary for life, specifically carbon and oxygen, the expansion rate had to be just right, which means that the gravitational pull slowing the expansion had to be just right, which means that the amount of matter in the universe had to be just right. That amount of matter happens to be precisely the amount of matter bound up in the stars and galaxies we see in our telescopes.
In order to allow time for the production of carbon and oxygen, but not too much time, the expansion rate had to be calibrated to the astonishing value of one part in 10^55.
To get an idea of how precise this is imagine a dial face with 10^55 calibrations (one with 55 zeros). Now imagine that the dial has to point to exactly one of those calibrations for the universe to have carbon and oxygen. If the dial deviated by just one increment no carbon and oxygen would form. That's breathtaking, but in order to achieve that degree of precision of the expansion rate the universe had to have just the amount of matter that is today bound up in stars and galaxies that it in fact does have.
Indeed, the total amount of matter in the universe had to itself be fine-tuned to an astonishing precision of one part in 10^59.
So, the universe has to be as big as it is and as massive as it is in order for us to be here in this little corner of a galaxy located in an even smaller corner of the universe. Little wonder that many people conclude that it can't all just be a cosmic accident, that there must be an intelligent mind behind it all.
Ross goes on to explain how the amount of carbon we find on earth is also fine-tuned. Just a bit more or a bit less carbon and life on earth would not exist, at least not life forms higher than bacteria. The article is not long and it's very much worth reading in its entirety.
Meanwhile, check out this video to get an idea of how big the universe actually is and how small we are. Each circle represents 10x the diameter of the previous circle:
A one minute excerpt from a discussion between Tucker Carlson and author Eric Metaxas (back when Tucker was still at Fox News) dovetails so nicely with what my students and I will be talking about in class in a few weeks that I thought I'd share it.
The topic of their conversation was why Americans aren't having more children, and the whole six minute segment is worth watching, but at the 1:50 mark Carlson asks: “Then what’s the point of life [if people don't want to have children and families]? Going on more trips? Buying more crap? Clothes? I’m serious. What is the point?”
Metaxas' answer is, I think, exactly right:
Nobody really says this because it’s too ugly, but if you actually believe we evolved out of the primordial soup and through happenstance got here, by accident, then our lives literally have no meaning. And we don’t want to talk about that because it’s too horrific. Nobody can really live with it.
But what we do is, we buy into that idea and we say, “Well then, what can I do? Since there’s no God, I guess I can have guilt-free pleasure. And so I’m going to spend the few decades that I have trying to take care of Number 1, trying to have as much fun as I can. By the way, having kids requires self-sacrifice. I don’t have time for that. I won’t be able to have as much fun.”
In other words, given the lurch toward metaphysical naturalism in the Western world, there's really no reason to think it's wrong to just live for oneself, to put one's own interests first, to seek to squeeze as much personal enjoyment out of this otherwise pointless existence as possible before we die.
Carlson responds to Metaxas' analysis with this,
But what a lie. What a lie. As you lie there, life ebbing away, you think, “I’m glad I made it to Prague.” Actually people don’t think that as they die.
True enough, but when they're alive and in the full bloom of life people often do think that the more things they can accumulate, the more sights they can see, the more pleasure they can experience the more meaningful their life will be. Carlson says that they're believing a lie.
Here's the video of the exchange:
Metaxas is, of course, not the first person to say what he says here. Philosophers, including atheistic philosophers, have been making this same observation about the emptiness of modern life for decades. Two twentieth century French thinkers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, can serve as examples.
Sartre wrote that, "Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal," and Camus declared that, "...for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful."
Multitudes of moderns have concluded that if that's the way things are then we may as well just live for ourselves and make the best of a bad situation. What sense does it make, they reason, to sacrifice the only life we have for other people, for kids and a family?
Their conviction is that what matters is personal prosperity, power and pleasure and anything that interferes with the acquisition of those, including kids, is best avoided.
Imagine that you're a crew member of the Starship Enterprise and are voyaging to another galaxy. Imagine, too, that you're a philosophical materialist who believes that all that exists is matter and energy.
When you arrive you're teleported to the surface of a planet. Unlike the transporter on Star Trek, however, in the process we're describing your body disintegrates on the Enterprise and is instantly reassembled out of completely different atoms on the surface of the planet.
Star Trek Teleporter
Assume that the reassembled person has all the memories and knowledge that you did before being disintegrated. Is the reassembled person (RP) really you?
If materialism is true, it's hard to see how it could be since RP is made of completely different material stuff than you were.
If you say that the material stuff has the same form as it did before being disintegrated you're adopting a kind of Aristotelian/Thomist view of the soul, which materialists would find offensive.
If you say that you have a mind that survives the disintegration process then you're again renouncing materialism because you're positing the existence of an immaterial substance, i.e. a mind or soul, that's an essential part of your being.
So, what is it that makes RP the same person as you? Memories? If it's memories how many of your memories must you retain in order for RP to be you? Every day we lose many of our memories. Can you remember word-for-word a conversation you had yesterday or the day before? Probably not.
Nor can you remember much about yourself from ten years ago, so what percentage of your memories must you retain for RP to be you? If memories give us our personal identity then an amnesiac or an Alzheimer's sufferer would be a different person than before losing his or her memory.
Besides, it's not clear in any case that our memories are material or physical. Perhaps the brain stores electrons or chemicals on neurons which somehow get translated into a recollection, but those electrons aren't the memory itself any more than an inflamed nerve is identical to the sensation of pain.
When you remember your mother's face you have an image of her face, but the image is not electrons or chemicals in neurons. It's arguably something immaterial.
Perhaps you might say that you and RP are the same person because the genetic code inscribed on your DNA would be the same in both of you, but identical DNA would only mean that RP was a clone of you. It doesn't mean that RP would actually be you.
It seems that the materialist has to assume that you have ceased to exist and that RP is not you but a new person similar to you. Either that or they need to acknowledge that materialism needs to be rejiggered somehow.
Maybe, though, there's another option. Maybe materialism is just false and there's something immaterial about us that makes us who we are. Perhaps we have a soul that bestows upon us our identity and which is unaffected by the teleporter.
Conservative politicians and talk show hosts frequently level the accusation that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and pretty much the rest of the elites in the Democratic Party are socialists. The charge is either true, or not far from the truth, concerning many of the people it's directed at, but unfortunately not just a few people, especially younger voters, have only a vague idea what socialism actually is and why Americans should reject it.
In an attempt to help correct this gap in the public's understanding I offer this allegory to which everyone should be able to relate:
Imagine that you're in a college class and the class is scheduled to take a test soon. You and your friends study hard. You form a study group. You review the Zoom recordings of the class lectures. You read and reread the textbook assignments. You stay up all night the night before making sure that you've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's.
Meanwhile, others in the class blow it off. They don't study, they play video games instead and spend their time texting their friends and sleeping.
Test day arrives. When you get your papers back you and your friends have all scored A's and B's and the sluggards have scored D's and F's. It's a familiar story to many students, and here's where the socialism metaphor comes in.
Your professor thinks it's unfair that you and your friends did so much better than your classmates. After all, the professor intones, you went to better high schools, you had the advantage of having better study habits, your upbringing made you more disciplined and instilled in you a strong desire for success.
The students who didn't do so well may have had none of these advantages. It's not fair that your privileged background should cause you to do better than those who are less privileged.
Therefore, the professor concludes, he's going to take points from your scores and give them to the students who got the D's and F's so that everybody winds up with a C. Think of it as an academic wealth tax.
When the next test comes around you and your friends decide that working hard doesn't matter, so you don't put nearly as much effort into your preparation as you did the last time. Meanwhile, your less motivated classmates certainly have no incentive to work harder since they do well enough by just goofing off. The scores come back and they still have D's and F's, but although you and your friends have the highest scores in the class, they're only C's.
When the professor redistributes the points everyone, including you, now has a D.
By the time the third test is administered nobody is motivated to work hard to prepare. The redistribution of "wealth" has sapped you and your friends of all incentive to put forth any serious effort. After all, why work hard when you can't achieve any more than those who don't?
Translate this into economics and you have socialism.
This short video makes the same point differently:
Physicist Michael Guillen has an interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) in which he argues that the "central conceit" of naturalism (atheism) is that "it is a worldview grounded in logic and scientific evidence. That it has nothing to do with faith, which it associates with weakness. In reality, faith is central to atheism, logic and even science."
He goes on to mention that atheism was his own belief during much of his earlier academic life:
I became an atheist early in life and long believed that my fellow nonbelievers were an enlightened bunch. I relished citing studies appearing to show that atheists have higher IQs than believers. But when I was studying for my doctorate in physics, math and astronomy, I began questioning my secular worldview.
In the course of this exploration he learned three things about worldviews:
First, ... all worldviews are built on core beliefs that cannot be proved. Axioms from which everything else about a person’s perception of reality is derived. They must be accepted on faith.
Even reason itself—the vaunted foundation of atheism—depends on faith. Every logical argument begins with premises that are assumed to be true. Euclid’s geometry, the epitome of logical reasoning, is based on no fewer than 33 axiomatic, unprovable articles of faith.
As has been pointed out in this space on other occasions, the naturalist must assume that our reason evolved to make us more fit to survive, it didn't evolve for the purpose of finding truth. Thus, both the theist and the atheist must accept by faith that reason is a reliable guide to truth.
The theist accepts that because the theist believes that reason is a gift from the Creator who is Himself reasonable. The naturalist believes reason is the result of a mindless process that by sheer chance produced the rational faculty that by a fortuitous coincidence sometimes helps us find the truth.
Second, ... every worldview—that is, every person’s bubble of reality—has a certain diameter. That of atheism is relatively small, because it encompasses only physical reality. It has no room for other realities. Even humanity’s unique spirituality and creativity—all our emotions, including love—are reduced to mere chemistry.
Third, ... without exception, every worldview is ruled over by a god or gods. It’s the who or what that occupies its center stage. Everything in a person’s life revolves around this.
For the naturalist, god is the cosmos, humanity, the state, or oneself. It is what they consider to be of ultimate importance and to which they pledge, consciously or unconsciously, their fealty and devotion.
What naturalists fail to grasp is that almost everything we believe, we believe to a greater or lesser extent by faith. Very little that we believe in life can be proven to be true. We can only accumulate more and more evidence in the belief's favor.
Of course, people, whether religious or secular, often believe things on the basis of little or no evidence. To believe something despite the lack of evidence is "blind faith," but true faith, the sort all of us exercise every time we board a plane or submit to a surgeon's hand, is believing (and trusting) despite the lack of proof.
Atheists like biologist Richard Dawkins are fond of saying that theisms like Christianity require "blind faith" whereas naturalism is based upon empirical evidence, but neither clause in that claim is true.
There's plenty of evidence for the main themes of theistic belief, so, if one insists on evidence to justify belief, there's plenty there to warrant it.
On the other hand, naturalists believe, and must believe, a host of things for which there's no evidence at all.
They believe that life originated through purely unguided, mechanistic processes, that the universe came into being from non-being, that there are an infinity of other universes besides our own, that moral and aesthetic judgments are actually meaningful assertions despite lacking any objective ground for them, that there are no immaterial substances like minds, that their reason is a reliable guide to truth, that the laws of physics apply consistently throughout the universe, and much else.
There's no evidence for any of these beliefs and lots of evidence, in some cases, against them. They're all instances of "blind faith."
Guillen adds this:
When I was an atheist, a scientific monk sleeping three hours a day and spending the rest of my time immersed in studying the universe, my worldview rested on the core axiom that seeing is believing. When I learned that 95% of the cosmos is invisible, consisting of “dark matter” and “dark energy,” names for things we don’t understand, that core assumption became untenable.
As a scientist, I had to believe in a universe I mostly could not see. My core axiom became “believing is seeing.” Because what we hold to be true dictates how we understand everything—ourselves, others and our mostly invisible universe, including its origin. Faith precedes knowledge, not the other way around.
Here's a short video featuring an interview with the very prominent agnostic astronomer, the late Robert Jastrow, who discusses his own struggle to maintain his agnosticism in the face of the theistic implications of the empirical evidence that scientists were discovering:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
